Nobody Cries at Bingo (28 page)

My cousins were a few years older than me and a lot more foolish. When the little boy started to throw rocks at us, they devised a special punishment for him. They instigated a fight between his sister and me. I knew that this was not a good idea. The girl had not done anything to me and I had done nothing to her. It offended my barbarian sense of justice.

Darren, my older cousin, took me by the shoulders and explained the reasons why the girl needed to be beat down. “It'll be fun!”

I didn't want to fight, but I had to. As a Cimmerian, you couldn't back down. At that time my motto for life was, “What would Conan do?”

The girl was taller than me and had long legs. I remember this quite clearly because she kicked me in the face about five times in quick succession.
Whomp. Whomp. Whomp.
Whomp. Whomp.
Her long legs flashed as they rose up to meet my head.

She did not vanquish me. As she tattooed my face with the bottom of her shoe, I managed to keep moving forward, mostly out of confusion. Once I got close enough, I employed my natural hair-pulling ability. I was the hair-pulling champ of my family and I often bragged that I knew seventy-five different ways to pull hair.

We ended up getting pulled apart by a security guard. I was crying. My opponent was crying, although I couldn't understand why since I had clearly gotten my ass handed to me. I suppose even Conan cried after his first fight.

My cousins hurriedly escorted me to their house. They cheered my exploits and flattered my fighting style in the hopes that I wouldn't tell on them. They didn't have to worry; I had no intention of reliving the battle any time soon. I excused myself to the washroom and examined my battle scars. There was a little blood under my nose and my lip was puffy and had its own heartbeat.

As I washed the blood off my face, my hands shook. Even though I was no longer in danger, the memory of the fight hummed through my body. I could not relax and felt like puking. I never wanted to fight again. That desire was incompatible with my love of Conan and with being a Native woman. By Crom, I'd be coming to this bridge again and next time I would be prepared!

I vowed that from now until my next fight, I would train every day. Like when Conan was kidnapped from Cimmeria and sold as a slave to the gladiators, I would train to be a warrior. Every night, to increase my strength, I would do push-ups, wall-sits and take out the garbage. I would beg my parents to enroll me in martial arts classes where I would find a sensei who would mold me into an unstoppable force. I would watch kung fu movies and practice the moves on my siblings.

Several years passed, in which I did nothing to prepare for my next bloody entanglement except read more Conan magazines. My next fight occurred in the seventh grade. There were many bullies at my school that year: older girls who gave you the mean eye and who looked for reasons to exercise their already honed fighting skills, and younger girls looking to establish themselves as “toughs.” There were even aspiring Don Kings who went about their day trying to promote fights among the girls.

One of the tough older girls decided that I had called her a bad name and she stalked me in the hallways for weeks. Her name was Crystal and she was three years older than me. She was a single mom bravely going back to school to make something of herself for her child. She kept getting distracted by her frequent smoke breaks, make out sessions with the bus driver and her love of terrorizing the younger girls.

Crystal wasn't extraordinarily big or muscular but she was rumoured to be a fierce and merciless fighter. She wore a lot of makeup and had a feathery haircut tailored to hide her acne-scarred forehead.

I became aware of her dislike for me gradually. It took me awhile to figure out that someone would distinguish me from my group of shy friends. So Crystal had to make it clear. When I walked past her and her group leaning against the lockers, she whispered to them and they erupted in laughter. When I offered a nervous smile in their direction, they laughed louder.

When my group walked outside the smoker's door to make our way downtown for lunch, she spit inches from my feet.

In the hallways she stepped past me and pushed me with her shoulder as she did. At first I thought she was just clumsy but when she knocked me into the wall and did not pause to see if I was okay or even say “excuse me,” I suspected it was personal.

“Umm . . . Crystal . . . are you angry with me?” I asked her, one afternoon. I was nervous. Still I managed to keep my voice relatively normal. However, I had no idea what to do with my hands. They moved around me as I spoke, settling on my hips for a second before migrating towards my tummy.

Crystal pressed her chest up against mine. I took a step back, partly from fear, partly from a natural aversion to touching boobs with another woman.

“Yeah, I am. Got a problem with that?”

“No. Well, yes. I mean you can have a problem with me if you want to . . . .” Was that my voice sounding like I'd sucked back a litre of helium? I cleared my throat. “I guess I'm just wondering, what did I do?”

“You know,” she snarled.

I looked around at the people watching our exchange. A crowd of teenagers had gathered, attracted to the smell of conflict. Everyone seemed to be glaring and shaking his or her head at me. “Yes, she is exactly the type of person who would do something and then pretend like she didn't know,” their accusatory eyes said.

I wondered whether or not more questions would help or hinder my case. I decided to try again.

“Don't take this the wrong way but I'm not sure what I did. Or didn't do.”

She pressed her face closer to mine. Her nicotine-tinged breath warmed my face. “You. Called. Me. A. Bitch.”

There was a collective gasp from the onlookers as well as from myself. Her accusation reminded me of the feeling when I set off shoplifting sensors in the mall — even if I had done nothing, I still felt guilty. I ran through my activities for the past few weeks: had I done it? Had I called her a name and then forgotten?

I wasn't one to censor myself that was true. My friends depended upon my unedited commentary for entertainment, but calling someone a name, particularly someone far stronger and meaner than myself? That seemed out of character for a cowardly type. I shook my head. “You must be mistaken Crystal, I would never do that.”

“So now I'm a liar?”

