Four

--------Clark

When I was in second grade--seven years old-- I got into my first fist fight.  I never thought I would have to fight somebody.  Well, not in school anyways.  After I graduated from high school, I could see me getting into a few physical arguments.  Sometimes I figured I wouldn't even until after college.  But I was wrong.  I was one of those kids who was friends with practically everybody and I loved helping others out however I could.  Well, we were one week away from Halloween, and we were making 'scary' drawings for our parents.  There was one girl who sat just a few seats away from me, Clarice Lickawitz.   She was drawing a black cat for her mother and she let another kid the day before borrow her black crayon.  Well, the girl wasn't in school the next day, so Clarice couldn't get her black crayon back and she asked if she could use somebody else's.  I finished drawing my pumpkins around graveyards, and when nobody else offered up, I grabbed my black crayon and walked over to her desk.  I told her she could use mine, and her face lit up, happy she could finish her cat.

Well, I turned to go back to my seat, and bumped right into her twin brother, Ronny Lickawitz.  

I was about to ask him what was up when he popped me in the jaw and sent me flying backwards onto my rear.  At one point, we were good friends.

"Hey!" I yelled.  "What was that for?"

I expected Mr. Harrison to yell at Ronny for that, but with just my luck, he was out of the room, talking to another teacher.

"Flirting with my sister!" he yelled back.

"Ronny!" Clarice cried.  "He was just giving me a crayon!"

He turned to his sister and gave her one of the most dirty looks he could manage.  "Shut up, Clarice!  You're such a little brat!  You should have asked me instead of loser boy over there!  I told you to stay away from punks like him!"

I didn't even care that he hit me.  I didn't care that he called me a punk.  What got me beyond mad was the way he talked to Clarice.  Don't misinterpret me here- I did not like Clarice.  I was only in second grade- I didn't know what flirting really was and I still had the idea of cooties in my mind.  The last thing I wanted was to date his sister.  As I was saying, what got me mad was how he talked down to her and called her a 'little brat'.  I never did- and still don't- like the idea of beating down a woman or talking to her badly.  When I look at a woman, (for the most part) I see a fine being who should be cherished and I think that most women deserve to have somebody who will look out for them and take care of them.  Of course, though, it's a different story when it comes to somebody who could literally be labeled as a 'w***e'.  They bring down on themselves what they get.

But I wasn't going to let him talk to Clarice like that.  She was always a sweet girl to everybody and she definitely wasn't a brat.

So I jumped up and got right in front of Ronny.  He turned and looked at me, and I waited.  I was going to make it suspenseful before I hit him, but his hands clasped onto my shoulders and he kneed me right above my more sensitive area...  I felt pain in my stomach, but it wasn't enough to make me fall.  Almost as though on instinct, I mirrored him and kicked him right between the legs- bullseye.  He grabbed himself as his pain twisted into his facial expression and I delivered a blow to his jaw, hard enough to make him fall backwards onto his back.

He was quick to get up but I wouldn't let it happen.  I jumped over him and straddled him as I started delivering blow after blow to his face.  I kept turning his face to the left, to the right, and back again in a repeating motion.

By the time Mr. Harrison came back into the room and pulled me off, Ronny was crying with a bloodied nose and lip.

I sat in the principal's office for two hours waiting for my mom to get off work and come in and get me.  Nobody believed that I was innocent.  Okay, maybe I wasn't completely innocent, but I didn't start the fight.  Nobody defended me either- not even Clarice.

I had a one week suspension.  That night when my father got home from work, he was beyond angry with me.  He didn't even say anything to me upon seeing me.  He just sat down on the couch, waved me over with his finger, and when I was close enough he grabbed my wrist and yanked me over his lap.

He beat me so hard that I couldn't sit for the next week.

When he was done, he yelled at me to go see my mother.  I really didn't want to.

But as I walked into the kitchen, she took one look at me and started shaking her head.  Callie was sitting at the table eating her vegetables, looking warily between mom and me.  At first when she spoke, her voice was quiet.  She wasn't calm, but she kept her anger out in the beginning.  It started to show the more she spoke.

"Clark," she said.  "How could you... why did you... that poor boy!"  She threw down the hand towel she was holding and sighed.  "I raised you to be respectful!  But to beat up that poor boy- and over a crayon!  I ought to send you to boot camp if you're going to be so viscous!  There's no need, no calling for such violence!"

"But Mommy," I started to say.

"Be quiet!" she screamed.  My eyes went wide and my heart started beating faster and faster.  My mother never screamed like that at the top of her lungs.  "Go to your room and don't leave it until I tell you you can!"

I ran to my room and slammed the door closed, terrified she was going to chase after me and beat me like my father did.  I was so terrified, I was about to push my small children's bookcase in front of the door.  Looking back on it now, it really wasn't all that heavy, but I didn't think about that.  Instead, I hid under my covers and cried.

One week later when I returned to school, nobody would be friends with me.  Everybody was afraid of me and they would whisper things about me and call me a 'freak' and a bunch of other names.

This continued until sixth grade.  A few months into the school year, a new boy came to school.  He was very skinny, but he was tall and had a muscular build.  He looked like he could break a door off the hinges.  (Of course, he didn't really look like that, but in sixth grade we exaggerated things a lot, right?  And besides, that's how my eleven year-old mind saw him, anyways.)

His name was Michael Johnson, an Australian boy that moved to the United States with his family because of an incident similar to my own- he beat the living daylights out of a boy and people quickly took to calling him Michael the Monster.

His first day in our school, he didn't say anything to me.  Instead, when I sat alone at Lunch, he stared at me and wondered why I was alone.  He could tell I was one of those people who--at the time-- should have been in the 'cool crowd', and so he asked the other students about me.  And after he learned my story, on the second day, it wasn't about any of the other students.  He sat with me at lunch, took the desk next to mine in all of my classes, and he became my best friend, simply because he understood what I was going through.  He helped me through a lot of things that nobody else would.  When I got into trouble, he was the one who either helped me out of it or helped me through it.  He never walked away from me when I needed help, and if he wasn't present when I did he would make himself present and make sure I got through it.  And it was the same with him.  When he got into a sticky situation, I got him out of it or helped him beat his way out.  We sparred with each other frequently and that's how I got my first lessons on giving an actual fight.  I learned that the little showdown between me an Ronny was nothing compared to fights I would face eventually in life.

When we were in twelfth grade, Michael joined up with Axton.  How they met, I don't know.  And part of me doesn't care to because it really isn't my business.  At first, I was questioning if I should still be friends with Michael.  I mean, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to take part in being friends with somebody in a gang.  But then that day came and Axton saved my rear from those guys, and I realized I was all wrong about it.  Axton really was a good guy, even though he's committed -and made me commit- countless crimes.  And, anyways, that's my story and how it came to be.