That Time I Got My Ass Kicked
Tripping Over Dad's Footsteps | 🥊 no. 005
I. Aftermath
“I don’t want to hangout with someone who just got their ass kicked.”
Noticing his voice trailing off, I stop running toward the boys bathroom and turn around to see my buddy’s slender back, his lanky 6’3” frame doing a terrible job of disappearing into the crowd of other teenagers roaming our high school campus at the end of lunch.
Standing there with blood trickling down my face, my body electric, tingling, and numb with adrenaline, it’s the abandonment in a moment of need that pierces my façade, and I can no longer pretend that I’m tough: I feel the first tears push through my clenched eyes.
With my weakness now making inroads through the grime stuck on my face, I resume my trip to the bathroom with a renewed urgency, hurrying in search of a darkness complete enough to hide a teenage boy’s radioactive embarrassment.
II. Dad Stories
Growing up, stories of my tattooed, muscular dad beating up bullies circulated through our house on a regular basis. They became mythological, growing in grandeur with each enthusiastic retelling. Not that dad was always the one responsible for sharing them.
After he was diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 and had the majority of his right lung removed, dad was forced to medically retire and live on disability.1 Just like that, his working life came to an end, and his new life as a stay-at-home dad and recovering cancer patient began.
With dad home, we started having more visitors at the house, especially during the week. The other men in my life—my uncle, older cousins, and dad’s buddies—often took extended lunch breaks or ducked out of work early to visit with dad and talk. Inevitably, they’d start recalling stories about his “scraps,” brawls they heard about or witnessed firsthand. Because I was homeschooled starting in third grade (roughly around the time of dad’s surgery), I was usually within earshot of these legendary tales.
Sometimes they talked about dad’s fight stories from his school days or reckless twenties; sometimes they talked about the fight stories from one of his many odd jobs: nightclub bouncer, freelance bodyguard, and correctional officer in a maximum security prison.
Each telling was a nostalgic victory lap where dad and his visitors would share laughs, crude jokes, and recreate the glorious moments when dad stood taller than any man in the world. The admiration these men felt for my father was palpable, and it made my young heart big and full with pride: That’s my dad.
The specifics of the stories themselves aren’t important so much as their general shape and overarching theme: dad beating up bullies. In every story, some nefarious fiend is harassing, threatening, and/or hurting someone innocent, and, like any superhero worth his cape and tights, dad would intervene: POW! BOFF! KAPOW! Each evildoer vanquished, left sprawled out on the floor, humbled, and knocked senseless by dad’s mighty fists.2
I never questioned the heroic stories about my dad. Fact checking and sifting through the anecdotal evidence of dad’s brawls for objective proof of his righteousness, trying to adjudicate and justify the violence, of course, misses the point entirely.
Growing up, I reveled in the stories, celebrated them: Surely, there is no one in the world as strong as my dad.
The legend became reality and sank into my little bones until they became part of my very being, as real and undeniable as my own flesh because it was my flesh. A reputation of manliness, physical prowess, and protecting innocent people from harm, dad’s legacy served as my North Star for what it meant to be a man—and a dad. I walked through the world under my father’s shadow, never daring to step outside of it.
It never occurred to me that the circulation of these stories about my dad’s strength were happening at the very moment he was losing it to cancer.
III. Back in the Bathroom
With everyone mercifully back in class, the boys bathroom becomes the most unlikely of sanctuaries, a place to contemplate the impossibility of ever returning to school, let alone confronting the administrative fallout of the fight. After a teacher broke it up, I ran with my friend—or thought I was, anyway—hoping to somehow escape it all. I knew it was only a matter of time before campus security found me, took me to the principal’s office, called my parents, and suspended me. Surely, I had left an easy trail to follow.
The mirror in the boys bathroom reflects a startling image: I notice a z-shaped gash on the bridge of my nose, and even I know it requires stitches. Bruises, scrapes, and puffy eyes from a mix of punches and tears, I awaken to the pain and soreness as the adrenaline evacuates my still trembling body.
Only a year removed from homeschool, I expressed to my parents how badly I wanted to go back to public school and seize the fresh start that comes with moving to a new city.
I look down and inspect the bloodstains on my newly purchased white Volcom t-shirt. I had purchased the shirt along with some other trendy clothes I saw boys my age wearing in an unsuccessful effort to fit in with the surf and skate culture that dominated my Orange County, California high school.
Anything to distract from the fact I didn’t have their family money or their looks or their friends and that I was a bad swimmer who couldn’t surf, and that my lone attempt at riding a skateboard had resulted in nearly crashing into a parked car, reminding me I was pigeon-toed and uncoordinated. I was a blooper reel to everyone else’s highlight.
I hated being the weird homeschooled kid, but I really didn’t want to be known as the kid who got his ass kicked at lunch. Now, I was both.
But nothing hurt more than how the fight revealed the vast chasm between me and my dad. Looking back up and at my face again, it was covered in evidence that I wasn’t strong like him: Dad never lost. The fight had been a demonstration of the great distance separating me from my father’s might.
Standing alone in the bathroom, I feel unmanly, ashamed.
IV. Origin Story
Dad’s ability to fight came from a childhood of being victimized, of being physically and emotionally abused by a cruel stepfather. He grew up around other working-class kids who lived similar lives of hopelessness and arbitrary violence, many of whom later turned to victimizing each other.
Dad didn’t learn to fight out of ego so much as he learned to fight out of survival. It was his growing strength, further cultivated during his teenage years of bucking hay for a meager paycheck, and the confidence he gained in his fists that gave him the power to tell his abuser never again.
I always thought of dad’s muscles and tattoos as fitting adornments to his fearsome persona.
Never mind the fact his muscles emerged as a consequence of the physical labor he had been doing out of obligation and necessity since he was a boy, or that his commitment to the gym was therapeutic rather than recreational, the one place where he could routinely purge himself of the rage and hurt and trauma he carried in his prideful, silent heart.
Never mind the fact his tattoos—all those images of broken skulls and graveyards and grim reapers—came in the wake of his cancer diagnosis and recovery, rooted in the anger and fear of a 36-year-old father terrified to leave his children behind like his twenty-eight-year-old father had left him after tragically and pointlessly dying so young; in his hopelessness, dad decided to take back control over his body by covering it with images meant to taunt death: the final bully there to hurt and steal from him.
Dad wasn’t performing toughness; instead, his body was a living, evolving testament to his pain. He spent a lifetime forging a body strong and scary enough to keep the monsters out and was using those calloused hands to build a life where the light could get in.
But, to me, he simply represented what a man was and should be: A fierce protector, muscled, tattooed, ready to defend the weak at any given moment. His was a masculinity I aspired to and anything else was a failure.
V. Fightin’ Words
“If I catch you following me again, I’m going to beat your ass.”
I’m a sophomore in high school walking around at lunch with one of my only friends—no small feat for a pale, awkward teenager just learning to interact with people his own age.
The skinny boy threatening me is covered with a smattering of freckles and has the faintest mustache sprouting above his thin lips. It’s the early 2000s, and he’s awash in some nu-metalesque performance of rebellion, draped in dark clothes, and adorned with fake leather and bulky, cheap silver jewelry, including the rings that will soon be responsible for cutting my face. His beanie pulled down tight over his scowling eyebrows, his small green eyes stare into mine and communicate the dare.
For weeks, he’s been coming into the grocery store where I work to steal, usually a bottle of liquor but not always. My manager tasked me with following him, advising me to keep a close eye so we could finally catch this punk in the act.
I sometimes imagine going back in time to that moment when my manager tells me to follow one of my peers and, instead of offering a timid yes because it’s my first job, and I didn’t know you could tell your manager no, I stiffen my shoulders and remind him I’m just a humble bag boy and say: It isn’t worth $6.75 an hour sir to get my nose bloodied and a scar I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.
