There's an old guy at work

There's an old guy at work, I saw him a few times in the hall but didn't notice anything until I sat down with him in his cubicle to show him something.
As I was sitting next to him I noticed his face had been grotesquely wounded.
It was shocking to notice suddenly, out of the blue, about someone who looked perfectly normal a week ago, when I last saw him.
The corner of his mouth on that side was split in a one-inch diagonal cut that ran through his upper lip and divided it completely into two fat swollen, loose flaps.
It was a horrible wound.  

We talked a while about the thing I was supposed to show him.
I couldn't imagine what could make a wound like that.
It looked like it was from a documentary photograph of a torture victim.

I looked at it when his eyes were turned to the desk.
It was dark inside and purple outside of that.
He had shaved as far as he could up to the wound, and on the verge of the gash the stubble had come out, sticky looking and blackened.

I asked him gently, what happened to him.

He said, "man, I'm hurting."

He repeated it.

I said, "Yeah man."

He said he got mugged.

He said it happened around Eastern Market. It came out of nowhere. The guy hit him in the face with his fist around from behind. He blacked out.
He remembered starting to come to, and the guy kicked him hard in the side, broke his ribs, and told him to stay down until he was gone.

He said he had stumbled and wobbled for a long time in shock. Someone had given him a towel. It was soaked in blood from a small cut on his nose.
But the horrifically slashed lips and cheek were barely bleeding at all.

"I didn't know this about the lips, what with kissing and all, but apparently they don't receive that much blood flow." He said.

He showed me the inside of the wound by pulling back his lip as much as he could without pain.
He pointed out how the canine tooth was what made the cut.

He said he had been in the army and had never taken a hit like that. He had never been hit with so much brutal force.
He was shaken by it. He said he was thinking of going back home to North Carolina. But he was into this gig here.
And the person who's house he had been renting a room from asked him to leave because she couldn't take the drama.

Now he was staying with a friend and looking for another place to stay.

He said it was ironic because the last time he had been working at this same place, he was pistol whipped in the forehead by a guy trying to mug him.
He pointed to a faint scar on his forehead.
The guy had a gun and had told him to give him his wallet and he told the guy he was going to have to shoot him.
"It was a bad day," he said to me, "I wasn't going to put up with that shit."
"He was going to have to shoot me," He said.
So the guy hit him in the forehead with the gun.
It knocked him down and the guy started going through his pockets and he reared back and smashed the the guy in the face and started wrestling with the gun.
The guy got the gun away and ran off.

He said, "People told me I was crazy to fight, they said 'just give 'em what they want.'"