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Antwerp, Belgium, Friday, February 22, 2013

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At night, it is like everyone left Antwerp for somewhere warmer. As I cross a square towards an Italian Restaurant, only a few people are within eyesight at any given time. It is mostly me and the cold.

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Except for two stumbling drunk men in their fifties, harassing a couple of well-dressed Asian girls. All four of them are headed the same way. The Belgians are improbably tall. The girls look Thai or maybe Malaysian, their high heels clicking with every dainty step. One of the guys says something to them in Flemish. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it isn’t good, like he is belting her with his words. His buddy has a look on his face of feigned shock and pride, like it is too funny to bear. Leaning toward them, he says a few more things, the girls try not to look and huddle their clothes around themselves just a little tighter. The loudmouth closes the distance. This time his insults are nearing a shout, and his friends laugh has settled into a sinister smile. I think that they are going to get physical with the girls. I had been walking the opposite way, but I do an about face so I will be behind the ass clowns.

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They touch those girls and I am stepping in, I thought, so what if I am outnumbered.

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*

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Twenty-four years before, in Keystone Colorado, I broke up a fight and almost got my ass kicked for it. I was spending the winter working at a ski resort, washing dishes. Two of the other dishwashers had spent the previous two weeks trading insults at work. I was friends with one of them, a guy named Brian, the guy he had trouble with was from Missouri. Missouri said that I reminded him of his little brother.

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“I hate my little brother,” he said.

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I laughed it off and we never had any real bad blood between us.

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Then, we were at a party at Sunrise, the employee housing for the ski resort where we all worked. Brian and Missouri had words, one of them suggested they take it outside, both of them overconfident. Under the trees by the edge of the parking lot they squared off, timid at first, and then started throwing punches. It was anybody’s fight, until Missouri pulled Brian’s sweater over his head and dropped haymakers on him. Brian fell to his knees, and Missouri pulled his sweater back, grabbed a handful of hair, hit him in the head once, and said “Are you done?”

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“Yes,” Brian said, woozy, swaying in a tiny circle.

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Missouri hit him again, and reared his arm back for another punch. I dropped the beer I had been holding and took two steps at him. I had played football in college at a Division III school. At 130 pounds I was the smallest guy on any team we played, but I loved the game even if I wasn’t necessarily any good. About the time the beer hit the ground I tackled Missouri in mid punch, putting my head into the center of his chest, grabbing him behind his legs at the same time and driving him into the air and onto his back. We skidded to a stop in the snow.

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I wished I had made a tackle like that in a game.

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I popped to my feet.

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“Fight’s over,” I said, and I reached out a hand out and helped Missouri up, but was surrounded by four or five guys, his posse.

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One of them got up in my face, bumping into my chest.

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“Get off me,” I said, shoving him away and making him take a couple of steps. 

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“What’s to stop us from kicking— ” another one of them started saying, stepping into my space.

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I moved an arm like a windshield wiper to push his hands away, before shoving him off balance in mid-sentence.

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“The fight is over,” I said again.

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“I’d have done the same thing,” Missouri said to me, dusting the snow off himself.

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I reached my hand out and he shook it.

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Missouri and his friends left, and not a minute after they do a group of guys came running out of employee housing, and sprinted straight up to me. They were laughing and patting me on the back, and one of them said, “Man, you tackled that guy like, BOOM! And we were watching, we thought you were for sure about to get jumped in an unfair fight, so we came out to even the odds. You did the right thing. Man, that was cool!”

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Brian had to go to the doctor’s, he wore his arm in a sling for a while.

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I visited Missouri the next day. He had broken a finger, either from hitting Brian on the skull or when he missed and punched a tree.

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He said, “You don’t really win a fight unless the other guy is in the hospital.”

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But he and I both knew he was trying to talk tough in front of his friends. Three of them were there.

“You’re lucky. We were going to kick your ass,” one of them said.

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“No you weren’t,” I said, “If you were, one of you would have hit me right away. Somebody tackles your friend, and you just stand there?”

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When someone is going to kick your ass, they seldom tell you about it first.

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*

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Back in Antwerp, I am not telling these guys first either. It is another cold night, another time I can’t stand idly by. But this is different, the stakes feel higher. This isn’t a party in a ski town. These two Belgians are giants.

I’m at their back. I think that might give me an edge, but as big and tall as they are if I don’t take one of them out of the picture immediately, I am going to get hurt. If they touch the girls my plan is to kick the guy on the left as hard as I can in back of the leg and send his kneecap into the cobblestones, the other one will eat an elbow. I’ll tell the girls to run but they are in high heels. Shit. I take a couple of deep breaths. Now I am five steps away. This really isn’t going to go well for me.

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Then the girls walk a different way, the assholes laugh and jeer but they keep going straight on, all four of them oblivious that I was even there, oblivious to what I might have done. I circle back to the Italian restaurant where I eat spaghetti and meatballs, my favorite meal when I was a kid. It is underwhelming. Smiling Italian waiters tell me where they are from in Italy, but I am barely paying attention. I am happy to still have all my teeth. The Belgian drunks probably would have beaten the garbage out of me. You would have thought that the brush with danger would have made the meal taste better. It didn’t.