The Violence that Finds Us

In 1958, I was on the Going to the Sun highway in Montana, headed toward Canada on a 650-c.c. Triumph motorcycle. It was after dark, and despite the fact that it was August, it was cold. Consequently, when I saw a little place with a restaurant sign out front, I stopped. The dirt parking lot was filled with pickup trucks and old cars. I went inside and had to stand for a minute or two before I found an empty table, because the place was pretty much filled. A few people were eating, but everybody was drinking. The air was heavy with loud talk and laughter and smoke. The smell of burned grease could not quite beat down the unmistakable odor of sweat and male musk. There was a whole bunch of folks packed in there who had not seen a bathtub in a long, long time. A battered jukebox in a far corner wailed about love gone wrong and lost. I felt completely and wonderfully at home for the first time since I'd started this trip some months back.

There was no menu, and I was sitting there smoking a cigarette, glad to be in out of the cold, when a one-legged man using a crutch swung up to my table with marvelous agility and stopped. His stump was cut off above the knee, and he stood there saying nothing. He was wearing a pointed boot, Levi's and a tailored shirt. I looked (continued on page 186)Violence(continued from page 99) back at him, not knowing what to say.

"What you want?" he said.

"Oh," I said, "you taking my order?"

He smiled. His teeth were incredibly white. "Yeah," he said, "I'm taking your order."

"Four scrambled eggs," I said, "and bacon and any kind of beer in a bottle."

Without even looking, he took a plate off a table a couple of feet away and set it in front of me. Somebody had had scrambled eggs but had not eaten them all. I sat looking at the eggs caught in a thin gauze of congealed lard, wondering what the hell was going on, thinking maybe it was a joke of some sort.

"There's your eggs," he said.

Whatever else it was, I knew it was no joke.

"Not my eggs," I said.

"You ordered eggs, you got eggs. Eat 'm."

Things were suddenly quiet, and for the first time, I looked--really looked--at the other people in the place, mostly men, and realized that every last one of them was an Indian. I didn't know they were Blackfoot Indians, and I didn't know that I was on a Blackfoot reservation. But I did know I was in deep shit.

I said, "I don't know what your problem is, friend...."

"I'm not your friend. Eat the goddamn eggs."

There was a lifting in my heart, an elation. I watched him for a moment. I didn't think he meant to do anything. We looked to be about the same size, 160 pounds, six feet tall, but the fucking guy had one leg, he was on a crutch, so I figured he'd step away from the table and somebody else would take it up, finish it.

"Hey, man," I said, "I been on a motorcycle all day. Does it have to be this way?"

For an answer, he threw his crutch to the side and--as they say in Georgia--reached and took me. The son of a bitch--on that one leg--was like a Pogo stick. Incredible balance and incredibly strong. If I could have got free of him, things might have turned out differently. But I was wearing a heavy denim jacket, and once he got hold of it, he never turned loose, and I couldn't make him. He pogoed me all over the place, his friends moving tables out of the way, and he bounced me off the walls, butting me in the face with a head that felt like a sledge hammer. I could feel the blood running on my face. He had no difficulty with me whatsoever, and when he'd finished, his friends threw me out the front door. I lay out there looking at my motorcycle from ground level, wondering if anything was broken. There was--my nose and a rib. Finally, I got up and went over and leaned on my bike. The cold felt good. The stars in the sky looked brighter and more wondrous than any I'd ever seen. The elation I'd felt earlier at the table, when I knew what was coming down, had turned to euphoria. I was at one with myself and at peace with the world. It was a way I had not been for a long time, and the reason was standing back in the restaurant on one leg and a crutch.

•

Are you plagued with a sourceless anxiety? Do you worry about God and the order of the universe? Or do you worry about the existence of God and whether or not there is order in the universe? Are you unhappy for no apparent reason? Do you obsess over the future of your children?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, then go out and get your ass kicked. It is the ultimate refreshment. You will be purified and holy. I give you my word that you will not be plagued by anxiety or worried about God, the universe or your children. Nose-to-nose combat is better than a psychiatrist, is never as humiliating and is not nearly so expensive.

