Category Archives: Ahimsa

Nice Hitler Mustache

I’d rather just have a small goatee, like an old hipster with a scruffy shadow on my chin.  I’ve never really liked mustaches, it’s just that the goatee without it makes me look like former Surgeon General C. Everett Coop, or an Amish man.  Sekhnet also said like a trout, I think, though it may have been a catfish.

So the mustache is a compromise to begin with.  I don’t like it bushy, like Stalin’s, don’t like it in my food, I don’t like the sides hanging down like a mocking Mexican bandit’s slit eyed mustache.  I blow my nose a lot, so I can’t have the mustache coming all the way up to my nostrils; I carve a horizontal snot channel into every mustache I’ve grown in recent years, to prevent nasal matter from landing in the mustache.  

I barely tolerate having a mustache, is the thing.  I think Django’s mustache is cool, so I model mine a little after his.  Sekhnet’s father always wore a trim, white mustache, and made it look natty, and he gave me some good tips on keeping it trimmed, so I do.  My godfather, Volbear, always had a close cropped mustache, the better to abrade the tender bellies of young cousins he’d hold upside down as they squealed.   Sekhnet likes to scratch various parts of her face with a short napped brush of a chin beard, and the cropped, trimmed mustache goes with this.

In trimming the mustache, to keep it as short as the beard, I sometimes inadvertently clip it a little too close on one side of my mouth, then I have to trim the other side to match.  It is only a matter of a few days until this grows in again, but sometimes, during that time, I see my friend Maya.

“Nice Hitler mustache,” says Maya pleasantly.  I used to try to explain how mine is more like Jimi’s mustache, how it doesn’t go all the way up to the bottom of the nostrils.  I always felt like showing her a picture of Hitler to show her how vastly different my mustache is from Hitler’s.  

On the other hand, she makes a good point.  I thank her, she smiles.    

She’s right, when you put it that way.  Why wear even the ghost of Hitler’s mustache?

The only trouble is, I trim my mustache much more often than I see Maya.  Have to start checking in with her more regularly.

The Blatch Settlement

The devil famously cavorts in the details, leaving a sloshy trail of offal for the squeamish to tread while picking among the good intentions of the compilers of pertinent details.

I’m thinking suddenly of the so-called Blatch Settlement, an agreement entered into between The Legal Aid Society (“Blatch” on behalf of a class of the disabled in public housing, one of whom was named Blatch) and New York City Housing Authority (“NYCHA”on behalf of the public authority’s right to evict the disabled).   It is as good an example as any of the imperfection of the law.  No surprise, as it’s created and agreed to by necessarily imperfect people.  The result is predictable:  those most affected by it have the least to say about it, the rules are imposed on them by those with the least at stake.   With all that, Blatch is a kind of masterpiece of its kind.  The tasteful marriage of modest, yielding reform and extroverted, stubborn status quo.

A little background:  NYCHA is subsidized housing in New York City. Tenants pay something like 30% of their monthly income to live in these tall, vertical low-income replacements for slum tenements.   The amenities are often not great, there is more crime in NYCHA projects than in the average apartment complex, there is more fear and hostility from the building staff than in your average apartment building.  NYCHA runs the NYC version of the projects.  

NYCHA has many, many buildings.  Hundreds of thousands of low income NYC tenants live in this “housing of last resort.”   When you are evicted from a NYCHA apartment that’s usually the last stop before homelessness or prison.  As they say in the movies: your choice, bitches.

A woman with severe mental problems who lived in a NYCHA apartment in Brooklyn was summoned to court for nonpayment of something like $100 in monthly rent.  She may have missed two months rent when they summoned her to court.  She had been refusing to pay because, among other things, Reagan’s people were leaving cans of human feces in her bathtub.  

The agoraphobic woman did not show up in court.  Since she didn’t appear, nor did anyone show up in her place, a default judgment was entered against her.  Several days later the marshal posted a 72 hour notice of eviction on her door.  

The marshal’s notice is literally the sign for the tenant to rush to court, as they are notified they have a right to on the notice, and have the judge sign an Order to Show Cause which gives them another chance to argue why they should not be evicted:  I have the money, I’m getting the money, I have rats playing cards at my dining room table. Tenants can sometimes get many Orders to Show Cause signed, dragging out evictions for months, or even years.   Landlords naturally hate this and NYCHA hates it too.  

