March 1989:
Okay! As pickings have been slim lately, (i.e., I've
been too broke to go out and make an ass of myself), I've been writing up some oldschool stories- and this is as oldschool
as you can get. It was the first time I ACTUALLY crapped my pants.
Now, I know everybody soiled themselves thousands of times
when they were little babies, right? Wrong. I refused to play sir poops-a-lot. As the legend goes,
even as a newborn I would somehow manage to pull my diaper or whatever off, and then crap all over everything but me.
I have no recollection of this phenomenon, but my dad has an 8mm film of me doing it at my third birthday party.
The footage is grainy and all over the place, but you can
clearly see me sitting at the head of a little card table laden with gifts in our old house in Indianola, MS. I had
this blank, frightened look on my face as smiling adults swarmed me from all sides talking gaga speak.
"Does mikey wikey want some cakey wakey?" ...and shit
like that.
To this day, I refuse to talk to kids that way, namely because
it gives 'em the false impression that all adults are retarded. Ironically, kids love me for this, and many a time I've
swaggered up to some friend of mine's little spawn and said, "What's up, G? Is Bush a fuckhead or what?"
"You're funny, uncle Mike," comes the inevitable reply.
"No I'm not, ya two foot bastard, NOW GO MAKE ME A QUESADILLA!!!"
And they'll do it! Usually with a big ass smile on their
face.
Anyway, I'm sitting there in my high chair, and- with all
my parents' friends looking on- I proceed to stand up, awkwardly push down my pampers, and piss right on the birthday cake
with my little mushroom dick. At three years old, I would've probably been content to eat it anyway, but the subsequent
footage suggests that Mom thought it might send the wrong message.
Whether it's wholly true or not, I maintain that I never
crapped myself until the summer of 1989, so let's set the Wayback Machine for that right now...
(insert Wayback Machine music)
This was shortly after the "Jail" story, and I had run away
to live with my Grandmother Lucille. The timeline of this story might contradict the timeline of the "Jail" story, but
I actually did the math on this one, and any discrepancy is solely due to the fact that I'm too lazy to go back and edit the
previous tale.
One day in late May/early June, as my tenth grade year at
T.L. Weston High was winding down, me and my cousin Marty, (who came to visit here in Asheville last week), were riding the
bus to school. One of the girls on that bus was this blond little Tokyo-Rose-of-the-trailer-park named
Jennifer Crittington. I'd "dated" Jennifer before, and- while I'm fairly certain I broke up with her-
I wasn't really happy about her dating someone else. (All hot chicks should belong to me, and if I get elected in '98,
it WILL come to pass). You see, she'd found a new redneck to NOT have sex with, and his name was Robby Bradley
Jennifer was two years younger than me- I was fifteen, she
was thirteen- so she went to Solomon junior high, (which sports the same soccer field where I ran from the cops and jumped
into the ditch). As such, the bus stopped that morning at Solomon to let the younger kids off, before taking the rest
of us on to T.L.
Just as Jennifer was getting up, Marty leaned over and said,
"Man, that girl is FINE! Why'd ya'll quit hanging out?"
Instead of explaining to Marty why I'd broken up with her,
I merely sneered, "She ain't THAT fine, Marty."
Jennifer heard me...
Summer break began a few days later, and I remember sitting
in my Grandmother's kitchen when the full ramifications of that wayward comment came to bare. I was talking to one of
my other cousins, Melissa, (Marty's younger sister), when she brought up Jennifer Crittington.
Melissa: "Hey Mike, you remember that girl Jennifer
you used to go with?"
Mike: "Of course! That was like- two months ago!"
Melissa: "Okay, so, did you call her ugly?"
Mike: "Not that I can remember."
Melissa: "Well, she's been going around saying
you did."
Mike: "What?!?"
Melissa: "Yeah, I saw her in the mall Saturday, and she's
really mad. She told her boyfriend Robby and everything, and now he wants to fight you. Jennifer was all bragging
about how Robby was gonna kick your ass, so I told her you were staying over here at Grandma's, and that he could bring it
on. I told her you know karate too."
Oh shit... Never have I known such
fear as at that moment. Yes, I'd been taking karate since I was six, and yes, I talked a good game- but that's all it
was: talk. I'd been in TWO fights, the first when I was ten, (which I lost to my neighbor, David Fuquay),
and the second was the one Alex Soprano described in one of his posts on Mike's Forum, where I headbutted
the bejesus outta this guy name Rodney Pierce at Rollerworld.
Regardless, I'd already come to know that I was gifted when
it came to martial arts, but I also knew that I was an enormous walking vagina, and the realization that Jennifer's boyfriend
was now stalking me, sent my heart into spasms.
I just stood there in shock, unable to comprehend how Melissa,
my own cousin, could've betrayed me by telling Jennifer where I was staying.
"Mike?" she asked after a maddening silence, "Are you
okay?"
"Yeah..." I stammered.
"Your face looks all pale. What's wrong?"
I couldn't answer. I was scared shitless, so I went
to my room and started stretching. I remember that afternoon vividly, because I was sore as fuck from doing squats
at the T.L. Weston weight room, and I desperately tried to limber up my legs in anticipation of a knock on the door that never
came.
The next week was spent in terror, but nothing every happened,
and I eventually began to feel safe. After all, I was freakishly strong for a fifteen year old, my cardio was good
from being on the cross country team, (not that I knew the value of stamina at the time), and I was indeed a lifetime
martial artist. In the absence of confrontation, terror turned to confidence, and I was quite full of myself when that
prophetic ring finally rang.
I'm guessing twelve days had passed since my conversation with
Melissa in the kitchen, and I was sitting in front of the television when Grandma walked into the living room and told
me I had a phone call. I figured it was my mom wanting me to come back home, but the voice on the other end was
definitely not hers.
Mike: "Hello?"
Caller: "'Dis Mike?"
Mike: "Yeah?"
Caller: "This is Robby Bradley, you son of a bitch, and I
heard what you said about my girlfriend."
How he got my Grandmother's number, I'll never know, but I
played it off like I didn't even care. Instead of denying that I'd called Jennifer ugly, (which I hadn't), I bowed up
and talked all kinds of trash. For thirty minutes, Robby and I threatened back and forth, and all the while I was
making fun of him; my need to save face, negating fear. He was a redneck, so I fostered his untutored fears about
karate by nonchalantly telling him that I would condescend to fighting him, but- that if he got lucky, and the fight turned
serious- I would maim or kill him.
I actually believed some of the bullshit I was orally
vomiting, because my naive karate instructors had been filling my head with this crap for almost a decade.
Still, the LAST thing I wanted to do was mix it up with Robby, and I was partly trying to disarm the situation by making
jokes.
No go. Robby didn't think I was funny at all...
As this was before Call Waiting, our conversation came to
an abrupt halt only when the operator broke in with an emergency call, and Robby and I ended things in limbo.
Said call was for my Grandmother, and that was the night we learned her brother, Billy Champion, had died from a heart attack.
To quote Morpheus from The Matrix, "Fate, it seems, is not
without a sense of irony."
I don't remember going to my great uncle's funeral, but I
do remember tying to comfort my Grandmother. She was distraught by Billy's passing, and thoughts of some punk hunting
my ass, seemed faraway.
The funeral came and went, and the summer was in full swing by
the time I was inevitably called out.
Again, fate is not without a sense of irony...
My Grandmother Lucille's house was on a little stretch of
suburbia called JoAnne Circle, and all four of my cousins lived on the same street with their father, Marty senior, (their
mother Anna- my mother's sister- had died some years earlier from cancer). As such, I spent most of the time hanging
out with Marty, John, Melissa and Sarah. We were very close, and still are- our shared sense of humor, (along with my
own brother Eric's), continually binding the six of us through countless family deaths and countless family tragedies.
In principle, I put no stock in family ties. But some
connections are forged so completely by youth, that they supercede the barriers of geography and lifestyle that would otherwise
tear them apart. So it is with my cousin-foursome, so it is with my brother Eric...
Anyway, all this is leading up to a single night, and that
night found John, Melissa, Sarah and I walking up to a convenience store called Superstop, (I don't know why Marty wasn't
there, but he wasn't). None of us were old enough to drink, so an adventure on any given summer evening was composed
of a trek to the store where we could purchase cokes and junkfood with our allowances.
