Dirty Deeds

BY Rebecca Cannon

Absolutely nothing contained in this journal is real information nor was it ever told to me by anyone I may or may not have met. Any coincidences with real life events are just the kind of random examples of universal strangeness that came up with these events in the first place.

Friday, August 2006.

Met ZO after a hungover day at work. Continuing with my research I asked him to share with me the worst thing he had ever done. “There isn’t one, there are definitely two. They might not be the things which others consider to be the worst things I have ever done, but they are the things which… when it’s late at night, and I can’t sleep, and I’m feeling shit, they are the things which I can’t stop thinking about. The things which prickle.”

ZO’s unacceptable behaviours occurred in primary school and high school, and they were both offences against the same guy. He explained to me: “I was picked on a lot at school, and this guy, it’s not even that I didn’t like him. It’s just that he was the only person that I could pick on who was worse than me.” The absolute lowest in the social ladder, he intimated.

“In primary school once, I bluetacked a long thin pin to his chair, sticking straight up. That was bad, that was really bad.”

“He sat on it?” I enquired.

“Oh yeah, it was really effective. It was awful.”

ZO paused, remembering the reaction of the guy as his screams of horror drew the attention of every student. The screams hadn’t stopped until long after the pin was removed, which wasn’t easy.

He took a deep breath and continued. “The second time…” but he paused, and winced as the details flooded back, “was in high school when this guy was drinking at one of those low steel drinking fountains. As I walked past I just reached out and smacked his head down into the tap.

“He hit it so hard it smashed up his upper and lower lip. They were all cut up on his teeth.” ZO waved his hand in front of his exposed teeth. A vision of the guy’s teeth smacking down into the steel fountain was painfuly clear in my mind.

“And it’s not even that these two things were so horrible in themselves. Even worse for me was the reasons why I did them. I didn’t even not-like this guy. You know, I had nothing against him. On each of those occassions I just saw an opportunity to release some of the anger and humiliation I was carrying around with me, from having been picked on all the time myself, and I did it to this guy because I knew he didn’t stand much of a chance of, you know, getting back at me.”

In essence, the worst thing ZO ever did was allow his emotions to turn him into the aggressive, evil, humiliating bully at whose hands he had suffered so much. He allowed himself to become the person he hates.

As we both contemplated the new level of friendship we had achieved in sharing this deep secret of his, I segued into one of the core reasons I am conducting this research. “An interest I have is in the concept of the human personality as an artistic medium. It is the creative outlet over which we simultaneously have then most, and the least, control. How are we supposed to live with ourselves, to become the people we want to be, knowing the unacceptable behaviour that also comprises us?”

ZO and I took another sip of our beers. Then he asked me to share the other entries in the journal.