The first time you realized that the world could be an ugly place

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Everybody has a moment when they realize for the first time that life isn’t all peaches and cream, or at least very few people are blessed not to have such a moment. Here’s mine.

It was 1964, it was a town on the South Coast of England and I was 16. My friends and I were in a pub drinking (this was long before the UK actively policed the age restriction rules for alcohol) and with us we had another guy that one of us vaguely knew. Then in walked the coolest guy I had ever seen in my life. He was the older brother of the guy we didn’t know well. He greeted his brother and sat down at the table with us.

I’m not kidding, this guy was Steve McQueen cool. He was around 20 I’d guess, he had movie star looks and was impeccably dressed. Needless to say my friends and I were in awe of the man, who spoke mostly with his brother. All of us knew this was the guy we wanted to be!

The pub was crowded with people standing at the bar and between the tables. Suddenly we noticed that our new cool buddy was looking around the bar and had seen something which displeased him. A young guy at the bar had made the error of briefly making eye contact with Mr Cool. Casually Mr Cool got up, empty glass still in hand, and walked the one or two steps’ distance to stand in front of the guy.

“Were you looking at me?” (this was years before Taxi Driver). He said it in a very quiet and measured voice. I think the poor guy he confronted sensed something and was about to apologize (though he hadn’t done anything) but he never got it out.

In the most deliberate and controlled fashion Mr Cool smashed his glass on the edge of a table and drove the jagged edge right into the guy’s face just near his eye. Then he viciously twisted and turned it not once but twice. All of us, in fact the whole pub, were staring in shock and disbelief. The injured man was staggering with blood spurting fom his wound when Mr Cool turned back to us and in the easiest of manners said, “Come on, guys, let’s take a drive.” In robot fashion we followed him as he walked slowly from the pub and got into his classy wheels. (Even if we’d thought about it we wouldn’t have stuck around after being seen sitting with him and fortunately the bar staff and customers had either been too frightened or in shock to stop us.)

We drove around 15 miles with Mr Cool casually chatting as if nothing at all had happened although even in my innocence at that age I detected a certain excitement and almost satisfaction in his manner. His brother was the only one who spoke to him but I can’t remember a thing he said. In fact the memory quickly fades from that moment on. I don’t remember where we went, how we parted, what my friends and I said afterwards. I do recall that he mentioned that the car was a stolen one (you can imagine how that added to our cheer) and I have the sharpest image in my head of his hands in beautiful leather driving gloves holding the steering wheel.

We never saw Mr Cool or his brother again, I don’t know whether he was ever prosecuted for what he did. (We, of course, never returned to the bar in which the incident occurred, at least not for a long time, we were too scared.) I do believe this though, if Mr Cool didn’t die young then he hurt a lot of people in the course of his life and hurt them badly. I realized when older that this was the first and perhaps only time that I’d seen a psychopath close up.

So that was the first moment for me (and I think my friends) of understanding that the world could be a terrifying and ugly place. I can remember from the distance of 53 years, as vividly as a movie, the broken glass being twisted around in that poor man’s face and it’s obvious that I will bear that image with me to my grave.

2

When I was sent to bed without supper. Or when I was told that mosquito bites are going to itch, and my mother can’t do a thing about it. Or when my first grade teacher hit my knuckles with a ruler.

Or the ineffectuality of the so-called double jeopardy doctrine. Punished (for no apparent reason) by Mom, then told to just wait till my father gets home.

3

I didn’t mean to make light of the OP’s event in my above post. But there is that kind of cruelty all around us. I have known three women, well enough to know their circumstances well, who were married to certifiable sociopaths, and two more who were the daughters of sociopaths. I say certifiable, but nobody ever certifies them, until they are prosecuted and convicted of a criminal offense, and they rarely are, they are too smart and cunning and under control.

4

My first real slap of reality came when I was 9 and President Kennedy was assassinated. My 4th-grade self thought the President was elected because he was the best man in the country, and the thought that someone would kill the best man in the country was devastating. I really believe that event marked the beginning if the end of my naive innocence.

5

My father had an anger management problem, which is to say I was physically abused from before I can remember. I never thought the world was a safe place.

