Romeo's Rules

by James Scott Bell

  The first punch clobbered my face and almost turned the lights out. It was brass knucks for sure. Down I went again.

  The kicks started. To the head, the chest, the ribs, the balls.

  I willed myself a vision.

  I am sitting in the prow of the boat, my hand dangling in the cool waters, looking at the bay and seeing the sun reflecting off the surface. The light dances as if the fire of Prometheus was being waved in front of a mirror. I know about Prometheus from my book of Greek myths, and I always thought he got a raw deal. The light now seems like his plea, his gift, his dying wish that we mortals would have access to the citadels of true knowledge. It’s beautiful to me.

  I am eight years old.

  I am thinking this is one of the best moments of my life. I’m fishing with my father and my mom has packed us my favorite kind of sandwich, the kind she makes on soft egg bread with sharp cheddar and ripe pears, grilled to a golden perfection then wrapped up in foil. She teaches literature and calls this her “Greatest Success Since Our Marriage Sandwich,” because my dad loves it, too. The line is from A Christmas Carol by Dickens, my favorite story because my dad reads it to me each Christmas.

  My father says, “What are you looking at, Michael?”

  When I turn to him I have tears in my eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” My father looks so different in the boat, with his funny fishing hat and flannel shirt open at the collar. He always wears a tie, even when he comes home and is working in his study. But here on the waters of the Chesapeake, he is the fisherman.

  My voice comes out squeaky. “It’s so … beautiful.” I’m glad I’m with my father and can say anything I want, and I’m glad the boys at school didn’t hear me because I know what they would do to me if they did.

  My father smiles. “You are connecting,” he says. “You are ready for the Great Conversation.”

  My father calls one of his classes at Yale “The Great Conversation.”

  As I wipe the tears away, wondering what he means, he says, “It’s the most noble enterprise the mind of man can engage in. I hope you will love it as much as I do.”

  “What should I read?” I am always asking my father and mother what to read next.

  “I think you’re ready for Will Durant,” he says. “The Story of Philosophy.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  “And you’re ready to memorize Vincit Omnia Veritas.”

  “That’s Latin.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What does it mean?”

  My father pushes the funny fishing hat back on his head and winks at me. I like it when he winks at me. It’s like we have a secret society, just the two of us.

  “I’m going to tell you what it means,” he says. “And how to live like you believe it.”

  WHEN I CAME to, it felt like my face was in an oven mitt drenched in hot water. Sucking in breath wasn’t easy. Later I figured out that was because my nose was caked with blood.

  I was tied up. My hands behind me. I was in a semi-fetal position on a hard floor.

  In the dark.

  I tried to listen to my body. It told me to quit listening. But I heard it anyway. It wasn’t good news. It was like after my first cage fight, against a guy named Gilberto Diesel (no relation to Vin). It was unpaid and supposed to be a spar, but Diesel, who was going through a bad breakup at the time, decided to break up more than with his girlfriend. He decided he would take it out on the new kid.

  So that’s what he did.

  I found out later he’d paid the amateur ref not to stop it. Took me a month to recover, and that’s what my body felt like now, only five times worse.

  There was a smell in my nose, antiseptic and stale. Could have been something they put me into a deep sleep with.

  Where was I? They said I’d be out of town.

  Maybe this was Tartarus, the place of souls waiting to be dispatched according to the whim of the gods.

  Who were apparently not happy with me.

  LIGHT SHAFTED IN. A door had opened. Footsteps came closer.

  “Mike Romeo?” A man’s voice, thick with Jersey and irony.

  I said nothing, tried to move. Pain played rugby all over my body.

  “I looked you up,” he said. “You were good. Or gonna be. How’d you end up like this?”

  Studded black boots scuffed into my sightline. Sharp at the toe. Absolutely could posthole my head.

  “Want some coffee?” Stud Boots said. “Maybe ice it ’cause it’s too hot. Hot as a bastihd, as we used to say back home. God, I miss it. Winter. I wanna see snow again. How was L.A.?”

  I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t even know if it worked anymore.

  “I got something to ask you. You know anybody there can get a movie made?”

  I closed my eyes. It was like stretching rubber gloves over bowling balls.

  “I got a screenplay, it’s my story.”

  Next thing I knew I was being picked up from the back, by my shirt.

  He was strong, whoever he was. Not very tall. A little bull. He moved me through the door. I was half under my own power but with tape around my ankles I had to take steps like a baby penguin. He brought me into a nicely appointed—and air-conditioned—room. It had a big-screen TV on one wall and a bulbous leather sofa on the other side. On the third wall there was a large painting of a naked black woman, the sort of thing you’d expect to see in some third-rate Lothario’s seedy apartment.

  Yet the rest of the place looked like a normal, middle-class home. The open floor plan, a living room with beamed ceilings and picture windows covered with drapes that could have been stitched by Martha Stewart’s less talented sister. The drapes were closed but the sunlight beating against them was bright.

  The guy in the boots did not look like a normal, middle-class guy. He had graying hair buzzed short, wore a T-shirt over heavily muscled chest and arms. His T-shirt was tucked into designer jeans.

  “Have a seat,” he said, and pushed me. I fell onto a leather sofa. It squeaked.

  I found my voice but it was still a long way off. “How about a beer?”

  He laughed. “Let’s play practice face.”

  I said nothing.

  “You ever play practice face?”

  Silence.

  “That’s where I practice on your face.” And then he smiled. “Like this.” He took a step at me and gave me a backhand across the cheek. The pain on pain was like an explosion.

  “That’s how you play practice face. I practice all I want until I’m satisfied we have a mutual agreement.”

  “How about I agree not to give you up?” I said.

  “You? Give me up?”

  “You’re in witness protection,” I said.

  He just stared at me. His lip twitched.

  “Haud ignota loquor,” I said.

  Now the guy looked confused.

  I said, “It means ‘You know it as well as I know it.’ I think your name is Jimmy Short Hairs. You testified, what, nine years ago? Seems to me I remember reading about that.”

  He opened and closed his fists a couple of times.

  “And now, let me check, you testified against the guy who took over what was left of the Gambinos. Can’t remember his name. But he’s in Marion now and he has a long memory, am I right?”

  Jimmy Short Hairs gave me another one to my nose. Blood trickled out. “I got a real problem with letting you go now,” he said.

  “Your boss, Mark David Mayne, might not like that.”

  He shook his head like I’d crawled in through his ear, like that thing from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. I was inside him now and chewing my way through his brain. This was going to be my only advantage. It was all I had to work with.

  “You’re gonna tell me how you know this,” Jimmy said.

  “Elementary,” I said.

  “Ella who?”

  “You’re in a middle-class home in a suburb.” Talking was getting easier for me. “You talk and act like a typical goodfella,
which all you typical goodfellas want to keep on doing. I remember your case and your picture. How’m I doing?”

  “You’re not making it easier on yourself.”

  “You have a screenplay?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “You wrote something about the mob,” I said, watching his eyes. “A Scorsese type movie, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, exactly. It’s all about me.”

  “What more is there to say? I thought Charles Bronson said it all back in The Valachi Papers.”

  “The what?”

  “You never heard of Joe Valachi? What kind of schools do they send you gangsters to?”

  He stiffened and took his stance for another blow to the face. That’s when I went Michael Phelps on him.

  Phelps is the greatest purveyor of the dolphin kick in swimming history. It’s what you do with the butterfly stroke. Both feet working together like a fluke, your body undulating. It’s always done with your face down in the water, not with your face up from a sofa.

  But you go with what you’ve got.

  I rocked back when he stepped in, and I brought up my fluke and thrust it at his left knee. Sweet contact. I wish it could have been captured on video.

  Jimmy Short Hairs went butler, bowing at the waist. I flopped forward, setting both feet on the floor. The momentum brought me up off the sofa in my own deep bow, so I could snap the back of my head up under his chin.

  There was a nice cracking sound and he fell.

  It was not a knockout blow, but it would do. I had two weapons at my immediate disposal—my knee caps.

  I jumped, folded my legs, and let gravity pound my patellas into Jimmy’s head.

  That put him to sleep. But just to make sure, I got to my feet again and did another spring-and-knee move on his pate.

  He made no sound.

  SO YOU HAVE your hands tied behind your back. What do you do?

  If an amateur has taped you, you can work it and wriggle out. Sometimes you can break it with the right move.

  But if a wiseguy does it, with what they call a New Jersey twist, you need another method.

  Fire.

  It always shocks people when they learn duct tape was not actually designed for heating ducts. Because duct tape melts.

  I hopped to the kitchen. I knobbed on one of the oven burners. Click click click. Then flame. I bent forward and brought my hands up behind my back, lowered my wrists gently over the flame.

  The smell of burning flesh and arm hair was potent. I moved back and forth like I was cooking popcorn. I stretched outward with my forearms.

  I continued to fry as the tape gave way. In times of extreme pain I try to think of something philosophical. It’s a game. What is applicable here from the history of ideas?

  All I could come up with was Jonathan Edwards’s Great Awakening sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards, they say, read it without raising his voice, but when he got to the part about the spider dangling over the flames of the abyss, people cried out and fell on the ground, pleading for mercy.

  Which is what my arms needed right now.

  I pushed more and the tape stretched more, but it didn’t burn through. Jimmy must have used up a roll on me.

  I heard Jimmy groan in the next room, then a scuffling sound, his boots on the floor.

  I stuck my wrists deep into the fire.

  Just as Jimmy Short Hairs appeared in the doorway.

  The only thing between him and me was a cutting block.

  The fire burned.

  Short Hairs grabbed a heavy skillet off the wall and started for me.

  Not much you can do in a situation like that, so I screamed.

  It was actually my old friend, the rebel yell. I bent double and dove for his belly.

  The skillet missed my head and got me on the back. Not enough to do lasting damage, but enough to send me down faster than I wanted.

  Jimmy went down under me.

  And my hands were still not free.

  I flopped my body once, getting in a cross-beam position on top of the miniature Mafioso.

  There are some things you need to have to be an effective cage fighter, or fighter of any sort. Those things are hands and feet. Both of these were not currently at my disposal. I was lying on top of a snitch from New Jersey who wanted to bash in my head. I could’ve taken him apart with one hand if it had been free. But now I was on top of him like a beached whale, and that is a position I never trained for.

  Jimmy Short Hairs did have his hands free and was using them to pummel my back. He was shouting as many Jersey curse words as his little mouth allowed him.

  Which gave me one quick idea, both to stop his mouth and stun the head that housed it.

  I gave myself another flopperoo so that I both turned on my back and got parallel to his body. I crunched upward as far as I could, like an armless man doing a sit-up, then brought the back of my head down on Jimmy’s nose. The hit made a satisfying crunch.

  So I gave him another one. That one hurt, both him and me. His teeth must’ve gone into the back of my head. I would find out later, looking at him, that’s exactly what happened.

  This was shaping up to be the worst fight I’d ever been in. There’s a certain artistry to good street fighting. The brawlers, the brutes, the people who think it’s just a matter of raw strength and five drinks, make brawls a dull and stupid proposition.

  There is no necessary conflict between art and violence. The former makes the latter more effective.

  Jimmy forced the issue by reaching his arms around and getting me into a classic guillotine chokehold, a hold that would, in about thirty seconds, end my life.

  Adrenal fluid rushes through the man who thinks he’s going to die. That jolt is what snapped the tape at last. And my arms were free.

