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Just a Pinch

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It is said that split-second decisions can change your life. I didn’t understand how true that statement could be until the winter of 2006. I worked for Macy’s in the cosmetic department. I was a unique feature there; I was a heterosexual male. Therefore, I should have been on my guard.

As I squeezed my way past Marie, I impulsively pinched her squishy, 60-year old tushy with my thumb and index finger. I imagined her silent outrage as I walked away without acknowledging the maneuver, a smug smile on my face. I imagined myself quite the little trickster.

I knew Marie quite well, and she knew me. At least I thought so. We both worked in the cosmetic department at Macy’s, she at the Elizabeth Arden counter, and I in the fragrance department. Our areas of responsibility were close by and we would often help each other unpack shipments and deal with customers, if the other needed assistance. Such camaraderie often brings people closer. Friendships are created, not unlike those that serve in combat. Stress brings people together. I felt we were close enough that the pinch would be considered a funny prank. Hell, I had been to her home! We drank wine and she said I could stay over if I didn’t think I could safely drive home. I certainly didn’t think that was a sexual advance, just as I didn’t imagine she would think my innocent pinch could be interpreted any other way. The innocuous squeeze was meant to be a joke, a cute bit of fun during a boring workday at work. I expected she would chalk it up to typical Jan shenanigans. I liked to call them “Jananigans.”

My youthful exuberance was not always interpreted as such.

I had been in the store manager’s office on many occasions. I was, at one time, a night supervisor and reported directly to him on all things related to my duties. These duties included closing the store during the week, as well as the responsibility of supervising all the associates. The other managers and I called him simply “Matt.” He and I would talk casually about associates and fellow managers, sharing details of my previous evening’s shift. Sometimes we would even get off-topic and talk about movies and music. It was a business relationship, but he made the situation seem to be friendly and professional at the same time.

This time I didn’t sit in front of his oak desk that was cluttered with knick-knacks. Instead I sat at the small, round conference table off to the side of that desk. Instead of his smiling, goateed, forty-something face, I looked into the face of a more serious, almost somber, store-manager. Gone was the good-natured boss. Replacing him was the very severe, store manager of a national conglomerate.

To exemplify this, he was not alone. Sitting next to him at the conference table was a woman I had never seen before. I couldn’t guess her age if you put a gun to my head. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and consequentially the skin on her face appeared to be pulled tight. She could have been twenty five, or seventy-five. She wore a knee-length wool skirt that did not give a hint to her figure. The things I could determine about her was that she was thin, Caucasian, and serious.

“Jan, this is Eileen Scrimshaw. She is from the corporate office in New York,” said Matt, introducing the thin, serious Caucasian.

“Mr. Campbell, have you read the employee handbook?” she asked, getting right to the matter. There would be no back-and-forth in this duel. She was out for blood!

“Not in some time. Not since the turnover,” I said, referring to the Macy’s buy-out out the previous department store Filene’s, the year before.

“Specifically the two pages on sexual harassment,” she said.

My heart began to beat faster. Blood rushed to my face and I was dizzy like I had just been sucker-punched. She had indeed drew first blood.

“I guess,” I confirmed vaguely. I attempted a parry and quick counterstrike. “It’s bad, right?” My attempt at a joke pulled a dry chuckle from Matt but otherwise there was complete silence.

Ms. Scrimshaw cleared her throat signaling that this was not the time for levity. “Mr. Campbell, Macy’s takes very seriously accusations of sexual harassment and must investigate all claims of such activity.”

“Of course,” I agreed sheepishly.

“You work with Marie?” she asked.

I closed my eyes as the confusion I felt withdrew and understanding advanced in its place. “Yes,” I confirmed.

“She has written a complaint that on October, 11th, 2006 you pinched her on the rear-end while on the selling floor. Specifically, behind the Estee Lauder counter,” the details landed on me like a series of well-placed punches to my stomach. I struggled to breathe. “True, so far?” she asked.

I took a deep breath and said “Yup.”

She placed a clean white piece of paper in front of me and said “I want you to write your account of what happened. Just leave it on the table when you are done.” She and Matt stood up and quietly left the room, leaving me to find the words to detail an incident I had not thought of since it happened.

Ms. Scrimshaw poked her head back into the room and said, “Also, you are suspended until a decision is made regarding your employment at Macy’s.” She was gone again, leaving me cut up and wounded. I had lost the duel.

