Beat up someone?
2
Up until the time I was in high school, I got into my fair share of fistfights, but I didn't (from my perspective, anyway) initiate them-- if someone came up to me with fists flying for whatever reason, or were deliberately insulting, or belligerent...being a kid/youth/teenager, and not wanting to be thought of as a pussy, I'd respond, often in a physical way. I wasn't a big, imposing kid, but I won some, and I got my ass kicked a time or 2 as well (I didn't actually start increasing my size until I was out of high school, when I started lifting weights; even then, no one was ever going to mistake me for Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Only 2 times that I can remember did I initiate the violence. In junior high school, a guy I didn't really know called me a "shithead" as we passed in the hall. In retrospect, it was the kind of kid stuff that happens all the time, but at that moment in time I took it very personally and went towards him. I pushed him prepatory to fighting him, and he went into his locker hard. I waited for a few seconds, and when he didn't come at me I left for my next class, writing him off as a loudmouthed wimp. Long story short: he had twisted around as I pushed him and had gone lip first into the locker, ultimately requiring stitches. I didn't see the blood, but later saw a trail of it going down the hallway, and when they finally identified me and called me into the principal's office, I was shaking in my boots. I was brought to the nurses's office, where the bleeding kid was sitting with an ice pack on his mouth, surrounded by his weeping mother and sister, who couldn't have looked more venomously at me if I had been Carlos the Jackal or Tex Watson. The principal tried calling my parents (who were working) and instead got my grandmother, who had grown up in Jimmy Cagney's NY neighborhood and had raised her family in one of Jersey City's tougher areas, and she told him (and I'm paraphrasing from memory), "If Eddie hit the other kid, then the other kid deserved it," which I don't think was the response the principal was expecting. I ended up getting suspended for a week from school, but my parents agreed with my grandmother, and that week off was more like a vacation than punishment. If it happened now, I'd probably get arrested.
On the other occasion, I learned from my sister that a kid down the block had spit on her. I don't know what his reason was, but that was very personal. I was burning. I waited by the kid's house and when he came up from the school bus, I was on him, and I quite frankly beat the shit out of him. It was a weird feeling-- usually, when I won a fight, I felt bad, because I was essentially soft-hearted, and I'd think, "Ah, the guy didn't really deserve that." And, of course, when I got my own ass kicked, I felt bad because I thought that I probably hadn't deserved it. But this guy who spit on my sister well-deserved the ass-kicking he got, and I didn't feel any regret or have any second thoughts. For the rest of the school year, when we stood outside waiting for the school bus, this kid would stand a good half block or more away from where we were standing, which was partly gratifying (a friend's father used to beat up guys for mob boss Willie Moretti, and I was thinking maybe he could get me a job with whoever had replaced Moretti after he died from lead poisoning in 1951), and partly unnerving (I didn't necessarily like the thought of someone being afraid of me, even if they were a prick). But I can tell you that he never went near my sister again, much less spit on her.
