Introduction
I’ve been corresponding a lot with our old law school friend, Malcolm Griggs, who is the Chief Risk Officer (among other things) for a large bank. He told me once for which horrors (those of a typical bank this size) he was responsible, and I threw up in my mouth a little. He’s a practical fellow, to be sure, but he also has a philosophical bent.
I mentioned to him what I’ve been thinking, of how the arc of my life has developed. He seemed very interested in that, and we’ve been talking about it.
The conversation, however, through no fault of his, has devolved into my recalling all of the grudges I’ve held. Nancy calls these victims my “hate figures.” I seem to need to have one upon whom to focus my anger from time to time. OK, all of the time.
Malcolm said admiringly that, though I was Polish, I held a grudge like a Scotsman. Malcolm is the truest son of Caledonia who ever breathed the Highland mist.
I told him that the Poles were the most aggrieved people in Europe, and they still pick fights on occasion with the usual adversaries. For instance, a few years ago they accused the Russians of purposely crashing a plane with a bunch of senior Poles on it, though Russians were on board as well.
On to my grudges, from the first to the last: Chuck Shinnaberry, Morgantown, WV
I was maybe seven years old, and Chuck came shambling down the street. He was taking bites out of a raw onion. Morgantown was a university town, but Chuck was a proper little hillbilly, thin face, dark hair and hollow eyes, shoeless.
Chuck said, in a drawling, self-assured voice, “I guess my dad knows everything there is to know about the Pittsburgh Pirates.”
The Pirates had won the National League championship that year (this is baseball, 1960), and had improbably beaten the powerful New York Yankees, including in a wild game 7 of the World Series thanks to a walk-off home run by their second baseman.
Thus, that year, everyone in Morgantown, 75 miles south of Pittsburgh, knew everything there was to know about the Pittsburgh Pirates. Chuck’s ignorant, arrogant insistence that his hillbilly father would know anything was infuriating for a little boy who really could recite the Pirates’ batting averages.
Yet I don’t hold much of a grudge now (it has been over 60 years) because I’m confident that, thanks to another comment like that, Chuck died with a knife between his ribs in a dive bar across the Monongahela River in Osage, the bad part of town. He was 42 and not mourned.
All of the Males at Nova Junior High and High School, Davie Florida
Oh man, was I ever set up to fail socially. In seventh grade, I was pudgy, a year younger than everyone, and I had no social skills at all. I probably came off as arrogant and clueless and dopey. And crucially I was one of those oblivious kids who wouldn’t stop commenting in class, despite everyone’s moaning and sinking in their seats when I spoke.
So I got bullied. It was the jocks and dopes who objected to me. They had a point. But, until I found my people as a sophomore, they made my life hell: I was lonely, miserable, and too clueless to understand why. So I guess this was my fault.
When I went back to my 20th high school reunion, arguably a successful lawyer by then, nothing had changed. I had pitched on the high school baseball team, and I approached our first baseman, Clay McGonagle, to say hi. Barely noticing me, he told me that, as a pitcher, I thought too much. Fuck him and the rest of the jocks. Florida can’t sink soon enough.
Frank Easterling, Auburn Univ.
This is really weak tea; I couldn’t hate people at Auburn as it would have been hating someone from Jupiter. Frank Easterling will do. He was in my political science class on local governments. Frank loved to volunteer in class, and he would begin each comment with, “Well, I’m from a rural county." We began calling him Rural Counties. One day, highly inflamed, he exclaimed, “The southern farmer can flood the market with any product you can naa-aaamme!”
It shouldn’t surprise me that I’ve never ever met another Auburn alumnus anywhere. They all went back to their rural counties. I’m confident Frank was crushed by a tractor, drunk on Mountain Dew and vodka.
Tommy Something, UNC-Greensboro Master of Fine Arts program
Tommy, whose last name escapes me, ran track at Alabama, and was full of stories of how he would intentionally pull his hamstring muscle so he wouldn’t have to run. This puzzled me. He was at Alabama on a track scholarship, and he didn’t want to run? I suspect it was all a lie, but he liked what it made him sound like: subversive and dangerous.
He wrote plays but took our fiction workshop. He was gorgeous, a slender track guy, blond hair with just the right touch of wave, blue eyes. He married a gloriously gorgeous woman, and they had a life in The Theatre together.
After we discussed one of my stories, Tommy came up to me and offered me the notes he had taken. “I don’t really like psychological stories like this,” he said. Though I didn’t yet know the specific theory about this, I knew I was allowed the premise of my story, so I said no thanks.
