Upon the Occasion You Get Your Ass Beat

This is a big subject. If you maintain a violent lifestyle, you will get your ass beat from time to time, I don’t give a fuck who you are. You might be the lovechild of Bruce Lee and the Hulk if they could have kids together, but people maneuver and perhaps 3 or 4 guys will kick your ass, or maybe there will be weapons involved, or maybe you are just outclassed by a better fighter, but if you are a violent person you will get your ass kicked from time to time. Life is not a comic book.

I think that maybe I was blessed to discover as a small child that I didn’t have to equate the beating with my self-worth. I was always able to separate the experience from my self-esteem to a degree. I knew they were ignorant people (precocious little fuck that I was) and I still had value that they could not destroy. That is an abused child superpower. When I got out of the Army, imagine this after being a grunt in the Army after a horrible childhood, I was a violent person. I fought a lot. I foolishly and restrictedly thought that I just kept coming across assholes, but I brought violence into my own life, primarily by my own behavior. I see that now. I fucked a lot of dudes up. Every now and then, I got my ass beat. Law of averages, anyone?

The degree of the beating of course has two sides of the equation, how badly they want to hurt you and how hard you’d fight back, plus realistically a third and fourth, physical power and fighting ability. I am clearly admitting that I have had my ass kicked, sometimes badly, but I am proud that no one has ever wanted to fight me twice. Let’s get to the next day. You survived. You got home. You wake up in your own bed, with cracked ribs, almost always a black eye (at least for me), a fat lip, and you feel vulnerable. This is not an experience that polite society is familiar with. You have to get into recovery mode. Slink to the corner store and get a bunch of beer. If you’ve really been fighting, you’ll already have a good first aid kit available. Hug yourself motherfucker. Tend to your wounds. Drink yourself blind. Cry if you need to. You’ve just been through some traumatic shit. Then you have to emerge from your cocoon back into the world.

A talented amateur boxer once gave me a good beating and kept expecting me to quit. One of my eyes was almost completely shut when I finally got him down on the ground where I was more comfortable than him, and just as I was doing some damage, his people pulled me off from him, but not before I had given him his own black eye and jabbed one of his eyeballs with two stiff fingers. As I was being pulled off from him, we made eye contact and he knew what would have followed. He had fear in his eyes. When I finally reemerged from my hibernation, there he was looking all cocky and called me “Guero”, which I’ve always hated, and I asked him “Do we really want to do this again?” Upon retrospect, he admitted that he did not. We never be-came friends but did have a grudging respect for each other after that and a couple times backed each other up in tense situations.

The upside of this unpleasant fact is that people are wary of a man whom they know has no fear of a beating and gives them out himself on a regular basis. They will cut you extra slack when dealing with you because you are a known crazy motherfucker.