Not everyone is a casual fighter

Bill was crazy. He was the sort of guy who hung around shopping malls just so he could harass crippled people as they passed by on their walkers or wheelchairs. One time, right outside the Hot Topic in Milwaukee, he kicked the crutches out from some retarded kid, causing the poor guy to fall on his already challeged face, breaking his jaw and dislodging some teeth. I think he did a little time for that stunt.
We're sitting at his place on the lower east side drinking and Bill, well, he's up on his feet, pacing back and forth and bitching about how the government is conspiring with the media to brainwash people to be abundant consumers, making sure their hard earned money returns back into circulation as quickly as possible. I don't disagree with him but it would be nice if the guy could just relax. Booze makes the man hyper and he roams about his place like a caged beast as he rants about how we are all getting fucked without a reach-around, so I think that it's high time we got out of here and found something to distract us.
"Bill, come on, let's get out of here. We'll pick up a twelve pack and a fifth at seigles and we'll drive over by the lake, maybe check out some ass."
He stops pacing and glowers at me briefly before reconsidering and offering a shit-eating grin. I out-weigh him by about a hundred pounds and have outlived him by twenty years and have been kicking the crap out of guys like him since before he was even born. I did a hitch in the army-I was drafted actually-and was dragged from my peaceful reservation in Northern Wisconsin to be a body bagger in some far away place called Vietnam. A lot of good men died there, on both sides, but what's done is done and all we can do is get beyond it and continue on with our lives. I guess it's safe to say that I'm living mine.
"Sure Cecil, that's cool." He says, grabbing his camera and then hunting around for his keys. Guys like Bill, well, they always lose their keys.
"We'll take my truck. Come on."
"But I need to find my keys so I can lock the front door."
"Isn't Sharon here?" Sharon is his girlfriend and is probably down the hall in her study room as she is a fulltime student at the university. How she is able to do so well at school is remarkable, seeing as Bill is here to distract her 24 hours a day. Bill was a student too at one point, for several years actually. An art student. It was during his fourth year at the University of Wisconsin when his careless, wreckless behavior began to take a turn for the worse, but it took us all a while to realize that he was sort of losing it-and by 'sort of' I mean, like, totally-seeing as we had always tolerated his diabolical deeds. He was a hot head who always managed to find a fight anywhere he went after he'd been drinking for any amount of time. He'd be the guy that would invariably misunderstand something that someone said to him, bringing forth his maniacal temper and, also invariably, bringing it forth on the biggest guy in the room. Bill wasn't a Napoleon or anything, I mean he was at least five foot eight or so, but he was scawny and looked like nothing more than a skinny bastard in a t-shirt but he was wiry and knew how to take his opponent down rapidly, often wrestling their sorry ass to the ground and getting them in a half-nelson before proceeding to smash their head into the pavement until they screamed 'uncle!' or went limp. Bill was a good fighter, I'll grant him that. We'd have a good scrap every now and then, when we were ripped out of our minds on whisky, and it was always Bill that started it and me that finished it. But he always relentlessly put up a good fight, and for that I respected him. I never beat him up too bad, I was mostly polite where I landed my blows, not wanting to chip a tooth or break his nose-knowing that he didn't have insurance-and I knew when he sobered up that he appreciated me for it. He just couldn't help himself, it ws the way he was wired. He was lucky to have me around for protection from his inner demons.
"Yeah, I think so. She might be studying." He says, then walks to the kitchen and screams down the hall: "Sharon! Where are the keys?"
"I don't know!" She hollers back in her flirty, little girl cadenced voice. "I gave them to you when I got back from school!"
"Well I don't know where they are!" Bill rages, a little thing like lost keys blowing up into a heated issue, and all the span of a couple of seconds.
"Did you look on the kitchen table?" She asks and Bill stalks over to the unstable, three legged structure, ready to swipe everything off of it's surface, when the flash of metal catches his eye.
"I found them." He says in a sheepish voice, a voice that says: 'Yes, I know I am an asshole for snapping like that. I'll never do it again.' Which we all know is a bunch of bullshit. It's how the process works: He peaks out for some reason or another and is found to be wrong so he either beats the living fuck out of the other person or he at once becomes the humble Benedictine monk, bowing and scraping. The latter of the two is mostly reserved for Sharon and me, and maybe that stoner guitar player acros the hall who is always screaming at the top of his lungs, calling it singing. He's a nut job too but he isn't like us, he isn't a brawler. He's had his share of fights, Bill has told me, even one that the two of them enjoyed together against a couple of pansy frat boys, but he isn't the type to fight his friends, and that included Bill. Bill said that he slapped him around a bit but he never really put him through the traces, he just wanted to see what kind of a man he was. Not everyone is a casual fighter.
"Are you going out?" Sharon calls out to him, her giggly, girlish voice fairly giving me a hard-on. She is a pretty little thing but she has a big butt-not that I don't like big butts a I've had my share-but if you just heard her voice you would think she could do one of them phone sex jobs. She is cute though, and Bill is jealous of anyone who looks at her twice and, in fact, she has been the catalyst of many countless random bar beatings when some guy ventured in a little too close, mistook Bill for a pushover because of his trim build and later found themselves picking up their teeth in an ally behind Conjito's Mexican restaurant while his friends stood around with their hands in their pockets, looking at the ground and trying to ignore the fucker's animal-like whimpering sounds. I've witnessed more of those events than I can remember, thanks to my incessant drinking.
After Vietnam I wandered around the country, trying to sort things out, but I soon found that a quiet room in a moderately clean building and a good bottle of booze were about all I needed, yeah, that and a way to afford those things, so I took on jobs in construction, painting, framing, whatever, using the fact that I was a war veteran to get me jobs when I was especially sweaty and hungover. Whenever I could I would try and find me a woman to take care of me in more ways then one and at present am living with a rather large and homely lady with the unlikely name of Mary Beth Ray. We call her Ray for short. Her father owned a chair re-upholstery business but when he became old and sick he left it to her, and she continued to keep it afloat and more with silent aplomb. As her unemployed live-in lover she only makes me work a few hours a week in the shop, sewing and putting the fabric on the chair frames. It's easy work and I'm good at it so I can knock out several chairs in a couple of hours-taking nips from my silver flask-and head out before lunch, ready for a sandwich followed by a full day of drinking... but I'm sort of getting long-winded as this isn't about me.
"Cecil and I are gonna cruise around by the lake." Bill yells down the hall.
"Can you bring me back something to eat? I'm starving!"
"I'm not coming back for a while!"
"Can you get me something now? I don't think we have anything to eat in the fridge!"
"Baby I just went to the store yesterday! We got all kinds of thigs!" He goes to the cupboards and rips them open, calling out their contents:
"We have soup! We have canned vegetables! We have crackers!" He runs to the refrigerator. "We have a loaf of bread-some of that flax seed shit you like so much-we have lunch meat, we have some swiss cheese...there is some pudding in here..."
"Can you make e sandwich? I'm so hungry!"
"All right, all right, I'll make you a sandwich!" He says, grabbing some of the aforementioned food items and throwing them on the counter, opening a drawer and finding a knife. "Are you hungry Cecil? You want a sandwich?"
I look over, eyeballing the meat and cheese, and something rumbles in my belly. I try and think back to when I last ate but it's sort of a distant memory. Maybe I had a burrito last night...
"Yeah," I say, reaching past Bill and into the fridge, grabbing myself another beer. "I'll take a sandwich."