The Worst Fight I Ever Ran Away From

Guy walks into a bar with a black eye, teeth missing, bone visibly protruding through the skin, says:

“You should see the other guy.”

I have to confess I am talking out of my ass. Probably you can tell by lookin’ at me — I have never been in a fight. BUT I did use to live in Milledgeville, Georgia, which is close.

Milledgeville’s a college town in the middle of nowhere in the South, that’s about all ya gotta know about it for the purposes of this story, so come on… let’s reinforce some stereotypes!

I worked for a while in a print shop called The Print Shop. We made copies and we made vinyl signs. I worked there with my friend Shannon — Shannon’s her real name and I’m gonna use it because she’s basically the only good person in this story.

The Print Shop was owned by a married couple — a pair of leathery old horse people named The Deals. Now, an enterprise such as a sign shop in Middle Georgia is a bit more than can be handled by a couple college kids and two people who resemble Dustbowl-era drifters, so Shannon went looking for someone to help do some graphic design.

She brought in a guy she knew — he was conversant in the ancient Macintosh program they used to run the vinyl cutting machine and he was ready to get to work, but… he was black. And so Mr. and Mrs. Deal refused to interview him for the job, or indeed be in the same room as him. They hid in the back and Mr. Deal in particular said some heinous shit — ”What’s that guy doing, thinking he can work?” only you know what word he said and it wasn’t “guy.”

Shannon, to her credit, snapped at him that she never wanted to hear him saying anything like that ever again. Then she went up to the cutting station and told the guy sorry, but he’d better just go.

I told you that living in Milledgeville is like living in a fight because that kind of racist pigshit happens everywhere, all the time. And in case you’re wondering, yes, Deal is their real name and I’m using it because why not? Are they even still alive? Are they dead? Who cares? Fuck them.

…I hope their horses are okay.

The counter to Fighting is not Flight. The binary is garbage. Flight is at least an action, it’s what I should have done that day, I should have quit right then and there. But no, the counter to fighting is what I actually did: Nothing. I put my head down, and I finished my shift and I went back the next day and opened up The Racist Print Shop. Because I am a fuckin’ coward.

The fight is not against those who run away, it’s against those who do nothing, against the silence of comfortable men. Running away scared is a natural, understandable reaction to fear. To sit resolutely, like a dragon on a pile of gold, like a troll under a bridge, like a cop on a man’s neck… that is fuckin’ evil. Stasis says nothing changes and I’m going to stay right here and make damn sure of that.

At this point, I don’t need to tell you that wE nEEd tO GEt ouT ThE VOte and wE NEeD tO reSisT. Our opponents are established and they are SITTING immobile holding on to their power. You took high school physics. You don’t RESIST an immovable object, you heave fucking bricks at it. You wrap chains around it and drag it away. You burn it down. Plenty of our brothers and sisters are already engaged in this fight, they’ve already suffered the gas and the broken bones and the lost eyeballs and the days and weeks in jail

BUT

You should see the other guy.

Originally written and performed for WRITE CLUB Chicago, 10/20/2020. My topic was “Fight” versus writer Corrbette Pasko’s “Flight” and I had a strict time limit of five minutes.