In the case of Eleanor Bumpurs, a large, reclusive NYCHA tenant with a history of emotional disturbance, the marshal, police and armed NYCHA employees came to her door the day of the eviction, in October, 1984, ordering Ms. Bumpurs out.   Here is a great and terrible paragraph from the wikipedia entry on Eleanor Bumpurs describing the wisdom of the city bureaucrats prior to the eviction day:

Four days before the eviction attempt, the city sent a psychiatrist to visit Bumpurs. He concluded that Bumpurs was “psychotic” and “unable to manage her affairs properly” and should be hospitalized. A Social Services supervisor decided that the best way to help Bumpurs was to evict her first, then hospitalize her.[3]

It would be a fateful decision for the tenant.  Ms. Bumpurs did not cooperate. Floridly psychotic people are not known for being cooperative, as even a NYC Social Services supervisor might have known.  Things escalated until eventually the authorities broke down her door, as they had the legal right to, and forcibly tried to subdue the large, hysterical 66 year-old and remove her from the apartment they were seizing, a home no longer hers.  

The story I recall hearing at the time was that, fearing for her life, in a nightgown, she attacked them wielding a large kitchen knife.  She was, according to the men who killed her, threatening their lives at that moment as they tried to force her out of what had been, until recently, her home.  At least one of the men present fired two blasts from his shotgun, the first shattering her knife wielding hand, the second putting nine pellets into her chest, killing her.

e bumpurs 

The City eventually paid a $200,000 settlement to her family.  Meanwhile, the chief judge in NYC formed a commission to figure out how to prevent this kind of horror from happening again.  The solution was the creation of the deeply flawed Guardian Ad Litem (“protector for the suit”)  program.  The judge would appoint a “GAL” to stand in the shoes of a person not able to adequately defend themselves against an eviction attempt.   Initially most of the Housing Court GALs were lawyers, but I believe that presently no GALs are lawyers.  There is no requirement that a GAL be a lawyer, and as time went by, and GALs were treated by the court with less and less respect, and paid a modest flat fee for an often enormous amount of work, sometimes including multiple Orders to Show Cause and a dozen court appearances, it became untenable for lawyers to act as Housing Court GALs.

NYCHA has a zero tolerance policy for tenants.  If they are summoned to a hearing by management and don’t show up, or don’t shape up, the NYCHA administrative judge, two steps later, issues an order to evict them.  They may be hostile and defensive at these hearings, act like animals backed into a corner by indignant NYCHA staff and aggressive NYCHA attorneys (as a group the most reflexively prosecutorial I’ve met), whatever, they get their say, or not, and then a NYCHA judge finds them ineligible to stay in housing of last resort.  

The good news for tenants is that NYCHA has to bring the tenant to court before they can actually get the warrant to legally evict them.  The bad news is that the NYCHA hearing officer’s decision is binding on the NYC Housing Court judge and momentary delay of the eviction is the only play for the Housing judge who finds the tenant unable to defend herself.  

I was called to act as GAL by a very compassionate judge troubled by having to evict a gentle woman of obviously limited intellect who NYCHA found had illegally allowed banned felon children to visit her on three occasions over the course of several years.  Not preventing a visit from a family member with a felony conviction is grounds for eviction under NYCHA’s rules.  In that case I was able to use the NYCHA hearing officer’s comment that she appeared to be a “nice, gentle woman” (“who happened to raise three felons”– which I left off) as a lever to pry the administrative case back open.  I asked to be appointed as her GAL in the administrative hearing as well as the court proceeding.  

The NYCHA hearing officer later noted to me that it had been a mistake to write that the tenant seemed nice.  He pointed out that the second half of that sentence pointedly referred to her children, the felons, but admitted he’d been foolish to include a reference to what a sympathetic and harmless seeming old woman she was.  The law is the law, and eviction is the punishment for disobeying a clear NYCHA mandate.

In perhaps my finest moment as a lawyer (a moment extended over the course of over a year), I managed to get the charges against her dismissed by NYCHA and her case in Housing Court dismissed.  It was the result of more than a hundred hours of hard, and at times inspired, work, including forensic investigation and vigorous cross-examination of NYCHA personnel.  

The post-hearing pages I reserved the right to submit, wrote and sent to the hearing officer were, without a doubt, the most persuasively argued pages of my legal career.  I was paid the statutory $600 to help this helpless and likable woman avoid eviction.  That comes out to less than $6 an hour for my legal work, once you do the long division.

Her final NYCHA administrative hearing was not very long before my mother died, and as we stood outside the hearing room, feeling we had quite possibly won – or at least put up a hell of a good fight–  the tenant I eventually saved from eviction told me how sorry she was to hear that I was losing my mother.

“Your mother must be a great person to have raised a son like you,” she told me as I shook her hand the last time we saw each other.

This, clearly, was a rare and exceptional case.  More common was a hard kick in the ass from an overworked and frustrated judge with no dog handy to boot.

The Blatch Settlement was a hard-negotiated agreement that in a case where NYCHA knew the tenant was disabled, or unable to adequately defend herself, NYCHA had a duty to inform the NYCHA administrators and the Housing Court that the tenant required the services of a Guardian Ad Litem.  It required the appointment of a GAL in such cases.  So now the tenant who can’t speak for herself has someone at the table who can.  A great step forward, no?

Except that there is nothing in the Blatch settlement forcing NYCHA to do this, no real consequence for NYCHA’s failure to do it, except that it’s easier now for a non-attorney GAL in Housing Court, if he knows about Blatch, to have the case of a disabled tenant slated for eviction after a one-sided administrative ordeal without a GAL, sent back to NYCHA for a new hearing with a GAL.  Then back to Housing Court, and here we go loop de loo.  

If the tenant had a GAL at the administrative hearing, and NYCHA does not inform the judge in Housing Court of this fact, as unambiguously required by Blatch: no harm, no foul.  The judge merely delays the proceeding and appoints a GAL.

Of course, I know the real problem here.  It has more to do with my own contemptibly naive belief in some twisted version of justice, with what SHOULD be, than with any law.  I suppose I get this from my father, and it’s fitting, in a way, to wake up thinking about the Blatch Settlement on Father’s Day.  Do I really, in my heart of hearts, imagine that, as a group, the descendants of people who were once legally sold, raped, killed for disobedience, forced to work virtually unpaid and lynched in many states for a century after slavery was abolished, are going to be given anything like a fair shake by the legal system, even in this exceptional nation, the land of the free and the home of the brave?  

I can see my father’s knowing smirk.  

As my grandmother would say in answer to such a question:  “please….” turning her face away with a big, dismissive wave of her thick, expressive hand.

Abuse on the sly

I was a U.S. Census enumerator in the 1980 Census.  I went door to door in apartment buildings, knocking and interviewing households on a list I got from a supervisor.  The list was comprised of people who had not mailed back their census forms.  The answers to these census questions were used by Congress to apportion funds, based on population.  It was important work for the neighborhood, the eye contact avoiding, Amish bearded supervisor impressed on us the first day.  Because my neighborhood is largely Dominican, I quickly learned to shout “Censo” through the closed doors in response to muffled queries.  Most doors, when they opened, opened reluctantly, some not at all.  I didn’t blame them, I hate uninvited knocks on my door, after all, even though it made my job harder when they didn’t talk to me.

It was a commission business.   We were paid strictly by the number of completed census forms we handed in every week.   There was one guy who handed in exactly the same number every week– a large number, he was the highest earner.  He undoubtedly wrote them out sitting at his kitchen table, or in the local diner, making up the information that nobody else was ever going to follow up or confirm, as fast as his hand could fill in the blanks.  It is likely his answers gave our part of NYC the maximum federal dollars for population, since he was, clearly, a canny fellow.

I, however, was raised to be an honest idiot, and so I walked to each apartment the required three times, at different times of day, times I duly documented in my sworn-to log, before filling in as accurately as possible an ‘estimated’ questionnaire based on asking a neighbor, or like my more successful colleague, my best and fastest guess seated at my kitchen table or on a park bench.  It was pretty dull work in any case, bubbling in circles with a number two U.S. Government Census pencil.  The memorable moments were very few, but there is one that stayed in my head and came up yesterday with sudden and disturbing clarity.