6

The OP sounds like a scene out of Trainspotting.

7

I was quarantined in a military hospital (1950, the Presidio in San Francisco) with measles when I was two. My mother told me it was like the scene in Sophie’s Choice where the medic grabbed me and carried me off, screaming. My parents did not visit me. For a week. My father told me that when they did pick me up, I was one ANGRY toddler. I haven’t really trusted anyone since.

8

grade school. 's when I learned just because someone acts like your friend doesn’t mean you can actually trust them.

9

The Cuban Missile Crisis that preceded that.

10

Many many moons ago when I was six years old I saw a picture of shrunken heads in a Life magazine. I realized that those were the actual heads of people. I was creeped out for years.

11

We would go on an yearly vacation every summer, usually for two weeks. When i was 12, we came back from vacation to discover that our house had been burglarized while we were gone. My room, in particular, had been trashed, and I felt very violated by it all.

When the police arrived, the officer said that there had been several break-ins in the neighborhood over the summer, always when the families were on vacation, and that the burglars were very likely amateurs, based on what they were doing – apparently, looking for small valuables that could be fenced. And, it being 1977, most people in Green Bay didn’t have particularly secure locks on their houses.

A few weeks later, they caught the burglars – it was our paperboy (who was about my age), and several of his friends. Since he was delivering newspapers, he knew when people would be on vacation (since he had to handle the “vacation stop” on the paper). And, since he and his friends knew me (and didn’t like me), they had specifically targeted my room to trash, as well as for stealing my things.

12

When I began to wish, hope, that there was a mix-up in the hospital. And I wasn’t genetically related to the people that were raising me.

I was about 8 years old.

13

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think the world was an unsafe place. However, there was a landmark, when I was eight and almost died of appendicitis. I realized that my mother, who reluctantly, eventually took me to the hospital although she thought I was lying about the pain (I was in surgery within minutes of arriving), would have been just fine with me dying, as long as she wasn’t blamed for it.

I’ve seen some pretty terrible things but none of them changed my world view.
added: I didn’t see harmonicamoon’s post when I wrote the above; there is a watershed of consciousness at 7 or 8 years old for most people, I think.

14

My father had an aunt and uncle who lived in Detroit. As a young child I think we met them about four times, and I liked them. For “old” people they were fun and liked kids.

There was a little park near their home. On the first visit my sister and I went down there and played on these model horses. They were painted canvas and stuffed with straw. Second visit we hurried back and the horses were gone. My great-uncle told me that someone had pulled out the straw and set them on fire.

As a kid that shocked me.

15

When I was six years old, they decided I should skip first grade, and was thrown into second grade with kids anywhere from six to 18 months older than me. So I was alone and friendless that year (the bullying wouldn’t start until the following year), and at about the same time, my mother started endlessly haranguing me over every little thing I did wrong. Like, for 45 minutes to an hour at a stretch, for whatever it was that I’d just done wrong, or hadn’t done that I was supposed to do.

So I was disabused pretty early of any notion that life might be peaches and cream.

16

A long, long time ago when I was six or seven years old, the doorbell rang in the middle of dinner (which was very unusual for our house). At the door was my friend’s mother, a nice Japanese woman who handed me a small packet of stamps and explained that this was a tradition they did when someone died. My friend had been killed in a car accident. For a middle class kid growing up in a world consisting of cartoons and candy, it took me a few days to even grasp that such a thing was possible.

17

Probably before I could speak. My father wasn’t very nice to me as a child.

18

I was 10 when I heard about the atrocities that the Nazis had committed. Especially Mengele.

19

Earliest most relevant example I can think of was when I was around 8 and was looking at the headlines in the tabloids and told my mom that Kennedy wasn’t really dead, when she introduced me to the concept of fake news.

20

I was in second grade and one of my best friends at the time lost his mother to cancer. I didn’t even realize she was sick - I probably had no concept of a deadly condition at the time. I was shocked…she was a wonderful lady who spoiled us with cookies and soda - looking back, she probably just wanted to see her son happy for as long as she could…my mother was then (and is now) a wonderful mom, so I realized then that moms could be taken away by forces far greater than me that I did not understand, and the thought terrified me…