The C Word

I had only met Brian a couple of times and it was clear that he was an acquired taste since his parents seem to have not bothered teaching him the fundamentals of social graces. Despite this he was interesting and intelligent, two traits that serve to counteract general unpleasantness, in small doses anyway.
It was through Michael and Steven that we had come to know Brian. We were all PhD students in New Jersey studying things related to human ecology, biology and anthropology. Michael was studying the bearded pigs of Sumatra, Steven the cat tail wetlands of New Jersey, and I was studying the reproduction patterns of tyras in northeastern Brazil. A good deal of my time was spent hunting for tyra scats because you get to know a lot about an animal through its excrement. Obviously, these are all subjects the world cares immensely about. But we were undaunted and sacrificed years of our lives studying things that have about as much relevance to the average person`s life as Jupiter`s moons or the keeper of the heads in medieval London.
It was a Saturday night and Michael had been invited to a party to which he asked us to accompany him. None of us wanted to go straight to the party and rather juice our moods with beer beforehand to unleash our social skills in the remarkable way alcohol does.
We congregated at a bar called The Cellar. Why anyone would go to this bar was a legitimate question. It was dark, decorated principally with heads of unfortunate deer and smelled of beer and wood. There were two pool tables and a darts board and many of the empty tables were cluttered with beer bottles which no one had bothered to clear away. The amount of people hovering outside smoking cigarettes gave away the fact that most of its patrons were working class. The person designing the place must have decided that aesthetics were for pussies and that sparseness, ugliness and general disrepair were in fact the appropriate setting for real, blue collar people. As opposed to wimpy wonks like us, with our fancy ideas and uncallused hands.
Brian was studying the sexual mores of the transvestite population of Aruba, again another subject of inestimable relevance to human history. His academic advisor was infamous in academic circles for doing things like traipsing around his office naked while smoking copious amounts of pot. This professor had long ago crossed the line between eccentric and bonkers though his pioneering studies on patterns of incest in Papua New Guinea assured him permanent employment. And anyone who wasn`t mad would have been able to guide Brian to a doctorate and with it some kind of legitimacy.
Our parents always tell us that honesty is a noble characteristic which we should strive to enact and cultivate throughout our lives. But in fact, we spend a lot of our lives lying blatantly, as when we ask our work colleagues how their weekend was when in fact we couldn`t care less or say how nice someone looks when in reality that person`s ugliness cannot transcend any amount of make-up or elegant clothes. In fact, lying ensures a certain social cohesion.
The problem with Brian was he was incapable of lying. He had gone through many jobs, the last one lasting but one day after he questioned who ‘the fucking retard was who designed the filing system’ and being told that that person was his new boss who almost immediately became his ex-boss. For people like Brian, the rest of the world is at fault for his travails in being unable to maintain relationships or steady employment.
We entered the bar to polite but wary nods from some of the regulars and having ordered a couple of pitchers of beer an argument almost immediately ensued between Brian and Michael.
“I can`t believe someone as intelligent as you could believe such an asinine theory. Hooligans fight because it’s fun, it’s so fucking obvious.”
This was Brian’s way of arguing with someone he thought was a friend. They had diverged on the causes of violence between soccer fans. Michael, who had a benevolent view of humanity and thought depraved behavior explainable by economic hardships, countered.
“In the Britain of the seventies and eighties, there was no hope for the working classes, what with the shutting down of the mines and shifting of industry abroad. They were desperate so of course this took the form of violence.”
Brian was unconvinced.
“That’s utter bullshit. Soccer fans were in fact mostly middle class, how else could they travel to all those game? You’re talking out of your ass.”
Michael, familiar with Brian’s inability not to be rude, did not take umbrage. We continued to talk of this and that, the main purpose being to achieve the kind of buzz that makes us and other people more interesting. There was a juke box which contained mostly Bruce Springsteen songs, him being one level down from Jesus Christ among people from Jersey. An occasional ACDC or Led Zeppelin song broke the Boss’ monopoly on the musical repertoire. There was not a lot of R&B or soul music being chosen. Make that none at all.
At around ten we left the bar, and walked in the direction of the house where the party was being held. Michael gave us some background. The house was shared by four women who were studying things like women’s empowerment, gender identification, the evils of patrician societies or the West`s role in female circumcision. Michael warned us that it was `best to stay away from telling dumb blond jokes’ or sympathizing with the president of Harvard who had said recently that woman were hampered and hindered by nature to be good scientists. This would likely be viewed dimly.
We stopped at a local store owned by Koreans who behind plexi-glass accepted your money for the beer they provided. In the store there was a group of Asians, two Ethiopian descended teenagers, a few American born whites and blacks. Outside, Palestinian taxi drivers drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and talked their guttural Arabic. This is the kind of scene the Ku Klux Klan depicts in recruitment drives, the darker masses slowly taking over.
The house was in a typically upper middle class neighborhood, but the signs outside the houses made it clear that these people were comfortable but enlightened. US Troops Out of Iraq placards were plentiful and the rainbow flag on more than one house. This was a street where humanity was loved, although not necessarily represented.