I was on that motorcycle to start with because I'd been out of the Marine Corps for two years, during which time I'd been attending a university. And two years of watching petrified men riding petrified horses had filled me with a sense of doom and a crushing anxiety. So I got on a motorcycle and headed West. That very day, I'd been riding up out of Wyoming, a state filled with God's Wonders, and through Montana, a state so ruggedly and brutally beautiful that to look at it was enough to make me feel my own insignificance in the Grand Scheme of Things.

When I wandered into that Indian restaurant, I still carried a residue of doom and anxiety from the university, and I was sick to death of God's Wonders and the Grand Scheme of Things, and I sure as hell was tired of contemplating my own insignificance. That was the reason I felt elation when I knew I was about to go nose to nose; that was the reason for the euphoria when I leaned, bleeding, against my bike. I had gone in sick and the Indian had cured me. That he had been the better fighter and the superior athlete was of no consequence. Winning or losing has nothing to do with it. The point is to lock up and get back in touch with yourself. Nothing gets you back in touch with yourself like a little of your own blood. A broken nose or a broken rib centers a man emotionally and mentally like nothing else can.

(I hear voices out there whispering, masochistic, macho, male insecurity. I can only answer that I do what I need to do to get through the world and also that I will not lose any sleep tonight or any other night because of the voices that have been whispering at my back for as long as I can remember, voices inevitably taking issue with my behavior. Paranoid, you say? If I am, make the most of it.)

But violence sometimes finds you at the most inconvenient moments, moments when you don't need it and can't use it. I can't remember the year, but once, I was assigned to look into the difficulties of Oklahoma preacher Billy James Hargis. The good preacher had allegedly fucked two members of his congregation, a young woman and a young man, whom he subsequently joined in the bonds of holy matrimony. (Hey, don't get your back up; this thing is about violence.) And I had a horrible layover in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. So I went outside and found a taxi.

"Is there a pool hall anywhere near here?" I asked.

"Sure," the driver said. "Thirty, forty minutes."

"Let's do it," I said.

When we got to the pool hall, I found a game with a boy about 25, a Mexican American. Truthfully, though, that he was a Mexican American never occurred to me until three guys came in wearing the Texas state costume: Stetsons, little pointy boots, cowboy shirts and Levi's. They stopped at the table next to ours. I took one look at them and knew they had never been nearer a horse than a John Wayne movie. But they were good-sized boys and holding a lot of mouth. They didn't say a thing to me, but they proceeded to get on my partner's game.

"You wipe the grease off your hand, you'll shoot a better stick," one of them said.

The boy I was shooting with looked up briefly but said nothing. He went on shooting.

"Speak it in spick, Luther," another of them said. "He probably don't understand."

My game was ruined, because I didn't know what might happen next and I had a plane to catch.

"I cain't speak spick," Luther said. "My momma wasn't a whore. Your momma's got to be a whore to speak spick."

As if it had been choreographed, the boy I was shooting with went right over the table and caught the guy just as he said the last word, went right over the table and caught him flush in the face with a cue ball. The guy went down like a sack of wet laundry, but to give him his due, he came right back to his feet, blood pouring out of his mouth and nose. Then the three of them swarmed over the boy and brought him down. He could never get up, and they put the boots to him. I backed away and watched. It wasn't my fight, I told myself. I had a plane to catch, I told myself. But he was taking some really bad leather there on the floor, and the cowboys didn't look as if they meant to stop. I should have stayed out of it, I probably should have, but I touched one of the cowboys on the shoulder and stepped between him and the boy on the floor.

"You've hurt him bad enough," I said. "You're gonna kill him."

