High School Tough Guys

The dude smacks Greg in the chest, his arm like a whip. Moves too fast to follow. I jump back as Greg flies into one of the hookah tables, cracking it into two pieces. Doesn’t move.

Hey! I yell at the dude. You aint gonna fight fair?

Fair? Eyal snickers, tilting up the brim of his hat with his thumb. You think Ishii’s gang will fight fair? You think everyone in the world forms up and takes it like a karate tournament?Battlelines? Greg moans, stirring in the flinders of the broken table. Good, says Eyal. You’re not down in one hit. Tell me. Are you as naïve as your supposed leader? You think this war is going to be fair and balanced?

Hell no, Greg moans. Gets up and leans back with his hand on the small of his back. Cracks it loud enough that I hear it. Fighting is more like professional wrestling than that formal stuff.

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The room beyond is bathed in blue and purple. Smells like weed and sweat. Bead curtains and silky blue drapes hang in our way. Gotta push past them, hack through them like a jungle. Hot as a jungle. Humid. We’ve gotta be in one of the octagonal rooms that I peeped from outside. It’s huge and open once we get past all the goddamn beads. Big pillows have been lain around short tables with hookahs. Fried fuckers sit around, passing that shit, don’t bother to look up as we pass. The lights are all covered with colored plastic, so it has this dreamlike vibe I’m sure the stoned freaks love.

Guys and girls sit at bay windows around the room, lying with one another. It’s quiet here. Just that thumping from the party raging all around us, the specifics of the music unable to penetrate this sanctum. At the back of the room is a mound of pillows surrounded by a semi-circle of dudes and dudettes belonging to that hippie-spiritualist type, dead and gone without a real connection to the sixties; their parents probably vote republican.

Atop of this fluffy throne are three dudes. The light makes it hard to see who’s what.

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Greg takes us across town, to the goddamn ritziest part of Apuro, a place I don’t have much of any experience with. Across the river and in the hills among the trees, there are neighborhoods that aren’t exactly neighborhoods. There are streets, sure, and houses, gotta have those, but there aren’t any people. I mean, there are, but not many. A block has one, two, maybe three houses on it. The streets wind and curve, spread along the hills like paved roots searching for untapped gold. Above the rest of the city, hidden by the trees. The whole place has this pine smell, this Northwestern feeling that I can’t place yet because I’ve only been out of Apuro three times in my life and none of my destinations were north ofSan Francisco. Here, I feel among the trees. We’re the fellowship taken through Lothlórien. Fairies and lights play among rooftops, crawl up the trees.

            It’s darker here, darker than below, but the cloudy sky has cleared and the moon gives us plenty of light. Chills up worse than earlier. Good thing the walk has us warmed.

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A group of rocks overlooks the river as it comes into town. It’s much wider there, much more wild. We find ourselves sitting on a flat slab that juts out of the bank. Looks like a box seat, a balcony. We smoke while talking about video games and music. Tim has a flask of whisky he starts passing around, and I certainly don’t complain. It’s early, but it’s a small flask. Might just be prep work for good night ahead of us.

I’d expected to get to business right away; it’s the reason I wanted to see Greg in the first place, but actually hanging with him reminds me why I like the guy. He takes jokes well. I swear, me and Tim lay it on thick all afternoon, and the guy either takes it like a champ or throws something worse back in our faces. That, or says something in Japanese to Tim and they both laugh, likely at me.

Eventually, we get to talking about Ishii because I guess it’s kind of a big deal. Tim and I take turns telling him about last night. I give him things from my perspective—leaving out anything about my plan—and then Tim adds all the funny faces I made or the stupid shit I said that I’d forgotten about or that didn’t actually happen. The important things are told; how we nailed Ishii’s bro at Walgreens and how I knocked the fuck out of Ishii himself with barely a hit landed on my own delicate frame.

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I give it all up for Tim. Tell him everything I’ve thought about concerning the plan. He asks questions. I clarify. He wonders about a certain contingency. I explain it. Can’t go too far down the road because so much is dependent on the next step. The basics seem clear enough. Take down key members of each gang, make it humiliating, avoid rumbles, avoid needless confrontation, spread word about the weaknesses of every other gang, and then wait for the other gangs to rip each other apart. I make him promise not to tell Mitch.

Alright, he says. I see why Mitch wouldn’t like this. I sure as hell don’t like it in a certain sense. Better off if you hadn’t said anything.

We’re on our way to meet Greg. Tim won’t be an unwelcome addition. We cross a street and head through gravel alleys behind old houses with overgrown backyards and rotting fences.

I’ve known Mitch as long as Mitch has known Mitch. He won’t take my idea seriously. It’s a crazy idea.

It’s brilliant.

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Tim charges. I think of Ishii and how easy it had seemed to break him. Can’t do that to Tim. I do my best to block, but he cracks me in the side of my head anyway. I tumble to the pavement. My mouth tastes like copper and dirt.

Fuck, man!

Wanting to fight is pretty stupid, Cody. He looks so tall standing over me, like a skyscraper rising into the sky.

I don’t want to fight you.

Doesn’t matter. He offers a hand to help me stand. I take it, thinking the lesson is learned. Wrong.

Tim punches me in the gut. I double over; feel him hit me in the back. Hits me hard. Probably the same maneuver I pulled on Ishii. I start to go down, but Tim catches me on his leg and flips me over like we’re a gymnastic duo. I land on my feet, stumbling away from him. He literally kicks me in the ass, forcing me forward.

