Author: Jeffrey McMahon

Around seven this evening, I found myself in Target performing the small rituals of domestic survival. I drifted first to produce, where I stood contemplating six-packs of kiwis—those fuzzy, unglamorous orbs that look like they were designed by a committee that feared both beauty and commitment.

To my left stood a blonde woman in black athletic tights, late thirties, hair cinched back by a black headband. Her eyes were ringed with the faint bruising of fatigue or life—or both. When she saw me reach for the kiwis, her face brightened with the sudden, evangelical urgency of someone who has found a truth and is no longer capable of keeping it to herself.

“Have you ever bought the golden ones?”

I nodded, already sensing the sermon.

“I love those because you can eat the skin.”

“I can do without the skin,” I said, hoping to signal that my relationship with fruit had boundaries.

She leaned in, undeterred. “Don’t skip that part. That’s where you’re getting all your antioxidants, folate, vitamin E, and fiber.”

She delivered this litany with the confidence of someone who had recently completed a deep dive into the internet’s temple of wellness influencers and emerged fluent in their catechism.

“I’m a true believer in the kiwi,” I said, offering a diplomatic half-truth in the hopes of ending the exchange.

It did not end the exchange.

She urged me to seek out the golden kiwis and to consume them whole, skin and all, as though salvation itself depended on my willingness to chew through fuzz. I smiled, nodded, and executed a tactical retreat.

She struck me as a fundamentally decent person, but I recognized the type. I’ve met her before in various incarnations: the recently converted, the self-reinvented, the earnest disciple of a new regimen. Somewhere in her recent past, there had likely been a fracture—addiction, heartbreak, loneliness—and now she clung to nutrition and fitness as both shield and scripture. Her enthusiasm, admirable in theory, had exceeded her social boundaries. 

Five minutes later, we encountered each other again in the granola aisle, approaching from opposite directions like two diplomats from uneasy nations. Our carts collided in that narrow space, and she immediately yielded.

“You can go first.”

The earlier fervor had drained from her. In its place was a kind of tentative humility, as though she had replayed the kiwi lecture in her mind and found it excessive. She seemed smaller now, slightly folded into herself, her previous confidence replaced by a quiet, almost visible self-consciousness.

I sensed embarrassment, perhaps even shame—not because she had said anything offensive, but because she had revealed too much of herself too quickly. Now she was attempting restraint, but the adjustment hadn’t taken. The performance read not as composed but as deflated.

The poor woman was unraveling in real time, her emotional weather shifting faster than she could dress for it.

“No worries,” I said, and moved past her.

Later, at home, I found myself thinking about the kiwi evangelist with more sympathy than irritation. I recognized the impulse. I know what it feels like to become intoxicated by an idea and immediately want to share it with anyone within earshot. I have been that person—too eager, too talkative, too quick to mistake oversharing for connection. Only later does the embarrassment arrive, that slow realization that enthusiasm, when stripped of self-awareness, can become its own form of social aggression.

People rarely reward that kind of personality. In professional wrestling, every story revolves around two archetypes: the Babyface, the hero who earns the audience’s affection, and the Heel, the villain who earns its contempt. Some Heels possess charisma so magnetic that people love hating them. They generate what wrestling insiders call real heat. Their arrogance, cruelty, and swagger become irresistible entertainment. In sports broadcasting, Howard Cosell was the apotheosis of this phenomenon. He irritated millions with such magnificent consistency that irritation itself became addictive. America tuned in partly to watch the games and partly to watch Cosell be Cosell.

But there is a far more unfortunate kind of Heel. He isn’t fascinating enough to hate. He merely occupies oxygen. His habits are tedious, his mannerisms grating, his conversation a slow-acting sedative. Wrestling has a name for this, too: go-home heat. The audience doesn’t boo because the villain has done his job brilliantly. They boo because they want him off the screen. They aren’t emotionally invested. They’re simply exhausted.

Sometimes I wonder whether our brains instinctively divide humanity into Babyfaces and Heels. If so, most of us who become Heels don’t achieve the glamorous status of generating real heat. We generate go-home heat. We become the person whose presence subtly shortens conversations, whose invitations quietly stop arriving, whose absence is greeted not with grief but with relief.

I’ve felt that kind of heat more than once. The cruelest version isn’t public humiliation; it’s private disappearance. A friend stops calling. Invitations evaporate. Conversations become obligations. You realize you’ve crossed an invisible line from Babyface to Heel, not because anyone announced it, but because the emotional temperature in the room has changed. You can feel the polite distance settling in like cold fog. At that point, dignity requires only one response. You respect the boundary. You gather your things. You go home.

Marriage provides one of the purest laboratories for go-home heat. I’ve known more than a few husbands whose wives finally reached the end of their patience and, with varying degrees of diplomacy, informed them that the show had been canceled. The message was always some variation of the same theme: I’ve grown up. You haven’t. Life with you has become lonelier than life without you. In the early days of courtship, these men were Babyfaces. They possessed charm, humor, ambition, and just enough mystery to generate what wrestling fans call pop—the roar of approval when the hero bursts through the curtain. But pop has a shelf life. If the hero never develops beyond his opening act, applause curdles into indifference. The jokes become stale. The promises expire. Eventually the audience stops cheering and starts looking toward the exit. Divorce, in many cases, is simply the marriage announcing that the Babyface has become the Heel.

I recently watched a far less consequential but equally revealing Heel performance at Trader Joe’s.

It was a quiet Saturday morning. About fifteen minutes into my shopping, I was comparing pasta sauces beside two sisters in their sixties, both sporting jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who had spent decades detecting trouble before it fully arrived. Then trouble arrived.

A disturbance erupted in the frozen-food aisle.

At first I assumed it was the familiar soundtrack of retail life—employees exchanging sarcastic insults, one playing the Babyface, the other the Heel, everyone secretly enjoying the performance. That illusion lasted perhaps three seconds. The voices hardened. The volume climbed. This wasn’t banter. This was a genuine kerfuffle, the kind baseball announcers once used to describe a bench-clearing brawl after someone wore a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball in the ribs.

The dialogue quickly settled into the hypnotic repetition of an absurdist play.

“Stop coughing on the food.”

“Mind your own business.”

Again.

“Stop coughing on the food.”

“Mind your own business.”

The sisters and I exchanged the universal glance of strangers silently agreeing that civilization had taken an unexpected coffee break. Around us, employees gathered in nervous little clusters like prairie dogs emerging from their burrows to determine whether the predator had moved on.

I never saw the alleged cougher. He remained an unseen villain, a phantom whose crimes could no longer be verified. But I did meet his prosecutor.

He stormed into our aisle still simmering with indignation, muttering fragments of his closing argument to no one in particular. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties with the unmistakable lat-spread gait of a man who had spent so much time widening his back that walking normally had become optional. He carried a grocery bag in each hand as though they were ceremonial dumbbells. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt bearing the single word STRONG, just in case anyone had mistaken him for an accountant.

The shirt was drenched with sweat, suggesting he’d recently emerged from the nearby UFC gym and hadn’t yet made the psychological transition from gladiator to grocery shopper.

His expression attempted righteous indignation, but something betrayed him.

He looked around.

No one was applauding.

No one admired his courage.

No one seemed grateful that justice had been served in aisle seven.

Instead, every face wore the same expression: Please remove this man from the premises.

The go-home heat was overwhelming.

He had mistaken confrontation for leadership, volume for authority, and muscles for moral credibility. Whatever point he believed he was making had been eclipsed by the spectacle of his performance. The entire store had unconsciously promoted him from self-appointed hero to official nuisance.

For just a second, I caught something almost touching flicker across his face. It was the expression of a balloon discovering a pin. His certainty leaked away. Chagrin briefly appeared before pride hurried back to cover it.

As for me, I reverted to one of humanity’s oldest survival instincts.

I became wallpaper.

I examined jars of marinara with scholarly intensity, refusing to make eye contact. The last thing I wanted was to be drafted into another man’s private morality play.

A few minutes later, I spotted him again while checking out.

He stood two lanes away.

The entire store seemed aware of him.

People stole glances over shopping carts. Conversations paused. The emotional climate had shifted. If Trader Joe’s had permitted audience participation, I suspect candy-bar wrappers, reusable shopping bags, and overripe bananas might have sailed gracefully through the air.

He knew.

His eyes darted around the room. He tucked his chin toward his chest, rounded his shoulders, and attempted the oldest disappearing act known to embarrassed human beings: becoming physically smaller. Unfortunately, shame rarely makes anyone less conspicuous. It merely signals to the audience that the verdict has already been rendered.

The whispers began.

“What a jerk.”

“One guy can ruin the whole atmosphere.”

“He really overplayed his hand.”

“That guy watches way too many Bro videos.”

He hurried out of the store with the defeated posture of a politician leaving the courthouse after an indictment, squeezed his improbable physique into a modest Honda Civic, and disappeared into traffic.

Go-home heat is a cruel force, but perhaps it serves an evolutionary purpose. Every society needs mechanisms for enforcing its unwritten rules. Sometimes applause rewards admirable behavior. Sometimes boos remind us where the boundaries lie. Like every weapon, however, go-home heat demands restraint. Used wisely, it protects a community’s moral norms. Used recklessly, it becomes little more than collective bullying disguised as virtue.