My friend MM and I would go drinking in our youth in the early 1990s, and by saying going drinking, I mean we would go into bar after bar and drink a beer and a shot of whiskey and when the money ran out we ould either hit up a bartender friend of ours or break out a credit card. That is what I meant by drinking. We'd start at 10 Pm and go until we got drunk enough to punch each other. This is what we'd do for fun.
One time, MM picked up a newspaper dispenser from the sidewalk as we left
Mac's Club Deuce and threw it at me. It missed and hit one of our acquaintances and I called MM a pussy with no coordination. The acquaintance got angry and complained about the pain and how we were assholes. We laughed at him and told him to suck it up.
We would have respected him more if he had punched us right in the face.
This fighting was our Disneyland.
Usually around 2 AM, MM would start to pester me. And then he'd really annoy me by telling me that I was a pussy and then ask me what I was going to do about it. That, or I'd needle him about some stupid thing. And people we knew and didn't know would start to back away as I told him that if he didn't stop I was going to put him down.
And then we'd fight.
A few punches, some grappling; blood would be spilt. Usually MM 's blood. MM is a bleeder. Cuts in his forehead, from my rings, blood on his chin from me running his head into the floor or railing of a bar or when I'd take him down in the middle of a sidestreet off Washington Ave in South Beach. I'd usually bleed from the mouth from a busted lip. It's not that MM wasn't a good fighter, but that I had a slight weight advantage and I used to kickbox for a little while.
When you're fighting every other day, your body remebers pain; how to evade, how to damage. Fighting sharpens you.
When the fights were over, we'd sit there in the middle of the bar with stools overturned or the drywall busted from us throwing each other around, or lie in the middle of the street bleeding and laughing and going over the nights damage and laugh and laugh and people would stare at us and stop talking to us for months or the bartenders or owners of bars would throw us out of their fine establishments and tell us never to come back.
One time, MM rolled down the window in his girlfriend's car as I was driving us all home. The girlfriend was in the backseat, MM was riding shotgun. So he rolled down the window after I turned the AC on and I asked him not to do that because it was a typical hot, muggy South Beach night and I hated the sticky heat. I rolled back up the window with the power switch. MM rolled the window back down.
I could have locked the windows and not allowed him to do this, but I believe in freedom. I wanted to see what he'd do.
I rolled the window back up and told him that if he did it againI was going to hurt him.
MM rolled the window down again as he looked at me. I didn't even look at him because I could hear him snickering, hear the power windows motor working, feel the oppressive humidity flooding the car as my precious mechanical cold air escaped.
I backhanded him across the forhead sending his head back against the seat and I kept driving.
MM didn't like that, and as he put his hand to his forehead and saw blood on the hand, he looked at me and screamed "Why am I always the one that bleeds?" and I laughed high pitch anger in his voice.
I never saw the punch coming.
He hit me in the temple. And as everything slowly started to go black as if the curtain was falling on a broadway show and I was losing sight of the road, I managed to push the clutch in and knock the car out of gear, my brain telling my right foot to press the brake.
I came to with MM hanging outside of the car, hanging on to the roof of the car as he kicked me while I was passed out and strapped into the car. I undid the seatbelt, not noticing that we were in the middle of the road and I only managed to stop the car about four feet from a line of parked cars. I got out of the car and yelled at MM that he was a fucking asshole and that you don't fuck with the driver.
This is what not having any direction and too much liquor will do to you. This is what being angry at being forced to live in this world of go to college get a job get married have children grow old and die a faceless number will do to you in your youth.
More obscenities were yelled. His girlfriend was out of the car yelling, also. And I said, "You fucking moron, I'm going to kick your ass," and we went for each other. After we grappled and his MM 's girlfriend threatend to call the cops and leave us on the side of the road, we were forced into the backseat of the car and told to behave like unruly, devilish little children.
And as I looked out the window and ignored MM , I yelled, "Why am I always the one that bleeds?" in a mimicking, whiny bitch kind of tone. Then MM started to laugh and say that I was a pussy because I couldn't take a punch. And we laughed about it, went back to his girlfriend's house and had a beer and cooked an early breakfast.
We don't fight anymore. MM was the bestman at my wedding and he has a baby girl now. I have a loving wife that is so girly and loves me so much that I don't want her to see me in bruises and torn clothes. And we are both just older men now and not silly little immortal manchildren.
But you know what? Fighting, feeling the pain and inflicting it, was a lot of fun. I agree with Palahniuk/Durden: When you were at Fight Club, nothing else mattered. Not your future or your past or your shitty job or you near-do-well-just-getting-by school grades or your lack of a sexlife or your rich spoiled friends or politics or celebrity lifestyles or the entire world.
The only thing that mattered was the fight.
And I miss that simplicity in my life, with my mortgage and tax itemizations and gridlock and car payments and how I'm not where I want to be financially and employment wise right now in life. I miss the illusion of command it gives you.
I miss the fight.
