Tough Guy Talk

Short Story

“And yeah, so I was sitting there, and this bitch, she hated me, had it out for me from day one you know. So she gave me the black card, you know what the black card is?”

“No what’s that?”

“In bootcamp, the black card pretty much says that they can beat you for the maximum allowed time, so they made me go eat first, because they have to give you so many meals in a day, and so many hours of ‘uninterrupted sleep’ so basically she wanted to beat me for the maximum allowed time with no breaks for me and….”

I had already began to space out as he was regaling me with what I was certain to be a long, uninterrupted beating of my own. I was in this bar and it was like three or four in the afternoon. I quit my job, you know, and I did pretty good about not spending my time getting fucked up while the sun could see me for the first two weeks, but this was the third week so my defenses were worn down.

It was totally different in the afternoon, as most dive bars are. Harsh white daylight shone over every piece of duct tape on the black leather cushions of the bar, bar stools, and booths, highlighting every stain long worn into the gray carpet with saccharine earnestness. At night, the lighting is low and red and hides the abounding imperfections of the building and its inhabitants.

This bar used to be my usual spot in the evenings, but they built up a shitty little stage at one end and then started charging fifteen bucks on Fridays and Saturdays for people to come in and see the no-name bands. The bands weren’t always terrible but they weren’t always good either, and suffice to say indulging in the local talent wasn’t exactly my reason for walking my ass over to the Black Cat in the first place.

Anyway, I’m in this bar and it’s late afternoon, and I was hoping to spend some time shooting pool alone. But instead, me and the bartender are subject to this slovenly veteran’s story of his iron cock or brass balls or whatever.

“… And I was smiling while she did it, too. She always had it out for me. The other guys, the other guys had to take their break in the middle of my beating and come back! Man I got it that day all over some stupid…”

My first inclination, as should everyone’s be, is that what he was saying is utter bullshit.

There was this guy that I used to work with back when I worked for the slumlord. And that’s no bullshit. All the houses the boss owned were slap shod cut up into apartments and were falling the fuck apart. Held together by hopes and dreams, you know, it really turned my stomach but I figured if me and the other guys weren’t there turning wrenches for King Jagoff then those poor tenants would really be hosed.

Anyway, we had this guy who worked with us for like two weeks who always used to spout off about the steel mill, how he commanded hot slag with the might of his melon-sized forearms and avoided death at every turn. The way he used to describe the sparks flying like gnats all around him, you could feel the sweat dripping from his brow and smell the sulfur in the air.

Come to find out he was Racist Mike’s (so I called him because his birth name was Michael and was an ardent white supremacist) sister’s nephew by marriage, and had never even stepped foot in a steel mill but worked for three years at Wendy’s.

Racist Mike told me then not to believe everything I heard, which was fitting because every third sentence out of his mouth was about how Jewish people controlled the weather or how everything we’ve ever been told was a globalist conspiracy.

I used to frequently tie his shoes for him even though I hated him. He had two broken hips and was waiting on a surgery that would never come, so he couldn’t bend over really well. I guess I just didn’t like to see him struggle in that way, crippled as he was.

“… Anyway, so I see the girl run out of the car so I run too, she’s obviously scared and her boyfriend comes running after her so I run up and start swinging at him, and he pulls out a knife and I keep hammering on him…”

The sunlight had found a spot under the neon PBR sign and was piercing the Jameson bottles. Our Homer had moved on to another tale of his magnanimous glory. I wondered,

“Whats the point?”

“Huh?”

I was gone again. Maybe it’s just a man thing you know? Like all my life I’ve had to sit and listen to stories of toughness manifest. Whether it was from my dad or my brother or my uncle, I always heard about their foes slain before them and the women of their foes driven to lament at their feet. The stories are always told from one man to another, as if to assert this power, this reassurance, maybe to avoid an actual physical conflict.

At least in a few of those instances, I was actually around to bear witness to their violence, to the ways that men can love their own bodies via the strength contained therein. And the expunging of that strength upon whosoever should be unlucky enough to have raised their ire in that particular moment.

“What do you mean what’s the point?”

He dribbled a little bit as he posed the question to me. The spittle slipped down his scraggly beard and came to rest in a nubile bead on the spot of his chin that my uncle told me if I hit a man hard enough it would knock him clean out. I looked in his eyes and saw fear. We held that brief moment of eye contact and the silence rested heavy on us as the air intensified, readying itself to be disturbed.

“Anyway,” I began:

“When I was a kid my uncle was in the hospital. He’s really my great uncle so he was pretty old at the time, coming up on sixty if I remember right, and something was wrong with his kidneys. He was fucked up, big time, you know? And we’re driving away from the hospital and hes got a cane and can barely walk when this guy gets total road rage driving behind us. I don’t remember exactly what happened to make him so mad. He was blaring on his horn and motioning for us to pull over, so we did. My uncle looked at me scared, kind of how you are looking at me now.”

“I’m not scared”

“Whatever so my-”

“What, like I would be scared of you?”

“It doesn’t matter, my uncle looked at me scared, and then got out of the car with his cane and hobbled over. All the while he’s yelling at this other driver, ‘GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT THE CAR, MOTHERFUCKER!’ So when the other guy opened the door and stuck his leg out, my uncle, fresh out of the hospital, reeled back and kicked the car door as hard as he could and fuckin’ broke the guys leg right at the knee. But he kicked it so hard he fell over and ruptured his stitches. So they were both there rollin’ on the ground bleeding and crying in agony, and I had to get the driver’s cellphone to call an ambulance for the two of them. But, when my uncle tells that story-”

“Bullshit,” he threw at me, the anger in his eyes told me he didn’t listen to a thing I had just said.

And then I kicked his ass.

Bing-Bang-Boom.

He didn’t even stand a chance.