The American Way of Revenge

Everyone wants Revenge, but scarcely anyone does anything about it. This is probably a good thing; in fact, this "good thing" is thought of as the social contract, wherein there is an implicit agreement by all to behave themselves, and incidents of misbehavior are to be dealt with by specifically designated authorities.

Unfortunately, nearly all of life is lived between the lines. An ungovernable passion in us that is capped by the sheer tonnage of law will squeeze out somewhere. On a certain, albeit low, level, many of us regard the idea of capital punishment with mixed pleasure, but pleasure nevertheless. Some of us actually cheer outside the prison walls. In terms of gross receipts, Clint Eastwood has made a lot of people feel good. True, the mass has always loved the easy or childish stroke; only a nation in the most otiose moral stupor would turn out in droves for the profound silliness of Rambo. It's the kind of thinking that makes South Africa not all that bad but Nicaragua truly evil.

But before I get too high-minded, I should add that I'd like to see Stallone-Rambo sneak into Lebanon and deal with those crazed shitsuckers who beat, then shot the young Navy man, Stethem, to death on the civilian American Airlines flight last June. The word civilian is important here. When an acquaintance of mine had his head, arms and legs chopped off as the result of a dope deal gone awry, I was upset--but then, business is business, as we are so fond of saying. It was the equivalent of war, and he was a soldier. Stethem, however, was flying home with a planeload of tourists when he was jumped on the face so relentlessly that his mom couldn't recognize him. More recently, a group of terrorists shanghaied a Mediterranean cruise ship, shot an old Jewish tourist named Klinghoffer and pitched him overboard in his wheelchair. The readily imagined visual is not pretty--the body would float for a while, but the chair would sink immediately. If I were to stop writing at this moment, (continued on page 126Revenge (continued from page 115) walk into the bathroom and connect myself to a digital blood-pressure machine, the results would not be pleasant.

Why all this brooding and seething on both a personal and a national level? Despite the mood swings of a nation in disarray, probably no one is going to bring a living POW back from the jungles. And to get out of the level of comic-book mythology, it is doubtful that any recourse can be had in Stethem's death, nor any offered by our Government, which is so lame and ineffectual in such matters. The fact that the Egyptian plane carrying Klinghoffer's murderers was escorted to Italy, only to have the ringleader set free, only illustrates our bungling. It is obvious that we should be commissioning all the hot items to the Israelis on a piecework basis. Teddy Roosevelt launched a number of warships to secure the freedom of a single, solitary American citizen named Perdicaris, captured by a Moroccan sultan. "We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead," said Teddy. But then, this is no longer a rough-riding world, and if you can't hear a computer whirring in the background or don't watch the news, you are blessedly infantile.

Revenge, frankly, can't be understood on a political level. The news of the most striking horror conceivable can enter Washington at midnight and be extruded the next morning in the studied inanities of a press conference. Revenge is human. Moving back in time, literally as far from a press conference as one can travel, after Bighorn, some Cheyenne squaws drove awls into Custer's very dead ears so he might be more attentive in the afterlife. Custer had been warned before his folly. This is getting closer. Our hearts are territorial, and the things closest to our hearts--our love for another, the deepest of friendships, our sense of our own dignity and even our sense of justice--are so hopelessly fragile that some of us strike out wildly in defense.

But Americans have never made an art of revenge as have the Sicilians, Corsicans or Mexicans. We shuffle and blunder, wanting to be largehearted in victory. We want to be simple-minded frontiersmen who get the job done.

The first revenge story we are likely to hear concerns the fabled dick in a jar. Apocryphal or not, this story is ubiquitous. I recently heard it in bars and service stations in Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin. I first heard it in Reed City, Michigan, probably in 1948 or 1949. A group of boys from ten to 12 would hang around a gas station on their Schwinn balloon-tire bikes, listening to advice from a not-very-bright World War Two veteran. Coca-Cola was a nickel a bottle, and there was the chance we would see Rochester from the Jack Benny radio show pass through town on his way to Idlewild, a black resort, in his huge limousine. Anyway, the pump jockey might show us his "kraut booty," as he called it, including a bayonet with dried blood on it, the blood of an American boy. Mingled with the usual stories of Nazi girls' fucking for chocolate bars was a horrifying tale.