Now that I have the perspective of a father, I might also suggest that this young boy stealing bottles of Smirnoff after school doesn’t need to be arrested: he needs help, love.
But, in this moment, at lunch, surrounded by my peers, having been audibly threatened, having no idea what to do and no prior experience with anything like this, I ask myself what dad would do if someone walked up to him and said they’d beat his ass.
In what feels like an out-of-body experience, I feel my arm pull back and my shaking fist land on his soft face. An unexpected reverberation of pain shoots through my fingers and wrist. Expecting him to collapse from my one mighty punch, I’m surprised to see him barely phased, still standing there and, caught in my surprise, I soon feel his fist striking me between the eyes, his ring slicing into the bridge of my nose.
Everything is fuzzy and the world is nothing but blurs and heat and bursts of light and every cell is alive with adrenaline.
As we’re locked together, and I try to ward off the torrent of throws coming my way, I’m shocked by how much blood is falling to the ground.
It was a bad day to wear a white t-shirt.
Postscript
Despite all the talk of violence in our house and my dad’s reputation for being a tough guy, he was gentle and loving. I was his only son and, given the absence of fathers in his life, he made being an excellent one his top priority. Even the physical and psychological toll of the cancer couldn’t keep him from being attentive and present, always generous with his time—a boundless, unconditional love.
In the wake of the fight, being the dumb teenage boy I was, I blamed dad’s gentleness for making me such a lousy fighter and, consequently, less of a man.
It was maddening to hear why he had chosen not to prioritize teaching me how to fight: He wanted me to be different than he was, to have a different life, to use words instead of fists.3
Two decades later, although I’m able to recognize the fight and my reaction to it for the silly adolescent drama it was, I occasionally wonder what it reveals—if anything—about my status as a protector. Now that I’m a father, archaic and old fashioned as it is, I ask myself: Can I defend my family? Can I defend my children? Can I even defend myself?
As a kid, I always felt safe with my dad, and I fear that my children won’t be able to say the same.
Yet, I don’t want to be known for my toughness, a realization it took me years to come to and accept. I can have my own legacy.
I want to be known for having a fearless love, to risk being called names for showing affection to the men in my life, hugging and telling them how much I appreciate their presence; fearless at the prospect of having people I trust weaponize my vulnerability against me; fearless to write for the world, to share and split myself open in the public square, letting all of me spill out for everyone: These are my shameful, flawed, ugly guts, and you can do with them what you please.
I don’t want to pursue toughness. I want to pursue love.
I am and have always been the vessel for my dad’s recovered love, his indomitable spirit, what he was able to protect and keep whole within himself during the years of violence and trauma he endured as a child but also as an angry young man and, eventually, as a cancer survivor. From this precious resource, I received and became the embodiment of the love my father had been denied. It was and is his wish for me to walk through the world wielding its transformative power.
I may not know how to throw a punch, but I know how to love fearlessly.
Thank you dad.
I love you.
For those wondering, my dad didn’t smoke.
This isn’t to suggest my dad is a saint. Conducting a post-mortem on his fisticuffs, soon to be 65, and a survivor of both lung and kidney cancer, dad is the first one to tell you there’s plenty of gray area, plenty of ego, and surely an occasion or two where he encountered someone as angry and wounded as he was. He acknowledges his volatility, that not all of these brawls were necessarily conducted out of a spirit of virtue. He was young and angry with a short fuse and felt he had nothing in the world to lose, refusing to accept anything he perceived as disrespect or an affront to his dignity, his manhood, anything that dared to stir the memories of the victimization he endured and witnessed as a boy. The world was overrun with shades of his stepfather.
He also reminded me how many times he suggested I take martial arts classes, and how he had respected my decision to stay home and write and read instead.
Great story, glad I found it!
Loving your stories, Jacob, so glad I get to read them! And your dad sounds great.