II. How Trying to Look Cool Got Me Punched in The Face

The fight started long before the fight started. In eight grade, with high school approaching, my friends started to sign up for high school football.

I loved tennis. I grew up in a small mountain town and every summer as a kid I took tennis lessons at the local rec center. The rec center served as a gathering place for families in our town. It had a lake for swimming. There were large lawns where we ran and shot each other with water guns. There was a frisbee golf course where we’d throw disks through a wilderness of pine and oak. And barbecue pits lined the sandy lake shore and we gathered on picnic tables here for so many hamburger hot dog meals. The small hallmark Christmas movie town spralled out from this center point and intermingled with forests and the granite feet of mountains. As kids we moved from one game to the next. I returned often to the tennis courts.

I opted out of many activities in order to play tennis. I loved to see the forward spin on the fuzzy neon ball as it exploded from the strings of my racket. I longed to see that ball land in the back corner of the opposing square. And I longed to see my desperate opponent friend in a full sprint, who would have rather played volleyball, swing and miss.

A tennis match made combat, in all its bloody muddy conquest, a safe and inspiring pursuit. And the court, with its clean geometry — its squareness and stillness — represented a cosmos that remained myserious but understandable. Writghwood was like that too. It was safe…and beautiful.

Near the end of eighth grade, my peers talked about what sports they would play in high school. We dreamed together of who we would become in the world ahead. My first and natural thought was that I would play tennis.

Wrightwood could only support space for an elementary school. After elementary, we rode school busses into the nearby high desert, where we would attend middle school and then to the neighboring high school. These schools served the many remote communities of the wider landscape. We left elementary to integrate into crowds of new kids from other places, some lower income, sometimes wealthier, some kids came from homes that trafficked drugs, some from homes where parents beat them. Some wore rags to school. Some rode horses in English style competitions. I recall not wanting my world to expand in this unpredictable way.

I made a few new friends in middle school. But I now looked up the road at the high school, a campus far more khaki in color, far more dotted with old cooked chewing gum burning in the desert sun, far more barricaded with chain link, in which dwelled far more giant and strange humans, fully capable in my mind, of murder.

Rumors had it gangs roamed within the student population.

Each day I looked out of the school bus window as we stopped to pick up high schoolers going to our neighborhood, and I’d watch these and other older teens emerge from the fortress campus. I saw goths robed in black baggy pants and trench coats, their necks and wrists strapped with leather and spiked silver jewelry. I saw jocks made all the larger by husky letterman jackets. I saw stoners draped in tie dye shirts and torn jeans, and those of them that boarded our bus smelled of a sorcerers substance that likely came from zip lock bags. I wondered how to live in the world ahead.

One spring day in the eight grade I walked home from our bus stop. I walked with my friend Max and his older brother Jackson, a tall powerful man among boys who could command our bus full of kids who shouted that threw objects to shut up if he felt he needed a calm ride.

As the oldest child in my family, having no forerunner siblings to bring news of the world ahead, I looked to Jackson as my window into high school. I looked to him for advice. As we walked through a field of high golden grass towards our homes, I told him, with a light in my eye, that I planned to play tennis in high school.

He laughed.

He said that tennis is the nerdiest sport I could play in highschool. I asked him what sports were cool. He said football most of all. Then basketball and baseball. The girls are always going for the football guys. But with tennis, he kept laughing, dude I can’t be there to help when you’re picked on.

I received similar feedback from other sources. Friends and fathers of friends. In my varsity blues world, tennis stood out as a sport for effeminate men who lived in Monaco. And the effeminate man in Monaco just wasn’t an acceptable archetype to embody in John Wayne America.

Many of my friends played football through most of their youth. They would sign up for football.

I would sign up for football.

And so I played on the second string practice squad of our seven time CIA championship team. I served the Diamondbacks as a 145 pound outside linebacker, and to the coaching staff it seemed, a practice bag that could move.

I felt like a fraud celebrating after games with the team in my clean uniform. Although they had me to thank for hitting practice.

I would sit with the team in the cafeteria as they talked about Friday night’s win. But sometimes they liked to retell the story of that one time when the coaches let me play and I tackled the running back after he stopped running and stood ten yards out of bounds.

Sometimes the coaches played the film clip in the locker room and the guys could relive the hilarity.

The humiliation of trying to play football left me looking for new modes of proving my worth in this confusing society.

I quit football after my sophomore year. Around the same time, I discovered an environment where they cheered for me…the parties.

The crowd cheered when I took down a beer from a clear hose connected to a large red funnel held by a friend who ballanced high above me on a stool. I started to spend more time with a different group of friends. We did not play sports after school. We did not spend a moment at school beyond what the state asked of us. We didn’t even spend the state-mandated time.

These friends pat me on the shoulder in fraternal equality as I blew clouds of marijuana smoke into a car already full of marijuana smoke.

We were heroes here, all of us. We celebrated with each other. We weren’t always sure what we celebrated. We chugged bottles of Mickie’s purchased by strangers and danced around a living room to the psychedelic notes of the Doors, and we threw our arms around each others’s necks and pressed our foreheads together and cracked up and fell to the ground.

We smoked weed on rooftops and watched the stars and sillouettes of the forests. We went snowboarding instead of sitting through social studies.

I don’t recall ever talking about college or academics with these friends who I still love to this day, although we reclined on front poarches and talked of sociology and extraterrestrials. We lived outside of a system that we felt gave us no clear place. We blasted punk rock by Bad Religion and NOFX while driving slow with the sunroof and windows open. We breathed the air that smelled of sap and ponderosa. We believed we would live forever, and we waged covert wars against deans and principles sneaking contraband through enemy lines. We often scoffed at the widom of our elders.

