I put on my dad’s Vietnam fatigues and helmet. He appears in the laundry room where I am dressing, and takes me to task about how my costume is not appropriate for Halloween. It’s almost as if he’s baiting me to present anything that might be horrifying or monstrous about the U.S. military. I demur.
I walk outside to find Ben waiting for me in his mom’s Mercury Cougar. In my right hand is a small orange duffle bag with the Gulf logo on it. Inside are six cans of shaving cream and six rolls of toilet paper. I’m not even sure what we’re going to do with them, but I purchased them earlier that afternoon just in case some hilarious opportunity were to present itself.
We go to Steve’s house, who will be driving us for the evening’s shenanigans. Suddenly inspired, I spray shaving cream over his license plates. This will disguise our identities! He is not amused.
We drive around the neighborhood, looking for people from our high school. Girls, really. Someone heard that Katie and three of the many girls named Jenny were all gonna be over near such-and-such place. We go.
We pull up to a crowd of teens who are milling about listlessly. Some of them chuck empty aluminum cans into the sparse pine woods that border our suburban neighborhood. Some laugh about the trick-or-treat candy they are too old to have collected. We get out. We mingle.
This place is dead, huh? Yeah, all places are dead. Who picked this place? I think Jenny. Jenny D? No, the other Jenny D. Well where are they? I dunno, probably on their way. Well I hope so – I don’t want stand around here looking at you dicks.
Time passes. The girls do not show.
This place sucks. All places suck. Should we go? Yeah. Where? Dunno – some other sucky place. Where’s Ben? In the woods I think. Why is he in the woods? Probably pissing. Somebody: “Stupid Mexican!”. Ben, from the woods: “I am NOT a Mexican! I am a Colombian/Ecuadorian!”
A truck pulls up with four guys, all of whom will remain nameless, and instead be referred to simply by the initials B, E, T and M.
M was their leader. The rumor was that he was on steroids, but whether or not that was true, he was always angry and always aggressive. He was a tightly muscled bag of meat who stood all of four feet high. It was hard to be afraid of him, because you felt like you could just put your hand on his forehead and keep him at bay until his next scheduled feeding. But he was certainly unpleasant.
B was the human version of Salacious Crum, the laughing muppet who sits at the side of Jabba the Hut. He was held back a grade I think, a freshman who ran with sophomores, and he was full of some strange contempt for those of us who hadn’t been.
E was like a regrettable, lumbering cyclops who had wandered out of Tartarus and simply fell in with the wrong bunch. Dumb, slow, and capable of great good or evil depending on who was giving him suggestions.
And T was relatively harmless, though he talked a big game. He once punched my buddy Tom right in the face and then immediately apologized when Tom didn’t even flinch from the blow. You gotta know your limits, and when you’ve exceeded them, and he had clearly known then.
I’m standing, talking to someone I don’t recall, when they arrive. They move quickly through our number, like pirates on some kind of raid. B suddenly leaps forward at me – at me? – and grabs my duffle bag. I am still holding it, and he is now holding it too, and tugging furiously while I resist. He’s cursing at me, telling me to give it to him, and I’m utterly bewildered at what is happening. Did he mistake this for his own bag? Is he somehow missing the exact same kind of bag, and saw me with it and thinks I took it? It doesn’t occur to me that he is trying to rob me – only that there must be some kind of mistake, and if he’d only stop shouting at me long enough to let me explain, he would understand that this is in fact my bag – a bag full of worthless shaving cream and toilet paper, I might add.
But he does not stop shouting.
And now M has arrived behind me, armed with a baseball bat.
I do not notice his approach, but I do notice when he hits me with a surprise attack in the back with the bat.
I am far from a tough guy. Indeed, truth be told, I would describe myself as kind of a pussy. But maybe it’s the adrenaline I am feeling from my attempt to resist the robbery, or that the muscles in my back are already tense from pulling at the bag, or some other mystifying reason, but when he hits me with the bat – a mighty blow according to all bystanders – I barely feel it. It doesn’t hurt at all. In fact, it is M’s screaming from behind me that really gets my attention, and causes me to momentarily loosen my grip on the duffle bag long enough for B to yank it from my hands.
I turn and see M, who has now leapt backwards several strides and is screaming and gesturing like some insane cross between Hulk Hogan and a badger covered in fire ants. I see his weapon lying on the ground. It takes me a moment to comprehend his words. “I dropped the bat!!! I dropped the bat!!! Come on mother f***er!!! I dropped the bat!!!”
