The Duel
The Wait
“I was so scared on my first amateur fight, I wanted to… I went downstairs, ‘I’m going to the store in the Bronx, New York, I’m going to the store…’ and I went downstairs. Man, I should get on this train and never come back, I wanted to get on the train and just leave, I was so scared. I didn’t want to fight anybody.”
Mike Tyson,
Tyson.
I once had an argument with a guy I used to bounce with.
“You guys are pussies,” he said. “No bottles, no glasses, no bar stools,” he said. “It’s only one on one – and there’s a referee!”
He came back later on, and said,
“You know, I’ve been thinking: I was wrong about that. The thing about bar fights is that you never know when they’re going to happen, and by the time it’s started, it’s over. You guys have to wait, knowing what’s ahead of you.”
The wait is the best part of the ordeal and strangely, probably the part I miss the most. The wait is the time you have to sit with your fear and decide whether or not you should make up an excuse or simply run away. It’s the time you consider what you have to lose. What it will mean if you are defeated.
The Theoretical Solution
The only cure for the situation was the good, old-fashioned punch in the face. J would be convinced swiftly and I would be gratified immediately. He wouldn’t have any motivation to grope me in public, but would also have his own crisis of emasculation resolved: there would be no question left in his tiny mind.
There were, however, a number of variables to be managed. The ultimate failure under the circumstances would be to be arrested and charged, so avoiding that was my principal consideration.
No matter what the circumstances, fighting in public is illegal. I know this from bouncing. In fact, I believe the most serious charge is ‘affray’, which is to cause a violent public disturbance. You go straight to gaol for that one.
Aside from that, I have no interest in fighting in public. It’s too difficult to control the various elements: the whole point of the undertaking is to deliberately harm injure someone else.
That’s something you want to do as ‘safely’ as possible, so that they don’t fall over and hit their head on concrete and die, for example. Lastly, there’s the possibility that it will be broken up, or other members of the public will prevent you achieving the desired outcome.
The desired outcome is to inflict physical harm on the other party in order to inflict psychological distress. That distress is both punishment and ongoing deterrent.
I haven’t actually been in a fight I wasn’t paid to be in ever in my adult life. All the fights I had that weren’t in a ring were while I was working in pubs and nightclubs, and they certainly weren’t fights I started. Those fights were driven by other people’s reasons, so in that sense, it was a very different situation to this.
When I’d last lived with Julian, I had been a skinny, scared little wimp. After school, I’d trained and undergone ordeals to change that small, skinny kid into someone capable of defending himself. Because people were less and less inclined to fuck with me, I came to believe that I had solved my problem.
And it isn’t that I’d necessarily gone ‘soft’; I had continued to train right up until my tendons began to deteriorate and various other injuries conspired against me.
The truth was, and the truth he asserted when he grabbed me by the balls – when he sexually assaulted me in a public place – was that I was still that same, scared little kid. If I wanted Julian to leave me alone then I had to convince him, just like I’d convinced everyone else over the past twenty-eight years.
The first thing I had to avoid was running into him again, unprepared. He was still the same fuckwit I’d known in high school, that’s for sure. He had that way of getting up into your breathing space, like emperor penguins do, pushing chest to chest, with the genital handshake providing that little bit of extra emphasis.
The reality was, if he wanted to march up and grab me by the balls, he could do it. Practically speaking, if I wanted to do anything, from having the time to decide how to deal with the situation, to actually hitting him, there needed to be physical distance between us.
He was a total idiot and his life, a succession of grotesque and embarrassing failures, was proof of it. Sexually assaulting me was yet another really bad idea in line with all the dumb shit he’d done to date and I had to be very careful not to be drawn into it. Hitting him was probably the best way to make myself vulnerable.
Naturally, the first thing to do was call my lawyer.
‘Sporting contest is a defence against assault,’ said J.D. ‘Two boxers in a ring are effectively assaulting one another, but they’re excused from prosecution because it’s a contest. If you can get him into your gym, and he consents, then it solves a lot of problems.’
It swiftly became clear that I’d need a second.
‘The other thing to do, and it’s going to take some careful thinking to achieve, is to get him to admit to groping you by text. That way, you can go him for sexual assault and that’ll tie him up completely. If he ends up on the sex offenders register, it’s going to affect his ability to work – the lot.’
Because of these considerations, I chose to settle on a duel.
Theme Park at its Darkest 
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