I felt very alone. Suddenly I was very angry! Why did Marie do this to me? We were friends; she knew I was only playing. Did she think I was coming-on to her? I mean, really! My self-righteous indignation was boiling to meltdown proportions!

I struggled to find the words as I detailed the short encounter. I made sure to indicate that I was friends with Marie and in no way was I making a sexual advance. I made a point to indicate how bad I felt about the incident. It was true, that I had not been overtly sexual to Marie, but I was lying when I said I felt bad. In fact, my only remorse was the fact that it had come to this. My excuses took up more room than the description of the incident.

It was a nerve-wracking couple of days, and the powers-that-be decided that I had not committed an egregious enough offence to lose my job. I suspected they thought I had learned my lesson by having to fear for my job for a couple days.

“What did I learn from my experience?” I ask myself. I learned to choose my words carefully. I learned that a single event can have multiple interpretations, and what may seem innocuous to one, may seem hostile to another. I certainly learned to be professional in my actions, while at work. Most of all, I learned to keep my hands to myself.

A History of Violence

I never knew my father. Alone, my mother raised me, but I lacked a male role model; a man who would teach me about girls, fishing and fighting. I had four older brothers who did have a father, but most of them had a penchant for violence that often got them into trouble. This violent history even got my oldest brother killed, so maybe it was best that I didn’t know my father. I believe violence has its place in the world, but there is a time and a place for fighting and there is a skill in knowing when and where.

My earliest role-models were the super heroes of four-color comic books. The modern age of comic books is filled with strong men and women who do not avoid the dangerous world of vigilante violence, but most avoid killing at all costs. Pop culture is filled with admirable, powerful heroes who punch first and ask questions later. However, super heroes do not actually risk much. Despite the risk to their social lives, the heroes usually win, and even when they die, they come back after a short hiatus.

“C’mon, kick his ass!” I was in a foster home at age seven and one of the first things my foster brothers and sisters wanted me to do was to beat up a local kid who was about my age. For some reason, they thought he deserved to be beaten up, but he was younger than them, so, by schoolyard rules was untouchable. I didn’t want to fight him, so I walked away. Perhaps I had failed an initiation test, but I didn’t care. That kid had done nothing to me, and I wasn’t going to fight someone else’s battle.

“I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” Nate Mason, a much bigger kid whispered to me in fifth grade math class. He was so much bigger than me that I didn’t doubt he had been held back once or twice.

I didn’t know what I did to warrant his aggression. I was quiet, but did well in math class and participated often. Only now do I realize how that might make a slender kid with glasses and a girl’s name the target of bullying, a term often used today, but hardly ever at the time.

All day he threatened me as we moved from class to class. “Jan, I’m gonna kick your ass after school!” I was terrified. I could have gone to the teacher, but that may have made things worse. In my frightened twelve-year old brain, the thought just didn’t occur to me.

The final school bell rang and I rushed out the front doors of the school. The door’s hadn’t closed behind me when I heard a familiar voice from behind me say, “Jan!”

Batman never called his mommy.

I spun and he was there- leaning against the brick wall next to the double-doors was Nate Mason, a full foot taller than me. Before he could say anything, I attacked him. With the strength of the Incredible Hulk and the rage of Wolverine I grabbed him by his heavy winter jacket and shoved him against the wall. Lke the Flash, I began to pummel him with a million punches. Only the shouts of the bus ladies brought me to my senses and I threw his broken body to the ground.

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Perhaps that story is dramatized, but the details are true. What I learned from that incident and from the one before it was when to walk away from a fight and when to stand up for myself. The knowledge that it is sometimes important to fight my own battles is valuable. Over the years, I have been involved in figurative fights and literal ones. I have fought solo and alongside allies. And for every battle I won, I lost two. And every time I lost a fight, I learned much more than from the ones I won.

Pain of Love Part Two- II

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“Can you do it?” Raven asked the question pleadingly. “We have travelled so far and I owe him so much.”

The old hag they had travelled so far to see just stood there and let Raven plead her case. Long moments passed and Grayne felt he could actually hear her dying. The sound he heard may have only been the creaking sound that emitted from her withered form. Aside from that, the room was silent.

The woman finished contemplating and her words seemed to creak out of her. “Raven, I can do it, that’s not the question. The question is; can he survive the process?” She breathed the words and they hung in the air like swamp air- toxic and heavy.