Now, I've preached on and on about my lack of belief in the
supernatural, but something happened that June night that seems really freaky in retrospect. About halfway to the convenience
store, I started to feel ill. And not just queasy, but cripplingly nauseous. It came on suddenly, violently, and
I had to sit down on the curb.
Growing up, I never got sick. I just didn't. And, for
the most part, I still don't. I don't get colds, I don't get sore throats, and I only throw up when reckless alcohol
consumption has exceeded by stomach's ability to compensate.
But that night I grasped my abdomen and doubled over, almost
like someone had gut-punched me. Years later, when I watched the film Highlander starring Christopher
Lambert, I briefly entertained the idea that I was one immortal confronted with another. If you haven't seen that movie,
then ignore what I just said. It won't make any sense.
Still, in the now, fifteen years after, I would categorize that
feeling as an empathetic premonition of impending doom- that is, if I were superstitious. Believe you me,
I'm not psychic, and the simple fact of the matter is- I don't know why I felt ill that night. It came and
went so quickly, that explanation is impossible.
Nevertheless, one of the most horrific ordeals I've ever experienced
occurred shortly after, and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
After weathering a storm of concern from John, Melissa and
Sarah, my PMS cramps passed, and we resumed our journey to Superstop. We were on a street whose name eludes me at the
moment, when I noticed a pair of silhouettes walking towards us. One was male, the other female, but I couldn't make
out anything else until they passed under a distant street light.
Holy Roman Empire, Batman! It was Robby and Jennifer...
The two of 'em were on a slow collision course with the four
of us, and since John, Melissa and Sarah all knew about Robby's vow to kick my ass, I couldn't just turn and walk away.
The constant shit I talked about being a karate badass would've made me look like a total fraud were I to flee, so pride
forced me to go on.
I should probably mention that my cousin John was a year older
than me, and since he played nose guard for the T.L. Weston Hornets, (he and Marty were the only two "whites" on the team),
he was a BIG motherfucker. He could bench press almost three hundred pounds, which is ungodly for a sixteen
year old. But John couldn't help me, for I would've never asked him to.
This was my fight, my consequence, and it
was time to pay the piper.
Now, I'd seen Robby around before, and he was average-sized
at best. He was actually smaller than me, but he LOOKED huge as he approached, fear making him seem ten feet tall
and bulletproof. Such was my mindset, that I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if he'd ripped his shirt open
to reveal a big red "S".
(Like Superman, get it?)
Sometimes I have a hard time accepting how much of a pussy
I was back then. I had every conceivable advantage: size, strength, speed, training- and STILL I was
terrified.
Ah, The Fear... My ever-present companion.
It was hot that night, hot and dark; the only light coming
from the telephone-pole street lamps here and there, and the glow from flanking windows. The street was otherwise deserted,
and a gentle Mississippi breeze caused the numerous magnolias to sway ever so slightly; the rustle of their waxy leaves
giving an eerie soundtrack to the showdown.
I was so scared that my vision tunneled in on me, and my heart
threatened to jump right out of my chest. Nevertheless, I stomped up to Robby, and- without saying a word- took a wild
swing at his head.
I missed; but, ya know what's funny? I MEANT to miss.
My fist passed a mere inch in front of his face, and since he never even brought his hands up, I have no doubt that I
could've ended the fight right then and there- if only I wasn't such a bitch. Ya see, I didn't WANT to hit Robby.
I just wanted to scare him, I just wanted to make him back off and leave me alone. After all, if I DID hit
him, he might hit me back, and the sheer thought of that was horrifying.
Stupid thinking in retrospect, but I was FIF-FUCKING-TEEN
for Christ's sake! ...and I didn't know any better.
Robby didn't back off.
The forward momentum of my faux punch brought our bodies crashing
together, and then we were grappling. He tried to get me into a headlock, but I instinctively applied the patented
"Mike Descado Armbar", (see Alex's description of my fight with Rodney Pierce for more on that technique), and then reversed
it. Just that quick, I had Robby in a head lock, but I was so terrified that I didn't even try
to punch him. Instead, I jabbed my fingers into his eyes like a supreme coward, trying desperately but unsuccessfully
to rip one of the small squishy orbs from its socket.
