My Four Fights

One day, on the playground during physical education class, we were running relay races. We were divided into two teams in lines at both ends of the asphalt basketball court. The game was simple: each of us in turn was to run to other end of the court, touch the hand of a teammate and so forth until all the runners had run and competed as a team. The race was direct and full of adrenaline both running and anticipating the run. Running fast was an important ability for a ten year old boy, and the relay was a good opportunity to demonstrate my prowess.

I was relatively new to the school having moved to Bogotá in the fourth grade from Barrancabermeja. There are many differences between the two cities. Barranca, as it is called for short, is in the jungle, on the equator, at sea-level. It is a relatively small town whose economy centers on oil production and refining. There we lived in a company-owned camp of about a hundred houses next to a company-owned golf course and clubhouse. Barranca is hot and wet. I remember the torrential rains and the explosive heat. Animals crept into the compound and were a source of great amusement to me, particularly lizards and various strange bugs. Our driveway was lined with a hibiscus hedge that bloomed profusely.

But then we moved to Bogotá, the large capital city in the mountains, at an altitude of 9500 feet and surrounded by even higher mountain peaks. It is situated on a high plain that used to be an ancient lake, so the city is relatively flat except where it has started creeping up the mountainsides as it expands. The climate in Bogotá is mild with a temperature that is rarely below 35 degrees Fahrenheit and never exceeds 85. There is a rainy season and plants and grasses grow lushly. The light in the mountains has an odd brightness that one senses as excessively intense perhaps because the UV spectrum is less filtered by the atmosphere.

The school in which my parents enrolled me was an "American" school, that is, a private school, taught in English and organized along the lines of schools in the United States. It was much larger than the cozy camp school I attended in Barranca. My new school attracted a variety of Americans, children of other foreign nationals and wealthy Colombians. My nemesis in this altercation was named Carlos Lersundy.

Carlos was a Colombian, tall for his age with black hair, eyebrows that were raised to a point in the middle and chipped front teeth. I was behind him in the relay race line. Evidently I must have jostled him as I was trying to get a view of the current runners. Without turning around, he cursed me over his shoulder in Spanish. I knew a significant amount of Spanish because I had been raised largely by maids who spoke no English; however, they hadn't taught me the swear words. "Hijo de p--a; m---con; ch---a tu madre." Not knowing what Carlos had said but sensing that it was insulting, I parroted back his imprecations. Instantly he whirled around and without pause hit me forcefully in the mouth. I was shocked, bleeding and felt little gritty bits of teeth in my mouth. I was too surprised to respond and teachers immediately intervened and took us both to the principal's office.

I don't remember further ramifications of the fight, but I do remember the gulf that I had discovered between the children of foreign nationals like myself and the children of wealthy Colombians. The native children seemed more confident in their world and could pick upon the slightest difference, weakness or lack of knowledge the rest of us suffered. I knew intuitively that the differences were unbridgeable no matter how long I lived in Colombia.

II

Ane Maat was my best friend. He was Dutch and his father worked for Royal Shell, and my father was American and worked for International Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey. We were inseparable companions every day after school and on weekends. Our playground was the entire city of Bogotá which we explored on our bicycles. Ane looked like the quintessential Dutch boy: he was tow-headed with thick hair, round-faced with a few freckles and athletic. In the relay races, he was always among the frontrunners. He had two younger sisters and jovial parents with an unrepressed, earthy quality, at least by comparison with my parents who were kind but a bit remote and prim.

Bicycles were absolutely central to all of our activities. My first was a single speed Schwinn with balloon tires and coaster brakes that I inherited from one of my older brothers. It was heavy and not particularly suited to our long excursions, and we lived on a hill that I ignominiously had to push the bike up because it was too steep to negotiate with the unwieldy Schwinn. Americans made bulletproof bicycles that were ludicrously inferior to European bicycles which were designed to be light, had thinner tires and could be ridden much greater distances without tiring. My best Christmas was when my parents gave me a black, light European bicycle with brakes on the handle bars and thin tires. When I saw it propped up next to the tree, I felt as if I was standing at the gates of heaven.