Though the woman’s eyes had lost their luster perhaps decades ago, Raven looked into them with the seriousness of stone. She said, “If there is any man alive who can, it is this one.”

Grayne stepped forward and also met the ancient woman’s stern gaze. His eye narrowed as he examined the hag. With sudden forcefulness he pulled Raven out of the grass thatched hut. He leaned over and in hushed but forceful tones said, “This…”, he struggled for the word, “…woman is veritably ancient!” In response to the look that came upon Raven’s pristine face, he said, “I know you said she is a miracle worker, but I don’t know…”

From the hut, the crone breathed, “I may be old, but my ears are as keen as any bird of prey.”

“It’s her eyes I’m worried about,” Grayne mumbled.

“Grayne, please! I know it sounds hard to believe, but I have seen her handiwork before. She can save your jaw!”

Grayne looked skeptical. “You’ve seen her replace teeth in someone’s jaw before?”

Raven lowered her head and spoke at the ground, a response Grayne had become accustomed to in the months since they had escaped the torture chamber of Farzan. “Well, no; only the reverse.”

Grayne was about to grab her and run as fast and as far as possible away from this place when suddenly the hag was beside him. She made no creaking as she sneaked up beside Grayne, but her putrid breath hit him like a fist of rotting foods. He wondered how this woman whose mouth smelled like dead things could perform a procedure on his own mouth.

“Grayne, though I have never done the procedure before, I have seen it done. Not with actual teeth, mind you, but with Dragoncalc, a stone that has the same hardness and structure as real teeth,” the hag spoke at Grayne.

He looked down at the woman, who was more than a foot shorter than her and shook his head in silent acceptance. After all, he could not present himself to Summer, the woman he loved, in his current condition. After a deep breath, he asked, “What can I offer you in payment? We have a few gold Stags, but perhaps I can…” Grayne looked at the hut for chores he could perform, but it seemed in good working order. The roof, though made of grass and sticks seemed strong and the wooden walls seemed in good repair.

She looked at him and with a smile that had two more teeth than Grayne’s said, “I am an old woman, and it has been years since I have known the tender touch of a man. Though I am old, I do have needs.” The words lingered in the air with fetidness.

Grayne staggered back from the impact of her statement. Though he had faced many terrors over the years that had hardened his mind making him effectively fearless, terror struck him in the gut and his stomach flipped.

The old hag began to cackle! “You should see your face. Don’t worry, Grayne. I wouldn’t fuck you for all the crowns in all of the Lannisters’ vaults.” She turned and walked back into her hut breathing a final cloud over her shoulder, “You’re too ugly!”

Pain of Love 10 (End Part 1)

Grayne heard the distant sound of horns and wondered if they were part of his dreams. He dismissed the idea, because he rarely slept deeply enough to dream.

He remained still and listened.

Again he heard them. His muscles were weak and his body was bruised and mangled, but his ears were sharper than they ever were. He spent most of his days listening to the sounds beyond his prison and imagining the forms those sounds belonged to.

He listened for the return of Farzan.

Minutes passed and several times he heard the sound of booted footsteps running outside his prison. He remained lying on the floor, listening to the thrum of troop movements, feeling their unified booted footsteps passing on all levels of the keep he had been a prisoner within for almost five years. He felt a feeling he had not felt for as long as he could remember.

He felt hope.

That hope suddenly washed away as the heavy wooden door to the ten-foot chamber he lived in opened with a clang. Farzan entered the chamber with a rapid clack of his heavy boots. In a flash of motion, Farzan stood above the withered form of Grayne with a blade at his neck.

“You win, Grayne. I know not how you have survived all these years, much less resisted giving me the one thing I wanted from you. Troops from your family house are here and it is likely that they will take the keep. That is why I have decided to kill you.”

From the stone floor, Grayne looked up at his torturer. Though he lacked the strength to resist the sword-wielding man standing over him, his one deep blue eye continued its defiance. The other was milky white and bore a deep scar from the top of his right cheek across his eye and to his forehead.

Grayne’s toothless smile grinned up at Farzan. His ghastly mouth and grotesque eye seemed to mock his torturer. “You almost had me. I was planning on saying your lover’s name later this evening,” Grayne mocked him. “Let’s make a deal. If you can hold the keep until the Hour of the Wolf, I will say his name.”

