My neighbor came over to my cabin with some weed. I gave him a beer and another and then another after that. We smoked his weed and drank all the beer and got into the tequila. We got bombed.
My neighbor told me to kiss his ass. He also called me a shit head and a motherfucker too. I called him a douche and told him that his wife had some jacked up teeth, huge and crooked like someone had taken a hammer to a bunch of piano keys. I told my neighbor that it was because of his wife’s teeth that she looked like a horse. I told him to get the fuck off of my porch.
My neighbor busted me in the chin with a right hook. He then kicked me in the cock. I retaliated with a left that went nowhere, and he came in with an elbow to my nose which busted it like a ketchup packet. My neighbor picked up a trash can and launched it at me like a missile. It hit me in the ass, and trash, mostly beer cans, went everywhere. I had just enough time to wonder why he’d aimed at my ass as opposed to more harmful areas of my body when he suddenly retrieved the aluminum trash can from the ground and smashed me in the head with it. I saw white lighting and I went down, a heavy pulse hitting sharply in my temples, the pressure of which was threatening to burst the veins in my aching forehead.
Luckily for me, my head had absorbed the entirety of that second trash can collision, and all of my important limbs that I needed for fighting were still in good shape. But now, time was of the essence. My neighbor had brought me to my knees, and would any second now be closing in to finish me off, probably with a two handed tomahawk chop to the back of my head which was his signature finishing move.
My neighbor laughed. I heard a series of resonant, staccato thuds, and I knew he was beating his chest, his typical celebration reserved for when an imminent victory was his. The planks on my porch creaked and whined under my neighbor’s hasty footfalls. He was making his final charge; his fists joined and raised high above his head, he shouted cusswords at the top of his lungs.
Einstein will try and tell you that the faster you move, the slower time will pass for you relative to someone who is idle. Or something like that. I’ve reason to believe that that’s some bullshit. For as I knelt, head hung between my shoulders, a dangle of crimson drool drooping from my lip and swaying like a pendulum in the dim morning breeze, Time Itself suddenly slowed to a snail’s crawl. The convective vibrations which had formerly threatened to rattle my knees loose from their ligaments was presently a sensation of sluggish, individual tugs, sometimes pulling this way, and sometimes that way, and was on the whole very calm and gentle and soothing, a force comparable to that which acts on a boat by the whims of a tenderly rolling ocean. The shrieks of cusswords morphed into a singular, unintelligible, sans syllabic baritone hum. At once, I was like Spiderman, witness to a world in perhaps 1/500th of real time. Things were slow, mercifully slow. For in this realm of absolute unhurriedness was I granted permission, privilege rather, to ponder, to consider, to think. I knew what this little skirmish was really about. A mouth full of jacked up piano teeth wasn’t nearly enough to keep me away from my neighbor’s wife. He knew I’d been partying over there when he was out working graveyard. Hell. I deserved this beating. I deserved it and then some.
Or not. As my neighbor, and John was his name, drew nearer, his fists joined, his knuckles white and just aching to smash me in the forehead, I recalled a bit of our history as neighbors. Was this not the same John that had spray painted my penis that day I passed out in the lawn? Was this not the same John who had one time bagged all the Freon out of my window unit for his own personal huffing habit, effectively raising my house temperature to a level unbearable in the Texas summer? And was this not the same John who had pooped in the upper deck of my toilet while I was in the lawn, naked and passed out with a purple painted penis? Across the board the answer was yes. So I answered the fourth and final question - had I yet been afforded my just recompense for John’s many trespasses? - with an entirely different answer: Nope.
I spit out the drool and raised my head. Onward came my slow-motion assailant, yelling his caveman battle cry, his mouth and cheeks bouncing and rebounding stupidly under his heavy strides like a skydiver facing the rush of wind at terminal velocity. I resolved to react with an offensive of my own, one that would both injure and insult, even considering that I’d just hours prior thrown John’s wife in the jackhammer and boned her all night long to a Def Leppard album.
In a jarring transition, time returned to its familiar speed. My arm, straight and taut and terminating in a potent, heavy fist, acted mechanically, moving with lighting haste as the hand of a clock, describing perfectly the 90 degree, counterclockwise path from six to three. Crunch! My fist slammed home – right into John’s balls – and in my mind’s ear, I heard that ding, that very same one that results from that carnival game where you swing the sledgehammer in an attempt to drive the metal piece up the long shaft and into the crowning bell.
John’s double fisted tomahawk chop never fell. As he stood there, abruptly stopped in his tracks and joining his knees to one another and forming a face like a lemon sucker and grabbing himself, I wasted no time. I was back on my feet and brandishing the empty trashcan above my head, shaking it maniacally like Leatherface with his saw. And now it was my turn to shout cusswords!
I brought the trashcan down mightily over John’s head, covering him to the waist. The can’s aperture was of such a diameter that it fastened his arms to his sides and prevented him from an easy escape. His hands flapping madly about at the wrists, sealed to his sides just below the can’s opening, John bellowed shrieks and curses (which were comically muffled by his aluminum imprisonment) as he ran repeatedly into the support beams of my porch, rebounding again and again like a goddamn circus clown. I laughed and pointed. After bouncing off of several supports like a pin ball, John staggered off of the porch and ran in the direction that he instinctively recognized as the course to his home. Muted, echoing oaths resounded incessantly from beneath from the can-on-legs as he rammed into the telephone pole, the fence, and finally, his piece of shit car, putting a dent in the hood and activating the alarm. What better show of comedy ever?!
Victory! Raise the Larry banister! No one comes on my porch and drinks my beer and liquor and tries to kick my ass, even if they do bring me some weed! For yet again, I earned the title which is mine by sweat and blood! Undisputedly, the biggest partier in my neighborhood!
