I'm Pissed, But I Don't Hit

When most people hear "Anger Management," they think of a violent felon in a courtroom ordered to attend classes under pain of incarceration. My situation was the reverse; the incarceration had already happened. I got into a street fight and found myself in a stinking jail cell at 4 o'clock in the morning.

The slammer gives you time to think, and I thought it was about time I learned how to control myself before I ended up a full-time guest of the state of New York. The charges were thrown out?nobody got hurt except their pride?but I knew it was time. Finding myself without a therapist budget or the particular desire to sit in front of someone for an hour a week, I went to the bookstore and found a couple of books that appeared to be written by people who knew what they were talking about.

It's helped. It's getting easier to head off extreme anger instead of waiting until I'm so mad I can't speak. I can tell the volcano's about to erupt when little things begin to irritate me. I'll be going along, enjoying my life, when people on the street suddenly seem rougher, more goonish, more asleep, more stupid, as in a stupor. I feel like I'm the only one who's awake, and everyone else is bumping into people, getting on the train without waiting for others to get off, tossing garbage on the ground, lighting cigarettes in crowded subway stairwells in front of me, narrowly missing me with their cars as they rush to get where they have to go as I walk the streets. People I know seem to shout at me and I'm standing right in front of them. As though I won't hear them if they don't yell.

It was like that a few weeks ago. Suddenly, little things become big things. I am consumed by a whole bunch of small issues at once. I overreact. I want to shake people. I want to scream at strangers.

Sometimes I do. I'm at the gym in the morning and there's only one other person in the free-weight room. I have a problem with gyms. People can be insensitive there, and I have a problem with people who are insensitive. The guy I'm sharing the free-weight room with is throwing the weights down on the floor in front of a huge handwritten sign that says PLEASE DO NOT DROP WEIGHTS. In the middle of my set, BAM! the guy's weights crash to the floor and it's a little hard to concentrate.

When stuff like this happens, I'm supposed to realize 99 percent of what goes on in my world that I disagree with isn't personal to me. The guy isn't throwing his weights to piss me off. He's just uninterested in how what he does affects other people. I'm supposed to do a bunch of things; count to 10, breathe deeply, decide if the situation warrants interaction and if so take such action without escalating the situation. Or walk away. That's what I should do.

Instead, I start picking up free weights, do intense, frenetic sets and then slam the weights to the floor with all my might. See how he likes it. It's as though I'm five years old and I have no other way to communicate. Slamming the weights as hard as you can makes an enormous racket, but the free-weight room is secluded so no staff appears to stop me. The guy dashes out of the room. One of the things I actually like about my anger is it scares people. They think I'm crazy. I don't mind.

I finish working out and go down to the steam room. Naked, I sit on a towel and let the hot steam wash over me. There's one other fellow in there. Looks like a body builder. He's a lot bigger than me, anyway. I close my eyes and breathe in the healing steam. After a few moments, the other fellow sees his friend outside the steam room and dashes over to say hi. While he's saying hi, he holds the door to the room open. The steam escapes.

"S'cuse me," I call. "Would you mind closing the door?" He keeps talking. "Hey, pal!" I say. "You're letting out the steam." He's not disregarding me; he is just so into what he's doing that he doesn't hear me. I need to get his attention. I unfold my arms and legs.

"HEY!" I shriek, in the manner I might use to warn a person about to be struck by a train. "CLOSE THE FUCKIN' DOOR! YOU'RE LETTING THE STEAM OUT!" My entire body is convulsed. I stand still, owning the yell and letting him see who it is who has raised his voice. If you're going to be nuts, you have to follow through. If he's going to yell back, start a fight or whatever, so be it. Just close the fuckin' door. There are other people in the world. Not just you. The guy looks me in the eye, sees my fury and leaves the room, closing the door on his way out.

I'm not managing my anger very well today.

Part of anger management means no liquor (booze makes you more likely to act out your feelings of rage), no cigarettes (smoking causes depression, they say) and no coffee (a stimulant). I never drank, I never smoked and I'm drinking coffee but not as much. I take no Prozac or Zoloft.

I'm supposed to feel what's going on instead of exploding at strangers or friends or wives, or throwing my bicycle off the roof into the alley when its chain falls off for the 100th time and I've had it fixed twice, or someone behind me gives me the horn the second the light turns green and I want to put the car in park, get out and ask him what the problem is. My wife says she is afraid someone will hit, shoot or stab me someday. She is not afraid for herself; my rage doesn't include striking or deliberately harming her, and she knows it.

The lycanthropy lasts two days. I do not crash any cars, do not throw eggs at strangers blasting loud music past my window or dump buckets of water on them, and do not cut off a friend forever with an all-caps e-mail over some egregious offense instead of talking things over. That's all in the past. Suddenly, the sun comes up in my soul and the cloud lifts. I feel like I've been away. It's over; I'm back.

Between episodes, I feel pretty good and can appreciate many things. Life in general. An egg for breakfast. A haircut. Making dinner. Painting something around the house. A discarded cigarette butt burning on the sidewalk outside my window that casts a pale blue plume into a cloudless sky. Sending an e-mail to my mom. Someone smiling at me on the street or in a grocery store. A small child makes a goofy face at me, and I make one back. Kids like me and I like them. They're not fake. Feelings come and they go, like waves breaking on the shore, each one different, each one unique.

The charges from my street fight are thrown out because I have no criminal record, and nobody involved was injured badly enough to see a doctor, including me.

What Anger Management boils down to is you get pissed but don't hit anyone, don't damage yourself, don't break objects and actually manage rage like a man instead of a boy. It does not mean life turns into butterflies and kitties. You've heard the term "feel the burn"? This is, at times, "feel the bile."