Anger Management By Merz Kathy goes back to school to learn - or teach - about managing anger "I am managing my anger, thank you very much. I found six things already today to get angry at." My fists were a blur as I slugged away into Betty Hunt's midsection, left-right- left-right, rat-tat-tat-tat. "Previously, before you had me go to classes, I might have come up with only four and let the other two off as examples of pitiable stupidity." This was a sore point between us. Betty was convinced I had a problem holding my temper. "Is it my imagination or are you getting quicker in your punching?" Her fist slammed into me as she began her methodical pounding of my own stomach. "Kathy, the class is for your own good. You don't need me to remind you that you killed a man. And I do not want to know what your involvement might have been in what happened to Marlowe." Her voice trailed off as she remembered the news items she had heard detailing the condition that fellow had been found in. And she was worried that I had played some part in the assault because of a fit of rage. That thought tortured my best friend and therefore brought stabbing pain to me every time the topic came up. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat into her unyielding stomach for my ten second turn. "And I was about to ask if you were hitting harder than usual today. As I have explained before, our instructor is giving me many tools for choking down my emotions. I'm becoming a regular ice queen so far as temper is concerned." Yes, giving me tools I had no interest in using. "Wow! I lost count of how many you got in that time." A lot of punches with my best effort behind each one, but Betty sounded about as bothered as if I'd been flapping my towel at her. "I'm glad it's working out for you." Rat-tat-tat back at me. Oof. Selecting words at the same time I needed to concentrate on keeping my midsection rigid against its punishment while simultaneously shaking out my arms stretched the limit of my intellectual abilities at that point in our workout. Betty was definitely putting more piss into her punches. "Well, once one recognizes the distorted thinking that lies at the root of much anger, she can begin excising those patterns." My turn again, and my arms were burning. My fists in their thin leather gloves throbbed. And we still had the weights room waiting for us, forty-five minutes of sweating and heaving, clanging and grunting. If I was mouthing such bilge at this point in our workout there was no telling what I might be reduced to by the time we headed for the showers. Two more turns for each of us still to go. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. I go to anger management classes because the truth would only hurt Betty more. I killed Sydney Honeycutt in the coldest blood that ever flowed in my veins, quickly and efficiently without any wasteful raging on my part. No more involving than ticking him off my shopping list, to be frank. And the only real anger Marlowe's fate stirred up stemmed from Betty's thinking I would have wanted any more help in disposing of him than I would in flushing the loo, or that my emotional reaction would be deeper than the same relief I might feel at consigning filth to the sewers. So I go to a class twice a week where people discuss things that bother them day to day and the ineffectual ways they respond. Nobody has ever hit me harder than my best friend does. She considers it a gift, a little help in the ability to take the punch she assumes is waiting for everyone. I've never hit anyone harder than I hit Betty dozens of times whenever we get in our full workout. It's my act of worship. Betty has never seemed angry when I've seen her fight. She responds to physical assault and stops when the threat is past. She killed a man once, herself, but it wasn't an act of passion or fury, just the most expedient way to save my life. Honeycutt aside, I typically fight in a white-hot rage ignited by some trespass against my person or against the expected decency of the world around me. Given time and freedom from witnesses I would rip out an opponent's heart and set fire to the corpse. Perhaps I see why she might think I have anger issues, but at moments like that, when rage consumes me and I've wound myself up to smash something I feel bigger, stronger, immensely powerful. It never occurs to me that putting matters right could be beyond my strength or abilities. I treasure my anger like a second wise friend who walks at my shoulder, the shoulder opposite from where Betty walks. I try to leave both those friends outside my seminar room. It would be a good place to knit, if I knew how. I could add stitches like Madame DeFarge in Dickens' Tale of Two Cities as I plotted dark but even-tempered deeds against my classmates who droned on about their petty difficulties, or against the occasional perpetrator of a described wrong worth getting wound up over. I don't knit so I spend my time sipping a large paper cup of coffee and watching the digital seconds blink away on my wrist. I learned at my first session that I would get scant sympathy or support for my abiding enmity for all who inflict uncomfortable and impractical shoes on women. After that it seemed pointless to enumerate offenses of lesser criminals so mostly I sit trying to appear sincere and interested. Like other classes we get homework assignments. Like my earlier bouts of education I am quite bad about doing my homework, putting it off and then scrambling at the last minute to get something down that I might turn in to our instructor or pass about for my fellow students to remark on. It isn't as if my copybook would be sent to Betty for review at term's end, but I had been trying in my own way to do penance for deeds she regretted but I did not – an odd balancing act. Tonight was the last class and time to give myself a graduation present. In the big locker room mirror I studied my carefully casual costume as I dressed. For previous class sessions I had dressed demurely enough, as if I were sitting before a jury I wanted to convince were my peers. For my final appearance I proposed to demonstrate how silly that illusion was. Fresh from over two hours matching muscles with Betty, my body looked like chiseled stone, if I do say so myself. Veins crawled everywhere: thickly across my biceps, in delicate threads across my lower abs. My abs, of which I am pitifully vain, had never been harder or sharper. Pecs mounded in sensuous hillocks with my nipples sitting up in recognition of Betty's presence as she dressed next to me. I glanced her way just in time to see her tug at her shoelaces, causing her biceps to surge into voluptuous, round masses of strength, and my vanity took a sudden step backward. I'm not into measurements, but I estimate her bi's to be two inches bigger than mine, with every other muscle similarly enlarged. A head shorter, twenty pounds heavier, she made me feel like a thin willow next to her compact physique. With a sigh I pulled my snug black muscle shirt over my head and made sure it would ride up above the beltline when I so much as breathed. Leather pants that fit like tights, metal-appointed boots, a short leather jacket and I was ready for action. Or ready for advanced scholarship on somebody's part. I intended to lure our instructor, Martin Macgregor, to an edgy bar I had discovered near the school. I would invite more of his pontifications about how women bottle our anger inside more than men because we are too weak to dare express it openly, lest we be swatted down by whoever was provoking us. Within about two drinks I figured he would have said something sufficiently stupid to justify peeling off my jacket so he could appreciate the physical lesson I was about to administer in just how competent some women are in giving eloquent expression to the fury we feel inside. Following this instruction I would summon a cab to deposit him at a hospital. For the final class we dozen sat around the large library table and Macgregor handed out signed certificates announcing our successful completion of the course. Then he asked us each to sum up the understanding we had come to about anger in our lives. I sat at Macgregor's end with a couple who were always front and center in our little group, swallowing up the wisdom that flowed from our instructor. Tonight they sat across from each other, the husband next to Martin and the wife next to me. They, or rather he, never failed to offer instances where he had successfully coped with his anger at the unfairness of the world around him. He seemed to fancy himself a hero of our times, overcoming cruel opposition in his many enterprises. By the end of our second meeting I felt I knew him well enough to write a thoroughly dull biography. His wife, on the other hand, seemed a cipher. Like me, she fiddled with a coffee to occupy her hands through the evening. She deferred every question to her husband, hummed noncommittally at suggested motives for actions or her likely responses. He usually wore trim business suits and did so this evening while I winced to see her variety of shapeless, weary dresses that disguised the contours of her figure. She might stand a few inches taller than him if she would, surely outweighed him, but tried so hard to curl inside herself that it was difficult to judge her dimensions or composition. "Well, I just know that I don't handle my anger properly," the wife, Marjory, initiated things. "I must be passive- aggressive, because I just know I provoke my husband, who is so much better at expressing his emotions than I am, although I don't mean to, it's just sometimes I don't understand things so he must explain them or correct me when I go wrong, and he's helped me understand how very unacceptable it would be to let myself give way to the sort of fit of violence that almost overtakes me, just as you have Mr. Macgregor in explaining that a woman such as myself simply isn't capable of acting out the urge to throttle someone who is cursing or threatening us, which we women sometimes bring upon ourselves through our basic passive- aggressiveness. Thank you." She sat down and dropped her eyes to her rather large hands folded on the table in front of herself. "No, my dear, thank you for being so honest about your problem," her husband, Richard, complimented her as he sat well back from the table in his own chair. He beamed at our instructor. "Don't you think she has made remarkable progress, thanks to your instruction?" I leaned forward and began straining my arms by lifting up beneath the heavy oak table. "Well, I certainly can't take the whole credit. And how about yourself? What have you gained?" Macgregor asked Richard as he duplicated the smug posture leaning well back in his chair. "Oh I have had some very valuable insights," he began. "Do you mind terribly if I go next?" I interjected. I pushed back my chair to stand and peeled off my jacket so my nicely rounded deltoids blossomed from my t-top. I was pleased my arms were enlarged from my gym session before class and that the isometrics I had just engaged in set the large veins down my biceps to throbbing again. "I perceive my anger to stem from certain few injustices rather than to cover up my shortcomings, should there be any, or to quell irritants. I would add that I am angered by insipid wine, which might fit in the irritant category but is really an affront to civilization. But mostly it rises against bullying in all its forms, by intolerance, and by the use of art and design for bad ends. Including expensive shoes designed to be impractical for any of their functions except to be looked at. Those things are apt to provoke an aggressive response. Otherwise I don't expect fairness from the world and I recognize my own responsibility to get value for the costs imposed on me, so not many things anger me." I didn't care what words were coming from my mouth, I was focused on displaying my bare arms and shoulders to maximum effect. I paused, took a deep breath so couple inches of washboard abs would blink into view, and continued with my fists clenched and shoulders tensed. "I would add one particular sore point. My best friend can't see, and that isn't right. I get angry about that when I think about it abstractly or when I see her missing out on something simply because her eyes don't work." For emphasis I punched my fist into my palm and flexed both arms. "Otherwise I'm a positive lamb where my temper is concerned. But I assure you that all the theorizing about women handling anger differently