Before you read, I’ve got a favor to ask. Listen to or purchase my first story collection on Amazon or at Bear Den Books. If you have, go to Amazon and leave a review. That’s all; now enjoy the show. — BGC
The truth is: I have a big mouth.
It’s not something I’m proud of. I admire the dudes who are capable of sitting quietly in corners, staring off into the distance, who don’t feel the urge to dump on every new pop song or trend. But instead, I’m the guy people pick out of obscurity for moments of unfiltered verbal throw-up. “Yo Brian, what do you think of the new Morgan Wallen track?” they prod, knowing I won’t fail to share an opinion, whether uninformed or sidesplitting, about everything.
I developed this character defect my freshman year of high school. Like any goofy-looking kid with no style or confidence, I was wary of predators lurking in the open savannah of the high school hallways, scanning for fresh blood. Once they set their sights, they’d pinpoint their victim’s biggest insecurity: a zit on the forehead, a pair of fake Adidas their mom bought at Payless, belly fat that leaked out from the bottom of their tee shirt. And then they’d fire guided missiles in their direction. In the aftermath of the explosion, hyenas would scour for scraps to bring back to their dens, recounting the humiliation to their friends and families as they devoured my flesh.
But I don’t blame them. Any moment in high school that my classmates spent pointing out the weaknesses of others meant I could relax and breathe easy, knowing my big head was safe from the enemy’s scope.
Of course, it didn’t always work out as I’d hoped. Talking smack is precisely what got me into trouble with Johnny and the Dominicans my sophomore year. But getting stomped out a few steps from my front door didn’t make me stop firing. It only made me more cautious about my adversaries.
For example, Chris.
This was a dude I had no reason to fear. He was from Jersey City but went to private school (soft) and was built like a beanpole. A month or so before the fight, we hung out a few times, smoking cigarettes behind the old A&P with Kurasz, Justin Amodeo, and the other kids in our social group who wanted to pass themselves off as cool but misunderstood rebels. We liked the same music and wore the same kinds of clothes—skinny blue jeans with tight-fitting band tee shirts. And apparently, we had the same taste in women.
Chris was not a threat to me. That is until he decided to date Jen.
It was the summer before junior year, and she and I were again working as camp counselors at Robinson School. Mickey’s dad had helped us get jobs there the summer before, a way to put some money in our pockets and keep us from spending every day locked in his attic blasting music from our amplifiers as we worked desperately to get our band Catullus signed to a record label before graduating.
Jen wasn’t a girl I’d typically like back then. But emo girls, with their studded belts and dramatic eyeliner, were few and far between in Hudson County. So I was satisfied with someone nice to look at, good to talk to, and who said yes when I asked them out on a date.
One summer night, we met at the park behind Veteran’s Stadium and talked about who-knows-what for two hours while staring out at the container ships on the other side of Newark Bay. At night, we’d speak on the landline after our parents went to bed. I wanted so badly to impress her—so badly to kiss her—but I was shy, broke, and 16 (not an ideal combo for making a relationship work, even with a nice girl who overlooked my ginormous dome and other hundred insecurities). Our relationship fizzled out when we went back to school in September.
Fast-forward a year, and I was still shy, broke, and no closer to kissing a girl when we returned to our summer jobs at Robinson School. Word got back to me that Jen was seeing Chris, the beanpole. This irked me for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that it meant he would kiss a girl before I did.
In the mid-2000s, male emo kids didn’t establish their place in the social hierarchy through typical qualifiers of masculinity. Being tough, good-looking, or wealthy didn’t matter. The alpha males were usually the skinny, dark-haired kids whose jeans fit tightest, bands rocked hardest, and who had girlfriends they’d make out with in full view of the rest of the buffaloes at the watering hole who lamented their (my) celibacy as they jealously stared on in wonder.
Like any teenage idiot, I had to show my dominance. And because we were in Bayonne and not the suburbs, I knew I had to do it the hard way.
