9:51 p.m. - June 27, 2002
Anger management and men in orange vests
For future reference, do not send me emails containing advice. I generally dislike them. I definitely dislike them when they urge me to either take Spec and then jump on him, or when they urge me to not take Spec because that's engendering additional drama.
I do my own thing and suffer the consequences. You should all know that.
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When does a close buddy become a former buddy? I guess it's around the time you drift apart and stop talking much other than when you happen to run into each other. I wonder because a former buddy, my partner in crime, was arrested today for beating up a gay guy. My sister emailed me the details today after she saw him on the news in California.
It's unbelievable on several levels, one being the obvious--I know this guy--and two, the situation itself. Old buddyism strikes and I catch myself being on his side and then think Callous, but it's true. We have a long history together--do you hear the onset of an exculpatory phrase?--and right now I'm thinking very easily could I be in his place. Well not jail, but as a blue-collar drifter with two kids by two different women who can't get his act together. I wonder occasionally about him, mostly when his mother, who's very close to me, says she wishes things had turned out differently for Aaron. We had the same wealth. We had the same schools. We had the same professional parents. We had the same type of father. The same sense of humor. The same expectations of achievement. Just about the same everything, though his father was considerably more abusive than my own. Maybe that's where the difference is.
Best friends since second grade, all the way through high school, but by that time we were different; I was valedictorian, he was expelled; I was college bound, he was aimless; I was eager, he was angry. When we'd hang out together I always looked at his bruises but we never talked about them unless mine matched his, and my house was his safe house, where his mother would send him when his father was out to get him. He is, or was?, like a brother.
I went to college, he became a carpet installer, then a wood-floor installer, then a mechanic, then I lost track. He became one of those guys whose muscles were his Mustang, his personality a cigarette on his lip, his life Ricki Lake. The last time I saw him he said I was lucky. Didn't know what to say to that then or now.
So today while working on a road some gay guy made a remark, sexual in nature according to witnesses, and then tried to drive off; being in a construction zone, the driver didn't get far and Aaron went after him, pulled him out of the vehicle, and pummeled him.
I can't imagine that. I can't imagine what it's like to lose control like that and be an automaton, striking out and not realizing it's blood covering your fists and it's somebody's life, pride, and dignity that's being diminished. I can't imagine what that guy must have felt, being unable to defend himself. I can't imagine how bad they must feel.
I wonder what the driver said.
Back in high school he beat up one of the gay students for looking at him "that way." When we were both 21 and I was home in California, he beat up a guy in a bar because the guy wouldn't stop looking at Aaron. And now this. Unbelievable.
You know what's awful about this whole thing on my own egocentric, selfish level? It's that I blame the driver for saying something in the first place. Yeah, yeah, all you leftist liberals and champions of every cause except heterosexuality, I know what you're thinking, because I'm thinking that too. But still.
I wonder how Aaron would react if he knew what I've done with Spec. I don't like being added to the same category as the driver, but aren't we the same?
Yuck.