I was 24, and I recall one good-looking young woman being openly seductive, shifting on the couch in her scanty nightgown, which slipped off her shoulders and receded at the bottom to show most of her smooth, caramel colored skin.  Her skin was lovely, and her body nicely formed.  She had a pretty face, too, and smiled invitingly, sitting close by the spot she’d patted for me to sit, but I was hesitant to be seduced, only partly because she didn’t speak any English.   She asked me in Spanish if I was married, and I shook my head slowly with a small smile accompanied by the jarring thought of her jealous lover turning the key in the lock as I leaned in to kiss her, or worse, a few minutes later.  

But the visit I recall even more vividly was to a married couple in another building.   The very friendly man opened the door with a big smile and a welcome the guy from El Censo usually didn’t get.  He may even have offered me a beer, which I would have thanked him for but declined.   I recall thinking this fit, self-possessed, likable guy in the immaculate wife-beater was what’s known as a man’s man.

Behind him in the tidy kitchen was a woman with a tear-streaked face, her eye make-up a mess.  She made desperate, pleading, mad-looking gestures behind his back.   He was very relaxed, but kept an eye on her too.  Whenever he noticed the histrionics she quickly hid whenever he turned to her he would shrug to me and casually laugh it off.  “She’s very emotional,” he told me with a smile, his raised eyebrows adding “you know what I’m talking about, my man, I know you know.” 

He quickly and efficiently answered all the census questions while she said nothing, stood behind him mugging like a mad woman.  

“He’s going to kill me,” she mouthed distinctly behind his back as I wrapped up the questions and put the clipboard back into my official plastic U.S. Census satchel.  

I had a moment of confusion then, cognitive dissonance of a sort, but there was now no mistaking where I actually was, nor the sharp pang of fear I still recall.  The strong, friendly man in the wife-beater was actually a wife beater.  If I let on that I knew, he would kill both of us right there in the kitchen, the reality of that hummed electrically in the air.  Calling the cops once I left wouldn’t be the end of it either, it was her word against his, and I’d already seen how that would play when the cops arrived.  

The cops would clap him on the back and thank him for the beers as they went out smiling, especially back in 1980 when people were not so aware of the dynamics of domestic violence.  If the guy even spent part of a night locked up he’d get out and come directly to find me, which would not take long, I lived alone a couple of blocks away.  When he spotted me he’d yell “cabron!”, race across the street, catch me by my collar, beat the shit out of me, break both my arms and my legs too.  The smell of fear was all I smelled as I smiled and shook his powerful hand.

I am not proud, all these years later, that I did nothing, even as I know there was not much I could have done.  Today I probably would have done something, I like to think.  I have done brave things for weaker people in such situations a couple of times since.  Plus, times have changed over the decades, the cops today would not necessarily roll their eyes at the emotionally worked up woman and or uncritically buy the calm, easy patter of the affable guy.  

And yet– people live in terrible situations, not to blame victims for being victims, mind you, but people, for twisted psychic reasons they themselves are mostly clueless about, place themselves in hells that they stay in, like that apartment I visited… like crummy and beautiful homes everywhere, behind the walls and doors of which unspeakable cruelties are routinely and systematically committed.

Blessed Are The Peacemakers

A peacemaker takes people in pain and anger and, if she is good, leaves them with less intense bad feelings, able to picture a time when they will reconcile and forgive each other.

Many people want to make peace, but it is an art few people master. Inartful attempts to make peace remind me of Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along?”  Convincing people to pretend it was all a misunderstanding and that everybody actually loves each other is not peacemaking.  There are situations where this may be the case, mutual misunderstanding leads to war.   But until the hurts are acknowledged, you might as well just squirt lighter fluid on the smoldering ashes.

Making peace is hard, often impossible, but blessed work, and the principle is simple and universal.

The first requirements are humility and empathy toward the parties. Judging the angry parties does not help make peace, only understanding the harsh reality of their feelings does.   The peacemaker cannot make peace (except in the case of the Colt .45 sardonically named The Peacemaker, which left the quarrelsome party silent at the end of the session)– the peacemaker can only bring calm, patience and listening skills to a situation from which these elements have fled.

The power of calm, patience and listening cannot be overstated.  It is aggravating not to be heard.  “I know what you are about to say and you seem unwilling to admit the possibility that you’re completely wrong,” is a poor strategy for a would-be peacemaker.  

