Unorthodox Angles/Andrew Gramling

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For about five years I had been living in darkness. Ironically, it was a sudden realization about the spiritual nature of life that preceded the coming of the darkness in my personal life. Becoming more sensitive to the subtleties of life, however, didn’t mean I got permission to ignore a large portion of what life truly was, but probably the opposite. I was too young to have been able to see what was coming ahead. I would experience a sinking feeling around the beginning of fall in my high school days where I had incomprehensible fantasies about what my life SHOULD be like, but it gave me no indication that something even more challenging was approaching. There was no way to prepare for or to avoid it.

Some people would call this period “The dark night of the soul.” I didn’t know how long it was going to last. I couldn’t see a way out of it either. People could walk the path with me, but nobody could walk the path FOR me. This was something I had to find my way out of myself. Fortunately, I had a strong family, and friends who were never touched by the darkness the same way I was, though I didn’t see them as much as the ones who were. They helped keep me grounded and from being overwhelmed by it. That didn’t necessarily make the journey any easier. It just meant I had what I needed to survive it, and sometimes that meant surviving by a millimeter.

The darkness was a composite of all the things that society tries to cover up, ignore, suppress, deny, and ostracize. Fear is also a part of it. People fear the dark more than the light in most cases. Some people are afraid of death. Some people are afraid of violent criminals. But here I was, more than waist-deep in it.

The dark can hide many things. More violent crime tends to happen at night according to statistics. I was surrounded by the dangers of the underworld for so long that my emotions became clouded by suspicion, fear, and sometimes anger. I never lost my sense of empathy, but sometimes showing too much kindness to the wrong people could get one in serious trouble. There were still things I was unwilling to do, like hurt someone unnecessarily, which was a view not always shared by the people around me; the people on my team or the opposition.

I did do some things I regretted later. For example, I was once part of a robbery. My friend met up with a young man named Brett who gave him money in exchange for a service. My friend came back to my vehicle without fulfilling the service where a group of us were waiting and we drove away laughing. A couple of years later, I saw Brett walking out of MATC Truax with his mother when I made my first attempt at college. Seeing his relative innocence in that moment made me realize what a dirty thing I had been part of. I wanted to apologize to him, but I was frozen to do anything. He didn’t even know I was a part of it.

“God is with us even when we fall,” I heard a pastor at a church say around the same time when I began to fall myself. Beyond all the confusion and chaos, I felt there was something that was letting me know in subtle ways that I wasn’t alone, but there were times when it was so dark it was hard to remember that. The auras of people and places were sometimes so intense that my thoughts became polluted by fear. Sometimes it was an irrational fear, and other times it was completely warranted. Just as I felt the presence of a divine source in my life, there were times when I felt the complete opposite as well.

“Is this all in my head?” I asked my friend Ed, who I met while helping him around his home through the E.N.J.O.Y program at East, who was a witness to much of what I was going through mentally.

“Not all of it,” he assured.

He had a strong background in spirituality, which gave him a level of certainty about it. He had claimed to have witnessed things that some people would automatically dismiss as fiction. A lot of very bizarre things were happening in my life too, which made his stories believable to me.

As difficult as these times were, perhaps there was a reason behind it. The dark side of a person, often referred to as the shadow, can remain in a person’s latent awareness for a lifetime, breaching the surface occasionally. In order for a person to be a true master of oneself, they must acknowledge ALL parts of their nature rather than simply chasing the positive like an addiction.

As I sank deeper into myself, many things began to rise to the surface, including the darker aspects of my personality, but I continued to deny it despite the evidence. I convinced myself that I wasn’t capable of such things. Suppression can only lead to explosion at some point in the future. Sometimes our environment and the people in it provide more feedback for our own inner state than we’d like to admit. Maybe it wasn’t the darkness that was creating this behavior in me. Perhaps it was already there, and my environment only matched it. Over time I did achieve relative stability in this harsh physical and mental environment I was in. Mastery isn’t achieved all at once, but it does come with effort applied over time.

I was beginning to wonder why no matter where I went, I was always finding trouble even though I didn’t do anything. That reason would continue to evade me until I was ready to be totally honest with myself.

At The Klinic

“I can see you deciding whether or not you want to punch me,” I said to the stranger who somehow got triggered when I asked him if he knew the guys who disappeared with the girl in her car a moment earlier.

“If you do anything, some of these guys might jump on you,” I continued, completely calmly and rationally despite his aggressive mannerisms.

“Oh, I’ll get four, five guys! Wanna see guns? I got guns in my car,” he responded.

“Guns??? MAN F*** THAT S***!!!!” I shouted very loudly.

I didn’t even really like fighting that much, but I was especially against guns, even after being in Florida for five months.

“Let me take care of this guy,” Chavez said calmly and confidently as he stepped forward.