I saw the cue stick coming, but I never felt it. The lights went out. When they came back on, the heat was there, the heat I fear most in the world, Texas cops. Guess who went to jail? But you already know, don't you? The cops handcuffed me and the kid. Personally, I had never been fitted to a pair of cuffs like that. To understand how it was done, put your right hand over your right ear. Now slide the hand back and straight down between your shoulder blades. Put your left hand on your left kidney. Now slide it up between your shoulder blades, where your right hand should be waiting. Even if you're something of a contortionist, it is difficult to do and hurts like hell.

They hustled us out to the waiting car. I was concentrating on not going down, because when your hands are cuffed between your shoulder blades like that, you lose whatever balance you ever might have had. As he was putting me into the back of the car, I don't know whether the cop pushed me or I just fell; but once I was down on the street, I was having a hell of a time getting up with my hands fixed like that. I also don't know whether it was on purpose or by accident, but in helping me up, he managed to step on me about 15 times. I know what I think, but then, I'm prejudiced in the matter.

Once in the back of the car, the kid went nuts. He was yelling and screaming, and I kept trying to quiet him down.

"Shut up, man," I said. "They got us. They got us, man, cool it."

I was mindful of what a writer--Dashiell Hammett, I think--said: "Your civil rights end at the precinct door."

But the kid was having none of it. "I went goddamn it to goddamn Vietnam and fought for this fucking country and I come home to be treated like a goddamn dog."

In the front seat, neither cop turned his head. But one of them, in that marvelous, slow Western voice all of us have come to know and love, said, "Just what we need in Texas, another greaser. Too bad you didn't get killed."

That did nothing to shut the kid up. He was just as wild and crazy when they took him out of the car as when they put him in. After they took us inside, emptied our pockets, took our belts and shoelaces and booked us, they put me in a cell by myself and I never saw the kid again. They let me bail myself out the next morning, but during much of the night, I listened to somebody screaming somewhere down the cell block, screaming as though he were being beaten or in a nightmare. I don't to this day know what was going on. I know what I think, but then, I'm prejudiced in the matter.

•

Violence, like many other things in this world, comes in various and sundry flavors. Perhaps the bitterest of them has to do with rites of passage, that small period when a boy is supposed to become a man. I don't know a hell of a lot about manhood, wherein it lies or what it's made of. I'll leave that question to better minds than mine--the fem libbers, for instance. They could tell you in a New York minute. But whatever it is, a good part of it seems to be bound up with violence of one kind or another, on football fields, high school and college wrestling mats, karate dojos and--God help us all--the Armed Forces that defend this land of ours.

In 1953, when I was 17, my brother was already in Korea, and feeling was fairly high in this country--or at least in south Georgia--that it was our duty to save Korea from communism. It was a good, simple time when young men wanted to go out and kill a gook for democracy. So I went to the nearest post office and found the friendly recruiter.

Later, I was on a train going down to South Carolina with some other recruits. When the train stopped at Port Royal, a whole gang of Marines swarmed into the cars and started pushing us and screaming at the top of their voices about spitting out chewing gum and throwing away cigarettes and standing up straight, all the usual bullshit that we expected, so it didn't bother us very much. We were herded into buses and taken to Parris Island.

One of the guys who had come down on the train with us was a slender, very pale boy with red hair who continuously smiled. Or at least he looked as though he were smiling. I think now that it was just the way his face was made and he couldn't help it. It made him look retarded, which he may have been, but I don't think so.

"You goddamn civilian turd, wipe that smile off your face!" screamed a buck sergeant. He was frothing at the mouth, and his eyes were starting from his head in a web of veins.

The redheaded kid only smiled back at the sergeant and then turned to look out the window of the bus. The D.I. had been screaming about the smile ever since he first saw it on the train. He'd worked himself into such a frenzy that none of us thought it was real. I mean, who's going to chew his lips until they bleed because of a goddamn smile on somebody else's face? So we weren't prepared for what happened when the bus stopped.

The sergeant jumped off the bus and was waiting when the kid came down the steps. He jerked off his helmet, grabbed the kid by his shirt, spun him once and started beating him over the head. The first time he struck him, his head splattered and blood was all over the kid's face. It didn't seem to concern the sergeant at all. He just kept pounding. The other Marines didn't even watch. They were too busy kicking ass and slapping us and getting us lined up. When we went running off across the drill field, we left the kid lying there, bleeding like a pig. I never saw him again.