Good luck to those who would be peacemakers, the impulse is commendable.   Few things in this troubled world are more blessed than making peace where there was implacable hostility.  Don’t forget, though, to check your own frustration at the door before you attempt it.  That’s all I’m saying.

Grow Up or Throw Up

 A child raised by angry parents spends a lot of time wondering what they did wrong.

“You did nothing wrong,” a rare, compassionate friend of the parents might eventually tell the kid.  “I love your parents, you know they’re my best friends, but they are unhappy people.  Unhappy people get mad a lot.  There is nothing you could have done differently.  It’s not you, it’s important for you to know that.  It’s just that your parents have their own frustrations that have nothing to do with you and they often took them out on you.”

Holy shit, you think, I’m fifty years old and just finding this out.  Wow.

My father remained in his terrible twos until he was eighty and hours from death.  Then it hit him.  “Goddamn it,” he wheezed, “I’ve been a horse’s ass.”  Never heard him use the phrase before, but he was at a loss, I suppose, to explain why he’d been such an implacably choleric two year-old his whole life.   A few moments later, there it was again: “I feel like a horse’s ass.”

It hit me recently, how destructive, if understandable, my anger at my father was.  Once I realized how much it hurt me to carry it, how reasonable I was to feel hurt by his actions and refusals, how incapable he was of doing any better, I was able to start letting go of it. Not of the damage his rage had done, only a bit of that ever slipped away, and it waits like a nightmare to leap out at me in moments of weakness, but I was done with my need to carry anger at a father who was not able to do any better than he did.

“He was a grown man, a father, he lived an otherwise responsible and moral life, why let him off the hook after he cursed at you and your sister every night, screamed and threatened and undermined, did his best to make you cower, even if you didn’t cower, even if you turned the rage against yourself sometimes, even as you banged your head against a wall.  Why let him off the hook for what he did?” says an angry friend.

Because he’s dead, dude.  Because, based on what was done to him when he was a baby, he couldn’t have done otherwise.  Because, lucky for me, and for him, I had let go of that anger at him by the time I was standing by his death bed hearing his last confession like a priest who’d never dream of fondling a parishioner.   He was contrite, apologized for the first and last time for his inhumanity.  I reassured him that he’d done the best he could.  I have gone over this many times in my head, here on this blagh.  The main thing, though, was that seeing him as incapable of doing better made me realize how pointless it was to be mad at him for it.  It’s like being mad at a cat for not addressing you in perfectly accented French.

I thought of it just now because I’ve been angry sometimes at people who have not helped me advance my idealistic plan.  The insight came late — they have no idea how to help me advance my idealistic plan, nobody helps them, life is hard.  Their incapacity to help makes it ridiculous for me to be disappointed that they don’t help.  They cannot help, even if they wanted to, except in the rare case when they actually can, but the rare case is extremely rare.  They have less of an idea than I do about the best way to proceed doing something that is most likely impossible for one person to do.

“But what about me?” snarls an angry former friend. “You pretend to be Jesus Christ to everybody else, you talk a good game about mercy and forgiveness, but you could hardly have been less merciful to me.”    

Ah, yes, there is that.  Aware of the harm that was done to me I’m determined never to be treated that way again.  My father apologized as he was dying, an apology that was perhaps 45 years overdue.  My sister never got any apology.  If I tell you time and again that you are harming me, and you justify yourself and plead your case instead of acknowledging that a friend should have acted less hurtfully?  

Well, my father was my father, I had strong reasons for trying to look beyond his faults.  But in the case of someone I am friends with, someone I’ve told multiple times that just because I can take a punch doesn’t mean I like being punched?  Well, “but, I don’t get to hit anybody, and I’m mad as hell, and you can take a punch, and I really didn’t mean to hit you in the face again…” only means one thing to me in the end.   Time to go.  

But that popped into my head just now in answer to an obvious question.  What I really intended here was to acknowledge, in black and white, how silly it is to expect people to do things they are not capable of doing.  If they don’t do something they have no idea how to do you can’t be mad about that.  They can do many other things, many of them good.  Don’t get hung up on the one bad one, I remind myself.  It is a relief to remember this.

