Jimmy, Pummeled

Jimmy sat on his dad’s collapsing, threadbare futon, watching some stupid dancing shit on the TV. He felt restless. He wanted to fight someone. He wanted to get smashed in the face and battered to within an inch of his life. It was an odd urge, he realized, but he insisted that he was not a masochist. He was something else. It didn’t have a name. He should be listed in a psychology book of case studies or something. He should be studied by eggheads with fancy diplomas and white coats and clipboards. There ought to be graphs and charts pertaining to his life. Evidential pictures of his fists.

Jimmy was careful  to keep his self-destructive hobbies under wraps but the scars on his face were signs of something dark and difficult. Disturbing. Mayhem dwelled within him. Meeting him face to face was terrifying. Most people made an effort to ignore his damaged face and avoid the subject. But they couldn’t help having a visceral reaction and were usually incapable of concealing it. It was almost amusing. 

He could always tell when people were disturbed. Once in a while someone without inhibition would say, Dude! What the fuck happened to your face? He’d tell the curious dunce that he was in a car accident. If they had more questions, he’d say, “I don’t like to talk about it,” and that was enough to deep-six the interrogation.

In truth, he was a bad liar and terrible at improvisation. He couldn’t just make stuff up at the drop of a hat. He supposed he could think up a plausible story and memorize it but he was a lousy actor and it would be obvious he was reciting a badly-fabricated speech. He’d just stammer through a rote…robotic…spiel to an audience of raised, skeptical eyebrows. 

He certainly couldn’t reveal the truth. Most straight citizens were appalled by violence and Jimmy didn’t want to frighten anyone. That wasn’t the point. The point was elusive. Hard to define. What was the point?

When he had to talk to the cops he’d tell `em the unvarnished truth. He’d been locked in several jail cells over the years (all for brawling) and when cops asked him about his damaged pan he’d just shrug and tell them, “I just like getting punched in the face.”

The silly dance show ended and a skit with puppets commenced. Sunday morning television was the worst. He watched the puppets without interest. One of them was blue. He disliked puppets because they looked so fake. Homemade. He always pictured the hidden hands working the felt. It looked like public masturbation. 

Jimmy traced his violent proclivities back to the streets of Philadelphia where he spent his earliest childhood. It was a sick, golden age. The brawls there were legendary. The fights were for everyone; black and white, young and old, sick or psychotic. Sudden physical altercations relieved the anger and stress and frustration that skid-life engendered. Jimmy learned a lot. And when he was running high with his gang, he fought a lot. He left a bloody front tooth on a Philly sidewalk one rainy night. Sucker punch. Out of nowhere. Lousy rotten bastard.

Another tooth got knocked out in front of Bernie’s Pub on Flag Street. In fact, he’d scattered his teeth all over town. He couldn’t chew meat anymore. He lost his right eyeball one night when a rival gang sandbagged him in the alley behind Irish O’Malley’s. Now he had a cheap-shit plastic eye that was never centered in the socket, making him look off-kilter and half-crazed. He saw his off-center eye as a boon. An enhancement. An announcement.  

Jimmy’s tragic face had been earned. His scars were stripes of merit won in heated, pointless combat. He was a warrior. Nothing more noble than testing your mettle in bloody battle.  

He made it his policy to never throw the first punch. He instigated the fights but never attacked the mark straightaway. Every fight began with a hard blast to his open face, his weathered mug hanging out there like fresh meat in a butcher’s display.  Ready and waiting. Willing. He didn’t flinch. He never ducked. He knew how to block a punch but he didn’t move a muscle until the initial hit sent him reeling. After that, all bets were off.

One mean, meaty asshole they called, “Double-Pete” for some reason, wore several huge jewel-encrusted rings on his fist like brass knuckles and they cut up Jimmy’s face pretty good. And even after his face was masked with warm, running blood, he refused to go down. He lost the fight (as usual) but he didn’t quit until the ambulance came and the pigs broke up the bloodbath. They dragged both stuporous assailants to the police station. 

Jimmy barfed blood that night and lost the hearing in his left ear.

It took forever to make his statement. His lips were so swollen, his broken jaw frozen shut with pain. He eked out his words with little staccato murmurs. The detective conducting the interview said he sounded like a chipmunk and Jimmy laughed, sending a fresh hurricane of pain into his head.     

Jimmy’s constant fighting was part of the reason his family moved around so much. He was always getting kicked out of school or arrested for defending himself. They were ashamed of him. He bragged about having a criminal rap-sheet at age thirteen. He insisted he was a “career criminal.” 

Now, at twenty-one, he was working at a gas station and trying to save enough dough to move far away from his family. Like Outer Mongolia far. 

Jimmy stood up. Thinking about all this stuff had spiked his blood pressure. He needed release. He grabbed his wallet and keys, feeling that familiar tingling of excitement in his scrotum. It was an urgent need for mutual combat. 

There was a rough, redlight district he favored. He was banned from all the bars and strip joints but he could still loiter on the sidewalks and harass tough-looking crooks and pimps into striking him. And then it was on. Rapturous violence. Life-and-death struggle. Solitary war. Righteously deserved punishment, like corrupt clerics sweating in Hell.

A broken nose. A blackened eye. A loose tooth. A split lip. If he was really lucky he might earn a concussion.

He needed to look as ugly as he felt. He had to be punished for the sins hidden inside him. He had to be marked. Branded. A walking, living advertisement that screamed, “You don’t want to know me!” “Fuck you!” “Get away!”

“Trust me.” 

Jimmy hit the streets, carrying his clenched fists like loaded pistols. It was a beautiful day for new bruises and broken bones and a face scraped red and raw across the sidewalk, baptizing the concrete with dribbles of blood and shredded epidermis, where they would remain until the next cleansing rain.