‘We talk about the people we love the most like they’re aliens. . . .’

Each Wednesday evening a group of men get together in a nondescript office building in Van Nuys to talk for hours about pain, the pain they suffer and the pain they inflict. Even their jokes are about pain.

Tall or short, manager or blue-collar, yuppie or graybeard, they have one thing in common: beating up women.

Batterers Anonymous is a therapy group for men who have beaten their wives and girlfriends.

The group leader is John. They use no last names and the first names used here are pseudonyms. John, a tall stockbroker, is also in Alcoholics Anonymous, as are many others in the group. Some of its methods are taken from AA.

About 15 men crowd onto a couch and chairs. The atmosphere is a combination of college bull session, Sunday night in an Army barracks, a confessional, a psychiatrist’s couch and traffic school.

About a third are there voluntarily because they love their wives and worry about themselves. The others were sent by judges.

The longtime members preach a simple creed: Don’t be such a jerk that you wind up behind bars. If nothing else, control yourself because beating wives is illegal.

The group welcomes Henry, a tall, ruddy-faced new member from Canoga Park who says he is already facing trial on two battery counts and was arrested again last weekend.

“Ohhhh, geeeez,” they groan, in mixed sympathy and derision.

“What do you do for a living?” someone asks.

“Construction work.”

“That’s real good, Henry. You can do lots of that in prison,” jokes Bob, a charming-rogue type in a blue and gold high school athletic jacket.

Bob has been coming voluntarily for 2 years. “I only hit her that one time, but I felt like a . . . then and I still do. I have a violent temper, but I never hit people. I punched a door a couple months ago.”

General laughter. Almost everyone, it seems, has broken a door.

With a few exceptions the men say they love their wives. Those whose wives have left them talk wistfully about getting them to return.

Chuck, a construction worker who comes voluntarily, says he ran into his estranged wife--who lives in a hidden “safe house” for battered women--at their home “by accident during the day.”

“You knew she was going to be there, right?” somebody asks.

“Well,” he grins, “I did just happen to have all these flowers with me.”

The group hopes he can woo her back. Others get raked over coals. Kent blames his violent marriage on a low-paying job. The others tell him he’s worn out that excuse, that he has told them for years that he was going to take technical education courses to get a better job.

“But you never do it, man. You’re not trying hard enough,” one says. “I think I can see your wife’s point now, you know?”

They talk about methods for controlling anger--writing notes instead of yelling, jamming their hands in their pockets, declaring “timeouts” and walking away.

The attitude toward women is mixed affection, bafflement and hostility. Women are usually “they.” Bob interjects: “What is this ‘they’ stuff? We talk about the people we love the most like they’re aliens from some other planet.”

The main message is that there is no excuse for beating women--”none, no matter what the woman did,” John says, “because most of these guys come here feeling that the woman drove them to it, that there’s an explanation. But we listen.”

Stories pour out, stories that probably wouldn’t be listened to anywhere else.

A stout Hispanic says that in every argument his wife reminds him that one of their children was fathered by a lover.

“I call timeouts, I walk away without touching her, I do,” Doug insists. “But she follows me. She won’t let it die. They hate the timeouts. It robs them of that control they gotta have.”

“They don’t play fair,” says one after another.

“How many of us believe that when a man is having an argument with a woman, the man is presenting an intellectual case and the woman is just pushing some emotional thing that doesn’t make sense?” asks Don, a real estate agent.

“We’re all married to the same woman!” Gary exclaims.

As the night deepens and the street grows dark, they talk about the shame that overwhelmed them while the tears were still flowing down her face. Then they bounce back and forth between the shame and bitterness, about the insults or humiliation that goaded them.

“I swear I was walking away. I had my hands in my pockets and she kept following me, throwing insults until finally she hit the right button and I came back at her and I was asking her when I smacked her ‘why did you have to say that? ‘ “

“I found her in another man’s apartment and she clawed the hell out of me. Why doesn’t that count against her? “

“She’s always challenging me, with stuff like ‘You don’t intimidate me,’ ” Bob says. “What the hell does that mean? I’m not trying to intimidate her. I’m just trying to express myself.”

He catches himself, grins, and adds “well, at concert volume maybe.”

“You have to try to understand them,” Don says. “They’re like us. They’re in pain too. This place gives us a chance to talk about the pain we feel being in love with women we hate, or hating women we love. Where else could we do this? Well, we have to start communicating it to them.”

After almost 4 hours, a few stay-behinds are cleaning up the coffee cups and ashtrays.

“You know, we’re all here for the same reason, but I don’t know anybody here who’s real high-strung or violent,” somebody says to Dave. “You don’t strike me as a violent guy.”

“It’s easy here,” Dave replies. “I don’t love you.”