I had fallen down the rabbit hole into the nonsensical land of teenage fighting. There was no getting out now. Still I tried. I apologized. She refused to accept it. I stared at her with soft eyes. She glared at me. I backed away. She gave me the finger. We were enemies and there was nothing I could do about it.

My friends Trina and Lucy and I discussed the situation behind the school. Trina was not helpful. “Did she say if she was mad at me?”

“She was too busy hating me.”

“She doesn't hate me, right?” asked Trina.

“I don't know.”

“Because I always liked her. Maybe I should pass her a note. Is that Crystal with a C or a K?”

My friend Lucy was no more helpful as she described Crystal's frightening prowess as a fighter. “I hear she grew her nails extra-long so she could scar the faces of the girls she fights,” Lucy intoned. “They say that none of the girls she's fought have ever been the same again. One girl nearly lost her eye. Now she has a scar right down the middle of her retina. Eye scars never heal completely. That's what they say.”

I shuddered. Although I often cursed my greasy, pimpled skin, I also loved its soft plumpness. I stroked my cheeks protectively. “Nobody will ever hurt you,” I promised.

That day we headed downtown for lunch. I had just ordered and paid for the single greatest creation known to man, a peanut buster parfait, when the she-devil strode into the Dairy Queen, smacking her gum and glaring at everyone that stood in her way.

This was one of the moments when Crom separates the girls from the Cimmerians. A true Cimmerian would throw the parfait in her face. Then, while she was blinded by caramel and chocolate sauce, would throw a kick at her abdomen all while uttering the deadliest war cry every known to man.

I chose my plan of action from Column B (B for Bashful). In an attempt to avoid her, I slowed my steps. If this move was done correctly, I could avoid eye contact as well as stop myself from crossing in front of her. My shaking hands betrayed me and instead I dropped the tray in front of her and watched as my parfait scattered across the floor. She smirked and stepped over me.

I had no more money for a new parfait so I sat next to my friends who had witnessed the interaction. They did not mention the incident though neither of them of offered me any of their ice cream.

I had to find a non-violent solution to this problem. I turned to Ghandi. Somehow he brought the British to their knees without even skinning a knuckle. This appealed to me. I dove into his book hoping to find some techniques to use against my violent opponent. After I learned that he had done it mostly through starving himself, I put aside his book. I'd been starving myself since I became a teenager and it hadn't helped me conquer shit.

Out of desperation I turned to my parents. I knew my mom's philosophy about fighting, which consisted of running to my aunt's house in the middle of the night. That technique wasn't going to solve this problem. So I turned to my dad.

I think I have consulted my dad exactly once in my life. And this was that one time. When I approached, he was watching television in the big chair. I sat next to him on the couch and laid out the problem to him during a commercial break. Dad realized the import of the situation and turned down the TV.

He took a deep restful breath as he leaned back in his chair. “When I was at school there was a bully.” He smiled as he often did whenever he thought about his childhood. “He was a big guy, a boxer.”

My dad had attended a Residential school. He had been raised in it. He had started when he was seven years old and had been accelerated two grades by the time he finished his first year. He graduated at the age of seventeen and went to business college until his grandfather, the chief of the reserve, asked him to come home and manage the band's affairs. We knew this via my mother who always relayed everything about my dad. If we hadn't had her, we would know anything about the dark-haired man who ate all the bacon and insisted that we watch hockey on Saturday nights.

My dad continued his story with a glimmer of excitement in his eye. Though most of us would have dismissed his upbringing in the red-brick boarding school as Dickensian, my dad had enjoyed every minute of it. The friends he made there were still his friends and they still had the power to make his laugh echo through the house when they called.

“This guy had been a provincial champ a few years in a row. He got so good no one wanted to go into the ring with him anymore to practice. Then he started picking on the younger students. Every week he would choose a young kid to jump in the boxing ring with him. He'd beat the hell out of them. One day he came up to me in the hallway. He pointed his finger in my face and told me the date and the time. I looked at my friend Irvin. He'd been in the ring the week before and still had a black eye and a cut lip from the lickin' he got. I knew I had no chance of beating the boxer so I had to be smart about it. When the day came for the fight, I was the first one in the gym.”

“I know how you like to be on time,” I chimed in. My parents' punctuality was legendary.

“It was more than that. I had to be first in the ring for my plan to work. That day I laced up my gloves as fast as I could. They weren't even completely laced when I saw that the Boxer had climbed into the ring. His friend was still lacing his when I made my move. I ran across that ring, pulled back my arm and punched him right in the nose.”

My dad sat back in triumph.

I was confused. “When did you beat him up?”

“I didn't. I threw off my gloves and ran out of the ring. The boxer's nose was bleeding so badly he had to go to the nurse.” My dad threw back his head and laughed.

I couldn't help but notice that my dad was no Conan. He wasn't even Red Sonja. “Uh, Dad . . . wasn't that a cowardly thing to do?”

My dad looked not a bit embarrassed. “It's not like I had a chance against him.”

“You cheated.”

“Let me tell you something. It doesn't matter if you beat a bully, you only have to let them know that you won't go down easily.”

Now here was something that made sense. Don't go down easy. That was easier to do than win at all costs. Especially since winning at all costs might scar me for life.

I took my dad's advice to heart and resigned myself to fighting the bully, though not in a fair fight. I walked around with a loonie tucked in my hand and waited for Crystal to approach me and invite me outside. I decided this was very Cimmerian of me. After all Conan would not force an enemy's hand but rather would let the enemy come to him. She never did. I suspect that Crystal got her satisfaction from the peanut buster affair and decided, quite rightly, that I wasn't worth it.