Cities are great incubators for highly evolved animal behaviors. Jam thirty rats in a space better suited for fifteen rats and you have the same sort of churlishness that was an earmark of pre-9/11 New York, where in the 1970s–80s swelter of returning Vietnam vets, junk (and the junkies to go with it), punk rock, and disco. You could find a fight as easily as a randomly exchanged glance. Reckless eyeballing, different from its Jim Crow southern variant, took on a whole different meaning in my NYC roman à clef. While this is a monograph about fighting it’s also the story of a fighter. As I stood on a sidewalk a block or so off of Eastern Parkway at a rundown park on the edge of Crown Heights, I knew what I was hearing even before I knew what to do with what I had heard.
What the hell are you looking at?
Depending on your age, disposition, race, socioeconomic makeup, half-empty-half-full outlook on life, and where you come from, you’re liable to do any number of things at this here juncture in time.
You:
Keep on walking: Not such a bad option—if you’re a priest. Or David Carradine in that TV show Kung Fu. It shows a remarkably adult take on separating that which is important in life from that which is not. It also shows that you’re a non-confrontational puss.
Exceptions: When you’re well dressed, in a hurry, and/or with a date. These three in concert, the perfect storm of Unlikely To Roll Around In The Dirt With Morons, when in evidence will also make you a prime target for morons. Like running from a large angry dog or not snorkeling in Florida swamps, no one will think less of you for doing this.
Act like you didn’t hear anything: This is a mere variation on number 1. A more pathetic variation, incidentally.
Go nuclear: You know it’s coming. And you know what the “it” is that’s coming. Forget about doing any sort of meeting halfway. You know there’s a point at which you figure out that your garbage disposal is not a spoon washer but a spoon bender, and that point could be now.
So you …
Attack: Call it a preemptive strike. While this is much harder to defend in a court of law, in the eyes of the habitués of the street scene this sort of bravado is the stuff of legend.
Start screaming: Animals do this all the time. It’s a kind of mimicry and the thinking of those who study animals is thus: if I can convince this angry Puerto Rican that I am a rhino, he will be frightened. This may or may not work. Remember—duress constricts vocal cords. Constricted vocal cords can thrust you back to puberty. Is Urkel a tough rhino? No. No, he is not.
Flee: While this clearly lacks any sort of couth at all, when combined with b) and even in odd cases with a), it makes for a bouillabaisse of semi-effective coping and survival strategies.
DRAWBACKS: You may still get your ass kicked. Savagely. By men with no appreciation for your theatrical tour de force. While summer stock may beckon, it’ll have to wait until the bruises clear.
Do what I did: Negotiate: The key to any successful negotiation is your ability to convince all and sundry that your willingness to go 3a) or 3b) is higher than their willingness to do the same. Moreover, since willingness is only part of the pie here, ability is a factor as well, so you best develop some ability or learn to mimic it. Ability mimicked badly will weaken your negotiating posture, as it makes an ass beating more than likely. But how do you negotiate your way around What the hell are you looking at?
Easy peasey The answer is: “YOU.”
Now his choices are highly limited: escalate, or decide that you are the bigger rhino and walk away. In my non-fictional rendering, however, he chose the former. Yes, he escalated by returning with the age-old and surprisingly useful Oh yeah? And like the rising hands on the baseball bat of one-upmanship this was spoken as he was closing the distance betwixt us, before he concluded that thought with You like what you see?
Your turn. Escalate or de-escalate? Now, be careful here. This is the trickiest part of your negotiation as animal brains reign and even something said to de-escalate might get used to escalate.
For example:
You say, No, man. Forget it.
He says, So now there’s something wrong with my face, fuckface?
So if you’re hellbent for escalation, like I was, you say something like what I said when I said, I don’t know WHAT I’m seeing. There’s a certain genius to this line. Or at least as much genius as a ten-year-old is likely to be able to bear. The genius comes from the fact that you have now said something confrontational, but confusingly confrontational. It’s the functional equivalent of telling a girl when she asks you if those pants make her look fat: “Fat’s the least of your troubles, baby.”
So now he was facing me, I was facing him, and it was looking like a draw. Almost exactly like a draw, in fact. Yes, a draw right up to the very moment that he bliztkrieg’d my face with several well-placed blows thusly concluding our lesson and my failed attempt at negotiating a fruitful settlement.
Now, what went wrong?
The sage observer will recall Tuco from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: “If you’re going to fight, fight. Don’t talk.” So here begins the cavalcade of wrong: letting any angry person get too close, trying to debate a moron, and finally, hoping for the best on a planet where that’s the least likely thing to happen. What the hell was I thinking?
Well, I wasn’t. And that’s the deal here—not thinking. In a place where not thinking is largely going to be more effective than thinking, not thinking doesn’t mean NOT KNOWING. I wasn’t thinking, and that was fine. Not knowing? Well, that was inexcusable.
So at this remove of years, 3,000 miles, and a Wizard of Oz-like hunger to know that which had previously been hidden, I decamped to the unlikeliest of places—a small, sleepy, beach community. A small, sleepy, beach community whose streets, based on my previous visits here, were filled with young men in late-model muscle cars who when asked for directions to the beach would gladly lean out of their passenger windows, going over and above the call of their now high-speed duty, to attempt to use ballpeen hammers to drive the point home that the only kind of California Dreaming you’d be likely to find in Huntington Beach is the kind you find when they get their heaping helpful fists of fury on you.
Yes, Huntington Beach, California. To meet the Wizard. In this instance, the original Huntington Beach Bad Boy, a handle hung on him when straight from a six-month lockup for assaulting a cop’s kid on the streets. He was then dragged, Rocky-style, into the Ultimate Fighting Championship, where people expected this barroom brawler to lose to “seasoned martial artists.” His name: Tank Abbott. Or the way he spins it. … “A-double B-O-double T … twice the man you’ll ever be.”
Twenty-seven seconds into his first cagefight, after he had knocked his four-hundred-pound opponent into a state of near paralysis, the boast didn’t seem nearly so empty. He had been doing the same thing in bars up and down the boardwalk for years.
THE BAR, THE ROOM, THE BRAWL, TANK ABBOTT’S TRICKS ON HOW TO AVOID FINDING YOURSELF WAKING UP MORE THAN ONCE A DAY
“Oh, he deserved it.” Tank’s arm bent back and he drew on his first vodka of the day. Or at least the first one that I’ve seen. Vodka with a strawful of cranberry juice. The “he” in this instance, the “he” that Tank was speaking of wasn’t any kind of universal “he.” No. It was the cop’s kid, the beating of whom had landed Tank in the slam.
“I was driving my truck around one night and got into it with this kid. I’m just trying to get somewhere and he’s screaming ‘Come on, Fatso. I’ll kick your fucking ass if you get out of that truck.’ I get out of the truck and he starts running. So I get back in the truck and fake him out as he’s running BACK to my driver’s-side window and he’s flipping me off as he thinks I’m about to get back in but I get him and knock him on to Queer Street. But, yeah. His father was a cop and so in I went. I had had ten other run-ins, but I’d never gotten any time for it, but this time, even though I’d say it was just a streetfight, his father coached him through two or three story changes and so I was gone. Six months.”
Tank’s eyes narrow as he takes full measure of my smirking face. “Nah. They don’t want to fight in county.”
The bar where we’re sitting is notably upmarket. Huntington Beach has changed from the ballpeen hammer days in all but spirit. We’re sitting ensconced in the red-tile, adobe-ized interior of a kind of place you imagine having dollar-drink nights on Jimmy Buffet’s birthday. Tasteful. Good food, music and vibe. Not a place where you’re likely to catch too many fights, but here’s RULE NUMBER 23 courtesy of Willie Dixon: You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover.
Tank’s shown up an hour late and credits/blames it on trying to look decent, as the night in question, that night being TONIGHT, he’s been tapped as a special surprise guest for like 300 Marines in the grand ballroom at the Hyatt Regency. Marines from the 3rd Battalion. Call themselves the Thundering Herd. And are described as the BALLS of the Corp. And waving down his second vodka, Tank’s involvement in said tribute to those who both manage to fight AND live is going to be more than worth the price of admission.
“Drinks for ALL MY FRIENDS!!!” His purposeful and knowing lift from the Bukowski-inked Barfly is not accidental and there is more than a little of the Bacchus-based poet in Tank. At six feet, 275 pounds with a 600-pound-plus bench press, the similarities perhaps end there.
“Oh, Tank’s not stupid,” says Todd Hester, editor in chief of Throwdown magazine. “Not by any stretch. But he makes it easy for people to forget.”
