The Schadenfreudist
What it is, see, is that I am a schadenfreudist. I enjoy the pain of other people. I think it was probably always there, in the background, as it is with many people. You know as well as I do that if you want to get the attention of the people around you, all you have to do is begin a story with ‘let me tell you about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me.’ Happiness is the other man getting the arrow.
Anyway, it all began long ago, while I was idling on my balcony in a Sardinian hotel. I was there with my girlfriend at the time, and I was looking at the swimming pool beneath me, when a couple walked out, all ready to enjoy a nice bit of sunbathing, a little splashing around, when a waiter came up to them and said the pool area was closed today, for a little building work. And I saw their faces so clearly; slight confusion, slight freeze around the corners of the mouth, the enquiring head tilt, butting up against a future that wasn’t supposed to be there, that was turning them away.
This was the first entry in my personal catalogue of schadenfreudic delicacies. The Turn Away. The locked door, the hand trying to turn it three, four times with ‘this isn’t right’ written all over the posture of the guy trying to open-and-walk-in-one-gesture through it, as he is used to doing. ‘This isn’t right,’ he thinks; but it is right. It’s exactly right.
After my Sardinian moment of truth I slowly added to my catalogue of ‘SF’ pleasures. There was The Body Rebellion, when some part of the physical apparatus takes arms against your own actions. A friend of mine, for example, got a mysterious neck complaint—he couldn’t turn his head to the left—when he started a job he hated. The doctors offered all kinds of suggestions, but his wife was much closer to the truth than Western medicine, ‘your neck hates work and you hate your neck,’ that’s what she said. Another friend became physically sick every time his ex-girlfriend was mentioned: marvellous to watch. And a third got a nosebleed whenever he was put on hold. Breaking wind during a tense moment at the theatre would fall into the category of Body Rebellion too, as would literally shitting yourself in a job interview. I savoured the involuntary gulp of anxiety that beautiful women created in the petrified throats of mini-men, or the unconscious tics and squirts of evasive faces in the spotlight of truth. Any moment when the body’s laws break through and interrupt the laws of man.
Brother to the Body Rebellion was what I called The Rising Of The Void, that moment when the internal saboteur smashes through the privet hedge of one’s tidy world, when the secret chaos of the heart erupts into the order of the situation, and sweeps the porcelain horses from the sideboard. I’m no fan of the mob, or of drunken destruction, but there is something to be said for a husband—crushed by his life, his family, his work, his world—getting off his face, setting fire to the family estate and sheepishly smoking a cigarette in the cinders when his horror-struck family return.
Relationships were a positive gold mine of schadenfreudic delights. I used to love watching couples, waiting for The Love-Spurned Wince of the rejected chatter-upper, The Break-Up Hunch of the sop trailing behind his too-beautiful now-ex girlfriend, The Repressed-Hate Lip-Screw of the scornful wife and, my hands-down favourite, The Sotto Voce Slanging Match, a what-would-have-been window-smashing ding-dong conducted in rushed, hateful whispers in order to preserve dignity.
I loved to watch couples instantly ‘sober up’ after an argument to give a big wave to the neighbours. I loved watching men in clothes shops. I loved watching tired people. I loved watching people miss their trains. I loved any kind of hold-up or frustrated disappointment—I ‘shadowed’ traffic wardens for miles, glorying in the SF carnage they left behind. I loved failure—I used to hang around outside the driving test centre to watch people get the bad news. Drink spillages, small-talk failure, frozen grins, awkward eye-darts, repeating a stupid gesture to make it look intentional the first time, the old hug-kiss dilemmas… on and on and on it went. I gorged on the heartless horror of the world, diving deeper and deeper into the river of suffering that ran under the city, the tidal wave of sorrow that flowed beneath the broken world.
But my favourite SF pleasure was the Revenge of the Past; that devastating calamity, absolutely glorious to behold, when your past wrongs—a shameful lie, a nasty bit of thievery, some kind of depravity which doesn’t fit with one’s public image, an embarrassing parent slobbering their unwelcome way into polite society: the possibilities are limitless—but the moment when they pop back into the light from whatever under-sink cupboard of the mind they had been hastily stuffed into. Fab-lous!
