The other thing that Donnie didn't realize was that the extremely narrow hallway favored jimmy because Donnie's leg-fighting style had much less room to maneuver. Should've picked a better venue. There'd be no roundhouses. No dragon kicks. Only straightforward stuff. But, although the hallway was narrow, it didn't feel cramped. The ceiling was real high, about twenty feet off the floor. The redbrick walls extended all the way to the top, pinching in along the white paneled ceiling.
It was Donnie that started it. Kicking furiously with high-low-high combos, he brought his kicks in faster than I've ever seen them: left, right, left, right, but every time he aimed for Jimmy and then slung a leg shot at him, Jimmy wasn't there. He'd already moved out of the way. The foot came left, Jimmy was right, the foot came right, Jimmy was left, every time. Jimmy didn't block a single kick. He didn't have to. Not a single one came close to hitting him.
Jimmy crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. Mimed a yawn. That just pissed Donnie off worse. He came even harder. He got up on his standing leg and continued with a flurry led by his right foot, as he hopped forward and unleashed a series of hard high kicks at Jimmy's head. But each time Donnie kicked, Jimmy would move his head just enough to avoid them, then he'd sneak in the quickest of movements, and pinch Donnie's calf hard. Like Mr. Miyagi catching flies with chopsticks.
I didn't even see them, just heard Donnie getting madder and more out of control, grunting and cussing, heard the strained movements of his clothing whipping about. So he kicked harder and each time he did, he got a pinch on the calf, a horse bite. He wasn't smart enough to realize that Jimmy was degrading his muscle strength, that eventually he wouldn't be able to lift his legs higher than his waist because of the bruising and blood rush. Like getting a real gradual dead leg instead of all at once.
By the time Donnie was breathing heavily, Jimmy had jumped a foot up the walls. He was spread-eagled across the narrowness of the hallway, holding himself up with an arm and leg each on the opposite walls. Donnie fell for the bait. He kicked the wall where Jimmy's right hand was, but Jimmy moved it up, so Donnie brought the same foot left but missed again, crashing his foot hard against the wall. When he saw he had no chance of catching one of Jimmy's hands, Donnie kicked out at Jimmy's unprotected torso but Jimmy went from vertical to horizontal on the walls faster than I've ever seen a human being move, like he was defying gravity.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would've sworn it was impossible the way he jumped and kicked his back legs out to new positions on the walls above, and his whole body was completely vertical, so that Donnie's foot flew past him by a few centimeters and I saw Jimmy's shorts ripple from the air created by the power of the kick. So stupid Donnie kept kicking. Back and forth like a pendulum at Jimmy's hands and feet, trying to bring him down, probably breaking his toes and mangling his heel but never once getting close. Jimmy just crab-walked up the walls, higher and higher until Donnie was jump kicking high above his head, missing all of Jimmy and getting slower and slower. If Jimmy was the fisherman, Donnie was the marlin and he'd fought his fight. He was done.
So, as amusing as it was to watch Jimmy utterly humiliate Donnie, I knew we didn't have much more time before fifteen guys streamed right through the locker room entrance and cluttered up all the fighting space in the hall like hair in a drain.
"Jimmy, we gots to go!" I yelled, and my words echoed off the high walls. Apparently, it was the only signal he needed.
Donnie was hunched over, hands on his knees and breathing too hard when Jimmy sucked his arms and legs in and collapsed into a freefall of easily ten feet. But just above Donnie's head, Jimmy brought his hands together and behind his own head in what we at Kung Fu would call a preacher's punch, dropped his legs to a more vertical position as he slammed both fists down onto the top of Donnie's back as one, not very hard because he was arching backward and bringing his legs back to horizontal, already a goddam one-hundred-eighty-degree turn in midair, just as Donnie felt the preacher punch and stood straight up.
Right then he caught the full force of Jimmy's uncoiling double-legged kick right in the abdomen. The kick was straight up old school kung fu. Aimed not at Donnie's body but three inches behind it, Jimmy finished the move clean through the ribs and then bounded off Donnie's body into a back handspring and landed easily on his feet. Donnie didn't have it so good. His broken body slid all the way down the hall, three feet, five, seven feet, nine, then slammed into the wall headfirst, cracking a bit of his skull off and leaving a nearly instant poodle-piss-size puddle of blood on the tile in front of the locker room door.