THE TERROR - A PERSONAL ESSAY

FEAR IS THE WORLDKILLER

by Adel Dauood https://www.instagram.com/adeldauood/

I got jumped at a pretty bad time in my life. Not that there’s ever a good time.

I guess what I mean is that when it happened I was already deep in the vulnerability matrix. I had just entered seventh grade, was in peak adolescent craziness, and to make matters worse, was dealing with a new super white middle-school whose super white middle-class bigotry was cutting the heart out of me. I wasn’t two periods into my first day before a classmate decided to call me a sand nigger like it wasn’t anything that was going to get him slapped. A couple of weeks later someone else asked me if my family ate dogs every day or only once in a while. It wasn’t all like that mind you; I had enough friends who came up from my very colored very immigrant grammar school but almost none of them were in the dique honors track with me and there was enough of this Klan shit that my third month at that school had me feeling like the poorest ugliest immigrant freak in the universe.

My home life wasn’t helping me none. My father had abandoned the family the year before, ran off with the sidepiece whose house he used to take me and my brother to, a Dominican bye-bye that plunged us into an even sorrier level of poverty, and no sooner had that happened my older brother was diagnosed with cancer, the kind that in those days had a real nasty habit of killing kids dead on an industrial scale. One day he was sprawled on our front stoop in London Terrace, holding court like a pasha ,and the next he was up in Beth Israel, forty pounds lighter, his lower back laddered with bone marrow transplant scars, looking like one minor infection away from the grave.

Not exactly the best year of my life. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried to do what teens were supposed to do, be “cool,” be “popular,” but that didn’t work so hot; mostly I just slouched in seat and read, hating my clothes my face my afroliminalidad. Sometimes I wrote my brother letters. Made it sound like I was having a great time at school—a ball.

Looking back on it now I’m sure that’s the last thing he fucking needed.

And that was when, as if on cue, I got jumped. Crazies like my brother, they didn’t get jumped, but the rest of us, it was part of the package. I don’t think I knew a kid in my neighborhood who hadn’t gotten their heads punched in, boys, girls, everyone.

It didn’t happen at the school or at the movie theater where shit always popped off on the other side of the neighborhood. At the hands and feet of these three brothers I dimly knew. The youngest was my age and on the day in question we had a falling out over something — I can’t remember over what. I do remembering him saying some spic this shit and me pushing him down hard onto the sidewalk and laughing about it and the kid running off in tears swearing he was going to kill me. The scene in my head jumps, and the next thing I know the kid comes back with his two older brothers and I mean older, like one of them was twenty and I’m getting my face punched in. The older brothers held me down and let the younger brother punch me all he wanted. In my panic I kept expecting my brother would save me but he was up in Newark, getting chemo, saving no one.

I remember the oldest one saying, Hit him in the teeth.

As these things go, it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t actually lose any teeth or break any limbs or misplace an eye. I wasn’t stabbed or baseball batted, or anything wild like that. Afterwards I even managed to limp home, but as my mother was at the hospital no one really noticed that I’d gotten stomped. Even took my blackened eye to classes the next day but since my assailants attended another school I didn’t have to tell the truth. I said It happened in boxing. (Back when my father was still around boxing was the only us team he believed in which was its own fucked up story). My first real beat down and I was furious and ashamed but above all else I was afraid. Afraid of the kids who jumped me. Afraid they would corner me again. Afraid of a worse beat down. Afraid and afraid and afraid. Eventually the bruises and the rage faded and the standard challenges and indignities of life as an immigrant of color took over but the fear—the fear remained. An awful withering dread that coiled around my bowels—that followed me into my dreams. (Hit him in the teeth.) On tv I would have told someone or acquired a bigger badder bodyguard friend but in the real world there was no one to talk to and besides my number one confidant, my brother, had his own shit he was dealing with.

So I locked up the whole miserable affair, deep inside, buried it in the deepest dirt of the self. You do that spadework because you think it will help but when has burying anything ever helped?

Without even thinking about it, I started doing everything I could to avoid the brothers. (Funny how you don’t need plans or even thought when you have fear). I avoided their part of the neighborhood like it was actual poison. I started looking around buildings to make sure the coast was clear. I stayed in the apartment a lot more, reading and doing jack shit. And whenever I saw the brothers, together or individually — in a car, on a bike, on foot — the terror would spike through me so powerfully I lost my grip on my body and felt like I was going to lose my mind. In Dune, a novel I adored in those days. Paul Atreides had the litany against fear he would recite each time he need to control his emotional and its key line is Fear is the mindkiller. Let me tell you fear is the mindkiller and the worldkiller. Anytime the brothers appeared I couldn’t think for nothing or be for nothing either. I would drop whatever I was doing and get away and it was only later, after I calmed down, that I would realize what I had done.

For their part the brothers didn’t pursue me. They’d jeer at me and occasionally throw rocks but even if they weren’t chasing me in the flesh they sure were chasing me in spirit. After these encounters I’d be a mess for days: depressed, irritable, hyper-vigilant, ashamed. I’d hate these brothers from the bottom of my heart but even more than them I hated myself for my cowardice.

Before that attack I had felt fear plenty of times—which poor immigrant kid hasn’t—but after my beating I became afraid. And at any age that is a shitty place to be.

Given all the other crap I was facing my adolescence was never going to win any awards. But sometimes I like to think if that beat down hadn’t happened I might have had an easier time of it. Maybe a whole bunch of other awfulness might not have happened. But who can really know? In the end the fear become another bullshit burden I had to navigate—like having a sick brother or brown skin and an impossible name in a white school.

Took me until I was a sophomore in high school—yes, that long—before I finally found it in me to start doing something about my terror. By then my older brother was in remission and wearing a wig to hide his baldness. Maybe his improbable survival was what gave me the courage or maybe it was all the Robert Cormier I was reading—his young heroes were always asking themselves Do I dare disturb the Universe before ultimately deciding yes they did dare. Or maybe it was the fact that I had access to the two pistols my father had left behind. Whatever it was, one day I found myself fleeing from a sighting of the brothers and suddenly I was brought up short by an appalling vision: me running away forever.

Did I have one of those pistols on me?

I honestly cannot remember.

But what I do remember is that I forced myself to stop. I forced myself to turn towards them and it felt like the whole world was turning with me. I couldn’t make myself walk towards them, I could barely even look at them so I settled for standing still. As the brothers approached the world started glitching, the ground tilting, the air whistling. One of them scowled.

And then without a word they walked past.

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An earlier shorter version of this was published in the New York Times in 2015.