Fist Fight

Another story from the Dairy. In 1962-63, Tom F. was in his mid-teens. Tall and gangly, his long brown hair was seldom combed and always seemed to hang in his eyes. I loved his dry sense of humor, which made him seem so much older than he was. Although he could be very nice, polite, and intelligent, Tom was a young man filled with contradiction. He was a superb bowler and used to win quite a bit of money from unsuspecting strangers who thought they could easily out score such a skinny kid.

But the dark side of his personality threatened to wipe out all the good. Tom’s frequently violent temper and “don’t give a shit” attitude got him suspended almost regularly from high school for fighting and general insubordination. One day, after being conspicuously absent from the neighborhood for a week, he showed up at the Dairy with a very black eye and chipped front tooth. When I expressed surprise at his appearance, he sheepishly laughed and said he had been arrested and spent the week in the juvenile lock-up, where he got into a fight with a bigger boy and got his ass kicked.

One summer night after work, Tom asked if I could drive him to the Tower movie theater on Grand and Florissant on my way home. Of course I agreed. It was right on the way home. As we drove north on Grand Boulevard, Tom suddenly asked me to pull over for a minute. When I did he jumped out of the car and, before I could say a word, picked up a large metal trash container that was on the sidewalk and heaved it through the front plate glass window of a small TV repair shop.

The noise was loud enough to wake the dead and startled the crap out of me. Tom calmly got back into the car as if nothing unusual happened. Naturally, I speed away as fast as my car could go, praying no one had had the time to write down my license plate. When I angrily demanded to know what the fuck was going on, he told me his mother paid the guy who owned the store to repair her TV. But after she got the set back it was still broken. The store owner had refused to either return her money or make good the repair. So Tom, on the spur of the moment, decided that a little home-spun retributive justice of his own was appropriate.

The only real fist fight I ever had as an adult was very indirectly linked to Tom. One summer night after work, I swung by Faith Hospital to pick up my brother, Bill, who was working there at night cleaning floors, as Jack and I had done years before. All three of us got the jobs as a result of our relationship with the girls who lived on our street, whose father, Frank, was the Hospital Administrator.

While driving west on Natural Bridge Road, a car suddenly cut over, nearly hitting the front my car. Naturally, I jumped on the horn to register my protest. The guy in the car ahead stuck his middle finger out the window and stepped on his brakes, as if trying to get me to hit him from behind. Filled with the righteous piss and vinegar of youth, I sped ahead of him and pulled the same stunt, only I really did stand on the brakes, not just tap them lightly a few times as he had. The guy behind nearly smashed into us. I could see him screaming at me in the rear view mirror. Bill and I gave him the old horse laugh as he drove next to us, shouting unintelligible threats.

A few blocks later, at the last minute I turned right onto Goodfellow Boulevard, fully expecting the guy to miss the turn and drive on, effectively terminating the confrontation. No such luck. He made an illegal U-turn past the intersection and in a few seconds was right behind us, flashing his bright lights and screaming curses out the window, demanding that I pull over. A wild-eyed, crazed maniac. That’s when I knew real trouble was staring me in the face. And screaming.

I wasn’t about to lead someone like that to our house and let him know where we lived. So I turned left a block or two south of our street and pulled to the side of the road, half expecting him to drive on. His car skidded to a stop right behind my car. As he climbed out I realized I could be in a world of hurt. He was one big son of a bitch. Broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, about 6’2”, he had to out-weigh me by a minimum of thirty pounds. Oh shit, I thought. Trouble with a capital T.

After yelling at each other with typical macho bravado for a minute or two I realized that harsh words would not be the end of that situation. I started to take off the light golf jacket I was wearing over my tee-shirt so he couldn’t pull it over my head, as I had seen happen in a number of other fights, and beat the shit out of me. Before I could get it all the way off he smashed a fist the size of a rock-hard grapefruit into the side of my head. That’s when I realized I was in very deep shit indeed. My ear was ringing and my whole head hurt like hell. Luckily, I was able to dance away and throw the coat to the ground before he could thump me again.

The rest of the fight is somewhat of a daze. We hit each other quite a few times, both of us landing solid blows to the head and body. After the second or third solid shot to the general vicinity of my jaw I knew it was only a short time before I would be on my ass. The guy had a punch like a pile-driver. Although I was a lot quicker and got a lot more punches in, he was much stronger. The only things going for me were speed and agility. I was able to hit him two or three times for each of his but they didn’t seem to slow him down in the slightest. He kept coming as if I wasn’t there.

All the while Bill was jumping around behind him, swinging a tire iron he had taken from our trunk. I don’t think he ever hit the guy but he certainly distracted him a bit. Which was probably why I was still on my feet and half-way healthy.

That’s when I decided to change tactics before being knocked into next week or the hospital ward. I feinted with a straight right to his jaw and immediately brought a roundhouse left hook from my heels, leaning into it as hard as I could. It was certainly the hardest and luckiest punch I would ever throw in my life. It landed squarely on the side of his right forehead above his eye. He immediately screamed and dropped on his knees, holding his hands to his face. Blood squirted between his fingers and ran down his forearms in a bright red stream. In panic, worried I had ruptured his eye itself, I grabbed one hand and pulled it away from his face so I could see the wound. The ugly cut ran from below the outside corner of his eye curving up into the brow and continuing almost to the bridge of his nose. To my relief, it was a very deep and nasty cut but nothing terribly serious.

Just then he angrily pulled his hand away and snarled up at me. “I better never see you around here or I’ll really kick your ass.”

I couldn’t believe it. The guy was on his knees, blood running from his eyebrow as if from a faucet, and he had the nerve to threaten me. In my pumped up, elevated testosterone state I wasn’t about to take that shit. Making a fist, I punched him hard right on the cut. He screamed again, fell to the ground, and rolled onto his side. Not so gently, I nudged him with my foot.

“Hey, cocksucker. Next time I see you again I’m gonna hurt you bad. You hear me, motherfucker?” And kicked him square in the ribs to make sure he did. Not hard enough to injure him but certainly hard enough to get his attention. I wasn’t into being a mean prick.

Not wanting to stick around and wait for the cops to show up, Bill and I hopped into the car and drove two blocks home. I walked in the house still agitated and pumped full of adrenaline. When Mom saw the blood splattered all over my previously white tee-shirt her eyes nearly bulged out of her head. But I told her it was the other guy’s and went to the bathroom to clean up and change.

My left ear was hot and so swollen and painful I could hardly pull the damn tee-shirt over my head. I had to put ice cubes on the ear for an hour before the swelling subsided. In the meantime, Bill was as high as a kite. He ran around the house telling Mom and Dad about the fight, demonstrating how I did this and that. It was touching to see how proud he was of me.

Not quite a week later Bill and I were on the way home after working at the Dairy and stopped at Katz Drug Store in Pine Lawn to pick up one of Dad’s prescriptions. As I parked the car and started to get out who should be climbing into his car two spaces away but the guy I had the fight with. A large surgical pressure bandage wound around his head. He had obviously seen a doctor and probably had a fair number of stitches. Not wanting to look like a big pussy, I gave him as hard a stare as I could muster and held my breath, waiting to see what he would do. My blood pressure must have spiked into the stratosphere.

In that anxiety-laden moment, the guy’s eyes widened as he recognized me. But then he looked away, hurriedly got into his car, and drove away without another glance. What a tremendous relief! I wasn’t up to a second physical confrontation with a brute like that. I knew without question that the next time we fought he would kick my ass. So I determined to make sure there would be no next time by giving him the death stare.

Several days later, Tom F. came in the Dairy and told me a story about a good friend of his. The guy was a genuine hard ass, mean to the core, one of the toughest street fighters he knew. One night about a week before, his friend had been robbed at gunpoint. His entire paycheck was stolen. Just after that, on his way to his girlfriend’s house in Normandy, he had an argument with two guys in a car and got into a fight somewhere off Goodfellow. He got beat up so bad he had to go to the hospital.

When my eyes widened in disbelief, Tom asked me what was wrong. I asked him if the guy was walking around with a big pressure-type dressing on his stitches. He acknowledged that he did. So I told him the story from my point of view, naturally omitting the details that would make me look like a pussy or just plain lucky. He couldn’t believe it. He told me that his friend had beaten a couple guys in bar fights so bad they wound up in the hospital. He was one scary dude. I told Tom that as far as I was concerned it was a closed case and that was that. Which was when I truly understood how close I had come to being hurt badly. And determined never again to engage in insults on the roadway.

The story must have gotten around the Dairy neighborhood because for a couple weeks all the kids regarded me with fresh respect. It wasn’t a week after that things returned to normal.