Just beyond the reach of the floodlight, in a dark corner of the backyard, a women is splashing around in a kid's wading pool that several men have been using as a urinal. Presumably unaware of this, she takes off her clothes and continues to flop around the pool as a male friend, still clothed, joins her. Then another guy jumps into the pool, but he's punch-drunk and falls hard. The drunkard gets up and tackles the naked woman several times. And then, from behind the crowd that has circled the pool, another man pushes through and starts punching the drunkard's face with machine-gun frequency. The blam-blam-blam, rat-tat-tat is over quick, and the puncher gets hauled away by his own friends. The naked woman slips back into her wet clothes and continues rolling around in the pool.
Crane stomps through the crowd, looking for opponents. To a guy with beefy arms and a crewcut, he says, "You wanna box?" The guy says he would, but points out that Crane has a height advantage of three inches. All told, Crane asks five guys, and each of them turns him down.
David Rehor
The Contenders: While waiting for a fight, Crane shows the eye of the tiger.
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Another friend of Crane's says she knows someone who might fight him, but she needs a phone. "Jen!" Crane calls out. "Show this woman a phone." As the woman dials Jenelise's cell phone, Crane dictates in her ear. "Tell him to come down here. Tell him, 'Let's box. Let's beat the shit out of each other.' Tell him I'd buy him a beer."
The guy answers, but he says he's "dead tired" and won't come out tonight.
Crane's anger gets redirected toward Trip: "Tell that big faggot to come down here and fight me!"
Another fight breaks out on the crowded porch. It's between two, maybe three guys; no one can see who's doing what, but it's over in a few seconds. The crowd settles down, sharing some verbal replays of the quickie.
At 1:45 a.m., with the party hitting its zenith, no one will touch Crane -- especially not Trip.
"He'll fucking kill me," Trip explains, tiring of the razzing he's taken. "He'll tear my head off. We're not even in the same weight class. If it came down to a street thing, where I was backing up my friends, I'd do it. But I'm not going to fight him one-on-one here. He's a monster. Crane would stick my ass. Even on his worst day and on my best day, we're not boxing."
Jenelise shares Crane's disappointment. "I wanted to see a fight," she says. "In Texas, he's normal size. But here, he's a giant. So nobody will fight my big, scary, Texas boyfriend."
She looks inside the warehouse, where Bronze is crashing around the stage, singing through his band's set. The two strippers are shaking, gyrating, bending over for a raucous crowd. "How can people care about tits when there's violence to be had?" Jenelise asks. "Especially when they're fake tits, at that."
Just after 3 a.m., Crane is drunk on beer and whiskey. He's also sad.
"Ain't nobody wants to fight me," he whines. "I've asked about six guys if they want to fight, and nobody wants to fight me. What, do I look like an asshole?"
For several reasons, no one answers.
A little later, Jerry Bronze stands at the front door. The last drop of booze was sucked up an hour ago. The evening's crowd estimate ranges between 250 to 300, yet Bronze insists that he and Gold only broke even. But despite the lack of fights -- no one complained; it's a put-up-or-shut-up kind of thing to bitch about -- Bronze knows he threw another good one.
"Everybody have a good time?" Bronze shouts to a bunch of stragglers working their way out the front door.
"Yeahhhhhh," they cheer back at him.
"What more can I do?" he asks.
In the backyard, where a few punkers are still hanging around and a few more are crashed out in the dead weeds, Crane has waited as long as he can.
"Fuck it -- they can all probably kick my ass now," he says, melancholy dripping from his liquored voice. "But nobody wants to fight me."
Crane pulls the tape off his hands. "I blew off time and a half tonight to come here. I lost a handful of cash, and I didn't get to fight," he grouses. "In Texas, I could fight any night of the week. Colorado? Full of dirty, stinking hippies.
"Go smoke your pot," he says to no one, really. "Fuck this town. Nobody wants to get hurt."
