I was volunteering at the school one day when I noticed a little boy looking dejected on the playground. I asked how he was doing and he gave a sullen shrug, confiding that he had spent most of his recess “running away.”
“Running away,” I repeated, horrified. The boy went on to tell me that he had been chased around the schoolyard for the entire break by a boy several years his senior. “Oh, sweetie,” I sympathized, “you should never have to run from a bully.”
Then I got a brainwave I would come to regret. At the time, I was a fan of a cooking show called Throwdown with Bobby Flay in which the renowned chef would challenge local culinarians to a cook-off of their signature dish, always summoning them to battle with the same hungry war cry: “Are you ready for a throwdown?” On impulse I told the boy, “You just look that older boy in the eye and ask him, ‘Are you ready for a throwdown?!’” He shot me a nervous look so I clarified quickly, “Don’t worry – you won’t actually have to throw him down. The strength of your words, alone, will be so intimidating that the bully will just turn and walk away.”
When I saw the boy again sometime later, I asked anxiously, “How did it go?”
“I don’t think I did the throwdown thing right, Ma’am,” he said, shaking his blonde locks forlornly. “The whole time I was asking him for a throwdown, he just kept kicking me in the nuts.”
My guilty conscience from that incident has never quite recovered and I have been on a mission to figure out bullies ever since.
A while ago, I advised a client in its struggle with a customer prone to tantrums. Company morale was plummeting, as day after day, my client’s personnel were subjected to the customer’s bitter tongue-lashings. I reviewed the customer’s contract and found a loophole: my client could terminate the engagement at any time on written notice. I told them to fire the customer.
“Oh, no, we can’t do that,” protested my client, a consummate professional, who had never fired a customer in over three decades of operations. “We must continue to use diplomacy.” But the customer’s tirades continued to worsen until they descended into downright abuse. “Okay, we’re doing it,” my client eventually called to say. “We want you to draft the termination letter.” And I provided them with a draft.
“Anita, this letter is a nuclear bomb,” they said.
“Yes, it is.”
“We are dropping a nuclear bomb on them.”
“That’s correct.”
“Okay, we’re doing this. But we’ll send it after the end of the work day. That way our people can have at least one night’s peace.”
My client copied me on the letter as it was emailed that night and just a few minutes later, I heard the ominous ting of a reply in my inbox. I couldn’t bear to look. Only after sending my kids off to school the next morning, and with a stiff cup of coffee in hand, could I bring myself to open the customer’s response. It began:
My dear friends, I am deeply saddened. I cannot believe that my actions have led to this. I need to learn to better control my emotions.
WHHHHAAAAAAATTTTTT????!!!!
By then, my phone was already ringing. “Did you read it?” my client asked exuberantly. “Our team has won the Super Bowl! We’re still firing them,” they added sternly. “But we’re going to be really nice about it.” And they were.
Unfortunately, I barely got to ride on that victory before I was put in my place by a bully again. I was parked down in the Village one morning running errands as a class of teenage students walked by with their teacher on a field trip. I had wrapped up my shopping and was reaching for the handle on my car door when I heard one of the boys gripe belligerently, “Who puts a fin on a Mustang?” My back stiffened. As a pejorative, it made just about as much sense as “who puts butter on bread?” or “who wears socks in shoes?” but that didn’t matter. Something inside me snapped.
I slipped into my car, started the ignition and slid the gear shift into S. The manual says that stands for “Sport,” but my kids call it “Sick,” which is the highest compliment that pre-teen boys can bestow on just about anything. When used in conjunction with a certain toggle switch on the console, a little crash helmet indicator lights up on the dashboard. It means: DON’T FORGET TO WEAR THIS. The engine revved. The ground quaked. And twenty-odd school kids and their teacher stopped, turned and stared.
The great thing about Sick gear is that you don’t have to do a lot to make a big impression. So I wasn’t breaking any traffic laws as my car prowled past the heckler and his audience with all the pent-up fury of a caged mama tiger. The turn for my street came up all too soon, though, and that was when I came to understand what the crash helmet warning was really all about. It was a drizzly fall day and the car skidded sharply on the wet leaves underneath me. I oversteered to right my direction and the rear wheels lost all traction, sending me screeeeeeeching around the corner in a violent fishtail reminiscent of a marlin on a line. My knuckles were still bone white on the steering wheel when I careened into the driveway moments later. Anita, hissed the voice in my head, don’t ruin your car over a thirteen-year-old!
My boys and I have very honest lines of communication, so I figured after school that day that I should come clean about my overreaction to a teenage bully.
“You drifted onto our street?” recapped my oldest son, and I nodded. I had forgotten the proper racing term for it. “Mom,” he said under his breath, with something that might have been admiration, “that would have only made you look more cool.”
“On my way home from school, I saw burnt rubber on the pavement,” piped up my youngest. “Was that yours?”
“Quite possibly.”
At this point, I still can’t say that I fully understand bullies. But I do have a deepening suspicion that they may just be friends in disguise, performing the rather uncivil service of helping us find our own inner badass.
Even the little boy from the schoolyard appears to have triumphed in spite of the throwdown mishap. I caught up with him at a Cross Country meet some years afterward, where he transmuted “running away” into one of the County’s best finishes. After his race, I watched him comfort another boy who had been chastised by a teammate. I thought of intervening, but he had the situation well in hand. “Hey, Buddy,” I overheard him say with a squeeze to the other boy’s shoulder, “isn’t this criticism coming from the guy who crawls around on his hands and knees at recess barking, ‘I’m Sparky the Detective Wonder Dog?’” His little friend nodded and giggled through his tears. “Enough said.”
Babble by Anita Odessa