MaxTalks

I just got assaulted. Or I guess you could say I lost a fight badly. I think if you lose a fight badly enough you can just say “I got assaulted”.

It started outside the Planet Fitness on Winter Street. A woman leaving work says excuse me after stepping out of the way of a man walking the same direction. He says something like a cat call before jogging after her. I turn around and see the woman holding her hand up while trying to get distance from him. He’s running after her, he looks ready to grab her, so I go.

“What’s going on man?” I ask. He stops to look at me while the woman gets away. He mumbles something I don’t understand, and walks toward me puffing his chest. I try to start a conversation about McDonalds which I get sounds stupid but I was just trying to distract him. Before I can say “McDouble” he’s in my face with one hand grabbing my shirt. I say something, he mumbles something angry back, and then he grabs me with both hands to perform a Magic Mike shirt tear. It was a nice shirt. 100% cotton. My mom got it for me one summer in Florida as a gift. Just two days ago I sat on the floor of my room for 15 minutes ironing out wrinkles so I could wear it again.

I don’t remember how the next part played out. One second I hear my shirt ripping and the next my ass is on the pavement. Another bystander, a man about twice my age, comes up to the guy and starts a full on fist fight. They trade blows and both end up on the floor before the guy wobbles away. I call the police, follow him into the park, and then let a group of officers on bicycles know what happened. They take a statement from me, start to question the guy a dozen yards away, and then I go home. The woman is safe, I got a minor scratch, and the man is in the hands of the BPD. That’s the story. For people concerned about me – I’m safe. For those who wanted to know what happened, that’s pretty much it. Everything that follows is a more in-depth reflection on the incident.

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What happened was terrifying, frustrating and confusing. On the train home, after the adrenaline had worn off, I was left with a tightness in my chest I couldn’t explain. It felt like a paperweight on top of my lungs, and every time I think about the situation it comes back. I want to make sense of that feeling and the situation as a whole. It’s my hope that by sharing my thoughts I’ll be able to take the first steps to moving on.

Violence is a visceral experience. I’ve been knocked down or hurt plenty of times before through sports or roughing around as a kid, but this was the first time I experienced a physicality that felt like true danger. Minutes after the altercation I couldn’t feel flesh or bone, my body was just energy. Talking to the police, I remember how distracting that energy felt as I tried calmly explaining details to an officer. The violence I experienced took agency of my body away from me. Not just in the moment of being grabbed or pushed, but in the minutes and hours and days after through stress hormones I don’t choose to release. One’s sense of security isn’t a logical position, it’s a feeling. Violence has shaken my sense of security, and when I walk around Boston or take public transport, I don’t feel as easy as I used to. I find myself avoiding eye contact more than usual and suspecting violence from people I normally would ignore. 

I don’t think it’s fair somebody could do this to me – change how I act and feel in the world – but it happened. The confusing thing is, I feel responsible for how things turned out. I feel guilty, like I should’ve done something different to prevent myself from this reality. Last week I talked to a bouncer who told me he’s never been in a fight in 15 years of working. He showed me how he’s avoided fights by moving his hands all over the person’s face to distract them. It seemed legit to me. Granted I was drunk at the time but maybe that’s the ideal condition to see how it works. Maybe if I had tried that I could’ve gotten the guy to calm down. But when I try to imagine myself in the situation again, I usually fantasize about violence. I think about driving my elbow into the soft of his temple, or leveraging my body to swing him into the concrete. Maybe if I came up to him with the willingness to harm, I wouldn’t feel powerless now. The angering festering within me would’ve been left somewhere on that street.

The thing is, I didn’t run up wanting to hurt him. I’ve been taught de-escalation and talking things through. Violence wasn’t on my mind and anger wasn’t in my heart. Those were lessons I hadn’t learned yet. I think that man had learned those lessons a long time ago, and his assault passed them onto me. I figure it’s a cycle. Violence breeds anger, and that anger fuels more violence. It’s a strong force. When he grabbed me, I could feel the anger pulsing out of him. As he dug his hands into my shirt and began pulling, he looked anguished. I believe he was using my shirt as an outlet for his built-up, overflowing anger. Anger from a shitty past or even a shitty day. Anger he didn’t know what to do with. Anger he let out the easiest way he knew how.

