People who never met The Righteous Man insist he is an urban myth. Those who sheepishly admit encounters with him say through clenched teeth, “No, he lived and the son of a bitch is still out there.” Others, tired of the question, think he may have lived at some point, but is certainly dead now, so what possible difference does it make?
I first heard of him three years ago, while I sat drinking in a bar in Elyria, Ohio doodling on a napkin and working on my PhD. Sitting at a nearby table was Ed, a young man, maybe twenty-five, relating a sad story to Lucy, a soft spoken woman his age. His hand wrapped in many layers of surgical gauze, Ed angrily discussed a recent run-in he had had with a motorist. Painful from his point of view, Ed’s account sounded mildly humorous to me, and so I listened in, careful not to smirk at points in the story which he found humiliating.
It seems Ed had been driving his vintage Harley Davidson at a high speed across Interstate 80 near Cleveland, when he encountered a silver Ford Taurus “creeping along” in the left lane at 78 miles an hour. The highway was crowded, but Ed needed to pass the Ford. He flashed his headlight and honked a number of times before the Taurus finally moved over. As he sped past the Ford, Ed flashed its driver his middle finger, and felt slightly better for it.
The driver of the Ford seemed to receive the hand gesture in stride, and Ed thought nothing more of it. Not an hour later, at a rest stop near Youngstown, he stopped for coffee and a donut. When he returned to his Harley, he found the stranger, (about six foot three, two hundred and thirty pounds, Caucasian, approximately 40 years of age - as would be reported later) standing politely and calmly in the parking space next to his bike, leaning against a silver Ford Taurus.
The two exchanged pleasantries, and then the stranger very calmly, almost as if in Zen-like tone, asked Ed what he was thinking as they passed each other on the expressway some forty five minutes earlier.
“You were driving too slowly,” Ed replied matter-of-factly.
“I’m sorry to have angered you to such a response.”
“Forget about it. Just stay in the right lane if you don’t feel like driving.” Ed said, mounting his bike and reaching for his keys.
“I really wish you hadn’t flipped me off. It smacked of rudeness.”
“Yeah, well, so does driving too f*$%ing slowly.” Ed hissed, turning the keys in the ignition, and revving his engine.
“Let me help you remember to never, ever flip someone off that you don’t know.” Came the calm response, in a tone that resonated with certainty and regret.
“How’s that?” Ed shouted, as he kicked his bike into gear.
Calmly, gently, the odd man reached over and turned off the Harley. Enraged and yet strangely uncertain as to how to respond, the cyclist clenched his jaw and said, “Now look old man. I don’t want to hurt you, but keep your hands off my bike.”
Slowly, the stranger grabbed Ed’s left hand and snapped the middle finger. As the cyclist screamed, the stranger repeated the action twice more, each time slightly beneath the joint that had just been broken.
“Please. Be careful with your anger.” And then, the stranger got into his Taurus and slowly drove off.
Ed, too busy with the pain in his hand, said nothing. Although he tried to focus and memorialize the moment for the purpose of some future vengeance, he was in too much pain to get a license number. The mysterious stranger was simply gone. The biker winced as he reflected on this.
I stifled a laugh.
The girlfriend seemed mildly sympathetic to the story, softly kissing the biker’s hand, as if to acknowledge the injustice he had received. Unfortunately for the couple, she followed this action by saying, “Maybe you shouldn’t flip off people you don’t know.”
The cyclist was incensed. “Nobody’s going to tell me who I can flip off. Matter of fact, when I get this bandage off, I’m going to keep my hand permanently clenched in the one finger salute. That’ll teach that vigilante SOB.”
Just as Ed finished speaking, a stout man who had been sipping seltzer water at the end of the bar, got up and asked the biker if he had heard him right. Uncertain of this new threat, well aware that he was in no condition to challenge anyone, the biker quickly backed down.
“You a friend of the guy who did this to me?” Ed said weakly, holding up his hand.
“Are you flipping me off? I’ll break your finger again!”
“No. No…I was just showing you my–” Ed stammered.
“I don’t know the guy, but I wish I did. I’d buy him a drink.” The short man replied, sitting back down at the bar with satisfaction. The biker sat back and sulked. I resumed my drinking, disappointed that a barroom fight wasn’t going to break out.
It’s curious how often an old story, having never before been heard, once heard is often heard shortly thereafter, and then seems to be heard quite frequently. I told the curious story of Ed and the stranger to an acquaintance in Los Angeles, who told me that it was an old story, perhaps an urban legend. In the version he heard, however, the person whose middle finger had been broken was a high school sophomore who had been torturing a fellow student on a public bus. In the story my acquaintance told, the mysterious stranger was sitting next to the sophomore who was throwing pennies at the back of the head of a young fellow bus rider.
“Please stop doing that,” had come the Zen-like request. The coin tosser ignored the man, focusing instead on bouncing coins off the hapless victim. When the request was repeated, Coin Boy gave the stranger the finger. Again, with what seemed like regret, the vigilante resolutely grabbed the young man’s hand and broke the middle finger in three separate places, leaving it in the shape of a very thin “Z.” Bus riders looked on, too stunned to stop either the boy from screaming or the stranger from getting off the bus at the next stop. The subsequent description of the stranger, however close, did not fully match that of the assailant in the Ohio tale. (Eyewitnesses claimed the “perp”, in this instance, was about six foot three, Latino, and had weighed two hundred and thirty pounds.)
Having heard two versions of the same story, I became intrigued. Using every gathering of friends and family as an opportunity to research and document the tale, I discovered many versions existed. An uncle, a physician at Rush Hospital in Chicago, told me of being unable to fully reset the bones on the middle finger of a thirty year old real estate agent who had come to the emergency screaming of a pure victimization that, upon further review, appeared to be a bit more akin to partial retribution. It seemed the realtor was talking on the phone in a movie theater, when a theatergoer asked him quite deliberately to “take it outside.” When the agent reacted with his middle finger, the response had been swift and painful.
A neighbor told me that while in Trenton, he saw a car stop on a street corner, and its occupant deliberately dump two fistfuls of fast food wrappers onto the pavement. As the vehicle was about to pull away, a tall forty year old black man approached the car and exchanged a few words. After a moment, the black man bent down, collected all of the garbage, and jammed it back into the car from where it had emanated. Enraged, the occupant of the car jumped out, and began a very short argument. Three quick movements by the vigilante, a scream, and the driver of the car stood clutching one hand in the other.
Intrigued by the commonality and frequency of the story, I did a search and discovered www.therighteousman.com, a website that seemed to chronicle all of the sightings of this mysterious figure. Someone, perhaps the web designer, had designated the finger-breaker “The Righteous Man.” On the website, sixty-two different stories of “The Righteous Man” appeared. Each story came to the same bone breaking end, but in each instance, The Righteous Man was uniquely described.
Having visited the site and having heard a story of The Righteous Man first hand, I knew him to be more than an urban legend, but I could not accept that one man had broken sixty-two different middle fingers on sixty two different hands in sixty two different locations. I assumed there were a lot of “copy cat” Righteous Men out in the world, and quite a few folks who only wished they could be The Righteous Man.
Three months after first reading the accounts of The Righteous Man, I revisited www.therighteousman.com , only to discover that no less than 417 middle fingers around the country had been broken and documented. I was amused. Not a week after that, I came across a comic book series entitled “Snap Goes Tall Man” written and illustrated by a faithful blogger to The Righteous Man website. The drawings were crude, but humorous. The lead character seemed to morph into various sizes, races and in at least three instances, genders.
And then came the “blowback.” A manager at a Home Depot in Santa Monica reported feeling threatened by a man who said he was going to break his middle finger in three places. In response, the merchant whacked the man upside the head with a can of paint. Other instances were soon reported of people taking pre-emptive action against perceived threats of a middle finger being broken. A wife in Cleveland reportedly shot her husband because she believed that, having given him the finger in response to his criticism of her cooking, he struck a pose reminiscent of the notorious “Righteous Man.” Two fishing buddies in Charleston, SC, reportedly stabbed each other one night in a tent after each gave the other the finger, feeling threatened by each other’s anger.
And then, it died down. The number of finger breaking incidents dwindled to a precious few. For a while, the number of pre-emptive strikes against perceived threats continued to rise and then, they, too, peaked. It was all as if it had never happened. In time, the question became of great cultural interest: does “The Righteous Man” exist or is he merely an urban myth?
I was overjoyed by and benefited from the uncertainty and quickly moved to provide the world an answer. The body of my dissertation practically wrote itself. In the end, all I needed was a thesis. At first, my instinct was to play both sides, and provide substantial evidence supporting the argument of those who desperately wanted The Righteous Man to exist, while at the same time supplying an abundance of counterargument material for those who equally wished him to be myth. Ultimately, however, I realized equivocation would lead to disappointment and cause my dissertation to be rejected.
Consequently, today I have come to argue that no individual in the world can claim to be The Righteous Man. On the other hand, a small number of people, acting individually, has become a powerful collective force, that in the end, constitutes The Righteous Man as we know him/her.
Anyone with evidence to his/her existence is welcome to add it to this blog. Click on the word “Permalink” at the bottom of this page to report your sighting of The Righteous Man.
