The Last Time I Got Into a Fight

To call the last fistfight I was in a “fight” requires a generous definition of the word fight. As well as a favorable understanding of what it means to be in something. And a serious conversation about whether fist is really a necessary qualifier.

I was twelve years old, shooting by myself at the courts behind Peabody High School, practicing bank shots from the foul line extended and doing the thing that boys do in Gatorade commercials and Nightline specials about latchkey kids. I’d shake invisible defenders, provide my own play-by-play (“Young goes baseline, spins into the lane . . .”), count down loudly and dramatically (“four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”), and hurl buzzer beaters toward the hoop with the accompanying appropriate announcement if I made the shot (“Swish! Young wins the game! And here comes his girlfriend, Tatyana Ali from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, leaping from the stands to give him a kiss! And some nachos. Boy, that Damon Young sure loves his nachos!”).

I was so invested in my fantasy that I hadn’t noticed that Ricky “Bumpy” Nelson—then fourteen-ish; now serving a life sentence for shooting and killing the new boyfriend of his ex-wife in 2006—had joined me on the court.

I’d met Bumpy two years earlier underneath that same basket. I’d envied his rattail, and he knew how to make a layup, so I’d invited him to my house to play Contra and Double Dribble. I remember him being so aggressively mannerly when he met my parents that I felt embarrassed, like they’d judge me behind my back for befriending someone so uncool. I also remember the conversation I had with Dad later that night:

“Son.”

“Yes?”

“Be careful around that boy.”

“Who? Bumpy?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He’s too . . . polite.”

Months later, when ten dollars disappeared from our kitchen counter during my birthday slumber party, Dad believed it was Bumpy and forbade me from inviting him to the house again. We’d already begun to grow apart by that time. I was into high-water Bugle Boy jeans with multicolored cuffs and Wiffle ball home run derbies in the alley behind our house. He was into throwing Frank’s RedHot sauce–filled water balloons at PAT buses and flashing his dick at school janitors and fat squirrels. The only reason he was even at the party was because he happened to come over the night the rest of my friends were there, and this nigga just stayed.

Bumpy also had a reputation for having hands. I’d never seen him rumble before, but it wasn’t hard to believe he could. Some dudes just carry it like that, and Bumpy was one of those dudes.

Anyway, I wasn’t exactly happy to see him when he crept up behind me at Peabody. Mostly because this nigga was a perpetual creeper. You’d never see this sneaky motherfucker coming. He’d just appear, popping up at courts and popping out of couches like he was playing hide-and-go-seek with gravity. His nickname was Bumpy, but we should have called that nigga Poltergeist. And he’d always ask you to do something that existed in the gray space where legal ended but illegal hadn’t quite yet begun. Like “No, Bumpy, I’m not gonna go pee on the bleachers with you today.” That day, however, Bumpy was interested in my bike, which was leaning on the chain-link fence with my lock linked within the wheels so you couldn’t ride it without the combination.

“Yo, Dame, lemme ride your bike.”

“Naw, man, I’m busy.” (Which was me saying, “Fuck no. If I let you ride my bike today, I won’t see it again till Wednesday.”)

“You a lame for that. Aiight, I’m out.”

He turned and walked back off the court and toward the gate’s entrance. I turned my back and continued doing Mikans. Twenty seconds later, I sensed an unease in the atmosphere, a disruption in my space-time continuum, and I stopped and turned toward the gate and saw that gravity-bending motherfucker sneaking away with my bike. Since he couldn’t ride it, this delinquent nigga was carrying it away and cracking the fuck up. I chased toward him, caught up to him, and pulled the handlebars while his hands gripped the down tube and the chainstay. Still thinking it was the funniest fucking thing ever, he pushed me away, and I tripped over a crack in the pavement and fell. At this point, I convinced myself that when I got back to my feet, I was going to sock him in the face. Both I and the mortified neighborhood squirrels had had enough of Bumpy’s supernatural shenanigans. Apparently this nigga could read minds too, as a right-hand cross landed on my cheekbone when I began to lift myself up. Thwarted and back on the ground, I responded the only way I was equipped to: lay there and cry like a baby.

