FUCK ME, I SAID IT AGAIN!

“Have you ever killed a man? If you’ve never had to kill anybody, you have no idea what life’s about!!!”

I was nineteen years’ old, a student, working several summery weeks in me dad’s factory (where he worked, not owned it) arguing with this guy who’d served in the military (in Cyprus or Malaysia, I believe). As far as he was concerned that clinched the argument. It somehow affirmed his manhood and my lack of it. I had unchivalrously said the word “fuck” in mixed-company. Trust me, I’d heard many of these women swearing like veteran troopers, I was still a determinedly desensitizing novice. But he decided to make an issue of it. I think he was trying to put me in my place, wherever he deemed that was. I remained determinedly undeferential, especially when he seemed to assume that killing somebody was an unanswerable badge of maturity and a conclusive argument-breaker. The supervisor intervened before he was tempted to put another notch in his six-gun. Though he never actually said he’d killed a man, simply implied it. Whether he had or not, I still failed to see its’ relevance to the argument.

I have a vivid recall of his eyes. Haunted me. Behind those eyes a mind obviously haunted by some horror or other, desperately seeking a righteous cause to stand up for and possibly justify all the scars in what I could only imagine was a wounded psyche. In hindsight. At the time I was battling for my own budding manhood, as well as against numerous blatantly pervasive hypocrisies popping up in my own wounded psyche, in this world I was struggling to come to terms with on my own terms. I’d already vowed to not temper my language to suit public decorum should I consider it appropriately communicated how I felt and what I was thinking and enhanced any point I was trying to make. At the time I’m not sure what point I was trying to make, other than exercising my budding manhood… Maybe I’d just forgotten me lunch-box and fuck it, I was looking forward to them sandwiches!!???

But this guy seemed to need to sharpen his pencil on my random expletive, so the point escalated. That you shouldn’t have to kill anybody to prove you’re a man? That free, honest, expansively colorful expression was our God-given right? That killing strangers just because you’ve been ordered to must be the opposite of what being a free man should be about? Not knowing exactly what your point is, is no excuse to say nothing? Sometimes it’s in the saying that we discover the point? If women don’t want to hear swear words they shouldn’t hang around in factories, pubs or pool-halls or possibly no mixed-companies at all, other than church or the rotary-club? That women are not as hyper=sensitively defenseless as so many men seem to prefer they should be? I wasn’t directly assaulting anybody neither physically nor verbally. So what was his problem? Of course these days I might possibly be reported to the police for a hate-crime against civility in a public place…

When I first started writing plays in London, I invited some actors for a preliminary read-through. I swear there was one “fuck” in the whole script, but it sent one actress packing in a disgusted huff. This was obviously before HBO. But still even now, in several super-polite community theatre productions I’ve witnessed a vibrant uplift amongst the audience should some “shit”, “fuck” or other expletive suddenly enter the on-stage dialogue. Is this a tribute to the power of expressive language, an indication of generally sheltered lives, a conditioned response to guttural impoliteness in mixed-company and in a public place, or a wake-up call that there really are some foul crudely malignant entities out there in the world that mercifully they can avoid on a more regular basis? Do they go home and in un-embarrassed privacy delight in “The Sopranos”, “Breaking Bad”, “Deadwood” or anything that’s not on the Disney Channel, the six-o’clock News, PBS, BBC America or general network programming? Or do they have a genuine scruple in no way to participate in our culture’s apparently orchestrated debasement? This isn’t a judgment or a criticism, simply a comment, an observation and a curiosity.. I’ve written thousands and thousands and thousands of non-swear words, yet so many times I’ve been asked after particular productions why I ‘always” need to use foul language.. If you presume to script any diversity of characters, there are bound to be some who literally and obsessively lather their pronouncements in expletives.

I never heard my father swear till I was fifteen years’ old, working in that same factory. I don’t think he ever once swore at home. It actually shocked me hearing a “fuck: come out of his mouth. He most definitely tempered his language to suit the company he was keeping. Unlike me granny who was quite liberal (if limited?) in her interjected profanities : “bloody hell!” “silly bugger!” “Shite!” As a kid I loved it, poetry to my indecent soul and could liven up any moribund conversation. At university a room-mate of my girlfriend would regularly lie on her bed vociferously reciting every swear-word she could think of or imagine. She was raised catholic and was determinedly desensitizing herself for unforgivingly profane worldliness. I was studying modern American literature at the time and hanging out with an American exchange-student, so I was happy to expand both hers and my Old English Dictionary defined expletive vocabulary..

But to get back to my point.. What cultural scripture first decreed it a bona-fide mandatory rite of passage into manhood to prove oneself capable of murder? The Mafia’s Bible? To demonstrate your loyalty? if we go down, you’ll go down with us? Now we know we can trust you? You’re on the team, brother! You are now a made-man! Blood sacrifice. The Godfather and Satan would be proud, another soldier and soul into the fold! Or maybe it’s just cowardly sour-grapes cause I just don’t have the guts for it? If the best I can do is say “fuck” in mixed-company, what does that say about my trustworthy usefulness in a war?????