Ane and I rode everywhere and engaged in various sorts of deviltry. We were expert slingshot and air-rifle shooters. Every local variety of bird was a favorite target as well as streetlights, picture windows and even city buses. For some mysterious reason we never seemed to get caught in our mischief-making. Only once do I remember learning that justice is swift. We were playing in my backyard with my air rifle and Ane dared me saying, "I bet you can't hit that pigeon." Our neighbor kept a pet pigeon in his back yard. No sooner had I squeezed the trigger and saw the pet fall, that I knew I wasn't going to get away so easily this time. I decided that I had better hide the rifle, so I took it apart and hid the parts all over the house in as many obscure corners as I could find. Ane, believing that discretion was the better part of valor, went home while I waited for the neighbor to discover the dead bird and the little bleeding hole in its chest. That evening after dinner, I heard the knock at the door, and I put on my best innocent expression while my father talked to our irate neighbor. I of course swore by all that was holy (nothing in my world was at the time) that I hadn't shot the damn bird, but my father of course knew better. The gun was reassembled and confiscated, and I was grounded (no bicycling after school) for a week.

Ane and I shared a thousand such adventures with life, death and the law. We discovered together the limits of the natural and social world and shared alike. But as the world is wont to happen, all good things eventually come to an end. Ane's father was moving back to Holland and mine was retiring early to the United States. There was a dread of the future in our lives. One day Ane and I were play-wrestling in the street when suddenly the play became serious. Ane's superior athletic prowess soon had me pinned to the ground furious and emotional. He wouldn't let me up when I capitulated, a violation about which the sacred rule of friendship is unambiguous. It was a betrayal that our friendship did not endure probably because it occurred only a week or two before we both went off to our mysterious futures in our respective "homelands". My mother tried to intervene to persuade me to forgive him but the wound to my pride was too deep.

Ane and I corresponded in a half-hearted fashion two or three times during the following years but never really reconciled. The last time I heard from his family it was a letter from his mother to tell me that Ane had been in a terrible car accident and had suffered a permanent brain injury. Sometimes I have felt remorse, guilt and a vague sense that maybe it has been my lot to live for both of us.

III

It wasn't long after my return to the United States in the eighth grade that Nick, the school bully, decided that I was a likely candidate for his thuggery. I was attending Robin Mickle Junior High School a working-class middle school in Lincoln, Nebraska. Who the school is named for, I haven't the slightest idea. At that time the city of Lincoln was virtually all white; there was a very small black neighborhood near downtown but otherwise, it was as white as the prairie is endless or the sky blue. Lincolnites were generally conservative (with the exception of a few university professors who were cosmopolitan enough to know there really was a larger world out there beyond the Platte River) and they lived in a world like Norman Rockwell's America. Differences were viewed with a gaping incredulity or simply not tolerated and certainly ripe for punishment if insisted upon.

My differences weren't at first apparent; with blond hair and blue eyes, I would seem to fit well into the American dream which fully mesmerized Nebraskans. But adults at the school were aware of my background, and one day, I was called out of class to speak Spanish with an Hispanic parent who was trying to enroll her child in the school Word spread quickly: "He speaks Spanish." "Yeah, I heard he lived in Colombia; I wonder if he lived in a grass hut." "What was the name of your gym teacher?" "Mr. Lopez." "Lowpez?" "Lopez" "Hey, let's call him, Lowpez." "Hey, Lowpez." Having lived in a metropolitan city much larger and more cosmopolitan than Lincoln, I resented the notion that my peers thought I must have lived in a grass hut. But I endured their ridicule and minded my own business.

