The place was named Howie’s. Seemed very much at odds with the prevailing redneck vibe, the name Howie, that is. Sounded more like a place owned by a fun-loving fella with glasses and a Star Wars action-figure set on the coffee table. In any case, that was the name, and it was near Poughkeepsie.
And when anyone around a certain age even thought about Poughkeepsie they’d, if they were film buffs, reference toe-picking and Popeye Doyle. Or at least Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle as he violated the cinematic civil rights of as many Negroes as possible in the genius non-fight-based flick The French Connection.
But to tell it honestly: it wasn’t even Poughkeepsie, it was Beacon. Beacon, NY. But “Poughkeepsie” would have been my answer when I was asked, as I inevitably would be: Where was that? Or, more specifically: What was that near?
And it was in Howie’s. In Beacon. Before I got put out of the joint by several much larger Marines. This is before I was heavily practiced in the fistic arts. It was before I got put out, but not before I had met Patrick. Up in the midst of prison central, amidst Sing Sing, Fishkill, and a host of other prisons, I was a lifeguard at a kid’s camp and had managed to find myself in a position where I was dating the daughter of the warden at Sing Sing (my sincere apologies to all involved in that particular debacle).
Joyce was a comely lass whose father’s position in town had made her a hometown heroine of sorts. One night while I was reveling, knee deep, in proud-of-myself mode I noticed the reckless advance of eyeballs of the most impudent nature. These belonged to Patrick. And my animal brain made me do what my animal brain usually makes me do in situations that smell like imminent danger: smile. Warmly. Comfortingly. GENUINELY. Because when you have that faked, much like sincerity, to paraphrase the old Hollywood saw, you have it all.
“You know Joyce?”
Oh yeah. How to manage to say this so it sounded like an apology? Who knows? But the key to avoiding a fight is, to put it most accurately, a process of not necessarily ACQUIESCING, but rather creating a situation where the road to NON-fighting is much more attractive than the road to FIGHTING. Acquiescing invites contempt. The other way, though, the way whereby you meet the threat head on with an embrace that elevates the fight issue to a position of primacy, THIS is the way that signals both who it is that you are and why you are that way: a fighter who, win or lose, likes to fight.
Because, see, then it becomes academic. And difficult: if he beats me, he loses the woman’s sympathy. If he loses, he loses her respect. Better, much better, to invert and subvert from within, and this is what I can see in a flash he’s chosen to do.
He says something generically unkind about her along the lines of “she’s a crazy broad,” and I mumble, if not assent, well, then, no ardent defense. And then he starts talking: equal parts threat and entreaty.
“This was the first place I ever broke another man’s jaw …”
And I was left to wonder if he meant Howie’s, the bar stool I was sitting in, or a Tuesday night, or whatever it was.
“You see, if you set out TO break his jaw you might fuck it up fourteen ways to Sunday. Hit his forehead and break a knuckle. Hit his cheek. Anything. But I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to kill him. And so, from that point of view, it might seem a pretty good deal for him that all he had broken was a jaw.”
He was waving over the barkeep and strangling the bottled necks of Budweiser as he held forth in a general and nonspecific tale of derring-do in an attempt to (maybe) scare me off. It wasn’t working. Not because I wasn’t afraid, though I wasn’t, but because he was being so coherent about it that I was caught. He had applied himself to bar fighting as a science and after about three hours of chatter, and an irked girlfriend wandering around somewhere, he invited me over to the house where he lived with his mother to lift weights and finish what was amounting to his dissertation of the dark art of duking it out with drunks.
His mother’s house was a screened-door affair. His mother watched TV and smoked quietly in the lime-green and monkey-shit-brown décor of their living room. We took a sharp turn to the right, then down the basement stairs to his iron shop. It was rudimentary cinder block with York dumbbells and 45-pound plates littered around like so many manhole covers. Patrick was white, about 6′2″, and about 210 lean pounds of anger, the source of which was never quite clear, apart from the same sort of malaise that strikes American men of a certain age for certain reasons having to do with the lack of rites of passage, absent fathers, and “bitches.”
The story, as he laid it, about the jaw breaking, had as its catalyst some threadbare excuse for “doing the right thing,” which I don’t think either of us believed. But that’s all that’s needed in a situation like this: an excuse.
“I hit him right on the corner of his chin. I was going for a knockout shot, and if you look at the point of the chin like a handle, you can swing that head around so fast that the brain just puts itself to sleep to save on the wear and tear. But I guess I swung for the fences because the handle snapped off, which meant in this instance that the part of his jaw in front of my fist moved faster than his head. So rather than knocking him out, I just heard what sounded like a knuckle cracking.
