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| This is not me. |
My brother Matt and I fought quite a bit when we were growing up. He
was just a little less then two years younger than me and we were
often in conflict about chores, or toys, or clothes, or friends, or
we would start out just fooling around play fighting when one of us
would accidentally go too far and then we would seamlessly transition
into real fighting. One night, while my parents were off at a
political rally for some nut job or another who wanted to be
president, they left us in the capable hands of my 13-year-old
sister. We had started a fight early in the evening and it had been
steadily escalating into a more and more violent confrontation.
Eventually, I had pushed Matt passed his limit of regular fighting and
he had picked up an aluminum baseball bat and was chasing me from the
back of the house to the front. I slid to a stop on the linoleum of
the kitchen, trapped in the corner by the front door. Now, I am, for
the sake of clarity, forced to make an aside about the types of films
my dad liked to watch. He liked to watch Clint Eastwood movies and
also hard-boiled detective movies. In those movies, if the bad guy’s
henchmen threatens you with a gun or knife you just bait them by
telling them that they wouldn't dare and that they do not have the
guts to try it. In the movies it always works, the henchmen having his
bluff called instantly gets a look of self doubt and the makes a
fatal mistake by letting his guard down in his moment of indecision.
The problem was, I was of the opinion that would work in real life and it actually has worked for me on occasion, this was not that
occasion. Back to my situation in front of the door. My back is to
the door and Matt is standing three feet away on the living room
carpet menacing me with an aluminum baseball bat indicating he may
have an off-label use in mind. This is when I decided to give the old
Humphrey Bogart a try and call his bluff. I started telling him he
was a pussy and that he didn't have the guts, and he didn't dare to
take a swing at me with the bat. Unlike the incomparable Mr. Bogart’s
enemies, that crumbled at the realization that they were, in fact,
weak and unable to follow through on such manly tasks as hurting or
killing; Matt seemed to take my taunting as a challenge. He got an
'Oh really?' type look on his face and then proved he was indeed capable
of pushing though the magnificently crafted wall of self-doubt that I
had verbally crafted. Almost instantly after my belittlement he swung
the bat and hit me in the knee and I dropped. To his credit, he only
gave me the one swat, more as an educational exercise then anything. He
just wanted to make sure that I knew that he was not the type of
person who would not use a bat on someones leg, especially after they
questioned his bravery to do so. I writhed around on the ground
crying in pain and Matt stood back a few feet asking me if I had changed my mind about whether he was brave enough to hit me with the bat now. I didn't
dignify his comments with a response other then to whimper out a
threat that I would tell on him. Which I did. You think that would
have been enough for me to realize that the bravado bluff did not
work on Matt but it didn't and I tested it again.