Bumpy never actually stole my bike. He took a couple more steps toward the gate, passed through the exit, saw I was more interested in pretending I’d just seen the last twenty minutes of Marley & Me than chasing him again, and lost interest, leaving the bike splayed on the sidewalk. After enough time had passed to ensure he was out of eyeshot, I inched around the fence to retrieve my bitch-ass second-place prize.

Remembering this story always makes me feel like a wuss. Not because I lost the fight. Or how I lost the fight. But because it’s a reminder that I’ve gone twenty-five years without getting in another one, and saying that aloud makes me believe I’ve neglected a baptismal rite of passable blackness. I feel like I should have been in more fights between then and now. Especially since I never really snagged a nigger fight story. Which makes me wonder why I haven’t been in more fights. And then wonder if the embarrassment of the Bumpy beatdown was so traumatizing that I’d vowed to never go through that again, and lived the rest of my life skirting physical confrontations.

This is partially true. Aside from random and unavoidable basketball-related skirmishes peppered throughout my life—usually comprised of pushes, raised elbows, really determined pointing, and aggressively enunciated cuss words—learning how to detect and eschew potential rumbles became a vital part of my personal ethos. But not necessarily because I feared getting my ass kicked. I just really enjoy staying alive, and randomly fighting niggas in East Liberty and Garfield and Homewood and Larimer when you didn’t know if those random niggas—or those random niggas’ cousins/friends/brothers/girlfriends—were packing would have been an efficient way of ending my still untarnished streak of consecutive years lived.

In an irony that much of America still hasn’t quite realized yet, it’s assumed that black people from the hood emerge equipped with fighting bona fides. The thought being we wouldn’t have survived long enough to make it out of the hood if we didn’t know how to handle ourselves. But while we’ve all been around fights, seen fights, heard about fights, and known niggas who can fight—and niggas who itch to fight; niggas who can’t wait to finish doing whatever they’re doing right now just so they can fight again—you escape the hood bullet-wound-and-criminal-charge-free by learning how to look like you can fight; accomplished by walking around like you’ll stab a nigga if necessary and possessing a resting Stanley-from–The Office face. And having a sense of humor. And being too busy to loiter and hang. And being friendly with enough fight-compelled niggas that they wouldn’t want to fight you. And then learning enough they about to fight/brawl/stab/shoot up in here context clues to sniff out and evade fights.

Also, I constructed and existed in a reality where I’d never have to fight. I hooped and played football, and was taller and heavier than the average kid, and was from East Lib—each granting me the presumption of ass-whipping proficiency. Plus, I’m at the darker end of the color spectrum. And everyone—even other black people—assumes that the darker-skinned you happen to be, the tougher you are; like our skin is only dark because it was left on the stove too long. (Which accidentally creates a paradox where the most willing fighters often happen to be light-skinned black dudes. They’re aware light-skinned niggas are presumed to be soft, so they get extra super-duper tough sometimes just to prove they ain’t. Hell hath no fury like a scorned nigga with gray eyes and freckles.)

My lack of postadolescent fighting isn’t even all that rare. Most adults exist on the far ends of the fighting spectrum. Either you’ve been in somewhere between 0 and 2 fistfights since you were thirteen, or you’ve been in 214, and you just fought in a Waffle House parking lot last night. No one has been in, like, 8 fights. But this doesn’t change how I feel. I don’t want to be in more fights. I’d just like to know how it feels to be in one—and whether I’d be able to handle myself in it—and I’d prefer retaining ownership of that feeling without actually doing it. I also still relish opportunities to seem tough. I don’t actually possess a need to be tough. That ship has sailed. My life is too tony to be fighting niggas in bars and on the street, and it’s hard being a legitimately tough guy when calling Suitsupply tech support while clutching a Green Machine Naked Juice. Looking tough and having other people (particularly women) witness this grandiloquent toughness is enough for me.