“Down he went, but he wasn’t out, see? And when he came up, his mouth was open and he was just going ‘uh uh,’ because his jaw’d been broken in an open position … And he was frantic. No one could understand him. He ran out and someone got him to a hospital. But this was better luck than I could have planned. Since he really couldn’t do much more than point, I skipped the whole ‘going to jail’ thing.
That’ll teach him to try to swoop on some chick I’m talking to.”
And he did a quick set of bench presses, easily hoisting the 315 pounds we had on the rack up and down for a count of six reps.
“See, these are the things I look for BEFORE I even make up my mind to make my move:
1. Does he have a weapon? A man with a weapon will, without even thinking, keep touching the spot on his body where he expects to find it. If his hand keeps brushing his pants pocket, that’s the pocket surprise.
2. Does he have backup? Sometimes it has nothin’ to do with whether or not he’s a good fighter. If he has a good team behind him, guys who, when they ‘break it up,’ pull YOU off first, so he can get in a last lick, this can make all the difference in the world. I myself work solo, because most people are assholes.
3. Is he right- or left-handed? You don’t think this makes a difference? Then you don’t know shit about fighting. I always work the weak side, which, at a bar, is easy to do: stand on the side he’s not holding his drink and, um … work it.
4. Everything’s good for something. Ashtrays, shot glasses, pool cues, and that old standby, beer bottles, are all fair game if you’re finding yourself outnumbered or outclassed. I also always consider edges for gaining an edge: the long line of a table, or the bar, or even a back of a chair can be your friend.”
But it sounds like you’re looking for a fight, and in my personal experience the search always ends up with me having made horribly meaningful tactical errors.
“Well, see, that’s the difference between me and you: you’re letting your analysis cloud your mind. Sometimes, like with this guy whose jaw I broke, I have a reason, in which case it’s a no-brainer. Other times opportunity presents itself, which is always much better than when you TRY to pick an opportunity. I’m just telling you shit that will make you better prepared. I’m NOT saying this shit will work if you keep trying to start shit with guys who are minding their own business.
“I mean the way this works karmically is that those in need of a beating will always find those who need to give one.”
Okay. This is getting kinda Yoda-fied for me. Are there are any rules for fight situations to avoid?
“Yeah.
1. If the other guy is too drunk? Well, what’s the percentage there, unless he’s pissed you off?
2. Domestic disputes? There’s no sense to this because inevitably you’ll also have to pop the bitch you were just defending, and with that the sympathy of the crowd swings against you.
4. Very, very quiet men. There could clearly be a reason that he’s sitting alone. Don’t fuck with a dog that’s sleeping. He ain’t bothering you, no need at all to bother him.
5. Guys who’ve just come back from their cars with a new sense of confidence. It’s usually called a gun.”
So that leaves?
“Loudmouths, mostly.”
And I did a set and he did a set and the conversation ranged far and wide before coming back to Joyce.
“I was thinking of fucking you up that night.”
You mean two days ago?
“Yeah. You were talking loud, hanging out with that chick I liked, and you were drinking, laughing loud …”
And you didn’t jump. Why?
“Well, you were not afraid, you were more sober than I thought originally, you looked me in the eyes, and then you seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t think you were a pussy but I also didn’t get any resistance from you. Your attitude was like ‘whatever.’ Which sort of, in a strange way made me like you.”
And then, like suddenly concerned that this made him sound entirely too gay, “But I’d have cracked your fucking skull open in a second if I had to.”
I laughed. This was well before I was the 210-, 220-pound fighter in my own right so, of course, I laughed. The meditation on my possible murder while we stood in a place where I could clearly BE murdered very much informed this decision. So we finished our workout and made plans to meet again for subsequent workouts, appointments which I’d keep. But we never drank together again, and last time I heard, he was employed at the local Nabisco factory. The toughest cookie maker in Poughkeepsie.
FIGHTS IN FIGHT MOVIES WHERE BOTH THE
FIGHT AND THE FIGHT MOVIE SUCK
ROCKY IV (1985): Sure we loved the first one, what with the whole hangdog charm deal and Philly as Mean Streets, but Jesus … when Hollywood loses its way it really loses its way. This installment, the most profitable of the whole cavalcade of boxing shame, will cause some to dismiss me as a crank, but this movie sucked … even if you like boxing. ESPECIALLY if you like boxing. Curiously enough, with truth resembling fiction and the passage of time, in 2007 this seems almost like a reality show.
LEONARD, PART 6 (1987): We spare no one. Specifically, WE are not going to spare ME, in this instance. Not only did this movie suck and is arguably one of the worst movies made in the history of worst movies, but I was in it. Three weeks of IN IT. With lines and everything, and despite boasting cast members who COULD actually fight (like me) and at least two or three others, this could in no way compensate for the begutted Bill Cosby fighting with ballet dancers dressed as ostriches. A movie that makes you want to strangle orangutans, you love it so much.