"This buddy of mine over in Luther a few years ago was screwing this rich doctor's wife. She was a spitfire, and no man could handle this crazy bitch. The doctor found out about his wife's cheating. The doctor was sad, because there is no medicine to control a woman hungry for dick. The doctor started drinking and became mad as hell. He tracked his wife and my buddy to their love nest, a deer camp over near Leroy, south of Rose Lake. The doctor peeked in the cabin window and saw that the two lovers were all fucked out and asleep. He snuck in and chloroformed the both of them. He took a surgery knife and lopped off my buddy's cock and balls, then sewed up the hole in his crotch. He put the cock and balls in a jar of vinegar so they could be preserved, like pork tongues or dill pickles. He left the jar on the night table and went on home. So hours later, my buddy and the woman wake up feeling like they been operated on, but a woman, as you might know, has nothing to cut off. She sees the jar and the jig is up."

"Did the guy die?" we asked.

"'Course not. My buddy had to move to Detroit, because everybody knew. The nuts and bolts of the story is, he is now a girl. He sits down to pee and has taken up religion, because the simple fact is, that boy will never fuck again."

"What happened to the jar?" someone asked inappropriately.

"Got me by the balls. Might still be there in the cabin."

This fruitcake, peculiarly American tale served to make me forever wary of doctors' wives. The most beautiful of them may as well be wearing a fright wig and an Elmer Fudd mask. Perhaps in the safety of a submarine....

•

Of course, our banal story of rube or bumpkin revenge is a mere skeleton of classic revenge. Much of our mental makeup is a stream of rehearsals of threats, real or imagined, an inventory of resentments that we moderate or else become psychotic. Classical revenge demands a purity of hatred against a backdrop of a specific code of honor usually found only in cultures that have not lost their traditional underpinnings--Sicilians, Corsicans, Mexicans again come to mind. In the United States, such notions are usually limited to rural areas of the South and West and to cities with large ethnic populations. In Detroit a few years back, there was a shoot-out between a group of Albanian cousins and brothers over a question of honor that left the police and the criminal element gasping. With the exception of the Belushi brothers, Albanians win the inscrutability contest over the Chinese.

Revenge doesn't thrive on situational ethics. You can scarcely kill your wife for unfaithfulness if you belong to a swap club. Moral waffling doesn't lend itself to the kind of sharply delineated code of ethics that is the breeding ground of righteous anger. Any wrong committed against you where your first impulse is to call the police or a lawyer is not fit material for revenge. The anger has to be a blow to the solar plexus or the groin: One has to stew, brood, agonize. As Faulkner might have it, the grief must grieve on universal bones.

Perhaps there is something identifiable in our history that makes us clumsy at our revenge in comparison with the Latins. The Romance languages suppurate with blood and intrigue, from the peasantry to the highest Church levels, while English (as spoken in America) has given the world explicit notions of the frontier, the gun fight and the quick-draw artist. Anyone in southern Europe knows it's smarter to shoot your enemy, good or bad, in the back. If you are right, why endanger yourself? The following little story from France is a wonderful example. (This and the other anecdotes are true, with situations and locations changed for obvious reasons--the legal profession has so trivialized human concourse that it can best be understood as a nationwide smear of Krazy Glue preventing freedom of movement. Much of future revenge will center on the legal profession.)

