Tough, Part Va

When I wake up in the morning, my hands are tight and inflexible, like wet leather left out to freeze overnight. The physical memory of violence is replayed in uncontrollable trembling that makes typing an impossible task. My fingers are sausages, swollen tubes of pulverized meat that feel like they don't fit the hands they belong to, as if my skin were OJ's murder gloves. My fingers are so thick that my knuckles crack involuntarily when I try to squeeze my hands around my coffee cup -- a necessary ritual for many reasons, not least of which is to allow the heat to penetrate and begin the slow process of loosening.

One of the major problems with being tough is the toll it takes on the body, particularly the hands. Aggression implies physical action, the intrusion of your body into other people's space, and the ground troops in these invasions are inevitably your hands. It is your hands that punch, that grab, choke, and smash. Like Marines hitting the beach, hands bear the heaviest burden of toughness and consequently suffer the most damage, even while doing the work that is so critical to the tough fight.

Rarely do street brawls bear any resemblance to the orderly gamesmanship of the ring. It seems like the worst damage is always done both by me and to me almost inadvertently, when the structure of the whole thing falls apart and pushing, gouging and twisting become the tools of the day. These wrenching interactions leave more lasting reminders of pain than punches. The muscles at the base of my left thumb still ache from the twisting received in a fight with two Lebanese slumlords that I got into over ten years ago.

Those guys were true scumbags: they'd been renting an apartment to my girlfriend for years that had holes in the roof, a rotting fire-escape and porches that were blocked off because they were unsafe. No matter how much she complained, they never fixed anything. When I met her, she was embarrassed to bring me to her home because of the trash bags she and her roommate had taped to the ceiling to keep water from getting all over their stuff.

When she moved out, the greedy bastards tried to take her security deposit by claiming that there was damage to the apartment walls, when in fact the biggest damage had been caused by water soaking in through the defective roof. They refused to negotiate with her, so my girlfriend asked me to help her recover her deposit. Knowing it was going to be a battle, I reluctantly went over to have a polite chat with the pair of slime-sucking leeches.

My diplomatic strategy was simple: I told them to return her security deposit, or I'd be forced to call code enforcement and file an official complaint about the condition of the building.

Admittedly, this is not a very tough approach. I've collected, I know that you have to punch first and get the money second. My only excuse is that I imagined that I'd outgrown my brawling days, that I was no longer just a tough, that I had been reassimilated into society. I had been discharged from the Navy for almost a year. I had just started a wonderful new relationship with the woman who eventually became my wife, I was back in school, it was the dawn of a new age of reason and tolerance.

What a fool I was.

It almost goes without saying that the landlords were unhappy with my proposal, since it was obvious to all of us that their place would be condemned should code enforcement ever actually have a look around. As we debated the finer points of our disagreement in the building's vestibule, both landlords started screaming at me, one in my face and the other from the side.

Then the one standing beside me grabbed me by the upper arm.

I am intolerant of people touching me. I like people to keep their distance, it's kind of a fetish of mine. I don't like it even when it's friendly, the old 'hey boy' pat on the shoulder makes me grind my teeth. When someone grabs me and shakes me while yelling in my ear, I am liable to respond forcefully.

A rolling block dislodged the guy's grip and I followed with a stiff chop to his throat. He ended up on the floor, coughing and gagging, but in the meantime his brother grabbed me. While we grappled in the narrow confines of the front hallway, the other one rallied and jumped back into the fight. With their combined weight they managed to throw me down the short flight of concrete steps to the sidewalk. They followed after me and while one tried to hold me down, the other repeatedly punched me in the face.

As I may have mentioned in the past, I don't lay still for a beating. I struggled to break their holds, kicking and thrashing. They were both on top of me, using all their weight to restrain me. One of them grabbed my thumb and tried to twist it around behind my hand. I don't know if he was trying to apply the arm-twisting police finger hold or just break my finger but either way I knew I had to stop him quickly, before he did something that wouldn't heal well.

I bit him on the leg and kicked him in the mouth. He let go.

In the end, I managed to rid myself of both of my assailants and get away from there. My girlfriend got her security deposit back after she told them that I was threatening to come back and burn the house down. For some reason they believed I would do it, but that's not the point. The point is that my bruised and swollen thumb took weeks to return to its normal appearance and the lingering pain has been with me ever since.

It's not only the fights that have destroyed my hands. There's been plenty of work hardening as well. The history of my manual labor can be charted not only in the obvious scars and disfigurements of my hands, but in the course taken by deep pains as they stab to the surface. As anyone who has any experience with power tools knows, years of handling saws, drills, grinders, and needle guns takes a brutal toll on the hands. The grip pads at the base of your fingers swell and callous, and the knuckles grow white with scars. I'm sure the vibrations of power tools are at least partly responsible for my morning tremors, but don't marginalize the effects of hand tools -- it's not just the slip of a chisel that requires seven deep stitches to close, or the blood-blistering pinches of over-gripped needle nose pliers. Though all tools have the ability to do plenty of surface damage, worse is the damage hand tools cause inside from the sheer pressure of squeezing. My hands know the shape of handles as patterns of bruised tissue, muscles and ligaments crushed in the vise of steel and bone. Down deep, I can feel the inflammation of nerve sheaths from the shock of hammer blows.

I have to admit though, the worst damage I ever did to my hands, I did deliberately.