I might have told this story in The Fighting Edge in 1998. The happening is over thirty years old. I cannot recall any specific dialogue, but am confident I can come close in one instance. I am no longer positioned with memory and notes to give proper due to this formative moment in my awareness as a piece of oral history. What I am about to relate I believe on one hand to have been the end of a life as man and a retreat to childhood for one person, and on the other hand the possible ascendant moment of a vile lesser person to status among us. I can, and in my mind must, relate the story of Dave the Twerp. This is not, however Dave’s story. Dave deserves no story, no recognition. And Dave was his actual name, not one I have invented to protect him.

I was working in a Baltimore area supermarket in 1982. None of us where even 21 years old on this night crew. I was the lead on the crew by simple virtue of attrition. One night I was just the only clerk to show up. The crew was five or six strong. I can only remember three specific clerks and will give their real first name, Randy, a minor league pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies farm system, Dave, a psychology major who had plans of going on to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist, and Craig.

Craig was perhaps six feet five inches tall and weighed in at about 260. He was very kind, quiet, and introspective. He seemed to live in a dream world. He lived with his parents, as did Randy and Dave. I lived with my new wife and step son in the ground floor of a house we rented from a man who operated his construction company out of the house next door.

Craig had some kind of mental or emotional handicap. His parents had not encouraged him to go out and work. But he, like other handicapped men I have met in the grocery business, chose work in the local supermarket as a method of empowerment, a way to be a man and support himself rather than living as a ward.

Working as a clerk on a night crew is not the easy brainless job people suppose. I have trained over 500 men and women to do this work, with well over 300 of them washing out. The job requires functional literacy [which many low income people lack], the ability to lift and place light to moderate weight objects constantly for 8 hours at a brisk pace [requiring a level of physicality that most middle to upper income people lack], a good sense of spatial perception [which many people lack], and the ability to memorize the location of 2-3,000 items. If you have to stop and look for something, or read the shelf labels to find the slot, you cannot keep pace and will be dropped after six weeks in most operations.

Over the past three decades standards, along with wages, have consistently been lowered, to the point where a retail food clerk who once made $10 an hour in the late 1980s now make $8 an hour in 2013. Factor in inflation and you have the extinction of an entire job description in the service industry which once supported families and now only pays cell phone bills.

The productivity bench mark in 1982 was 200 cases per night. That is now an upper limit management fantasy, with most clerks stocking between 80-140 cases per shift. At age 50, I still do 250 per night. Randy and I were studs, slamming up 400 cases of freight a night, and then helping Dave and Craig finish their aisles before going on a five-mile run after work.

Dave, a tall good-looking darkly-tanned son of upper middleclass parents resented this work immensely and constantly slacked off, getting maybe 100 pieces of freight on the shelf. He was certainly the most intelligent man on the crew. But instead of using his cerebral mass to work more effectively, he used it to gripe about what losers we were, that we were doomed to be stuck in this dead-end business when he was a big shot psychiatrist, with a big house and a beautiful wife.

I reveled in Dave’s misery, soaking up the suffering of the rich boy while I could, resigned to the fact that his was the path to success in America.

Randy reiterated the fact that Dave would always wish he could throw a 90-mile-per hour fast ball, and that Dave’s prize wife would always wish she belonged to Randy, or some beefcake like him.

Craig, he just worked, struggling with the titanic task at hand, putting more stuff on the shelf than Dave. Craig did not want to be the worst, the weakest, the guy that always needed help at the end of the shift. Craig was a highly intelligent person, a savant of some kind I think. I recall he had memorized all of the music of a jazz artist named Nefarious Monk. He was well-read and had even taught himself how to play complex table top war games like Squad Leader, which had a novel-length rule book. But the stress of having to get all of this stuff on the shelf in 8 hours was difficult for Craig to manage. What was a game for Randy and I, and nothing but punishment for Dave, was for Craig the swimming of the English Channel or the scaling of Everest.

Hence, Randy and I helped Craig, who helped himself as best he could, not the insulting job-slacking rich boy. Craig did have one exceptional talent, his great strength. He could right tilting pallet loads of freight that had buckled coming off the truck. While he was not the strongest man I have worked with, he was in the top five. Once, while I was fixing to climb onto a pallet of canned goods to pass the contents of a higher pallet of groceries down to him, he simply grabbed me by my belt and collar and set me up on the thing, like a parent standing their toddler on a wall to see some sight.

Craig once related to us a charming story about how the people we worked for—an older couple—had once shown up on his parents’ lawn and dumped trash all over the yard! It turned out that his adult sister had, upon moving out, dumped all her trash into the grocery store dumpster. Miss Betty and Mister Len, on finding an addressed envelope, decided to have revenge on at least one of the people who increased their trash pickup costs by dumping in their dumpster, and drove the trash to Craig’s house in Mister Len’s Buick.

One night, as Dave the Twerp griped in the produce room through which we hauled pallets to the sales floor, Randy asked him if he would help us steady a pallet. I think Craig seconded the motion. Dave was soon speaking obscenely about sodomizing Craig’s mother. There were also words about Craig being ‘retarded’ too. Nothing mattered to Craig except for the insults to his mother. Craig stood before me in the middle of the room, Dave to my left, with Randy behind Craig.

Craig stood, red in the face, shoulders rounded, looking contemplatively at his great hands as he flexed and flexed them as if they were squeezing something between the hotdog sized fingers.

Dave kept talking of raping Craig’s mother and doing vile things to her. In almost any society on earth, prior to the 20th Century, the men of the village or town would have forgiven Craig for wringing Dave’s Twerp neck. Dave was no runt either. He was an athletic six feet tall. But he was a quibbling thing, not a combatant. There was no fight on his horizon, but a throttling.

Dave continued speaking obscenely of Craig’s mother. Finally Craig looked at me with wide open hurt eyes, “Should I kill him? That would be the right thing, to kill him?”

There was no question of could, but should. In his mind Dave was as good as dead if he could get confirmation that his lethal instinct was ethical.

I think something finally began to dawn on Dave, and he shut up. I cannot remember what Randy and I said to calm the giant. We spoke to him for a long time in the produce room and stock room, explaining to him, that although Dave deserved death—which I believe, to this day, he did—that Craig would go to prison over this, and that it would break his mother’s heart, especially with her honor being the cause of it.

Neither Dave nor Craig worked on that crew for much longer. After that night Craig’s state-of-mind deteriorated visibly. His face began to twitch. He scowled often. He no longer spoke at lunch, or even sat with us at lunch time, but stayed out in the aisle staring ahead. He soon resigned apologetically.

A year or so later I saw him out walking round with his headset on. He had lost a great deal of weight and was gaunt. He had trouble remembering me, but did remember that we were friends. I had no desire to remind him of our time at work together.

I blamed Dave.

I blame Dave.

Dave was a twerp and I hope he never became a shrink.

I hope Dave is dead.

Over the past thirty years I have seen Craig out walking about the Parkville, Overlea, Hamilton, Gardenville area; a tall gaunt man with graying hair, hands in pockets, listening to his headset, all but deaf when I say hello. He remembers me as a kind face out of the past, waves, smiles, and continues walking.

Civilization is the enemy of men.

Cultures, as far back as we can trace them, have supported a man’s right to use physical means to combat psychological aggression. Civilization has always aggregated to itself the exclusive right to use physical force. In a civilized world, Dave the Twerp is somebody, and Craig, the handicapped man who was willing to throw his life away for what he believed was right, the defense of his mother’s integrity, he is nothing.

People shake their heads when I express my hatred for the United States, the nation of my birth. It is not this nation that I really hate. It is civilization, of which America is just the greatest expression. How could I not hate a system that rewards the Daves and punishes the Craigs?

Consider Craig among a band of Vikings, Iroquois, Zulus, Mongols, Typees or Pirates. He would find a place. Allowances would be made for his mental state, and good use made of his immense physical strength. He might even gain special taboo status.

Consider Dave among any of the warrior peoples above? Wulf the Skull Splitter would be carving the blood eagle in his quivering back. Shaka would give him a head start and let the boys run him down for practice. The rest would probably toss him to their women as a slave or torture victim. In any case, Dave, among such people, would, if he wished to live, refrain from rudeness, and if he wished to breed, become politely useful to society.

There is an old saying that notes, “An armed society is a polite society.”

The flip side of that is the fact that a civilized society is a rude society.

If you ever find yourself wondering why youths join gangs, recall that there, in the ganglands, on the interior fringes of civilization, it is still possible to be a man and not be vilified or punished for it. Imagine Dave the Twerp and Craig standing on the ground floor of a vacant house in Detroit or Baltimore, surrounded by gang bangers, having that conversation about Craig’s mother.

Craig would be a hero.

Dave would be dead.