Facebook
TwitterIt’s the worst episode of “Where Are They Now?” when you find out your old family friend is a sociopathic abuser. If you haven’t looked someone up in a decade, it’s preferable to find out they’re dead. If you haven’t looked them up in decade, you don’t honestly care if they’re alive; finding out they’re a monster means they’re hale and hearty and you’re associated with them.
Spoiler alert: Having no desire to be associated with the toxic and infantile war he’s made of his life, I will neither name him nor give hints. I also have no intention of taking even the smallest amount of attention away from the people he tortured: They are telling their own stories, all far sadder, far more important, and far more difficult to tell.
When I read Unnamed’s ex-girlfriend’s detailed public description of his abusive behavior, I thought, yeah, that sounds like him. I hadn’t seriously thought about him in thirty years, but he was one of the monsters of my childhood. When she described his manipulations and fits of rage, I didn’t flash back to the memories I usually tell people about. Those are stock bullying stories; boilerplate memories of the 80s. We all got beaten up.
What I remembered was driving back from a beach vacation with him and his mother. I noticed she was about to merge into an eighteen-wheeler, which never goes well for two-door hatchbacks. I mentioned it. She corrected her course, and, for better or worse, we’re all still here.
I was momentarily proud of my first moment of speaking up in a constructive way, and not assuming the adult at the wheel was fully cognizant of all the variables. This faded quickly. The mother made a point of telling my mother about this several times, to the irritation of Unnamed.
In my innocence, I did not understand exactly why he became increasingly enraged with every recitation. With the experience of being beaten up multiple times, I was keenly aware of his agitation. Memory does not serve to create an accounting of the exact timing and severity of the attacks, but it does enough to remind me of the outbursts that ruined the next few days for everyone. And taught me to keep my mouth shut.
I heard his father was also a monster; hints in conversations cut short because they couldn’t continue in my presence. Whatever lessons his father taught him, Unnamed was doing his homework. Testing boundaries, setting expectations, learning how thoroughly he could impose his desires on others.
But hey, it was the 80s. Different time. All children are evil.
My next memory is of his mother praising him for not belittling a fellow female student. In graduate school.
In a time of monsters, one more surprises nobody. I await this one’s self-defense the same way I await an autopsy report: The body is cold; I just want to know more about the poison. Because I had that poison in my system too. I brought this up among friends, and how bad I felt on the day I realized the things I’d done. One friend said, “Oh, I’ve felt that way every day for 43 years.” My other friend came back with, “Well yeah, the point is that we feel bad about it. Monsters don’t.”
Trust that people will engage others in the spirit of kindness is how a society operates. A high-functioning society cannot be ready for people who navigate the technical loopholes. A society with no loopholes is one that has no room for implicit trust, and without that, you don’t have a society. You have a prison. The best monsters weave their way through these loopholes, and we hope there’s enough trust in the world around them for the survivors to tell us the monsters are here. If that trust becomes reliable, we might stop the monsters before they do real harm.
Or we should have known, because it wasn’t just the 80s. We celebrate bad behavior. We celebrate mean people who excel, and think that meanness is necessary for success. The more successful a person is, the more we forgive them. At the top, monsters walk free, after a long ascent of honing their manipulations and expanding their appetites.
Nobody noticed a monster in training 30 years ago. Everyone assumed he would grow out of it. Many defended him as an adult, even though he was a massive jerk to everyone, all the time. Now erudite, successful, and public, his obvious negative traits became part of his story; acceptable, necessary eccentricities.
Even blinded by success, we could smell a monster. The trouble is, nobody likes bringing up a smell.
