“Simple.”
“Now you try it,” he said.
Raymond put me in a snug, and what I found to be meaningful, headlock and said, “Go!”
But I could not reach over his shoulder and certainly not around his misshapened, oversized, and smelly head to come even close to his red and bulbous nose with nostrils ample enough to accommodate a few fingers each had they been able to get there. “I can’t reach,” I said.
“Keep trying,” he said and gave my head a squeeze and a little twist that incidentally must have affected my spine because my shoulder pain lessened. “Close your eyes and visualize your actions, your movements. Picture everything. Imagine you are me.”
I shuddered at the very thought. Still, I couldn’t reach his nose, and now I was finding it extremely difficult to breathe. I tried to say as much, though I’m sure it sounded like mere gurgling to him, and then he let me go by tossing me to the mat. Rather thusly.
“We’ll have to come up with another stop, another strategy altogether.” He paced. “This is the thing, you can’t let him get you in the headlock in the first place. Yeah, that’s the thing.” He studied me for a long scary second, as if to figure out what part of me might make the most noise upon breaking. “Okay, okay, come at me as if you want to put me in a headlock.”
I did, but it must have looked incredibly silly since he was at least a foot and a half taller than me. As instructed, I went at him like the complete fool I was. He stomped my left instep with one of his turned-in monkey-looking feet, hooked that same foot behind my right ankle, and popped me in the chest with the meaty heel of his hand, sending me sprawling onto the mat.
I lay there and he stood over me. He put his fist in his palm and bowed. “Our time is up today, Not Sidney. I will see you next week.”
“Thank you, Raymond.”
One of my favorite places, no doubt for its relative safety, was the small public library in Decatur. The librarian became accustomed to my face, and when she finally asked me my name and I told her, she simply said, “What an interesting name.” So, I liked her. She let me go into the old part of the stacks where the books were dusty and damp, and many were falling apart. I loved the smell of the books there, with their staleness and floating dust. I studied and studied, devouring all sorts of books, confused much of the time. I could hear my mother’s voice. “Read. Always read. No one can take that from you. The evil picture box [her name for the television] won’t make you smarter, but books will. Read. Read. Read.” And then she would lock me in my room with the Britannica. It was in the stacks of the library that I found a book by an Austrian psychiatrist named Anton Franz Fesmer. The slim volume was titled Passive Carriage Manipulation. The manipulation described was very much like hypnosis and perhaps more like the thoroughly debunked mesmerism; the similarity of the names was no doubt in great part responsible for Fesmer’s notable lack of recognition. Fesmerism was a method of gaining control of a subject without the subject’s awareness. The idea was a beautiful one, and it of course appeared to me as the perfect form of self-defense. The program had, however, one, rather huge, procedural hurdle. It required that the practitioner stare for some time, minutes, at the subject. The claim was that once one got better at it, the time of eye contact would become shorter. Fesmer also claimed that, unlike hypnosis, the subject’s actions would not exclude those that he or she would find offensive or unacceptable when not under the influence. I read the book twice and on a Wednesday went to the playground and got my ass kicked.
“Why are you staring at me?” Those were the last poorly formed words I recall hearing.
But I persisted, and I practiced on Claudia, Betty, and Ted and finally had my first success with Raymond.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I stared at him.
“Not Sidney, why are you looking at me like that?” Then his eyes glazed over, and he said nothing.
I had him stand open, defenses down, exposed, and he received my punch to his midsection. He crumpled and became immediately un-Fesmerized. And so I stared at him again, and he slipped under. I beat him up fairly well that day, and he went home sore without any inkling why.
I still couldn’t Fesmerize Claudia, but I thought I might have gained just a bit of influence over Betty when I had her toss away the remaining portion of her Arby’s roast beef sandwich, something she had never done before.
Wednesday came, and I found myself at the playground. The biggest of the bullies was there alone, and without the others to show off for he showed little interest in me, except to say, “Hey, little motherfucker, you wait till later.”
I stared at him. I was about twenty yards away, no doubt trembling though I really don’t recall, and I launched my gaze at him, complete with one eyebrow raised, as clearly described in Fesmer’s procedural guide. The bully, his name was Clyde, asked me at what I was staring, his precise words being, “What you starin’ at, li’l motherfucker,” the “li’l motherfucker” saving him from ending a sentence with a preposition. However, I kept to my immediate business of raised-brow staring. Irritated, and no doubt bubbling with sadistic urges, he started toward me, grinding his fist into his palm the way he always did before pounding me. I felt my stomach tighten and tremble, but I stayed with it, and by the time he’d dragged his knuckles the twenty yards to me, his dull bovine eyes were glazed over like Raymond’s. I issued post-Fesmer instructions to him to not only protect me, but to allow me to strike him in the face whenever I pleased. When I said, “Oh, dumbshit,” he was to lean over and put out his chin. I practiced once, and then just had to do it again. I was somewhat impressed by the punching skills that Raymond had somehow taught me.
It all worked beautifully that day, and I found myself equipped with a tool that I knew would serve me for the rest of my life, a kind of psychological Swiss Army knife. The problem with the method was and would be the fact that not all people can be Fesmerized, and when they are impervious to it, they are not, sadly, oblivious to the person who is staring at them like some kind of maniac. So, if it doesn’t work, one comes across like an insane and possibly dangerous person. Unfortunately, I was never able to come up with a reliable profile for susceptible subjects. At first, I thought it was dumb people who made good subjects. I thought this until I was one day beaten to within an inch of my life by a remarkably stupid boy named, simply, Sidney, who had the obvious problem with my name. My staring bounced harmlessly off his pit-bull head like so many marshmallows. “What you be starin’ at?” he shouted. “You, yeah, I talkin’ to you!” I have to admit that I was distracted by his diction, and so perhaps my stare was somewhat weakened. By the same token, Betty, one of the smartest people I knew, turned out to be highly susceptible to the old Fesmer eye. The weapon was revealed to me as flawed and unpredictable and unreliable, and so I resigned to use it sparingly.