The thing provided is a stab at cheap 'hard-boiled' fiction. It is not the sort of thing that actually happens. Witty dialogue is a movie convention, not a fact of life. I have been the one starting it off on several occasions as an adult and never, in an instance where I actually struck, did I say anything first, let alone something witty or cutting. Your throat kind of closes up, you are trembling under your skin, you just do it, to get it over with, get past it. Only when you know there is no real risk do you say anything.
Further, the account of the fight is bullshit. A bean-pole does not knock a fireplug down with a single punch to the nose. A blow to the center of the face delivered hard enough to knock a 250 lb man to the ground would break much more than the nose ( including bones in the hand delivering the blow ), and render the person who received it insensible for some while. Put bluntly, if afterwards someone pounded his head on the sidewalk for a minute, he would not likely have been aware that was happening. And of course, if he had had his head pounded back onto pavement for a minute or so, he would have taken obvious damage and serious injury, and required medical intervention.
The story as presented is clearly a fiction crafted to accord, so far as the crafter is capable of managing, with what he thinks will set him on the right side of the law and the police.
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