Bigger Than My Anger

Last night I watched a documentary, The Bitter Buddha, about comedian Eddie Pepitone.  The film crew shadows him in the weeks leading up to one of the biggest shows of his career and interviews other comedians like Patton Oswalt and Sarah Silverman about their perceptions of Eddie and his work.  Some call him the comic’s comic, expressing confusion over his relative lack of notoriety in spite of his 30 years of experience in stand-up.  Others believe he’s made the best of what he was given.  Everyone, including Eddie, agrees that he is “a man at war with himself.”  He draws on a vast reserve of anger in his performances, which almost always incorporates extended periods of yelling into the audience, emanating a profound resentment that is at once rooted in his personal sense of failure and political, as he takes on different characters like the drunk, the disillusioned husband, the exploited worker, standing out in his comedy as the everyday poor-man who is both sick of and resigned to his fate of being perpetually ground down and spat out.

Eddie traces his rage – “the voices in his head” which nowadays he calms by feeding squirrels at the park – to his childhood.  His mother suffered from manic depression and his father tried to overcompensate for her absence by becoming a tyrannical disciplinarian.  Eddie is almost always yelling but he also seems to be perpetually on the brink of tears; the way he works and carries himself reminds me of a boiling pot of water with the lid on, dancing precariously on the upward pressure of steam and froth brimming over.  So he meditates high atop the Hollywood hills, spends almost every minute on the road screaming expletives at other drivers and is a vegan who eats ice cream. He’s also an avid Tweeter; in one of his most memorable sketches, he talks about how “it’s really the little things that count…you might have been diagnosed with something growing in your ass, but you look at your stupid phone and someone re-tweeted what you wrote this morning, and you think, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll go into remission.’”

I appreciated the film as a study of someone whose past and personal flaws and contradictions seem always to be on the brink of devouring him alive.  He’s 52, yet hard living has aged him so that next to his father who is decades older, they look like brothers barely a few years apart.  As Eddie puts it himself, “My comedy is my only legacy.  Is that sad?”  He fascinates me.  For one, he represents and is living what might be the artist’s greatest fear: to strive so hard and come up so far behind, and to have absolutely nothing else to fall back on.  The fear that grips someone who chooses to live out their calling, and to mold that calling into craft, is not the fear of someone who is chasing a career or a job.  When an artist perceives herself to have failed, it’s not just her pride, dignity or livelihood at stake, but her sense of justification for existing.  What if we don’t matter? What if the truth is no one really wants to hear what we have wrought so painstakingly and painfully into language from the crucibles of our lives?  Questions that sometimes disguise themselves as doubts over whether or not we are good enough to fuck with the road less taken.  (This is especially true, I think, in a capitalist economy that is constantly churning art and artists into commodities for mass consumption.  The motherfucking game is set up such that to get in the door, you have to be something unique, but once you’re in, you’ve got to standardize – if like me you believe that true art is particular and true art makes the artist, this means you are expected to constantly destroy that which is creating you in the first place, hence why so many artists go crazy or just stop making real shit, I suspect.) But witnessing a hustle like Eddie’s kind of makes your breath drop suddenly inside you, heavily, ponderously.  ”There is absolutely no one like him,” Patton Oswalt says of him.  It takes a steelier courage, and an immense love for the craft, as well, I believe, to keep creating as yourself in the face of so much disdain or worse, indifference.  Because Eddie Pepitone doesn’t suck.  He is very good at what he does, but his brand of comedy does not offer you comfort or escapism or good company; he takes you to the inferno of loneliness and self-doubt and despair, and asks you to laugh with him.

But more to the point, Eddie’s anger is so pure and chaotic, so sincere and open that it both disarms and disturbs you; it is so truly a helix of dark and light that the image which comes to mind for me is an angel gone insane, desperately searching for his way back to heaven while circling it over and over without ever recognizing it.  Watching Eddie perform, I laugh as an act of defiance and acutely feel my brokenness at the same time.  I have struggled with anger a lot in my life.  As a child, emotions were not encouraged or given space in my home – only anger was named and expressed regularly by the adults.  As I grew up, it became the only sort of self-expression I was competent at.  I used to get thrown around a lot by older boys at school because I had a smart mouth and I wouldn’t back down from a fight no matter how skewed the odds were or how physically fucked up I would end up.  At home, I’d throw and break things when I fell into a rage, when it really felt like my whole body would burst if I didn’t slam it against something.  I did not fight girls, only boys and then men, probably compensating for the fact that I could never fight back against my father and other men who had been violent to me.  But the last time I picked a fight, my opponent was a woman.

