I was visiting America when I saw that the New York Times piece was finally out. It had been months since the journalist interviewed me on the topic, which was my primary area of interest and the subject of my recent book. In my hourlong conversation with her, I’d given her the lay of the land, deep insights, examples, and the names of other people to whom she could speak.
Excitedly, I clicked on the link.
My name wasn’t mentioned, although most of the people I’d recommended were. Reading the article was like looking at a synopsis of my book. Throughout the day, several colleagues messaged me to say how odd it was that I wasn’t referenced, as the journalist’s prose sounded so much like me speaking that I could have written it myself.
Even in the afternoon, I was still trembling. In the little gazebo alongside my parents’ swimming pool, I was perspiring from the heat but sweating from the rage.
‘I’m so mad, I feel like breaking something,’ I said, my voice tight.
‘Well, there’s a place for that,’ my sister said, deadpan as anything.
She handed me her phone. Less than a mile from my parents’ home, in suburban southern Indiana, there was indeed a place for that. They called it a smash room, AKA a rage room.
I’d never heard of such a thing, but gripped by rage as I was, I immediately dialled the number.
‘Something made me really angry this morning, and I’m all frustrated and tense,’ I said to the lady who answered the phone.
‘Well, honey, you just get your butt on down here and break some stuff,’ she said. ‘That’s what we’re here for.’
She told me to wear close-toed shoes, but there were no other instructions or requirements. I borrowed a car, and literally five minutes later I was there. That’s America for you.
It was a good-sized, low-slung building in a residential area full of neat front yards and tidy houses built from Indiana limestone. It looked like a former gathering place for some community organisation, like the Boy Scouts of America, the Rotary Club, or Veterans of Foreign Wars. The sign was loud, rendered in neon colours, and showed a sledgehammer and the word ESCAPE in jagged cartoon font. The business also featured rooms where you could be locked in and puzzle your way out with the clock ticking down, which is some folks’ idea of entertainment.
I imagined oscillating between the two offerings, ratcheting my stress up in an escape room and calibrating it down again in a smash room, striving towards some optimal level of physiological arousal. Today, though, I wasn’t interested in any more stress. I was here to smash shit up.
Covid-19 was raging through the area at the time, and I hesitated as I was handed a boiler suit in prison orange, a pair of thick gloves, and a clear Perspex face shield. Something about the bumper stickers and posters on the walls behind the desk made me think it wouldn’t be politic to inquire about pandemic hygiene protocols, so I held my tongue. Maybe it was risky, but at that point it felt riskier to not get this anger ‘out of my system.’ I zipped up the suit, lowered my shield, and was ushered into the smash room for my twenty-minute session.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark of the neon-paint-splattered interior. I’m sure they vary - since this date, I’ve seen a smash room on a TV series that was kitted out like your grandmother’s dining room - but this place looked like a location for torture and homicide. Various tools for rage ventilation were laid out for my use - a sledgehammer, a regular hammer, a baseball bat, a golf club, a crowbar, and even an old vacuum cleaner that apparently wasn’t intended for hoovering up broken glass but instead was an option for a frustrated housewife or put-upon domestic cleaner to whirl overhead and whack against the wall or floor.
I was unsure at first. Breaking stuff is something I’ve always sought to avoid. I felt awkward in my ugly suit, my bulky gloves. Taking a deep breath, I extracted a bottle from the first box, wound up my pitch, and flung it against the opposite wall. The noise was sharp and aversive, and I winced, but the initial psychological impasse was broken. Less than a minute later, I’d smashed the entirety of the first box of bottles, wearing out my arm, grunting and shrieking like Steffi Graf going up against a tennis-ball launcher that’s been set too fast.
Then, out of breath, I stopped short. Twenty minutes is a long time when you only have two cases of bottles, some of them still reeking with stale beer from an incomplete rinse, and it had taken thirty seconds for me to realise that I didn’t like this very much. But I’d paid my twenty dollars, and I figured I should at least try using some of the weapons with which I’d been provided.
When the bottle broke on impact with the baseball bat, sending shards of glass pinging off my face shield, I was startled. I’d expected the strike to propel the intact bottle towards the wall, which shows you my tenuous grasp of physics. I really didn’t like that. By that point I just wanted to go home but felt embarrassed about being impolite to the proprietors by leaving without breaking absolutely everything - you see, I’ve lived in Britain rather a long time. Full of misery, I half-heartedly tossed the remainder of the bottles in the general direction of the opposite wall and exited the smash room.
‘Feels good, don’t it?’ said the proprietor. She said how important it was for people to get their anger out in places like this ‘instead of beating up their wives and things like that.’ I smiled weakly, thanked her for her service, and ascended the basement stairs into the sunshine.
I’m not sure why I went to the smash room. As a psychologist, I was aware that piling aggression on top of anger was unlikely to work, probably wasn’t going to fix what ailed me. Giving it time, making space for the disappointment, and doing some breathing or exercise would have been far more effective in making me feel better, although these strategies would hardly have made for a good story.
On reflection, maybe that’s why I did it, even if it was unconscious at the time. Someone took my expertise and my words from me, so maybe having that experience and making this piece are the best ways of taking those things back.
So this is Elaine Kasket, writer and creator of lemonade from lemons, reporting not- quite-live, from the smash room.
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Elaine, how awful. I do hope that your publisher will contact the NYT to complain about this. It's appalling, and I applaud you for not taking that baseball bat directly to the source of this outrageous stealing of your expertise.
Well let's home karma bites that so called journalist in the bum sometime very soon!