But most of us are not Brad Pitt.
No self respecting man will ever admit he has never been in
a fist fight. Luckily for men, sooner or later, most likely sooner, they will end up in one.
Through
years of movies, comic books and TV-series impressionable young men - are there any other? - have learned the three main rules
of fist fighting.
Rule number one : the agony and damage caused by a right hook to the chin can be almost fully neutralized
by simply rubbing it a few times while giving the opponent a sincere “You will pay for this.”-look.
Rule number
two: breaking furniture or bottles over someone’s head will result in nothing more than this person being unconscious
for five minutes. Only car crashes and skateboard accidents cause serious concussions or brain damage.
Rule number three
- assuming that after sustaining rule number one and two you are still able to count to three - : throwing someone through
a large window is the perfect way to end a fight. In no way should it be viewed as a perfect way to end a life.
Embrace
these three rules at least once and you will put one or more dentist’s kids through college. Deny these rules and you
will never experience the feeling of nursing an upper lip the size of a tennis ball, inhabited by a billion Brazilian fire
ants.
“Cataclysmic” is the only word to describe my first
fight, as it laid to waste most of downtown the same way Godzilla would Tokyo. Actually, one of his distant relatives started
it all.
Billy Vermeer decided to imitate a slobbering space monster, which wasn’t that much of a stretch for someone
as ugly and overly saliva-producing as Billy. With an astonishing amount of enthusiasm, he took it upon him to wreak havoc
on my near perfect sand sculpted version of a modern city. It turned into the fiercest fight the “Happy Bunny Big Ears”-kindergarten
ever witnessed.
Everyone has to deal with their share of injustice throughout life. But to me, the first experience was
the strongest one. This information could well be an extremely important revelation in the field of child psychology. Or it
could simply mean I have yet to suffer real injustice.
As Billy’s foot flattened the financial district, I slowly
but steadily grew towards full combat mode. What started off with a quivering lip and a little, quite cute, yelping sound
quickly blossomed into a mature fire truck siren, including the Doppler Effect children’s vocal chords have no problem
reproducing. Things turned from bad to worse when I decided to back up my vocal discontent with some more affirmative action
by throwing my little red plastic bucket at Billy, hitting him full on the nose. At this point, Billy decided to stop his
rampage in favour of joining me in a duet of spine shattering howling.
Then Billy started the waterworks. The expression
must have originated with Billy because his crying in combination with his slobbering would rapidly turn the entire sandbox
into quicksand. Jenny Lemieux’s foot got caught in it and, struck by an ever growing panic, she too would chime in.
The three of us created a series of sonic booms, setting of the alarms of every car in a four block radius.
For a brief
moment, the kindergarten and its surroundings became the epicentre of a miniature apocalypse. Everyone in town prayed it would
never happen again.
We repeated it three more times that same afternoon.
My first semi-real fight happened during that short, innocent
period in my early teens after smart boys had reluctantly accepted the fact girls do not have cooties but before the permanent
tendency had set in to go through gargantuan lengths of acting like fools in order to deny the existence of said cooties through
a more hands-on experience.
I can’t remember the cause of the fight, which isn’t all that strange. Nature
has no being crueller than a male in his early teens. So if a thirteen year old decided to fight over every insult received
or given during that one year, he would have no social agenda whatsoever till his 49th birthday.
The reason I call them
semi-real fights is because it involved a lot more wrestling than actual punching. Because punching could be painful. And
not just for the recipient. Many a thumb gets sprained or even broken at that age, and sometimes later too, because making
a fist really isn’t quite as easy as it looks. The reflex in which the thumb disappears into the fist seems safe at
first but the thumb will endure quite a lot of the impact which may cause a sprain. The result is even more damaging if the
thumb is positioned outside the fist in such a way it will be the first point of impact. This is an almost absolute guarantee
for a broken bone.
If this is the case the damage itself is the least of your problems. When you have a broken arm or
leg, people won’t give you a second look because your injury looks rather obvious. Two types of cast exist for thumb
injuries. The first one requires a slightly spread position of the hand while the white cast gets moulded around it. This
is the worst as you are now the owner of huge Mickey Mouse-like hand. The alternative isn’t that much better. A metallic
clamp is put over the thumb positioning it as far from the rest of the hand as possible, making the thumb literally stick
out like the proverbial sore one. It now seems you are either very supportive of people around you or trying to hitchhike
everywhere you go. God forbid you ever need two of them because you will permanently look like The Fonz going “Heeey!”
