What It Feels Like to Have Your Ass Kicked

Posted on January 22, 2006 in Adolescence Childhood PTSD

Many people use the phrase “I’ll kick your ass” as humor — me included. We flaunt this violence against the cleft of the buttocks as if it didn’t hurt. I know differently. When someone says “You should have your ass kicked” to me, I feel as if my suit of titanium emotional armor has just encountered the force that crumples it into shingles. You see, I remember all too well what it feels like to have my ass kicked. There is nothing joyful or elating about it for the victim.

It works like this: You’ve said or done that which is offensive to your father or mother or brother. Let’s say it is your brother. For purposes of demonstration, you can borrow mine. The second after you utter that which is offensive, a fist enters the vicinity of your face. Force propelled by muscle and backed by bone crashes through your skin, your muscles, your fat, and your jawbone. Being that Brother is six years older than you are, he’s bigger. About the same size as your parents, in fact. So you being slender, take the blow hard.

I don’t know if it is blood or just the nerves throwing bright light across your eyes. The light spreads and you think you can see the deep blood red darkness of your brain inside your skull. It hurts and there are words going along with that hurt. Words like asshole, jerk, stupid, idiot, bigot, etc. Words that have been picked up at drinking parties and inside locker rooms while scratching between the threads of a jockstap that smells like it was dragged through the Nile during the First Plague. Those words justify the assault. They say that you are less than human, an animal, a creature. My brother used to say that I reminded him of the mentally retarded kids he doubtlessly abused at a camp one summer. The verbal abuse comes just as the brain makes its appearance on the fleshy screen of your eyes.

What that does is set you up for a lifetime of cravenness when someone disagrees with you. Fortunately you can reverse that with therapy, but at the time, you are not thinking about how to cure yourself from the effects of this pummeling in the future. You’re wondering where you’re going to be hit next and what the monster is going to say as he does it. You know that the words will stick with you all the more. Monster brother relishes that.

Of course, there’s more to it than this. Brother had Mom and Dad to himself for six years of life, then You came along. That was unpardonable of you, especially because you’ve learned to remind him what a bunch of jerks Joseph’s brothers were. He insists that he is Reuben but he acts like the Mob that stripped Jacob’s favorite and sold him as a slave — on Reuben’s advice. The glitch in the story is that you are no one’s favorite. All the beatings and nights trying to find a place in a small house where they won’t happen across you don’t make you feel that you belong here. You’re borrowing everything and they make sure that you know it.

The weight of his body shifts so he can force you to the floor. There are a couple of methods he uses it. One is the Charge. He runs at you and causes you to hit the floor. The other is the Grapple. He grabs your shoulders and throws you to the floor.

And there you are. He grabs your arms so you can’t fight back. You smell the filial demon’s breath in your face. You might hear Mom or Dad telling him to stop it. Well, Dad — who often punishes you using a half-inch thick wooden dowel — might. Mom is grinning because she can’t get over the fact that her own parents loved her now dead younger sister more than they did her. (Several years later you surmise that they often chided her for mistreating you. Other relatives tell you that they didn’t like what they saw, either. Apparently you had the look of fear in your eyes constantly.)

Family members who wore blinders told you how proud your parents were of you. They couldn’t understand why you blankly avoided their eyes.

He’s on top of you, like a man about to force his rod into the tiny slit of your own penis. Breathing. Repeating the nastiness, the foulness, the desecrations of your dignity which will remain with you for years.

You might ask why your parents allow this bully to do it to you right there in front of them, on the living room or dining room floor. Sometimes on your bed or in the bathroom if you ran there. (Hiding in the bathroom seldom saved you — they’d wait.) Why didn’t your parents stop him?

To them, the role of ass-kicker was something that passed down from father to son. You grew into the task like you grew into mowing the lawn. Except the youngest only got the lawn-mowing job. He wasn’t allowed to take it out on the dog — his father had made it clear that the dog ranked above him. “Look Bingo. That’s a baaaaad boy.” Trapped in your cage by three bitter sociopaths, you sank into yourself. “Why don’t you have any friends?” your mother would ask. Just another way of saying “What is wrong with you?”

They all had their different styles. Your brother the punch or slap and the knockdown. Your mother a slap and the use of her finger nails. Your father used the dowel and the belt. The hand rarely. If his aim wandered to your legs, arms, or face, your mother would cry “Don’t bruise him there! They’ll see it in PE! They’ll see it in PE!”

She told you that she said it to save you from the social workers.

You clearly experienced mood swings, but they chose to pound on you instead of taking you to a psychiatrist. As a nurse, Mom knew all too well what kinds of questions psychiatrists asked. She told you that she was worried about the drugs.

No one cared about you. You accepted many labels: stupid, ignorant, petty, crybaby, etc. You fantasized about beating them until you actually hit another person in school. The feel of your fist against their chest, your flesh against their flesh made them into another version of you. And you dropped your arms. You let them rip into you as much as they pleased.

Nothing could contain your terrible temper. Everyone knew about it. Your father told you that it was your greatest liability. Staggering in a blue smog of numbed-up fear, you didn’t see the irony.

Years later, people would tell you — just like your brother did — that you had no notion of hardship or suffering. They attempted to grant you the experience by bullying you, verbally abusing you. They could never say they were sorry. And you did the same to other people, all in the good name of showing the unaware what it was like to suffer.

You tried to offer it up to God, to endure it like a Saint. But your brother called you Holy Joelie. Perhaps that is where the idea that you were a prophet, that you had a divine streak came from. Stress bore down on you like a fraternal fist so you sloughed off your mortal skin and rose to discuss finding Justice in the world with the Everlasting and Almighty. Madness derives its structure from our panics and our loathings.

After this many years, the ass-kicking taunts you in your muscles, your dreams, and your waking visions. Nerves simper about the dread and the alarm. You hear a word and you are back on your back wondering if your brother really can ram his rod into your penis. You wonder if he is the Green River Killer, but you doubt it because you know that if he is a serial killer, he wouldn’t go after women. He’d go after young boys who remind him of you. Your nephew is fortunate that he takes after his mother and that his father travels.

Those are people you never see. The wife doesn’t want to hear about her husband. He made a scene at your wedding and he once told you that you “don’t feel like a brother”. He names his son “Benjarmin” to spite your memory of being Joseph. Your mother — who will never apologize beyond “We didn’t know any better” which isn’t an apology at all, but an excuse — tries to mend the fence by telling you that should you need a kidney, your brother is the best donor. You remind her that your blood is so full of prescription medications, no surgeon would want to use you. On your way home and to understanding friends, you joke about “the kidney”. You joke a lot so you don’t remember how it hurts to be punched there.

An ass-kicking does not end when the brute stands up and allows you to rise. When they stop telling you how you deserved it, the silence is never merciful. You splash the emptiness with the acid bath of the memory. Every argument, every confrontation causes you to shake. Jerks point to that tremor and laugh about how you lose it. You have lost it — you have lost your dignity, your sense of boundaries, your feelings of self-worth. It takes a long time to come back from all that and all the while they heap new abuse on you about how you just can’t get along with others, how your made the failure that is your life all by yourself.

Then one day, a year ago, you get so pissed off at the people and words that remind you of what was done at you, you decide to kill them all off. You take the chewed off ends of your glasses and start to carve at your wrists.

Thanks Mom, Dad, and Robbie. Thanks a lot.

I didn’t learn a thing from the three of you except sickness. All the gifts, all the laughs, and the fun times vanish the way an orange explodes into juice and pulp when you hammer it. I’m grateful for my wife who called my psychiatrist and my psychiatrist who called me, who talked me into going into the hospital instead of ending it there. I learned from my suicide attempt was that I was a survivor and to do that I didn’t need any of you.

For those who didn’t know, that’s how an ass-kicking feels like to me. Almost. You have to be in this skin to know this skin.