Words Can Hurt

When the phone at my desk rang the other day, I could sense something was up. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was, but the ring itself seemed angry somehow.

Before this impression had time to fully take hold, I picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” I said, expecting to hear the voice of one publicist or another.

“Is this Jim?” a male voice asked. 

“Yeah,” I said.

“Jim…Knipfel?”

“Yeah.” I was beginning to wonder if I should recognize the voice. I’m terrible at that. But something else was nagging at me. Like the ring, there was something tight and angry about the voice, a vibration running just below the surface.

The moment he said, “I just read the story you wrote this week…” I could guess where this was going. That’s what they always say when something you wrote pissed them off. It seems that once again I’d written something unthinking and cruel about some stranger no longer among the living. And now his son was on the phone to let me know just how rotten my words had made him feel. Not just him, but his mother too, the deceased man’s widow, who apparently saw the story first.

Even before he explained all that—again reflexively—I started feeling bad. With enough practice, most anything can become a reflex. 

He was completely, without question, justified to be pissed. Beyond pissed, even, given the story he told me. Lord knows I’d be pissed—and while we were on the phone, I remember thinking how relieved I was that he’d decided to call instead of stopping by. He sounded large.

He controlled his anger, though, and spoke rationally. That was the worst thing about it. Before he hung up, he said, “Jim, you’ve got to remember that words can hurt.”

It’s something I’ve certainly been reminded of over the years. Funny thing, though: In the late ‘80s, if someone was pissed about something I wrote, they’d send a death threat. I used to get a lot of those, and they always gave me a little boost. Imagine—knowing that the words you’d written, these little marks on paper, had affected someone so deeply that they wanted you dead. It’s a nice feeling.

But in the ‘90s, the culture shifted and people became more sensitive, and things changed. The death threats dried up. Instead, people would call and ask me to explain why I’d written what I had. Or just try to make me feel bad.

The death threats I’d ignore. And if asked to explain something that was very clearly spelled out already, my impulse was to fuck with whoever asked. Entertainment flaks are the best for this, as they are very easy to confuse. 

Last year, a promoter who’d put together something he called “a tribute to John Lennon,” but which was, in reality, just a low-rent talent show, took some offense when I pointed out that it was nothing but cheap exploitation. 

He called and yelled and yelled and tried to make me feel bad. I let him yell, and looked at my watch, checked my e-mail. And when he was done yelling, I said, “Okay.” 

He made a small noise in his throat, slammed the phone down, and I got back to work.

That wouldn’t fly with everyone. Different gripes need to be handled in different ways. The success or failure of those people who set out to make me feel like a bad person all depends on whether I think they’re justified or not. In a lot of cases, they are. 

In almost 20 years of this, the one guy who really threw me for a loop was Clint Howard. Yes, that Clint Howard—Gentle Ben, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Planet Ibsen, and hundreds, maybe thousands of supporting roles. He caught me off-guard by asking me to explain myself and making me feel bad.

Fact is, I’m a huge Clint Howard fan, and have been for quite some time. Yet for some reason, two years ago, when reviewing the DVD release of an ’80s horror movie he starred in (Evilspeak), I said some terrible, rotten, cruel things about the great (and perpetually employed) Clint Howard. I think I must’ve been cranky that day. Simple, passing crankiness is responsible for so much frustration and heartache in the world—nasty reviews, road rage and the like.

Anyway, so I wrote this cranky Clint Howard review, and two years later he sends a note, asking: “So why do you think I’m pathetic?”

While that in itself would’ve been pretty pathetic, he tempered it by having a sense of humor about the whole thing and playing it cool. He was very charming.

I went back and read the review (which I didn’t remember at all) and saw that I’d been way too nasty. He was right, I was wrong; I admitted as much, and everything was just fine after that.

That one turned out better than most (perhaps because Mr. Howard could very easily make me disappear). The guy this last week, I’m guessing, hung up as mad as he’d been when he called. But he’d had his say, and I still feel bad about what I’d written about his dad.

So what’s the lesson I take away from all this? There are huge moral and philosophical issues to consider, of course—journalistic ethics, our perception of strangers, personal responsibility, the Buddhist concept that words really can do damage.

But in reality, it boils down to this: I sure do miss the days when people used to send death threats.