Grudge Packer

...in which Ashley goes saboteur shopping.

For the past several years, I’ve made a promise to myself to develop a few grudges. I’ve never had any, and I think it’s time I did. Not just the minor tiffs and quarrels life invariably presents, but the sort of deep, serious resentments that can keep one awake on sweaty nights, scheming bloody retribution. I’ve known others to nurse such hatred throughout their lives, blaming specific wrongs committed by select douchebags for all their personal failings, and frankly, it looks like a lot of fun.

“I could’ve been somebody if Tammy Byers hadn’t pulled down my gym shorts in front of everybody in 6^th grade!”

“I would’ve made Chief Foreman at Northwest Industries if that sonovabitch Danny Crawford hadn’t fired me for stealing fire extinguishers!”

It just seems so tidy, so pragmatic to sharpen one’s hostilities with that kind of laser focus. Fuggin’ Mrs. Burgess! Goddam Tyler Huggins! Shitass Walter Mondale! One bad grade, one insult, one tie-breaking Senate vote, and all of life’s problems can be explained. And here I am with my rancor and belligerence scattered in all directions, my contempt decidedly slapdash.

The reason I’ve been unable to cultivate, much less hold grudges, is the same as for many of my late-life troubles: I have a terrible memory. It’s the same reason I’ve never been able to embrace superstitions, much as I’ve always wanted to. If one wants to obsess over unlucky numbers, black cats, or hats on the bed, one must remember that these were the source of one’s bad luck. Had I the wherewithal to observe my many obvious misfortunates with supernatural clarity, I would recall that day I picked up the penny the wrong way and flagellate myself accordingly. Alas, my strolls beneath life’s ladders are soon forgotten.

And so it is with Those What Done Me Wrong. Yes, I can summon the occasional memory of considerable dickishness from people in my past: the neighbor kid pouring sand in my Fruity Pebbles, my girlfriend having phone sex with another guy while I sat five feet away¹, my boss promoting me just for the thrill of demoting me again. These are all assuredly personal injuries I do not forgive, perpetrated by people whose obituaries I long to laminate. But I lack the capacity to obsess over these offenses. I simply forget these people existed. Perhaps I should set up a Google Alert shitlist. Or better yet, some combination dart/vision board on the wall to inspire me to ritual bitterness, to keep them grudges a’burnin’.

Ultimately, these aging infractions get thrown on the piffle pile because I am still here, in all my spectacular glory, and my persecutors are not. Since the star of this epic blockbuster I call my life is me, heavily insured and protected, these bit players in the early reels can have little impact on the story. If I really want to rationalize with this metaphor, I can suggest that it was not me who absorbed these emotional blows years ago, but my stunt doubles (Buster and Levi, the latter doubling for Young Ashley despite being nowhere near as cute). The star is untouchable, invincible. This further explains why everyone in any given plane crash, natural disaster, or global pox is going to die but me.

Perhaps it isn’t just that the offenders are too inconsequential to be grudgeworthy, but the transgressions themselves too puny. Maybe I just haven’t been victimized with sufficient malevolence to leave a mark. Sand in my cereal may be a mean-spirited prank, but it’s hardly a cement-shoes level of betrayal. I’ve had it too soft. But then I consider those who maintain smoldering grudges over the blandest of trespasses – unpaid twenty-dollar loans or bad reviews of new hairdos – and wonder if I just don’t have the Spite Stuff. To be grudgeless, perhaps, is to be a doormat, a gutless Siddhartha, allowing violations of trust to float on the winds of peace into oblivion. Worse, I’ve been known to review these incidents of injustice and blame myself for the circumstances. Clearly, it was my fault Tim Chesterson stole my stereo and traded it for cocaine. I hope he’s not still mad at me.

Well, no more Mister Wuss Guy. As another infamous wimp once warned, this aggression will not stand.

