I was hoping to save up a little energy to write a bit about the stories I’ve read in Matt Sumell’s debut collection Making Nice…but I don’t seem to have it. There’s a macho swagger here that will repel a lot of folks but hell I’m a barbarian and I dig what he’s doing, even if it’s been done by a few (many) other folks before (there’s that Carver/Johnson/Lipsyte axis, yes)—it’s funny and savage stuff.
Here’s a longish excerpt from “Punching Jackie,” which you can read all of at publisher Henry Holt’s site, but if you don’t like this excerpt, you’ll probably kind of hate the story, and the book, which is fine:
Either way it made me upset, and I slammed the refrigerator door so hard the milk exploded, then I turned around and told her to shut it or I’d punch her mustache off her face and watch it fly across the room like a hairy bug. Then I flapped my arms like I was flying, like a bug, like her mustache. Now, I know I crossed a line there, but I hope some people can at least appreciate how much restraint it actually took on my part to not just turn around and haul one off on her. Knowing some people will find that difficult to appreciate, let me employ this awesome analogy: My temper is like a rogue wave of weapons, and my ego is like the dam holding back the rogue wave of weapons from being unleashed on the townspeople/-person, in this case my sister. Sometimes, though, the wave of weapons is too big or powerful or whatever, and some squeeze through a crack or splash over the top or whatever. It’s unfortunate, sure, but don’t I deserve at least some credit for holding back 99 percent of the entire wave of weapons that I could’ve just as easily unleashed on her if I wasn’t a good person/ego/dam? More important, she was making fun of the ego/dam, provoking it to break or whatever. So in a sense she was sabotaging me, like a fuckin’ saboteur. Like a fuckin’ dirty, no good, no-pot-washing, dandruff-having lady saboteur. My point, then, is didn’t she, in some way, cross a line first? I think so, and that is number one on my list of seven excuses as to why it was OK for me to punch my sister in the tits.
1) She started it. I know that’s a childish thing to say but . . .
2) When adult siblings revisit the house they grew up in, they often regress back to behaving like children.
3) Sibling status overpowers lady status. Siblings don’t count as ladies.
4) Testosterone production has a direct link to aggression and fluctuates in response to competitive situations such as a tennis match or arguments about dishwashers or changes in one’s perceived status in a social hierarchy, for example a sibling hierarchy, or a dishwasher-deciding hierarchy, or a hairarchy of mustaches (in which case she’s the winner hands down). When disrespected, there is a biological response within my balls and they make more stuff that makes more aggression. Try as I might, it’s out of my control. This admittedly may be a weak argument, but the logic is the same as acting like an asshole then blaming it on PMS.
5) There is a certain clarity in violence. There’s nothing rhetorical or vague about it–it means only what it means, which if I had to I would translate as roughly: “I don’t like you right now, a lot.” Less roughly translated of course depends on the particulars, and considering these particular particulars I’d have to go with: “The fact that you are insulting me in addition to being more intelligent, eloquent, calmer, successful, plus have all your hair and an apartment and a job that you actually care about frustrates me so greatly that I am going to dominate you physically because it’s the only area in life in which I think I have the upper hand.” However you translate it, though, it isn’t really all that cruel or enduring. In my experience physical suffering is more transitory than emotional suffering. Words, on the other hand, do lasting damage. There’s no taking them back. Not really.
6) One time I punched a boyfriend of hers in the face repeatedly because she told me he hit her. Years later she admitted to me she made it up because she was mad at him. He died in a car wreck before I could apologize. Another time this jerk-off in a bar was being a jerk-off to her, and I told him to knock it off. He did, for the most part, and as I made my way back to the table she came running over to me and said, “So-and-So doesn’t think you have the balls to hit him.” I was younger (dumber) and drunk (extra dumber) and had a canine sense of loyalty, all of which she knew, so I’m sure she figured my reaction would be some version of Oh yeah?–which it was. I turned around and walked back over to the guy, tapped him on the shoulder, and slugged him in the ear, et cetera. That makes two out of an approximate forty instances of violence in my life that she in some way instigated, which if my math is correct equals 5-ish percent. My question then is, how can someone who has more than once taken advantage of what I consider brotherly goodwill cry foul when that sort of attention is directed at them? It’s all kinds of wrong.
7) She was literally asking for it. After I threatened her she got in my face and yelled, “You think that makes you a big man? Huh? You gonna hit me, big man? Well go ahead and hit me then. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me, you fuckin’ piece a shit.”
“I really want to,” I said. “Bad.”
“Go ahead then, you fuckin’ asshole. You’re a fuckin’ thirty-year-old fuckin’ loser, and you know what else, you fuckin’ thirty-year-old fuckin’ loser? Mom was right about you, you’re a fuckin’ abusive piece a shit.
Biblioklept 