They took us to a warehouse, where they made us stand on one foot while they issued us an enormous seabag full of clothing and boots and all manner of other shit that didn't fit. Then they made us strip and put everything we owned into a bag they said would be sent home. Finally, we ran across another field to a barracks and were left in a squad bay, standing at attention. We had not as yet met the men who would see us through Parris Island. But we were about to.

We'd been standing at attention for a long time when three men came screaming through the door. The senior D.I., a staff sergeant, grabbed the recruit next to me and started beating him in the face.

"You goddamn black bastard!" he screamed, spit flying from his lips. (They all slobbered a lot on Parris Island.) "You think I give a shit if you're a nigger? You think I care if you're a black monkey?"

The whole time he was screaming, he was slapping and punching him, screaming, "You think I'm prejudiced because you're a goddamn nigger, don't you? I don't give a shit if your skin is green or blue or black."

He beat the kid all the way around the squad bay and back to the place he'd started. Then he came toward me. That's when I saw how big his wrists were. He had the biggest, most brutal wrists I've ever seen on a human being. They had ropes tattooed around them.

I never saw the hand coming. My head exploded and my right ear rang like a bell tower.

"You degenerate turd, look what you've done!" he screamed at me. "You've pissed on yourself!"

I looked down and, sure enough, old Harry Crews's bladder had got out of control and pissed both britches' legs full. And even though I was made a squad leader in the platoon, I continued to piss on myself occasionally. The drill instructor had great experience with young Marines, though, and he saw that I was a high-strung type and that my defective bladder was the result of nerves and not of cowardice. I still am not so sure of it myself, but that was his opinion.

"In my opinion, Crews, you are a high-strung type and that is why you keep giving water the way you do," he said.

"Sir, yes, sir!" I screamed at the top of my voice. On Parris Island, the first word out of your mouth and the last word out of your mouth has to be sir. You also have to scream at the top of your voice. It means you have balls. That is the theory. Sound like you got a pair!

"Don't scream so goddamn loud in here!" he shouted.

"Sir, no, sir!" I shouted back.

We were in his tiny, airless office, a closetlike room right off the squad bay, where the platoon slept. The rest of the platoon was out on the drill field. I had been out on the drill field, too, five minutes before, but one of the junior drill instructors had sneaked up behind me and slammed me on the side of my head and I'd pissed on myself, and that had embarrassed the hell out of the senior drill instructor, because I was a squad leader and, as such, I was hand-picked by the senior drill instructor, which meant I was supposed to be able to take my beatings and stuff, just like I ... like I ... well, like I had a pair. So when I pissed on myself, the senior drill instructor had screamed and chased me across the drill field here to his steaming little office not to beat me good, as I had thought, but to have an almost fatherly talk with me.

"See," he said, "you're a Marine now."

"Sir, yes, sir!" I screamed.

He'd been leaning on a file cabinet. He came over to stand in front of me. He was no more than a foot from me. "I want to talk to you. Don't say anything else. I've got a headache anyway. Don't scream anymore."

"Sir, no, sir!" I screamed.

"Goddamn you!"

He hit me right between the eyes with his fist. I went straight back, slammed into the wall and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor. I could hear him above me. His face swam for a moment, and then I could see he was smiling down upon me, his face radiant.

"Crews!" he screamed. "You didn't do it!"

I looked down at myself and waited for my eyes to focus. He was right. I wanted to tell him that I'd seen the lick coming, and that was why I didn't give water. But I couldn't talk. He picked me up and slapped me twice in the face. He stepped back, and we both looked down to check me out. I hadn't. He hugged me. My nose was bleeding. He got some of the blood on the side of his face. He held me so I couldn't fall. He punched me in the jaw and then hit me in the stomach. Still my bladder held.

He was ecstatic. "Goddamn it, I knowed I knowed a Marine when I seen one."