(His eyes were dark and beady, and not unlike a ferret's,
so it wouldn't have been a great loss.)
From the sidelines, Jennifer cursed, "He's fightin' dirty!
He's fightin' dirty! STOP IT, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!!" But Robby's muffled voice rose from my armpit to
silence her.
"It's ah' ight! It's ah' ight! We can fight
that way!"
His tone conveyed neither fear nor anger, for Robby had come
to scrap, and he wasn't gonna punk down no matter how "dirty" the melee got.
Lemme' tell ya something, boys and girls... that was one tough
redneck!
Robby covered his face with his hands, and, bereft of further
eye-gouge opportunities, I stepped out and bent over, thus hiptossing him head over ass into a nearby yard. Keep in
mind, I'd never trained Judo or Jiu-jitsu at this time, so my technique was totally instinctual, yet nonetheless effective.
WHAM!!! His back hit the grass
with a bone-jarring thud, and I went down on top of him, thus securing a hold I would later learn is called, "Kasi Katame",
(I'm guessing on the Japanese spelling, but, for you grapplers, it's also known as a "Scarf Hold").
Basically, I still had him in a headlock, only on the ground.
Our bodies were prostrate and parallel, his behind mine, almost like we were a couple of spooning fags. Yet I still
had his head in my armpit, and from that position, I could've easily reined down punches with my free hand.
Again, I didn't.
I just wanted it to be over, I just wanted The Fear
to go away, so instead of pummeling his face into hamburger meat, I merely held him down and started talking.
"Geeze man," I chuckled with as much amicable nonchalance
as I could muster, "You stink! Do you know what deodorant is?"
I was hoping that Robby would laugh, that he would realize
that- even though I had the upper hand- I wanted a truce.
Robby didn't bite.
"Ya fucking MAMMA!!!" he snarled, then bucking this way and
that until he pulled his head out.
We briefly jostled for position until we were both standing
again, and that's when Robby threw a wild right hand at my face. I deflected it with a half-assed cover block,
(not that I knew what a "cover block" was back then), but the heavy handed force of it knocked me away, and I actually cowered
and turned my back on him in anticipation of a second blow.
* cough * "DOUCHE BAG!!!" * cough * cough *
As Forest Gump put it, "It's strange what a young man recollects..."
I don't remember Billy Champion's funeral, I don't remember
the girl I lost my virginity to, and I can't even begin to ascertain the first time I stole money from a Salvation Army donation
bucket. But I DO remember the first time I kicked someone in combat.
As I've alluded to before, I was born with a gift for martial
arts, and I've been plagued with tree-trunk-sized legs since... well, since as far back as I can remember. I used to
have to wear Husky jeans three sizes too big in the waist just to accommodate my thighs, and I still can't wear normal pants.
I wish I could say that my loose fitting attire is on account of my gigantic crank, but there are some ex-girlfriends
of mine that read this site, and I'd hate to get called out.
It was a curse in all things except for kicking, and that
night gave me the first inkling that my freakishly gargantuan quadriceps had a purpose. Robby charged in as soon as
I turned and cowered, and that's when my right leg- of its own volition- shot up and back to nail him square in the chest.
It was not unlike a donkey kicking; my heel cannoning into Robby's sternum and stopping his charge mid-run.
He grunted, he doubled over, he staggered back.
Perfection...
I didn't mention this earlier, but Robby was dressed in cutoff
sweat pants and a perforated football jersey. If you know anything about the latter garment, you'll know that such jerseys
are somewhat waxy and abrasive. As such, the coarse fabric shifted with the force of my kick, thus flaying his
torso like a cheese grater. I know this because, when I looked back, Robby pulled his shirt up- simultaneously
coughing and gasping for air- to reveal a abominable raspberry. I think he was as shocked as I was, because it
looked like he'd just slid into home on a baseball field of broken glass. Blood was leaking from a score of abrasions,
not to mention the impact damage of the kick itself.
Robby was stunned and hurt and confused, and- for the fourth
time that night- I could've won the fight by merely throwing a punch.
I didn't...
