Smashed in the face on the A13
The night I learned an important lesson about masculinity and ego
I don’t know if you’ve ever been punched in the face while driving along a duel carriage way at 60mp but I have and, I can tell you, it’s not pleasant.
It was late one night in the early noughties and I was driving some pals home from a football match. One of them, an older guy I was very close to, was sat next to me in the passenger seat, pissed off his nut (having tried to drink off the pain of yet another West Ham defeat on a cold and rainy night at Upton Park).
We had somehow managed to get into an argument about the American invasion of Iraq. Something I said pissed him off and he clocked me one right in the side of the head, just as I was descending the flyover heading west on the A13. I swerved across a couple of mercifully empty lanes before regaining control of the car, pulling over and instructing him to get the fuck out.
I’ll never forget his parting shot as he exited the vehicle. He booted the door and shouted “Fuck you, I don’t want a lift in your shitty car anyway!”
How. Fucking. Dare. He.
I mean, disagree with me over US foreign policy, fine. Punch me in the side of the head, sure. But call my car shitty? That really overstepped the mark.
Some context: the car was a five year old Peugeot 306 which I had purchased from my girlfriend’s mum a year previously at a heavily discounted price. It wasn’t exactly flash but it was the best car I’d ever owned at that stage of my life. Before that, I’d only driven proper old rust buckets, the type you bought for a few hundred quid and which broke down every five minutes. The Peugeot had a CD player and working air con. To 26 year old me, it felt grown up and classy.
When he wasn’t drunkenly attacking me, this mate of mine was someone I usually admired and respected. He was a decade older than me and, like a lot of the older blokes I hung around with, he’d worked his way up from humble beginnings to make a big success of himself in the media. I can’t remember what car he owned at the time but it would definitely have been a very expensive one.
This is why his remark about my motor stung so badly. I can honestly say that the next day when I woke up with an aching jaw, it was the words ‘shitty car’ that echoed round my mind more than the violence. I felt hurt at the suggestion that I was small time and pathetic; that he was too good for my crappy hatchback. That I was unsuccessful, unglamorous, maybe even unmanly.
This was the level of insecurity I carried around with me when I was that age. I think a lot of young men do. Masculinity is something we learn to express in pretty limited ways: often it’s through the things we possess. Cars are one of the big statements we can make about ourselves: we feel like they reflect our taste and sophistication but also out success and our wealth. These are the things that feed our egos.
I wanted respect from this older, richer, more successful man. It tore me apart to think he looked down upon me.
I was a young man consumed and controlled by an extremely fragile ego. I was unable to forge my own criteria for what ‘success’ was; instead, it was handed to me by other blokes who were just as insecure as I was. I was too afraid to stop and reflect on what I actually felt about who I was. I just wanted other people to admire and possibly envy me.
These were all clues to the struggles with drink and drugs I had ahead of me. I was insecure, unsure of who I wanted to be, uncomfortable with a lot of my feelings and constantly trying to distract myself with external comforts. Work, money and ambition were, as it turned out, interchangeable with booze and drugs.
Don’t worry: I’m not a fucking Buddhist, much less a commie. I like nice things. I enjoy earning and spending money. I’ve been skint and I’ve been flush and I know that flush feels much nicer. I happen to believe that being overly careful with money is a middle class conspiracy designed to stop the rest of us having fun. I find posh people who are careful, awkward and understated out their money to be unbearably smug and dreary.
All that said, I realise now that there is a difference between enjoying the comfort and convenience that money can offer and actually linking your own value as a human being to your bank balance.
As it happens, that bloke who punched me is still my friend. Neither of us drink anymore. He hasn’t punched me in years! And I can’t recall ever falling out again over geopolitics either. When he got sober, a few years before me, I saw his ego slowly deflate in a way that was quite beautiful. He was still funny and smart. But he no longer worked so hard to prove his credentials with corny displays of wealth and success. He became vulnerable and I admired him for it. And, eventually, I wanted to try it for myself.
Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times
https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123
https://www.thecalmzone.net
@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138
@CharitySane 0300 304 7000
https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/
https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/
https://andysmanclub.co.uk/
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/gambling-addiction/
Well said.
Ah yes, "and fellas no matter how hard we try, we can only be as fly as the cars we drive, right?"
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It's always interesting times to see what others tell us will make us valuable and what we think makes us valuable and what actually makes us feel valuable and what actually makes us valuable.