The problem was that I was a bit of a sadist about it all, see. I was laughing at them, to relieve myself of my life, and that’s not, I came to understand, the schadenfreudic way. But it was a hard travelling to get to that realisation, a terrible hard travelling.
It started with an interview with my bank manager. I sat in her little office and she said to me, ‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen Ralf. The bank is going to recover its money. That means we’ll take ownership of your house, farming equipment and land. We expect you to vacate them in the next thirty days. If you can’t pay, we’ll sue. We’ll go to court and get you evicted. In any case, you’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year. If you’re looking for sympathy,’ she said, ‘you came to the wrong person. It was an idiotic risk, you risked everything on an ostrich farm, and you lost, so now you don’t have anything. No house, no business, no money. That’s it. It’s… You’re finished.’ Then she gathered up my papers, shuffled them on her desk, stood up, said, ‘and there’s something else. I’m leaving you,’ and walked out.
I’d lost everything, see, in one smash of God’s big fist; my business, my house, my money and my girlfriend, all gone. But that wasn’t all. I’d been suffering for several weeks from constipation and back pain, and I walked out of the bank, and lifted my bike off of the railings I’d hooked it onto to lock it up, and put my back out, properly put it out. I was lying there on the pavement for about an hour before someone stopped to help me.
I slowly recovered and somehow scraped together a shoddy kind of half-life at the bottom of the social barrel. I got a job in Poundland, moved in with a repulsive old, crippled woman who was letting her spare room and there I stewed, fermented in my new ‘life.’
This woman, Brenda, was a horrible old witch. She was a lymphatic dwarf, always pissed up. She used to be a compliance and professional standards officer, but when I knew her she was living on a disability pension, spending all day in front of the television drinking Aldi sherry. She loved the news above all else, she loved the wars and the murders and the kiddy-fiddling. The more barbaric the better. ‘Oh my heart goes out to them,’ she’d say about the poor, poor children. She had become a pity-monster, you know? never really happy amongst the happy. She’d be in the caff, looking around for someone to sympathise with, until she saw a woman with a retarded son, ‘oh my god that poor woman,’ she’d say, with relief.
Not that she went out much. She only got off her collapsed sofa to bake cakes—she made fake homemade sponges with a LIDL cake mix, which she sold at the Bring’n’Buy sales in the local churches, passing them off as her own. Or she’d occasionally drive down town in her disabled buggy to pick up her pension or buy lottery tickets, rolling through people like a crippled bowling ball—or she’d go out into her garden and inject weedkiller under her fence to destroy the beloved flowers of her hated neighbour, a stiff Iranian woman who never put her bins out.
I’m not going to lie, I was down Joe. I’d sit on my bed, in my empty room, wallpaper peeling, condensation on the windows, suffering fluttering round inside my heart, laying eggs in my soul as the tiny white case bearing moths fluttering round my bedside light were laying eggs in my cardigans. I thought about killing myself—every day I went over how I might do it, but God knows how, I dragged myself into work and back home again. I was fuelled by hatred; hatred for Brenda’s hot clothy intimacy, for my ex-girlfriend’s pointless cruelty, for the plebs in Poundland, for humanity, for this stinking mass of block-solid ignorance that a perverse god had set me among.
My commitment to the schadenfreudic way only increased. I watched for it everywhere, but like every drug, I needed harder and harder hits. Before I knew it, I was smoking pure, uncut sadism. I paid for things in pennies, just to annoy cashiers. I superglued wheelie bins shut. I started watching true crime documentaries, reading about murderers and rapists. I even started watching the news, which I’d always thought I was watching for information but now revelled in its true purpose, pure sadistic pleasure at other people’s suffering. And I began torturing poor Brenda, who was afraid of foreigners, down and outs and all young people, by paying such people to approach her when she went out shopping, spook her by escorting her out of Costco with a creepily solicitous ‘afternoon Brenda, how are you doing then?’ Terrified her, that did. I also let her church know that she was a cake-faking fraud.
