Just because you asked, let me tell you about myself. I am sixty-three years old. Five-foot five and a hundred and fifty pounds of kick-ass muscle. Maybe I don’t have what they call a six-pack, my stomach muscles don’t show off like that, but they are strong beneath the surface. And the arms? Oh man, veins up and down the biceps and forearms. Incredible.
When you are short, bigger people sometimes think that they can bully you. When this happens, I have several techniques I use, but one is something I picked up in the fourth grade from Sister Bernadette. I grab hold of an ear and start pulling as hard as I can. Big grown men cry for mercy as I lead them around a barroom and kick them in the ass and out the door. If they come back in, I go for the other ear. Another technique is to lie down on the floor and start kicking like crazy, at shins, kneecaps, the groin. Or I’ll spring off my toes and leap around a man’s neck, wrap my legs around his waist like a boa constrictor and bite the end of his nose. Sobers the biggest bully right up.
I don’t use weapons, not guns or knives. I hit Big Eddie in the head with a bottle once. We were at a party and Big Eddie got very out of line and was a danger to himself and others and so after he punched his wife, who was short and squat and wearing a long brown coat even though the apartment was hot, I picked up a bottle from a table and smashed it over his head. It was terrible. It was not like in the movies. He didn’t crumple up into a nice helpless unconscious heap on the floor. No. Big Eddie cried out, “Ow! Ow!” like a kid hurt on the playground and he went stumbling around the party holding his head while everyone stared at Big Eddie holding his head and lurching around and then all the party-goers were staring at me, the guy holding the bottle, and the blood started coming down over his forehead and someone asked, What happened to Big Eddie, and Big Eddie’s wife, who looked very wide and formidable in that long brown coat, pointed at me and said with great venom, “Chuck hit him! Chuck hurt my husband!” And there I was with the bottle in my hand and suddenly Big Eddie was the victim and I was the bully. So I would never hit someone over the head with a bottle ever again. I don’t like being the bully. I love everyone, really. Even Big Eddie. Especially Big Eddie Can’t we all just love one another?
Robert Garner McBrearty’s short stories have been published in The Pushcart Prize, Missouri Review, New England Review, North American Review, Narrative, Fiction Southeast, StoryQuarterly and elsewhere. He’s been a recipient of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center.