It took Robby a few seconds to regain his composure, and then
he charged again. I pivoted and pushed him aside before going on the offensive myself. Even more terrified than
I was before, I unleashed a succession of high, circular kick combinations- none of which found their mark. Given my
love of kung fu movies, I'd practiced such things FOREVER, and the display was impressive to say the least. Inside crescent,
spinning outside hook kick, jump spinning round... all the shit you used to see Van Damme do in the mid-nineties before
he got all coked up and started dating that big-nosed chick from Blossom.
As I said, I didn't hit Robby, (nor had I intended to), but
I definitely backed him up. In wide-eyed wonder, he retreated from my kicking flurry, eventually stopping to hold his
ground once he'd figured out that I was just showboating. With a calculated exactness far beyond his hog-maw-eatin'
mind, Robby rushed in with an overhand haymaker. As before, I deflected the admittedly well-timed punch; but
him hitting my forearm sent my guard right into the bridge of my own nose, and that was all she wrote...
I stumbled back and tripped on the street curb, thus plopping
down onto the grass of another yard ass first. The blankness of combat I enjoy now did NOT descend, and instead
of going robotically numb, I succumbed to The Fear completely. I felt a jolt from beneath, like
I'd sat down on a firecracker, and then there came the heavy wetness of something squishy in my underwear.
Pants? Meet shit!
Yep, I'd befouled my drawers. Totally, irrecoverably,
embarrassingly- I'd unleashed a shotgun blast of butt mud. If only I'd had the presence of mind to 'moon' Robby first,
I could've used it as a weapon, for nothing secures victory like getting hit in the chest with feces, (believe me!).
Alas, that's not what happened.
Driven by incoherent panic, I scrambled to my feet and did
my best to block a subsequent barrage of punches. As will become clear later on, I did a fair job of defending myself,
for Robby never hit me- not even once.
Ah, but THE SMELL hit me, and hit me hard, almost
to the point where I found myself a single gag away from adding vomit to my bodily discharge. It had the tart aroma
of rancid nacho cheese microwaved over a bed of roadkill. Add THAT to the stench of sweaty ass with a hint of a Mexico
City whore house, and you'll have some idea of what I'm talking about.
Robby smelled it to, (apparently), for he paused mid-swing,
dropped his hands to his sides, and asked, "Dude, did you just shit yourself?"
I didn't answer.
Regardless, the fight continued, and what ensued was a slow,
tedious game of chase where Robby stalked me up and down the street while I steadily backed away from him in unabashed bewilderment.
At one point, I tried to put a telephone pole between us,
but Robby faked right, then came around on the left, thus knocking me down on my feces-filled shithole once more. To
my credit, I defended every single time, and Robby was already exhausted. The fight ended when I backed into a nearby
yard and- feeling a hedge of bushes against my back- did a clumsy summersault over it.
I landed on the other side in a heap of shame and defecation;
my opponent deciding that he'd done enough.
Bloody but semantically victorious, Robby declared himself
the winner, and he and Jennifer limped off down the street, ostensibly going back the way they came.
As for me, John, Melissa and Sarah came to my aid, and
I dismissed my defeat by stating that something had gotten in my eye, and that I was only backing off because I could no longer
see. It was a total lie, but one that would've probably allowed me to save face had they NOT been born without
olfactory glands.
Thank the gods that I was wearing blue jeans, for nothing
less that American-made Levi denim could've contained the entire contents of my intestinal tract.
Anyway, instead of retreating to Grandma Lucille's, we went
back to their house, and I remember sitting on the edge of the bathroom tub feeling like the pussy I was.
Melissa and Sarah were totally on my side, but John teased me mercilessly, no doubt because he and I had had our own little
cousin-against-cousin brawls growing up, and I'd always won. John was so incredibly strong when he was sixteen,
that he could've LITERALLY torn Robby Bradley apart without breaking a sweat, and my defeat made it clear to him that I was
no longer the reigning "badass" of the family.
He said stuff like, "But, you're okay- right, Assmaster? -uh,
I mean, Mike?"
Naturally, I denied that I'd pinched a loaf, instead blaming
the smell on a mythological pile of dog shit I'd gotten pushed into.
While none of my cousins have ever brought it up since, I
have no illusions about them actually believing my story, especially since the seat of my pants was brown instead
of blue.
