I Once Had The Ever-Living Shit Beaten Out Of Me
If you’re familiar with my body, you probably think I’m undefeated when it comes to fist fights. I don’t blame you–my quick twitch muscles fire so fast that most people assume I’m a meth addict, and a crowd of schoolchildren once mistook me for an actual Avenger, because I told them I was an Avenger, because children are fucking stupid.
But you’d be woefully wrong. My lifetime record in fist fights is 1-1-1. But before we go any further, let me state for the record that fighting is the dumbest thing on earth. Street fights are a terrific way to learn that many people carry weapons, and that your body is filled with all sorts of intricate devices that, if punctured with a prison spork, will leak and fail and cause you to die with your pants full of shit. I’ve envisioned this scenario many times because I have a flair for heroism. I like breaking up fights, especially if the two sides are of different ethnicities, because it makes me feel like I’m doing my part to bring the world closer together. Haha obviously that’s a joke–I do it because I want someone to tape the scene with their phone, caption the video “privileged white Harvard grad stops fight, ends racism once and for all, earns honorary ‘brother’ status by black delegation” and upload it to youtube where it will EXPLODE as a beacon of light in our shadowed world.
With that out of the way, here is the tale of my first street fight. I was a sophomore at fair Harvard, halfway through my year, and home in Maine for Christmas break. Our family always spends Christmas together because my parents aren’t divorced and we all love each other which is why I respect women even though I prefer the company of men. December 23rd, the eve of Christmas eve, is a big night for partying and reconnecting with your old high school friends, all of whom are ready to show off their increased drinking tolerance and newfound frat vocabulary. And so it was that my friends and I went out to the Old Port in Portland, where the cobblestone streets were slick with a wintry mix even before our bar crawl began.
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The nightlife scene in Portland is fun, albeit limited. It consists of a couple blocks of local bars that serve craft beers on tap and smell, throughout, of the bathroom. If you’re not from Maine, the one thing you notice is how big everyone is. The guys wear thick beards and flannels and heavy work boots and won’t look away if you bump shoulders as you pass. People are friendly until they aren’t, and that switch can turn quicker than the tides. As sophomores, this was our first real trip to the bars downtown. We finally had suitable IDs, passed down from older classmates who had aged into the legality of their own credentials. Once inside, we would cheekily pass the IDs around and laugh at the lack of likeness between the picture and the card’s underage caretaker. Stupid bouncers! That’s not me!
Last call in Maine is 1AM. It’s outrageously early and has the effect of front-loading and accelerating the drinking of anyone looking to makeout on the dance floor before the lights come on. Of course, the odds of that happening are super low anyway, given that Maine suffers from that defining New England syndrome of imbalanced gender ratios. Like Boston, it’s about 3 guys to every girl wherever you go out. And like Boston, the sexual frustration of mateless males can lead to aggression. Between the reckless drinking, the scarcity of women, and the big-bodied testosterone of Portland’s bar scene, you have the ingredients for a pretty nasty brawl at every turn.
As the lights came on at Bull Feeney’s, my friends and I went the way of so many others who want more from the evening. Bill’s Pizza is a mainstay for the after-bar crowd because it remains open until 2AM. We stumbled into the cozy pizza joint and found a booth. I quickly spotted some guys that I’d played sports with from a rival high school and went to catch up, leaving my un-athletic friends to play with their un-athletic dicks. I wasn’t really friends with these other guys, but we were friendly enough and I was excited to re-hash our rivalry and remind them how many times I’d torched them top cheese thanks to my superior genetic makeup and the support of my nuclear, cohesive family. As I slid into their booth, they slid a slice my way and we began to weave our myths of self-importance together.
Moments later, the door opened and two girls entered in a state of chaos. They were screaming at each other, on the verge of blows, and making a terrific ruckus. Behind them, their two boyfriends and two of their friends stomped in, shaking the sleet from their collars as they tried to pull the women apart. It was the PERFECT entertainment for a group of pizza-faced morons, crammed into a booth, at the end of a night of holiday revelry. We giggled through mouthfuls of cheese and slapped each other on the back, pointing out the similarities between this group and the hit show Jersey Shore, which had premiered just a few weeks before.
“Hey look, it’s JWoww and Sam!” yelled one of my boothmates.
At that, one of the boyfriends detached himself and came to our table. He was fucking enormous. Thicker than a Cliff bar, he looked like he’d been pulling lobster traps from the ocean with his bare hands ever since his father handed him the keys to their boat on the morning he went away for 25-to-life. I remember his width. Had he been a penis, guys and girls alike would have said no chance.
“Hey guys, don’t egg them on. We’re trying to get them to chill out,” he said, quite fairly.
“Keep your dogs on a leash,” muttered the guy to my right, incapable of spotting death when it was staring him in the face.
WHAM.
It happened so quickly that I didn’t see it. I remember that all of a sudden, the remaining pizza slices were covered in blood. I looked up from the pizza to the face of the kid who had made the dog comment, and he was cupping his hands in front of his nose. His hands were filled with a pool of blood and his nose was hanging at a crazy angle. My first thought was… fuck, I can’t eat those slices now because of the AIDs epidemic. And then all hell broke loose.