Unless the hurtful thing they do is bad enough, objectively, and they make a habit of it and won’t acknowledge they’re acting hurtfully.  Then it is probably best to take a two second break from trying to be Ahimsa-Boy and say, with all necessary mercilessness: sayonara.

The nature of the straw that breaks the camel’s back

The straw does not have to be any special straw.

In the fable the man piles straw on his camel’s back until the camel is at the limit of what he can carry.   The man wants to bring just a little more straw on the journey, to make it worth his while.  Seeing the camel straining, he decides to add just one more straw.  Camel’s back breaks.

This is how accretion, the adding on aided by gravity, can bring down many things.  Resentments, for example, grow by accretion if we do not resolve them.  I am strong, we may reason, I can look past this insult, this betrayal of trust, this small injury.   We carry this one, and the next, and believe we can be philosophical about it.   Most of the time we can be, but we must continue to carry whatever we do not resolve, it has a weight and causes a certain drag and friction.  

A trauma of some kind comes up, the other party, arguably intending no great harm, does one more thing that weighs in on top of the pile of grievances we already bear on our backs.  Boom!  Done, broken.

When times are relatively good we can carry more without breaking. At the breaking point, the final straw can be relatively light, it will tip the scales and the thing will break, whatever it is.   Forgiveness has its place, and it is a wonderful and essential place in a good life, but only if the thing forgiven is not endlessly repeated.

Otherwise the thing forgiven, papered over, minimized, agreed to disagree about, ignored, lost but not forgotten, is carried on an already burdened back.  The straw is waiting to fall on to the pile, as it is always poised to do.

So, in a nutshell

“I didn’t wind up painting yesterday,” she said, “but I looked at the colors and the brushes and I had a thought.”

“OK,” he said.  

“I realized what frustrated me so much the other day when you were probing about something that had made me angry.  I don’t mind the probing, but I object to the premise– ‘you believe you were wronged but there is another possibly equally valid side to the story and isn’t it possible that you are completely wrong, and in fact, the one who wronged the other person?'” she said.

“Not an unreasonable premise,” he said.  

“No, not unreasonable. Even something worth discussing.  Only there was one thing missing– you jumped to that premise without recognizing how hurt I was and that, possibly, I was entirely in the right to feel hurt.” she said.  “Even if I later realized I was wrong to be hurt, after reconsidering in light of your new insights, I was badly hurt at the time and you brought up something that was a painful experience for me. And brought it up with no expression of sympathy before trying to convince me I could have been wrong to feel the way I felt.”

“Yes,” he said, “but isn’t it equally possible that you were wrong?”

“Possible?  Yes, particularly if I was a thoughtless and emotional person who reacts to things impulsively.  Equally possible?  No, not even remotely equal.  If you heard my side of the story, which you did, and couldn’t admit you’d feel hurt too, which you eventually did allow, after an hour of batting back hypotheticals, you would have to recognize that I had good reasons to feel hurt.  You would have felt hurt too.  Might have acted much like I did, maybe better, maybe worse.  In the end, you might have convinced me to reconsider, but not if you didn’t at least acknowledge that I had a right to feel hurt.”  

“So this is all about you?” he asked.  

“Listen to me carefully: I am going to paint now,” she gave a wan smile and turned to head out into the garden.

“I will never have true peace with this person,” he thought hopelessly as she went.

What do you do with your rage?

“And what,” he asked, “do you do with your rage?”  

“What makes you think I fucking have rage?” she asked.  

“OK,” he said, “not rage… anger.  What do you do when you get angry?”  

“When I get angry I get silent.  I don’t believe in yelling any more, it doesn’t help.  The only thing that helps me when I’m angry is being silent.  I need to process it, think through what exactly is hurting me, why I am so angry, see if I can discover a way to not react with the violence I sometimes feel when I am hurt by someone I trust.”  

“What if the person you’re angry at needs to talk things out?” he asked.  

“Fuck him,” she said, “I truly don’t care when I’m hurt or angry what the person who made me angry needs or wants.  What I need and want is an apology, or failing that, silence.”  

“But that’s not very fair, I thought you’re trying to be mild and peaceful,” he said.