That same week, Jen and I were supervising the kids playing in the schoolyard after lunch—which I skipped to try to get my weight down so that my gargantuan thighs wouldn’t rip my jeans down the crotch every time I’d throw a kick in the moshpit.
“You know I know your new boyfriend,” I said, playing it cool. “Not really a fan of him.”
“Oh really,” she said, disinterestedly.
“Yeah, I honestly can’t believe you’re into him,” I said, looking away into the breeze, trying to seem just as disinterested.
“What don’t you like about him?” she asked.
This was my opportunity to let go of the arrow. But I didn’t want to take a shot at something obvious like his personality or his track record with girls because I knew neither of us had those things. Instead, I aimed where I knew the tip would penetrate the deepest.
“He has bad hair,” I said matter-of-factly.
Two hours later, Mickey and I were in the middle of band practice when JD, our loveable leading man, got a phone call. I put down my guitar and Mickey his drumsticks as JD walked over to the corner of the room. An ominous feeling flooded the room.
“Word,” he said.
We couldn’t hear the person on the other end of the line only JD.
“Really? Outside?!”
My palms started to sweat.
“Word. He wants to throw hands?”
Oh no, what had I gotten myself into, I thought, as Mickey and I locked eyes.
“Word? Alright, I’ll tell him.”
On the two-block walk from Robinson to his house after work, I had felt pretty good about myself. “Dude, his hair does suck,” Mickey had said, cracking up, as we swept ours back then carefully lifted the longest strands in front of our left eyeballs. “I can’t believe you said that though.”
Now we were both rushing down the stairs, trying not to alert his parents, who were watching TV in the den. His bedroom faced the street. From the windows, we could see at least two dozen dudes lining the street in front of the house like a cackle of hyenas.
“Dude, we gotta get them out of here before GH sees,” Mickey told me.
JD called back and instructed the ringleader, a popular Hispanic kid I’d seen in the hallways at BHS but had never spoken to, to lead his crew around the corner to the back of the high school.
We’d meet them there.
Even though nearly 20 years have passed since this moment, my arms still tingle and sweat forms on my forehead as I relive the memory. I was minutes from the first real fistfight of my life not eight months after getting my head bashed in.
Because this was Bayonne, you could never guarantee a 1-on-1 would stay that way. So I looked around the attic at my four bandmates. In the corner was Mickey, my ride-or-die best friend, who would be there for me no matter how outmatched we were. JD, easily the best-looking and most popular of our crew, was a floater, straddling any number of social groups as long as there were cute girls and good vibes. I couldn’t count on him to jump in and risk his pretty face if things got out of hand.
It was the same for Cesar, our bassist, who went to school with Chris in Jersey City. Adam, our lead guitar player, was two years younger and had his grandma tailor his band tees so they’d better fit his torso: there was no way he was going to fight.
“I didn’t even eat today, bro,” I said to Mickey as we waited for Adam’s mom to pick him up before the rest of us took the short walk to the school.
Each step felt like a million paces into a new world. One that, in reality, I’d been secretly wishing for every time I turned on a UFC fight and shadowboxed in the kitchen. A thousand times, I had imagined myself avenging the clobbering I’d taken at the hands of the Dominicans. But now that I was within minutes of a bare-knuckle scrap, the vast gap between imagination and reality struck me like a haymaker to the jaw.
“You got this, son,” Mickey reassured me, patting my back. I was still wearing my green Robinson camp counselor tee shirt. Sweat was already forming in my armpits.
As we arrived at the spot where the fight would take place, the ringleader called Chris and me over.
“So I hear you two got beef?” he asked rhetorically in his baggy white tee shirt, his jeans sagging below his buttcheeks.
Chris nodded, looking like a bipedal giraffe. He was 6-foot-3 and weighed no more than 130 pounds. His legs reached to my chest, and his neck alone was the length of my forearm.
“I guess so,” I muttered, looking more like a cross between an our-of-shape rhinoceros or a corgi.
“You told Jen I had bad hair?” Chris asked, trying to sound formidable.
“Yeah, you do,” I said, trying not to let my voice crack.
The ringleader, who had assigned himself the role of referee, paused for a second, dumbfounded by the source of the conflict. But neither he nor the two dozen other people in attendance—a hodgepodge of grungy kids we sort of knew and thugs we’d never met but who had heard there’d be a fight and wanted to witness the spectacle regardless of the opponents—were interested in mediation.
“Alright, let’s do this then,” the ringleader said.
He announced the ground rules to the crowd: 1-on-1, only hands, the fight’s over when one man is either unconscious or quits.
If I could go back in time and redo the next moments, I would’ve immediately started bouncing on the balls of my feet like Mike Tyson. I’d have cracked the bones in my neck, done anything to bluff that I had no doubt I would come out on top. Instead, I nervously stepped back a few paces and strained to summon any skills I might’ve somehow absorbed through observing Andrei Arlovski, Chuck Liddell, and Chris Leben gore dudes in the octagon.
“FIGHT’S ON!” the ringleader shouted, raising his hand and slashing the air in front of his chest.
Chris came at me first, his fists at his face. We both stood orthodox, our left legs in front and right hands cocked slightly back. Only punks retreat, so I knew I couldn’t take a step backward, just sideways. I also knew not to circle to his left, where I’d be vulnerable to his power hand (I learned this from listening to Joe Rogan on fight nights.)
I stepped in to throw a jab with my left, but before it split the gap Chris caught me with his own, right on the button. I tried again, and he hit me again. And again. His arms were twice the length of mine, and by the fourth time he connected, blood poured from my nose like a faucet.
“You done?” he asked, shifting his weight between his front and back legs, growing in confidence, cracking his bloodied knuckles before getting back in his stance.
“No, let’s fight, dude,” I shouted.
A roar erupted from the crowd. I could see Mickey nervously looking on, nodding his head toward me in affirmation. “You got this, bro,” he whispered quietly so that none of the hooligans turned on him for showing favor to the wrong fighter.
I stepped in and threw a looping overhand right. Even if Chris did catch me with another jab, as long as I connected with a harder shot, I could knock him on his butt. But my punch fell short and I ate another stinging jab that caused tears to form in my eyes.
Screw this, I told myself, rubbing the tears away and shaking my hands out before reloading.
I suddenly remembered that in the UFC fights I’d watched on TV, short, stocky dudes matched up against much taller guys like Chis never let the fight stay standing. I had to find a way to get him to the ground, where it didn’t matter that I was a foot shorter.
What I want to believe happened next is that I executed a perfectly timed, classic judo takedown—a technique that I’d watched UFC vet Karo Parisyan repeatedly employ inside the cage. Closing the distance, I stepped just inside Chris’s range, tempting him to throw another punch. As he did, I wrapped my right arm over his left and used his momentum to lay him flat on his back with the most effortless of movements…
In reality, I rushed in and grabbed Chris by his head.
I couldn’t get him down because I’d never actually trained to throw someone on the floor using their momentum. So I sort of held him there in a headlock. His arms were so long that he could still hit me even as I held his face down toward the concrete. His arms flailed and his right and left fists connected, rattling my equilibrium. I knew that if I ate another punch or two, I’d have to let go, losing my advantage.
I wrenched with all my might as if his giraffe neck were a jar of mayonnaise I was trying to rip open. Finally, after exerting all my strength, I was able to pull him to the ground. It was instantly apparent that Chris hadn’t been watching UFC fights like I had when I was able to maneuver my legs to end up sitting right on top of his chest.
I could hear Joe Rogan screaming from somewhere in California:
HE’S GOT THE MOUNT! BIG HEAD’S GOT THE MOUNT! BEANPOLE HAS GOTTA MOVE HERE, MIKE. BIG HEAD IS IN THE PERFECT POSITION TO END THIS FIGHT.
Mike Goldberg, Rogan’s longtime UFC commentary partner—also somewhere in California or inside a hallucination deep inside my deranged mind—responded:
LOOKS LIKE IT’S TIME FOR SOME GROUND AND POUND, JOE. BIG HEAD’S GOT ALL THE MOMENTUM HERE!
