giving me a clear shot at the rest of the creep. Before the kid can recover his balance from the first punch, I’m pummeling him in the stomach, hunching my shoulders, ducking my head, and getting in close, protecting my torso as I make him wish he didn’t have one.
It’s been years since I’ve been in a real fight, but it comes back to me like I never left that rough, sad schoolyard in South Carolina. Like I was never spirited away to a softer existence in Maui, and an even softer one in Croatia, where Gabe’s money made sure I was never treated like a waste of flesh again.
Back in Giffney, I’d been nothing but Chuck Cooney’s oldest son, the kid most likely to get sent to juvie. I’d grown up in a neighborhood where you had to fight to prove you weren’t an easy victim, and I’d learned my hood lessons well. I was a runt until my fifteenth birthday, but by the time I was eight, I could level kids twice my size.
I learned to fight like a monster because I knew no one was going to take it easy on me if I didn’t. If you lost a fight in my old neighborhood, there was a chance you’d lose a few teeth or an eye, as well. I once watched a kid get beaten so badly he was puking blood by the time the two guys beating the shit out of him got bored and went to go steal cigarettes from the corner store.
When you grow up like that, you don’t see any other way. Beat or get beaten.
Learn to be tougher than the people who want to hurt you, or get used up, battered, and abused.
If I were still the little beast I used to be, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret for beating the fucking shit out of this kid. Back then, I knew the laws of the jungle. I had absorbed them into my blood stream, been born with them encoded in my DNA. Weak fucks who try to take what the stronger fucks have deserve what they get. They deserve to suffer and to die if they’re unlucky enough to get punched in the wrong place one too many times. This kid had tried to hurt someone under my protection and take what was mine, and he’d lost, and now it was my right to make him wish he had never been born.
But I’m not that monster anymore. I don’t have a taste for blood, or the freedom to risk killing someone with my fists. I have a conscience that would eat me alive if I took a life for any reason other than self-defense, and I have so much to lose.
I have Sam and our future and that is…everything.
“Get out of here.” I shove the kid away, breath burning my lungs, making me aware of how much energy I’d been exerting.
He falls to the ground near the trash cans with a groan and doesn’t get up for a long moment, making me wonder if I took too long to regain control.
I silently start counting, promising myself I’ll go find a phone to call for help if he doesn’t get up by the time I reach ten, no matter how fucked I’ll be if I end up in jail in a foreign country. But finally, after another groan and a whimper that makes me think he was closer to thirteen than sixteen, he staggers to his feet and lurches away around the edge of the apartment building.
I watch him go, torn between feeling relieved and disgusted with myself.
A quick glance at the building reveals sheets hanging in the windows, a Christmas tree still visible in a second story apartment, and an air of poverty so heavy there is no mistaking the building for anything other than the slum that it is. This is where the people who are just a few rungs above rock bottom are clinging to the shit splattered concrete before they’re swept away into the sewer.
This is a place like the one where I grew up, a place where almost no one gets out and no one gets better.
Generation by generation, people are sucked into ever more crushing poverty until kids are born knowing it’s pointless to hope for something better. The only way out is to take what the world won’t offer you, to steal what the powers that be will never give you a chance to earn.
As awful as it was to see Sam
It’s been years since I’ve been in a real fight, but it comes back to me like I never left that rough, sad schoolyard in South Carolina. Like I was never spirited away to a softer existence in Maui, and an even softer one in Croatia, where Gabe’s money made sure I was never treated like a waste of flesh again.
Back in Giffney, I’d been nothing but Chuck Cooney’s oldest son, the kid most likely to get sent to juvie. I’d grown up in a neighborhood where you had to fight to prove you weren’t an easy victim, and I’d learned my hood lessons well. I was a runt until my fifteenth birthday, but by the time I was eight, I could level kids twice my size.
I learned to fight like a monster because I knew no one was going to take it easy on me if I didn’t. If you lost a fight in my old neighborhood, there was a chance you’d lose a few teeth or an eye, as well. I once watched a kid get beaten so badly he was puking blood by the time the two guys beating the shit out of him got bored and went to go steal cigarettes from the corner store.
When you grow up like that, you don’t see any other way. Beat or get beaten.
Learn to be tougher than the people who want to hurt you, or get used up, battered, and abused.
If I were still the little beast I used to be, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret for beating the fucking shit out of this kid. Back then, I knew the laws of the jungle. I had absorbed them into my blood stream, been born with them encoded in my DNA. Weak fucks who try to take what the stronger fucks have deserve what they get. They deserve to suffer and to die if they’re unlucky enough to get punched in the wrong place one too many times. This kid had tried to hurt someone under my protection and take what was mine, and he’d lost, and now it was my right to make him wish he had never been born.
But I’m not that monster anymore. I don’t have a taste for blood, or the freedom to risk killing someone with my fists. I have a conscience that would eat me alive if I took a life for any reason other than self-defense, and I have so much to lose.
I have Sam and our future and that is…everything.
“Get out of here.” I shove the kid away, breath burning my lungs, making me aware of how much energy I’d been exerting.
He falls to the ground near the trash cans with a groan and doesn’t get up for a long moment, making me wonder if I took too long to regain control.
I silently start counting, promising myself I’ll go find a phone to call for help if he doesn’t get up by the time I reach ten, no matter how fucked I’ll be if I end up in jail in a foreign country. But finally, after another groan and a whimper that makes me think he was closer to thirteen than sixteen, he staggers to his feet and lurches away around the edge of the apartment building.
I watch him go, torn between feeling relieved and disgusted with myself.
A quick glance at the building reveals sheets hanging in the windows, a Christmas tree still visible in a second story apartment, and an air of poverty so heavy there is no mistaking the building for anything other than the slum that it is. This is where the people who are just a few rungs above rock bottom are clinging to the shit splattered concrete before they’re swept away into the sewer.
This is a place like the one where I grew up, a place where almost no one gets out and no one gets better.
Generation by generation, people are sucked into ever more crushing poverty until kids are born knowing it’s pointless to hope for something better. The only way out is to take what the world won’t offer you, to steal what the powers that be will never give you a chance to earn.
As awful as it was to see Sam
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