than men because we lack the physical ability to escape feeling a victim or doubt we can mount a truly aggressive response has nothing to do with me." I stretched my arms in front of me and tensed the triceps so they wrapped around my upper arms like boa constrictors. "Nor should it stop any woman from responding to some martinet who thinks he can dictate our clothes, or push us toward some cripplingly weak body image, or sling about ugly labels when we look or behave the way we know inside to be true to our natures." I flexed my arm and raised my clenched fist in a menacing manner, glancing surreptitiously to judge the effect my knotted biceps would have on my audience. Marjory and Macgregor stared open-mouthed while Richard pointedly averted his eyes and frowned. "I've met plenty of women and men capable of besting me in a fight, but there has never been a time when I have regretted an honest reaction to the verbal aggression of some bullying coward." "You have actually reacted violently to someone? For something they said? And you got away with it?" Margaret sounded incredulous, as if she expected lightning would have struck me for such an act. "Martin," I asked our instructor, "I've been lectured that the law recognizes ‘fighting words' as justification for violence in certain circumstances. How does that fit with your theories of managed anger? Are there times when the well-tempered person can strike someone for improper speech, or must one accept that sort of behavior despite the deliberate injury it causes inside?" I sat again and brushed my shoulder against Marjory's. Hers was pleasantly solid, I found. "Well, the whole idea behind provoking someone to violence is just a disguise for anger with the assumption the person being insulted can't prevail and must accept the abuse. To the extent there is protection for retaliating physically against verbal assault, it is a throwback to primitive times and possibly applauds a person overcoming a bully." He puffed himself up as he lapsed into full lecture mode. "I am reminded of Stosny's typology . . ." As Martin began to drone I placed Marjory's red hand on my lean arm and tensed it this way and that. She stared and felt it with genuine amazement. "Marjory, get your hand off that dyke," Richard shouted across the table. "You're making a fool of yourself and not to mention how you're making me look. You stupid cow, you know better than to behave like this in public. And you, Ms Davidson, I'll thank you to keep your ideas to yourself and dress decently when you're around normal people, instead of performing in the freak show." I winked across at him and deliberately flexed the biceps as Marjory marveled at its definition and solidity. "Is that truly the way of it then? Her arms look the way you pretend yours do, when you pose in front of your mirror," Margaret spat at her husband. "And the way mine were beginning to look before you ordered me to quit my fitness class. And the way they will look after I start going regularly to the gym again." I already had my other hand on my coffee cup so when she cast the heavy oak table aside and lunged at Richard I simply lifted it to safety. It was only by luck that I caught hers in mid-air, spilling only a few drops on Martin Macgregor rather than the entire contents - luck and the reflexes I train along with my muscles. "You may disagree," I commented as I handed Marjory's cup to him, "but I would classify this as instrumental aggression, aimed at winning herself some measure of respect and civility rather than hostile aggression. That would be if she were motivated by revenge for years of that wanker's putting her down and demeaning her. His would definitely be the hostile version, seeking to hurt her and punish her for her superior size and strength." I called over to her, "Marjory, if you'd like to stop by my shop one day I would be delighted to give you a personal fitting and offer advice on a more becoming wardrobe. I'll slip my business card into your purse here and you can call me at your leisure." Marjory had her husband by the throat and banged his head twice against the wood floor before rising majestically to her feet, her hands around his purple neck as she dragged him up with her. "Thank you, I appreciate the offer. We're going home, Richard. We have some things to discuss, some changes to make. Understand? Now grab my purse" With his feet barely scraping the ground and any thought of fighting free obviously futile, Richard could do nothing but squeak a strangled assent and accept her pocketbook from me as she steered him toward the door with her thick hand on his collar. "Well, I believe this might be a good time to dismiss the class. Martin, are you available for a drink? The evening is still young." I turned to Macgregor, who seemed shell shocked by the turn his seminar had taken. He gave only a dazed nod in reply. A few evenings later I called round to Betty's apartment to strut my certificate of completion. We talked about the material covered in the class and Marjory's happy breakthrough to embrace her own anger and sort out her marriage. "It sounds like your instructor got all his understanding of people from a text book. I can just picture you wanting to teach him a good lesson about handling emotions by outperforming him in bed and then hauling him somewhere public and making him lick your boots." She chuckled, "Or leading him around on a collar while you explained that some men would be angry about the experience rather than grateful." I looked at her in surprise. "Outperforming him in bed? I enjoy learning from you, you have such attention to detail. The first bits, about shagging him bloody in his car and then dragging what was left of him into a bar, happened the night following the last class. But your inspiration of licking feet never occurred to me because I was wearing my good boots. Saliva might have ruined the leather. I left it with periodic worship of my flexing muscles with his hands and tongue while we shared a bottle of wine. And I didn't think to bring a collar. I shall have to keep your version in mind if I ever encounter someone who needs educating so badly again. Would you fancy going out this evening, my treat? We can take turns in the flexing and worshipping departments."