Fighting

Everybody has stories they like to tell. Favorite stories. Some of us have stories we'd like to tell, but for one reason or another we cannot.

Maybe we're afraid of hurting somebody's feelings. Maybe we can no longer remember enough of the details in order to make the story interesting anymore. Or maybe we're just embarrassed that we've had a certain story swirling around among our memories for more than 60 years now without our telling it for the simple reason that we're fairly certain nobody really wants to hear it.

This is that kind of story.

Growing up in Richland in the mid-50s and 60s, most of the boys sooner or later, in one fashion or another, got in a fight. We just did. Maybe more than once or twice. Now, they weren't always a big deal kind of fight, and it never involved more than hitting each other with our fists. And even the biggest and most violent fights I ever witnessed or was part of had unwritten rules of conduct. You didn't kick anybody. Ever. If you knocked someone down, you let them get back up. If they wanted to quit, you let them. And you never ganged up on anybody. That kind of thing.

Oh, I know it all sounds silly to be talking about it now, especially as an old man lying here on my back in the middle of the night staring at my ceiling with my cell phone and plunking out the letters with my fat finger and trying to navigate around spell check in order to slip in a swear word here and there.

So yeah, sometimes some of us would fight. And I honestly don't think any of us ever had a good reason. Not that I can remember, anyway. And that old nonsense about two guys fighting over a girl just simply never happened. The girls hated it, and probably hated us, when we would get in fights. And they certainly never came around when the fighting was taking place.

But I saw some good fights, some real good fights, in junior high and high School. A couple memorable ones in the Zips parking lot with about 30 of us all gathered around in a rough circle while two guys threw wild roundhouse punches at each other out in the middle. I never saw a fight last more than a minute. Most of them were shorter than that. It wasn't that anybody was hurt all that bad; it was that people got tired of throwing punches. That takes a lot of energy.

But make no mistake. People did get hurt sometimes. I know I did, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I didn't quit, but getting hit in the nose takes all the fun out of it.

I saw two older guys, when I was a new sophomore, slug it out there in that parking lot on one of the first Friday nights of my sophomore year. And the police showed up and both of the boys, or young men, ran off through the crowd and around the building into the dark. I don't know if the cops caught them or not. But that was quite a night, and one I'll remember for as long as I live.

Sometimes we would all pile into cars and follow the two fighters out along the gravel road headed down toward the river. And then we would circle our cars and leave the headlights on, and the two fighters would throw punches in the semi darkness with dust rising up in front of the headlights there in the dark. Honest to God, I can still see it as plainly as though it were only last night, even though it was a lifetime of last nights ago, and even though I'm getting a little drowsy remembering it for you here in the safety of my warm bed.

That was the night I got hurt, the night on that gravel road down by the river.

I had to show up at my girlfriend's house the following night and greet her parents with one eye swollen completely shut. They were wary enough of me before that, anyway, because they weren't the sort of people who wanted their daughter going out with one of the boys who fought at night on gravel roads down by the river. Of course they weren't. But I remember my girlfriend had a 12-year-old brother who was hopping around excitedly in the hallway that night when I came over, and he saw my eye and knew what it meant.

And something about the innocent thrill he got out of seeing me hulking there in his home hallway with my wound, actually made my girlfriend's good father chuckle with amusement at the situation. And one moment sort of glided into the next, so that everything was more or less okay.

(Thank you for that, Rob. You saved the day).

So okay, I'm done here now. Except to reflect with you just how different things are now than they were then. How even going out on a gravel road in the middle of the night with 30 or 40 boys circling in the dark in front of their headlights while you fought had a kind of Innocence about it that, looking back, is a little embarrassing, but that carries with it no shame.

TDK '65'

• Fighting
  
• Parking
  
• Last Time Around
  
• Charlie Nevins
  
• Young Men And Fire
  
• Austin Healy
  
• Cathy
  
• David River's Birthday
  
• Han's Pavilion
  
• Muscles, Our Neighbor
  
• John Browne, Learning to Dance
  
• Your Brother Mark Browne
  
• Buster
  
• Celluloid Lies
  
• Nuked
  
• Learning to Box
  
• Dog and Goose
  
• Buses and Such
  
• Stealing
  
• Hookybobbing
  
• Stiles Old Upstairs Apartment
  
• Sign Of The Time
  
• Learning to Drive