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“Go outside! Go! Get the hell outta here, BG! Goddamn. You’re gonna kill ’im!”

As much as I could exaggerate about the blood on the ground, I don’t need to. It was everywhere—puddles of it, literally, on the ground, and splotches all over the walls. And unless he cut open one of his knuckles on a blow to my face, none of it was BG’s. Most of it had come from my first fall to the ground when the back of my head had hit the corner of the windowsill in the front foyer and split open. The knockout blow. It didn’t help matters that I was an over-bleeder, either, probably a hemophiliac. Little cuts had always needed an embarrassing number of bandages when I was growing up or the blood would have just kept coming, so you can imagine the effects of a deep gash. Later, BG told me that he thought Derrick’s fruit punch had exploded all over the ground.

So, there I was, standing idle, right outside my front door, looking directly into the eyes of Derrick Hale, my hero, blood dripping down my neck. I was panting, gasping for breath like I was the one that had just gotten the workout.

“Damn, man,” Derrick said. “What the hell was that? You ain’t have to fight ’im. I understand where you’re comin’ from, but damn, you ain’t have to fight ’im.”

I looked down at all the blood on the ground and on my shirt. I touched my forehead and felt a bump. I licked my bottom lip and tasted blood. I took a second to ponder what had just happened.

To hell with this.

So I dodged Derrick and ran back through the house where BG was unlocking the door to get out. And I jumped on him. With all fours. If you’re still trying to measure my fighting capabilities, there you go. I fight like a monkey.

Once again, he flipped me over and started pounding me. Derrick wasn’t going to be so kind this time, though. He ran through the house, unclasping his jewelry along the way. “Y’all muh’ fuckas gonna make me start swinging on both of y’all,” he declared. His eyes were lighting up just like BG’s had when I pushed him.

I don’t know if BG was taking it easy on me on round two or not, but he didn’t come at me as hard. I think he saw the blood spilling out of my head and onto the kitchen floor and walls and probably felt bad. Wow. He felt bad, so he took it easy on me. I had really wanted to teach him a lesson that night, teach him that my truck was my truck, but the tables had turned dramatically away from my favor. I would love to tell you that I underestimated him because of his indolent moving abilities, that his lethargic attitude shifted the odds in my favor, or that the last couple of months spent weightlifting and doing push ups played to my advantage. Nope. None of the above. It was David versus Goliath except we were about the same size, and BG didn’t stop after the knockout blow. So, nothing like David versus Goliath, actually. More like Cain going after Abel, but I lived to tell the story.

And the entire debacle had been in slow motion, too. At least my end. People that get in fights will tell you, as they reminisce, “Man, I’m not sure exactly what happened. It was all such a blur to me.” Ha. Not me. My fight with BG was in slow motion, like The Matrix. I remember everything, blow for blow. I remember it like a dream, a nightmare, where I was almost incapable of fighting back, as if my arms were being held back by some invisible force.

But it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t slow motion, and my arms weren’t being held back. It was real, fast, and I was just a lousy fighter.

In the end, after I cleaned the blood off the ground and touched up the walls with paint—both tasks that I performed within an hour after the fight—my biggest injury was the back of my head, which surely required stitches, but I refused to give BG the satisfaction of telling his friends that he had sent his pansy roommate to the hospital. I showered and walked around with a towel for the next two days until the gash stopped leaking.

Later that night, Derrick called to make sure I was all right, relaying the message from BG that