[sinclairfan]

My name is Lynne.  I grew up the daughter of a firefighter in Upstate New York in the 1970s and 1980s.  I went to college at a large New England State University, and wanted to tell you about the semester in college I travelled across the Atlantic Ocen to find out more about a catfight that happened a continent away and 180 years ago from today. 

I was majoring in sociology at college.  Don't ask me why sociology, other than some vague notion that it was Goldilocks from a degree of difficulty perspective--not to easy and not too hard.  It didn't prepare me for any particular career, but I was thinking I'd go the grad school and become a lawyer.  I had a knack for Spanish, and figured I could help under-privledged recent immigrants navigate the welfare system.

One day in sociology class, the topic of Phyllis Schafly, the anti-ERA conservative woman came up.  The debate in the classroom about the ERA had gone pretty much how you would expect--the girls were for it, the boys weren't.  But then our sociology professor interjected that, "Ya know, certain women of MY generation are against it as well.?"  What??? How??? all the girls in the class asked.  And the professor said, "Well, she says that if you ever inter-mingle the sexes in the office or the hospital or the faculty lounge of the military barracks, that men's libidos are so uncontrollable that they'll be forcing themselves on the women 24/7, and the women's lives will be unbearable."  We then debated the silliness of this antique worldview, and said that women can stand up for themselves better than that (funny how no one questioned the boorishness of ALL men).

Then, a student from a rough neighborhoof of Boston said, "It's true.  Have you ever seen 2 girls fight?".

The ERA conversation continued down its meandering part.  But his rhetorical question echoed in my ears.

Actually, no.  I never had seen 2 girls fight.  What was he talking about?

Now, I left out an important detail about myself in my brief intro.  Besides learning sociology and Spanish that semester, and I was also learning something else that semester, from my 19th Century European History Teaching Assistant, a Jewish grad sudent named Sarah. 

I was learning different ways for two girls to encounter each other sexually--kissing, fondling, and more.

Sarah and I started flirting over discussion of 19th Century Spanish Literature (she was blown away I knew so much of it).  And then she propositioned me.

I finally said yes.  She knew I had zero experience with girls (and some, but not much, with boys), but said she would teach me.

That night, in her bed, I asked her why I couldn't get the Boston's boy remark about girls fighting out of my head.

She told me it was because he was basically right--that there was nothing like it.  The viciousness, the primal-ness, the violence.

And, if the matchup was right, the sexiness.

Really?, I asked.

Really, she said.

Little did I know that three months later, I'd be in the musty reading room of the Trinity College library in Dublin, Ireland, reading an Irish girl's description of a vicious catfight she had in the city of Bilbao, Spain in 1836 against a Spanish girl her age and size.

A fight described so vividly and convincingly that I decided it was woeth the trans-Atlantic fare, and more.

When I came harder than I ever have, thinking about it and imagining it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I?

Sorry.  I get like that telling people about Shannon and Juana.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

How did I get all the way to age 20 with my girlfight innocence intact?

Well, the first huge thing that helped was no having any sisters.  I just had one older brother, who was sweet as could be to me all the time.  So when friends of mine would complain about smackdowns they had taken from older sisters, or administered to younger sisters, I assumed they were exaggerating.  I thought all siblings got along as gently and sweetly as my older brother and me.

Now, at high school itself, or at dances, or on the school bus ride home, there was occasional head-butting between female classmates.  But most of the time it was just posturing and tough-talking.  The clear-eyed mean-ness of one of the girls would occasionally get provoked--but that by itself always seemed to short-circuit a physical confrontation that felt like was building.  There was once a senior girl on the bus who got so agitated on the ride home to a planned after-school fight with a junior that the junior actually developed second thoughts, and refused to get off at the stop the fight was going to happen at.  Normally, the cowardice and loss-of-face by the recalcitrant junior would have been devastating to her status; but the loss of composure by the too-anxious-to-start senior was so undignified that the school bus passengers gave her a pass.

The rumor mill had it that they did end up fighting, but no where that I was fortunate to witness.

Our high school had a traditional powderpuff football game against the town next to us.  I hopefully attended, anticipating not (necessarly) a full-blown bout, but certainly at least some catty pushing and shoving.  Instead, unfortunately, and collisions were followed up immediately with an extended hand and a back-slap.  Good sportsmanship was the order of the day, even when girls competed.  Evidentally.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Why let everyone else always do the dirty work?  Why not mix it up yourself?  You know you want to.

It's true.  I wanted to.  Nearly everyday.  To get into a girlfight.

It started with weekday afternoon soap operas.  The plots were usually pretty stupid.  But more importantly, they would drag on for weeks.  Married couples falling out of love with each other and growing apart.  Single people crushing on each other but never able to quite connect (Luke and Laura's 1981 wedding on General Hospital being the exception that proved the rule).  Or couples connecting, then circumstances removing them from each others'lives--a melodramatic unlikely illness, a relocation.

Relocation.  That traumatic event of 1970s childhood.

With no Snapchat or Facebook or email, if parents moved states for a job in the 1970s, or even just moved 3 towns away for a bigger house, you lost touch with that classmate forever.  FOREVER.  Think about that.  There was no realistic way to stay in touch.

And it never failed.  The person that moved always fell into one of three categories:
> a boy you had a crush on
> a girl you were friends with
> a girl you wanted to challenge to a fight.

I had someone in each category move away (Upstate New York was already shrinking in population, not growing).

My person in the 3rd category, the girl I wanted to fight, was named Dawn.  She and I had this thing--we never spoke.  We either gave each other the cold shoulder, ..... or the cold stare.

I don't know how it started, but at some point over the years, we decided the other was a snob, and we decided we didn't care for each other.  At the mall or the cafeteria table, we would snub each other.  In the mall, we'd "bump each other by accident" and not apologize.  At school dances, we'd leave a fruit punch circle if the other joined.  We never invited the other over for sleepovers.  If we found out the other was attending a mutual sleepover, we'd be a no-show.

At some point, I just took at as a given that Dawn and I would fight someday, and probably sooner rather than later.  One or the other would make a catty comment to each other, the other would say, "Excuse me?," and it would be totally on.

Or, a false or true rumor would start that the other had said something about the snob-ishness of the other.

Or, an instigator girl at the school would "start shit"/"stir the pot" between Dawn and me.

Or, one night at 9pm I'd just pick up the phone, call Dawn, and say, "Wanna fight?".

Or, she'd call me and do the same.

But somehow, none of the above happened.  And one day, Dawn didn't come back to school from Winter Break.

She had moved away.

I actually went home and cried.  Then after I cried it out, I pulled down my pants.  I pictured myself picking up the phone, telling Dawn I couldn't take the tension between us anymore.

Tension at school.
Tension at dances and football games.
Tension at the mall.
Tension at sleepover.

I'd tell her that I thought it was time she and I met somewhere and "fought it out".

We might not be friends after that.  But at least we wouldn't need to look over our shouldrrs everywhere.

She'd agree.  After school the next day, we'd go into the woods, alone, and catfight.

There might be a winner, there might not. 

But evertime I'd imagine that fight which would now never happen, I came.

I loved thinking about it.

But my heart ached that we never fought.

To be continued......

[sinclairfan]

The semester I began my flirtation with my teaching assistant Sarah, I happened to be taking a European History seminar on the Pax Britannica, the 99 generally peaceful years from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the start of World War I in 1914.  The completeness of the Pax Britannica was a bit overrated--there was the Crimean War, where Britain and France sided with Turkey against Russia from 1852 to 1855, which is tangentially famous for the pioneering battlefield nursing breakthroughs, medically and humanistically, of Florence Nightengale.

But Tsar Nicholas I's Russia wasn't the only country where the Brits intervened in a white-hot war.  Spain had three flare-ups of a succession crisis called the Carlist Wars, where supporters of claimants to the throne shot at each other in a civial war off and on from 1834 to 1874.  England and France meddled in that war as well through paid and volunteer Foreign Legions.  The Brits have always been prolific journalists and memoirists, and an obscure diary by an Irish woman volunteer would bring me across the Atlantic Ocean four months later.

That existence of that diary was brought to my attention by my Teaching Assistant Sarah.  Sarah and I were breaking several taboos as we flirted that fall.  The first was the T.A.-student affair.  While the strict ban on academic teacher<->student relationships was still 10 to 15 years in the future (the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998 is what clinched it), it was well-recognized in the mid-1980s was until grades were final and on your transcript, there was an inherent conflict of interest in sleeping with someone you were about to assign an A, B, C, D, or F to, either on an assignment or an entire 3-credit class.  Was the A in the class content or the sexual enthusiasm?

The second taboo was our same-sex flirtation.  Both of us have dated exclusively boys before our flirting, and we didn't think of our interest in each other as an awakening of any sort, or a way of coming 'out'.  We just had parallel academic interests, which fed an attraction to each other.  But it was still naughty-exciting.

And the third taboo, the biggest of the three elephants in the room when Sarah and I had our clandestine chats, was the topic of girlfights.  That we needed to cloak our mutual curiosity in physical and mental struggles between women in academic jargon and philological scanenger hunts was pretty ridiculous, when you think about it.  I also find it fascinating that while the sexual harrasment and LGBTQ+ issues were fully fleshed out in full public view before Sarah and I became middleaged adults in the mid-2010s, our girlfight obsession has to remain under lock-and-key to this day, something we can't share with any upstanding friend or colleague.

I was already sensing this in my youthful longing for a clash with Dawn.  If she or I ever did get the courage to throw down, it was a given that it wouldn't be in front of friends or classmates or shopping mall strollers.  And this went beyond a desire to avoid suspension, detention, or arrest.  It was because if we did fight, we would want our tactics to be as uninhibited as possible--to be free to go after each others' hair and breasts, and perhaps more.  And to be the only 2 people aware we had done that.  That's why my visualization of our battle always seemed to take us, privately-no-witnesses, into the woods.

Sarah loved hearing about my tense standoff with Dawn, that failed to climax only due to her parents' relocation.

It made us want to kiss and finger each other, and that's what was happening by our Office Hours second meeting with each other.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

As Sarah and I kissed and got ourselves and each other more aroused from fondling and talking about my slow-burn grudge with Dawn, Sarah (a deep thinker, who had a tendency to over-analyze everything) speculated that although Dawn had never verbalized an explicit 'call-out' for me to get physical with her, perhaps in hindsight she had made a physical challenge to me which I had mis-construed, and had therefore missed a chance for an air-clearing fight.

I search my memory, and as usual, Sarah's question was spot-on. 

There was a spring semi-formal dance one year where Dawn and I, aling with all the other girls in attendance, were in short skirts and armless tops and high heels, the long upstate New York winter having finally released its icy grip on our psyche's.  In theory, all of the girls in my circle of friends were there with dates, but none of us had serious romances going with the boys who had taken us to the dance, so the boys congregated in one end of the banquet hall, and the girls in the opposite end.  One exception was Dawn, who was glommed onto her date in the boys' circle, kissing him ostentatiously in a manner I found phoney and not genuine.

Sarah asked me if perhaps Dawn was kissing the boy knowing that I was watching from across the room.  Probably, I responded--she seemed to be looking over her shoulder periodically at our circle of girls.

"You should have walked across the room and told Dawn her PDA kissing was gross.  That would have started something real fast."  I couldn't argue with Sarah--she was right about that.

> "I should have kissed the boy myself."

> "Now you're getting the hang of this.  This is fucking hot."  [Sarah's tongue flicks mine fast and hard.]

> "What's hot?  Kissing me, or talking about Dawn and me that night?"

> "Both, you bitch." 

I love that Sarah calls me a bitch.  It reminds me of one other incident the night of the dance, which I don't share with Sarah, but keep to myself.

As I walked to the restroom to freshen up, Dawn was coming out of the door and her eyes were adjusting to the contrast of dimmed banquet hall lighting with the annoying fluorescent lighting of the bathroom.  Both of us were also unused to walking in heels.

Our shoulders crashed into as we passed each other at full speed, causing us both to stumble.  "Watch out, you bitch," we both snarled, simultaneously recognizing each other.

Dawn to a step forward, opening her palms as if to say, "Well?......"  I scanned her body up and down as if to respond, "What?  Right here? In these clothes??".

The familiar tension between us had never been higher.  I was pretty sure this was finally the moment I had been waiting for between Dawn and me.  That it was finally Fight Time.

But the spell broke as a group of girls came laughing out of the bathroom.  They asked Dawn to accompany them back to the hall. 

She went with them.

Shit, what a vicious fight that would have been if it happened them.

Sarah feels me.  "Why are you so wet."

"Call me a bitch.  Over and over."

Sarah starts kissing my shoulder. 

Bitch.
Bitch.
You sexy fucking bitch.

I start cumming into Sarah's hand.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

For sexually-awakening college students, Sarah and I probably spent less time than typical exploring our fantasies.  Both of us were actually quite serious students pursuing likely careers in academia, in the liberal arts, meaning we were expecting to have a life of letters (books, manuscripts, periodicals).

Which meant many hours of reading.

I was developing an interest in an arcane topic--18th and 19th century Spain.  America in the 1980s seemed like it might be being overtaken by Japan (crazy, right?), and I was going to become famous someday, I hoped, by writing a grand comparison of Japan surpassing the U.S.A. with how nineteenth century England surpassed Spain.

But the more reading I did, the more engrossed I got in how much there was to learn about Spain, and its largely forgotten Carlist Wars from 1833 to 1874, which was a long Civil War which started when King Ferdinand VII dies, and his brother Carlos claimed to be his rightful heir, proclaimed himself Carlos V, and raised an Army to take the throne from Ferdinand's young daughter Isabel II, and his widow Christina.

The stalemate between the Carlists and the Christinos, as they were called was both amateurish and brutal, with both sides routinely slaughtering each others' prisoners.  Both sides also employed mercenaries, with the Christinos seeking the aid of Foreign Legions from France and from England.

When you do academic research in History, you're expected to most heavily rely on primary souces, meaning material written at the time of the events in the originsl language, as opposed to secondary sources written today-or-recently in English.  I was somewhat fluent in Spanish, but sought Sarah's help in helping me thru the vagaries of Castilian, Catalonian, and Basque, 3 variants of early 19th century Spanish, when regional dialects were still the norm in rural Europe, since national primary school systems still didn't exist.

My seriousness as a student helped close the 5-year age and maturity gap between Sarah and me, and helped our flirtation turn into a true relationship, rather than a stereotypical same-sex experimentation.

Through some academic detective work, Sarah uncovered a treasure trove of original letters from some of the female hangers-on in the English Foreign Legion near the northern Spanish city of Bilbao.  There was an Irish woman (well, a girl Sarah's and my age, who had had to grow up fast in the cruel, Hobbesian world of the 19th century), who travelled with mercenary armies and essentially earned her keep by sexually servicing the officers.  Her name was Shannon, and she was 21 in 1833.  It was a brutal existence, but she had gotten an education in her childhood from the Catholic nuns, and she was a woman-of-letters like Sarah and me--the girl kept a journal.  She wrote about her existence in the Foreign Legion camp.

What an academic find!!

The Legion came into possession of a motley crew of Carlist prisoners, including a Basque girl Shannon's age named Juana, who was attractive and escaped getting shot since she was useful as a hostage.  Or as a camp prostitute, like Shannon.  Shannon's journal details her and Juana's increasing dislike of each other as they vied for the position of Camp Favorite.

Which the two mutually resolved in 1834.  Woman to woman, alone.

Sarah and I couldn't believe what we were reading.  We were aroused and enticed.

Shannon's journal pages ended right as it began describing the building up to their confrontation.  Sarah snd I did some research to find where the continuation was. 

The British Legion's one year term had ended shortly after Shannon's fight with Juana, and Shannon had returned to her home in Dublin, Ireland.

And the remainder of her journal was in a box in Trinity Library in Dublin, gathering dust for 150 years.

Sarah and I needed to know what was in that journal.  But we wrre poor college students.  How would we get there?

By a bit of a fluke, my school had a student exchange program with Trinity.  I applied for it, and gave my Carlist War research as justification for going.

I got the Exchange semester, for four months, approved.  At that age, four months seems like half a lifetime.  And with foreign long distance phone rates costing a fortune, even staying in touch by voice would be sporadic.

> I'm going to miss you, Sarah tells me in bed our last night before I leave.

> We'll talk about Shannon's fight with Juana when I get back--hopefully it was a long one.

> I hope so, too.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

Let me take a quick historical detour here.  Anyone studying Spanish royal politics, starting as early as the 14th century, but especially gaining steam in the 16th century when the Austrian Hapsburg Charles V got his hands on the Spanish Crown, needs to be familiar with the term "avunculate" marriage.  It's when someone marries a sibling's (or half-sibling's) child; in theory it can mean an aunt marrying a nephew, but in Spanish Hapsburg and Bourbon history it nearly always meant an uncle marrying his niece.

Genetically, avunculate marriage is even grosser and more in-bred than first-cousin marriage--children of first cousins share 12.5% of their genes, but children of avunculate marriages share 25% of their genetic material.  Avunculate marriage is actually still legal today in Rhode Island, and in certain situations in New York.

Royal families were drawn to avunculate marriages in order to keep the succession of power in the royal house, and to not let a foreign power squeeze in my marrying a royal princess.  But there were two scenarios where it would crop up.  The first was an elderly widowed King like Philip II in his twilight years, three times widowed and wanting companionship.  But there were also situations, like the first Carlist pretender Carlos V, twice marrying nieces, even after the first one died at a very young age.

Why is this important for this story.

Centuries of in-breeding like this made the Spanish kings and princes seriously "messed up".  The men were intellectually dull, cruel, and sometimes, in the extreme case of Charles II (King of Spain from 1665 to 1700) infertile, deformed and ugly.  (His 32 ancestors from 5 generations back had only 23 unique individuals--9 were duplicates.) 

And the women were sexually promiscuous.  The name of the side in the Civil War--the 'Christinos'-- were named for Maria Christina, the deceased Ferdinand VII's widow--and niece--who carried on passionate affairs with Spanish generals.  Christina was acting as Regent for the child Queen Isabel II, who was known to be, once she matured, a nymphomniac, sometimes supporting as many as four lovers.  Isabel II was also very religious, and would go to Confession and get forgiveness for her adultery, and then do it all over again.

It was all very tawdry and public, and caused the population to lose respect for the Spanish Monarchy.

And, as a sheltered nineteen year old from Upstate New York, it was the type of thing I couldn't stop reading about.

Truth was stranger than fiction, I was finding.

The women princesses also loved to watch women fight.

It must have been finding eligible men to be so deformed and un-natural, that they were drawn to their own sex for masculine behavior.  My reading of diaries of Spanish and Neapolitan Bourbon princes included vivid description of arranged fights between household servant women of every variety-- older ve older, younger vs younger, older vs younger, 2on2 and 3on3 fights.  And sometimes the princesses become participants themselves and challenging their own servant girls, with their male lovers watching.

These diaries never made it into history books.  The Trinity library was packed with boxes of them, untouched for decades.

I was a kid in a candy store.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

One more historical side note:  the British hierarchy of aristocracy was Duke-Marquess-Earl-Viscount-Baronet for men, and Duchess-Marchessa-Countess-Countess (again!--there's no such title as 'Earl-ess')-Baroness for women.

In catty women disputes, a Marchessa would always defer to a Duchess, a Baroness to a Countess, etc.

But what if two Countesses had a dispute?

In the 18th and 17th centuries, they would duel.  But in the civilized, refined 19th century, women on women duels were becoming gauche.

So the two Countesses would duel by proxy.  They would each designate their most feisty maid in waiting.  And the two maidens would duel with bare hands--claws and knees and elbows and feet.

Shannon, the Irish lass whose memoirs I had found, was the designated dueless for a certain Lady Belfast.  Lady Belfast was a quarrelsome bitch--so Shannon was forced to defend her lady's honor frequently.

Shannon became a very skilled catfighter.

She also enjoyed it.

Lucky her.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

As I settled into life in 1985 Ireland, I slowly picked up on the slight-but-important differences in Irish-vs-American life.  And, surprisingly, in British-vs-American life.  Because Dublin, the capital of Ireland, is as much influenced by British culture as it is by Irish culture.  Especially back then, before the 1992 European Union (and, globalization in general) homogenized much of Irish society, Dublin was the Gateway for Brits in Ireland, and for Irish into Britain.  So much so that just 13 years earler, the British Embassy in Dublin was burnt to the ground by protesters angry at Bloody Sunday, the shooting of 13 Irish unarmed citizens by the British Army in Derry, Northern Ireland in January 1972. 

So, instesd of our soap operas like my beloved General Hospital, the Brits (and Irish) watched dramas like Coronation Street.  The American version and the Brit version were a bit different (the British ones were less glamorous, more gritty, more working class characters and story lines--not the glamorous doctors and society divas of GH and Dynasty and Dallas).  But they had one thing in common.

The women characters would butt heads.  And every so often, would fight.

Everytime a potential girlfight was building, I would religiously watch in rapt attention, hoping tonight's episode is where things would explode.  And most times, if patient, my hopes would be fulfilled.  And on screen catfight.

I confessed to my flat-mates my fascination. 

They asked me if I had ever been in a fight growing up in America.  I spilled my guts about my rivalry with Dawn.  But that in the end it was star-crossed.  No fight ever happened.

> So you've still never been in a fight?

> Not yet. 

> Do you want to change that?

> If the circumstances are right, Yes.  Yes, I want very much to change that.

My flat-mates told me about a pub where soccer hooligans, including female ones, were known to hang out and 'look for trouble'.

They offered to take me there.  As in, now.  If I was ready.

> Let me go pee.  Then, yes.  Yes, let's do this.

After peeing, I masturbated in the bathroom.

Then I put on a halter top and jeans.

Fight clothes.

I'm actually about to fight.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

At the soccer club pub (Irish-English social life in the 1980s was all about the corner pub--I developed a taste for, and toletance to, Guiness stout real fast), I was like a celebrity with the Irish soccer hooligan bitches.

They loved hearing about my high school grudge with Dawn.  And Ibloved telling them about it.

I heard them chattering in the background amongst themselves about it.

<> What do you think would have happened if those two American bitches had fought.

<> I think they would have bloody killed each other.

<>  ['Bloody' was just an emphatic/interjective Irish adverb.  But it made me picture Dawn and me giving each other a bloody face and lip.  It turned me on.  I was totally ready to fight for real now.]  So when do we stop talking and start fighting.  I came here to fight. .....[hushed silence]..... Or are you bitches all talk and no action??

<> [After 10 seconds of silence that seemed like half a semester, a readhead girl my age and build, and dressed in fight clothes, stepped forward.]  My name is Shannon.  I've never fought yet either .... except for against my cousins.  I'll fight you.

<> [I couldn't believe Shannon had the same name as the girls whose 150-year old memoir I was studying at Trinity.]  Where'd you have in mind, Shan?  Back alley?  In America, we call it 'taking it outside'.

<> Then let's go with that.  Hope you don't think I'll go easy on ya just because you're a guest.

<> [I get up in Shannon's face.  Her breath is pure Guiness.  I wonder if I should be glad her reflexes will be slow, or concerned she'll feel less pain.]  Hope you don't think I'll go easy on you just because it's your first fight.

<> Then we understand each other.

The crowd exits the pub and goes to the side alley.

Here I go.  First Fight.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

Shannon's posse led Shannon and me to a well-lit back alley, very narrow and isolated, with surprisingly clean, or at least orderly, dumpsters and grease vats.  The paved ground looked like it was power-washed every couple of days.
 If we were in America, I thought to myself, this space would be filthy and decayed.

I thought about what my fight strategy would be against Shannon.  I was alert to dirty tricks by her friends, and even to the possibility that Shannon was a ringer, and she and her friends just wanted to take advantage of a rare opportunity to beat up an American coed.  So I considered whether I should grab and tug at my redheaded opponent.

But although the ground was clean, it was still hard pavement.  I didn't want to give Shannon the chance to mount me and bang the back of my head onto the surface.  Additionally, my hair was straight and long and soft, while hers was curly and and stubbly--I felt more vulnerable if we resorted to hairpulling.  So I decided I would stand up as long as I could against Shannon.

I realized now how much mis-spent high school time I had wasted on IF I should fight Dawn, and not nearly enough on WHERE to fight her.  Fight her in front of a small crowd, like this fight?  Fight her alone somewhere?  Indoors or outdoors?  Maybe if I had spent more time on THAT, the fight would have happened.

Shanoon and I are lined up against a concrete wall.  All I can think of is First Carlist War firing squads in 1834 Spain--except just one of us is going down, not both.  Just as in 1830s Spain executions (or bullfihhts), the crowd, very close to us, is ready for some action.

<> Fuck her up, Shannon.

<> Rip her tits off!

<> Hit each other, bitches!

The tension becomes irresistable, and Shannon and I close our fists and start taking deliberate, straight-on shots at each others' faces.  The second I feel her hard knuckles on my cheekbones, my blood runs hot with pure hatred of her, and my legs are shaking with adrenaline.  I kick her shins, and she retaliates.

<> The American kicked her!!

<> Fuck her up, Shannon!  Don't let her do that!

I start bobbing and weaving my head, but the concrete wall leaves us with little room to maneuver.

The sound of fists on face is intoxicating.  Shannon's hands start to feel softer on my face--she's pulling her punches.  I taunt her.

<> Hurt your hands, bitch?

My hands hurt, too, but I pretend like they don't.  Shannon pulls back from a direct hit, tries to retreat, senses the concrete wall, and takes a knee.  I go in for a kick, she grabs my kness, and pulls me down on top of her.

I grab her scratchy red hair, and start pulling it.  I start clawing at her scalp.

<> Break them up!!

<> Shut up!!  Let them finish!!  Get up Shannon!!

My nails find the flesh of Shannon's face and start raking and digging.  She finally starts yeilling, "Get off, Lynne!!  You win."  I hold her face to the crowd and make tell them what she just told me.

I want to hurt her more, but let her go.

Her friends comfort her.

<> Shit, Yankee.  Where'd you learn to fight like that?

<> I don't know.

I go back to my flat and masturbate.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

After winning my alley fight with Shannon, my original plan was to avoid the pub for a couple of days.  Shannon was smart, and bruised, enough not to tangle with me anytime soon, I figured.  But I didn't want to risk a member of her soccer gang coming at me out of revenge, nor a random pub barfly seeing a chance to make a name for herself by taking out the American catfighter.

But as the evening went by in my flat, I realized how small and boring (and lonely) Irish flats are.  Nighttime TV was no where near the quality of America (afternoon programming had some decent soaps I could masturbate to, but evenings were hopeless--with no MTV or HBO either).

Plus, I realized I would lose status if I stayed at home.  It would look like I was avoiding confrontation.  So I took a shower, made my hair look nice (not easy, with no access to a hairblower which worked on Irish AC outlets), and headed to the pub.  I walk in the door.

Shit, Shannon is here.  Why the fuck is she here?  Well, probably for the same reasons I am, I decide.  Nothing else to do.  And to not appear afraid.

And, .... loneliness, too?  Could Shannon be lonely.  Why DID she never fight until age 19?  I had the excuse of growing up in upstate New York in the uptight early '80s.  But Shannon grew up in fucking Ireland .... in the middle of a near-War with the Brits, and an actual Civil War within Ireland (Catholics vs Protestants, North vs South, IRA vs Unionists).  In an inner city.  Surrounded by soccer hooliganism.

I was curious how her face looked.  Had I scarred her up bad?  What if she was already socially awkward, and now I messed up her face?

I actually felt ....  bad .... for her.  Kinda.  I mean, she agreed to fight me.  And would have done the same to me ... or worse .... if given the chance.  She HAD punched my boobs during our fight.  Right?

Then why did I feel bad?

I try and catch a glimpse of her face.  Shit, did she see my looking?  Her friends buy me a drink, I must be "good" with them.  Shannon isn't hanging with them--have they ostracized her?  For losing a fight to me?

Ok, shit, I feel bad.

I pretend to go the the restroom, but stop at her barstool.

I look her in the face and hug her.  She's scratched up pretty bad, but it doesn't look like I broke any skin.  Hopefully it won't scar.  I break ghe ice.

> No hard feeling?

> No, of course not.  It was a fight.  I kinda liked it.

> [Phew.]  Don't tell anyone .... but I liked it too.

> Truth is .... I loved it.  [She reaches for my face and kisses me.]  But I'd love even more .... to WATCH YOU fight.

> Tonight? 

> [She kisses me again.]  Would you?

To be continued....

[Thommy1982]

Great Story. Please go on. I love to read your storys

[sinclairfan]

Even though Shannon and I continue to sleep together and experiment with different types of sex (both of us are inexperienced for 20-year olds, even by 1980s standards), and share each others' backgrounds and upbringing (Shannon had a very traditional, strict Irish Catholic upbringing, where even dancing with a boy was a 'near occassion of sin'--well, no duh, that's the point), I still don't dare to share with her what brought me to Dublin for the semester--the 1830s memoirs of her namesake, Shannon the Carlist Wars diarist.  The coincidence just seems too magical  and I don't want the spell broken.  (There's something about Dublin--leprachauns seem real.  It's truly the Emerald Isle.)

We talk about possible arranged fight opponents for me ('arranged fight':  even today, 36 years later, in 2022, that phrase still sends an erotic thrill down my thighs).  We talk about different members of Shannon's soccer gang--but they all fight too serious, too rough.  I'm miles from home--I can't afford to get seriously injured--or thrown out of the country for that matter.

We consider going to a pub and flirting with a man to arouse jealousy in his date or girlfriend.  But if the girlfriend had too many Guinesses in her, she might respond not with fists but with a knife.  And the man might expect sex.  Gross.  (By this time I had decided I was probably never going to sleep with a man.  Any man.  Ever.  Part of me was sad about that.  But I just didn't find men sexy anymore; at least not naked men.  Plus they smelled gross.)

Shannon recalls a soccer tournament trip to Amsterdam, seeing the legal prostitutes in the windows.  She remembers thinking at the time 'what else' they would do for an hour besides sex.  She considered asking if one of them would fight her for the hour, but chickened out.

Maybe she and I should ask one of the Dublin streetwalkers.  The Dublin  street scene was less gritty than other British cities like London or Edinburgh or Liverpool or Manchester.  But there was still a several block area, by the wharves, where the girls would service the sailors and soldiers.  Dublin was overstuffed with soldiers because of 'The Troubles' with the IRA.  Wherever there were soldiers, there were hookers.

That's why Shannon the 1830s diarist, and her enemy Juana, were in the warzone in Carlist War Spain.  To service soldiers.

We gather our loose bills, dress up modestly (so as not to get picked up as streetwalkers ourselves) on a Thursday night, and walk to the wharves.  We hold hands to make ourselves less of a target for muggers.

We start looking at the girls.  Some are too tall, too short, to heavy.  We want one in my weight class.  Shannon wants to watch an equal fight, not a beatdown. 

The girls have such heavy Irish brogues, that I can't even tell if they're speaking English, Gaelic, or Welsh.  Shannon is fluent in all three.  She begins soliciting girls one by one.  I still can't understand a damn word any of them are saying, but some of the girls begin to look me up and down.



To be continue...

 

[sinclairfan]

As Shannon and the Dublin streetwalker and I walk back th Shannon's flat, I motion to Shannon for an explanation of what she and the streetwalker just agreed to in Gaelic or Welsh or whatever language they just spoke in for 10 minutes.  As an aspiring scholar, I'm more multilingual than 99% of humanity.  But my Specialty is the Latin-based Romance languages:  Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese even.  But Gaelic and Welsh are a remnant of the Celts, and I have little familiarity with them.

Shannon, the 1830s memiorist, was thoroughly Angicized.  Her memoirs about catfighting in 1830s Ireland and Spain are in proper Queen's English.  She never developed the Nationalist Irish urge to study Gaelic.  The Irish Nationlist backlash against actual and perceived British oppression didn't take off until the 1846-48 Great Famine. 

Otherwise Shannon would have learned Gaelic.  And so would have I.  And I would have understood, from eavesdropping, that (circa 1985) Shannon and the Dublin streetwalker had just agreed that the streetwalker would fight me, in Shannon's apartment, for 25 pounds (about 50 American dollars in 1985).

So, as soon as we got back to Shannon's apartment and shut the door, the pretty Dublin streetwalker tackled me in the kitchen.  She began swinging at my face and tried to mount me.  I instinctively got into a guard position, refusing under any circumstances to give her my back, and kneed and kicked her viciously in her crotch.  I felt bad, but refused to lose a fight with Shannon watching me.

The Dublin streetwalker changed tactics quickly, and starting tearing hair out of my scalp and tossing it on the linoleum floor.

After a minute of this, I almost wished I had allowed her to mount me, regardless of the pummelling.

How would I go to class on Monday?

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Shannon masturbating.

I needed to give her a better show than this.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

The Dublin streetwalker isn't messing around in the haymaker punches she's throwing at me.  She's actually trying to knock me out. 

But what am I trying to do to her?  I'm just trying to pin her under me.  Just to hold her down, first to protect myself, and then to subdue her.

I don't know why, but I don't want to hurt her.

Is that why Dawn and I never fought back in Buffalo, growing up?  Did we know we didn't so much wabt to fight, but actually wanted to hurt each other?

Did we know that if one of us got control over the other one in a fight, that that wouldn't end the fight, but rather that it would just be the beginning?  That the girl in charge would start scratching the other one's flesh and tearing out hair?  Why is tearing out hair such an effective "trophy" after a catfight?  (The physical catfight itself--and the social-psychological catfight building up to the actual confrontation.)  Was it because of how it hurt as the follicles were removed from the scalp? Was it because that hair had taken 6 months to grow in, and 6 seconds to remove?

Dawn and I had never had a physical catfight.  But the social psychological catfight was "on"-- it had slowburned for months.  We both knew it.  And our closest friends knew it.

As much as they would have loved to see us physically have at each other, some maternal nurturing instinct in them held back.  They knew the deadly seriousness of the hatred between us.  They knew the guilt they would feel if one of us maimed the other and they had been the facilitator or instigator of the ultimate battle.

That would have been some heavy guilt.

Neither Dawn nor I would have hesitated to put each other in the hospital for a month.  Or longer.

We hated each other that much.

So much that it was sexy.

To be continued.....