Dirty FingerNails

All I want to hear was the roar of the train. I want to hear the metallic scream of the train, I want to sit down, next to a stinky bum or a hipster or next to no one at all, I want sit on the train and head toward 95th street, get off at Harrison walk the block and a half to my apartment, get on the elevator to the 21st floor, go to my room and lay down. I just want to go home, and lay the f**k down. It's 3 in the morning, or maybe earlier, I don’t know. I'm not going to bother to check my phone for the time, I'm about 40 feet under ground, and virgin mobile's signal couldn’t find me with Sherlock Holmes on the case. My face hurts real bad and the bridge of my nose is gashed and leaking, my inner lip is too. My knuckles are numb from the cold and the wild swinging. I got into a fight a few hours ago. It was at a party at one of my good friends homes in Wicker Park. I was about 14 beers into a nice drunk, a happy drunk, I was dancing, but not really dancing, just kind of moving, but f**k it I was feeling nice. The skanks were in rare form tonight, smiling and laughing and looking great. Girls sat on my lap and tried to get me to dance with them, but I had to decline, I cant dance even if dancing nowadays has been reduced to rubbing my penis on your thighs and back. Some people think of dancing like a test, a test to see how much chemistry two people have. It can even be an examination of someone’s sexual prowess, but I can f**k, what I cant do the jerk or the nerd or the whatever the s**t. So I don't dance with anyone. Anyway, I spotted a girl in the crowd and took her upstairs to get her drunk and talk about her insecurities and her hometown and her favorite movie and maybe get a little make out action. We hold hands and I lead her up the stairs, she's grinning when I turn around to look at her and grin makes me grin and then we are just two grinning fools. There is a dude following her, a gay dude and he's grinning to. Two guys and one girl is a gangbang, two girls one guy is a threesome, but what’s one straight dude, one gay dude and a girl, besides something I'm not interested in? This worries me a bit because gay guys are notorious c**k blocks. The list goes, in order of c***s blocked throughout history, Ugly Friend, Gay Friend, Ex-boyfriend. But it doesn’t matter because he's skipping up the stairs right behind us so I'll just have to make the best of it. We end up sitting down on the bed in the guest room, the dude knows better so he takes a seat in the chair in corner and pretends to text. We talked about some s**t, it was kind of cool. She goes to the Art Institute and she's in the Asian Student organization, it's funny because she isn’t Asian at all. After a while one of my friends barges in the room all wide eyed. His pupils are bouncing around like ping pong balls and he cant seem to stop licking his the corner of his mouth. He's on cocaine, no doubt about it. It ain’t long before he's talking about licking things, inappropriate things civilized people consider sacred . Now I know the dumb a*s so I'm just laughing, but they don't think this raving fiend is too funny, the girl gives me a kiss on the cheek and they fly out of that room like freed slaves. Now its just me and this drug abuser, he says he'll sell me a line for five dollars, I don't pay for cocaine thou, never have, never will, unless I win the lotto. After awhile his sporadic conversation topics and semi-demonic eye contact gets the best of me and I bail too. Walking back down the stairs I notice, the dancing stopped and the crowd pushed all on one side. It's easy to tell a crowd that’s looking at a fight, they don't blink, and all the girls look like they smell something bad. There's camera phones out, yeah someone’s getting beat up. I look at the pit and another friend of mine as well as the home owner are fighting four dudes who I've never seen before, the dude who owns the house is big, and worse than that he's strong and worse that its his property and he's been drinking rum. He is wrecking two of the strangers, you can almost her the dull smacking sounds of the punches over the music. My other friend is an old high school wrestler and he is slamming and rolling around with his opponent. That looks fun, I thought, well the beer in my gut thought and before I knew it I was pushing through the crowd trying to lead a hand to a few friends in need. Now, before you go off thinking I'm some bad a*s cowboy, I'm defiantly not. I haven’t been in too many fights and I haven’t won a single one. I used to wrestle in high school, and I would of made it to state but this ginger kid beat me in the preliminaries. But these dudes weren’t ginger, and they didn’t look too tough. Usually in this situation I'd grab a weapon, a bottle or pan or some kids crutches I just wanted to go home, and lay the f**k down. But something in my belly was tensing me up into a testorone fueled frenzy. I felt muscles I didn’t know I had, and all the rage for every little insignificant annoyance got channeled in my fists, every dropped call, every lost bus pass, every elevator I didn’t make, every time I lost at Street Fighter, 20 years worth of inconvenience got sent to this one punch that soared like a firework and exploded into the back of the tallest dudes head. Now, the skull is infinitely stronger than the knuckles, so I don’t recommend throwing punches at the back of heads. He took two steps forward and grabbed the back of his head with both hands. Oh, f**k, what have I done, this guys had at least a foot and a half on me and he was bulky, lean, wouldn’t surprise me if he played basketball or some s**t. I panicked, then I looked toward the massive crowd and there unblinking eyes, they were surprised this little s**t had the nerve to standup to a giant like this dude, David vs. Goliath I thought, then I thought about how if David didn’t have the slingshot, Goliath would of ate David's bony a*s up. Before long I found myself jumping up and wrapping my arms around the big f*****s neck. My feet hit the ground again and my face turned from enraged to deeply panicked. From “F**k this dude.” to “Oh s**t, I f*****g dead.” I get vicious and give him some knees to the spine, he's confused and I know how to capitalize on confusion. My forearms tense and constrict his neck, he's getting scared. I think about everyone watching, including the girl and the gay dude, I can't lose in front or her. I imagine the dude telling her; “She, he got a coke head friend, he can't fight And he got a little bitty dick. He's probably gay too.” F**k that, I think, as I starting sticking the dude in the face with my right hand while my left arm keeps the death grip. My punches light up the side of his face and ear, I know how it feels to be hit in the ears and that ring that comes after it and I almost feel sorry....