An old man in France told me this one evening over a goblet of Calvados. "During the occupation of France, there was a reasonably successful farmer near a small village in Normandy. This farmer did his best to ignore the Germans, had a wife and two teenaged daughters and a son away at war. The farmer raised pigs and fed them primarily on beets and beet greens. Scarcely anyone knew that he and his family provided a safe house for members of the Resistance and for Jews trying to escape from the country. There was an envious couple in town and, as an aside, the husband had been thrashed by the farmer for trying to molest one of his daughters when she was a child. The (continued on page 134) Revenge (continued from page 126) couple, Vichy types, caught wind of the farmer's Resistance activities and reported them to the Germans. The Germans raided the farm and found two Jewish children, whom they summarily bayoneted. The farmer and his wife were forced to watch while their pigs were killed, their daughters raped and strangled. The Germans then held a barbecue.

"When the son returned from the war, he heard the story but was wise enough to delay his revenge, allowing the couple to think they had gotten away with their betrayal. In 1947, the son and two of his friends bound and kidnaped the couple. They took them to an abandoned quarry where a large cave had been partially filled with a ton or so of beets and a dozen pigs. The son and his friends returned in a few weeks with a dozen villagers. They all toasted the well-gnawed bones of the couple and had a fine pig roast there in the quarry. I cherish the moment the pigs finished the beets and began chewing on those swine. May they be eaten in hell forever."

This is a wonderful piece of classic revenge for not altogether obvious reasons: The son waited in order to give the couple a sense of prosperous grace--revenge, as they say in Palermo, is a dish best served cold--and, more important, the punishment precisely suited the complexion of the crime. There on the dark floor caked with pig shit, you can feel the first bite. Bullets would have been peaceful and unearned bee stings in such a case.

•

Of course, revenge is frequently captious and childish. A man shoots a recalcitrant cigarette machine. A drunk with a cleft palate was teased and mimicked by snowmobilers in a bar I occasionally visit. He demolished a dozen of their machines with his three-quarter-ton pickup. A friend in San Francisco was justifiably enraged by his landlord. He bored a hole in the roof and gave the landlord's apartment a several-thousand-gallon hosing that, unfortunately, streamed through the floor into his own apartment.

And at a certain point, there is a baffling stupidity to anger. Years ago, when I learned that my sister's first husband had slugged her, I made inquiries to find out how I could get him murdered; but I was on a Guggenheim grant and could scarcely handle the seven-grand fee. I settled for a phone threat. Years before that, I set-out to murder the drunken driver who had killed my father and sister; but he, too, had been killed in the accident. I suspect that affairs of the blood and those of love bring us closest to the flash point.

Another acquaintance is a commercial fisherman from Seattle: "I came home from two months at sea. It was barely after dawn when I got to the house. I was too young to know that it's only good etiquette to warn your wife that you're coming home. I took off my boots and tiptoed up the stairs, horny as could be.

"Well, she wasn't alone, and you know who was with her? My best friend! Well, I slipped my .38 out of the dresser drawer and looked down at them through the sights, wondering which one to kill first. I heard my three-year-old daughter cough in the next room. My wife looked beautiful, and I thought of all the good times I had had with my friend Bob. I knew this kind of thing could happen with friends on both sides of the fence, though I didn't know why. Just proximity, I guess. So I was standing there and I suddenly pressed down on his neck with my free hand until his eyes were popping. I jammed the .38 in his mouth up to the cylinder and cocked the pistol. My wife woke up, but she knew enough not to say anything. She was rigid as ice. I lifted the barrel up hard against his palate and ripped the pistol out, with his teeth coming out with the sight. I can say he will never forget me. I walked out of the room, kissed my daughter goodbye, and now I'm here in Corpus Christi."

There are certain people whom one does not advise to seek professional help, a marriage counselor or a minister. They are neither better nor worse than the rest of us, but they are there. To say that such people have atavistic notions of justice is mostly to provide fodder for the modern-living pages of newspapers, where not much can be lost because there was never much at stake. I tried to persuade this man to go back to Seattle and make amends with his wife, and all he did was break into tears and walk out of the bar--and this was ten years after the event.

