I was in my first street fight yesterday.
Well, more of a park fight…
I’m an amateur, so I really don’t know what to call it. I would like to stress my lack of experience in these sort of things. I don’t know if I conducted myself properly.
Basically, I went for a run with a friend yesterday evening. After over an hour of pounding pavement, we ended up at the top of Victoria hill and were resting in the gazebo there. It was a quarter to eleven, so it was dark out. But the gazebo is lit up quite well and we were near a major intersection.
Suddenly, an indian came up and asked where the smokes were. He was dressed mostly in black and had a scruff of facial hair. According to my friend, he smelled like pot. Let’s call him Black. We didn’t have anything for him. Heck, we had just been running. You want to carry as little as possible, and you certainly don’t want to have cigarettes.
Anyway, he started to take offense at us. Apparently we thought we were better than him because we had a place to live and he was homeless. (In this economy, you can only not have a job by choice. So my pity-meter for the homeless is at an all time low.) He was looking for a fight. His friend, a portly indian dressed in white and with a ball-cap, came up. Let’s call him White. It looked like he was trying to calm his friend down, but not very well.
We got up to leave. We didn’t want trouble. According to my friend, Black hit him in the back of the head at that time. So when Black tried to jump over the gazebo railing to get at us, my friend pushed him back. White was now no longer trying to calm his friend down.
They both ran around the gazebo and Black hit my friend in the face. His glasses went flying. My friend then TACKLED Black. They then started fighting on the ground. I have no doubt that my friend could beat up Black, no problem. Black was, after all, high, and probably not in the best of shape.
But White started kicking my friend while they were on the ground. I tried to stop him, and so White turned his attention to me. He threatened to stab me while reaching into the front of his jeans. Not the most pleasant of imagery. So I backed off. At no time did I see a weapon. When White went back to attacking my friend, we repeated that scene.
I figure that White wasn’t looking for a fight. But he had to support his friend’s stupid decisions. And that meant he couldn’t let a fair fight happen so they were trying to both beat him up.
Then the fight just stopped. They both got up and parted ways. I can’t remember the reason why. I figure that our side wasn’t looking for a fight, and when the indians (does that make us the cowboys?) stopped we didn’t pursue the matter. They walked away.
My friend was covered in the blood streaming down his face from where his glasses got knocked off. We went to his place and phoned the police. We gave a brief description of the assailants, and then waited until midnight for an actual officer to show up and take a report. While waiting we got ice on the wound. He seemed fairly upbeat, but that might have been the adrenaline talking.
My friend’s wife took him to the hospital to get stitches. I went home.
I ended up without a scratch on me. My friend had blood all over the side of his face. I feel I should have done more, but I’m not sure what the proper protocol is in these sorts of things. I didn’t want to escalate the situation, but I didn’t want two people beating up my friend.
The people I’ve told the story have varying opinions. My sister is wondering why I was in a park after dark. A co-worker wondered why two runners didn’t run away from the problem. Another thought the whole thing was surreal.
Ironically, those weren’t the only vagrants I had trouble with that evening. While leaving to go for the run, I found three people sitting in the stairwell, with backpacks, smoking. Initially I just told them smoking wasn’t allowed. After I had gotten to my car I realized it was obvious they didn’t belong. I went back and escorted them from the building.