GYMKATA (1985): You know who this movie makes us sad for? Dan Tyler Moore. (Related to Mary? Who the fuck knows?) His book The Terrible Game was the basis for this movie about a gymnast who combines his ability to dance around in tights with karate to enter what seems to be some sort of early ultimate fighting competition in some sort of unnamed Middle Eastern country. What the hell is it with the ’80s and sucky movies?
BOXING HELENA (1993): Not … even … a movie about boxing. And so, on this count: it fails miserably.
DIRTY DANCING (1987): Despite the presence of someone who claims to have some passing familiarity with a martial art (Alex, the correct answer is “Who is Patrick Swayze?”) and appeared in Roadhouse (also Swayze, in not a bad movie about bouncers), Dirty Dancing, despite the premise of dancing in not very clean locales in the Catskills, has a fight scene where Swayze punches out the rich-kid rake but this is no way compensates for the fact that this is a big-time chick flick.
BEST FIGHTS IN SORTA-KINDA-NON-FIGHTING MOVIES
THE GODFATHER (1972): When Sonny Corleone (real life martial artist James Caan) beats the fuck out of his brother-in-law Carlo Rizzi, up to and including the biting of Carlo’s shoe, well THIS scene sums up in total EXACTLY what was going through my mind that night in San Jose of which I will speak no more. That Caan wasn’t nominated for an Oscar seems typical for a city and industry that think that there’s something daring about Colin Farrell. (Hint: It’s called public drunkenness, not daring, where I come from.)
SNATCH (2000): Though director Guy Ritchie’s career is caught up in the cinematic chainsaw that is his wife, Madonna, he, at one point, had managed to get his hands around a pretty straight on—despite all of his extant Tarantino-isms—take on underground bare-knuckle boxing. My underground boxer friend Pete was trying to get me a bout in one of these (average take rounded out to about five thousand tax-free American dollars) before he was hounded out of the game by drunkenness and a steadfast refusal to let them professional-wrestlize him into take shorts. Ritchie caught it, and that he managed to do so with Brad Pitt made it all the more amazing. Hey, wait a minute, isn’t this a fighting movie? Whatta you? A cop or something?
HAPPY GILMORE (1996): Sure, sure … Adam Sandler fights octogenarian Bob Barker. Sure, it was a good fight. But was it worth the $26 mil Sandler got for doing it? Twenty-six friggin’ mil. I’d fight Dr. Ruth for that kinda money.
SLAPSHOT (1977): The Hanson Brothers putting on the foil. That’s all we gotta say about that.
THE QUIET MAN (1952): Victor McLaglen, ACTUAL boxer and wrestler, fought John (real first name, Marion) Wayne, actor, in this flick for like an hour. It was nice to see Wayne get everything that was coming to him, though.
COOL HAND LUKE (1967): George Kennedy has no modern-day equivalent. Neither does Lee Marvin. Or Ernest Borgnine. Or Robert Mitchum. (Does James Gandolfini count?) So when he starts bouncing Paul Newman’s head offa the furniture, it makes you cheer. It just makes you cheer.
BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006): Borat, a man, wrestles naked with Azamat another man, over the latter’s lotioned magazine loving of the fur-hating boobie queen Pamela Anderson Lee Rock-Now-Maybe-Lee-Again. A fun-loving flick for everyone from nine to ninety.
BLADE (1998): Wesley Snipes can actually fight. He can so almost actually fight that he and comedian Joe Rogan, who can REALLY fight, were going to meet in the eigh-sided ring on the under card at the UFC. Never happened, but if this celebrity shit ever takes off? Yeah, well, I got dibs on Jared Leto.
A BRONX TALE (1993): When Chazz Palminteri locks the bikers in the bar and says “Now youse can’t leave” immediately prior to beating them into floor wax. The finest fucking moment in cinema for anyone who ever knew a cugine, got his ass kicked by a cugine, or knew a cugine who kicked someone else’s ass.
HOOPER (1978): Burt Reynolds, Brian Keith, and Terry Bradshaw—and Sally Field just so everyone didn’t feel so gay. Great flick about stunt men. An fights galore. Though in our minds Reynolds will never rise higher than he did in Shamus, this is a great late 70s dealie, which means? Yeah, you got it: lots and lots of cocaine was killed in the making of this movie.
FIGHT FILMS WHERE THEY
AT LEAST FUCKING TRIED
THE BOURNE IDENTITY
TRANSPORTER
RAGING BULL
ONG BAK
FIGHT CLUB
GOODFELLAS
ENTER THE DRAGON
GLADIATOR
FAT CITY
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE