Seven Fights

A compendium of half-assed badassery.

I really don’t quite understand my tolerance for physical pain, but I know what it’s like to have my nose broken. I was hit by a pitch in the eighth grade. I can’t remember if it was a hardball or a softball, but I know that because the local hospital was closed that I didn’t get it set until about four hours after it happened.

Getting your fractured nose set involves a tool that looks like half of a curling iron. Fortunately for me it involved a large dose of opioids. One doctor gave me two shots of Demerol and the other stuck a nasal elevator up my nose into my head and yanked. I could feel the Lego snap as the bones popped back into place. I’ve walked away from a lot of fights, some of which involved a contest of wills and others a contest of fists, but somehow I think I’ve always been ready for the pain.

Winky
The first fight I always think about was the one which was emotionally most resonant, which was that with my best friend. We were walking home from school and I stepped on a line, allegedly. Therefore he said “Your mama drinks wine.” I said I didn’t step on a line and my mama doesn’t drink wine. Out of nowhere he socks me in the gut, probably because I called him a liar. One punch and I’m down, all of the wind knocked out of me. If you know the feeling when it takes 15 seconds for you to even breathe again after you crumple to the ground, then you’re with me. It takes another minute to get back to your feet. By that time, Winky had gone home.

It turns out that was on a Friday. On Saturday Winky showed up to play football on the lawn nextdoor. I immediately stepped to him and walloped him in the face in front of everybody in the neighborhood. My mama don’t drink wine! Somehow, the way he tried to move his head made it worse. He suffered two black eyes. I didn’t realize how hard I hit him, but as I was apologizing he was running home crying. Like boys, we remained friends, but two black eyes. He never lived that down.

Rando #1
The last time I ever had to punch somebody, I didn’t get the chance. I was 18 or so and I was still taking the bus home from my union job. So it had to be the fall of ‘79 as I was still adjusting to being an ordinary Joe. At the time I hung out at Mr. Moto’s and the Holiday Bowl after work and on the weekends. I had taken the eastbound 27 to Crenshaw and was waiting for the northbound 85 and got tired of waiting for it. I got off at 8pm. It’s dark. So I started walking.

The form of getting jumped, as we called it, was for some random strange dude to try to sense you out. So they would ask “Where’s the party at?” or something like that. I don’t know, I’m heading home. Oh do you live around here? No I’m meeting my homies at the bowling alley.

Can you loan me a dollar?

No man. I ain’t got no money for you.

So any money I find on you I can have, right?

Oh so you want to put your hands in my pockets?

This is a panto. Everybody knows the words. What I’m dealing with is somebody who thinks I can be intimidated. But I really didn’t feel like squaring off with the dude, so I’m using verbal judo and just walking. I can smell the desperation on homeboy, but he won’t quit. He follows me for three long blocks. I don’t look back.

We step onto the block where the bowling alley is and he sucker punches me and then runs across the street. He figured he was walking into a trap, but he wasn’t. My glasses weren’t broken. Just a lousy evening.

Danny
Sometimes the heat of the moment gives the opportunity to do what everybody wants done, but nobody is ready to do it. This is especially the case in the fourth grade. We’re playing sockball and Danny, who is an annoying dork — or at least that’s how I remember him, tried to cut me in line. I’m next. No I’m next. What you gonna do about it? Smack.

It was the first time I ever hit anybody in a fight. I apologized immediately, but he was already off and crying. I really felt sorry for Danny, but I didn’t want to apologize a second time. That’s just about all I remember except that several years later I saw his picture in the local highschool yearbook. He was the very same dork. I felt responsible for that.

Rando #2
The Vineyard playground is still 10 blocks from the house I grew up at. What I know was that we lived in the nicest part of our middle class neighborhood and there were a few hot spots. Vineyard wasn’t one of them, although older kids were there to play basketball. It had 10 foot hoops, unlike the shorter ones at the elementary school around the corner. I didn’t often go there because, generally speaking, if you can’t slam on the elementary hoops, you don’t need to be at Vineyard, especially not on the regulation court in the gym.

His name might have been Pookie or Ghost or something stupid, but he made it clear that he was a Crip. I have no idea how it started, but I put my glasses in my pocket and went at it. He knew how to fight and he was pretty quick. No matter how many times he hit me in the face, I kept on. One thing about fights in the 70s, everybody understood the protocols. You fight until somebody quits, or cries “uncle”. I refused to quit, but I was getting whooped.

At some point, our ‘responsible’ coach told us to take the fight into the bathroom because it was embarrassing to do this in public. Fine. The difference made no difference. The fight went on for 15 minutes, but he could get me to quit. He gassed out. I was pretty tired as well. Anyone could see that he beat me up, but he couldn’t beat me down.

I walked home and looked at my face in the mirror. No black eyes.

Patrick & Harry
Having never lost a fight, neither Patrick nor Harry could intimidate me. In seventh grade, Patrick hated me because I was a public school kid. I hated Patrick because he was rude and wore his stupid afro with a part down the middle.

In ninth grade, Harry hated me because he was a football player on the highschool team and I wasn’t. So he thought I would back down. I think he threw an eraser at me, or did I throw one at him? I just never backed down.

