I got in a fight the other day, one week before I turned 53. It was the first fight I’d had since I was 12. One of the older kids in our neighborhood used to bully me. He’d take my baseball glove and wouldn’t give it back. One day I tried to pull it out of his hand and he shoved me to the ground. I banged the back of my head against the hard ground and was momentarily dazed. I got up crying and ran home to my mother. When I told her what had happened I expected her to call the bully’s mother. I should have known better, or, rather, I should have known my mother.
As I stood before her, rubbing the back of my head and crying, she grabbed me by both arms and shook me. “Stop crying like a baby!” she snapped. I was more afraid of her now than I was of the bully. She dragged me by an arm to the side door and pushed me outside. “And don’t come back until you beat him up,” she said.
My heart was pounding in fear of the bully as I walked up the sidewalk toward his house. He was 14 and a lot bigger than I was. But I was even more afraid of my mother if I didn’t do what she had commanded. I hid behind a tree and waited for the bully to walk by. I jumped out, leaped onto his back and forced him to the ground. With both hands I banged his face into the ground until his nose began to bleed. Then I jumped off him and ran home.
When I told my mother what I had done, she said, “Good boy.”
Just then there was a knock at the side door. I stayed in the kitchen while she answered it. I heard the bully’s voice amid his sobs, and then my mother’s voice saying, “I’ll take care of him, you just wait here.”
She shut the door and came back to me. She put a finger to her lips and whispered, “Make believe you’re crying.”
Then she clapped her hands together while I faked sobs, and she shouted, “That’ll teach you!” When the bully left, satisfied I’d been punished, my mother and I began to laugh, one of the few times we ever laughed together. For dinner that night, she made my favorite meal of pizzafrite as a reward for my courage.
I didn’t have a fight for years after that. Maybe it was the way I carried myself, the way my mother had taught me, to let everyone know I was willing to physically defend myself.
One night when I was in my 40s, my wife and I were walking along a darkened side street in Florence, Italy, at midnight. The street was deserted except for us, and then, behind us, I heard footsteps. I glanced over my shoulder at two grizzled men studying us with narrowed eyes. I knew instinctively what they were planning.
I pushed my wife ahead of me. “Hurry up to the corner,” I whispered. “Flag down a car, anyone.”
She hurried away. I was in the middle of the street now. I turned around to confront the two men on the sidewalk. I took a deep breath, puffing up my chest, and let my arms hang menacingly at my side, my hands already clenched into fists. The two men stopped. They stared at me. It wasn’t going to be as easy as they thought. Before they could make up their minds I hurried up the street too and around the corner, where my wife was waiting.
That was the point of courage, my mother had told me, to protect not only yourself but also those weaker than you, especially women. My mother could never countenance men who hit women. Men who hit women were bullies, she said, and bullies were always cowards.
As I got older I never thought about my mother’s lessons, but they must have been so ingrained in my nature that even approaching 53, I had not forgotten them.
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY morning in Fort Lauderdale. The sun was warm, the blue sky clear, and a faint breeze was blowing in from the Atlantic across the beach. My wife and I were pedaling our bicycles on the sidewalk along the beach.
The sand was packed with sunbathers smelling of coconut oil. The sidewalk was crowded too, with strollers and bikers and skaters and one father on rollerblades pushing his baby daughter in a carriage. My wife moved ahead to clear a path for us by squeezing the horn on her handlebars. It made a funny little “toot-toot,” sound, and when people heard it behind them, they invariably smiled as they made way for us to pass. “Thank you,” my wife said.
We were halfway up the beach when I saw a rollerblader skating backward, heading right toward us. He was a big guy, with a bodybuilder’s muscles, in his late 20s, and his perfectly tanned skin in his bikini bathing suit was glistening with oil.
I realized he was skating backward without looking back over his shoulder, as if the entire sidewalk was his own personal rink. My wife didn’t see him until it was too late. He skated right at her, brushing her bike. She wobbled on it a bit, than regained control as he skated toward me. I shouted, “A–hole! Watch where you’re going!”
For the first time he looked over his shoulder, swerved to miss me and then stopped. He studied me for a minute, an older guy with a white beard. Then he made his decision and skated back toward me.
“Who are you calling a–hole?” he said.
“You,” I said. “You almost ran into my wife.”
He must have expected me to back down from what I had called him. When I didn’t, it confused him. He tried to intimidate me with his stare. He was so intent on glaring at me as he skated a little ahead of me that he still didn’t notice my wife. He skated into her again. She tumbled to the sidewalk, her bike falling on top of her. She cried out in pain, and at that moment I felt myself leaving my bike, my body in the air, everything slowing down, silent, like an old movie.
I hit him in the chest with my right shoulder, and he fell backward onto the sidewalk with me on top of him. I heard my wife screaming, “No, Pat! No!” We rolled over and over, each of us searching for an advantage. Finally, I managed to get him in a headlock with my left arm. I pulled back my right hand into a fist and was ready to punch him. But he was so lathered with oil that he managed to slither out of my headlock like a snake.
He leaped to his feet in front of me. He had the advantage now, and I braced myself for his attack. But instead, he turned and skated off as fast as he could, calling back over his shoulder, “You’re f—ing crazy!”
My wife helped me up. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes. Just a skinned knee. What about you?”
I was shaking, weak-kneed, not with rage but with a spent physicality I had not known in years. It had all happened so fast I hadn’t had time to think. I had just reacted with a pure, visceral rage. Then I felt the pain in my left arm.
“I think I hurt my arm,” I said. We both looked at it. My left bicep had rolled into a tight ball high up my arm. I knew instinctively that I had ripped the tendon that connected the bicep to my inner elbow.
“Wait here,” I said, and went across the street. I got some ice from a waiter at a restaurant and returned to my wife. She was sitting on the wall, trying to compose herself. I sat beside her and iced my bicep to keep the swelling down. The pain was now a dull ache.
I was still shaking. I began to feel lightheaded, dizzy and nauseated.
“You look pale,” my wife said. “Do you think you can make it home?” “In a few minutes,” I said.
We sat there for a long time, staring at the passing cars, neither of us speaking. The ice had numbed the pain now, and I felt well enough to pedal home.
I had pedaled only a few yards when the sidewalk began to shimmer and move. I felt as though I was going to pass out. I stopped and sat on my bike until the dizziness passed, and then tried again.
It took us almost an hour to pedal home. I had to stop at every block to keep from passing out. When we finally made it I lay down on the sofa in the sunroom. My wife brought more ice for the arm. The bicep was still shriveled into a tight ball.
“Well, you’re never going to win a Mr. Universe contest now,” she said.
We both laughed. And then she added, seriously, “That’s the first time in my life a man ever fought for me.”She was 55.
PAT JORDAN is a freelance writer and the author of nine books. He lives in Fort Lauderdale.
