I’d never thrown a party except one. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen, even twenty. No, it couldn’t have been twenty because my friend had enlisted in the army, and he was the one who’d incited it.

We were in a honky tonk bar in the boondocks. My friend was dressed like a cowboy, and over ninety percent of the crowd in that bar, you would’ve imagined, wore cowboy hats, Wranglers, and boots. It was karaoke night at the Cadillac Ranch. My friend, who’d been drinking and square dancing all night, got up on stage full of sweat, pointed at me, and announced through the microphone, “Ben is throwing a party.”

The crowd followed his finger toward me. I didn’t know it until then that I was throwing one. It scared me. Who knew who would show up?

After he came down from the stage, I asked him, “What’re we going to do?”

“I got it all figured out,” he said. “We’ll have someone over twenty-one buy the drinks, and we’ll go back to your place right now before anyone shows up.”

Somehow the partygoers found out my address. We raced there before anyone else did to get the house ready. My parents were out of town, visiting my grandma for the weekend, so I knew they wouldn’t come home. The guests started piling into the house. Two of them carried in one beer keg after another. I was getting nervous.

The cowboys and cowgirls started showing up in droves. Before I knew it, the whole house was filled with drunk people from Cadillac Ranch. I no longer wanted them there. I didn’t want them there from the beginning, maybe just the women.

Some of them started talking to me. They’d ignored me at the bar, but because I’d thrown the party at my parents’ house I was now the center of attention.

A few suspicious men showed up not dressed like cowboys. They wore white t-shirts, and their heads were shaved with cigarettes tucked at the top of their ears. They didn’t look like they’d come to party. Quite the opposite. They hung out near the front door, looking around at the party.

I kept my eye on them while I was drinking beer. One of them went outside. The other one followed. They didn’t look like they were leaving either.

I peeked through the curtains of the dining room window to the front yard. They stood under an oak tree, face to face, very close to each other. I didn’t think they were exchanging pleasantries, so I went out there to see what was going on.

One of them shoved the other one and said, “You want to go right now?”

“Let’s do it, sucker.”

I had to stop it before things would escalate, but both of them could’ve taken me down. “Hey, what’re you guys doing?” I said.

“Ain’t none of your business,” one of them said.

I couldn’t tell the two of them apart.

People could smell a fight from far away, so they started leaving the inside of my house to watch the event in the front yard. I wished they would’ve walked back in. Now I worried about the police showing up. If that would’ve happened, who knows what my dad would’ve said when they came home and found out that their only son had been arrested for disturbing the peace? Not to mention lawsuits if one of them got badly injured.

I approached them and got close to them as they brushed their chests against each other and eyed each other down. One of them threw a punch across the other one’s face, and the other one took him down in a wrestling move. They started rolling around on my mother’s lawn, punching each other.

The party gathered in a circle to watch the fight and cheered the fighters on.

“Get him.”

“Knock him out.”

“Kick his ass.”

They were animals. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t just fall to the lawn and join them, trying to break it up. All I worried about was the damage they would’ve caused to my parents’ property and if one of them was killed. I jumped in anyway, even though both of those guys could’ve taken me in one punch. I didn’t put up much of a fight, trying to break it up.

“Out of my way,” one of them said.

A stray fist caught me in the ear. I grabbed my ear and winced.

Another dude jumped in to try to break it up, a big nasty cowboy, well over six feet, had to be a linebacker of some sort. “I got ’em,” he said.

I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans. The big strong man was able to tear those thugs apart from each other. In the moonlight, I could see their faces were red with welts. They would soon be black and blue all over. They breathed hard and tried to catch their breaths. Blood was leaking from their nostrils.

The circle broke once the fight was over, and everyone went back inside. That was when I decided to yell at everyone to go home, so I did it while people were in the living room and the kitchen. Some of them were even in my bedroom, making out on my bed. I went through the house and yelled at random people to get the hell out. I’d never raised my voice at strangers like that before, but I was furious and had to get them out of there before the cops would come. And they could tell how angry I was by my face and the sound of my voice.

The droves of people started leaving.

My friend stood by my side. “Sorry, dude,” he said.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I said.

That was the last party I ever threw, but I would go to many house parties after that but never cause a disruption like those two idiots in my mother’s front yard.