He hugged me again and then beat me for a long time to prove to me that I could take it. Later, when we left the office, he told me I'd gone in there a boy and come out a man. And I believed him. But, of course, now, 30 years later, I don't. I only believe that I got the knack of not pissing on myself. That is a very big thing to get the knack of in the Marine Corps. It has nothing to do with manhood, but it will do until something else comes along.

•

Violence sometimes comes not from one's own predisposition for it, or from prejudice of one kind or another, or from the misfortune of joining the wrong branch of the Service; rather, it comes from turning a corner one day and walking square into the face of madness.

Right now, I'm holding a scar--an ugly one--under my left arm, about six inches above the elbow. The scar is a little more than two months old. I was sitting on a bench in a little park close to the room I use for writing. I rent the room for no other purpose and, consequently, it has only a desk for my typewriter, a couch and two chairs. There is a tiny bath off it but no kitchen. When I plan to stay the day, I take sandwiches and a semihuge container of whiskey and water and have lunch in the little park.

I was sitting there on the bench, working on a sandwich and sipping the whiskey, when a young man suddenly appeared. I hadn't seen him coming because he had approached from behind me. He was smiling, tanned, neatly dressed, maybe 20 years old.

"You're Harry Crews," he said.

"Guilty," I said.

"I've read your books," he said. "All your books. I really like what you do."

Well, shit, man. I don't get much of that, and I frankly admit that I need more of it than comes my way. I immediately liked the guy.

"All right if I sit down?" he said.

"Sit," I said.

We talked for a while, and he really had read the books. It was a relaxed and pleasant time. Right in the middle of talking about something in a book, he stopped and said, "How's it feel to be famous?"

"You'd have to ask somebody else about that," I said.

"Oh, you're famous," he said. "I know you."

Well, what the hell, I thought, he's young. "I'm not," I said, "but since you asked the question, I think being famous would just be one long pain in the ass."

He frowned. "But you can't believe that. You've spent your whole life trying to be famous."

He was young, but that was hardly an excuse for such bullshit. I said nothing and opened the whiskey again.

"I smell that whiskey," he said.

"Yep," I said, "whiskey's what you smell."

"Could I have a drink?"

I looked at him. He'd asked for it like a child asking for a piece of candy. The container had a two-cap top. I poured him a drink. He drank it right down and beamed upon me.

"I've had a drink with Harry Crews."

"Yeah, with that and fifty cents you can----"

"You're making fun of me."

"No, I'm not making fun of you. But, tell you what, I got to go back to work."

"I'm boring you."

"No," I said, "just got to get back to it."

The boy was suddenly on his feet, and I saw his hand flash and then felt something under my arm about half as bad as a bee sting. I was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, and when I looked down, the whole left side of the shirt, from arm to waist, was full of blood. The boy leaned toward me, his eyes bright, and there crept into his face an expression quite unlike any I'd ever seen before--part idiocy, part triumph. Then he bolted across the park at a dead run. He need not have hurried. I was not about to chase him. Anybody who chases madness deserves what he catches.

A screwy, inexplicable act, right? Wrong. I think it more common than not. I live in a small town, and there is an incredible amount of shit about my name in the street. It is not unusual for somebody I don't know to walk up to me in a bar and ask me about a story he's heard about something I did, a story of absurdity or violence or drunkenness. Rarely are the stories true, and when I was younger, I used to try to correct them. But not anymore. It's all too boring. I just shrug and let it slide.

The boy in the park that day had bought an illusion without substance. He had conjured a notion about me that had no basis in reality. Nonetheless, the notion was true for him, and he wanted--for whatever reason--to join himself to it, to become part of the illusion. Nothing joins like blood. Wherever he is now, he knows I'm carrying his scar.

Fortunately, my ball of wax is very small. Only a little blood was needed. Had I been more accomplished or more widely known, he might have thought it necessary to kill me, inasmuch as murderer and murdered are joined in an ultimate bond.