Naturally, the origin of the taboo of adultery is that the social contract in small communities demands it in the name of order. Modern urban life weakens the taboo a great deal, but many men and women remain distinctly unmodern. I remember telling a feminist that a traveler in the 18th Century had noted that an Indian tribe in the upper Midwest punished a squaw for adultery by letting everyone ceremonially fuck her in public. If she lived through it, fine. Before the feminist could go for my throat, I added that the guilty man was executed immediately.

•

The nastiest piece of instant revenge I've ever heard about was told to me by an old Sicilian living in New York. "Back in the early Sixties," he said, "there was this old capo out in Brooklyn who was sem-i-retired. He owned a little restaurant and loved to cook. He was a very rich man, but he would put on an apron and cook me his favorite dish, a cacciatore made with pheasant and sausage and the ripest of fresh tomatoes. Without the ripe tomatoes, you have nothing, you understand? His youngest son was a bum, almost a hippie. He wanted the old man to get into the heroin business and the old man refused. So the bum makes a deal by getting 200 grand from this lawyer, saying his dad, the capo, will back up the deal. So the son fucks up the deal because he's got no muscle, and the lawyer is out the money, which anyway came from a crooked public-construction deal. The lawyer forces the son to take him to see the father. Right in the father's own house, at the kitchen table, the lawyer loses his temper because the old man won't back his son. The lawyer calls the capo a flea-bitten old dago, a greasy wop. The old man pretends to be sad and depressed. He shuffles around behind the lawyer's hard-backed chair, grabs him by the hair and snaps his head back, stunning him. He bites out the lawyer's goddamned Adam's apple! Chews it right out! He spits the Adam's apple in his son's face and tells him he'll do the same to him if he brings any more lawyers into the home. The lawyer bleeds to death and the capo tells the son to clean up the mess; he told me this story while we were eating dinner. I wanted to ask him if he brushed his teeth afterward, but he's a dignified old man."

This would have made an additional, effective scene in The Godfather--but then, true violence is rarely done well by Hollywood, where the texture of the scenes are too stagy and neurotic, lacking the immediacy of a neighborhood bar fight, with the screaming and the spilled blood smelling like sheared copper.

In fact, show business, publishing, the media and the arts in general offer nothing in terms of revenge. The ethics are frankly too blurred for a solid push-off. Years ago, Steve McQueen was visiting the ranch of Tom McGuane and noticed a sign in the kitchen reading, Getting even is the best Revenge. McQueen, a man of sharp edges, thought the sign went a bit far. Once, in a state of pointless rage about Hollywood, I asked the director Bob Rafelson, how he could possibly get fired, sue the studio, then go back to work for the same studio while the suit was pending. This man is not known for his wisdom, but he cautioned me that things in the movies moved too quickly to hold a grudge. Hollywood is not Latin America, where you might sit for three years eating mangoes and drinking rum until you decided to shoot the man who called your sister a whore.

People at large don't realize that publishing and the reviewing media are a microcosm of the movies, the boxing world, ward politics, a Serengeti water hole and South African racial postures and, as such, don't merit the ivy-laden respect they manufactured in the past. The most wildly unjustified bad review is simply a bad review, akin to someone's saying your child is ugly; Sometimes your child is ugly; but then, what a job is this sitting there telling people their children are ugly, especially when the viewpoint is last week's Gotham attitude. In any event, duels are no longer fought over such things.

But this is not to say that classic revenge can't occur in business, just that it's less than likely in the media and in show business, where, as Aristophanes would have it, "whirl is king." I can readily imagine the intrigue involved in a corporation like General Motors, where there are several thousand young, hyperintelligent M.B.A.s who all want to be the C.E.O. In first-class compartments, you see these people speaking to one another in short, clipped barks, manicured like bench-bred dogs. But business revenge lacks resonance without some added quality. An American saw dictates, "Don't go into business with your best friend." The following, told to me by a retired sheriff in South Dakota, is a ghastly example.

"Two boys grew up on farms in eastern Nebraska just after World War Two. They wanted to be cowboys, so they left school at 16 and went to Montana, getting jobs on an enormous ranch near White Sulphur Springs. One, named Dave, was smaller, craftier and more imaginative. The other, named Ted, was slower but of normal intelligence, ruminative, a reader of Western novels and a first-rate steer wrestler.

