8 Nose

Many of my students are fighters, young men and young women, too, nearly all between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, and in their required first-person narrative essays they regularly describe their involvement in street fights and wrestling matches, in beatings, in brawls, and even in shootings, all of them fueled by ignominy, failure, loneliness, depression, pride, sex, and—almost without exception—alcohol and drugs. I myself have never been in an actual physical fight. But in high school some of my friends and acquaintances fought.

I was present when Gene Dell broke Greg Lunt's nose in a fight out at the Old Highway one night. They'd agreed to meet and duke it out. I never knew exactly why, perhaps a taunt, a dare, a challenge.

"Do you think I can beat him, Robert?" Greg asked me confidentially before the fight.

Greg was the kindest, gentlest, most generous person I knew. There seemed a lot I had to consider. I thought for several seconds before I answered.

"No," I said.

"You son of a bitch," Greg said grinning.

They circled one another, boxed, punched, bumped into parked cars, staggered, fell, and then rolled and wrestled around on the hard gray pavement for several minutes. There were eight or nine cars there, maybe a few more, a fairly large circle of spectators, most of them friends of one or the other of the two contestants. I was with Greg, Kaat, Voitenko, and Powell.

Someone pointed at Dell and yelled, "He's got something in his hand!"

It turned out to be a roll of nickels.

"How'd we know Lunt wouldn't have something, too?" Ron Conley yelled, defending Dell.

This evoked several seconds of booing and hooting. Witnesses from opposing sides exchanged catcalls and taunts. As I watched and listened, Wayne Conley, Ron's younger brother, strolled up to me, his lips and his eyes narrowed in a caricature of menace.

"I hear you been lookin' for me, Robert," he said.

This was code language for picking a fight.

"No," I said. "I haven't been looking for you."

I met Wayne's stare.

I had no idea what he was talking about. My answer confused him. Someone else had probably put him up to it—I don't think we had even ever quarrelled—and Wayne wandered off.

The fight was over.

Our small circle drove back to the funeral home where in the summer Greg lived with his grandparents. We gathered around Greg in the bathroom as he stared soulfully into the mirror at his nose and we stared soulfully at him. With a facial tissue Greg dabbed delicately at the blood trickling only slightly and slowly from his nostrils. The bridge of his nose was horribly bent and bruised—purple, blue, and an unnatural white—and clearly broken.

It was an ugly moment.