There was Manny, a light-skin black guy, pretty cool. Manny was only five-foot-five, kind of stocky. This Mexican guy is bigger than him, picking on him, won’t let up. Manny sucker punched the Mexican on the jaw—that prison-style punch, while walking by. He started laying the work boots to his head. He had just got released from prison. I liked him. Manny was an alright guy.

The kids of the military people on the base go there and one of them gets a live hand grenade from his parents and brings it to school, so they had to evacuate it. This fuckin’ kid has a live hand grenade in school—how that happens I’ve got no clue.

At a job at Howard County Community College a duct installer had a beef with a sprinkler fitter on the job. The duct man was going up a ladder to work in the ceiling and the sprinkler fitter came up and swung a twenty-four-inch pipe wrench and hit him in his orbital socket—swung it like a baseball bat. He fell off like he was shot, not moving. The guy that hit him was arrested. The guy that got hit came back to work two weeks later with his head swelled up like a horse, black and blue. They had replaced bone and rebuilt his eye socket with surgical plastic. He wanted to come back to work and did—give him points for being dedicated.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival