Revenge on Bullies

In the passage of John Irving’s Avenue of Mysteries that most stuck with me, the protagonist, Juan Diego, recalls a boy who picked on him in adolescence, and the reassurances he heard as a boy. The essence of the lesson is that revenge on bullies rarely plays out like it does in the movies or on TV--in a crane kick that both humbles Johnny and earns his respect, your telekinetically empowered friend breaking the boy with the switchblade's arm, or in a dramatic tell-off that humiliates the mean girl in front of the whole school so that she withers and no longer poses a threat to the innocents.

No, Juan Diego learns that revenge is served over time. In overcoming such oppression and arriving as a successful adult while that mean-spirited jerk, cruel enough to pick on someone out-sized or psychologically ill-equipped for a rebuttal, struggles in both personal relationships and professional pursuits. After all, can a jerk maintain a marriage or be a successful parent? And who wants to hire or promote a jerk up the ranks of a company? (There are exceptions, I know--many a corporate executive who would be described as cut-throat before kind, but bear with me on the principle.)

Still, I understand this impulse toward a more immediate revenge. I still remember a group of older boys who hid in a hedge in Halloween masks, only spring out at my friend and I on a walk, push around, and chase us. I remember sophomore year of high school, changing in the locker room after gym class, when a muscular senior grabbed the back of my neck and the back of the neck of my friend and squeezed. I forget what he said in the moment, but remember the physical pain, and more so the wince of pain and fear on my friend’s face, and more than that the sense of helplessness. That somehow I ought to help my friend, but that there was nothing I could do--nothing, at least, that wouldn’t get one or the both of us pummeled for sure. And I remember daydreaming about that moment afterward. That I might have shouted after him, after he let us go. Threats of real violence. Not that I had thoughts of meaningfully hurting, much less killing anyone, but that I might make the threat, as much trouble as it would get me in, and might enter the fear into his consciousness. Make him lose sleep and watch his back in the hallways.

It’s a strange and ugly fantasy, this idea of psychological warfare. I’m embarrassed to have entertained the idea now, and yet, when I put myself back into a fifteen year old’s head space, I get it. The absence of power and desperate groping to access some. I don’t necessarily believe in the idea of the media, be it news or R-rated movies or first-person shooter video games causing violent behavior, but I do very much get the way in which it can plant seeds, or pose possibilities of what actions are available to fantasize about, let alone execute.

Out of all of this, there’s an unspoken corollary to what Juan Diego learns about bullies. That, sure, as Beyonce might suggest, “the best revenge is your paper,” but that there also might be those bullies who change over time. Heck, I saw it to an extent in my school years, in kids who were jerks in gym class and on the school bus, who, by the time we were in high school, were friendly, or at least indifferent toward us nerdier, un-athletic kids. And isn’t that an objectively better outcome--not so much revenge per se, but rather all parties involved legitimately becoming better people?

There are those boys I looked at with a mix of fear and envy, who found me on Facebook and sent me friend requests a decade or two later. More often than not, I accepted, not expecting to see that they’d failed at life, and I was the greater success--more often than not, I’ve found us on more-or-less equal footing. And I like to think this is how we all move along. In letting vengeance go and continuing to connect not out of spite but from a place of curiosity and maybe even care.

The best revenge, then, might be to forget those middle and high school bullies, and to forget myself as victim. To see us as people who have inevitably and profoundly evolved since those points in time.

That bully from the locker room? I thought to look him up as I wrote this post. The funny thing, all these years later, is that I can’t remember his name.