The Artless Streetfight

There's nothing like a steel guitar crying in the night
Nothing like a sawdust floor and a good 'ol friendly fight
I'd finally find my way back home and you'd patch up my face
But that was another time and another place
--Clint Black

So there I was, sitting in my car in the parking lot of Half-Price Books, talking to my friend Chris in Nebraska, when I noticed a disturbance in the Force. At first, it was a small, subtle thing, but that’s how it always begins; very small.

It came in the form of two punks.

They were tattooed, muscular white guys in matching wifebeater shirts, looking like trouble, and were walking with a purpose towards a small group of other guys thirty feet away from me. When they got there, I saw them and six other guys standing in a semi circle around something that was just out of my vision. All were young, maybe in their early to mid-twenties. There was a weird, manic tension in them, though. The kind of tension you see just before all hell starts breaking loose.

I was just about to pull my car forward to see what they were all looking at, when another guy backed up into my line of sight. A young white guy, fit-looking, maybe 150 pounds, with his chin down, shoulders hunched, and fists balled up at chest level-the classic stance of a guy who thinks he's about to get hit.

Suddenly, another guy came into view, a goateed Tongan or Samoan by the look of him, though not really big like the islanders often get, but solid and strong looking, with a magnificent afro. As he came into view both guys started swinging on each other like back alley brawlers. Now mind you, this is 3:00 PM on a Sunday afternoon in a parking lot of a major shopping center, but neither guy seemed to care that they were fighting in plain view of a slew of sheeple witnesses.

They fought in bursts. They circled each other, vying for position, and one guy would go on the offensive, lunging forward a step and swinging three or four times wildly, while the other guy would throw a few defensive punches while backing up and then they'd stop for a moment and repeat the process, while the spectators whooped it up and egged them on.

Both had guts, I'd say. Each was slugging and getting slugged in return, right in the face, but neither man showed signs of stopping for awhile. They really weren't good fighters, though. There was no art or skill or science to their fighting whatsoever. They merely stood toe-to-toe and swung wild haymakers at one another for about a half-minute to a minute (it seemed longer at the time), with neither man seemingly doing any damage to the other. As the fight progressed, they got sloppier as well, The haymakers got wider, and they began to laen back a bit and expose their chins rather than keep them tucked in. A hard shot to the throat would have been bad for either one.

The real problem with their fighting was that neither man was hitting with any power. There was no forward drive, no drop-step, and no torque of the body or hips. Nothing. The punches were coming from their arms only, and despite the fact that each guy got hit in the face at least 6+ times, I couldn't see any real damage to either of them. No body shots either. One guy with a decent shovel hook could have ended the fight with a shot to the liver, no problem, but they were headhunters only, and it wasn't working for either of them.

Finally, the white guy threw a flurry of punches, and the Tongan threw a few of his own. Then the Tongan backed up a few steps and put his hands on his knees, panting, and raised a palm towards the white guy in an I Surrender gesture. The white guy dropped his own hands, which had been poised in mid-wind-up, and he walked away. The Tongan walked with his friends to their car, and everyone left in opposite directions.

I remained sitting in my car for another ten minutes, until the cops showed up. Two cruisers passed me, and then turned around and pulled up behind my car. Why they chose me, I don’t know, but I opened my door with a big smile on my face and asked them if they’d gotten a call about a fight. The officer by my car said they had, and I explained briefly what went down. By then two more police cruisers had arrived, and I decided to leave before they arrested me just for not being horrified enough by the thought of a fight going down in front of me.

Truth be known, it was a good, clean fight; a friendly fight. Punches were thrown, dominance established, surrender accepted, and everyone walked away without any hard feelings as far as I could tell. That’s how thing were done in the past. You had a problem with another man, you both stepped outside to settle the matter. No cops, no BS. You swung until somebody had had enough, and everyone walked away.

It was a good way.