Our group of 4 slid out of the booth, leaving our shattered man to stuff handfuls of napkins against his crumpled face. I was in a strange spot because, again, I wasn’t really friends with these guys. But I’d never been in a fight and I’d spent a lot of time watching Mike Tyson knockout compilations, so I felt prepared and justified in going to war. The assailant started backing towards the pizza counter as our team yelled, “what the heck, man?!” His cronies quickly joined ranks, and there was a lot of pushing and shoving, but no punches because we all respected the sanctity of the pizza parlor. One of the employees, who had watched the entire scene unfold, wisely pulled the fire alarm and yelled, “the cops are on their way!” As one, our entire muddled mass spilled out into the street. And that’s when the fists started flying.
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I was the first of our group to get outside, and the first person I spotted was the guy who had thrown the punch that broke our guy’s nose and ruined the pizza. I felt the inevitability of my situation; I didn’t have a choice. It was time to dance, and I had a partner who looked extremely willing. I closed the distance between us and swung a long, looping hook shot of a “punch” from behind my shoulder. Imagine a pinwheel punch, as though you were trying to bop someone on top of their head. In 7th grade, I told a girl I was going to try to kiss her 10 minutes before I finally gathered the courage to do it, at which point her parents had picked her up from the movie. But even that kiss was less telegraphed than my punch. My target lazily took a step back, enjoyed the breeze from my harmless, passing fist, and took aim at my face which sat unguarded like a pie cooling on a windowsill. Using the momentum of my miss, he guided my head to the ground with a jab that I can still feel when I chew gum for too long.
I had no idea what was going on around me, but I was on my hands and knees on the brick sidewalk, and I was in big trouble. My opponent hopped a leg over my back and straddled me like a pony, which I thought was a little dehumanizing. He then grabbed the back of my shirt, lifted my face to a convenient height, and started smashing me in the side of the face with his croquet mallet fists. I was pretty drunk, so I didn’t feel a whole lot, but I was aware that the world was shaking violently around me. Sparks flew in my brain and I thought about the book, “The Education of Little Tree,” in which the protagonist finds his happy place in the woods to escape the ruler beatings of his catholic school teacher. After about 6-8 perfectly-landed punches, I’m pretty sure he grew tired and let me crumple to the sidewalk.
I lay there for a few minutes, just chillin’. The brick was cool on my face and I wasn’t in a rush. The pizza was probably cold by now anyway. Oh, and it was covered in blood. I could hear the fire alarm blaring through the doors of Bill’s Pizza. I slowly pushed myself to my knees, and then to my feet, and took stock of my surroundings. Everyone else appeared to have tied. Each of our guys had paired off against one of their guys, and most of those fights had turned to wrestling matches that had petered out due to fatigue. Bodies lay strewn across the sidewalk in tattered shirts and sweaters, gasping for breath but largely unhurt. Meanwhile, my sparring partner was handing out orange slices and eucalyptus towels to the fallen fighters of both teams. He was completely untouched, not a hair out of place. He looked like Mitt Romney after a bath.
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By contrast, my face was a mangled mass of hamburger meat. I would later find out that I had hairline fractures in my gums, half a tooth missing, a heavy concussion, and a completely broken nose that had shifted a long way left. Woozy, I stumbled to the guy who had gotten his daily cardio fix on my jaw just moments before.
“Hey man, are you ok?” I asked.
“Yoooo, you don’t look so good man.” He reached out and grabbed my shoulder, steadying me.
“Dude, it’s all good. That was awesome,” I said, grinning. A mouthful of blood spilled out of my cracked lip. “You really beat the shit out of me.”
I was so happy. I don’t know why. At the time, I thought it was really cool to learn that I could officially take a punch. I didn’t have a glass jaw; I had taken a beaten and I was still standing, kind of. This, to me, was the true measure of a man.
I shook hands with my guy. It was surreal. I legitimately thanked him for punching me in the face. Maybe I was grateful that he had backed off when he realized that I was completely useless in the fight game. But either way, I felt an immense sense of gratitude and relief as their group piled into a cab.
Meanwhile, my guys had to take care of the kid with the broken nose. I assured them that I was fine, so they hopped in a cab and took him to hospital, leaving me with my friends from high school. Now, these guys had not lifted a fucking finger, but I don’t blame them for joining in. The one guy they knew in the fight (me) was getting beaten by the biggest bear on the other squad. It was a lesson I deserved to learn on my own. Still, we jumped in our own cab and went back to my buddy’s place, where we rehashed the evening time and again. Finally, as the adrenaline ebbed from my veins, I headed upstairs and passed out, happier than a clam.
At 6AM, I woke up screaming. The alcohol had worn off, and my face was on fire. I stumbled to the bathroom and immediately puked up all the blood I had swallowed during the night. Reality was setting in, and I needed help. I pulled my clothes on gingerly, expanding the neck hole of my shirt so that none of it would touch my nose. I couldn’t breathe and the vision in my right eye was half-blurry. I spent the 20-minute drive home concocting cockamamie stories to explain to my mother why my face looked like the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan. Finding nothing that would hold up, I ended up telling her the truth. Believe it or not, she was thoroughly displeased as she drove me to get emergency dental work done on Christmas Eve.
As it turns out, I can’t take a punch. It took me 3 weeks before I could eat solid food. But I’ll tell you this–thanks to my face, that big guy didn’t hurt anyone else that night. I’m proud of that.