The prospect of this ordeal should make anyone very careful about punching someone. The result can be downright comical.
Nothing is sillier than a fight in which both opponents are dancing around each other, afraid to connect because a punch could
cause more damage to themselves than to the victim.
But no matter who fought or for how long, the result of every one
of these fights would invariably be the same each and every time: detention. And in detention, the use of thumbs came in very
handy – get it? – in order to write the hundreds upon hundreds of pages with the same line: I will not get into
fights.
I’ve always considered myself to be rather average.
But for a reason I haven’t yet been able to fully understand, I somehow tend
to end up with beautiful, intelligent girlfriends. Or, to put it slightly more accurately: ex-girlfriends. That, of course,
is the inevitable downside of the required intelligence factor.
This little introductory sidestep is made merely to explain
how I came to date Xena, Warrior Princess. Not the real Lucy Lawless but Susan, who may very well have been the inspiration
for the hit series and whose family name I am withholding for reasons that will become obvious soon.
I can imagine not
many male members of the heterosexual persuasion would say “no” to the thought of dating someone who looks like
TV’s beloved Amazonian beauty. However, I suspect a hint of doubt would rear its head when the relationship involved
someone who not only looks like Xena, but also acts like her.
Through an incalculable series of events, infinite possibilities,
me acting like me at the right times and, more importantly, not acting like me at the right times, the Universe paired me
up with the Goddess of Hurt.
The clubs we frequented in those days would send out very colourful flyers. Next to the theme
of the evening and the opening and closing time, they also included the time around which a fight would break out, followed
by estimated time of arrival of the police. Experience has taught me the police always arrived three minutes after the last
participant in the fight had fallen over.
Susan would actually enjoy partaking in the fights. I strongly suspect that,
if bored enough, she wouldn’t have thought twice about starting one herself. Often I found myself standing near the
bar, sipping my beer, while chatting to the ladies whose boyfriends were in the middle of the fray, getting pummelled by my
girlfriend.
“Which one is yours?” I would ask a cute brunette with a pink streak in her hair. Her answer,
preceded by a deep sigh of boredom betrayed the fact the situation wasn’t new to her: “Over there. Blue jeans,
black sweater, getting the living daylights beaten out of him by that Humvee with the Sepultura t-shirt.”
I would
cringe in sympathy and she would ask if I was either too scared or too smart to jump in. I quickly explained I was part of
a tag team, of which one member did most, if not all the work.
“Mine’s the one in the short skirt holding
the blonde with the mohawk in a choke hold.”
I would wave and shout “Hello, honey!”
She would stop,
smile broadly and wave back before rotating Mohawk’s arm in a manner it shouldn’t normally be able to.
The
evening usually ended with Susan making puppy dog eyes at the police officers, telling them she had nothing to do with anything.
It always worked. Mohawk wasn’t going to press charges because to some people exposing a bruised ego can be more painful
than bruised ribs.
Susan often told me she loved me and that we were going to
stay together forever. Our future was crystal clear. We knew where we would live, what cars we would drive, how many kids
we would have, what their names would be and what kind of dog we would get them.
I strongly believed in this well planned
future because I knew I was never going to break up with her. Due in no small part to the fact I was way too scared to do
so. But somewhere down the line, I noticed her growing interest in another man whose best feature was his uncanny ability
to display the cranial capacity of a hummingbird.
When I, albeit slightly drunk at the time so not really using my otherwise
superhuman diplomatic capabilities to their fullest extent, confronted Susan with this undeniable truth, she broke my heart…
my wrist, my arm and dislocated my shoulder.
Brad Pitt looks extremely cool all bruised and banged up in
movies where he is supposed to look cool being all bruised and banged up.
But most of us are not Brad Pitt. And when we
receive a fist to the face, the result is not painted on by an entire squadron in charge of make-up. It is the absolute truth
Brad Pitt, sporting a black eye and a bump on the forehead, looks like a hero who has gone through hard times.
It is the
absolute truth you, in real life, sporting a black eye and a bump on the forehead, will look like an imbecile who failed to
negotiate the little step at the end of an escalator.