“The world is a circle of people justifying everything they do– everyone does it and here in the West it is a reflex, a tic.  We have to be justified, will argue hypotheticals to the death, we live in an adversarial system where every idiot makes his most vigorous argument.  There is always a reason somebody accidentally forgot, or was careless, or stupid, or hated themselves too much to realize you had troubles too, or got sick and couldn’t keep a promise, or was confused, or underestimated the harm they were doing, or said the wrong thing at the exact worst time, or acted like an asshole, racist or shithead believing sincerely that they were in the right the whole time.  Very few people do things believing they’re wrong, they do things they feel justified in doing, even if their justification is objectively feeble or even insane.  The first thing I need when I am hurt by somebody I know is the simple acknowledgement that they fucking hurt me.  It’s called empathy, also, taking responsibility instead of making an excuse. Does not seem like a huge thing to expect, if the person is concerned with my feelings, as I expect my friends to be, as I try to be toward them.”

“But you are capable of violence,” he said “and it scares people.”

“When have I ever been violent?  If people are scared they don’t know me, they are defensive, maybe, they’re scared how they would act if they were as angry as they think I am.  They compare their anger to mine and imagine what terrible things they might do.  I have no idea what people are scared of.  I use words and I try to use them as precisely as I can.  I often write them down and revise them until they are as clear as I can make them.  Words can sometimes hurt more than a punch in the face, worse than an arrow, I know.  I try to measure my words before I let them fly,” she said, “I make every effort to do better with my anger.  And anger, as you know, is a devilishly challenging emotion.  In fact, I see you can refer to it, and talk about mine, but not actually talk about your own.  It is easier to speak of mine, I suppose, since I express it more freely.”  

“Well, you do speak your mind,” he said.  

“Yes, I speak my mind,” she said.   “I would recommend the same to you, don’t be mad, don’t be passive aggressive, don’t dissemble, don’t complain I’m not listening while assuming you know what I’m about to say based on some memory of something I may have once said.  Don’t give me another hypothetical I can’t use while parsing and finding flaws in the one I give you.  Listen.  Use your great brain to hear what I am telling you, use your sensitive heart to feel the feeling I’m talking about– that’s more immediately important than the intellectual part.  I am not fucking Gandhi, it’s true.  Who knows if Gandhi even was Gandhi.  If there’s an afterlife Martin Luther King, Jr. has an excellent reason to be mad as hell.  MLK would be right to be raging up there at God’s right hand, in light of the almost ridiculous symbol he’s become in light of how little has changed for the masses of those he struggled for in the almost 50 years since he died. I couldn’t blame Martin for coldcocking God right now.  Gandhi too, for that matter, I wouldn’t blame him for kicking St. Peter in the balls.  I’m not them, or what they represent, but I’ve gone a long way toward becoming more like them.”

“Maybe not as long a way as you like to think,” he said.  “You’re still pretty goddamned angry, and scary too.”  

“As El Gato Ensombrerado said to the querulous fish in The Cat in the Hat, Spanish version ‘no temas, pececito’– ‘don’t worry, little fish’.  My father was an angry man, my mother was an angry woman, both of my grandmothers raged, one of them whipped her infant in the face, the other broke yardsticks over her kid’s ass.  I come from a home where people raged at each other, in a world with many styles of expressing anger including, frequently, deadly ones.  It is a daily challenge to do better, to get as far as I can toward being more patient,  more reasonable, milder.  It is better to forgive than to be stubborn about being right, it’s true.  But there is also a time when another person tears the fabric of trust and friendship, and argues like a lawyer, or a cornered rat, instead of empathizing with you for the harm they’ve done, and that’s the time to leave the room.  Only bad things can happen if you stay in that room, it’s a room where the air becomes toxic and never clears.”  

“Or you can work it out, truly be committed to being mild, forgiving, even when you have every right to be mad,” he said, “as you yourself are fond of writing in calligraphy.”  

“That’s true,” she said, “it is a good and noble aspiration and something I might do more if I was a fucking saint able to repair the torn fabric of a relationship that had grown toxic.  Which I am not.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go paint now.”  

“Wow,” he said, “right in the middle of our conversation.”  

“I’m sorry,” she said, “what exactly are we discussing that we are in the middle of?”

A whiff of fear stirred on the air around him and he said nothing.  Without any noticeable expression she went into the other room, presumably to paint.