  I drove my elbows into his ribs. And scored. His grip loosened.

  I reached back with my right hand and shoved my index and middle fingers into his nose and drilled for gold.

  Jimmy screamed and let me go.

  I rolled off him, got to my knees.

  Jimmy pushed himself away like a crab.

  I got up and hopped after him.

  Jimmy rolled to his belly and got up. He was in a hallway now. His boots slipped on the hardwood floor.

  I did a standing broad jump at him. He jumped away from me. This was the most absurd fight I’d ever been in. I felt like the Easter bunny.

  There was a little table with a fake antique lamp on it. At least I thought it looked fake. Leaded glass. Not the kind of thing I’d think a Jersey guy’d want in his house. But then again, he was posing.

  I grabbed the lamp and tore the cord from the wall. Then heaved it at the back of Jimmy’s head.

  It hit solid.

  I hopped some more.

  I looked around for anything else to grab, to use as a weapon. A bookshelf about six feet high lined the wall at the end of the hallway, where a bent-over Jimmy now was, groaning.

  I wondered what a guy like this would read, as there were books actually on the shelves, along with a stack of magazines. On top of the stack was a muscle magazine with a busty woman sitting on the shoulders of a guy whose body looked like it was sprouting volleyballs. I swiped upward at the top shelf and it popped. I took the shelf out and the books scattered. I laid eyes on a title, Kardashian Konfidential.

  That made me want to hit Jimmy all the harder.

  So I did. Right across his back.

  It made a satisfying slapping sound.

  It would’ve stopped a lesser man, but Jimmy Short Hairs kept in fighting trim. He lurched to his right and came out swinging at my legs with something he’d grabbed.

  A broom.

  The broom handle whacked my shin and gave Jimmy just enough pause to get to his feet.

  Now he was facing me like a lion tamer.

  “I am gonna cut your head off!” Jimmy said. “And I’m going to put it on the counter so you can watch me gut you.”

&nb
sp; I glanced over at a desk that was tucked in the corner. There was a laptop on it, some papers and a pen and pencil holder with scissors sticking out.

  “You’re going to whack my head off with a broom?” I said. I thrust the shelving at him once, making him jump backward. I hopped to the right and grabbed the scissors.

  Jimmy looked like he didn’t know what I was going to do with them. What I wanted to do was bend down and cut the duct tape from my ankles.

  But that’s when Jimmy charged me like a rhino.

  THEY SAY THAT the great matador, Manolete, was the bravest of all in the face of a bull’s horns. He would stand straight and true and with the deft touch of his cape, control the toro effortlessly.

  But Manolete had certain advantages I did not.

  Like unencumbered feet and a cape.

  But as Manolete had done so many times in his illustrious career, I used the sharp points of steel like an esquote, the killing sword.

  As Jimmy made his thrust I turned and jumped backward.

  And as his shoulder made contact with my left leg, I jammed the scissors into the back of his neck.

  Jimmy fell face down and started to flop around, grabbing at the blades sticking out of his red-flowing flesh.

  Something buzzed and vibrated on the coffee table in the living room.

  Cell phone.

  I heard a car door slam outside.

  “Smoked meat!” Jimmy said, then coughed, then laughed again.

  Footsteps coming toward the door.

  Jimmy squealed, “Help.” He rolled onto his side.

  My feet were still bound but by this time I had the hopping thing down. Three jumps got me to recliner by the window with a square pillow on it. I reached for it and almost froze.

  On the pillow was a picture of Pope John Paul II.

  I did not have time to cross myself, confess, or contemplate.

  Jimmy Short Hairs said “Help” again, a little weaker, but enough volume to reach the front door.

  Bounding to him with the pontiff pillow, I dropped to my knees and pushed the Pope over his face.

  John Paul stared at me, accusing me of a mortal sin.

  As someone knocked on the door.

  Jimmy Short Hairs, suffocating, hit me on the arms with bloody hands.