Back to Fighting Ninjas Again
When I think about myself, as a mildly neurotic, self-obsessed, self-analytical writer of confessional poems and columns sometimes must, and I think of all the amazing feats I’ve accomplished even though I was born without hair, my mind becomes a carnival, a lovefest, a celebration of all things Polish Hammer. You won’t find a more smugly self-satisfied son of a bitch left of Donald Trump. I am awesome. Awesome in the sense you feel standing among the ancient ruins of Persepolis, as opposed to what passes for awesome when associating with those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But… there are shallow pockets of self-loathing lurking in the Polish Hammer psyche. There are isolated incidents in my past that can inspire less than admirable feelings for the Main Man of Superior Grooviness.
You know, people tell me half my charm, aside from my absolute humility, lies in my laid-back attitude. I’m nearly unflappable. Stress finds few handholds in the smooth façade of my effortlessly cool exterior.
Most days.
But every once in a great while. Three times that I can remember. I lose my cool. My temper flares. Explosively. The transition from sweet-natured nice guy, a veritable man of the people, to a seething madman who would see the entire human population reduced to cinders is instantaneous. I don’t even see it coming. The bat shit crazy escapes. And then I have to punch a wall with all my might.
It’s happened three times. Once at seventeen. Then again at thirty-six. And now, once more, two days ago, at the age of fifty-one. It’s never worked out great for me, punching those walls. Each time, I swore I’d never do it again. Never really understanding what compels me to do it in the first place.
First time, my first girlfriend, the high school sweetheart, broke up with me. That was thirty-four years ago; I can barely remember the person I was back then, but I likely didn’t like him half as much as I like me, today. My memory consists of scrolling chyrons defining my youth. Jim Morrison is a worthy poet! Wearing all black all the time is perfectly acceptable! I’m unwanted and untouchable and will likely live out this life utterly alone. Now, Debbie may not have been able to swerve my opinions on the Lizard King or improve my wardrobe choices, but she did alleviate my encompassing sense of alienation.
My memories of Debbie are also hazy at best. I recall so little concerning her personality or character. I question myself, now if I ever really tried to know her, or did I just like her because she liked me. My mother believed I was obsessed with her due to the size of her breasts which were amazingly ample given her frame. It offended my sense of propriety at the time, but now, it’s one of the few traits I remember about her. So… when your ma calls you out for being a shallow asshole, take heed, she’s probably right.
Anyway, when Debbie announced she wouldn’t be sharing her naked body with me any longer, I was devastated. So distraught I decided my best course of action would be to punch her house which was made of a nice, red brick. She seemed as surprised by my violent outburst as I was. I was such a decent, laid-back fella, you understand. Downright affable, if no longer F-able. She’d decided the night manager of the local McDonald’s held more potential as a sexual partner, leaving me with a mangled hand I couldn’t even masturbate with. The house I punched, it shifted not at all. But something shifted inside me.
In the aftermath of punching the brick wall, Debbie looked into my eyes, and I could almost read her thoughts.
Oh, no! This Dumb Polack’s gonna end up stalking me.
I only stalked her for a little bit. My hand hadn’t even healed, yet when I met Chrissie, at a Greek diner of all places while I was trying to eat a Frencheezie with the same hand I wiped with.
“What happened to your hand?” She asked.
“Broke it fighting ninjas,” I answered.
“Did you win?”
“Baby, you never win fighting ninjas. You just try to survive.”
That’s how fucking smooth I am. Timothy Chalomet ain’t got shit on me. And I’m not even burdened with the stresses of styling a headful of hair.
She liked me because I wore blue jeans and collared shirts. She’d run the gamut of schmucks in sweatpants and ICP T-shirts. Now, it could be noted that she did possess small breasts, and when we broke up, I thought nothing of it. I certainly didn’t feel the compulsion to mangle my hand striking immovable objects. I just reckoned the next girl would hopefully be a bit more forgiving in terms of my twin Polish curses. The thinning hair and the woefully average-sized penis. Average for a goddam Frost Giant at any rate. Cause nothing reinforces rampant masculinity than a Dungeons and Dragons reference.
Anyway, life moved on. The second time I fought ninjas, was during the final days of my first marriage. Now, detailing that debacle would fill a hundred notebooks, and I have neither the will or inclination to delve into that sordid mess, but for the sake of this one paragraph in this one column, I’ll say that I matched her every misdeed with at least three of my own. There was not a mistake that I couldn’t double down on. The marriage didn’t result in a straight plummet to rock bottom; it was more of a dithering saunter in a vaguely downward spiral. I didn’t know how to pull out of it. I don’t think I wanted to pull out of it. At some point, in keeping with my white trash roots, I punched the bedroom wall. Nothing wrong with that. Punching through drywall can give one the false sense of imperviousness, a Hulk-like strength, even. Catching a stud with a balled-up middle finger, however, has a tendency to remind a jackass just how fragile the bones in a human hand can be.
The middle finger of my right hand still has a bit of a crook to it, and if anybody asks, I usually tell them that it was dislocated during a nasty brawl with some irate ninjas. And this, I think, is usually accepted as Bible fact since I almost never have to address any follow-up questions.
After that second time, though, I thought for sure, this is it. No more fighting ninjas. Fucking up my hand has no upside to it. And for sixteen more years, I refrained from raising my hand in anger at any inanimate objects.
So, two days ago, Bippy, my boss at Hydra Hydraulics came bee-bopping along. Now, there’s just something about this rat bastard that sets my teeth on edge. I can’t put my finger on it. He’s grossly incompetent, to be sure, but this is to be expected when dealing with Hydra staff. Not one member of Hydra management is fit to manage a fucking gas station. That’s not why I hate him. Sure, Bippy struts across the factory floor like a bandy rooster. That’s not enough to piss me off. The poor bastard’s 5’2 with the face of a startled frog. If he needs a clipboard and a smidgeon of authority to offset the fact that his penis looks like his balls are wearing an acorn hat, then so be it. It’s not enough to compel me to rear back and punch a cinderblock wall with all my strength.
But when you’ve spent almost a year asking for fixtures in order to do your goddam job correctly and you keep getting put off with a lopsided, amphibious grin and continued assurances that it’ll get done, but it never gets done, and you have to Frankenstein fixtures together to get through the shift until finally one of the fixtures fractures dumping a cylinder into the bottom of the tank of chromic acid, forcing you to have to fish the fucking metal tube out of the blackish morass with a big fucking magnet tied precariously to several knotted straps while Bippy asks jackassy questions like “Have you got the part out yet?” when it’s only been fifteen fucking minutes since you walked in the door, or “are you running any parts in the other tank?” when it’s all you can do to try to locate the sunken cylinder, all of the sudden you forget what a fractured hand feels like and you punch the goddam chrome shop wall in order to release the pent-up frustration threatening to express itself by slapping the hell out of Bippy the Chihuahua Cornholing Clown.
My son watched me punch the wall, pull back my hand. Shaking, split skin, already beginning to swell.
“Why’d the hell you do that?”
The fact he has to ask makes me feel pretty good about his chances of getting through this life.
“Son, those ninjas ain’t gonna fight themselves.”
He seems confused by my answer, but he’s quick to understand he’s going to have to do the lion’s share of the work for at least the next five weeks.
As I type this one-handed, with the hand I wipe with, I try to console myself with the hope that if the pattern of my life holds up, I won’t have to worry about another aggrieved hand until I’m at least retirement age.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
