Published October 6, 2020
The world is giving me plenty of time and opportunities to think about evil and its many forms. It’s a topic that’s probably crossed your mind once or twice in the past few years.
I chose the photo above for several reasons, not least of which was to help set up a few points. A pitchfork, horns and an ominous red glow are pretty clear signals that something’s up, right? I am reminded of a scene from “Broadcast News,” when reporter Aaron Altman refers to the anchor, Tom, as the devil. In fairness, Tom is becoming involved with Jane, a producer and one of Aaron’s closest friends, so it’s not all about the news business.
“What do you think the devil’s going to look like if he’s around?” Aaron asks. “Come on! No one’s going to be taken in by a guy with a long red pointy tail!”
It’s one of my favorite movie speeches, and one that I’ve paraphrased over the decades as I’ve seen standards erode and broadcast news make Aaron’s words ring with more layers of truth than he could have imagined in the mid-1980s.
You can’t spell devil without evil, and while we’re on the subject, how do you deal with the latter when it sneaks up on you where the better angels among us are supposed to dwell? Well, OK, I’m probably being too kind to a nun, a coach and a Catholic schoolboy before I even introduce them to you.
I attended Catholic school for 12 years. I’ve written elsewhere on this site about how, less than halfway through those dozen years, grown men put a lot of pressure on me to play for the school football team. A blog post on the first anniversary of my coming out as a transgender woman included a pointed reference to one such interaction: It wasn’t just the coach who, upset that I hadn’t signed up for football, saw my crayons spill out of my book sack one day after school and said, “Oh, I guess you’d rather just color, huh?”
Eventually, I signed up to play. One day after school, dressed in my football uniform and waiting to practice, I sat alongside teammates on a long pipe running horizontally a few inches off the grass alongside a driveway onto school property. My helmet was off, and I held it in my hand. An older boy, Phillip, was bullying me for reasons that I can’t recall, and he shoved me, causing me to fall backward off the makeshift seat. My arms flew back with me, and my helmet struck the quarterback in the face. He was hurt, though not seriously, but it caused quite a stir. Before I knew it, I was called in front of an old Irish nun and the football coach, who was also a sheriff’s deputy.
The quarterback, one of the most popular boys at the school, had a facultywide protective bubble around him after a family tragedy that had shocked everyone on our campus. Teachers and administrators paid extra attention to him, and justifiably so. I remember the nun being vigilant about watching to see if he regularly licked his lips as a coping mechanism. She spoke about it in class. They were looking out for him in ways that none of us had ever seen. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through at such a young age.
What happened that day near the practice field was not my fault. Phillip’s shove caused my helmet to strike the boy, but somehow Phillip convinced the nun and the coach that I had intentionally harmed my classmate, and I was punished for it.
Phillip was not.
The coach, a bear of a man, bent me over and swatted me hard on the buttocks with a wooden paddle right there in the classroom in front of the nun. It was just the three of us. No witnesses — just me and two adults who were supposed to be looking out for me five days a week while I was at school.
What do you do with that when you’re 8 or 9 years old? You cry, you swallow the pain, and you move on with your childhood. I don’t think revenge on Phillip ever crossed my mind — he was older, bigger and had already convinced two faculty members that I was the one who had done something wrong. I don’t think I told my parents. I don’t remember if the school told them that I had been spanked with a paddle. I don’t remember all the ways that I pushed down the memory of that humiliation and betrayal by representatives of the Catholic Church and my Catholic school.
It wouldn’t be the last time a Catholic school coach paddled my ass. In high school, a long line of us stood and waited our turn for collective punishment over something that escapes me now. By then we were wise to the ways that the coaches made the experience even more painful. Holes in the wooden paddle to make the spanking sting more. Tape wrapped around the meat of it. Was it to secure the wood after it having been broken on someone? To cover up an indecent sketch? That was one of the stories. To add to the pain? To the whole mind game of it all? Who knows? Who cares? This, I am sure, was part of how our character was meant to be built in those days, and our morality shaped.
All these years later, it is hard to believe it was real, but it was.
It was quite the little morality play: the older bully who lied, the star quarterback who was minding his own business before being whacked in the head with a football helmet, the bullied teammate whose helmet did the damage after the shove, the nun who believed the bully, and the coach she called in to paddle the child who had been bullied, the one who had no leverage and no one speaking on their behalf.
Looking back, I don’t know how I put it behind me. But it was an early lesson in how life can be unfair, and how evil can come from the very people who spent their days warning you about the dangers of evil and the devil inside you. Woe be unto thee, the nun was fond of saying. I really don’t remember anything the coach liked to say. Coach stuff, no doubt. Life lessons. Be tough. Act like a man. You know, the stuff I was never any good at.
None of the three who visited this particular evil on me were terribly bad people. Something inside each of them was amiss, and each in their own way, they harmed me. It’s not for me to figure out why it happened. It had been years since I’d thought about them until a recent nightmare brought back the memory. I decided that it was time to write about it.
I don’t feel any particular motivation to forgive them. I am not sure how I went from “Oh, I guess you’d rather just color” than play football to being seen as a helmet-slinging ruffian who needed to be paddled. I’m not sure what went askew in the administering of their duties that made the adults’ shoddy and unfair investigation into the incident seem acceptable in their eyes. I am fairly certain that they never thought about it again, and if anyone involved had lingering guilt, it would likely have been Phillip. He had to know that he was a bully and a liar. I suspect the events of that day echoed much more throughout his life than mine.
On the whole, I know that the incident broke the trust I had in the adults who were supposed to protect me. I am not sure when or how that was repaired, or to what extent. You might not find what these three people did to me evil. Life since then has taught me to recalibrate my thinking about evil and how we and our institutions frame it. This process is still evolving for me.
I’ve spent a lifetime trying to contend with my demons. The monsters that have come to me in my nightmares since childhood have kept me plenty busy, and derailed more than a few days with their lingering horror. Those monsters are archetypes, in and out of familiar costume, with recurring themes and too many variations to recall. The trickier monsters have always been the ones inside the people who are supposed to be on your side. On my better days, I have empathy, because I don’t want to believe that they set out to do me wrong. The present day gives me plenty to work with there.
There’s no moral to this story, really. Sometimes these things keep me awake until I write my way through them, and then I try to get a little sleep before sunrise. It’s a bonus if the sleep is nightmare-free. Wish me luck with this one. The world is a scary place.
Devil illustration by Arda Savasciogullari/via Shutterstock.