I knew Chavez was more than capable of doing it, but something inside of me wouldn’t allow it. I put my hand up while facing Chavez.

“No. I got it,” I said, still completely calm somehow.

I wanna show you something,” the stranger said.

I stepped forward towards him.

“OK. What?” I asked.

“Come here,” he said as turned his body slightly away from me. He looked like he was trying to light a cigarette in the wind.

Again, I stepped forward.

“What? I asked.

Just then, he abandoned his plan, perhaps because he saw that I was unafraid.

“I’ll see you on the streets!” he said as he walked away alongside the brick wall of the Klinic towards the entrance.

About a minute later, the girl who disappeared with the group of men pulled up in a parking stall nearby, laughing and having what appeared to be a good time. There were about four men in the car with her, like was described by her friend. That was kind of a relief.

I looked about 30 ft. down the parking lot towards Park St. and saw the confrontationalist come back around the corner with two other men on either side of him. The two men took one glance down at us and both turned and headed the opposite direction without even saying anything like a cartoon. The stranger came straight up to me without his escorts.

“I’m sorry, man! I’m f***** up!” he said as he put his hand out to shake while laughing at his own misunderstanding.

“It’s alright, but I wasn’t trying to start anything with you,” I said as I completed the handshake.

Somehow everything ended well. The girl who had disappeared came back unharmed, and a fight was avoided.

I’m not sure why I was so calm and unafraid of the man when he was only a thought away from punching me in the face with all his effort. Part of it might’ve been because I had already been hit before.

Less than a year earlier, I was at the Anchor Inn at Schenk’s Corners after work with some colleagues, and something went down after they left. A man known as “The Bear” was calling last call. He kept singling me out to leave for some reason, but I resisted. An incident occurred between us, but nobody got seriously hurt.

Exactly a week later, I was at The Klinic with my friend Josh. The Klinic was a very dark bar, but on my left, I noticed someone who looked familiar and began looking at him through a side glance.

“I apologized for what happened the other night, didn’t I?” the man asked.

“I THOUGHT that was you,” I said.

Without knowing it, I sat down right next to The Bear at a bar on the other side of town exactly a week later.

“When I hit you, it was just to get your attention,” he said.

Really? The guy was around 300 lbs., compared to my 145, looked rougher than Chavez, and didn’t get his name because he was good at giving bear hugs to people. He gave me a nice palm strike on the chin that pointed my face straight up at the ceiling and my hat flew off like I tried to stand up to a hurricane. I heard a woman at the counter scream. I was looking up at the ceiling thinking, “Did this guy just hit me? I think he did!”

After staring at the ceiling for a few seconds, I tilted my head back down at him. I had only one question for him.

“Is that the best you can do?”

He looked confused and didn’t know what to say as about 15 people jumped in between us. One of the bartenders, a man named Ryan who I had talked to a few times and didn’t have a great start with, talked to us both independently. After that, The Bear came up to me with his hand out.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He had such a pitiful look on his face, but I was still enraged. I came about one inch away from punching him in the face, but I couldn’t complete the action. How could I hit a man who was apologizing, even despite what he had done? After great reluctance, I ended up shaking his hand. The problem was he didn’t even work there and had no authority to do last call.

The Bear bought me a drink and told me a story

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“A couple years ago, I was at a bar just havin’ a drink. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned towards whoever it was, they started punching me in the face a bunch of times. I didn’t even see who it was because they left out real quick. The next night, I was at a different bar. Someone tapped me on the shoulder again. When I turned to look, same thing happened! Someone punched me a bunch of times and I still didn’t see who it was. So on the third night, I decided to do something different. I went to a bar that had a mirror and sat in front of the mirror with a pitcher. When the guy tapped me on the shoulder, I looked in the mirror and saw him. I hit him in the face with the pitcher, grabbed him, lifted him up on the counter and asked, ‘Why do you keep beatin’ my ***?’ He said it was because he thought his wife was cheating on him with me. I ain’t been with anybody except my wife for the last 20 some-odd years.”

His wife was sitting on the other side of him and mentioned some of his hobbies, which I didn’t imagine a big tough guy like that would do.

His story, and the fact that he bought me drinks added a very human perception to his character for me. I had totally forgiven him by this point.

“Don’t become like me,” he said to me.

He wanted to see me do something else with my life besides hang out at bars and drink.

After about 20 minutes, he and his wife decided to push on.

“Thanks for the drinks,” I said to The Bear.

“It’s only money,” he said.

Sometime after the incident at The Klinic, my old friend Josh told me something.

“That dude you almost got in a fight with. He’s known for knocking a lot of people out with one punch.

Sometimes you wish you knew things ahead of time.

Going to the bars was still fun despite the danger, but all of these run-ins were making me start to think there was a limit to all this. I wasn’t quite there, but maybe it wasn’t so far away.