The True Story of My Teenage Fight Club

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INTRO to TODAY’S EXCERPT.

Without realizing it, I’ve always been interested in the idea of “toxic masculinity.” But it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that I’d begun to consider it from the outside in.

After coming to some conclusions and feeling like I’d made sense of things for myself, I bought The Will to Change by the Black feminist writer bell hooks, who is best known for her writing on the intersectionality of class, gender, race, capitalism, and other systems of oppression.

I’d read bell hooks in college and loved her, despite the niggling doubt that I fully understood what I was reading.

The Will to Change has been a revelation that’s shifted my thinking and understanding of masculinity. At its heart, it’s about how patriarchal culture keeps men from truly knowing love. In order to feel and offer love, men must know themselves. This is a challenging task in a society that denies men the space to feel, offering instead a climate for aggression that gives rise to toxic masculinity.

As I work on a piece about that book for next week, I am running a piece about masculinity in the lead-up, but from a male perspective.

I didn’t wonder long about whom to ask. Book critic and the most tattooed guest regularly appearing on The Today Show, Isaac Fitzgerald, wrote about his tumultuous childhood growing up in a Massachussets halfway house with young parents and his improbable path to becoming a writer in the 2022 New York Times bestselling memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional.

It is a personal reckoning and a self-interrogation that wrestles with the masculine self in a body and society. This book seeks to broaden the limited concept of masculinity by exploring where Fitzgerald has felt forced to go and takes on similar themes as bell hooks’ book, The Will to Change.

Today’s How to Live is an excerpt from Dirtbag, Massachusetts.

The True Story of My Teenage Fight Club

An excerpt from Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald

I don’t remember whose idea it was to start our own fight club. All I know is we tried it for the first time at Connor’s house, where we did everything worth doing.

Connor’s house was like all our houses, but worse. We lived in the middle of nowhere, but Connor’s house was straight-up in the woods. Our homes were heated with wood stoves and riddled with holes, which bugs crawled through, but Connor’s had only just gotten running water. He basically lived in a treehouse from an Ewok village—if you squinted your eyes and ignored the cars rotting in the front yard.

My friendship with Connor was one of those friendships you know is going to be special from the moment you meet the other person, even if the actual specialness doesn’t come right away. For a while, it’s just both of you standing around waiting to be the true friends you’re meant to be, until there’s that moment of connection that changes everything.

In our case we were in seventh grade, hating life, trying to get through a shitty school field trip at a museum, when we somehow ended up bonding over our fathers. Mine was absent and angry, his dead. From then on, more or less, we were best friends.

A lot of us had parents who were never around, but Connor’s mom was better than absent: She just didn’t care, in the best way possible. She’d come right home from her part-time job, have a few drinks, and go to bed early. Her brand of not caring felt like a blessing; she really, truly did love us, and we understood each other, and she left us the hell alone.

It’s strange to call Connor’s house a safe place, given all the dumb and dangerous shit we did there, but it was—a house where nothing was chasing us, where the only trouble was the trouble we made ourselves. There was always food in the fridge and DVDs to watch, and you never got hit in the bad way, the unfair way, where it was just adults unleashing their frustration on you. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t hit each other.

We liked hurting ourselves. In middle school Connor and I fought no-holds-barred BB gun battles, our heads filled with Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. We painted our faces with mud and loaded up our army surplus store backpacks with bottle rockets and Roman candles and anything that could be set on fire.

One evening, when it was raining too hard, we brought the fight inside. Pinned down by heavy fire from Connor, I was stuck hiding in the bathtub until I came up with a brilliant new weapon: a homemade flamethrower composed of my cigarette lighter and his mom’s Aqua Net. The bathroom wall caught fire, and we had to douse the blaze with water from the toilet.

The war games quickly gave way to Jackass-style stupidity: throwing ourselves into ravines, riding a busted baby carriage down the hill behind the house, hotboxing the junked cars in Connor’s front yard, and jumping off his raised-on-stilts front porch “just because.” We were teenage terrors and we were profoundly bored, both qualities compounding each other.

The leap from shooting each other with BB guns to punching each other in the face was not a big one. It started with one-hits; we’d square up against each other and go blow for blow. First one to fall or call it quits lost. But more often than not, it would break out into an actual fight, so eventually we just said, “Fuck it, let’s do it like they did it in Fight Club.” Usually we didn’t plan in advance—there were no cell phones, no email. Boys just showed up at Connor’s house like it was a teenage dirtbag Neverland.

So many of these fights blur together, but I’ll never forget my first. It was with one of the Mikes. There were a lot of guys named Mike; this particular Mike was funny and kind, liked to climb trees shirtless while yelling at the sky, high and drunk and pulling down wood for our bonfires with his bare hands. In the house upstairs, Connor’s mother was asleep. There weren’t many people over. With a few beers in each of us, we stood shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, of all places.

Mike swung first. His fist hit my mouth and my first thought was “Fuck, no way my folks can afford the dentist.” No way we could replace my already fake tooth from when it had been knocked out in the fourth grade during a real fight over a basketball. My head snapped back, and then came right up as my fists started flailing. I was more stunned than in pain; the pain came later.

As we fought, my fists bounced against Mike’s hard, sinewy body while his seemed to sink into my heavier frame. For a moment I had him up against the fridge, and our boys let out the “OHHHHHH” that always felt so good to hear. Then his fist landed on the bridge of my nose and stars exploded into my vision. After that, Mike must have swept my leg or just pushed me over, because suddenly I was looking up at the ceiling of Connor’s kitchen, yellow with cigarette smoke, and Mike was offering to help me up.

“Want to go again?” he said.

When there got to be too many of us, we started fighting in the quarry down the dirt road. We looked beat up a lot of the time, but what was the difference? Teachers didn’t take much notice, and we wanted to treat our wounds casually, just like the movie did. None of us were really popular or unpopular in high school. Some of us did more drugs than others, and some of us played football while others got drunk underneath the bleachers, but for the most part we got along because we didn’t have shit-all else to do.

Watching was almost as much fun as fighting. We’d make a circle around the fighters, shouting encouragement. The mood was bloodthirsty and cheerful; usually we were rooting for both of them. No winners or losers, just the guy who stayed up and the guy who went down.

As in the movie, most of the guys fought with their shirts off, pants slung low. I always kept mine on. My friends knew that they were something to be looked at; they were performing when they shucked their tacky Hawaiian shirts and stood there dressed only in baggy cargo pants. (Another nice thing about Fight Club: Its thrift-store style was highly attainable, and boy did we take advantage.)

We pretended; we postured so hard, wearing aviators we’d stolen from gas stations. But, you know, our fight club did work. We did get closer to and were more supportive of each other. That was real. Who knows if it was the way the actual fighting affected us or the way the movie told us we would become closer, but it happened.

Connor was kind of the leader; he wasn’t the loudest and bossiest, rather, he was the most caring and thoughtful among us. Maybe it was because he had a little brother or because he knew he had a responsibility to us since it was his tumbledown house, presided over by his loving, negligent mother, that sheltered us all. It was perfect for those of us who didn’t live there, but maybe hard on an eldest son.

The last time we fought was in Connor’s living room, where one of the Mikes knocked another Mike so hard that a blood vessel in his eye burst. Immediately the white part of his eye went red, and against it his iris gleamed a shocking blue, and it was horrible and beautiful and like nothing we’d ever seen before. Eyes had been blackened and noses bloodied, but nothing like this. Someone said, “Has his pupil been knocked loose? I heard you can go blind from that.” We took one of the frozen burritos from Connor’s fridge and held it to his face.

****

What’d you think? Pretty powerful, huh? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda

About me: I am an author and a mental health advocate. I’ve published 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind and live in Brooklyn with my dog, Busy.