You Don't Hit Girls

I grew up in a little neighborhood, in a little town in Kentucky. Couples then were still having 3 and 4 kids, so I had no shortage of friends around. We spent our time playin' baseball, football, and GI Joe... and the occasional game of truth or dare with the little blonde twins up the street.

Growin' up in a family like mine... in a place like this... well... Its safe to say that most of us were men before we should've been. In its prime Europe was producing not just men, but kings, who were barely in their teens.

I still remember what happened when a young man named Tony... and remember... when I say young man... that's what I mean, a man who happens to be young... encountered the 13 year-old version of a femi-nazi.

She lived a few houses down from us. She always wore camo. She told everyone that she was as tough as any boy, and she frequently tried to prove it.

One day a group of probly... ten of us were playing baseball in a little field behind my bestfriend's house. A typical altercation commenced about who was safe, and who was out... and somehow or another... GI Jane (That's what we called the Femi-Nazi) shows up. She squares up with Tony and gets in his face.

Tony simple took a couple steps back, and nicely asked her to calm down.

She punched him the face.

He took it. I'd seen him fight. I knew he knew it was coming, and he could've blocked it, dodged it, or simply beaten her senseless before she even threw it... but he didn't. He just took it.

"Look... calm down. I don't fight girls. It ain't right."

She punched him in the face again, then started cussing him. She said everything you can imagine. She even started calling him a coward, to scared to fight a girl.

"Don't hit me again. I've already told you, I don't fight girls. It ain't right."

Red faced and seething now... she punches him again, and then she cusses him, and his family.

"You need to go home. That's three times you've hit me. You ain't gonna do it again."

Now.. at this point we noticed that Tony's stance had subtly changed. His feet were now shoulder width apart... left-foot slightly forward... his left hand hung close to his hip, and the fingers of his right hand were wiggling just a bit.

We all knew where this was goin'. At this point, we tried to intervene. We tried to get GI Jane to back off... fact is... we all wanted to see her get what was coming to her... but we didn't want Tony's Daddy to beat the tar out of him.. and we knew he would.

Aparently though... Tony had made a decision.

Little Miss made the mistake of throwing another punch... or I should more accurately say... attempting to. Her fist hadn't moved forward an inch when her nose exploded under Tony's fist. She was fallin', but Tony was on her already. He didn't care. She wasn't a girl to him anymore.

He pinned her to the ground and simply beat her senseless. She was crying like a 3 year-old girl who stubbed her toe... and begging him to stop.

He probably hit her about 8 times total... none of which were even partially blocked. The girl was a mess. Bleeding from the nose... mouth... swollen cheeks... She looked like she'd had her butt kicked. She had.

Tony went a lot easier on her than he would have another male. That is to say, he voluntarily stopped the beating.

See... Girls now assume that boys don't fight them, because the boys are scared of them. Tony wasn't scared at all. He just knew right, and wrong. He handled it differently than I did, when a chick in High School put me in the same situation, but I'm not going to say that he handled it wrong. After all... she was 3 years older than him, 5 inches taller, and probably out-wieghed him by 20 pounds.

At the time, Tony was the smallest kid in our class.

Most of all... I remember the look on his face after the last time she hit him. The calm resolve. He knew his daddy was gonna whip him for what he was about to do... but he was gonna do it just the same.

In the end though, he didn't get a beatin' at all. His daddy just said, "I told ya it was wrong to hit girls. That ain't no girl though son, that's just an animal."