I have never been in a fight.
After I saw Apollo Creed’s fists turn Rocky’s face into a ketchup smeared pulp that was all the warning I needed. Individually, the closest I ever came was in ninth grade. Fortunately, when tensions escalated between me and the other guy, instead of throwing the first punch, he laid down the gauntlet by challenging me to a foot race. I think his words were, “Let’s settle this! You…. Me… race track… five minutes! Bring your track shoes!” Although I didn’t own track shoes, I had never breathed a bigger sigh of relief. Racing I could do. Getting a broken nose, I could not.
For some young men, it’s a rite of passage to have battled at least once. There are even gangs based on this tenet. You can’t enter unless five of your so-called friends are allowed to break your jaw. AHHH, friendship.
At the time, my group of friends’ initiation process wasn’t as extreme.
“Can you memorize the label on the Budweiser can?”
“Yes.”
“Welcome aboard.”
Despite our lax standards and dovelike ways, we managed to have our own “Outsiders” moment. Nineteen years old, we were drinking in a friend’s backyard, when the topic of some guy I had never heard of came up. I turned my attention to my friend, Pete, and the two of us began talking about something else entirely. Five minutes later, a pale version of the Hulk, named Chad, obviously on steroids and fired up about something I hadn’t heard a word of, took a baseball bat and slammed it on the ground.
“COME ON!” Chad yelled.
This got everybody out of their seats and ready to kick some ass. Pete and I looked at each other, bewildered. They seemed really pissed. I didn’t know what some guy had done, but it had the other six guys foaming at the mouth and talking about how it was imperative that we strike hard and fast against this beast. And Chad led the charge. The same guy who months before had let someone piss on his face for fifty dollars. “Lead on, Caesar!”
I got in line and followed anyway, piling into the back of Jason’s white Nissan truck with three other people. We were supposed to go to this stranger’s house and fight him, and, as an added bonus, his friends. Leaving the house, I couldn’t shake the image that our opponents would be men who made you crane your neck and say, “Oh my god.”
We already had the group fight dynamic all wrong. There’s a checklist to these things. Okay, we got the baseball bat part right, but we also needed some two by fours. Any fight sequence looks better with a couple of guys tapping some form of wood into their hands. And you need to have a uniform dress code. Matching t-shirts and colors, heavyweight belts, tattoos and a collective name. We were an amalgam of outfits, four of the guys were wearing sandals, a shoe that was last used for fighting during the fall of the Roman Empire, and the closest thing we had to a group name was, “We’re some dudes that hang out together.” The least we could have done is quickly huddle up and call ourselves “The Cobras.”
Besides, who goes to someone’s house for a big brawl? Such a brawl could quickly be averted by doing something like, … well, let me think … not opening the door perhaps?
Nonetheless, I sat in the back of Jason’s truck and wondered if I was going to have to fight. Jason played the fight theme song, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and there were a few steely-eyed stares I wasn’t used to, so it seemed possible this might be serious. When “Eye of the Tiger” first blasted out of the cab’s back window, even I felt a little buzz. But the fifth time through the song, and with total lack of knowledge of my supposed enemy, the buzz was definitely gone. It didn’t help that I kept repeating in my head, “Don’t get punched. Don’t get punched.”
We stopped on a suburban road and parked in front of a yellow ramble-style house. Chad was the first one out of the car we had followed to get there. He came over to Jason’s truck, bat in hand and said, “We’re not sure if it’s on this block, or the next.”
“You don’t know where it is?” someone in the back of the cab asked.
“I’ve only been there once. It might be this one here. I’m not sure.”
Chad walked up to the rambler and looked into the window. There was a family inside watching TV. They shot up in their seats and looked at Chad like an escaped gorilla. Before the father came out with a shotgun or his own baseball bat, Chad scurried back to the car.
“That’s not it!”
We drove down the block and stopped again. Chad got out and started towards another house. He stopped before walking down the stairs to the entryway.
“I think we’re in the wrong neighborhood. None of this looks familiar.”
This was embarrassing. People don’t go to a fight and take a wrong turn. You never hear about how the battle of Waterloo almost never happened because the men couldn’t find it. So, we headed off again without any idea of where we were going. The troops in the back of the truck were quickly getting restless.
“Does anybody even know this guy?” I asked.
No one in the back of the truck knew the guy. When Pete and I tried to find out what he had done, the others struggled for an answer. They said they thought he had shoved, or slept with, someone’s girlfriend, but they couldn’t be sure.
The steely-eyed stares evaporated and now there was a unanimous chorus of “I’m not fighting,” and “It’s fucking cold back here.”
We ended up in a similar neighborhood about a mile from where we were originally. Chad stated with assurance that the house in front of us was the one.
“You guys got my back, right?” He asked. Jason responded by restarting “Eye of the Tiger,” but the rest of us didn’t say anything.
I looked at him, trying to convey this message; “Do I know you?”
As Chad and someone else walked to the door, two of the guys laid down in the back of the cab, lit a few cigarettes, looked up into the sky and started talking about how they wanted to smoke some pot, but couldn’t figure out where their weed had gone––Oh yeah, we were ready.
I didn’t know exactly what we were supposed to do. If the guy and his friends showed up at the door, how was I supposed to get myself into such a rage that I would want to punch someone? I could maybe come up to them and start booing, but if I was to introduce more venom, their story was going to have to include the fact that they were the ones who brought back swing dancing.
I figured at this point, there should have been a change of plans. Instead of greeting the guys at the door with the pleasant request, “So, would you like to come out and get beat with this baseball bat?” we’d just hit them up for some weed.
Chad knocked on the door and I put my palms together, looked up into the sky, and prayed that no one answered. After five minutes of that, Chad was back at the truck, shrugging his shoulders and telling us that no one was home. He wasn’t even holding the bat anymore. It was official; “We’re some dudes that hang out together” were the worst gang fighters ever.
“The Cobras” would have remembered to go over the real keys to a gang fight. First, an actual gang of people who want to fight. Second, another group of people willing to partake in this process. And finally, telling the other gang to be at a particular location at a particular time.
THANK GOD FOR OUR INEPTITUDE!
We went back to the house and gave our interpretations of what happened. We did not have a great brawl story, the kind where years from now we could wistfully look back on the ass kicking phase of our life.
“Do you guys remember when Viper cold clocked that guy and didn’t even drop his beer!”?
“What can I say man, it was a Budweiser.”
At first, as if compensating for this, we lied. We recited some manly verses, mentioning how we could have totally taken them if given the chance. Eventually, though, we were making fun of ourselves, wondering what the hell we were doing going off to brawl.
We had no idea.
