I feel like I did such a terrible job attempting to explain eye contact and pre-contact aggression in Wolfing And Eye Contact that I will use as an example, an incident from about 1998, in which I behaved in what I regard as a negative manner.

I was working frozen food on a crew of people who hated me. This crew included a night captain named Jerry White Guilt Delusion who could not stand me, but respected me, and a criminal woman named JoJo. There was a new security guard, a fifty-year-old white guy.

JoJo was walking around behind Jerry telling him not to do something as Jerry walked with the security guard up to me. Jerry asked me to accompany them to the back stockroom. I followed with them until they got to the inventory racks across from the freezer I worked out of, where I habitually laid my insulated flannel shirt. I carried this shirt through the summer months to work, as it served as a defensive weapon. Also, since there were no lockers open when I was transferred to this location, and clothes left in the lunchroom by employees had routinely been stolen by the neighborhood junkies, who came in to shoot up in the bathroom, I laid it on the stock across from the freezer box door.

I stood with my back to the freezer, facing Jerry and the new security guard, who then told me that he suspected I was using the shirt to load with aspirin from the shippers stocked here and that he needed to search it. I was also not to lay any clothing in the stockroom henceforth, and had to keep it in the lunchroom.

I recall JoJo biting the back of her hand, Jerry stepping off to the side, and the security man backing up against the rack as I got under his chin with my forehead and snarled at him in low tones. Ever since getting punched in the balls repeatedly while fighting my brother at age 18, I had not been able to raise my voice without experiencing extreme nut pain. So, the angrier I got, the lower my tone went. I don’t know what I said, if it came out as words, and what the security guard’s response was other than to grab Jerry by the wrist and walk away as they both darted nervous glances at me. I do recall that I was still growling as they walked off.

I remember asking JoJo, who had generally avoided me and thought I was “a weirdo,” but who was no standing breathlessly looking at me like I was a hunky movie star [the girl had issues, read Lord Of The Lezbos Or 'Harm City Island'] if she thought they were going to call the cops on me. She informed me that they were too terrified of me to call the police. She then went on and on about how turned on she was by how men hated and feared me in equal measure, and that men were her enemies too, and that I should let her give me a ride home after work…

In any case, JoJo said it was the way I had of looking people in the eyes and not speaking that kept me friendless, hated and feared and made her wet.

Later on in the shift the security guard, George, introduced himself to me, apologized, and asked me if I would back him up against the local hoodlums when they came in the store and threatened him, like they had the previous guards. As it turned out, George had lived the most sorrowful life of any of the people I ended up interviewing for my first book on violence, which turned into a 1675 account survey of violent encounters. George’s stories can be found in The Logic of Steel and When You’re Food. George was a good man, whose wife left him, leaving him with nothing but a photo of his son and a vague notion that she could be found in Texas. He once tried driving his dirt bike to Texas and turned back dispirited in Oklahoma after “eating about a million bugs.” He had been tortured and bullied as a boy, would be mugged by two black men, who heartlessly stole his son’s picture, ended up employed as a grave digger after getting beat up in another ghetto store by local hoodlums, and eventually took his own head off with a shotgun.

I never felt good about how I frightened George, when he was really just trying, in his awkward way, to do his job. I feel even less good about it since his death.

I suppose what I am writing about is a hunch that one of the aspects of being good with imposing your will through eye contact and body language alone is to have a deep antipathy for other humans.

I do know that I have always been careful about initiating hard eye contact with anyone that I regard as physically more dangerous than myself and also mentally as strong. This does indicate that I have practiced a form of silent non-contact bullying for much of my life, which is not exactly an uplifting admission.