My head hits. A flash of white, a flood of red. Blackness…
Struggling through the black, through the silence… trying to move, trying to see.
A moment passes, a second, a minute. I don’t know. I can hear something now. Sounds filtered through thick soup. What the sounds are I don’t know, I can’t…
Clarity now, and in surround sound. Chairs scraping on concrete. Voices. Shouting. A woman’s scream.
“He’s the son-of-a-bitch who killed the little boy.” I think that was the woman with the paperback. Not flirting anymore, I guess.
“That cop who…”
“Fucking cops!”
The darkness turns to gray then to fog. I can see shapes… now clarity, in living HD. Gray concrete under me, table legs next to my head, and over there, several pairs of feet. Anyone want to lend me a hand? Above me a table umbrella. Noise to my left. I turn toward it and see, just inches away from me, heavy legs in blue jeans, brown boots. Doc Martens, I think. One of them rockets toward me. A hair-of-a-second later, I feel a jarring pain in my hip.
I’m still open to getting a helping hand here, folks.
From overhead, Tuba Man’s voice shouts a barrage of curses, sprinkled with “Jimmy.” I see the flash of brown boot and feel another shot of pain in my hip. Better there than in the ribs, I always say. Actually, it’s better not to be kicked at all. Maybe he’s trying for my ribs but he’s a bad shot.
I have to get up… have to get up, have to…
A brown boot stomps my chest.
All goes red, but then a moment later, at least I think it’s a moment, I can see again. That hurt. Hard to breathe.
The impact twisted me around a little, because now I see a different table, this one lying on its side; five or six people stand behind it, one of them the guy with the open laptop. He looks mad. Must have been his table.
Gosh, people, I hope my little boot party isn’t disrupting your latte and biscotti.
The big legs in blue jeans come toward me again. I try to move, try to shield my head, but the command from my brain isn’t getting to my muscles.
I flash to a kickboxing match about fifteen years ago, another time when I lost my brain/body connection for a moment. It wasn’t a good thing then—it was one of my two losses—and it’s not a good thing now. I close my eyes and try to roll into a ball, but again my muscles ignore me.
A woman screams. Chairs slide on cement again. I open my eyes, though wary of catching a boot toe in a socket. The big legs in blue jeans are still there but the boots are pointing away from me.
I move my head a little to see another set of feet in front of the boots, these wearing red converse. Tuba Man is saying something, but my ears are ringing too loudly for me to hear. I get just a hint of another voice, a gentle one, accented.
Ignoring the mad taiko drummer going ape bananas in my skull, I look up, squinting my eyes for clarity. I can see the bottom half of the fat man in blue jeans, his legs spread, arms at his sides, hands fisted. I can’t see the other person, other than the motionless, red converse shoes between the big boots. If it were not for the dark pant legs, I’d swear the red shoes had been neatly arranged there, serenely side-by-side, as if no one were inside them. In contrast, the large, brown Doc martens are scooting, twisting and shuffling.
I want to warn Red Converse Man to look out for Tuba Man’s sucker punch, but my neck muscles give out and the side of my head drops back onto the sidewalk. All I can see now are the motionless red shoes and the restless boots. Then they stop moving. The right boot rolls up on the toe. Is Tuba Man launching another sucker punch?
The red shoes disappear and an instant later, they reappear a couple of feet over. What the hell? One of the shoes disappears and at the same time, I hear a loud grunt, then another and another, like three short, single notes through a tuba. A second later, a fat face thumps onto the cement just inches from mine, its eyes closed.
For a fleeting weird instant, I have a disconnected thought that the white cat that nose-poked my ear last night when I was lying on my garage floor might stop by to nudge the fat man awake. I have to get out of here before it does.
Gotta get out of here… gotta get…
*
Hear birds. Feel warmth. Smell grass.
It’s a peaceful place, wherever I am, and I want to stay here, to bask in the darkness and to avoid the light. Oh man! Gigantic pain in my forehead. Then like the voiceover in an infomercial, “But wait! There’s more. You also get a humongous throb at the back of your head and, if you call right now, we’ll throw in a crushing pain to your chest, ab-so-lutely free.”
The three-for-one price deal opens my eyes, but a searing brightness slams them shut. I examine the red behind my eyelids and mentally check out the pain in my body. It hurts like hell, but it’s manageable. I’ve received worse when I fought full contact… well, not quite worse, but I can handle this. I turn my throbbing head to the side and open my eyes again, just a slit this time. Green. I open them a little more—more green—and then all the way open. Lots of green.
Grass all around, trees, a light-cool breeze, a dog sniffing a bush a few yards away. I look down and see wooden slats. A park bench? I’m lying on a park bench?
“How is the head?”
I snap open my eyes and start to get up. “Uuugh!” I close them again.
“Beaucoup pain, I bet. The back of your head, too, where it bounced off the cement. That had to have hurt.” The voice is coming from above me.
Clenching my teeth, I force my eyes open and struggle to sit up. I twist my body toward the voice and cop-scan the man sitting at the end of the bench: white, early sixties, longish graying hair, wearing a white overshirt, and black slacks. I’m surprised to see that he’s not Asian. He sounded Asian.
“Who are you?”
“Just a guy in the park,” he says in a kindly voice. “Thought maybe you needed company while you meditated in the horizontal position about how you failed to block that punch.
Is this old guy busting my chops? And what’s with the accent? He sounds like Johnny Tran, my Vietnamese brown belt.
“You know, it is said that we must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. Well, you got lots of fuel today, I think. As Yoda would say, ‘Filled up your tank, you did.’”
What the hell is this guy saying? I touch the back of my head. “How’d I get here?” I can vaguely remember a big guy sucker punching me. After that, just images: red tennis shoes, chair legs, a fat face.
“Maybe the real question is: why? Why are you here? Why does your head hurt?”
I turn my face up toward the sun and close my eyes. It feels good and it eases the pain in my forehead a little, but not the pain in the back of my skull.
“I got sucker punched.” I say, looking back at him.
The older man shakes his head as if the thought amuses him. “Maybe you should learn self-defense if you are going to go around picking fights.”
“I was in line for coffee, pal. I hardly go around picking fights. I teach martial arts.”
The man giggles, child-like. “‘Your powers are weak, old man.’ That is from Star Wars.” He shakes his head again and looks up at the leaves flittering in the soft breeze. “What are you going to tell your students when they see that big knot on your forehead?”
Now