Girl Fistfights Boy

Girl Fistfights Boy

  by

  David Wallace Fleming

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PUBLISHED BY

  The Ranch was one of those three-level clubs with sprawling, rooftop bars that are popular in downtown Austin. It was on West Sixth where the college girls and models strutted in leading-edge technologies of revealing garments under water misters and palm fronds with glassy-eyed stumblings between tricked-out limos and hippies pedaling yellow, paint-chipped rickshaws.

  A rickshaw had carried Alice and one of her best friends to the Ranch that evening but just for fun. They weren’t in any hurry and arrived at the front doors well before the rest of the bachelorette party. This allowed them to get in extra drinks and shots and make fun of stupid guys that didn’t know what they were doing. One of these stupid guys was Benny. Benny hovered around like a satellite, exchanging orbits between her and his group of friends like he wanted to buy her a drink or something. He had noticed her looking at him and mistook the extra second of eye contact for interest. In truth, Alice had thought that the guy was a dead-ringer for her ex-boyfriend except that at five-eight and around a hundred and forty pounds he was much scrawnier, more insubstantial than her ex. She had always been attracted to size and strength in the young men she dated and it seemed like the more ambivalence she felt about the sustained existence of manhood, the more attraction she felt to tall guys with muscles. Her ex had been one of those guys. The exact same face as Benny. The same lackadaisical surety, same measuring smirk and beady, know-it-all eyes. At first, when her ex had been rough during sex it had been exciting but what the X-box jockey couldn’t get was that her initial spark had always been contingent upon the experience growing into something more than grabbing and pulling and intimidating—domineering her with smug breathiness. When he revealed this to be the only gear in his transmission, excitement turned to resentment. She couldn’t help but imagine how pleasurable it would be to kick the scrawny guy’s ass, to watch his inadequate body squirm helplessly as she projected her ex onto him. She was exceedingly single-minded and confident for a marketing strategist fresh from college, a young woman of twenty-two.

  After orbiting a couple times and not knowing what to say, Benny sat down at the bar and pounded shots. This had happened to him before. Each time it happened it was a little more frustrating; especially so, since all his life people had told him he was supposed to be so smart. He had his IQ measured at 145 in the second grade by an over-eager mother. With the problem of his worth in society solved, he proceeded to slowly destroy himself. This was accomplished through lethargy in K through Twelve and marijuana throughout college preceding to this very evening—a Friday night—the third to last weekend before he was to graduate in Forestry and move back into his childhood home, play Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and surf the web for a job for a few obligatory hours before separating out his first bowl. He liked to watch Jean Claude Van Damme movies while he was high, liked to see the man’s spinning legs connect with a dazed opponent’s head on the screen with his trademark, barbaric yawp and feel a little part deep within his fried brain sparkle to life with ghosts of forgotten, ancestral powers.

  Alice liked to watch Van Damme movies also. She imagined herself as Van Damme knocking the men’s heads about. She never did anything substandard; she was a collector of talents; each time she mastered a task, her father—an aloof ad agency executive—doled out a pellet of hardened, warehouse-desiccated affection. She was encouraged by her mother and father to take Tae Kwon Do lessons from the age of seven and by sixteen had obtained her black belt with a measured pat on the head from Dad. She had sparred with many young boys and her long, powerful legs had helped even the playing field and even granted her victory over boys beyond her 120 to 140 weight class. These victories always felt both inexplicably good and bad. The trouble with boys was also their greatest strength. Boys had such impressive bursts of strength and energy. But if you could channel that energy into something silly—something, say, for example: unproductive—they became your helpless slaves: in battle, in bed, in anything. She locked eyes with Benny, flashed an indecipherable smile and watched him glow with naïve excitement.

  Both Benny and Alice had become frustrated as the night wore on: for Alice, it was the beauty of the soon-to-be bride winning all the young men’s affections and, for Benny, it was the connected ex-football players high-fiving blonde bombshells with exquisite ease. In response, they had both consumed large quantities of alcohol. So, around one-thirty in the AM, they wanted to urinate.

  There were long lines to both the bathrooms on the second floor. Down on the first floor, the men’s bathroom had gone out of service and Benny hesitated as he examined the participants of the medium-sized line behind the girl’s rest room. There was one guy in line towards the front and there didn’t seem to be any more people corralling behind him. It was certainly possible that he might be able to wait out the line and make it into the women’s rest room before any other girls arrived to give him shit. He cued up. He waited and checked the clock on his cell phone: 1:34 AM. He might be able to make it back for last call at 2:00.

  “Is this the line for the girls’?” a patrician and melodious voice sang out from behind him. He turned. His stomach bucked. Fate was pushing him in a certain direction. The skin of her upper thighs just below her snug plaid skorts boasted of itself: dewy, bronze with sublime exaggerations of the most graceful, feminine musculature. The way skin looks when ready. The way—as each fool knows—magic, sexual skin can glow even in the dim light.

  “Hello…?” she said, pecking forward impatiently with her hands on her hips. “Is anybody home inside there?” she gestured toward his head.

  She was speaking to him! He paused to gather himself. “What happened was—the men’s restroom was out. And now people are waiting in this line.”

  “You mean, you’re waiting in this line,” she said, taking a step closer in stiletto heals. “I don’t see any other dipshit guys waiting in the women’s line.”

  Benny felt a tightening in his chest. “It’s a short line. It shouldn’t take too long. I’m sure you’ll be in there in no time.”

  Alice puffed up her short, bleached bangs with her mouth—hands on hips and foot stomping. “Yeah,” she said. “Or I could just beat you up and walk past you.”

  “What did you say?” Benny asked, taking his hands out of his pockets. She was taller than him even without the four-and-half inch heels. He didn’t like having to look up to her impatient eyes to ask the question. Something was missing from his conduct. He wasn’t being chivalrous—that was what some women’s magazine writer would say if he was seen selfishly not yielding his position in line to this girl. But the girl was being a pushy bitch. He hadn’t expected any more girls to show up when he’d taken his position in line and he’d already waited several minutes before she’d arrived. Plus, if he gave up his position, another girl would show up ten seconds later and say the exact same thing.

  Benny turned his back.

  The back of his black, embroidered, rockstar cowboy shirt—the one the guy obviously didn’t pay his own money for, the one a size too big for his frame—it was wrinkled all over. She felt the pressure in her bladder. She’d just pop his ego and be one person closer to the bathroom. She tapped him on the shoulder.

  He turned around and stabbed out with his glare.

  “I could do it to you, you know,” she said.

  “Do what?” Benny asked, dully. But he knew what she meant. He knew she thought she could kick his ass. Thi
s wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened. Something strange had happened to women about seven or eight years ago. They started minting more and more aggressive girls. Girls that wanted him to beat them in arm wrestling before they could feel attraction. Girls that followed him out to his car in dark, secluded parking lots and hit on him and accused him of stalking them if their affections weren’t returned. Girls that were prone to repeat to him, “Even though I could kick your ass,” or that made direct correlations to Tae Bo exercise DVDs and real world street fighting. Sure, he’d never been in a real fight before. Sure, he’d never had to rush Omaha Beach with a carbine, dodging whizzing bullets and shrapnel like the Great Generation or ward off scalp-hungry Apache’s with a flintlock but he was still a man…wait, could he even use that word out loud anymore without being laughed at? The point was that he was male and still deserved some respect and if this girl wasn’t careful—

  “Hey!” Benny screeched and pushed her hands away. She was poking him right in his chest. Right where his heart would be were it not