Israelis and Palestinians. Britney and K-Fed. You and Steve. Rivalries both public and private seem to be tearing the world apart. In today's column, self-help guru Chad Fifer attempts to place these conflicts in perspective with a story from his past.
When I was twelve, I walked into our downstairs bathroom while my Grandpa was taking a shower, tossed an ice cold cup of water up over the curtain and gave him a heart attack. He must have known before he dropped into a coma that I was only fooling around and didn't mean to start the war that would occupy the next six years of our lives, but when he finally regained consciousness, his only thoughts were those of revenge.
This quickly became apparent to me upon his return home in the winter, when I was diagnosed with nocturnal enuresis, or "bedwetting" as it is more commonly known. I began waking up every other morning or so with large wet circles on the sheets, and my parents nearly went mad blaming themselves. Dad thought that he'd put too much pressure on me in Little League, Mom imagined that the beautiful people on television were filling me with self-hatred, and both assured me that it was all right if I felt gay every once in a while. Of course, I knew that the blame lay squarely with Grandpa, who had been sneaking into my room while I slept, sliding under the covers of my bed, and dribbling out every ounce of urine that his benign prostatic hyperplasia would allow before stealing back to the safety of the guest bedroom.
The old man obviously anticipated some sort of retaliation, for the guest bedroom – remodeled two years earlier to suit his needs after Grandma left him – remained closed to the rest of the house whenever I was around. My only opportunity to strike back was at dinner, a formal affair in my household at which I was expected to wear a jacket and tie while my three younger sisters wore matching off-white gowns, making them appear to be the miniature brides of Dracula. Pre-coma, Grandpa had always made a minimal sartorial effort at dinner – a cardigan sweater and sometimes pants – but now that the rivalry was on he had taken to wearing a tuxedo, which, much to my annoyance, made him look quite dashing, and not at all like a bad magician.
Poisoning was too obvious. Grandpa had employed a food taster – our family dog – and would not take a bite until the creature had first sampled it. Three dogs later, I had to cave to the man's vigilance and put aside the syringes of spoiled milk. It was time to explore a more unexpected strategy, which was why I hired a homeless man to run into the house while we ate and stab him in the thigh.
Aside from landing Grandpa back in the hospital, this strategy had the added benefit of allowing me access to the formerly impenetrable guest room. I commenced booby-trapping immediately, but the old fox had thought two steps ahead and laced the room with vintage pornographic animation cells as well as hidden, motion-triggered beta cameras. The sharp pebbles I glued into the tips of his gold-toe socks may have temporarily inconvenienced Grandpa once he returned, but the footage that landed in the mailboxes of friends, teachers, and local news outlets – the footage of me destroying myself over Betty Boop's exposed gams – haunts me to this day.
Things really got out of hand after Grandpa started seeing Grandma again. An unofficial cease-fire had settled over the house while we both recovered from our injuries, and my thirteenth year was mostly vengeance-free. It was shortly after my fourteenth birthday that Grandma returned from what Grandpa called her "whore's pilgrimage" out West and rented a small apartment over the Ice Cream Palace. When word got to me that Grandpa had been spending his days wandering back and forth under the window of her apartment with his accordion, gradually winning the old woman back, I smelled weakness and knew that it was finally time to strike.
So I seduced Grandma.
Okay – not personally. Grandma wasn't that much of a whore. No, I simply created an alter ego, Rex Dodgerton, and began writing her love poetry using the precepts of verse that I had absorbed during my first weeks of Freshman English:
Two roads were in some woods.
They were all snowy.
I took one but you weren't there at the end.
So I went back and took the other one you were at.
It was awesome.
I sent these poems to an elderly pen pal I'd been assigned in German class, who did me the service of repackaging and mailing them to Grandma so that the postmark was from Munich, thus hiding my authorship. Within weeks of receiving them, she was off to meet her Rex in Europe, and Grandpa was crushed.
The war might have ended right there had my pen pal not betrayed me, first assuming the fictional mantle of Herr Dodgerton in order to meet my grandmother and then casting it aside after falling desperately in love with her. Their affair became the subject of the much-touted romantic comedy, Die Heisse Alte Dame (The Hot Old Lady), which arrived at our art house theater when I was sixteen and exposed my treachery to a sad, angry old man in the back row.
All sense of fun disappeared from our rivalry after that, and though the skirmishes of those last two years were bloodless, they stretched the limits of fair play. There was "The Night of the Double Ruse," in which I scratched my face in my sleep, awoke to find that I had covered it with shaving cream, and then screamed my lungs out as I discovered that I was also buried alive. This was followed by "The Bait and Switch," in which I altered the details of Grandpa's Annual VFW Ball invitation so that he would arrive an hour late and in a costume, and then engineered a gas leak so that the party was cancelled right before he could make an entrance. I knew that Grandpa loved his costume parties more than anything, and the bastard was inconsolable afterward, refusing to remove his domino mask and prowler's gear for at least a week.
Super glue on the gums, crushed glass on kite strings, scuba gear coated with LSD… we went at each other with every devious scheme we could imagine. And through it all, Grandpa and I maintained a measured civility in public, never letting on that we were enemy combatants, each bent on shriveling the other's heart. Because of this façade, I was dubious when Grandpa climbed into bed with me on my eighteenth birthday, shook me awake and told me that our relationship had been the one thing keeping him going over the years, but that he was tired, and ready to move on. I assumed that this admission must be for the benefit of a parent or one of my sisters, but when I sat up to look, I realized we were alone. I heard one last, sorrowful breath from Grandpa, and then he was gone.
I sat there in the dark for some time, pondering his corpse. The contest had ended, and I had emerged victorious. But Grandpa's dying words seemed to ruin the sweet taste of my success. The man's life had been lonely, sad, fueled only by revenge and rancor. I was disgusted by him, but also by myself. While my peers had spent their time in school chasing girls and driving fast cars, I had spent mine trying to ruin an octogenarian. And for what? The thrill of it, sure. But ultimately, I had learned nothing and grown even less. At eighteen, I was essentially the same as I had been at twelve – devious, combative, a virgin. I felt ashamed of myself. I felt... wet?
Turns out the old bastard had managed to leak out one more slowly expanding spot of piss on my sheets as he expired. The last laugh was truly his. And I had to laugh with him. Not only had he taught me the pointlessness of combat for combat's sake; he had bested me with his last breath. From that moment on, I swore I would never get embroiled in any feuds or rivalries again. I left my vengeance, my hatred and my prejudices in that room with Grandpa, and walked out into the night with a clear head for the first time in years. The stars twinkled down at me and rather than shake my fist back at them I smiled. I felt the grass under my feet, the cool evening breeze at my back and saw my future in front of me, ready to be embraced. I wanted to embrace it back.
But first, I returned to my room, squeezed Grandpa into one of my sister's dresses, and put a note in his hand that read "I'm a little girl!" He was dead, after all, and it was my birthday.
Chad Fifer's first self-help piece can be read here.