But such maimings do not account for the majority of random violence among people, or so I have come to believe. When real human potential is stifled by social circumstance, the result is spilled blood and rent flesh. Examples abound everywhere, but we conveniently do not see them, or else we make something out of them that is not true.

When I was 16 years old, I knew three brothers from south Georgia who were legendary for their willingness, their eagerness, to fight. Casts, wired jaws, bandages and sutured wounds were their habitual decorations. The sap was just beginning to rise in me, and I was deeply pleased and honored to find myself in their company one Friday night, the four of us already half in a bag from a Mason jar of moonshine, roaring along a dirt road toward a roadhouse just outside Waycross. We'd been all day in the woods with crosscut saws and axes, and that night after supper, the oldest brother, named Justin but called Cooter, looked across the table at me and said, "Boy, you want to go with us tonight?"

"Where'bouts you going?" I said. Not that I cared. I was 16, and I desperately wanted to see how it was on the other side of the stories they told and the stories I'd heard about them.

Cooter winked at his brothers and then said to me, "It may be that we can find some old girl that'll lift a leg for you." I tried to be cool as hell about it, but I was dead on ready, so horny in those days, I could bump into a table and come.

"I wouldn't mind taking a little ride," I said.

Dreaming as I was of lifted legs, I was not prepared for what happened when we walked into the roadhouse. The place was only about as big as a corncrib, furnished with a rough plank bar, scarred tables and ladder-back chairs. Cooter stopped just inside the door and his brothers came up to stand on either side of him. He took off his hat, the same sweat-stained hat he'd worn all day in the woods, and sailed it out into the room.

"There's my hat, you sumbitches," Cooter said in a voice I'd never heard before. "Is anybody in here man enough to step on it?"

Everything went quiet as men looked up from the beer they were drinking or the Prince Albert cigarettes they were rolling. Finally, a tall boy, big-boned and lanky, got up from his table and walked over to where the hat lay. He looked at the hat for what seemed a very long time, and then he looked at Cooter.

"We gon' see whose ass is the blackest," the lanky boy said and stepped squarely on the hat.

I don't know exactly what happened after that or how long it took. The room seemed to explode. There was a lot of screaming and cursing and chairs flying about. But I awoke in the back seat of Cooter's old Dodge with a terrible pain in my stomach from ruptured blood vessels that would cause my belly to be black for weeks. Cooter had lost a tooth, and one of his brothers had a flap of scalp torn loose that was bloodying the whole inside of the car. The three of them were chuckling and talking, incredibly calm and contained. They had found the release they had been looking for and were now happily returning to the farm they tended together. The next morning, they were back at their axes and saws, cutting pulpwood. I was in bed with a towel full of ice on my stomach, wondering what the hell had happened.

Strange to say, but these men were well thought of in the countryside. They were hard workers and men of their word. If a farmer got hurt and was laid up, they would appear, unasked, to do whatever needed doing.

Why, then, was it their habit to come home, sometimes twice a week, busted up and bloodied? I understand it imperfectly, but I have come to believe the reasons are centered in the fact that they were locked into social circumstances that resulted in a kind of raging frustration that found its outlet in rank violence. They were men of great native intelligence but no education. They were natural leaders with nobody to lead. And, perhaps worst of all, they were sensitive and perceptive enough to see that they were in a cul-de-sac from which there could never be an escape. They probably would never have admitted, or been able to admit, to any of that, but I've seen too much in my life in too many places not to believe such was the case. In that respect, they were blood brothers to Mexican Americans starving in El Paso and to black Americans in ghettos across the land and--not surprisingly--to men and women from "good" suburban families whose spirits have been smothered by a sea of material things they do not need and cannot use.

I wouldn't want to be caught saying that violence is good, if for no other reason than that Cooter and his brothers went out one night and died in a hail of double-aught buckshot. But violence, for all manner of reasons, finds some of us. I would maintain it doesn't make us bad, it only makes us human.

"But violence sometimes finds you at the most inconvenient moments, when you don't need it."