Some of that anger is with me now. What to do with it, I’m not sure. After hearing about the assault, one coworker suggested I take boxing lessons. Competency to violence is appealing – and it would’ve been nice to have a solid right hook for my coworker after that stupid response – but I wonder what good it would do anyway. After I got shoved to the ground, another bystander came up to the man with fists drawn. They both threw punches, hard, and ended up on the ground. The perp got up and started off toward the park. Yes he was hurt more than before, but he was still a threat. I called 9-1-1, I followed him into the park, and I told officers where he was. None of that involved physical strength or violence, yet I think it did a lot.

It’s not lost on me that physicality and violence are inextricably tied to masculinity and socially conditioned as appropriate ways for men to solve problems. Think of lines like “Let’s settle this outside like men” or look at every male actor in a Marvel movie that has to gain 20 pounds of lean muscle before playing roles like “ANT-MAN”. I think our culture offers little variation in masculinity outside of this burly, machismo type, and as a result I’ve felt alienated from identifying with masculinity my entire life. While I intentionally separate myself from that world, I think this assault exposed some lingering pain from the disconnect between my expression of masculinity and the machismo-version I don’t live up to. I think that pain manifested in shame for having been knocked down or not having shown retaliatory violence. Of course that’s ridiculous, I never had any intention of fighting a homeless guy, but that shame existed nonetheless. One more thing: after talking to police, I reached into my gym bag to replace my ripped shirt and found I packed a neon pink running shirt. That seems a bit ironic, I don’t know.

The final thing I will touch on is my frustration with the Boston Police Department. Just take any assumption you might already have about police incompetency or budget bloat and assume it to be true because I can now confirm first-hand. When I got on the line with the 9-1-1 operator, she asked me where the assault happened. I told her “Park Street” and she said, “The street or the T stop”. I said “The T stop, above ground” and she said “You need to give me the exact address”. What the fuck. If anyone reading this isn’t from Boston, Park Street is the central hub of the entire city and is maybe 50 square feet. This is like asking Google Maps directions to get from your bed to your fridge. Believe it or not, I don’t know the exact address of Park Street station, but clearly the 9-1-1 operator didn’t either because she kept insisting she could do nothing without the intersection info. Even after I told her “Park St and Tremont Street” she said that wasn’t enough. As if a fucking intersection isn’t specific enough she still asked I give an even more specific address. This whole time I’m following the guy into the park to keep him from getting away but because of the Abbott and Costello bit with the operator, I lose him. 

After the 9-1-1 call. I located a group of 6 officers loafing around the park on bicycles and went up to inform them about the guy running loose. I assume they’re given bicycles because they can’t be trusted with more dangerous vehicles like cars, boats, or motorcycles, but that’s beyond my realm of expertise. To cut them slack, most of them seemed competent enough, but one of the officers nearly made me burst a vein out of rage. After I pointed out the guy I think attacked me, this officer exclaimed “That’s him, that’s him!” The other officers went after him and he stayed behind. He followed up by asking “Are you 100% that’s the guy” to which I respond “No I can’t be 100% sure. He matches the description but I can’t say from here if that’s totally him”. In other words, a perfectly measured response. After this admission of reasonable doubt, the officer YELLS to the other officers, “It’s not him! He just said it’s not him, pull back!” Um… BITCH WHAT!? I didn’t say that! I just told you I can’t give you absolute certainty! I asked him if I could get a closer look at him or hear his voice to which he condescendingly explained to me that “No we’re not going to just let you walk up to him, it doesn’t work that way”. Thank you, officer. My apologies for not being thoroughly familiar with the process of being assaulted. By the way, all these cops are sitting around in the park thumbing their bicycle bells all while getting paid, yet I probably stopped more crime than they did not even twenty yards away from where they were loafing! Have they not seen Scooby-Doo? Are they not familiar with the concept of splitting up? I could write a whole stand-up special about these cops, believe me, but I think this post is experiencing some bloat of its own.

I hope you enjoyed my story. This was fun to write even if traumatic to experience. Take care, much love.

– Max