It was the night after Christmas six or seven years ago and my sister and I had gone to the supermarket to pick up some photos we had just developed.  While we were there, there was a Chinese woman very loudly and persistently verbally abusing people in the checkout line-ups.  She had a little girl, I assume her daughter, in the child seat of her grocery cart and her husband, a huge tall man, was unloading their stuff as though nothing was happening.  I felt myself starting to boil but didn’t say anything as we passed by them.  Minutes later, however, my sister and I were walking down the ramp to leave the store and this woman started screaming and cursing behind us.  I turned around and yelled back at her to lower her voice.  In response, she pushed her grocery cart with her child in it at my sister and I.  That should have tipped me off that something was not right with this lady but by then I was seeing red.  The woman marched up to me and started screaming at me, sticking her finger in my face.  She was about 300 pounds and I was 1/3 her size, and without a second thought, I right-hooked her in the face.  She pulled me down with her and we went at it.  I would not let her go and just kept whaling punches at her even after her husband jumped on my back, pulling out bunches of my hair and ripping the contacts out of my eyes.  We had to be pulled apart by three security guards.  The woman accused me of trying to steal from her but I had confessed right off the bat that I had thrown the first punch and there were enough witnesses to discredit her testimony, that it was her and her family that got banned from the store.  The next day, still seething, I went to the cops in a preemptive move and reported what happened.  He was sympathetic with me and said he would get in touch after he tracked her down to hear her side of things.  That evening, the cop called to let me know that the woman was mentally ill and a new refugee from China.  She and her husband were terrified of getting deported after the events of the previous night.  Did I still want to press charges?

Until that night, I had always felt my anger to be justified. I took pride in it and savored the feeling of burning like it was my one counter-attack against a life in which I felt so often judged, humiliated and violated.  Like just a few weeks before that incident I had chased down a guy on a bike who had stolen my purse and beat the crap out of him.  Or the times I would fight my ex because he stole the milk money or got high in the bathroom where the baby’s clothes were being washed.  I would imagine myself David facing Goliath and the Goliath would take on many forms over the years as I acquired new paradigms like ever expanding battlefields: white people, rich people, men, settlers, Republicans, Zionists, the government-at-large…on and on and on.  And the point is not that people with those forms of privilege have not and are not perpetually doing fucked up shit to rightfully earn the anger of people they oppress.  But what I learned that night, when my inability to control my anger could have cost an entire family their safety, was that anger depends on and perpetuates the illusion that we are small.   It’s not because he feels like a big man that Eddie Pepitone is screaming into the crowd.  It’s not because I felt like a big bad hero that I picked a fight with that woman at the supermarket, it’s because I allowed her verbal missiles to diminish me and then I in turn, wanted to diminish her.  Anger really doesn’t give a shit who the enemy is.  And in the aftermath, when I felt overwhelmed by shame and regret, I felt once again the temptation to demonize this woman, to allow anger to make me small again and minimize my choice – i.e. my culpability – so I could say, “Well, there was no alternative.”

There are those who say that the root of anger is fear.  That we get angry so we don’t have to feel fear.  I’m no psychologist, but from my own investigation of my life, I think anger is older than fear.  Anger is what taught me fear, and fear is what gives my anger opportunities to manifest and magnify.  So I have actively sought out places and situations that nurture fear in me so I can continue to give birth to anger.  I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Han’s writings lately and the one lesson I am focusing on right now is this: I am bigger than my anger.  Because it’s not that anger is not valid response to the ignorant fuckery that victimizes us daily – and disproportionately as women, people of color, poor people, etc. - but it is dehumanizing to feel as though I have only one emotional recourse, and worse, that it is an automatic one, to problems that require not so much my craving for retribution but my capacity for transformation.  Years since the supermarket incident, I have developed self-restraint over my physical enactments of anger toward others and my immediate environment, but it has also led to a turning inward of the anger.  Into self-belittlement and punishment, into my body shutting down for weeks at a time because it is so exhausted from being at war with itself.  I am realizing more and more these days that it’s not the traumatic experiences I’ve been through that are still hurting me but my programmed response to them.

So what’s the place of art in all this?  Watching The Bitter Buddha, I see a man who has infused his craft with his anger in an effort to transform it, to find moments of freedom from it.  Instead of finding real bodies to inflict with its blunt force, Eddie uses comedy to make a mirror of the anger that permeates him like bread in a bowl of soup.  A mirror which he then offers to his audience.  I have used poetry to dig up the parts of myself where sorrow, compassion, hope and emotions other than anger are stored, though even now when I read some of my poems I can see very clearly the inflections of fury in my choice of words, in the intensity of the language, like a monster is just on the verge of breaking loose through otherwise beautiful lines.  I am aware that anger has also served me in important ways, especially when I needed to speak out strongly against injustice, but it has cast such a huge shadow over my life that I no longer wish to be at its beck and call.  I am eternally indebted to poetry for teaching me to bring other parts of my humanity into the light, but work on the page is not enough.  I can only write and get there after I’ve already suffered and come limping out the other side of anger, which like fire, does burn down eventually even if for some of us they remain active embers, just waiting for the right breath of air or a piece of wood to let it blaze again.  I have no conclusive answers yet right now, but reminding myself that I am bigger than my anger has helped immensely, if only to give me distance from my anger and permit me to look at it critically.  I leave you with this poem by my friend and teacher, Joy Harjo:

Equinox

I must keep from breaking into the story by force

for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand

and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun,

your nation dead beside you.

I keep walking away though it has been an eternity

and from each drop of blood

springs up sons and daughters, trees,

a mountain of sorrows, of songs.

I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north

not far from the birthplace of cars and industry.

Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have

broken through the frozen earth.

Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand

before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter

of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war

and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead

and made songs of the blood, the marrow.