Never fight fair



 

Sure it’s a drag to get in this much trouble my first day in high school.

I don’t like going to jail

Not even when I was in junior high school.

But with two junior high schools on our town, half the kids I meet in the high school halls don’t know me.

And don’t know they need to be afraid of me.

So I need to do something right away or else even the kids who fear me might think they don’t have to now that we’ve graduated to this place.

The last thing I need is to spend my whole freshman year hammering on people’s heads just to remind them I’m still tough.

Some people might even try and laugh at me.

And if there’s anything that makes me go crazy it’s having people laugh at me.

So I look around for someone I can make an example out of it.

That’s when I see this skinny kids chatting away with some girls in the hall.

I walk right up to him and tell him to give me five bucks.

He looks at me and asks me why

I tell him because I want it.

Then the kid tells me to fuck off.

The girls laugh.

I see red, then grab the asshole by the collar and proceed to wail on him.

Except after a minute, I realize I’m not winning.

In fact, this skinny kid’s fists wail on me so I’m barely holding my own.

Right then and there I realize I’m in the fight of my life.

So I do what I always do when I can’t win.

I cheat.

One kick to the kid’s crotch and he bends over like a pretzel.

After that I wail on him until he’s squirming on the floor.

I don’t know who calls the cops.

But the next minute, I’m pressed against the wall with two blue shirt brutes breathing hard in my face telling me they’ll break my neck if I move.

Later, in a jail cell, I hear one of the cops saying that the skinny kid is the son of the mayor.

He also happens to be the boxing champ from the other junior high school.

Strangely, this pleases the hell out of me.

Maybe the court will hammer me.

But word will get around school that I beat up the mayor’s son because he wouldn’t give me five bucks.

And nobody’s gonna mess with me after that.

 



Main Menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crystal clear

Image
    I clean the windows once a week, squeaky clean so I can see the whole street, as there is no glass at all, and I see every detail of every tree and house the smudges blind me to sometimes. I have no acute fascination with what goes out there or in the houses of my neighbors; I just don’t like not knowing things, half the reason I troll news websites knowing I won’t like or agree what I get yet determined to know what it is I disagree with. My neighbors think I’m nosy because they see me when I see them, and they snarl at me when I come out to collect the newspaper from my doorstep, saying untrue things perhaps to get me angry. I mostly don’t talk with them when I don’t have to, and I listen to them only when they complain about my dog being off his leach and leaving not-so-friendly calling cards on their manicured lawns. Sometimes I see too much, the domestic disputes through their unguarded windows, shades down as husband-and-wife shout things I cannot hear, kno...
Read more

Oh what a strange trip it’s been

Image
  They’re all gone. The people and the visions. Though the living room looks like Kansas after Dorothy left it. Food strewn across the carpet, revealed in the orange wedge of sunlight as I throw open the porch curtain to let in fresh air. The place smells of pot and hormones -- ashtrays overflowing with the endless parade of more ordinary cigarettes. Butts even float in the bottoms of almost empty wine bottles. I smell him, the stranger who stalked my girlfriend all night, giving us both hits of LSD as if the each tiny tablet was key for his getting between her legs. His heavy cologne stains me with the outraged I was too stoned to stop. She slumbers in the other room alone as I stand naked, bathed in sunlight. I am changed. A chemical reaction running me in a way I can’t describe, as if I was the rape victim, as if my virgin thoughts have been violated by the light show and the hallucinations, s if I am some new person craving to get back to what I once was. I’m too scared to wake...
Read more

Am I in hell?

Image
The wind blows across the Texas Panhandle like sandpaper across my face, a harsh sun making this dip south feel like a trip through hell. I think of LA and how much I miss its dismal streets and how I ache to get back to a place where rain takes a whole season to wash the world away, rather than this place which dumps it all on you at once after months of slow scalding torture. I keep thinking I’m already dead, despite the doctors’ claims – they asking me again and again if I’ve ever used a dirty needle or made love to another man. They make assumptions about me because my driver’s license says I live in LA. They ask me for a list of lovers, then shake their heads when I give them one, trying hard to make out the boy’s names from the girl’s, and wondering how on earth they will manage to contact them all, eyeing me as if they suspected me of deliberately spreading a plague. The car radio naturally stopped working in St. Louis. So I feel again in the glove compartment for the box of bat...
Read more