"By their mid-20s, they made the down payment on a small cattle-hauling business and stockyard by virtue of Ted's rodeo winnings and savings. Dave had spent his money on ladies and flashy pickup trucks, but he was the brains behind the newly acquired business. Ted stayed away from the paperwork, having full trust in Dave, because they had been partners since they were kids. As the business prospered, they married cousins and added a farm-equipment dealership and a grain elevator to their holdings. Ted acted as foreman and trouble shooter, while Dave stuck to the office, taking up golf and buying a Cessna. They pretty much stopped seeing each other socially, what with Ted's refusal to learn correct grammar or join service organizations.

"Things came to a head when Ted broke his ankle on a cattle chute. During his short convalescence, he talked it all over with his wife, and they decided to try to sell their half of the business to Dave and find a ranch to buy. They were sick of the vagaries of modern life, and Ted wanted to get back to the life he'd come West for.

"The upshot was that a meeting was arranged, and when Ted arrived, Dave had two local lawyers and an accountant with him. Everyone seemed a tad embarrassed to explain to Ted that he owned nothing on paper and had no legal demand for any moneys from the corporation. But in consideration of his hard work, they had decided to give him a check for 50 grand, which would fulfill any claims he might have against Dave. Ted wasn't such a fool that he couldn't immediately figure that the 50 grand was about five percent of what the company was worth. He tried to look at Dave, who naturally averted his eyes. Then Ted picked up the check, tore it in half and walked out.

"Well, everyone in the area knew what had happened, but there were enough new and prosperous people moving in that Dave didn't lack for buddies. Ted moved north with his family and became top hand, then foreman on a big ranch owned by a rich dude from Chicago.

"Then one day, about a year later, Ted calmly walks into a Rotary meeting where Dave was speaking and slaps the shit out of him in front of everyone. This beating took place once a year for seven years, including once on December 30th, and on the following January third, when Dave got out of the hospital. So last year, Dave sells out and moves to La Jolla, California. Dave couldn't stand the behind-the-back laughter and the simple fact that every tavern in town had a calendar pool with a lot of money on his next beating. The upshot is that I got a call from a detective in La Jolla. Seems that Dave was sitting on the beach with a flashy girlfriend. Down the beach comes a cowboy who beats the shit out of him, right in front of all these fancy people. The detective was trying to figure out what was happening, because when they let Ted out of jail in the morning--Dave wouldn't press charges--all Ted would say was that the price of beef had dropped from 70 to 51 in the past ten years. So I told the detective the story. He said to tell Ted to stay out of La Jolla. I said he could tell Ted himself when he came out there next year but that I'd be real careful if I was him."

There's a purity here, but perhaps it's a bit too relentless. Maybe not. I know that Dave upped his offer over the years from the original 50 grand, but to no avail. I have no idea whether or not Dave's attitude is that of a smart guy or a penitent or if he's considering a move to London, Deauville or Tibet. The squeamish sensation can come from the question, At what point does the transgressor become the victim? The backwall is that a modestly intelligent man, if sufficiently cautious, can destroy anyone he wishes.

•

And then there are stories that are pointlessly foul: "This farmer's wife was going to divorce him because he was all the time beating the hell out of her. Once, at a church picnic, he shoved her face down into a hot bowl of scalloped potatoes and a couple of us brethren couldn't stand it and kicked the shit out of him. Well, this farmer knew if she divorced him, he'd have to sell the farm to pay the divorce settlement, so he goes up to Minneapolis and hires this ex-con. He probably got the idea on TV, but he tells the ex-con he'll pay him five grand to rape and rough up the wife. The farmer gives the ex-con a date to do the job while the farmer is supposed to be in Grand Forks."

