Rumbles? Oh, yeah. I’ve been to my share of rumbles. Got a scar from the last one, you know. It wasn’t from brawling, though. The wound was inflicted at the keg party that eventually broke out in place of the gang fight. Tried to impress a girl by leaping from a cliff behind the Waterville Armory, hit my knee on a rock. Hurt like hell and bled all night. That kind of thing can get infected, you know.

Back in the day, there was always talk of rumbling. One guy would get into a scrape with another at a football game and the next thing you know, each was calling up his own army. The scheduled clashes were eventually announced like this: “Saturday night. The pits on the north end. Skins only. We rumble.”

Just like that, with Matt Dillon coolness and confidence.

Rumors swirl

Rumors would circulate in advance of the battle. This side was said to be bringing Ian the Terrible, a one-time football player kicked off the team after biting off the coach’s ear. The other side would have Amos, said to have killed a man with a pool cue when he was 13. Amos didn’t like to talk about it.

Things like knives and chains and brass knuckles were forbidden. We were to fight like men, with fists and elbows and knees. But invariably, one oaf would show up on fight night carrying a board with a nail in it, and there you go. The perfect excuse to call the whole thing off.

“Hey! ‘Zit’ Clawson has a board with a nail in it!”

“So he does. Well, this will not do. I guess we better just forget about it. Say, any of you chaps have taps? Perhaps we could get a barrel of lager and celebrate another successful rumble.”

The next thing you know, there are 120 teenagers in the woods behind the armory and one of them is bleeding from the knee.

I bring this up for two reasons. One, I recently watched “The Outsiders” because it was five in the morning and there was nothing else on the tube.

I love “The Outsiders.” Those were hard days for teenagers because there was just no reasoning between those down-trodden greasers and the uppity socs, with their upturned collars and fancy cars.

They knew how to rumble back in the S.E. Hinton era. They always did it in the rain because that just makes for a good time, with slipping and sliding and blood mixing with wet soil. The cameras love it.

And then came the rains

The kids would come out to fight on the clearest, sunniest day of summer and as soon as the first fist was hurled, rain clouds would roll in and it would start to pour, transforming hard-packed dirt to film-friendly mud within seconds. It was rumble magic.

I mention it also because every day for the past two weeks, I’ve been hearing about planned rumbles in Lewiston. I get calls from young people who have heard rumblings about rumbling and they pass the information along.

The first was to go down at the high school and the confrontation was predicted to be particularly violent. But school administrators got wind of it and the rumble had to be scrapped.

So organizers of the rumble (elected through a system of caucuses and popular votes) selected a new site: Kennedy Park.

The conversation must have gone like this: “We’ll meet you any time, anywhere. As long as it is in front of a school filled with teachers, or in a tree-shaded park directly across the street from the police station.”

Poor locations for rumbles. Which was probably for the best. Back in the days when Matt Dillon threw hands alongside Patrick Swayze and Ralph Macchio (he neither waxed on nor waned off) a strange thing happened. The boys would fight hard for half an hour, fists pounding into faces, knees crashing into ribs, elbows spearing into throats.

Yet, when it all was over, everybody limped from the muddy arena reasonably unharmed. Fat lips, bloody noses and black eyes were all they carried as souvenirs after all of that carnage. Because body parts were composed of leather back in those rough-and-tumble days.

In Real World Lewiston, I suspect things would not be so orderly. A half-dozen guys would show up with knives. Two might have guns strapped to their ankles. Everyone would have a roll of quarters squeezed in a fist and you might see a razor or two.

In the old movies, the combatants dusted themselves off after a rumble and went off to smoke and pitch pennies in their denim coats and jeans rolled at the ankles. In the real world, you’ll find puncture wounds and shredded organs. People get maimed and die. Teenagers are arrested, stand trial, go to jail.

Who needs it?

So with that in mind, I’m glad those brawls at the sand pit back in the day never amounted to much. I never got steamrolled by Ian the Terrible and no one I knew ended up connected to hospital machines.

Back then, the thrill of the rumble mostly came in the form of loud machismo preceding the event followed by a party to replace the actual fight. All was well, except for that one dork who occasionally busted open his knee in a reckless display meant to attract the opposite sex.

I got the girl, though, and how do you like them apples? It was a fine relationship until her brother chased me off.

I wouldn’t have run, you know, but the dude had a board with a nail in it.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].