Friday, Time to Find a Fight

Back in our high-school days, we “cruised the drag” as I suspect everyone did in all of the cookie-cutter towns spattered across the map.  The idea behind cruising the drag was to connect with girls and friends and ultimately find parties.  Well, I should more properly say that those ideas propelled most of the kids filling the night streets and parking lots of or town.  We also had driving up and down the street, with stereo blasting out-of-date tunes, the occasional twenty-something who forgot to grow up when they reached the age of nineteen.  And in Helena, Montana, you normally found added into our mix the F----- brothers.

I suspect that the F----- brothers were unique to us.  Hopefully so.

The three F----- brothers made notable exceptions to most globally accepted ideas of fun and rules of conduct.  They stormed the streets aching for as fight.  We bumped into them often enough—one or more of them hanging from the window of their blue Dodge Dart flipping everyone the bird as they whizzed by, throwing beer cans at passing cars, screeching through parking lots pitching insults at everyone.  At times they took a more direct approach and simply stood at the center of the street we circulated and blocked traffic until someone stepped out of a car to challenge them.  You could count on somebody fighting if you saw that Dodge Dart parked somewhere on or near the drag

The important point, as far as the F----- brothers were concerned, was that all (or at least one) of them managed to stir-up a fight on Friday night.  On those nights where none of their advances or offences managed to promote a decent fight, they would, sometime after midnight, resort to beating the hell out of each other in a crude kind of practicality that evaded those of us not yet concerned with any reasonable or unreasonable sort of  practicality.  If we drove past the Dodge Dart parked along the street and found the doors flung open and the brothers beside it, throwing punches at each other, we knew should be heading home, the hour was late.  Nothing more would develop for the night.

As a footnote, I might mention that I worked with two of the F----- brothers on a construction job some fifteen or so years after my high-school graduation.  They had become carpenters.  I found myself liking them immensely.  They worked hard and displayed good humor with only the random fit of anger that forced one or the other of them to throw their framing hammer clear through a sheetrock wall.  I suspect that we all grow up, at least until we start sheet-rocking.    

--Mitchell Hegman