Looking like a Teenage Killer

My father took out a copy of Newsday and opened it to an inside page. “Look at this,” he said, handing the newspaper to me.

I was visiting my father’s apartment near the city. My parents had divorced a few years earlier and I lived with my mother farther out on Long Island.

In the newspaper was an article about a teenager from Queens who stabbed another teenager to death.

“He looks just like you,” my father said.

The teenager and I were both 17 and my dad was right: I felt we could have been brothers.

“If I put you in a line-up with him,” my dad, who was a cop, said, “they’d pick you as the murderer.”

I laughed, asking my dad if I could keep the newspaper. I wanted to show it to my friends.

I felt proud that I looked like a teenage murderer, and I now wonder why this connection made me feel this way.

When I looked at the photo, I stood a little straighter. My chest puffed out a bit more. As a boy, I wore my violence like a varsity jacket.

Although I was only 17, I was already in several violent fights. In one, I was pummeled so badly that I vomited after the fight ended.

I walked away with lumps encircling my head, and I felt depressed for weeks.

In another, I was sprayed with mace, before being knocked out by a punch I couldn’t see. That night, I called my father for advice on how to stop the burn.

He laughed at my shenanigans and, although I have no way of proving it, I think he felt proud of me.

“Wash your eyes out with water and give it time,” he said.

These stories affiliated me with a team I was proud to be on.

After taking the newspaper article from my dad, I returned to my mom’s house and walked downstairs into the basement, where I had my room, and read the article.

Here is how I remember the murderer my dad said I resembled.

The kid was from the city and he went out to a party in the suburbs on Long Island. At the party, a much larger teenager — a football player, I recall — started trouble with him. The kid from the city was smaller, about my height, 5 foot 9 or 10.

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The football player punched the kid and sent him back on his ass. Little did the football player know that the kid was working on a knife ever since the football player started trouble.

He was bending the blade back and forth near the handle, trying to get it to the point where it would snap free. After the football player punched the kid, the time was right.

The kid from the city plunged the knife into the football player’s chest and snapped off the handle, leaving the blade deep inside the teenager. The football player bled to death.

Looking back, I know how horrific this is. I know the football player had a family that loved him. He had a life that the murderer stole from him. His future was blotted out in one second — and it’s tragic.

I can see that now. Yet, when I was young, I identified with the city kid. I wanted to be like him, not a murderer, but someone to be feared. Someone people did not mess with. Someone willing to protect himself.

My father was a city kid and he told me stories about fights he had when he was young. He told me about the time he kicked someone so hard he lodged their body under a car. He told me about the time he and a friend fought some guys at Coney Island and they tossed another teenager through a shop window.

My father’s stories were seminal. They made legends of the men who fought in them, and adherents of the young men who heard them.

When my father said I looked like this teenage killer, I melded my identity with the killer’s. His story became mine. I coopted his aggression as a part of my manhood, which was built on violence.

It took me years — and several concussions — to divorce myself from this destructive identity. Overtime, and with years of therapy, I began to understand how aggression not only hurts others but destroys oneself.

It ruins relationships. It isolates people. It turns connection into resentment, understanding into ignorance, love into hate.

Instead of seeing people, we see enemies — and act accordingly.

And, for some, aggression turns inward. It did for me.

After my teenage years, my violence turned on me. Looking back, I am glad it did because it kept me from hurting others.

Yet, I was also killing myself.

If I could return to the day my dad said I looked like a killer, I would disagree. I am not the boy in the photo.

I would have seen how different we were and how different we looked. I would have stopped myself from identifying with a teenage killer.

Today, when I think of the teenage killer’s face, I see my high-school friend, Steve. He was just as violent as me, if not more. He once beat another teenager to the point where the boy’s ear nearly tore off.

Like me, Steve was celebrated for his aggression. He was a legend in our community.

Yet, unlike me, violence caught Steve when he went into the Marines.

As we had so many times before, Steve had a fight with someone in a bar, another Marine, who had a knife. The other Marine stabbed Steve in his heart.

Steve died on the barroom floor.

Today, all their faces — the teenage killer’s, Steve’s, and mine — blend into one. I identify with the pain — of the killer, of Steve, of mine— that makes young men violent.

Instead of identifying with aggression, I identify with a childhood that I believe causes aggression.

If I could, I would ask my father why that boy killed.

I’d ask other questions:

What do you think led the teenager to bring a knife to a party?

Why was he preparing to stab someone the whole time?

Who gave him the hate he carried?

Such a simple conversation — which leads to difficult answers — would have changed me.

I wish I could have told my father that I sometimes feel a similar aggression in my body.

I would have liked to have said that those times my dad hurt me — the physical, emotional and psychological bruises he caused — made me angry, too.

I wish I could have told my dad that I identify with the pain the teenage killer may have felt, but I don’t identify with his aggression.

I understand him, but I am not him.

Then, I would have given the newspaper photo back to my dad, where it belonged the whole time.

[Author’s Note: This essay is part of a series of personal narratives on childhood abuse. If you would like to read these, please check out my profile on Medium. Thank you! — Patrick]

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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