Farzan was not amused. “You won the game, northerner.” The black-bearded masochist prepared to thrust his blade into Grayne’s exposed throat. Grayne did not resist. He could not stand much less defend himself.

Grayne’s lethargy turned to action and he suddenly yelled, “No!” Suddenly a hooded figure was upon Farzan, but he sidestepped and managed to avoid a fatal strike. Instead, the blade jutted out of his left breast. Blood poured from the wound as he pulled himself from the blade and his attacker.

Stumbling away, he dropped his sword and turned to see the hooded form of his female assistant. She was defenseless, but he was too stunned to attack her. He just stood there as soldiers entered the room.

Three men of house Marbrand entered the torture chamber with blades barred. One pointed his sword at the robed woman and another prevented Farzan from fleeing. The final warrior approached the beaten form of Grayne and started to cut him down. His sword wouldn’t cut the thick chains, so he began to look for keys.

In seconds, the soldier found the keys and freed Grayne. He slid off the torture rack and the soldier struggled to keep him upright.

“Why, Grayne? Why did you save him?” the hooded woman asked.

Grayne answered her with a question of his own, “What’s your name?”

“Raven.”

“Raven, this man’s life is mine to take. I will kill him in time.”

The soldier that freed Grayne unsheathed his dagger and held it out to Grayne. “Go ahead.”

Grayne looked for long moments at the man who had tortured him for years. He stared with his one good eye at the now-powerless Farzan and slowly shook his head. “No. Not like this. One day, when we are both at full strength.” He smiled a horrible toothless smile and said, “I need him to fight back.”

Pain of Love 8

Grayne swung under the scorching rays of the summer sun. His body hung limply at the end of rusting chains supported by cruel hooks that had days ago stopped hurting. He felt only a buzzing numbness as he slipped in and out of conciousness.

At first, his prayers to the Seven were verbal, but now were silent as his voice was too dry for words. He had prayed for escape and bloody retribution, but now he silently wished for the strength to survive to be with his beloved Summer again. The image of her soft hair and smile kept him alive, the memory of her gave him the mental strength to endure.

Even the peasants that had enjoyed the public brutality he had been sujected to had long ago lost interest as his screams had faded away.

Grayne suddenly became aware of a fluttering and a weight upon his right shoulder. He turned his head until he could see a black raven perched on his shoulder with his left eye. The vision of a flail impacting the right side of his face was the last memory he had with that eye. He only felt discomfort from the area his eye once was as the dead eye was exposed to the elements without even an eyelid to protect it.

The raven cawed at him. Grayne tried to shake the bird off but was reminded painfully of his situation as the sharp hooks dug deeper into his infected flesh.

“Go away. Scat!” Grayne commanded the black bird. Though ravens were routinely used to send messages between men rich enough to afford such beasts, he suspected this was an ordinary wild crow.

He believed, that is, until it spoke.

” Whatcha doin’, Grayne?” the bird asked.

Grayne hissed at it, trying to frighten it to flight. “Well, that’s a fine howdyado,” it responded.

He knew he was having a fever dream, but the raven looked and sounded real enough. The legends spoke of ravens being the messangers of the gods, but they only sent ill omens and he didn’t believe in such childlish stories. “You’re not real. Now go away and let me die in peace.”

“Fuck all that!” it said flapping its wings but remaining on his shoulder. “You ain’t gonna die. What about Summer?”

“She’s better off without me.”

The raven turned its head away from Grayne and said, “That’s the truth. She’s a fine piece of meat, she’ll find a new man with no trouble. Especially with how you look.” The raven turned back and shrieked in alarm. “Ye Gods, man. What’s wrong with your eye?!”

Grayne said nothing.

“Looks painful. It is, isn’t it?” The raven bobbed up and down with excitement. “It’s all pusy and WHEW does it stink!” It scrutinized the eye with a diecerning vision. “Yeah, that’s got to go.”

With his good eye, Grayne saw the raven open and close its beak as it moved closer to his face. “No. Don’t!” he shouted.

“It’s got to go.”

Grayne screamed as the raven pulled the dead eye from its socket like a worm from the ground. Peasants slowly returned with grim humour to watch and laugh as the raven tugged on his infected eye until it was torn free. They clapped as the raven flew away with its grisly prize, leaving Grayne sobbing and moaning with renewed agony.