"The ex-con is suspicious, even though he has been given half the money up front. So when he comes to town, he leaves a note under his pillow in his motel, knowing if things go well, he'll be back in an hour. He goes out to the homestead and rapes the poor lady. While he's in the saddle, the farmer--who was supposed to be away--shoots him through the window three times with a 30.06. Naturally the slugs went through both bodies.

"So the farmer drives off to the sheriff's office and collapses on the desk with the rape story. The bastard is still weeping when the deputy shows up with a note from the only motel in town and the farmer goes ape shit. It was real sad we couldn't have hung him right there."

This is a transparently disgusting piece of low life. As a tonic, I offer a story told to me by a French count about his own father, an eccentric gentleman, now dead: "I think I told you that my father was an ace in both wars, in addition to being an inventor and a bon vivant. As a young pilot during World War One, he was flying out of the Dordogne. The situation was indescribably tense, and between missions he played with his two friends, Joseph, a crow he had owned for years, and Simon, a kit fox. He even took those two for plane rides. Everyone in the barracks loved these animals, except for an officer who was my father's immediate superior. This officer was a nasty character who hated my father because he was a count and because he was very successful with the girls in the neighboring town. One day while my father was on a mission, this officer returned to his room to discover that the crow and the fox had tipped a good bottle of wine off his desk and had eaten some smoked sausages and bread. The animals had also shit on the floor. The officer flew into a rage and strangled both animals, hanging them from the doorknob to my father's room.

"When my father returned from his mission, he pretended to be only mildly upset, though he was grief-stricken. He buried the animals together and mourned them in private. Even after the war, he visited the grave of his beloved friends, Simon and Joseph. Anyway, all the pilots in the barracks--including the guilty officer--kept waiting for my father to do or say something, but after a month or so, they were lulled into thinking the incident was over.

"One evening, my father shared a bottle of good brandy with the officer, and they decided to go to town and visit some girls. On the way back, when the officer was feeling drunk and well fucked, my father threw him off a high bridge down into the river and the rocks far below. The body was found the next afternoon, and it was assumed that the officer had fallen over the rail while drunk. Everyone knew what must have happened, but no one said a word."

•

This story has a lovely purity to it, despite the question of whether or not the death was merited, or if any death is ever truly merited. I recently heard a hick radio preacher say that AIDS was "God's judgment on the homos," as if God were the drum major in the band composed of Reagan, Falwell, the Pentagon and the U.S. Congress. "'Vengeance is mine ...' saith the Lord," or someone said that He said it. It's hard to put the money on a bet you're not going to collect until dead.

Years ago, I wrote a novella, Revenge, in a collection called Legends of the Fall. The story concerns the nearly implausible anguish between two friends, an American fighter pilot and a Mexican barone, caused by an act of betrayal. The relatively innocent woman over whom they are fighting dies. I don't think good novels are written for dogmatic reasons, to offer principles of right conduct, and I certainly didn't figure out the soul of revenge other than that, like many other forms of human behavior, it destroys innocent and guilty alike. As Gandhi said after Hiroshima, "The Japanese have lost their bodies, now we will see if the Americans have lost their souls." This is the kind of question Melville filed under "the whiteness of the whale."

On the way back from Montana last summer, I stopped at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. The site of the murder of Crazy Horse was closed due to "budget restrictions." I felt a surge of anger akin to a lump of hot coal under the breastbone. The scene of one of the most momentous events in the soul history of the nation was closed while gaggles of tourists wheezed through the cavalry horse barns. I would gladly have given up my own life to see a few thousand mounted Sioux come over the hill and torch the whole place. You can get consciousness and a conscience free by reading history. It awakens a desire in you, thought by many childish, to see parity on earth with no hope of heaven.

And if in weak moments you hope for heaven, you want to see the bittersweet surrealism of Crazy Horse riding double with Anne Frank on Ruffian, riding through the cosmos from the Southern Cross to Arcturus, from Betelgeuse to the morning star.

"The anger has to be a blow to the solar plexus or the groin: One has to stew, brood, agonize."

"The media and the arts offer nothing in terms of revenge. The ethics are frankly too blurred."