“The fire that fueled me always was—what was that thing … that metaphor … or that car from that thing: the gray ghost?”
“No. The idea’s just that there’s a lack of respect, and then respect. Because between the two, something’s happened. They learned something.”
“They learned that I’m much better than they thought. Much better. I mean, in a bar fight you always have that element. Every single time. And it’s either because they don’t notice, don’t care to notice, or notice the wrong thing. I used to stalk these guys.” Tank’s warming up into his fourth drink. “Yeah. The steroid-bodybuilder types,” and on cue one walks in: 265 pounds, 5 percent body fat, sleeveless T-shirt, tribal tattoos, goatee, and stunner shades. He’s a movie star without the movie and his girl doesn’t know any better, either.
“You see, these guys,” he says nodding toward Mr. Olympia, “would pull into a spot with a lot of fanfare and I’d spot them and I’d start making my move. Edging closer. Until I’d be back-to-back with him … or somehow in his circle.”
Is this where we get to the “he deserved it” part?
“Well, I’d be back-to-back with him or suddenly like in his space. And it wouldn’t take long. A comment. A noise. And then they’re …” and he’s miming drunks’ drinks changing hands, hands waving in full regaling, chests bumping, and his playing the anti-Wizard thing for all its worth, and after a particularly inopportune comment the also inevitable, “‘Hey … why don’t you fuck off?!?’ And I’d be acting afraid. Or shy. And I’d be egging him on with a comment here and there and then they’d cross that line and it’d be over.”
Lots of ways for it to be over. Name a few.
TANK’S FEW WAYS FOR IT TO BE OVER
1) Head Butts: “they’re now illegal in mixed martial arts [MMA, what the Ultimate Fighting Championship is] competition but I never met a head butt I didn’t like. Easy and effective.”
2) Any fistic combinations of use: jabs, uppercuts, crosses, elbows.
3) Any combinations to go horizontal to take away the big man’s advantages, as well as restricting the action to the floor, where eyewitness accounts gets blurry: “I get them on the floor and they can’t get up.”
“The great Karl Gotch once said, ‘Bulls die on the floor,’” I offer.
Tank smiled. “Here they did.”
And when it was over?
“Well, the gray ghost had shown that on this day they were going to learn something. Call it respect if you want to. I mean they learned that I wasn’t whatever they had thought I was that got them where they were when they figured it out.”
“The floor.”
Tank’s a study in contrasts. Built well for chosen endeavor: smallish ears lying tight to his head, narrow eyes, a whole upper row of false teeth from the second in a small spate of drunken driving accidents, false teeth that he takes out when he fights, looking like, with his Snuffy Smith beard, all of the SoCal kind of hillbilly he sort of is.
And so there is method to his madness, it seems. In a town that sports an airport dedicated to The Duke, John Fucking Wayne, there is a logical consistency that echoes AC/DC’s line about “Never shooting nobody that didn’t carry a gun.” He was a goddamned public servant. Like a Batman or something.
But there was this other thing that I was looking for, and that was the animal anger that drove one to fight. It was a calling that became a job, but well before that, it started out as an emotional need. I felt it. I have felt it and in the middle of an early 1980s interview with Anton LaVey from the Church of Satan I tried to get him to touch on it, back when I thought it had something to do with evil. I asked him about three times in the guise of discussing evil and he said, “Okay. Evil is what doesn’t feel good.” And I asked again because I was talking about bloodlust and an emotional delight in domination. And he finally begged off, “Look, I’m an atheist.” The implication being that this was just a con.
So it was with Tank. The ground floor of WHY WE FIGHT he had to have had his finger on. A father that bounced basketballs off of his head? A castrating mother? All of the familiar Freudian tropes.
“Well, I had an older brother who played football, and my father was a rah-rah football type of guy. A tough guy. I started fighting when I was nine. Wrestling …”
“Not in the ring. Not ever. Because that’s business. And it’s strategy. And technique. I mean if anybody I was fighting in the ring managed to get some sort of emotion out of me, it’d be a tough day at work for them. But, no, I never felt any sort of emotion there. In the streets, though? Well, that was totally different. Anger is an emotion but it wasn’t always THE emotion, but it had to do with the gray ghost thing. Showing them that things ain’t always like they seem. I was that punk rock kid. I remember being 135 at fourteen years old. And I remember being surrounded by the whole school. And I fought then …”
And so what about now … after the nine Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) wins, the magazine covers, the girlfriend who’s an ex-model, the cash, the celebrity, and the handshaking that doesn’t stop while we sit and drink, with even cops who used to ARREST him coming up for some of the juice? If you’ve already shown them what is it that gets you to the fucking party anymore? Out of bed? Anything?
“Cash. In the ring, cash. And outside the ring? Nothing. I mean, the occasional guy who doesn’t know who I am and wants to start something is usually wised up by some of his friends before it gets to where it’s going. The guy who wants to tell me ‘fuck you,’ well, that won’t even get me to put my drink down. I mean I really don’t have anything to show them anymore since I’ve showed them all.”
At the age of forty-one does this feel like you’ve lost something? I mean, what do you do if this has defined your personality for so long? I’m not asking him for him. I’m asking him for me.
“This.” And he waves down vodka number eight. And then points to a Henny Youngman look-alike sitting behind us. Eighty-six years old. And drinking. “That.”
And then on cue he turns and catches at the muscle boy movie star sitting on the patio. “Let’s go sit outside.” And we all laugh and laugh. And I say, “Let’s.” But before we get around to doing this, Tank’s girl shows up. Thin and drawn high and tight, she occupies that space of former-ex-something or other. Model. Actress. New York party girl. Whatever. She nods in my direction, not as a hello but as a question to Tank: Who the hell is that?!?
“Oh. He’s writing a book on fighting and fighters and wants to interview me.”
“Sit down.” And when Tank says to sit down, well, you consider it. And he tries to mollify, cajole, cheer to no avail as the hours tick by and the drinks chug on through, and it’s clear as clear can be that when she says, “OH! It’s just allllllllll about TANK ABBOTT, isn’t it?!?!” that this is going to end the only way it can. And my obligation, as any might exist anywhere at all, is just to be absent when she says, “Do you KNOW what he just ASKED me, TANK?!?!” Because this evening is cruising toward an ass-kicking.
And their fighting continues at the Hyatt Regency amidst the Balls of the Corp, and I’ve started drinking too at this point and am drawing hard looks from the Thundering Herd until some of them start to recognize Tank while his girl is whining about having been a model and how she’s not just one of “TANK’S GIRLS” and how she deserves to have doors held open for her and Tank is neither angered nor exasperated, and when I ask how long they’ve been together he says, “Ten months. … and about ten more days.”
And he’s still drinking and she’s still beefing, and when he walks out on stage to hand off the award to the returning hero, along with the Mayor of Huntington Beach, he was just supposed to pass it along but the Thundering Herd is thundering in recognition of him and eighteen vodkas later that mike is as good as his and he’s on the stage hands raised while the crowd screams and he says, “I wish I could be over there with you guys … KILLING HADJIS!!!” And the crowd goes wild. Tank, waving, weaves back to his table, to his girlfriend, who turns her back to him, and to the fight, any fight, that will most clearly mark his place in space.
THE FIRST CINEMATIC NOTE OF CAGE FIGHTING THAT ALSO DID NOT FEATURE MEN CLAD IN TOGAS, SANDALS & THE TELLING SHEEN OF BABY OIL
Hard Times (1975) Directed by Walter Hill
The men are shirt-free. They raise their hands in what appears to be surrender while circling each other. Surrender until they open their hands. No weapons. No weights. No edge. They’re surrounded by a cage. Chain link. And touts around the periphery scream and wave dollars.
Hard times, indeed.
But we’ve seen shadings of this in every cheap chopsuey flick up to and including Bruce Lee’s bows and Rambo, but back in 1975 this was dangerous, and no less so with Walter Hill at the helm. He who would also direct The Warriors, and quasi-action flick fare in 48 Hours and so on. But before he had become a director he’d been pulling duty on oil rigs, construction, and other places where a man might learn his way around the business end of a fist.
And in his gritty-in-a-way-that-nothing’s-been-gritty-since-the-’70s flick, a potboiler of a story of Depression-era fisticuffs starring Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and a raft of characters that looked like they had actually spent some time cage-side, we saw some, albeit fake, no-holds-barred fighting—hooks, knees, elbows, and leg sweeps—shadows of which would only later emerge later in the very real mixed martial arts (MMA) in America of the 1990s.
