I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even recognize an old classmate as he rode his bike downtown and called me \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mannie,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which immediately told me I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known him since childhood.I believe his name is Leo. He told me that though he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been reading Work of Art for years, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never made the connection. Leo said he especially liked \u00e2\u20ac\u0153those articles about the fights we all used to have.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
That made me realize that in fact I have written quite a bit about a fight or several, usually in our barrio, the 900 block of Railroad Avenue. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s see: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written about 750 columns. There are a slew of articles on language (my passion) and quite a few about school, travel, family, growing up, lost loves and my neighborhood, with its requisite fisticuffs.<\/p>\n
Do I exaggerate the number of fights I witnessed or sometimes participated in during my childhood? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think so, but my hesitation is based on the fact that now, in my late seventies, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not privy to much pugilism anymore.<\/p>\n
Leo grew up \u00e2\u20ac\u0153across the tracks,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the Pecos-Commerce area, where there was even more action and each denizen of that neighborhood was able to school us in fisticuffs. Almost every day two boys would square off, with a large, hermetically sealed circle immediately forming around them.<\/p>\n
Even boys who generally stayed indoors, playing with Tinker Toys, came to witness the action. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if this definition fits, but I think of almost all the fights in our area as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clean,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a term I use advisedly, as some might argue there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no such thing, just as there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no such thing as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clean bomb.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
My recollection is that the combatants almost always fought one to one. We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see a bigger boy jumping in to help a kid brother.<\/p>\n
The absolute worst excuse for a fight came from Joseph and Billy, two upperclassmen at Immaculate Conception High School, who went looking for someone to mix it up with one Saturday night. Finding none, they agreed to fight EACH OTHER. The reason? Puro sport.<\/p>\n
Brilliant, Joe and Bill! You blacken each other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s eyes and loosen teeth, brag about it at school on Monday, but you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a single witness to your heroics.<\/p>\n
Fights usually started over someone breaking the rules to a game or because someone spiked another sliding into third, or someone claimed he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really down when tagged.<\/p>\n
Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what one boy, Paul, did: He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d run with the football, then, when someone used the two-hands-below-the-waist defense, he would toss up the football the moment someone touched him, then he’d claim, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have the ball.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He threw a pass to himself. What gall!<\/p>\n
What angered several of us was the temerity of Paul\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s making his own rules. But as the rest of us weren’t exactly NFL-quality referees, we didn’t do too well in explaining Paul’s infraction.
\nThe \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clean\u00e2\u20ac\u009d aspect of fights \u00e2\u20ac\u201d as we learned by watching Westerns at the Serf \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was that you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hit a guy when he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s down. Ever notice in the early Westerns that the good guy always lifted up the fellow he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d just knocked down, and the process started all over again?<\/p>\n
We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have any kicking either. What we did have was a clearly partisan group of spectators, each one an instant ringside manager, explaining to one of the fighters how to get the advantage.<\/p>\n
Almost daily we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d see the customary circle around two fighters, and because the circle was so tight, it was impossible to tell who was performing this mini-Clash of the Titans.<\/p>\n
Sometimes one of the fighters would recognize the voice of a parent, and the fight would stop, lest the punishment delivered at home would make the street fight seem like a cakewalk.<\/p>\n
After all these years, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still impressed that when the fights ended, the participants resumed their games. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t recall whether the fighters reached a truce, sealed with a handshake, but we noticed that as we all went back to our game, the fighters gave each other a respectful distance.<\/p>\n
And as for fair play, I marveled at the fact that most of the boys who mixed it up were of equal size. We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see any of that Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. Pee-Wee Herman kind of machismo, and if it were obvious that the two were mismatched, we all tried to prevent them from throwing blows.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been trying to make the case that those in a fight at least abided by a set of commonsensical rules. We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use knives or brass knuckles; we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t kick or bite, nor did we attack when one was on the ground.<\/p>\n
Well, at least the males seemed to follow those rules.<\/p>\n
One bloody fight happened outside the old Castle School in East Las Vegas. It involved two girls, one of them a passenger on the bus I drove. After I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d picked up my students, one of the coeds calmly asked me to stop the bus to let her return a notebook to a classmate who was walking home.<\/p>\n
She tricked me! Immediately the pummeling began, the two girls performing Stage Two of a feud they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d carried on all week. My passenger was the winner, employing every dirty trick in her arsenal, biting, scratching, kicking and clawing. While the rest of the bus passengers cheered, I had to grab my student by the ankle, levitate her and shove her back into the bus.<\/p>\n
The fight lasted only a few seconds. As we drove off, the other girl fighter, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d performed less admirably than my passenger, shouted out a menu of what was in store for her rival the next day.<\/p>\n
I drove the bus for two years and never saw either girl again; they may have quit school or transferred. I remain amazed at how experienced the junior high school girls were.<\/p>\n
I believe they could have given lessons to the male counterparts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even recognize an old classmate as he rode his bike downtown and called me \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mannie,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which immediately told me I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known him since childhood.I believe his name is Leo. He told me that though he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been reading Work of Art for years, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never made the connection. Leo said he especially liked \u00e2\u20ac\u0153those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1578"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}