How to Hold a Grudge

There was this kid I used to skateboard with in high school who was a real jerk. Let’s call him T.H. T.H. was smart but aggressive, and his jerkiness lay in his utter lack of respect for you, his willingness to act without regard to your situation or feelings. It’s hard to call up the specifics now, 35 years later, but he was the kind of guy who, if he crashed the night over at your place, would eat all the ice cream, put the empty containers back in the freezer, and leave the freezer door open. Then he’d go to the bathroom, pluck out his pubes, and, while you weren’t looking, carefully lay them out across your sofa, each equidistant from the others. Then he’d pee on your dog. I’m not saying he did that, but it’s the kind of thing he’d do. (In fact, he might’ve done that.) We were friends, but I was kinda glad he lived a couple of towns over, so I wouldn’t have to see him every day. And once I went off to college, I don’t think I ever saw him again.

But then, in the mid-2000s, Facebook came along, and one day T.H. popped up among the many people from my past I was reconnecting with. I was wary. We “friended,” but I wasn’t sure if I should reach out to him on DMs at all: Did I really want to restart an association with this asshole? I was a goddamn adult now—why let people like that back into my life? But also: I could be a grown-up about things, maybe we see how it goes.

In the end, he messaged me first—and right off the bat, the motherfucker apologized. Without going into specifics, he acknowledged he’d been a dick as a kid—a dick to me and others—but he’d moved past that and wasn’t anymore, although he still felt bad about the way he’d acted. I shrugged, or whatever the equivalent of a shrug was on Facebook DMs at the time, and we traded some updates on our lives (he was a firefighter now) before letting things drop.

But honestly, I was pissed: I am not very good at holding grudges. Really, I’m pretty good at letting things go! I don’t stew over mistakes other people have made, or things they’ve done to me, intentionally or inadvertently, because: 1) it takes a lot of energy, and I’m lazy; 2) it doesn’t get me anywhere; and 3) I can’t control how other people behave, only my reaction to them. (I also have some complicated issues regarding anger, which we’ll get to in later episodes of Trying!) And overall, very, very few people have ever behaved toward me in a way that would earn a grudge, so I don’t even have much experience with this.

But T.H. was one of those very, very few! He didn’t have to be such a jerk back then—he had, as far as I knew, a decent, middle-class home life, he did well in school, he had a social life, he was a talented skater. No, he chose to be a jerk, and that was the kind of thing that would earn a grudge from Matt Gross.

And now, with a simple, unprompted apology, it had all evaporated. Decades of low-key resentment no longer had any basis. My grudge was over¹.

It was gone so smoothly and so suddenly that it made me feel like maybe I’d never even held a grudge at all—that I didn’t even know what such a thing could be. A grudge, a true grudge, should be eternal, implacable, irrational. It should be fixated on irremediable actions, the more distantly past the sweeter. Ideally, the grudge should be reciprocated, so that it can fester from both ends. A grudge should force friends and family to choose sides, to sympathize with the grudger and even adopt the grudge themselves, or at least develop their own, minor side grudges.

Holding a grudge should make you feel like a 13th-century peasant in Germany (whence the word itself descends), taking your resentment to Grimm’s Fairy Tales levels of perversion and horror. A grudge, never far from your conscious thoughts, should twist your body and warp your destiny. Grudges are Roald Dahl territory, absurd and fatal. If revenge is best served cold, grudges are an ever-bubbling hot pot that scalds all equally, with every taste.

Or maybe that just sounds good to me, a non-grudge-holder who tends to romanticize feelings and actions with which I have little experience. It sounds so juicy, doesn’t it, to hold so many resentments, to be able to enumerate them, to rank them, to—if you’re lucky—see them paid when their targets falter and fail. How delicious it must be to emerge victorious from a long grudge!

There is one grudge that I have, that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years. It’s not an enormous, melodramatic one, but it is mine. It is against Boston.

As you may recall, in 2014 I took a big job in this little so-called city, and it did not go well. There were many, many reasons—I can delve into them all another time, if you wish—but they boil down to this: I fucking hate Boston.

I hate the people of Boston, a mix of unrepentant racists and old-line, hoity-toity, upper-crust dolts who do not believe the racists exist. I hate the public transportation. I hate the parking. I hate the way Bostonians dress. I hate the way people in Cambridge, Somerville, Jamaica Plain, and Brookline will insist they don’t live in Boston—they live in fucking Boston. I hate Storrow Drive and the very fact that there’s a place called Back Bay. I hate all the universities, of course, but then so does most of America these days. For good measure, I hate the public schools, too. I hate that there are hardly any butcher shops in Boston. I hate Boston’s stupid-ass ducks.

I do not, however, hate the Red Sox. I don’t care enough about the Red Sox to hate them.

Are you convinced? Like I said, I’m inexperienced at this grudge stuff, and I don’t fully know how this thing is supposed to play out. But I’m optimistic about this one! It feels right, it feels like it’s got legs, and I think people—well, maybe not Boston people, but certainly everybody else—will understand where I’m coming from, and take my side. I want you hating Boston on my behalf. With a little bit of effort, we can make this grudge medieval.

The best thing about this grudge is: Boston can’t apologize. We’re in this for the long haul, Beantown (I know you hate being called “Beantown”), and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Do you have a grudge you want to share? Anonymize it (so I don’t get sued), email it to me, and I’ll feature it in a future edition of Trying!

Notes

1. To a very small degree, it was replaced by a grudge against T.H. for having ended that grudge, but that seems almost too minor to count.