I rained blows down on my opponent’s face. He squirmed underneath my weight; I was at least 50 pounds heavier and wasn’t going anywhere. I was finally the gorilla.
Chris tried in vain to cover his face, but I was relentless. In that instant, he became every Dominican thug, every emo kid from the suburbs who kissed girls when I didn’t, every kid who’d ever made fun of me in school, even my dad wondering out loud whether I was really his son or some punishment from God with my weird hair and eccentric mannerisms.
BOOM.
CRASH.
BOOM.
CRASH.
“I quit, I quit!” Chris shouted from beneath me. “That’s it, I’m done.”
“You’re done?” I asked, loud enough so that the ringleader-turned-referee knew the fight was over.
“Yeah, I’m done.”
I was breathing heavy, but I refused to get up until the ringleader approached to evaluate the situation for himself.
“Stand them up!” one of the thugs shouted. There was murmuring in the crowd. Apparently, none of them had ever watched a televised fight or listened to the pre-established rules of combat. “They gotta throw hands!” they screamed, imploring the emperor to signal for the onslaught to continue.
Mickey, all 5-foot-7 and 100 pounds of him, swept his hair back, puffed out his chest, and stepped in.
“He said it’s over,” he muttered bravely.
“Shut the f*ck up!” another bystander shouted, feinting to throw a punch as Mickey retreated.
“He’s right,” the ringleader said. “Fight’s over!”
A collective sight of disappointment emerged from the crowd. I looked at Chris, and he at me. He extended a hand; I met it with mine. “Good fight,” we uttered in sync. In each other’s gazes, we could see a resigned acknowledgment that we were both pawns swept up in a moment much bigger than either of us had imagined.
My crew and I walked back to Mickey’s and got in Cesar’s car.
“Time to celebrate,” JD announced like a proud older brother. He and Mickey were slapping my back again, bouncing in the back of the car, shouting from the open windows. Cesar was dropping JD off for his shift at Magic Fountain, Bayonne’s famous ice cream and shake stand on the corner of 43rd and Broadway. “Anything you want, it’s on me!” JD said.
I ordered an extra large chocolate milkshake and asked Cesar to drop me off at home.
Once inside, I went to the sink to wash off my face. The blood had dried along my lip. My mouth was swollen, and I had scratches on my cheek and forehead where Chris’s blows had landed. But I stared at myself in the mirror with a sense of pride.
I couldn’t wait until my dad got home to tell him.
I sat in the kitchen chair with the same shirt I wore during the fight. It was stretched out in the neck and had a tear along the sleeve. But once my dad would enter the room, I was sure he’d smell the heroism in the air.
I sat, trying to look masculine and self-assured, waiting to hear the keys in the front door and his footsteps on the stairs. I waited and waited, hoping my mom or brother didn’t come in first.
Eventually, I heard the keys.
“What happened to you?” my dad asked as I sat stoically with the TV off.
“I got into a fight,” I responded, emotionless.
“You win?” he asked. He smelled like dirt, hard work, and cigarettes.
“Yeah, I beat him up pretty good,” I responded.
“Then why does your face look like that?” He pointed to my swollen lip.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He grunted, working up phlegm, which he swallowed. I was waiting for him to tell me he was proud of me. That I’d made amends for being outed as soft by the gang of Dominicans months earlier. That he didn’t care my hair looked like a girl’s or that I pouted every time he asked me to help with his tools or to cancel my Saturday morning plans of sleeping in and playing guitar because I needed to go with him on a plumbing job.
As I waited, my dad removed his watch and set down his wallet. We were completely alone. He paused for a second then put them back on.
“I gotta go do a job at Manuel’s,” he said. “Tell Mommy I’ll be back in two hours.”
“Okay,” I said, as he turned to walk out the door.
I got up and washed the rest of the blood from my face. You win some, you lose some, I guess.