Telephone Fist Fights

by Will Musgrove

David Libeert

Sitting on an upside-down milk crate behind The Family Diner’s kitchen, I stare at an open Dumpster, wondering what’s inside. Garbage bags full of half-eaten food? Rats? Body parts? Like a bad habit, I create and recreate elaborate possibilities. After each scenario, I repeat to myself I’m not that important, that the Dumpster’s imaginary contents won’t make me a somebody, won’t give me any purpose.

I’m here visiting Jerry, the guy dad has beaten up three times now. The first two fights happened when dad and Jerry were young, around twenty, my age now. The final fight happened yesterday. Having not been born yet, I only know the beginning and middle bouts from bedtime stories and my own retellings. The one yesterday I watched through a bus window. All three ended the same: dad victorious, straightening his clothes, his sole sign of exertion.

With his soaked dishwasher’s apron wrapped around his pencil waist, Jerry exits the diner lighting a cigarette. He knows I’m here. My waitress had promised she’d tell him. He doesn’t acknowledge me, though, doesn’t even look in my direction. Instead, he inhales a drag, scratches his chin stubble, and speaks to the smeared, blue sky.

“You Doug’s kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Here for another round?”

“No.”

Strands of his shaggy, blond hair poke through the holes in his hairnet, giving his profile the shape of a porcupine. His swollen lip hangs from his face like a leech. Purple and black bruises speckled with infected yellow circle his cheek and puffy eye. I tally them like a child numbering rings on a stump. Each blow is accounted for. Dad’s right knuckles are imprinted here, his left there. Throughout the years, I’ve tried and tried to make those hardened joints mine, to twist them to serve my me-me-me crusade.

“Then what do you want?”

Jerry isn’t the only guy dad has beaten up. He’s just the only guy he’s beaten up more than once, the only guy who gets a name in my retooled versions of the stories.

Growing up in small-town Iowa, dad, stringy and nerdy, doomed to wear thick glasses at age five, was a cliché target for bullies. One day, before the start of third-grade math, two boys shoved dad out of his desk, and, tired of his hostile existence, he picked a fight for the first time in his short life. He yanked the legs out from underneath one, causing the boy to bang his head on one of those old cast-iron radiators, then tackled the other boy and pummeled him with tiny fists.

He’d defended himself, and there was no going back to cowering, to crying and pleading. Following this win, he convinced grandpa to let him enroll in martial arts classes. In the thirtyish years since, he’s mastered several styles of combat, won several tournaments, competed in a multitude of bar brawls, served in the army, taught self-defense at a now-defunct school, and married my mom and had me.

He lived.

Currently, he drives a bus for a living.

He spends all day going around and around.

He’s moved on, understands you can’t feed a family with trophies and violence.

Me? I quit martial arts as soon as I started, said it was too tough. I’ve never been in a fight of my own. I’ve inherited dad’s past, however, have used it among other lies and half-truths to define myself, because without what I say, I’m nobody.

“I want to apologize.”

“I deserve what I got.”

At a party, Jerry, just out of high school, had slipped uppers into dad’s beer. Once he’d come down and figured out who’d drugged him, dad broke Jerry’s jaw and swore he’d do it again every time he saw him in the wild. They went three years without coming into contact. Then dad spotted Jerry drinking in a park and sent him to the hospital. Then twenty-five-ish years zoomed by, and dad was parking his bus on the shoulder, and Jerry was backing away, his arms up and spread like an X on a treasure map.

Pressed against the windows, dad’s passengers cheered him on. I witnessed the first punch, the first globs of blood spraying from Jerry’s nose, and turned away. This was real. This wasn’t me bullshitting with friends, joking about dad (or sometimes even me) breaking this or that on Jerry, who was just a plot device at that point. This wasn’t me claiming to have known someone or to have done something. No, a man was being beaten in the street.

“I’m not here because of dad,” I say, dropping my head into my soft hands. “I’m a liar, Jerry. Do you know how many times I’ve told stories about you, changing them slightly so dad or I snap your legs or arms or whatever? Do you know how many times I’ve told people I’m something I’m not? I’m afraid is all. I work at a grocery store. I still live at home. I’m afraid this is it, that I’ll never have or be more.”

Jerry flicks his cigarette butt. The cherry lands on the concrete and flashes gray.

“I’m going to do you a favor, kid. If kicking my ass makes you a somebody, then do it. Hit me in the face. I won’t hit you back or call the cops. I never did your dad. Hit me in the face and become a somebody.”

I launch to my feet. Jerry stiffens. I cock my arm back. Like father, like son. There’s whimpering. I glance around. It’s Jerry. Tears zigzag around his bruises like wet lightning bolts, and I realize I’m not dad.

“Well?” Jerry says, flinching.

I can’t.

“You wasted your chance. I have to get back to work. Tell your dad I said hi.”

Jerry disappears inside.

I’m proud of myself for stepping out of my manufactured shadows.

I walk over to the Dumpster.

I peek inside.

It’s empty.

It and I still need to be filled.

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Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Versification, Unstamatic, (mac)ro(mic), Ghost Parachute, Serotonin, Defenestration, Rabid Oak, The Daily Drunk, Flash Frontier, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove.