I wished he hadn't said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace.
In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.
My first knife fight was in prison. Like most prison fights, it started trivially and ended savagely. My adversary was a fit, strong veteran of many fights. He was a stand-over man, which meant that he mugged weaker men for money and tobacco. He inspired fear in most of the men and, not burdened with judiciousness, he confused that fear with respect. I didn't respect him. I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.
And I was tough enough. I'd grown up in a rough, working-class neighbourhood, and I'd been fighting all my life. No-one in the prison system knew that then because I wasn't a career criminal, and I had no history. I began my prison experience as a first offender. What's more, I was an intellectual, and I sounded and acted like one. Some men respected that and some ridiculed it, but none of them feared it. Nevertheless, the long prison sentence that I was serving-twenty years at hard labour for armed robberies-gave most of them pause. I was a dark horse. No one knew how I would respond to a real test, and more than a few were curious about it.
The test, when it did come, was flashing steel, and broken teeth, and eyes rolling wide and wild as a frenzied dog. He attacked me in the prison laundry, the one place not observed directly by guards patrolling catwalks between the gun towers. It was the kind of unprovoked surprise attack that's known in prison slang as a
Its edge was sharp enough to shave a man or cut his throat. I'd never carried a knife or used one in my life before prison. But in there, where men were attacked and stabbed every other day, I'd followed the advice of the hard men who'd survived long years there. It's better to have a weapon and not need it, they'd told me more than once, than need it and not have it. My knife was a sharpened spike of metal about as thick as a man's finger and a little longer than a hand. The hilt was formed with packing tape, and fitted into my hand without bunching the fingers. When the fight began he didn't know that I was armed, but we both, in our separate ways, expected that it was a fight to the death. He wanted to kill me, and I was sure that I had to kill him to survive.
He made two mistakes. The first was to fight on the back foot. In the surprise of his sneak attack he'd first rushed at me and, with two slashes of the knife, he'd cut me across the chest and the forearm. He should've pressed on to finish it, hacking and tearing and stabbing at me, but he stepped back instead and waved the knife in little circles. He might've expected me to submit- most of his foes surrendered quickly, defeated by their fear of him as much as by the sight of their own blood. He might've been so sure he would win that he was simply toying with me and teasing out the thrill of the kill. Whatever the reason, he lost the advantage and he lost the fight in that first backward step.
He gave me time to drag my knife from inside my shirt and shape up to box him. I saw the surprise in his eyes, and it was my cue to counter-attack.
His second mistake was that he held the knife as if it was a sword and he was in a fencing match. A man uses an underhand grip when he expects his knife, like a gun, to do the fighting for him. But a knife isn't a gun, of course, and in a knife fight it isn't the weapon that does the fighting: it's the man. The knife is just there to help him finish it. The winning grip is a dagger hold, with the blade downward, and the fist that holds it still free to punch. That grip gives a man maximum power in the downward thrust and an extra weapon in his closed fist.
