Fighting With Mittens

Essays

Sep 7

In elementary school, we used to have to walk from school to Cadman Plaza Park to have gym outside. Sometimes, we had lunch or recess out there. There were always two hot dog vendors with their carts. They were in direct competition for all business, but especially for our tweenage duckets we had tucked into our corduroys. One day, they got in a fight. An actual fist fight. One was a man and the other a lady. The man stabbed the lady with his hot dog tongs. We were all shook. We left hungry.

I had a bully in first grade. He tried to bully everyone. No one really knew why because we were too young, but I remember it vividly. He was bigger than most of us. One day, I had enough. I took a dodgeball and smashed him in the head with it. I don’t know what came over me other than that I was not scared to get in a fight because I didn’t know what that really was. He fell back and hit his head. The class was silent. I am pretty sure my teacher smirked. He stopped bullying us.

A fellow prosecutor in Sarasota once came by my office to ask me if I told everyone else that he was scared to go to trial. He expected me to lie about it, say no, and that would be that. I said, “Yes. You are.” He didn’t speak for almost a minute. He didn’t really have a response because he was scared to go to trial. It was all an effort in futility. He started trying to back himself up, so I interrupted him and asked him to tell me how many trials he averaged in the year before I got here. He didn’t know. We never found out the answer. He got another job a month later.

When I lived in the red house in North Hollywood, I had two boxing gloves for some reason. I don’t think anyone thought I was going to become the next Jewish Rocky, but someone got them for me. My friend, Steve Gomez, and I thought it would be cool to box for fun. We each took one glove and proceeded to knock the holy hell out of each other. He got a bloody nose. I put them in the bottom of my closet after that.

During the pandemic, my friend Ryan and I met with an off-market seller of a self-storage facility in Bergen County. It was early on, probably the first April, and I was still scared of the COVID germs. I wore winter gloves. I did this when I showed houses too, even though it was hot out. I figured it was an easier way to avoid sanitizing every 10 seconds. The owner of the facility offered us a beer. I don’t remember how I opened it, but I held it in my giant mitten. We got him to agree to a deal, but he backstabbed us a week later by using us to get a better offer from someone else. The beer sucked.