The garden of the party house was just kempt enough to not have neighbors ring the cops. The bushes and plants were slowly being strangled by ivy and weeds would soon be the majority plant. If you want to rent a house to students, kiss goodbye to your garden for a while.
As the door opened the energy of the party whooshed out onto the street and we walked in. Unconsciously, we held up the two six packs of beer we had bought to make sure people knew we weren`t chumps. Jimmy Hendrix was playing and a few people ran their fingers along their palms pretending to be a guitarist and emulate the God of guitar in a rather cringe-making fashion. Little groups had formed, as they do, and laughter in the air floated a bit like smoke.
We headed over to the table where the food was laid out. Predictably, soy made up a good deal of the composition of the food, this being a vegetarian household. In fact two of the girls were vegans and regarded drinking cow’s milk as a crime against the universe.
“What if we stuck a big, fat bloody steak bang in the middle of this shit right now?” Brian suggested this less than tactfully and loud enough to be heard by those around. This produced a series of disapproving glances and should have foretold of what was to come. We moved over to the fireplace, where some bowls with cut vegetables and dip were our immediate victims since we hadn’t eaten dinner.
The place had that typical feel of a group house filled with people who would probably not shed a tear if someone tortured Dick Cheney to a slow death. There was a poster of Martin Luther King on the wall with a small exert from his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Another poster announced a massive pro-choice march that was held in Washington some years back. Surprisingly, Sweet Honey and the Rock and Holly Near were the musical entertainment. On another part of the room, a large poster of Mercedes Sosa adorned almost an entire side of a wall. El Pueblo Unido Nunca Será Vencido.
A bookshelf was sparsely occupied by a couple of Alice Walker books, an Erica Jong book placed quite prominently to show no one here was a prude. The New Our Bodies Ourselves and not much else. Chairs were arranged around a television, a couple of plants made up the rest of the sparse furnishings.
Unfortunately, Brian was getting drunk and this led to his talking about his love life. As I hope is clear from my description, the fact that Brian`s romantic experiences have been disastrous, rancorous, seedy and full of bitterness should come as no surprise. His one true love, a black woman with whom he was married (and would come up in conversations when he was accused of saying something racist), had left him for her cousin.
“Their parents were brother and sister for fuck`s sake,” he said once in disgust.
The latest travails for Brian involved a graduate student who had not managed to immediately see that Brian was not someone her parents would approve of and when she did, she dumped him with little ceremony.
“She wrote me an email. “You`re a real asshole, Brian,” it said. She was a real cunt.”
A woman who had been walking past suddenly stopped dead. She had scraggly dreadlocks and was wearing the multi-colored clothes Mayan woman in Guatemala use. She was likely to have had a lesbian experience at some point in her life but decided she wasn`t gay. She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips and glared at Brian.
“I would very much appreciate it if you would not use that word in this house.”
We were all a bit taken about since the aggression in her voice belied her attempts to appear polite. This was one of those situations where some groveling would have rectified the situation. I mumbled an apology which was almost immediately drowned out by Brian’s indignant voice.
“Excuse me, but I didn’t think I was talking to you.”
Why people use words or phrases like “excuse me” or “I`d appreciate it,” when clearly they feel neither of these noble sentiments, is interesting. This little confrontation had rippled through the party and people’s attention suddenly focused on the scene.
“That is a foul and derogatory word and it’s not appropriate in this setting.”
She was wagging her finger now, and another woman had joined in the fray and nodded her head vigorously. Brian was unmoved and unrepentant.
“You`re probably the type that thinks that pornography exploits woman; that prostitutes are forced into selling their bodies. Why the fuck are you studying anthropology?”
Michael and I looked at each other a little incredulously. Where had he come up with that one, we both wondered?
She seemed startled by this new line of argument, which she called ‘heinous’ and ‘misogynist.’
“What is your problem? Do you hate women?” Her head was wobbling like Indians in those films where they`re being chewed out by some British colonial officer with a stupid looking mustaches.
“No, I love woman, especially having sex with them.”
“You’re basically a sexist I would say.”
Brian was enjoying the confrontation and the attention it was attracting. To capitulate in an argument was about as foreign to him as rationality for those who take the words of the bible literally.
“Well I would say you’re basically a fucking cunt.”
When Hitler invaded Poland, he made war with Britain inevitable. In a venue of infinitely less importance, Brian’s last statement made our expulsion from the party a question of time. In fact, it was almost immediate. Our Guatemalan loving friend literally screamed for us to get out or she’d call the police. Briefly I wondered what a cop would make out of this scene. He’d probably have more serious matters to attend to, I reasoned. But like the ‘here, here’ in the House of Commons, others in the party were loudly voicing their disapproval of our presence. It was clearly time to go.
I had never been kicked out of a party before and we really didn’t know what to do. Expletives continued to pour out of Brian’s mouth, his complaints about how we were being ‘throttled by self-righteous assholes,’ and intellectual discourse was now being censored’ struck a chord among us.
We went back to the Cellar bar where last call was being announced. Brain used the ‘c’ word several more times that night and nobody seemed to care. Obviously the people hadn’t studied enough anthropology.