Now that I have your attention…
This post is about the moment it all changed for you, the moment you realized you needed to know how to hurt people. The moment when the puzzle that is your personality, your social network and the world beyond your driveway all fell into place with a kind of awful clarity and made you sit back, winded, with a newfound unease in the pit of your gut. An unease that could only be quelled by knowing how to beat a man to unconsciousness or death with your bare hands.
The moment you realized that knowing how to use violence was the only thing that was going to get you back to enjoying life like you did in your prior state of blissful ignorance.
I’ll tell you about mine.
Lucky for me, it was one of those easy-to-miss two-paragraph news items on page A21, stuffed down as filler between all those ads for tire alignments and mattress stores. And yet, it must have been the perfect time for me to see it, because it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here’s the gist of it:
A local San Diego college student went down to Tijuana for some bar-hopping with his buddies. At some point during the night he became separated from the group and vanished. A couple of weeks later he was found in central Mexico, all splayed out on a voodoo altar, having been ‘used up’ in some hideous ritual. Bled out and eviscerated.
I was a college student in San Diego at the time, and had, on occasion, been to TJ. My first thought was, “That could have been me.” My second thought was, “No matter what, I am NOT going out like that.”
Up until those two small paragraphs I had been training — but casually, and with some ‘funny’ ideas about how violence worked. I found the idea of taking a man’s eye or breaking his spine (or otherwise permanently crippling him) to be morally reprehensible. I devised an elaborate system of target selection based upon the intent of the other man. In other words, if he just wanted to duke it out, then I’d only stun or knock the wind out of him. If he wanted to kill me, well, then it was on. But still, that whole eye thing bothered me.
‘Used up in a voodoo ritual’ burned all that crap out of my system in a searing flash — the world was not what I imagined it to be. If I wanted to continue living in it I would have to get deadly serious about the staying alive part. And that meant doing ANYTHING.
If things went to violence, no matter who chose it, I was going to be the one doing all the ugly, awful things — not the other way around. Period.
