Autumn 1988
God, if only we were one pint of the man that Jude was. -- From Arabella to Sue, he drove the length of the gridiron. Taking the ball off tackle, like Roger Craig, high knee action and three linebackers piggybacking, he strode to Marygreen, in the rain, for fucking paydirt. How about the second marriage in the butcher's shop? The blinds were drawn so the morning sun couldn't get in, the booze was still being hooched, and Arabella looked as pretty as a 12-week-old cadaver. Yeeouww! There's a wedding. I got into a fight on Friday with a big fat bouncer at an East Village bar. It all started when he wouldn't let Ashley back into the bar. We had all stepped outside to go to another bar; it was about 1:30 AM; but she had left one her fucking knitted hats, and she had to go back inside and search for it. To make a long story short, I told the guy to let me back in to get it because Ashley had started to freak out -- screaming obscenities and grabbing at the guy. I searched and searched and finally found it, but when I got back outside the situation had elevated into something even uglier than when I'd left. -- Ashley is totally drunk and screaming at the guy; he pushes her, and then Terri goes crazy -- because he pushes Ashley -- and starts hitting this big fat asshole. Okay, so now it's my turn. I see that Terri is going wild and that this guy might slug here. So I step in. We do the obligatory lip-to-lip macho smooch. He thinks he's got a poo-see on his hands. -- I was wearing an Art Quinn tweed and a knit sweater. He started in on the foreplay oration, you know, the "Watta ya gonna do? Are ya gonna party?" shtick. But he became suddenly surprised, eyes changing dilation, when he heard that I knew how to converse in the same tongue. I don't know exactly what my riposte was, but it was something I had said before, in a similar situation, with an equal amount of fuck-you fearlessness. Then, all of sudden, I was being hurled backward, diving and flipping into the rainy-wet sidewalk. Apparently Tweedledum -- big fat asshole #2 -- had grabbed me from behind and tore me down. But that was it; that was all I could take; that was the moment that I saw red; that was the moment that Peter Parker traded in his reporter's badge and his camera for the Spidey suit. -- I shot up -- Tweedledum was shouting, "Nobody fucks with my friend!" -- and I went for Tweedledee. I let out the Bosworth grunt, driving Dee hard, about ten feet, into a parked car. -- He felt like an old sofa bed, a lot of puff padding, and you could feel the thin sinews underneath, springs as thin as guitar string. And I knew my body felt hard to him. I was the road. And I took him off his feet and down to the pavement. And no fear filled my body. I knew he was scared. (Lucky for me, in hindsight, I had been following my eighty-push-up-a-day regimen for that week.) But then Dum ran up and started dropping fists on my head; and the little ladies, Terri and Ashley, came out the woods like screaming furies, long finger nails and crazy energy, making everything a pot of boiling Hollywood water. This gave me an opportunity to get on my feet, which I did, and I started driving into both Dee and Dum. And I knew that I had already won the battle; I knew that they couldn't beat me: I was stronger than they were, spiritually, physically, whatever; and they knew it. They could bloody me and rip at me and go for my eyes, but they knew it wouldn't beat me. My equilibrium was solid. I wasn't wild. I was determined and ready to keep going. So they backed off. There was a lot of shouting and cussing afterward, but they weren't ready to go again. I got a few bruises, on my neck and head, but I fancy that they're worth it.
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