I knew this was bullshit. I knew that no one I knew gave a shit about how many fights I’d been in (and won) as an adult. With the niggas I knew and hung out with in my twenties and thirties, fighting would probably just get me deleted from group texts and disinvited to brunches and bachelor parties. (“Yo, you didn’t invite Dame to the housewarming?” “Nah, man. That nigga just be fighting too much. Can’t have him up in my new crib breaking all my IKEA plateware.”) But even though I knew it didn’t matter, and knew that fighting and the toughness associated with it only mattered to me because of those mythical benchmarks of sufficient heterosexuality that I knew was a sham, I still gave that lie a home. I still had investments in it, and I couldn’t let it go just yet.

Fortunately, on May 14, 2012, the stars aligned and allowed me to do exactly that.

One of the PhDeez had a birthday, and the entire crew planned to celebrate by caravaning to Savoy, where we’d reserved two tables upstairs. Altogether there were eleven of us; nine women and two men. And since a table at Savoy is a big-ass Black Pittsburgh deal—it’s the place in Pittsburgh where niggas go to show off—the women each had their freakum dresses on, and I was wearing my finest and shiniest two-button Sean John suit. (Did you know that Sean John sold suits? I didn’t either until I saw this one on a discount rack at Burlington Coat Factory. When I bought it, the sales clerk suggested I also buy a few of the slightly damaged Trump ties sitting behind the counter. They were five for ten dollars. I declined.)

Our section at Savoy was a din of doctoral iniquity. The PhDeez had mostly eschewed the partying and bullshit associated with college life when undergrads, so if out together and in a relatively safe environment, they’d release all of those suppressed twerks and lap dances on unsuspecting couches and crotches, caged birds finally free to be Bougie Black Girls Gone Wild. Every so often, a nigga would clutch his nuts and inch over to the section, attempting to maybe get a phone number or a grind partner or just a closer look. First he’d pound up and brown-nose me as if I were the PhDeez’s bouncer or handler. And then he’d just stand there like the Strip District’s horniest scarecrow, waiting for one of the women to engage him. And then, after five to seven minutes of not being engaged or even fucking noticed, he’d walk all sad and slow and shit back to the bar.

After Savoy, the entire crew drove to the twenty-four-hour Eat’n Park in Squirrel Hill, where the midnight breakfast buffet is a popular and crucial sobering agent for Friday- and Saturday-night club-hoppers in Pittsburgh. Our crew of eleven had expanded to near twenty. And all of the extras were either niggas who were currently hooking up with one of the PhDeez or niggas who really, really, really, really, really, really wanted to. We asked one of the servers to put two long tables together, and we squeezed our asses into them. I sat at the head of one of the tables, flanked by the PhDeez, while the thirsty niggas all crowded together at the second table. I knew and was friendly with everyone, except for one stocky Kappa nigga I’d never seen before. He was wearing a bow tie and oxfords with no socks, so I hated him and his ankles immediately.

The buffet’s food—while hot and plentiful—was usually terrible. The bacon was flaccid and annoyed, the eggs despondent, the pancakes in need of a spa day and a therapy session, the French toast sticks trapezoidal and impenetrable, the fruit fishy, the fish fruity, and the sausage gravy looked too much like spunk to even try. You’d see it and you’d wonder how many East End sperm banks were missing samples. Fortunately, I was too tipsy and hungry to give a fuck about any of that. So while the PhDeez ordered from the bougie-ass menu—which meant they’d have to wait like eleven whole minutes for their food—I ravaged the lamp-heated nutriment, packing green sausage patties and woebegone grits into my mouth like a taxidermist stuffing sawdust into a dead walrus.

When drunk, I usually eat how rabbits fuck—angry, sweaty, and looking over my shoulder for falcons. I made multiple bacon runs to the buffet. Too many bacon runs. Like eight bacon runs. I ate twenty-seven slices of bacon that night. As I’d walk back to the table, the PhDeez seated near me would snatch a slice or two off my plate while I pretended to try to stop them. It was both one of those drunk-people games that’s only funny to other drunk people and subtly intimate. They were comfortable taking food off of my plate and I was comfortable allowing them to do that (as well as taking food off of theirs when it came). These were my girls. My homies. My niggas. And they could do that. Random stocky sockless Kappa niggas couldn’t. But that didn’t stop the random stocky sockless Kappa nigga there from trying, as he reached his random stocky sockless Kappa hand up from his seat and tried to grab a slice off of my plate during one of my runs.

