Fist Fight 1985, a Nate Conway short story.

In 1985, I was fifteen, full of fury, or maybe unregulated testosterone, would be a better term.

Then I met Larry Pine. He was older, much larger than I, exponentially so- more everything than me really, so I decided to piss him off.

Fist Fight 1985.

I grew up in a fantasy of my own lore. This false mythos was curated by action films, sports fanaticism, and again, my new friend, raging testosterone. By the time I met up with Larry I had taken that melting pot of make believe and morphed it into truth; that I actually was, a ‘tough guy’. Of course none of this was based in fact, as it was before the immortal brawl of Ashland St, I had not actually been in any fight but rather a series of confrontations with schoolmates whereupon I took a particular odd boxing stance, placed a maniacal look in my eye and wore the persona of someone who knew how to throw down. This attitude sufficiently built my reputation, scared away any potential opponents and sufficiently fed my own mythology.

Except for Larry, as he wasn’t the philosophical type, and didn’t scare at all, nor was my father Vance, a bricklayer, who also would end up contributing to the lore of that fateful suburban afternoon, when I, Harry Lyle, kicked off the biggest brouhaha Lincoln County would ever know.

Some say Rome was not built in a day, and that good takes time, but I managed to set my fate with one flip of the bird.

To a guy who, many years later, would end up in State prison for his work for the local mob.

And this act of pure adolescent stupidity and hubris was committed on my first father’s day off in two months.

I can remember the conversation.

‘Warren, your Mom’s working in Littleton and me, well I took the day off to celebrate National Chess day, (even though we all knew he only played the game for quiet drinking time we respected his excuses). So please keep your knucklehead friends out of the house- it’s a big day for me and I appreciate the help.’

Then he lit a Marlboro and cracked a beer at nine AM.

Still that warning didn’t stop me nor did the pleadings of Bobby ‘biceps’ Benton, who after having told me the story of Larry’s toughness begged me not to search for the ‘the toughest kid in Bridgeton’. Because to me that was merely another chance to build upon my reputation as a scrapper.

‘He’ll take one look at my Sly Stallone snarl and then run for the hills’ I thought while chalking up another victory to the world of imagination.

After our conversation we rode our bikes along the pot holed streets to Larry’s house. I strode up to the front door and rang the doorbell. Mrs. Pine, the retired schoolteacher and sweetheart of a woman, answered the door to say her son was not home, and I delivered the coolest Charles Bronson inspired passive aggressive threat I could muster.

“Tell ‘em Warren is asking for him, Warren Lyle, he’ll know the name (he in fact, did not- yet).”

“Ok Warren, you can try the basketball court, he does love basketball.” She replied almost as an aside and closed the door. Some kids are wise beyond their years, I was not, in fact I was decidedly immature, dickish and like everyone with a chip on their shoulder, fully deserving of my disastrous fate. We found him at the Highland courts. He was a mountain of a youth which did nothing to stop my critical thinking to fail.

‘Hey Larry.’ I called from afar. The man-child with locks of sandy hair and shoulders that needed to be angled between most doorways turned, the ball palmed in his oversized mitt and peered at us with a look of both disgust and utter confusion.

I let it rip: high and hard, the old middle finger right down the lane to his view. The players stopped seemingly perplexed at the suicidal gesture. One player laughed too loud and Larry whipped the ball at the young man’s head. The others waited silently for his reaction.

“You’ll be seeing me soon enough tough guy.” I called out and then pedaled away.

“Aren’t you going to fight him?” Bobby asked while trying to catch up to me.

“He’ll get his soon enough but right now I have to see Melanie.” I replied as Larry began to sprint while howling descriptive obscenities. It was yet another curveball of strategy in my nuanced idiocy.

“He looks pretty mad’ Barry noted.

“That’s the plan Barry, that the plan.”

We biked away clueless to the rage behind us only to learn that the furious Larry would have caught us had it not been for Misty, the dog he tripped on and the beating he put on Misty’s owner. That debacle of fur and fists allowed us to ride away temporarily unscathed.

God I was a dumb kid.

After the bird flipped the coop, I went my way to Melanie’s house and Bobby went his.

We played video games at the arcade, bowled and drank flat soda from paper cups filled with too much ice. Unable to find a private place to make out we perused the town green, got kicked out of the library for kissing in the mimeograph room, stole cheap candy from the convenience store, and shared a slice of pizza before heading back to Bobbys’ to skateboard, listen to punk rock and smoke the ‘dirt weed’ Bobby had stolen from his Dad. In retrospect that sounds like a pretty good day for any youth as I was going about my business blissfully ignorant to the storm my hubris had kicked up.

I was trying to relight the dilapidated joint when Larry drove by in a truck that only a behemoth like Larry could drive. Bobby tripped up on his board, Maddie kept swaying to the music and when the brake lights came on I, for some reason- maybe it was the weed, Maddie or the natural gift of fear, whatever it had been-came to the sudden realization that I may have bit off more than I could chew. That he had indeed not been frightened by my middle index finger and bravado. His truck reversed direction with a grind of gears then stopped at the end of the driveway.

“Did you just fart?” Bobby asked.

I had no response while trying not to make any eye contact with Larry’s bulging gaze.

“Well you said you wanted to fight him Warren, now’s the chance.” Bobby was a good friend with a bad penchant for pointing out the obvious truth. The folly of my ego, my pretensions love of ‘tough guys’, kung fu and ‘fuck you punk rock attitude’ would finally prove to get the best of me.

“Hey Larry ( the more I recall, the more I remember how I was merely trying to save face in front of Melanie)- you came to the right place if you’re looking for an ass-kicking (he had not).” I tried to shout but it came out as more of a breathless high-pitched whine; non- Eastwood-esque by any cinematic terms.

His first meaty punch came with more of a sonic, out of body feeling than I’d imagined. The second was more grounding in that it knocked me to the asphalt. As the heavy blows kept falling upon my body I flailed, a proverbial fish out of water bounce, to protect my head while making odd animal grunts. To his credit, and everyone else determent, Bobby tried to help. Some thirty years and hundred pounds later, he still holds this to be true. He smashed his skateboard against Larry’s side (it was as high as his arms could reach). This pre-emptive strike only angered the snarling ogre but it gave me the much needed split second to get back on my feet and while Larry reached out and squeezed Bobby’s head not unlike the aforementioned basketball; just plucked the smaller boys head and lifted him off the ground, quite a feat of strength when you think of the physics.

Melanie, having witnessed my humiliating defeat from a safe distance, ran off in search of safety, but me, Mr. Intelligence, I saw an opportunity for revenge Chuck Norris style; I wanted to end the villain with a crescent kick. I thought this despite knowing full well I had no formal karate training beyond the stacks of VHS tapes in my bedroom. Needless to say the kick missed its mark completely and I ended up back on the hard ground face first. The awkward attempt was enough to turn Larry’s attention back to me. Having been released from the death clutch Bobby again returned to his weapon and as Larry bent over to give me another wallop he was smashed over the head by the skateboard. It shattered and for the first time we saw Larry wince.

“A fucking skateboard, you’re going to need a lot more than that.” He growled.

Had I merely taking my beating gracefully and accepted it as an act of adolescent rite of passage that some teenage boys feel they must endure the entire fiasco would have been avoided. I, on the other, at that age, in that moment, was an unavoidable mistake waiting to happen.

Thump. I punched Larry straight in the groin as hard, and with as much power as my untrained hands could muster up. He immediately stopped the strange threats of dismemberment and started to desperately gasp at the air. Bobby and I ran like hell; leaping hedges, scrambling pass irate retirees cleaning their pools, scaling fences, and dodging dogs as we bounded through the backyards of our neighborhood until we reached the safety of my house where my father, thankfully, was not to be found. We locked the front door to begin the process of preparing for Larry’s inevitable return.

Bobby had a sofa pillow duct taped to his torso, a hockey stick strapped to his back and an ill-fitting football helmet half cocked on his head. With my Asian style bandana strapped on tight, a Louisville slugger in one hand, and a trach can in the other I had gone a more theatrical route. Prepared for battle we turned off all the lights and prayed for ‘something good to happen’ as I remember it.

Being fully able to recite prayers at the drop of a hat was a benefit of our Catholic schooling, the stifling repression, I’m not sure that aided the cause, or was the cause of our foolish decisions. I mostly blame me because I’m not sure if JC himself could have gotten us out of the mess we now knew we were in. There were no prayers answered in a five-mile radius of my childhood home that day. The dread of anticipation filled the front living room like a John Carpenter soundtrack. Bobby frantically tried to call our friends, but their home telephones were answered by machines, siblings or busy signals.

Except for Melanie, ‘Maddie’, she knew, and that made it all the worse.

Her father, Trent McFadden, a court documented ‘hot head’ and certified auto mechanic who worked nearby was the first to hear the news and was always eager to find reasons to be furious.

Larry was also enjoying his ferocity by finding a known friend of ours Collen Chambliss who was admittedly, the local pot dealer and resident stoner. Somehow, despite living on the East coast, he was a mix of California cool and Rastafarian calm. Also Collen and his cronies were possibly one of the only social teenage groups not to have participate in the melee. They did however drive by slowly and then after seeing the insanity, sped away; ‘Not cool’ was their general consensus.

Chris told Larry my address before the big man could even get out of the car. I would have done the same but instead I was planting ill advised booby traps with Bobby ‘biceps’ Benton.

We had a plan devised of pure bullshit; a fishline trip followed by more obstacles, a blanket and an attack. There may have been paint involved as well but I can’t recall. I put a rusty multi tool I found from my short-term Boy Scout experiment in my pocket in case things got rough. None of the above proved helpful.

He snapped the fishing line like Godzilla and for the record, no one trips on marbles nor do they guffaw over Legos as it was in our case: nothing stopped him. Not even the maple syrup on the front steps: that actually pissed him off more than anything. He did smash through the nuisances and pound on the large oak door. From inside my dark front room dressed as a samurai fool I began to try and stop the shake cursing through my arms from the fear. We had hidden along the backside of the sofa but he sniffed us out.

“I know your in there.” He shouted into the small window. Not soon after the weird threats of death and destruction is when the ball really started to roll and the violence, regret and retaliation spread like peanut butter on white suburban bread.

Anthony ‘Allie’ DeSousa was at the time, coincidentally, another contender for the title of Littleton’s ‘Toughest SOB’ and happened to be out cruising with his friends; a decidedly unhinged group of boys who loved metal, cars and trouble. They were driving down Ashland St. and saw Larry smashing at my door. Inside we began to scramble for new weapons; anything to defend ourselves with. Allie and his friends saw it as an opportunity for fun.

As we cowered behind the worn fabric sofa little did Bobby or I know that this breathless moment was merely the calm before the storm and that it would get worse, much, much worse off for us very soon. A genial landscaper, Fulton Craig wandered over to see what all the commotion was. At that same time Trent was gunning his muscle car down the road searching for whomever ‘scared my little girl’. The week prior it was ‘the bastard that won’t pay me’ and before that ‘the fuckhead who dented my car’’, whatever the occasion was he relished in the reasons.

Larry’s basketball squad, seven total, hoping to see an ass kicking, watched from the bushes as the ‘hairbags’ approached Larry from behind. Fulton bagged one of the wasted thugs with his rake then kept Allie and the others at bay with the end of his tool. The basketball players responded by sprinting to assist. Trent whipped his Chevy into the driveway and Jo Jo Holloway, mailman, and former ‘professional’ wrestler, locally so at least, also ran to the scene unfolding.

A mile away at Madeline’s ranch home unbeknownst to us, word leaked out about ‘something big and bad was happening at Warren’s house- I can’t say anymore, just keep it a secret’. It may have been Maddie who admitted to having said those exact words by calling twelve of her closest friends. It was a bad secret to share.

Across town at Rollie’s Barbell someone told Bobby’s dad, Billy ‘Triceps’ Benson that his son was in trouble. Billy was, incidentally, late to the party because he had to make a protein shake before saving the day.

I didn’t bear witness to the tipping point but Fulton always claimed it was the large mailman storming up the walkway while shouting for peace that was the spark that lit the fuse by tackling Larry through my front door. In hindsight that sounds about right. We responded by not jumping into action but instead by running and jumping over the entangled combatants only to find more mayhem unfolding on the lawn. The metal heads and basketball players pulled Fulton in opposite directions. It appeared as if a Baroque Renaissance oil painting with grimaces, fallen angels and the clutches of hands. This was moments before the karate school arrived to settle on an old debt. It was soon to be a sea of madness with no escape from the waves of men, young, middle age and old dressed in various states of uniform: auto mechanic jumpers, construction hard hats, sports jerseys; one man was wearing a single boxing glove. All of it smashed together and impeding any chance of escape. There was no fighting back for me- it was crawling and the acceptance of blunt pain. Larry and Jo Jo continued their personal grudge match as throngs of people; drunks, miscreants and do-gooders arrived, ready to rumble either because they knew someone in the fight or they wanted to end it.

The first patrolman to arrive knew he was woefully underprepared and had no choice but to watch and hope another unit answered his call for assistance. Depending upon whom you speak with there are various versions of the story. That the police could have stopped it but didn’t. That someone bused in the Littleton Varsity football team. That there were upwards of two-hundred people involved in the scrum. I couldn’t confirm that because all I felt were the strikes to the back of my head and legs. Bobby hadn’t fared much better even though his dinosaur sized father finally arrived to swat away teenagers like gnats at a picnic. Just like any bad putting though the pests ended up being able to overcome and soon toppled the gargantuan bodybuilder then swarmed upon him like locusts. Bobby tried to stop the onslaught but was immediately spit out by the preying beasts.