He and Gloriosa no doubt had a highly acrimonious divorce, ironically not made less acrimonious by the fact that, as “artists”, they had nothing to split up. Fuck you and your notes, Tommy. I like to think of you in your roach-ridden garret in New York. Want foie gras with that?
Instructor of English, Auburn University
Nobody. No one at all. These were arguably the happiest years of my life, my 20’s as an instructor. Beer, baseball, parties, girls, marijuana I hid in the attic. The deadlines were few and easy to meet and you couldn’t get sued for teaching. At least not back then.
Oh. There is one guy. His name was something like Len Levine (I fictionalized him for a short story and can’t recall what his real name is.) He was a psych professor and had an office in a nine-story building with the rest of arts, humanities, and education. If a vote were ever taken, he’d have won Most Obnoxious, Arrogant, Rude, and Just Fuck Off Already. However, after this girl I was in love with dumped me without comment, she took up with him, and they eventually married. I could never wring it out of her what went wrong with us. For a few years, I’d think, Him? Really? What’s wrong with you?
At some point they seem to have divorced. I don’t know what he’s up to as I can’t even recall his last name and anyway he got a knife between the ribs just like Chuck Shinaberry and for the same reason. This venue would have been an elevator where he was being loud and annoying. The girl has had a highly successful academic career, which warms her mean, cold, vacant heart.
UNC Law School
I hated a guy named Mr. Baer because he always talked loudly in the library and was impervious to my glares. Up in the stairwell once, he yelled to someone, “I got Fulbright!”—meaning an interview with the elite law firm Fulbright & Jaworski in Dallas. I hope that he died of a heart attack at his desk on a late Saturday night doing something he hated.
Adams Kleemeier
They’ve been merged out of existence. They were always overly-optimistic in a Navy sort of way, a mid-level sort of gang who made up for it by preaching what a family they all comprised. But I do think they were self-aware, as they weren’t smug, like Nancy’s firm.
We hired a girl called Juleigh Sitton for a summer job. Her dad was a judge, and you’ve never met such an entitled white girl. We let her live in our house that summer while we were away on vacation. She derided us because she couldn’t find the silverware and figured we were too cheap to buy any—a little presumptuous for a kid who one imagines was hoping for a permanent job offer at summer’s end.
She wrote once about a social occasion where “Folks like Summey Orr” attended. “Folks like Summey Orr”? Jesus. I hope her current botox regime is working.
SAS Institute
Please see blog dated September 5, 2019. Over and over again, once a week or so, I’m having nightmares in which I have to quit to avoid being fired. And a fresh hell: during the day, I’m getting micro-second flashes of scenes from the nightmares. Come on, none of my joints work anymore. Isn’t that enough punishment ?
The founder of SAS is worth over $7 billion. But is he happy? I hope not. The groundskeepers said he liked to see grass up against the tree trunks. I hope he strangles in that grass.
AIG
This place made SAS seem like a kindergarten. After eight years of stress, I developed a 90% blockage of the left anterior descending artery—the widow block. I have a stent to remind me. I hate everyone who ever spoke to me there, except for my boss Robert and a couple of others. Tony Galioto can fuck right off. His hair sure did.
(Recently, after thirty years, I contacted an old colleague from AIG, Michael Gioffre. We’re enjoying a spirited email correspondence, but Michael said that if I didn’t mention him in this post, I’d be dead to him. As you read this blog, you know what that means. Hi, Michael!)
The Practical Legal Writer LLC
I don’t want to talk about it. Biglaw can also fuck right off. Lately I see that to preserve their partners’ multi-million dollar annual salaries, they’re laying off associates and staff as secretly as possible and staging said layoffs right after performance reviews so they can blame the layoffs on poor performance instead of the meager firm performance outlook that isn’t totally their fault at all.
Parenthood
My daughter. Youth sports. Umpires and coaches, except for the wonderful Thom Alpaugh. Nothing further, your honor.
Conclusion
Note that the later entries are shorter, because I just can’t.
But the bottom line? Those grudges are just old jokes now, and I am living a pretty contented life and grateful for how lucky I am.
Except there is that guy I see all the time, walking in Bermuda shorts in the coldest of winter days, bald and with a long soul patch. What message is he trying to send, anyway? The way he glances at me, I can tell he doesn’t much like me, either.
Comments