He Didn’t Have to Take This

I was 31 when I learned someone could say “I don’t have to take this” and walk away. It was the second time I heard the phrase. The first time it was between two women, an acting student and her teacher, so it didn’t take. The second time was at the newspaper where I worked, and the person who used the magic phrase was a man, a hard-jawed aggressive type. The assistant managing editor was haranguing him and finally he stood up, uttered the magic phrase, and stalked off to see the editor-in-chief. No throwdown, no chin-to-chin standoff to see who wilted. He marched away and complained, as restaurant customers do. This all passed as manly behavior, since our editor-in-chief applauded tough guys and had just hired this particular fellow for his rock-hard tendencies, notably an inability to ever sense he might be wrong about anything at all.

Being himself not especially rock-hard, the editor-in-chief stayed in his office and phoned the managing editor to come back from jury duty; that way somebody could fire the assistant managing editor, who’d been a thorn in everybody’s side since forever. During the wait, the assistant managing editor roamed the newsroom, announcing “I’ve been fired!” to newcomers. Apparently the editor-in-chief had the reporter tell her but it hadn’t stuck. Then her executioner arrived and she was led to a conference room. I don’t know where the rock-hard reporter had gone to; I think he had to cover an event. The editor-in-chief stayed in his office, door closed.

A lesson that emerged from the flurry: “I don’t have to take this.” You could say that and you wouldn’t be some pussy who was backing off, you’d be a hard case laying down a line. I knew this because nobody snickered about Rockhard’s maneuver; nobody rolled their eyes when repeating the story. Soon enough they rolled their eyes about Rockhard himself, who proved to be habitually rude and showed no special aptitude for gathering news or writing it. But his “I don’t have to take this” moment, this sequence of announcing nonacceptance, stalking off, and then complaining, seemed to play just fine.

It beats me as to why. Taking everyone else, and especially that newsroom, at their own estimate, you’d think the only way forward in confrontation was to keep flexing your jaw muscles and slitting your eyes until one party or the other had crumpled; stalking off would only be a gussied-up crumpling, a laughable show of dudgeon (nostril flair, nose up like so, listen to that voice shake). I’ve heard plenty of and-then-I-saids, plenty of triumphant replays of confrontations, but none featuring the phrase. But in practice there it is, the honorable exit line, the out.

For a while I thought I’d acquired some useful information. Everyone else knew about the phrase, now I did too, and next time my face was being got into I could furnish forth the right words and escape. But I’ve never done it. If you have to study up on these things, you can’t use them to good effect; they play out the same as when a parent tells their kid what to say to the jerks at the playground. Everyone else has a way out, not me. I have to take it.