There are few social crimes worse than an anonymous nigga taking food off of a nigga’s plate. I’m pretty certain the nineties East Coast/West Coast rap feud started because Suge Knight snatched an oxtail out of Biggie’s bowl during a house party in 1994. I wasn’t actually upset about this breach in decorum. But I knew I had to address this clear affront to my masculinity and my appetite. And I was fucking elated that this random stocky sockless Kappa nigga gave me a prime opportunity to look tough. I’d waited twenty years for something like this, to be a tough nigga in front of a crew of women. I could have kissed that random stocky sockless Kappa nigga for the gift.

I went back to my seat and sat down, placed my plate and my hands on the table, stared down to the opposite end of the connected tables (where he sat), and spoke calmly and forcefully with the deepest voice I could conjure.

“Yo, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Huh?”

“You heard me, bro. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

At this point, you could see the expressions on everyone’s faces changing from Wait. Damon’s not serious, is he? to Um, yeah, he’s serious. This is getting uncomfortable. And entertaining. This is uncomfortably entertaining, and finally landing on Wait, we’re not about to witness a couple niggas in suits fight over some bacon, are we?

Random stocky sockless Kappa nigga finally replied.

“It’s just bacon, bro. My bad. I didn’t realize Pittsburgh niggas got so heated over bacon.”

Now, I knew I wasn’t going to fight this dude over some buffet bacon. But he didn’t know that. And I was perfectly fine with allowing him to continue to wonder if I was actually that bacon-brawling-ass nigga.

“Really? You got jokes now? Come on, bro. You don’t wanna go there.”

Holy shit! It worked! As soon as I finished talking, I could see an inkling of fear form and then pass through his eyes. He really believed that, wherever the fuck “there” was, I was more than willing to go “there.” He thought I leased beachfront property “there” and was just elected mayor of “there.” And no one wants to go “there” with a nigga willing to go “there” over some bacon.

“I’m just saying, man, I saw them take some bacon and I thought it was cool. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

I went in for the kill.

“It was cool with THEM because I know THEM. THEY are my niggas. I don’t know YOU. I’ve never seen you or your shoes before in my life, dog. Plus they’re women. Niggas don’t take food off of other niggas’ plates, man. It’s whatever, though. I’m cool.”

This, officially, was the most badass thing I’ve ever said. Or done. And I knew immediately it was the badassest thing I’ve ever said or done because of the muffled laughs that followed. They were the type of laughs that happen when you shame a random stocky sockless Kappa nigga who needs shaming. And the type of laughs that happen when bougie black girls are relieved that no niggas fighting over emasculated pork are going to stain their freakum dresses. And if they’re relieved no fighting is going to happen, it means they believed there was enough of a possibility of a fight to be relieved by it not happening. THEY BELIEVED THERE WAS ENOUGH OF A POSSIBILITY OF A FIGHT TO BE RELIEVED BY IT NOT HAPPENING. WHICH MEANT THEY BELIEVED, FOR A MOMENT, THAT I HAD ENOUGH TOUGH NIGGA IN ME TO FIGHT A PLUMP NIGGA IN A SUIT OVER SOME BACON.

The random stocky sockless Kappa nigga apologized again. And Marguerite said we needed to hug it out. So we got up from our opposite ends of the table and embraced to sarcastic cheers. World War Swine had been averted. And finally, after two decades, I exorcised those Peabody High School basketball court demons.

The ghost of Bumpy was (finally) dead, and I could ride my bike back home.

I sat back down and tore through my fifth plate of bacon. And then I went to the bathroom and threw up.

Excerpted from What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young. Copyright 2019 by Damon Young. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.