The visually most interesting fight I participated in looked
like it should have been held in a saloon of one of those old cowboy movies. Almost everyone in the club was fighting almost
everyone. The only thing lacking to make it look authentic was someone in the corner who frantically kept playing the piano.
By today’s cultural standard, this task could have been taken over by the deejay. However, at that point, he was
unable to as he had received the first punch for playing Céline Dion’s “My heart will go on.” from the Titanic
soundtrack.
At first, I was standing safely near the bar, not wanting to
spill my drink. After all, judging by the price the club charged for a beer, the metaphor “liquid gold” made a
lot of sense.
To this day, I still blame that single beer for what followed because all of a sudden a perky voice inside
my head went: “Let’s join in.” I could hear my own voice taking a stance for a more rational approach of
the situation.
“Nu-uh! Way too dangerous.”
“Aaaaaw. Come on.”
The attempt Perky made to
convince me was so pathetic I got cocky. This is a big mistake. In my case, getting cocky will work when bluffing my way through
a bad hand at poker and it will bite me in the backside when boasting I can play Tomb Raider 2 without listening to instructions
first.
Basically, when it comes to being cocky, I really should be intelligent enough not play the odds. But I never claimed
to be intelligent.
“All right, Perky. If you are so smart, give me one good reason why I should.”
“This
is your chance to do what you always wanted to.”
At that point,
two things happened. The people standing next to me perked a brow and gave me some extra room because apparently I had been
talking out loud. But more importantly, Perky won the argument.
I
know the following confession is pure evil so I will make no attempt to justify or defend it. Just like in the movies, I always
wanted to tap someone on the shoulder and hit them as they turned around.
I know. I know. Daffy Duck, albeit with a lisp,
said it best: “You’re difpicable!” If there is indeed such a thing as reincarnation, I will surely come
back as the floor of a public restroom.
But not afraid of that possible nightmarish future I eagerly assumed the role
of predator and scanned the combatants for a suitable prey. My mind raced through a process of elimination, getting rid of
the more difficult adversaries.
“Too tall… Too strong… Susan… Too athletic…”
And
then I saw my target. It was a young, wiry college student. I knew him. I knew him very well. This was me, quite a few years
ago, eager to experience a real fight and totally oblivious of the actual pain a fist to the face will cause.
I smiled,
justifying my action as not being one of pummeler towards pummelee but more of a teacher towards a student. The walk towards
my victim almost seemed to be in slow-motion and I was thoroughly enjoying every nanosecond working up to the moment of impact.
And then, just as I was about to tap him on the shoulder, someone tapped on my shoulder.
I vaguely remember the floor getting raised to eye level at
a tremendous speed. The rest of the evening remains a bit of blur.
For me, it ended with a cut just under the left eye
and a headache that required every aspirin in the free world. I didn’t look like Brad Pitt but I didn’t look like
an escalator-idiot either.
The college student was less fortunate. When I saw him a week later he was wearing what appeared
to be a bright white, geeky-looking hockey mask. I overheard him saying he had a broken “nobe” which explained
why he looked like a laughable third cousin of Jason from the Friday The 13th franchise.
I genuinely felt bad for him.
Not just because, if I had hit him, I would have made sure not to hit him on the nose, but mostly because his wound couldn’t
provide him with a decent war story. It turned out that, a few seconds after my unscheduled exit, a friend of his slipped
and fell backwards, head-butting him right on the nose. Apparently “friendly fire” can also be achieved without
the use of guns.
I haven’t been in a fight since, assuming getting knocked
out cold with a single blow can be considered being “in” a fight. There is an off-chance I have gotten older and
wiser. Although a more realistic approach may be I really don’t enjoy pain and the price of band-aids keeps rising.
Sometimes I miss Susan. There is something comforting in driving
through the darker streets of the city when your passenger is a warm, soft-voiced, beautiful anti-carjack system. But then
the weather turns colder and suddenly I am struck by a blinding pain as a lightning bolt hits my wrist and travels through
my arm to explode into fireworks upon reaching the shoulder.
It is a constant reminder that, although probably I couldn’t
qualify as a self respecting man if I had avoided those fist fights, I could have opted for that other typical male solution,
and simply lie about them.
* * *