Most of all I hated professionals, do-gooders, the tidy people, whose life’s mission it is to make everything perfect, who won’t touch reality unless they’re wearing the rubber gloves of morality; you know the teachers, the protesters, the politicians, the artists, the luvvies and especially the doctors—scum of the earth—those good people, working for the good of us all, working for Universal Basic Income, and Green Energy, and Veganism, and Ethical Trading, and Clean Cities, and Public Health and Life. My God, I hated them, I hated their cleanliness and perfection. I hated it like a tiger hates a dinner party, I hated it like a child hates ‘going for a nice walk,’ I hated it like a madman with diarrhoea hates crown green bowls. I just wanted to shit everywhere. I’d rather be free in shit than happy and organised and perfectly healthy.
So I did everything I could to upset them—still do actually. I smoked, I ate badly, I was a first-class malingerer and set up a popular website to teach people how to pretend to be ill, I set off fire alarms in every institution I ever went in, I sent butchers’ vans to vegan protests, I paid street cleaners to avoid wealthy streets, I sent bomb threats to schools and blew the tyres of headteacher’s cars. I did everything I possibly could to frustrate professionals. I got caught, was in and out of custody, but I didn’t stop. All of this was keeping me alive.
Until the day I died.
I was lonely, and was getting the horn, regular like, so I started going every few weeks to a Chinese massage parlour to get a hand-job. It was always the same routine, with a chubby little bumless housewife in a sweaty room that they did their laundry in, always a washing machine going. She would start off giving a normal massage, and then she’d ‘accidentally’ brush my testicles, bring me to attention and then, when I turned over with a semi, she’d nod to the old pidÿn and say ‘you wan’ happy handy?’ and I’d say, ‘yes please’ and she’d mechanically toss me off while I cried.
Then, one day, as she was working away, she suddenly started singing Happy Birthday, out of the blue. I asked her what she was doing and she said, ‘today my birthday,’ and I said, tears in my eyes, ‘surely I should be singing you happy birthday then?’ and she said, ‘okay you sing.’
So there I was singing Happy Birthday to this woman, until I ejaculated. As she wiped me up I asked her how old she was and she said ‘forty,’ and I thought this is how you’re spending it, your fortieth birthday, tossing off a weeping stranger in a utility room. I was overwhelmed, suddenly, like a colossal wave of something passed over me, see, or through me, something was happening, something… else. And suddenly my tears, which had all, until that moment, been completely self-pity, suddenly they became other-pity or all-of-us pity. Actually Joe, I’m still not sure what happened, but it was as if I was weeping for existence… You couldn’t even call it sadness, which is far too personal and small. It was the world weeping through me, while I was unmoved.
Needless to say, I lost my erection. The woman, Janice she called herself, although her real Chinese name was Guanyin, she was also by this time crying. I sat up and I said to her, ‘I don’t want to pay for any more happy handies. If you ever give me another happy handy, I want it to be an actually happy handy, not a totally tragic handy. So, what I’m saying is, Janice, I’m asking you if you’ll marry me?’
She laughed at me. I was being a bit previous, getting overexcited, which I’m prone to, but we started going out with each other and we fell in love. She was a simple thing was Guanyin, a country girl, a peasant you might say, but it turned out that she had more love in her than I could believe anyone could have and, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, she poured it all into me. She just continued loving me, worshipping me even. I’d never known anything like it.
She didn’t give up the wanking though, in fact she raised her prices and ferreted even more cash away. I also took on another job, doing nights at a Tesco warehouse, saving up money until we could move in together. I’d got a surprisingly large sum together in the end, aided by a spot of luck one night in a casino, but that’s another story. Point is, it was all going okay, when the massage shop was raided and Guanyin was deported. She was sent back to China where, it turned out, she was already married. I couldn’t follow her because by then I had a criminal record as long as a table, and they don’t like that in China, so we made secret plans to meet in Mexico, where people like us can disappear. I continued saving money, continued working, when the radio went dead; Guanyin stopped writing to me. I couldn’t contact her, I had no idea where she even lived, let alone the faintest idea how to track her down, so that was that. That was that was that was that was that was that.