I hold out my hand. Stop! Shit, Tim. You just going to beat my ass?

Apparently, he says, like he expected something else. Thought you were tough shit now. Beat Ishii, talking about how you’re looking for fights. Here’s your fight. Now what?

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Greg Ōta is not Japanese. This was the main point of contention between him and Ishii when Greg called it quits on the tough guy scene. Greg’s father is not Japanese either. Greg’s great grandfather was Japanese, but he immigrated. Just in time for the internment camps. Good times. Go America. This is not to say Greg hates his heritage. Greg loves his Japanese roots. He’s been to the country twice, lives in a practicing Buddhist/Shinto/Christian home—and doesn’t mind it? I can barely handle one religion, nigga’s got three and a billion different gods—and speaks the language. Not well. Learned it from classes here, not from his family. The kid is as American as you get, and not that ‘Merican sort; not the don’t tread on me mother fuckers who can’t remember this country was built by immigrants, paid for by slavery, and sold to a hundred other countries around the world. There is one part of Greg’s Japanese heritage that successfully moved down the family tree. His great grandfather was a government agent, just as his father before him. The line goes back a long ways. Greg can’t get a clear picture how far his family’s government ties goes, but says it’s at least to Tokugawa Yoshinobu—that’s the last shogun of Japan. Agents of the shogunate? Imperial spies? Think harder. Ishii was in love with Greg because of this connection and the ancient arts passed to the first-born male. To say what these arts are is to invite their use upon you. He certainly isn’t without his own kung fu, but it’s not necessarily his fighting style’s ass kicking potential that’s of interest. Kid has a way about getting things done. Sound dangerous for me? Less so than you might think. Hates the shit out of Ishii now. Although he has all the trappings of Ishii, Greg does that asshole one better and distances himself from the whole greater than thou attitude of Ishii’s gang. He’s American first. Japanese isn’t even second. Aint got no cultural pride, nigga? Well fuck you, says Ishii.

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         While Mir is going insane with the heart of kung fu legend beating like a thousand Poe stories under the stairs, I’m out being a fucking hero. I can’t shake the attention after the showdown between me and Ishii. Punk Chix aren’t bad about it—they’re all over me, and I don’t mind—but when I get home, I find grandma waiting for me in my room. Hair curlers and a rolling pin wouldn’t have been out of place. Chews the fuck out of me, not for fighting, but for the dozens of phone calls flooding the Clymer home after ten PM. Not acceptable.

You have bad friends, she says. Calling you at this time of night.

          Grandma is easy on me. Doesn’t pull any of the ‘poor old grandmother’ bullshit, and she can’t lay a hand on her niño precioso. Walks back into the house. Gives me time to sit down and realize what I’ve done. Things will never be the same. 

            Then the phone rings, and I hear expletives I don’t recognize coming from inside the house. Damn. Never heard grandma cuss so much. I go in. She’s holding the phone out like I can hear what’s coming through the receiver from ten feet away. Tell your friends to stop calling!

            I nod and take the phone from her. There’s soft breathing on the other end. Hello? Who is it?

            Dead in a week, Clymer, and they hang up.

            Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

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Mir goes looking for the box. Knows full well he’s not supposed to, and don’t think that doesn’t matter to him. His mother’s command means a whole hell of a lot. More than just about anything. Mir is the type of kid you don’t make “yo mama” jokes to, that is unless you want him to freak the fuck out on your ass. Finds the box easily in the back of a storage space under the staircase. It’s behind a stack of coats and a box of Christmas ornaments. Mir stares at it, just the outside because his mother had resealed it already. Seem to be a light coming form the box, an energy. Radioactive, or magical, or divine; a relic. Thought it could contain anything. An artifact or the preserved brain of his father. The mystery would eat away at his polite sense of respect in the days to come, but for now he lets it be and returns to his room, taking a backwards seat at his desk chair to stare at the remaining letter’s hiding place beneath his pillow. Refuses to sit on his bed. Already thinks it’s haunted.

He dicks around the house all day. Reads his airplane books, looks at pictures and articles online. Cleans up his room, the bathroom between his room and his mother’s. Goes into the kitchen to make soup, but realizes he’s not hungry. Ends up staring at the storage space door for a half hour before realizing why.

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Saturday morning, Mir wakes up to the sound of his mother noisily opening the front door. Goes downstairs and gives her a big hug. It makes her smile because the clinic was horrifying again. Didn’t know things could be this bad. Kid came in with a broken back. The two guys who’d brought him in said he fell, but by their looks, she guessed it’d been a fight. What is the world coming to? she thinks. Aldeheid doesn’t know what kind of place she’s moved to; if she did, she’d probably get out of there with Mir as fast as she could. But the job is something she needs and the strange request in her late husband’s will makes her heart heavy when she can’t figure out why he wanted them to move here.

Mir keeps hugging until he feels awkward. How was work?

Just fine. School?

Mir looks at his shoes. Starting at a new school on a Friday wasn’t fun.

Aldeheid goes about making breakfast for the two of them. Rösti—kinda like hash browns—pork sausage and oatmeal with a glass of milk and orange juice. Looks like the balanced breakfast they advertise with sugary cereal that no one ever eats, ever.

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