Someone did lose an eye, but in all fairness, Carmen had significant optical damage prior to the fight. The weapons of choice were my father’s hand-crafted wooden Adirondack chairs. That may be the thing that to this day he still scoffs about.

“I paid a lot of money for those chairs”. He is oft to say.

There was also the rumor that the fisticuffs went on for so long that someone ordered a pizza. I wouldn’t have known because it felt like forever. I tried to channel my best Steve McQueen but it was hard to believe when you are being kicked in the stomach.

As in any emergency time began to unwind; fast and slow, all at once; manic to calm. I was wandering, being hit and trying to hit back but could never find the culprit. I didn’t know these people- except for my barber who had Allie in a headlock. I knew him. Larry held Jo Jo aloft before tossing the enormous mailman into the sea of entangled body parts.

Then it finally happened; the real big man of the house came home. My father parked his 1978 LeBaron at the curb. A pizza and six pack sat untouched on the passenger seat next to him. For a moment he just sat and watched the scene unfolding. His arrival had given me new strength, the kind that says ‘the world is coming to an end’, so I freed myself from the puzzle of violence, ran into my house, entered the bathroom overlooking the front lawn, locked the door and began to cry.

John Wayne I was not. It was not pretty, nor bold, but what came next was nothing short of audacious.

I watched from the safety of my guilt-ridden bathroom as my Dad, Vance Wyle, the man who had a master degree in the art of swear crafting and explosive outbursts, got out of the car as if nothing was amiss. Ignoring his home under she nonchalantly took a long haul from his Budweiser, lit a Marlboro with his engraved Zippo lighter, and leaned against his car to take it all in.

I can still hear the word Larry shouted to my Dad at that moment, on National Chess day, his only day off in months, while his beloved home was being demolished by strangers- and it has always made me wince- ‘cocksucker!’. The power and provocation of the word momentarily lulled the mayhem. The insult surely resonated with my father as he put down his beer, stubbed out the cigarette into the palm of his hand, raised his eyebrows to a oblong rectangle, dropped into a karate stance and began to threw an odd combination of kicks and punches at the air. The sensei in the crowd winced at the form. Larry seemed confused by the display or possibly the numerous blows to his cranium he had experienced that afternoon. From the bottom of a pile Jo Jo whispered…’White Moon Judo’ and another fallen combatant agreed. When I first saw it I felt truly hollow inside as to how obvious it was that it had been awhile since Vance had practiced or actually done any physically athletic in the past twenty years. It had remnants of the afternoon my elderly grandfather had tried to teach me soccer but broke a hip instead. But then again, things never shook out the way I thought they would; then or now.

I shouted from behind my shameful window- ‘Dad- don’t do it’, fully expecting to watch the exact thing no child every should bare witness to; Dad getting his ass kicked. On his day off. In his own front yard by a much younger man. The ultimate suburban dishonor.

Maybe Larry knew this, I doubt it, he wasn’t the honorable type, but for some reason Larry watched my father’s unorthodox fighting stance, the maniacal look in his eyes raging, trying to emit the persona of a man who knew what he was doing, and the big man quit. The giant had apparently seen enough of this wild man now spewing his own threats of violence, crushing beer bottles with his heels and shadow boxing, so he turned away to leave the fight behind him. Larry walked down the street limping as the cavalry of fire trucks and police wagons barreled down Ashland St. .

It didn’t take long after that to end it. Blasts of water propelled combatants across the lawn. Smoke bombs pelted the air. The dogs went hog wild- this was what they had signed up for- finally! My battleground of a front yard was being cleaned of all the detritus from the violent affair.

Watching it from the bathroom I took stock of my own condition. I felt as if a broken coward; truly beaten, my nose broken, a laceration on my brow that streamed blood into my eye and a foot shaped bruise that ran the length of my torso. I returned to the window knowing that any consequences my father would impose could not be worse than the feeling I held in my stomach. Watching the State Police herd the last of the unruly mob into wagon’s I let my mind drift as the masses of elbows and knees, screaming tounges and bloody men fought tooth and nail not to be dragged away.

I wondered- “How tough am I?”

Epilogue Spring 1986

Despite the madness not one single person was arrested that fateful day. Instead Chief Lowell detained them all in a football field until family members could pick them up or if they converted to Christianity, whichever came first. Part of the unconventional police chief’s plan was to have all of the indivduals involved in the ‘Ashland Brawl for it all’ as it was now called, put on a broadway-style, family friendly, variety show to celebrate Earth Day. The event was decidedly terrible.

On that day however, after the roughnecks had been rounded up, and the last of the municipal forces left, my father showed me a trick- how to put out a cigarette in your hand without it burning- told me it would ‘keep you out of more fights than not’.

End.