The Brawl

Fighting: Fictional Memoir

Photo by Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash

I remember a brawl I got into one time when I was briefly living in the coastal beach town of Santa Cruz, in California.

It was 2005. I was 22. A cold January night. It was one of my worst periods in life: I was living in the ghetto, gangbanger-infested Beach Flats, on K Street, seven of us punks in a two-bedroom place. We slept on mattresses on the floors of the rooms, and on the couches. Cockroaches meandered. We dumpster-dove for food, sometimes driving the hour north to pillage the huge dumpsters of San Francisco. We did coke, mushrooms, LSD, and drank like fish. A couple times I’d even shot heroin with sketchy hoodlums we met down the block.

My punk buddies and I were at a big party. In the suburbs; I forget what street. I remember this night for several reasons but one was that only a week before I’d felt terribly sick and had gone to the ER. The doctor did some tests and said my liver was damaged. He asked how much I drank. I told him the truth. He was floored. He told me to quit. I said I would.

I didn’t.

The party was at this nice house with a lot of windows, a medium-sized driveway, an attached garage, and then a big backyard. There must have been about 75 people there. Someone started a bonfire in the backyard. There was a keg, and many of us brought Steel Reserve and Old English forties. Almost everyone was a local punk rocker or else went to U.C. Santa Cruz, like my buddy James who’d suggested I move in with them a month before. James and I’d gone to high school together, he a smart full-scholarship kid and me a rich kid who didn’t even take my SATs. Floating around Ojai and Ventura after high school, working dead-end retail jobs, surfing, and taking a couple classes at Ventura College, hadn’t inspired me. So James told me to come up to Santa Cruz. And I did.

Everyone knew about The Locals in Santa Cruz, the working-class kids who’d actually grown up in town. They stood out. They tended to be bigger and taller than us, tough-looking, with lifted trucks that sounded extra loud due to the flow-masters they added onto their exhaust pipes. They surfed or else skateboarded or else just went to bars and drank. They looked like a mix of surfers and construction workers. Broad-shouldered, mean.

I’d seen them skulking around town before, but I’d never encountered them.

Until now.