In neither case were any punches thrown. There was a hostile face to face standoff that could have exploded. Never, however, was my sense of self or reputation based on whether or not I could kick somebody’s ass. I had opportunities to learn to box at the Sugar Ray’s over on Adams and West Boulevard, but I never took it seriously. My job in all of my social situations was to be the brains of the operation, but sometimes people are not ready to think.

So you take it outside.

Rando #3
Being the oldest of four boys, my job was to be a protector. One day when my bike was broken, I took my brother’s bike to Boy’s Market. Today that block is an empty lot, but back then it was the center of the community. So I’m on my way there and a gang of kids on bikes jump me in broad daylight at Crenshaw and Exposition at the railroad tracks.

So I’m holding on to my brother’s bike with my left hand and swinging with my right. This was like a classic kung fu fight where the master stands on the side and gets all of his junior goons to beat down the mark. One by one and then two by two they try to rip me off, but I’m swinging and yelling. You’re not going to get my brother’s bike. After some time, they start to back off. The boss says OK. They lay off.

Of all the fights I’ve been in, this is the most proud I have ever been, also the most motivated.

Rando #4
The time I was really scared was on New Year’s Eve. My brother and I had taken the Adams bus home from a party at church. It was dusk and we turned off the main drag to get into the neighborhood. This one was Ghost or Pookie, announcing that he was a Crip. So what? So I’ve got a knife.

Since I have already saved Bryan’s bike, I told him to stay back while I took care of this. So he stayed out in the light on the street and I went towards the alley one just west of Crenshaw. I was pissed and I didn’t really believe he had a knife. But here’s the thing. If you were all that, you wouldn’t need a knife. You think you can beat me in a fair fight? Because I can just call my brother and it will be two on one.

I actually didn’t say that, but I knew that. I took the gamble. The more I talked fearlessly, the better I figured my odds were. At this point I was probably a junior in highschool but still not that big. It turned out that Bryan saw my nextdoor neighbors across the street. “Hey! It’s Darrell!” Darrell and Rabo and some other kids, maybe four altogether, plus Bryan.

Oh you know Darrell?

He lives right next door.

Aw. Alright I’m gonna let you slide because you know Darrell.

Yeah so no fists exchanged. But did he really have a knife?

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The Contemporary Context

So I’ve had a couple fights with Crips on the borders of my neighborhood, and a few scraps with this and that kid I knew. I can’t say that I paid much attention to my reputation because I was never interested in being a badass.

A kid named Dana may very well have lived and died going after that badass life. I don’t know. The internet doesn’t know. So I will never know. But I know the fear of living in close proximity to gang life in Los Angeles. I know what it’s like to be a middle school kid who has to walk past high school dropouts, and junkyard dogs.

In retrospect, many times I think I should have learned to box. Moreover I think I should have gone to the military instead of working in that union job. The reason has everything to do with the amount of ignorance that passes as culture, and the amount of nihilism that moralizing culture doesn’t actually suppress.

I’ve been thinking of all this in three contexts. The first is in the evaluation of how thick or thin my own Martial Education has been. In one way it is remarkably thin as compared to what I’m reading these days about the fall of Troy and what it took to defend one’s life from crafty kings and ambitious princes. In another way the simple fact is that I haven’t had to punch anyone since 1979. I’m soft, in the way that motorcycle tires are soft, not soft like butter. I’m built for performance, not to flavor your popcorn. But I think most American men are soft like actors - wanting to be like Daniel Craig but actually are more like Pierce Brosnan. The irony is not that these studio gangsters talk the talk, but that they want to.

The second context is in reviewing social capital and the unique dilemmas facing black Americans who want social power, individual distinction, racial unity, respected traditions and upward mobility. These are especially difficult choices when one grows up in a segregated neighborhood as I did. I have no difficulty imagining white Americans as ghetto and sheisty as those I knew as a roughneck kid, I just never had to fight them because they lived far, far away. All my fights have been with black American kids. Seven in eighteen years, without getting a black eye between them all. So what does it mean to reckon with ghetto life? It depends how hard you have to fight, with whom and whether or not you catch a criminal case in spite of your courage and dignity. Everybody fights. How much did you have to fight? Did you win?

The third context is the ass-backwards ethics we have adopted in our popcorn butter lives and how we have evaded social responsibility given the Ivy Cabal kind of families so many of us are following. Sorry if that sounds glib, but I do have to write sentences in my own voice, so long as there are readers who desire to be less affected by the popular slop. But you knew that was the context if you understood the meme of the picture above, #ScottishKnifeGirl.

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So here I am saying that, no matter the facts of that story, the fights we fight may never be known until decades after the fact. Who is there to defend us when the whole of our society is soft in the wrong way? How are we sustainable when there is always a contingent ready to demean our martial education and distort the meaning of self-defense by disarming common sense?

Accidents may smash us in the face like a home run to deep left field, or a wild pitch. Either way, we must occasionally be reminded to be ready for the pain. We must be ready to step up and fight, with or without proper supervision. Do you want to know what’s crazy? I heard we might go to war with Mexico because Demerol is less than 100 times as potent as fentanyl.

Half-assed badassery.