I was heartbroken. Devastated, like I’d been raised out of the mud only to be plunged ten times deeper into it. I’d also just been in for a hip operation and was on strong painkillers, which didn’t do much but constipate me again. I sat at the end of my bed, in emotional and physical agony. I felt I had reached the end of the end. And yet, it wasn’t the same. I sat in the same scummy den of grief I’d spent so many hours of misery in, looking at the wall, with the same feeling of drowning, suffocating despair and dread. And yet, something had changed. I was richer, but that certainly wasn’t it, because in every other respect I was just as badly off and, in losing the love of my life, far, far worse. So what was it?
I got up to go for a walk. Children were giving their parents hell, boyfriends were reeling under the tempests of their girlfriends’ moods, old people were tripping up and looking back with scornful hatred at the exposed bit of pavement which had been responsible, beggars begged for pennies, buskers begged for fame, Jesus people begged for Jesus; everything was as it was, and I loved the pain as ever I did, but something was different, in fact two things were, and these were, I’ll tell you; discernment and empathy. Firstly, I found I could only now laugh at people who clearly deserved it, and secondly I felt for those who didn’t. But what was that based on? What had changed in me, I wondered; and just as I did wonder, Brenda threw herself on me.
She had found out that I had ruined her, that I had revealed her fraudulent cake-making ways and that I’d been paying people to terrorise her. So enraged was she, she ran down the high street looking for me—her disability had been a painstakingly maintained illusion—and then, when she found me, she leapt on me like a massively overweight cat. We fought there and then in the street, her accusing me of every moral crime under the sun, and me agreeing with her. ‘You’re a selfish bastard!’ she cried, ‘I know!’ I yelled as we wrestled. ‘You’re a fiend! A fiend!’ she gasped. ‘I am! I am!’ I said. ‘I ratted on Janice!’ she screamed.
Just at that moment, just as a small crowd had gathered round us, filming us, a bird shat on us. Not a little stream of watery white over my shoulder, but a gargantuan turd-pie, splattered over my hair, nose and across my lapel. Two boys, around twelve, saw it and, with typical city-child aggression, fire flashing from their eyes, barked AAH-HA-HA-HAs, really lording it over us, fumbling for their phones to broadcast the event to the world.
Brenda rolled off me gagging and, as the sticky white excrement, which also smelt vile—like cat-shit vile—crept down my face, it happened. That’s when I realised the truth of my life. I felt something crack, at the base of my spine, near to where I’d had the operation, but it was a spiritual crack, just as much as a physical one. I metaphorically and literally cracked up. I started laughing, and I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I could see, right there, a new world opening up, split open in front of me; a richer, realer thing, a sense that the superb spectacle of horror, and I, were changing places, or melding, or becoming one. I stood, shitty as hell, as the laughing sun-gods burst from behind the clouds of my mind, and the glorious truth that I had been feeling for these past years exploded. It was the laughing version of my tears for the world, a divine laughter, a laughter to shake the universe to its cold black roots.
I checked a German dictionary to coin the right word for my new state, but ‘selbstschadenfreude’ didn’t quite cut it—bit of a mouthful I thought—so I settled on euphiasco—perhaps the greatest art of them all—of deriving pleasure from your own delectaflops. I was to be a euphiasker, a risablist, a grand cham in the timeless dance of self-mockery.
I saw straight away that, just as the greatest schadenfreudists are not in the least bit sadistic, so this new practice must have nothing of masochism, self-pity or passivity about it. No, no, no; euphiasco cannot come from a fear of responsibility, a need to assuage guilt, or a pathological confusion of feeling alive with the raw sensation of self-mutilation. It was far higher than human emotion; something mysterious, you see, something beyond was at play here.
I disentangled myself from Brenda, apologised to her, gave her a grand—didn’t know much else I could do, but she sloped away—while I hit the streets, where you find me today. The best place for a euphiasker, I find. Here I can laugh at everyone, because I laugh at myself, and I can laugh at myself, because I can laugh at everyone. I’m beyond sadism and masochism, beyond pity for myself or for anyone else. I don’t care about your feelings or for mine. Innocent children, lovely women and animals; and the innocent, feminine, wild inside us all, I weep for that, but for your stinking self and mine, only laughter remains Joe. Only laughter.
‘And now,’ Ralf concluded, ‘you knows it all.’