Selecting candidates for grudges will invariably lead the aggrieved to their parents, so I gave Mom and Dad serious consideration. On the one hand, this seems like an obvious choice, given the endless number of permanent traumas, accidental or otherwise, inflicted by every lumbering dimwit careless enough to have reproduced. Yet the injuries doled out by one’s parents, as well as the resulting umbrage, just seem too expansive, too all-encompassing, with that convenient vagueness so essential to the Freudians. Yes, Dad may have punched you in the thorax on Christmas, but wasn’t this just symptomatic of an all-embracing web of assholish Dadness, including too many grisly episodes to choose from?

Because my understanding is that a grudge should be harbored over a specific act of wrongdoing, and Dad “ruined my life forever” at least four or five times per day. How could I choose just one harangue? One unwarranted punishment? To say nothing of Mom, whose Machiavellian strategies of possessive jealousy and guilt-baiting manipulation are so complex that no single incident of fat shaming at Dairy Queen can distinguish itself.

But while mulling over dear old Mom, with her reign of emotional terror eternally pumping through our virtual umbilical, I suddenly had it. From early childhood, no less. The grudge. The incident and the instigator: Travis Hammond.

Travis gets a high rating as a grudge contestant because he was, first and foremost, a chicken-fried dipshit. A roadkill-skinning public masturbator, drunk from the age of seven, shoplifting Hustler and burglarizing booze cabinets, a bumpkin dumber than Dog Chow. He was roundly detested by all the kids in the neighborhood, though as we’ve established, hatred alone does not a grudge make.

The incident, now coming into focus from the haze of 1976, involved my beloved banana-seat bicycle, adorned with a star-spangled motif in trademark-dodging imitation of Evel Knievel. As I was mounting this patriotic steed, Travis, several years older than my preschool self, decided that terrorizing a younger child would be a good way to liven the boredom of that suburban afternoon. And so, gripping the tasseled handlebars of my treasure, Travis “pretended” that he was going to steal my bike.

Because I was a product of the Southern scumbag Seventies, raised among vulgar redneck teens and associated gutter trash, I had developed by that time a rich vocabulary. And because I considered Travis One of the Guys, a fellow inmate of our juvenile street class with shared mongrel sensibilities, I immediately commanded him to unhand my bike with all the sharpest profanity I could muster, as was the style at the time.

Travis released his grip and took a step back, leading me to believe my invective had won the day. He then went around the corner, knocked on my front door, and told my mother that I had been using foul language.

I don’t need to tell you – or I shouldn’t need to tell you – that, among prepubescents, this is just about the lowest offense imaginable, worse even than Kool-Aid poisonings or permanent testicular disfigurements. This is Code of the Schoolyard 101. Ratting out a classmate to a teacher or a paddle-wielding vice-principal is unquestionably low, but telling Mom is the lowest, grounds for immediate excommunication from childhood itself.

Recall, in the popular film of that year, what the high school punks did to Carrie on her prom night. Now imagine that, instead of dousing her with hog’s blood, the gang had marched over to Carrie’s house and told her demonic, child-burning mother that Carrie had used the f-word.

My mother didn’t burn me for my crime. But she marched outside to me and the bicycle I didn’t deserve to give me a loud, angry admonishment for my obscenities in front of a delighted Travis. It goes without saying that a permanent disfigurement would have been preferable.

So there it is, my grudge. An event I had completely forgotten, which I shall now ruminate over like Loki in the doghouse until the end of time. Travis Hammond, my own personal Judas, betraying not only me but the social contract itself. I now proclaim him singularly responsible for all my failures, my fractured self-esteem, my soul-crushing cynicism, my disgust with the whole human experiment. Fucking Travis. I’m going to remember this affront to my dignity forever, letting it burn eternally in my black, unforgiving heart.

Or was that Travis? Maybe it’s Alan Strickland I’m thinking of. There were so many of those assholes back then.

- A.H.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)

1. I’ve speculated that she may have considered this the makings of a hot, long-distance 3-way, but given the consistency of her maliciousness, I think she was, like most of the girls who pursued me, undiagnosed.