And back among the social ranks in school, we believed ourselves to now be cool.

We wore jeans and brown and black button up shirts that looked like they came from Johnny Cash’s closet. We wore dark sunglasses that we removed only after several sentences into the teachers’ lecture, as if to say, we have more important things going on elsewhere.

Our peers seemed to respect us, or so we believed, because we did not care…and we cared.

I lied a lot to maintain this way of life. I lied to my parents who thought I attended a lot of sleepovers. I told them my eyes were red because I just hadn’t been sleeping well. As they saw more of the truth, I spun more elaborate lies and started to believe them.

One afternoon near the end of my senior year I pulled the sunglasses from my face and stepped into my first period peer leading class. Through some terrible administrative oversight, I earned the title of “Peer Leader” each and every year of high school. It was a role that supposedly asked me to lead in some way. Most of my party friends gained the same title and we sat on desks in this meeting hour talking about the weekend and snowboarding and the girls we liked until the bell rang for our next class during which we would also do nothing.

I saw Mitch Corbell each day in this class and we talked crap to each other. He was a junior and so an underclassman, but I saw him as an equal. I liked him. I thought he was cool. I don’t recall what we said to each other on the daily. But this morning whatever I said caused him to stand up and slap me across the face. Everyone in the room sitting on desks talking fell silent and looked at us. Mitch then took a seat on the other side of the room.

After class people approached me and asked me what I planned to do about Mitch’s open display of disrespect. I didn’t feel strongly about it one way or the other, but they kept asking me. I thought about the socially respectable response, and so I said, “I will fight him.”

I had fought only once before. My friend cheated in flag football in third grade and he teased me on the field as I argued with him and I lost my cool and punched him and he looked at me in shock, then later we both sat in the principles office and cried and we became good friends after that.

At home, I sometimes asked my dad to put me in boxing or martial arts, but he always said that fighting would never be my way to solve problems.

Nobody told me that Mitch Corbell practiced boxing with his father and brother, and to come home after losing a fight meant bringing shame upon his family and ancestors.

I remember calling out to Mitch from across the outdoor quad, “Mitch, I’m going to fight you!” And I punched my left fist to my open right hand, the universal sign for I’m going to fight you.

He didn’t look scared.

I looked cool at this time. At a party a week before, I let a girl who I thought was cute shave my hair into a mohalk. It looked great. A big flowing blonde mohalk. And I tied a bandana around my head which completed the look.

It was a Friday and I looked forward to the weekend. My friends and I would drive to Ventura, my favorite place in the world, and go surfing and fish for perch and corbina. I forgot all about my spoken public obligation to fight Mitch Corbell.

As I walked with a crowd to the parking lot after school, someone said to me, “Nate, there’s Mitch down there by his suburban. Now’s your chance!”

I didn’t think. With my prefrontal lobe disengaged for reasons evolutionists will continue to study, I walked fast ahead of the crowd towards Mitch, and I could hear everyone’s excited whispers and something that made me feel good.

Mitch closed his heavy steel pasanger door and stood tall in stoic and athletic preparation.

I said, “Mitch, this is for this morning.” And with kind gentleness I fulfilled the needed theatrics by throwing a right hook that grazed his cheekbone.

Mitch, if it were my overhand backspin serve, with you on the other side of the court, you’d have something coming, bro.

He returned with a punch, I didn’t even see it, that caused me to stumble backwards and I woke up while still on my feet somehow, and I felt warm liquid on my face. Then I remembered that I started a fight.

He charged at me. I grabbed his shirt. He shoved me. A concrete curb caught my ankle and I went tumbling down a dirt hill beside the main highway, backed up with cars in after school traffic.

Mitch used his legs to run down the hill, and he stood over me about to clobber me unconscious. All of a sudden I felt something real in me. I dodged the first punch. And a second. Something in me said I’m going to defeat him or go out on a stretcher.

But Mitch disappeared from my sight and I jumped to my feet. I wondered why so much blood was speckled across my white t-shirt and why Mitch held his nose as it bled. He then picked up my white bandana and held it to his nose.

No way I did that, I thought. In fact I didn’t. My friend Peter did. Peter had the arm of a quarter back but couldn’t secure first string on the football team and so we often hung out in our party-like haze. Peter later told me that he didn’t give the moment any thought. He just saw his homie in trouble, exact words, and jumped in to help him.

He’s a loyal friend, but that did not go well.

I rode away from the scene in a friend’s van to urgent care where I had my split open eye brow stiched up. I went to the beach but couldn’t go in the water. News spread fast that Peter and I premeditated an attack on a vulnerable underclassman. But Mitch faught nobly, doing significant damage to one of his agressors.

I knew I would be sitting in the dean’s office so my mom made me shave my mohalk. When I looked in the mirror I did not look cool. I looked like convict with a purple swollen shut eye.

When Peter and I sat before the Dean, Mr. Tupelo, we took turns telling our stories and he took down notes and let out the occasional laugh of disbelief…and disgust. I was suspended. During that time at home I received phone calls from Mitch’s older thug friends telling me that I was dead.

They were right. They never came around and offed me like they said, but I felt dead. I no longer felt a heart inside my chest. I gave it over to the crowd and I wanted them to love me. But the crowd soon graduated. They left for colleges and trade schools. Some stayed in town but their lives no longer looked the same. They spread like ashes in the wind, and my heart was there, among the ashes as they blew away.