A History of Violence

My prostration before the altar of violence started young, very young.  Certainly a touch of bloodlust in male youth is not uncommon.  But you must understand that I used to lie awake at night, trembling in exaltation. Why? Because the Power Rangers were so fucking awesome.  The fervour that gripped me was the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever had.  The first Power Rangers movie was soon to come out and they were getting new giant robots, (zords to those in the know).  It seemed likely that these new zords would kick even more ass, nearly inconceivable considering how much ass was already being kicked.

I’ve never believed in anything like I believed in them. 

Back then, I would bring my Power Rangers lunchbox to my kindergarten class in the morning, and I would spend each subsequent afternoon being looked after by Gatina, a warm, plump, motherly Greek woman who, despite being so endowed, was not my mother. She ran a daycare out of her house and was patient enough to engage me in various debates, such as the likelihood of me ever liking girls and pro v. con: can a waterbed save you from a house fire?  She was a wise woman.

One day we walked through the aisles of the local grocery store.  I dutifully put her chosen items into the cart, withholding the eggplant so as to gain the confidence boost that comes with having a makeshift club at one’s disposal.  I must have been especially good or especially whiny, because before we left she led me to the Shoddily Made Toys aisle, common to most medium to large sized grocery stores, and told me I could pick something.

            “How about a cow?”, she asked me.  “Or a horse?”

My gaze held no regard for plastic animals.  My eyes were immediately and irrevocably fixed upon a light blue gun.  This light blue gun, as I recall, had a spring loaded feed that kept up to a dozen thin plastic disks mashed up into it if you really packed them in tight, pushing the spring down much farther than it was supposed to go.  This was very necessary, because an extra four shots could mean the difference between a glorious imaginary victory and a brutal imaginary death.  The disks were fed into the barrel from below.  When you pressed the trigger a plastic bit slid across the stack of disks, pushing the top one out the barrel at a tremendous speed. 

            “You have to promise you won’t shoot anyone”, Gatina said.

I promised, but already in my head I was shooting everyone.  I was laying waste to that grocery store.  The staff in the aisles were crashing through their carefully arranged displays as I blew them away.  I was diving into the deli, taking everyone out at the knees.  I was shooting those plastic farm animals because they were terrible, terrible toys.  I was not shooting Gatina.  She had bought me the gun.

Guns played a major role in my development, well into grade school.  Where as most of my friends had one or two, I had dozens.  If it launched a foam dart across the room, potentially and surprisingly often right into an unsuspecting friend’s eye, then I wanted it.  I wanted it bad.  One Christmas my grandpa got me a rifle that shot plastic suction cup bullets.  Run of the mill, you might think, but when he shot me with it in good humour I began to cry, apparently because it was surprisingly powerful or because I was a pussy. It was deemed too dangerous and my grandpa said he’d take it to hunt seals in the Arctic, a promise I believe he has yet to make good on. A year later I was kept awake again by the sudden, heart-rending understanding that my moment of weakness had cost me perhaps the greatest gun I had ever laid my hands upon.  It was a night spent in dark rumination on what might have been.

After that mechanical dysfunction, I made two forays into the realm of outdated, but no less awesome, violence.  Did you know that before the invention of the longbow, knights were virtually invincible in battle?  I did, because that’s the sort of thing that turns my crank. The weapons are the common foot soldier were largely useless against a knight’s layers of plate and chain mail armor. My first bow landed me in trouble after I shot at a passing car and then hid under the bushes after they stopped, apparently quite upset about my assault on their hubcap.  It was a terrible hiding spot and I was very quickly caught.  I don’t think my parents ever hired that babysitter again.  My second bow was ingeniously made at lunchtime with a chopstick, a ruler and an elastic band.  It landed me in front of the vice principal, a very nice woman who was passionate about art and had taught me in the fourth grade.  She’d had our class make kiln fired clay fish for Mother’s Day.  I had made a manta ray.  She was very upset with me, despite having quite liked my manta ray.

 “Is this a Japanese chopstick or a Chinese chopstick?” she inquired gruffly.  “Because if it’s Japanese then it came sharpened like this, but if it’s Chinese then you sharpened it.” 

Her mastery of Asian culture only confused me, so she rounded on her main point. 

“Having a weapon like this at school could get you expelled!”

I, in a continuation of a theme almost as prominent in my life as weaponry, broke down and cried like a Nancy.  In elementary school I was the type of boy who was often struck in the balls by all manner of things, so crying in such an unabashed fashion in public was not foreign to me.  To this day the regularity with which I was sacked confounds me, as I did not have particularly large balls.  In all honesty, I suspect they were (are?) slightly smaller than the statistical average.

From here I could segue into my junior high love affair with professional wrestling, but it would be superfluous.  The short of it is that I spent two years asking people if I could “just try this move out” on them, which required a lot of pelvis contact and was not well received.

It’s a good thing I don’t seek validation through women.

                                                                                                                                         ~ Kyle Stevenson