Fist Fight

0438 hrs

Another wonderful day in the world; a new day with another shifting of my internal wind.  The mainsail fills and my seemingly hopeless state of mind and body take a new bearing along a different tact.

It came to me during the leg dangle sans coffee an hour ago.  While I smoked in the dark, I felt a hundred licks and as many cold-nose touches, as the Brigade maneuvered for a comfort spot on the night-night.

Even Momma joined the Morning Frolic.  She has overcome her fear of the madding crowd; and if that aging fat little dog can do it, so can the aging big fat human emulate her example.  Not the madding crowd thing: the PTSD Viet Nam blow-back thing.

I dread not the monograph in situ, nor the next, nor the last, nor all those in between.  The fear of the telling has vanished like the illusionist’s cloud of smoke.

When I got up to make my coffee, there was none of the characteristic grumping-blaming-resigning that heretofore accompanied this start-up chore.

I wanted to get up.

I wanted to be here with you, gratuitous reader, to bring you the news of what it felt like to lose the shackles of my past and wriggle out of the claustrophobic shell of hiding and cringing from my ghosts; my demons; my jailors; my terrible enslavement to the memories of long long ago. 

The great gift of a benevolent Power far beyond my frail understanding is the clarity that comes through much pain and suffering and a voyage across an ocean of tears.

I have finally arrived at the world of my birth and stand on its shores as discoverer of a New World: the world of now, the world of living each moment as if it were my last.

Crap!  The only thing missing from that outpouring is the harp music.

Fear not, voyeuristic reader!  The muse-inspired insanity lamp is still lit; I have not relegated young Holden Caulfield back to the Lilac Room of the Edmonton Hotel; there to make another fumbling pass at those three insurance secretaries from Seattle.

He is sitting right here at my shoulder, red hunting cap with bill turned backwards, full to the brim with his whining sardonic commentary of the vicissitudes of uncertainty.

He should be here in the present, to hear the political rhetoric become more pathetically shrill as the Presidential Campaign closes in on election day; like a violin tuned by the tone-deaf.  Sometimes I am tempted to stop scrolling down the page and listen to a little of it.

For me, that would be somewhat like being a pre-war German Jew listening to Goebbels, broadcasting on the radio, for some hopeful note of retraction of the holocaust to come.

Thanks, but I am swearing off the hemlock of hate; lost my taste for the stuff, I truly have.

And now, the adventure continues:

(Wake up, Ed Sullivan—you and me got ahr work to do!  End ah’ve told yew for the last tahm about them hands in yore armpits; AHM NOT TELL’’IN YEW AGIN!!!)

A ver. Vamos a continuar.

Christmas was nearing, which meant exactly dick to the forsaken troops of Viet Nam.  Some units made a half-hearted attempt to join with the season—hand-made Christmas trees, cinnamon scented candles—it was stupid inane frivolity--in the context of surviving this shithole.

Nobody in our Division chose to play Santa.  Life was tedious enough without someone putting together a caroling group to serenade the causeway.

The Bob Hope USO was soon to arrive at Tien Sha.  Were we thrilled? 

We were thrilled at the prospect of a three hour break from work, to go ogle some hot starlet Blondie shaking her tushy at all the brave boys.  If we were going to enjoy the USO, we’d prefer to enjoy it from the vantage of our Laz-E-Boy back home in the world, thank you very much.

Not much else changed for the Yuletide, except the weather got a little cooler; and my relationship with Jurgensen, Thor-on-fucking-high up at Tug Control, got decidedly hotter.

Thor kept forgetting that we in the Boathouse did not control the pusher boats.  Neither did he, despite his frigging delusions. He didn’t control the tugs either.  No tug captain, at least a rank of E-6, took instructions from some non-billeted E-3 shithead.  This pudgy Naval Reservist from some upstate New York billet was apparently unaware of the omnipotence of a Navy Capitan aboard his own boat.  

The pusher boats were the province of EN-1 Byrd, the head snipe of Division.  Red haired, red faced, walleyed Byrd was a bull of a lifer who brooked no bull: not from the crews, not from the Boathouse; not even from Rambo.  As indispensable as he was to the operation of Service Craft’s mission, he was the Troll on a fairytale bridge; doing whatever the hell he damned well pleased.