That is, until the afternoon after school when Nick decided that my differences merited his special attention. Students were fond of gathering at a nearby, old-fashioned drugstore and soda shop to buy candy or after-school treats of one sort or another. It was on the way home to my grandparent's house, where I was living until my parents could wind up their affairs in Colombia. Naturally, I made a habit of stopping on my way. Suddenly and completely without reason, I found myself in front of the drugstore in the middle of a ring of students, facing Nick, the bully, threatening me with his fists. I took my glasses off and handed them to an acquaintance. Instantly there was an exchange of blows, and Nick was bleeding profusely from his nose. I am not sure who was the more shocked. But the result was I was the clear victor and Nick demurred from any more pugilism. He and his allies hurried off to tend to his injury while I walked on home with a new acquaintance who lived on my street. I wasn't more than a block from the store, when I started crying from the emotional aftermath. "Don't cry: you won!" my companion urged.

The next day at school something odd was in the air, or it seemed that I was walking on air. The attention and unexpected respect paid to me was miraculous. The gym teacher's attitude was particularly memorable when he said, "I heard you beat up Nick, where did you learn to fight?" he asked.

"Bogotá, Colombia" I replied.

IV

I was much too old to be in a fight, but then, I was living in Tucson, Arizona. By this time I was a young man with my very pregnant wife and we were headed out to the movies after I had put in a long, unbearably hot day of work in the woodshop making furniture. Why people move to the desert is something of a mystery, even having moved there myself. They pour into the Phoenix metropolitan area at the rate of 2000 per week, astounding given the 115 degree heat, the dropping water levels due to drought and the dissipating Colorado River. With global warming in the works, I would have thought people would be moving to Canada or Alaska. Perhaps people have a longing for hell, to find the incendiary land sooner, in order to defuse the surprise when they die. In the desert one must be a con and watch out for cons. Because there is no shade, it seems a necessity to be shady and treasure the little dark places of the world. The question "What rock did he crawl out from under?" has an everyday application because it seems that many people in Tucson fit that description. Every summer afternoon before the "monsoons" arrive, Tucson looks light-blasted and even the bright colors of the houses seem to fade. A quarter mile stroll to the local Circle K to pick up a newspaper on a Sunday morning is almost an unthinkable trek without a bottle of water, sunglasses, a hat, and sunscreen. People do other strange things as well, like become a woodworker in a land of cacti and shrubs.

One shady place was the movies (one even sought the shade in the evening to dispel the memory of the day's heat). We pulled into a rather full parking lot, but thankfully, just in front of us we found a car leaving. We waited patiently as the car backed out and then proceeded to park in the vacated stall, when another car, coming from the opposite direction, zoomed into the space. As we indignantly drove slowly past the transgressor, my wife glared at him and raised her middle finger. Nothing to be done, we drove on and found another space in the recesses of the parking lot. As we neared the entrance to the theater and the line for tickets, it was clear that we would be standing directly behind the predatory parking spot thieves. As I took my place in line immediately behind the young man, I was happy to notice that he was 5 or 6 inches shorter than me and perhaps 20 lbs. lighter. Over his shoulder he sneered "Your wife shouldn't be doin that in her condition." With the reference to "her condition", my adrenaline started pumping, but I ignored the comment and waited. My silence must have threatened him even more because moments later he shouted, "I am not a fag" and with that he wheeled around and hit me in the throat, presumably missing my chin because he was so short. I felt as if I grew to twice my normal size, and I glared down at him and said "Do that again." As he considered whether to risk another blow, his girlfriend pulled his sleeve saying, "Let's go." They hurried into the theater and fortunately chose a different movie to enjoy. We took our seats; my wife consoled me and we marveled over the insanity of what had just transpired.

In the dark, I swallowed repeatedly as the movie lights began to flicker.

This is a photo of a great Nebraskan poet named John Niehardt. He wrote Black Elk Speaks and the long epic poem A Cycle of the West. He really was an excellent poet but he was writing classically styled poems when the "great" poets were inventing modernist styles and so the world left him behind; however, his terrific account of meeting with the Lakota medicine man, Black Elk, is one of the best books ever written about native american spirituality.