Another thing my dad taught me…
I was in the ninth grade when the fight took place. It started in math class earlier that morning.
The day before, the math teacher was all mad that we had muddied up the class room, really bad, he couldn’t pin it on any one kid as the school yard was a mess, so he just bellowed and threatened us with punishments if it happened again.
No big deal.
The next day though, when I walked in, a particular classmate was sitting in my chair, and scraping a ton of mud off of his shoes, under and around my desk. I walked up and read him the riot act, telling him, “I’m not taking the blame for it.” He got all cocky, so I grabbed him right there, and was about to set to, when a friend grabbed me and said, “Not here, wait till noon.”
That was just enough time for the teacher to walk in and see what was going on. I went and sat in a different seat and the other kid got yelled at for the mud.
I was sitting at the lunch table by myself having some of that good school pizza when ‘my friend’ from math class came up and said, “Hey it’s noon, he’s waiting across the street.”
I had completely forgotten about that.
So I went. Cliche’s, stereotypes and profiling are true to a point. But we were not meeting behind the school by the bike rack, we were in front of the school, across the street, in front of a little arcade/pool room hangout called ‘The Store’. The owner came out and told us to move along so we and about a hundred of our classmates started to cross the street towards the residential houses across from the school. As we turned to go my adversary said, “Hey, if anybody catches us fighting, just tell them were joking around.”
I didn’t say anything.
I stepped into the street first. Mr. Muddy Shoes was right behind me. And before his second foot hit the street pavement I turned and punched him in the face.
It was on!
It was mostly a wrestling match. He tried to knee me in the face, so instead of pulling backwards, I went with him. I let him pull me toward his knee and at the last second I veered away, and used the momentum to knock him, and me, to the sidewalk. As we wrestled a bit more I got to the top, but a cop car was coming, some older kids who were watching yelled for everybody to break it up.
Well that was that. I only fought a couple times in school. It must have been enough because I had a small reputation of one who wouldn’t back down.
I was by no means a tough guy. And I never went looking for a fight. Truth is, I was always very nervous when it came right down to it, scared even. I wasn’t very big, or strong, and I didn’t know anything about fighting, really, but I didn’t let people push me around either.
Next week I’ll tell you about the visit to the Principles office…
Leave a Reply