One-Two Punch
Fight Scenes by Greg Bottoms
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If Beavis and Butt-Head were real people, but less funny and far more tortured, they might remind you of the duo at the center of Fight Scenes (Counterpoint, 144 pp., $20).
This coming-of-age memoir concerning two at-risk juveniles is bound to resonate with those who lacked the genetics and social predetermination for their adolescence to resemble an Olsen twins movie (i.e., most people). Greg Bottoms, whose 2000 Angelhead: My Brother's Descent Into Madness spills the heart-wrenching truth about his older brother's battle with mental illness, recounts the dreary experience of escaping from his broken home one summer in 1983. His time is mostly spent with his best friend, Mark, another troubled youth who masks his insecurities and splintered family life with a careless grin.Growing up in Bottoms' world is a mundane series of trials and errors. Greg and Mark drink beer in abandoned houses with the town idiot who suspiciously provides the kids liquor and seeks their company. He captures the disorientation followed by the ominous feelings of "what am I doing with my life?" after smoking cheap weed with Mark. He dates the town slut, another misunderstood creature in this world of outcasts, until she breaks his heart.
A violent showdown against Bottoms' bigger, stronger 16-year-old nemesis — imagine Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story on steroids and a lot less lovable — is written as if the author was distracted by "Return to Thunderdome" as he wrote, some of it osmotically absorbed into his subconscious. This scene is the only real violent action in the story; most of the plot is about the relationship between the boys as they are shaped into adults. Their struggles force Greg to reconsider what being a man really is — being a Mr. T tough guy, sleeping around with women from truck strops and telling stories usually ending in "... and then I decked the guy," or something more profound.
Luckily for readers, Bottoms has emerged from his teenage tribulations as a scathing, powerful, insightful writer itching to share stories packed with meaning — even if that meaning is gleaned from summer afternoons at Popeye's.
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