Adventures in Delinquency (Part 3) – Fight! Fight! Fight!

I certainly wasn’t born a fighter. I have notched up nearly a half-century of conflict avoidance, and counting.

However, in my formative years I did have several brushes with the masculine art of fisticuffs.

My first pseudo-fight was with a bullying kid. I had complained to my dad that the kid wouldn’t leave me alone. Now we would be wisely counselled to “talk it out” and “use our words”. But the advice from my dad back in the day was to “pop him one” if he tried picking on me.

Pop him one? I could scarcely imagine that. But I really didn’t want to be picked on. The next time the bully started poking my chest and knocking my ball cap off, I could feel my frustration and anger rising. I didn’t pop him one, but I did give him a hard shove. He staggered back and looked at me with big eyes. Then, he started crying. Then I started crying. We probably both went running back to our respective mommies, but on the plus side I don’t think he picked on me any more.

Less than a year later, my self-defence skills were once again put to the test. We were living in the thriving metropolis of Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. A winter’s afternoon above the Arctic circle is enough to put anyone on the edge of mayhem. I and a group of other neighbourhood boys were scrambling to fill the tiny sliver of daylight after school. We tossed snowballs at each other as we darted under, over and onto the utilidor structures that carried the services through our rows of multicoloured townhouses.

“Snowballs” is a term applied loosely here. About that point in history, on Canadian Sesame Street there was a great segment. “Hey! They’re building an igloo!” said the narrator. Then there was a fast frame sequence of a couple of Innu building an igloo from wind-hardened blocks of snow. The point is that our “snowballs” were more like tiny “igloo blocks”.

Everything was fun and games until I came around the corner and pelted one of the gang who was trying to escape the onslaught. He stopped dead in his tracks. Maybe I hit him in the ear or the snowball was above regulation size, I don’t know. He turned around with a crazed look in his eye. My only thought was “Uh oh”.

He charged toward me with a beet red face and a snarl. I think I was still in shock when he charged right into me and knocked me to the ground. I would like to say this is where the Mr. Miyagi-type training my father gave me kicked in and I amazed my friends with my “Karate Kid” fighting ability. For starters, my father had correctly gauged the probability of turning me into a fighting machine as slim to none and provided instruction accordingly. And the only thing that amazed my friends was that I didn’t have the sense to get my arms up as I went down.

So there I was, on the ground with my arms pinned under his legs as he unleashed a hail of mercifully mitten-covered punches. As I swung my head from side to side in a futile attempt to do something – anything – I could see the wide eyes of the neighbourhood gang in full wildebeest and zebra mode.

Whether my assailant stopped or I squirmed away or a combination of both, as soon as I was up I raced away. Probably crying, and probably home to my mommy. The next day I walked the halls with a nice purple mark just below the eye. In most other circumstances, a black eye would be considered a badge of honour in the halls of elementary school. But as word got around, it most clearly was not.

Todd is probably a top Canadian company exec and weekend triathlete now, but back then he was a nerdy little wisp of a kid with thick black glasses and a tuft of white blond hair. As in: “You got a black eye from Todd?” Disbelief, and an “oh poor you” headshake… not the stuff of legend.

The final bout of my fighting career came soon after the start of high school.

I was subjected to a slight from another student known as “Cowboy”. It was such an egregious affront to my masculinity that I remember nothing about it. The problem was, my friend Dave – an older, more rough-and-tumble student – heard it and asked me “You going to let him get away with that?”.

Crap. Now it wasn’t just up to me to let it slide or not. School yard decorum and longer term honour were at stake. Recess must have just been drawing to a close, because I looked over at Cowboy, and somehow the words “Meet me here at lunch time!” left my quivering lips.

I must have spent the next hour and a half in a full mental tizzy, working through all the moves I had perfected on the Intellivision “Boxing” computer game. Translating large 2D pixels into a coherent real-world fighting strategy was a bit futile as you can guess.

Prepared or not, I soon found myself in the centre of a schoolyard scrum with Dave smacking me on the shoulder and urging me on.

“Just pop him one”, said the Yoda-like image of my father as it floated through my consciousness.

Cowboy took off his denim jacket and we squared off. It was on. Time to execute my plans.

“What time is it?” I asked Cowboy.

As Cowboy looked down at his Timex, I went for it. With spaghetti arms I gave him a shove, and down went Cowboy, with a “What the?” look on his face.

While I clearly had this fight in the bag, my true prowess will never be known. The playground monitor burst into the scrum and grabbed the two of us and hauled us down to the office. In his imitable British English, old Mr. Smith the principal dictated the suspension notes to the kindly school secretary Mrs. Simonds.  “One for Cowboy, and another for {suppressed snicker} Mr. Schroff”.

So one black eye, a two day suspension and let’s call it 1-1-1 for the record of my fighting career, in which I never did “pop” anybody. If any impressionable kids are reading this, remember to just use your words to solve conflicts.

But hey, if it comes down to it, “What time is it?” works even better now. The other kid will be using one of their hands to hold up a smartphone!

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash