Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [97]
So I waited and waited, the temperature of my blood rising with every passing moment. My leg started shaking and I didn’t even realize it. A hundred thoughts were running through my head, all surrounding how I was going to get BG to understand that he couldn’t keep using my truck without permission.
When he came home and walked through the door, I just sat there, staring at him, deadpan, like a psychopath. Derrick was with him, right outside the front door, but I didn’t know that at the time.
“Adam, listen, I know you’re mad, but, check this out, I had to go pick Derrick up.” He looked at Derrick. “Tell ’im.”
Derrick stepped in the doorway. “It’s true,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. Evidently, they had made the detour by our house to give Derrick the opportunity to vouch for BG’s character in the whole matter.
I just kept staring at BG. I didn’t know what to say, but neither did he.
“I don’t know what to tell you, dog. Somebody had to get ’im, and I was the only one available.”
Staring, blood boiling. Later I would discover that he was lying anyway, that they had been shooting pool for the last couple of hours.
“Look, I know you’re mad, Ad, but just don’t even worry ’bout it. It ain’t gonna happen again.”
And that’s when I got up and walked over to him. “You’re damn right, it won’t happen again, mother fucker.” Eloquently, I pronounced every syllable of every word slowly, with emphasis at the end. I grabbed his shirt by the chest and threw him up against the wall.
And that’s when I realized exactly what I had done, what an idiot I was. I had known ahead of time that I wasn’t a fighter, but for some reason, it just hadn’t registered at that moment. Before that night with BG in early April, my record as a fighter stood at a disgraceful one out of four, and that was in my neighborhood, the suburbs—Heather Hills—home of some of the worst fighters in the history of fighting. We were such bad fighters that people actually got bored watching us fight at school. “Eh, this sucks. Let’s go back to class.” And I was a particularly poor fighter. Even my one win had come from one lucky, sneaky punch, but none of that was clicking in my mind that night with BG. I was just really, really mad. That’s all. My other efforts thus far had been in vain, and I didn’t know any other way to get my point across to him.
But BG had other things on his mind, like whooping my sweet ass. I swear I think I saw his eyes light up after I grabbed him, like, “Oh, hell yeah. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, baby! Let’s do this!”
So we did. In less than five seconds, he had stuck his leg behind mine and tripped me down onto my back. From there, it was all downhill for me. He put his left hand around my neck and just started wailing on me with his right. Remaining neutral, Derrick jumped in to try to break it up. He didn’t care about motive or who had started it; he just wanted us to stop.
But BG wasn’t stopping. He would have gone all night long, especially since he had the upper hand. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu techniques I had picked up watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship on TV were not working like I had planned. I was no match for BG, and I knew it before he even started swinging on me. Fighting was a sport for him. That is how he had grown up. He and his friends would beat the hell out of each other in the afternoon and then have sleepovers that same night. BG had grown up settling disputes with his knuckles, whereas I had grown up talking things out or seeking creative means of revenge. Fighting? We might wrestle a little if things got really, really, really serious, but that was rare.
That night, though, BG didn’t care much about our histories. He was completely immersed in the present. Thankfully, just as he was getting warmed up, Derrick