Sure, each pusher boat crew included a snipe; but if Byrd said the boat was down, his snipes groveled and took their craft off-line until Red Byrd said otherwise.

This particular day, for reasons of his own, he had put the entire flotilla in a down status.  Nothing was going out from the causeway and nothing was the response from the Snipe Shack; while Big Red Byrd read his porn magazines, coffee in one hand, stogie in the other, the lascivious rag resting demurely across his crotch.

Calls from the hole-in-the-wall went unanswered.  A sacrificial page from the Boathouse went down the causeway to the Shack, only to return moments later with half of his ass missing.

Jurgensen, his voice husky with impatient rage, demanded to know WTF was going on, in the phonetic shorthand of military radio chatter.  I had the malicious pleasure of telling him (phonetically) to go fuck himself; and he could give Sierra Charley Two a lima-lima for further instructions on self-fornication.

I was not so inclined to schoolboy cruelty as to send him to direct his penny-tyrant tirade at Byrd himself.  The Bull of the watch would have simply removed another half hind quarter from a non-snipe seaman jerk-off, topping off his feeding for the morning repast.

The hot sun peaked at midday chow and still the Division duty boats lay idle at the causeway.  Meanwhile, the tugs lay off Deep Water Piers, keeping two ships company that were going nowhere.  The pilots of both ships took turns screaming over the net at Tug Control, directing their ire in the wrong direction.  We enjoyed the repartee of screaming over the radio as, of course, there was no lima-lima to the anchored ships for a more discrete intercourse.

Jurgensen, being the focal point of the pilots’ phonetic cursing, blamed Providence for the untimely delays.  Unable to duck the fire and unwilling to reveal his impotence, he secretly blamed the Boathouse.

Specifically, he blamed me, who had been the messenger of his abashment, using my best KEEZ-FM baritone.

At 1400 hrs, Byrd finished his cigar and ruminations of naked vaginas long enough to release the duty boats back to service.  The work picked up, but the damage was done:  Jurgensen must have sat fuming up there in his lofty tower nursing one fuck of a resentment…at me.

Here I pause for a rumination of my own…about fistfights.

This is more for the women, who don’t give a shit about men blooding themselves; unless the blood spilled is in defense of their virtue.  Men will find this familiar ground, but will largely ignore it, morphing off into the dark recesses of their own revelries.

Single combat once mimicked all great land battles up until the time of the Civil War, when the inability of commanders to see that the technology had far outstripped the tactics made carnage a wholesale commodity. (Reference ‘carnage’ under the battles of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, etc.; and The Charge of the Light Brigade—if you’re a Brit)

In the so called modern world of Holden Caulfield, fights have become either spontaneously triggered by a testosterone rush; or arranged, like a gentleman’s duel at dawn.

Everyone has been privy to the former—bars, high school corridors, proms, etc.—let’s look at the duel of dudes.

Since puberty, my experience has been similar in the very few fights in which I have reluctantly engaged.  ‘Someone’ (call him the duelist’s second) approaches me at an inopportune time and announces that, “Lee Ray is alookin’ fer yew—and he’s agonna come and KICK YER ASS!”, or some such banal bluster.

Then, Lee Ray meets up with me at some prearranged location of his choosing, to humble me before half the males in the school.  They will all be there, if there is no conflicting cockfight somewhere else.  Boys love an ass-kicking, especially when they are merely the viewing public and not one of the bashees.

After careful consideration, I have reached a few conclusions:

1.    Boys get goaded into making fight challenges by peer pressure or the connivance of an Iago lurking in the shadow

2.    The challenger is a precocious bully

3.    The challenger is a coward

4.   The challenger will take on only someone he is convinced he can beat up, or someone who will submit to a degrading cry of ‘uncle!’

Since I have never been a lone challenger; ergo, my opponents were cowards to a man (Let’s see: Doug Andersen, Jerry Gonzales, Angus Mulgrew, Al Frobisher—uh huh.  Cowards one and all)

Finally, back to the fricking story!