It was one of the most disparaging moments of my life, but
it taught me something, and that's why I usually write about the fights I've lost, instead of the fights I've won.
What did I learn? Well, I learned that confrontation is won or lost in the mind first, and the body second. This
truth would later allow me to ruin the shit of guys who were far better fighters, simply because
I knew The Fear, and the power it has over those who're plagued by it. In one way or another, we're ALL plagued
by my ever-present companion, and acknowledging this is the first step towards a richer and less-shitful existence.
I've come to understand The Fear, I've come to accept
it, and that's why I live the life I do, why I live the life my stories impart.
Enough preaching...
The next day I looked in the mirror to find a small,
horizontal red mark across the bridge of my nose. That's the only damage I sustained, and it was gone in three or four
days. Contrastingly, Robby was yoked with a bone-deep bruise on his sternum in the shape of a Nike hightop, (so Melissa
told me, by way of Jennifer), and a two foot abrasion that ran the length of his torso. His right eye had also hemorrhaged
from my cowardly gouges, and he sported a crimson gaze for weeks after the fight.
Did I win? In terms of damage, yes...
In terms of honor, no...
In my mind, I lost; and solely because of The Fear.
My ever-present companion has popped up many, many times since,
but I've never completely succumbed to it the way I did that warm June night when I was fifteen. I'm not a brave man,
boys and girls. I'm not a moral man. But there are things far more important than said ideals, and they're called honor
and pride.
The first is paramount, the second is superfluous.
To live in fear, is a life half lived, and each of us embraces
certain dogmas to give us that other half. For me: again, it's prideful honor. For others: it's religion, or cause,
or morality, or duty to king and country. I soapbox endlessly against the dangers of faith, but the vehicle is
never more important than the destination, and maybe that's the one point on which I agree with everybody.
No matter what your beliefs... fight! Fight The
Fear! But do so with scruples, with integrity, and never be ashamed to admit that you don't have the fortitude
to do so, nor the answers to do so. There are six billion people on this planet that think differently than you do,
so you must force yourself to understand them, and thereby understand the person that stares back at you in the mirror.
I know that might seem vague, but you'll totally "get it" if you ever crap your boxers on account of an obstacle you had
the ability to overcome...
***
Robby Bradley went on to become a United States Marine, then
enrolling at my old stomping ground, Delta State University. I don't know if he got a degree in anything, but I saw
him one night years later through the window of a dorm-centric laundry matt. He was wolf lean and surprisingly
small, having never grown any taller than he was when he was fifteen: five foot seven.
Since I was returning from a karate class, I was dressed
in my Shotokan uniform, (complete with black belt), and we locked eyes through that window for the briefest of moments.
He smiled, yet it wasn't a smug or taunting expression.
No, it was more a gesture of whimsy, of nostalgia. Robby remembered; I remembered; but we hadn't been enemies
for years, and I felt a strange kinship with him. It occurred to me later that Robby's experience that long
ago evening had been just as harrowing as mine, for I doubt he's ever been kicked as hard as I kicked him. Granted,
he didn't drop the kids off at the pool, but the traumas of youth have a way of becoming inconsequential with the
passing of years- no matter how dire they seemed at the time.
I saw Jennifer Crittington again too, (who likewise found
her way to Delta State), when I unknowingly started dating a girl from my 400 level Readings in Biology
class who was also Jennifer's roommate, or bestfriend, or bisexual lover- I can't remember which. Gabrielle was her
name, and she, Jennifer and I went "road popping" one afternoon in late 1995. Jennifer's account of the above story
was mercifully void of me soiling myself; in fact, the way she told it made me seem like a hero.
Funny how things work out like that...
Anyway, Gabrielle got uncouthly drunk that same afternoon
and pissed me off, so I sent her packing. Jennifer took Gabrielle back to the independent dorm they shared, and
I never saw either girl again.
I know I joke about it a lot, but I haven't crapped my
pants since. Sure, I've done a pre-shower undress in the bathroom to see skidmarks in one of the few pairs of white
boxerbriefs I own, but that doesn't count. I guess, all & all, soiling yourself is like jumping on a bike with the
seat missing- you need only do it once.
I wish everyday that I could learn that lesson...
