2
THE COLD EYE OF REALITY
Knife fighting has often been held to be somewhat glamorous, even heroic. Here’s your first, and one of the most important lessons in the science: Hogwash.
Standard folder, 7¾ inches overall length. HRC617
There has never been anything glamorous or heroic about it. It has always been a quick and dirty business and it always will be. When two men are facing each other with death as the very probable outcome, the only thing that counts is surviving. With that as the goal, most people choose to throw everything else out the window.
Here’s your second and even more important lesson about the science of knife fights: stay out of them. If you can run, run. If you can’t run, shoot. If you don’t have a gun and can’t run, well, maybe what follows will be of help.
Let’s start with one aspect of the knife fight that most, if not all the other books, have ignored: what happens afterward. Cutting and/or killing another human being is regarded in a rather serious light by our society. The courts take an especially dim view of knives and the use of them on other people. Punishment can be severe.
A friend of mine who is a cop told me about the first real cutting he ever saw (he doesn’t count minor stabbings). Some guy went berserk in a bar and started slicing up people. One of his victims was cut so badly there was some question as to whether he would live. The knife wielder was lucky, however, in that someone brained him with a chair before the cops, including my friend, arrived. Had he still been standing then, he would quickly have received a chestful of .357s. Some great luck. Now all he has to worry about is being in jail, under $30,000 bond, facing three to five in the state prison. I wonder if he feels what set him off is worth what he’s looking at now?
When I was about sixteen, I saw my first knife fight. I was, I admit, roaming a ghetto section of town where I had no real reason to be. I was just looking around, feeling tough and quite streetwise. A fight broke out and I crossed over to watch the action. This was great fun, then.
There were two guys in their early twenties. Both had knives out, but weren’t circling or moving at all. Then they both moved forward and started slicing. No fancy moves, no dodging, no parrying, just two crazy guys hacking away at each other. It lasted about a minute, although to me it seemed like half an hour. Then one stepped back and you could see blood spurting from his neck. He shook his head slightly, then fell. The other walked forward holding his stomach. Then he turned and collapsed on the ground and you could see his entrails on the pavement.
They had tied for second place.
I never realized that two men could hold so much blood. By the time the ambulance arrived, they were both dead. I wondered at the time what it was they fought about. I still wonder. Was it worth their lives? It had better have been because that’s what it cost them.
That was thirty years ago2 and things were a little different then. Two guys could get into a fight, one or both get cut and, when the cops came, no one knew who did it. If one of them got caught, he’d claim he was jumped by a total stranger. If they both got caught, they’d claim they were both jumped by two other strangers. No one wanted the police in their quarrels.
I remember one guy who did call the cops, however.
He was a redheaded guy who worked out at the gym with us. When he started, he was pretty skinny, but he gained some weight and got right husky. Then he stopped coming. He failed to show up for workouts and no one heard from him. Finally, one night he walked in. He looked like death warmed over. He’d lost about twenty-five pounds. His head, neck and back were crosshatched with scars. I thought he had been in a wreck and gone through a windshield, but the lines were awfully straight.
After repeated questioning, he finally told us the story.
Seems he had got into a fight with a neighbor and as they started to square off, the other guy flicked out his knife. Red backed off and then popped out his own knife.
Red said that his neighbor stopped, threw down his knife and said, “Nah. Red, we been friends for too many years. Let’s just have it out man to man. No knives.”
Red, being a gallant, if somewhat stupid, soul, agreed and threw down his knife, next to his neighbor’s.
I didn’t really need to ask what happened, but I did.
Red, looking somewhat embarrassed, said, “He reached down and picked up both of them.”
I managed not to laugh, and then Red told me he’d done something really bad to get even.
“When I woke up in the hospital, I told the po-lice who it was that cut me, and even swore out one of them warrants. It may have been dirty, but he had no right to cut me with my own knife.”
I lost touch with Red and haven’t heard of him since. But I bet he owns a lot of land in Florida, and several bridges to boot.
I don’t mean to be flippant about Red or his neighbor, but how anyone could be so innocent and grow up in the same neighborhood I did is beyond me. Once those knives are out, it’s totally different from a high school fistfight. It is real and very, very serious. No games, no givebacks. It’s for every marble, all at once. If you have a choice, don’t play. It simply isn’t worth it. If you don’t have a choice, however, then play tough, hard, strong, and for keeps. Because it is for keeps.
But as I said, things have changed. Now you stand a very good chance of a long jail term. If I harp on that, bear with me. All too many people think once it’s over, it’s over. But it isn’t. Frequently, a ten-second knife fight kicks off twenty years of grief.
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Blood has never turned me on. I dislike it, mine or anyone else’s. But given a preference, I would rather see his blood than mine, and that has to be your feeling, also. Being tough, able to take pain, etc., is fine. But is it intelligent?
It might surprise you to know how many people are fearful of hurting someone else. This is well and good. Maybe it indicates these folks are a little higher up the evolutionary ladder than the rest of us. But in combat, whether it’s on the street or a battlefield, that attitude will sign your death warrant.
Quick and dirty. Ugly and brutal. It’s no game to take lightly. I admit I have known some who did and are now growing old peacefully, but I’ve known a far greater number who’re not growing old at all. Or else are doing it behind bars.
Once you get involved, you’re talking about the rest of your life. Just how lightly do you take the rest of your life?
Wound, downward cut across the body.
2Thirty at the time of writing, sixty years at the time of first publication.