About 2100 hrs that same night (9:00 PM), ‘someone’ came to me and announced that Jurgensen was looking for me and was going to kick my ass.  Being well into my cups, I accepted this heralding, and went to sit on the fantail of a pusher boat to await my fate.

As I sat there, waiting for my ass-kicking, I went over all those fights and the outcomes so dependent on my response to the bully.  I did not want to fight Jurgensen; I didn’t want to fight anyone ever.  After finding myself at one such cockfight during high school, I had no desire to be a spectator either.

I decided, reasonably, that I would reason with him—speak to his sense of responsible behavior.  That would work, right?

He arrived, accompanied by the fight fans, both his friends (the goaders) and everyone else on the causeway still standing.  Even the night crew abandoned their duty posts to come watch the fun.

Jurgensen had left Tug Control at 1700 hrs, made a beeline for the Crow’s Nest without availing himself of chow; and, according to reports after the fight, had drank beer steadily for three hours before deciding the moment had come to teach that Boathouse Prick a lesson.

Down the causeway they came, champion and mob.  The arena was a narrow section between the pusher boat mooring and the Snipe Shack, about four feet wide.  The crowd fanned out to either side of the pusher boat while the Champ plopped himself down next to me on the fantail.

Convinced that they can’t lose against an inferior opponent, bullies have only two ploys.  Some immediately launch into a punch-up, the first blow usually a sucker punch.

Others will start talking in the hope that their intended will capitulate without standing up for themselves.  If the bully succeeds in cowing the victim, he achieves victory, for once a man is downed in this manner, he rarely has a second thought to come back from the humiliation.

Before I could gain my advantage, to lead bully-boy into the proposition of civil civility, Jurgensen half turned to me (we were hip to hip) and began the talking ploy.

It started predictably with,” Yah Know, Cotrell, I’m Tug Control and what I say goes, get me?”  All this in the slur of the advanced inebriate.  He rumbled on, and as he did, the words became a tumble of sound that I no longer heard.

I sat there, getting angrier and angrier, listening without listening to this fat drunken slob; listening instead to all those other rants from the Al’s and the Angus’s lodged in my head.

With a motion so fast (it surprised even me) I brought my fist across my torso with a left hook begun low and swinging high.  I connected with the lecturer’s left temple, and blood began to spurt down his face.  He fell over on his side, his tone abruptly altered in shock and disbelief.  Even in his stupefaction he must have sensed that this wasn’t playing out according to plan.

As I went to stand to finish him off, I slipped and fell backwards into the water.  In my own drunken-stoned condition, I went straight to panic.  Screaming repeatedly for Delaney to help, I floundered there in the dark between the boats until Delaney reached down and hauled me up to the causeway.

With me soaking wet and Jurgensen bleeding like a stuck pig, the fight was over.  Later, sitting in the boathouse in dry clothes again, everyone came up to shake my hand and congratulate me as the winner.  Apparently, my single roundhouse TKO seemed to impress the shit out of everybody.

I wasn’t impressed. I was disgusted with myself.  I sat there receiving the well-wishers without comment or response.  After the Boathouse cleared out, I left for my hooch and went to bed.

The next day, Jurgensen, over the lima-lima, made a lot of sounds like somehow; he and I had made up and resolved our differences.  I had no way of telling him the gulf of differences that remained between us.  No way.

As compensation, I tacitly agreed with him by the egregious omission of agreeing to dick.  Thereafter, we even included him into some of the Boathouse Pirate escapades, as long as only booze was the lubricant.  The peace pipe of passing a joint wasn’t gonna happen with this chastened blowhard from Ithaca.

A schoolyard brouhaha between two blonde male children--in a place where savage fighting was decimating human beings by a daily body count of hundreds…thousands; how more pointless could this have been?

The memory of this trivial incident has brought back to bear my shame and guilt at having been in such a secure area amidst the maiming and killing of the American War; that we could so indulge ourselves in this play-acting brawl, to the public embarrassment of ourselves and the fleeting fancy of the spectators.

Fuck fighting, fuck war and fuck all those who support it.  Now and forever, Amen.