As he screams, red-faced, it dawns on me that he is screaming at me – really? – and he is in fact inviting me to a fist fight. If he were more articulate, he might be saying something like this: “I demand your attention sir, for I have a grievance, the crux of which I shall now explain emphatically! Having attacked you from behind with this weapon, I am now loudly proclaiming my agreement not to attack you with this weapon again, and instead propose to attack you with my fists – and perhaps karate kicks from my feet! Do you agree?! Do you agree to my proposition!?! I am being completely fair now, and utterly disavow the unfairness of which I was previously guilty! Can you not see how compelling my offer is?! What more must I do to persuade you that I am in fact the victim here? The victim of your hard-headed refusal to let me retroactively justify my preemptive strike upon an unsuspecting victim by agreeing to have me strike that victim more?!? Well?! Well!?”
As this fact is registering, and I’m preparing myself to engage in a fight – the reason for which utterly eludes me – Steve appears in front of him and begins insisting “No, no, he’s cool, he’s cool! Chill out M, he’s cool!” You know, because being uncool means you might deserve robbery and unprovoked assault with a baseball bat.
Steve holds him back. Which is to say that Steve and M engage in the dumb male ritual in which the person being “held back” doesn’t really resist, but puts on a little show so as to appear to be seen as resisting. All the while pretending to be furious at the person who is holding him back, but not nearly as furious as he is at the person from whom he is being held back.
And why is THIS guy so furious anyway? I’m the one who just got jacked.
Things happen quickly from there. E appears near me in case he needs to start hitting me in conjunction with any hitting of me that M might be doing. B runs to T’s truck to hide his ill-gotten loot. T laughs like a hyena and fires up the engine. Ben, back from the woods, arrives at my side and says with a mixture of sympathy and respect: “Dude! What a hit! Are you alright?! How are you still standing?” Steve – ever the good faith broker, the dude who can hang out with anybody, the guy with street cred who is good with nerds or apes – walks M back to the truck. And to my horror, I see that the girls have arrived during the chaos.
Moments later, T’s truck is peeling out and away, with four morons and my Gulf duffle bag inside. A crowd encircles me – concerned classmates who (with the exception of Ben and Steve) were noticeably absent during the altercation.
And now Katie appears in front of me, to see if I’m okay. I adore this girl, and would normally be delighted to have her talk to me. But right now I’m jittery and furious and humiliated and – oh God – are my eyes tearing up? Shit, not now! Not in front of her!
I mumble something and look away, nervously sticking my hands in my pockets. My right hand strikes cold metal, and I suddenly remember the chain weapon – a Japanese kusari-fundo to be exact – that I brought with me. Why? I have no idea. I guess I grabbed it in case society broke down and I suddenly found myself living in the 1979 gang movie The Warriors. Which, I guess had sort of happened for a few minutes there.
I had spent countless hours of my youth in the backyard practicing with all sorts of ridiculous ninja weapons. This is because video games sucked back then, and girls didn’t talk to me yet (or really ever), and there are only so many Xanth novels you can read before you need to go outside and beat the crap out of a hedge while pretending to confront the evil Magician Trent, or Conan’s nemesis Thulsa Doom, or the dipshit from the movie American Ninja who wore a white ninja outfit (you know, in case he needed to sneak up on a polar bear).
My parents bought us all kinds of lethal crap like that as kids. What in Hell were parents thinking back then?? “Now you boys behave, and don’t hurt anybody with this razor sharp katana.” I had gotten this particular weapon through a trade though. Growing up, the boys in my neighborhood used comics, weapons and pornography as currency, and this deadly chain weapon had cost me two copies of Penthouse magazine – the gold standard at the time, and a dear price to pay.
As I pulled this weapon out of my pocket – three feet of black chain with two metal weights on either end – it was like I was holding some kind of alien artifact. What is this? Why is it in my pocket? What was I going to do with this? None of it makes any sense.
For a moment, I try to picture hitting M across the skull with this chain, the way I had taken down countless imaginary orcs and Stormtroopers so many times before. And the mental image just makes me feel gross, and wrong, and so, so much worse. I plant my foot and send the chain sailing into the woods.
“Hey! There are people in there!”
I turn to Ben. “Get me out of here.”
We don’t talk much on the way home. One of them asks me how my back is. It’s totally fine – I really don’t feel any discomfort at all. But I almost feel like I should act like I’m in pain. Because from their perspective, I couldn’t not be in pain, and they feel like I must be putting up a front to hide this fact from them, and it’s hurting their feelings that I’m not sharing “the truth” with my buddies.
We pull up to my house. “You sure you want to go in Mike? It’s still early. We could go to Burger King and get one of those chicken sandwiches you like.”
I pause there in the passenger seat. I look at my house. I look at the driveway that needs edging. Dad will make me get up early on Saturday to do that – to use the ancient, gasoline powered edger with its spinning blades at 7:30AM. I could do it just as well at 11AM, after I’ve slept in a bit. But that’s not how he wants it.
I look down at the musty army uniform I’m wearing, with a different Hamilton’s name stitched over my heart.
“Yeah, let’s go get a chicken sandwich.”
Five minutes later, I’m dipping onion rings into little white cups of ketchup, and it’s banal and glorious and absurd and beautiful.