Robert E. Brown. Tales from the Land of Entrapment

Everyone takes a beating sometime.
Part I. Alex the Bully.

"Everyone takes a beating sometime." That's a statement that everyone in Lost Cauces New Mexico understood. Living in a desolate desert, in a college town close to the Mexican border bred boredom, frustration and anger in a cultural environment of extreme machismo. Everyone got their ass kicked eventually. In my late teen's and early 20's fights were readily the nightly norm, and they were never fair. Being a skinny 140 lb. loud mouth shit talking punk rock kid scored me plenty of beatings and I learned after a while not to open my mouth unless I had numbers behind me or a clear escape route. That might sound cowardly but if you have been around enough real street fights and bar brawls, you know the bitter truth about fighting fair. Unfortunately for my friend Alex, that balanced "choose your battles" lesson was never learned. Alex let the pendulum swing from bully to pacifist. Both tactics seemed to get him beatings in the end.

Alex was a mean little Hispanic kid who was smoldering with Napoleon complex angst. He stood at an impressive skinny 5'2" and always adorned with a bad, dirty black dyed Dee Dee Ramone hairdo and the standard issue black leather jacket & combat boots. The first night I met him I was throwing one of my regularly occurring "father's away on business" house parties. Mobs of high school kids drinking shitty beer and even shittier wine while listening to poorly dubbed Black Flag cassettes on a beat up sticker covered boom box. A kid named Tony showed up with a new leg cast earned from being too bold on a half pipe and said something this new guest didn't like. I walked into my kitchen to find Alex using Tony's nose as the center target for his newly found flesh and blood punching bag. Tony stood defenselessly held up by two crutches as the little shit carefully took face shots that Tony had no way to block. The kid just stood there bleeding as he received at least 5 brutal rabbit punches before I came in to break it up.

After his stunning victory Alex decided to put his new strategy to the work two weeks later. Jonathan sat slumped in a chair all but passed out drunk. Earlier in the night he had been mouthing off and shit talking Alex who had waited to make his move. Jonathan's gimp leg still required the help from a cain so when Alex swooped in for the kill, he made sure to kick it from his victims reach. It wouldn't have mattered. Jonathan was wasted and incoherent. He barely registered that it was his turn to be Alex's bloody punching bag. The next day he had to be briefed on how he received his spit lip.

But don't get the wrong impression. Alex's fighting phase wasn't limited to sparing with the handicapped. He would pick fights with anyone, and for a time it seemed that the worse the odds for him, the better. One night we were at party at a shitty two story apartment building. I was standing outside on the second story walkway with some of my crew. "Oh fuck look" someone screamed. I looked down at the parking lot and Alex was flat on his back with a huge black guy and what we found out later was half the NMSU football team looming over him. They started to walk away and Alex staggered to his feet and said something we couldn't hear. The football player turned back around and jacked Alex so hard that he bounced into the air and tumble rolled for 10 feet.
"Oh shit. Do you think we should go down there?"
"Against those guys?"
"Good point."
And he got up again. Said something again. The football player walked over and hit him again. He stumbled another 10 feet across the parking lot and dropped to his back again.
"Hey Alexander, stay down!" We laughed and jeered.
"No, no get up Alex, do it again!"
He got up again. And we watched the same routine play out over and over again, slowly moving form one end of the parking lot to the other.

But it wasn't a beating from a hulking college football player that turned Alex into a pacifist, it was a beating from a skinny hair metal band. We used to make regular excursions into Juarez where the drinking age was 16 and tequila shots were a quarter. Alex had gone down there with our friends John G. and Kenta. They went to some dank mexican bar where Alex spent the better part of the night bad mouthing and harassing a table of hair metal guys from El Paso about their spandex and matching white cowboy boots. At the end of the night they made the long walk back across the border bridge and Alex spotted the hair band 50 yards ahead. He sped up his pace leaving John and Kenta behind in order to make sure the hair guys could hear his taunts. But as he closed the gap between him and his verbal victims, he left his own crew behind. Suddenly Alex found himself alone at the bottom of the huge bridge in a poorly lit, empty walkway surrounded by some very angry metal heads. Within seconds those matching white cowboy boots were kicking his face in. John G. and Kenta were only a minute behind him, but a minute is all it takes. As they came up on the scene those now bloody boots were casually walking away. Years later I asked John why he didn't go after the hair guys. "Seriously, don't you think it was a long time coming?" He had a point.

The next day upon hearing the news, I went to Alex's house to view the damage. His mother earned a living by using her house as a makeshift daycare and when he came out of his room all ten toddlers began to cry. One of the older children ran over to Alex's mother and while pulling on her leg he sobbed "make him take off the monster mask." Shit, I wanted him to take off the mask too. But that was his face. 40 stitches and a crushed nose on a mass of puffy tissue so swollen that he had to tilt his head at an angle to see out of the one eye he could still open.

In one night at the tender age of 19, Alex the Bully became Alex the Pacifist. The fight was literally beat out of him. From then on you couldn't get Alex to raise his hand and from then on he fancied himself a peace maker. Unfortunately for me, a few years later I found myself in a position where I needed the little scrapper back. But that Alex was gone.


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