The old blues standard said it best: Nobody loves a loser, and on our po-mo flipside it seems everybody, and we mean freaking everybody, loves a winner. The whole Church of the High Five sings hosannas for the returning victors all pumped with the momentary glory of having TOTALLY KICKED ASS. From the 1950s lovable loser Charlie Brown to the 1990s Kurt Cobain variant, the truth will be proclaimed: hangdogism is now dead. Welcome to the decade of The Winner.
Yeah. Whatever.
An ass-kicking, like Fame, is a capricious bitch, and so it is that we celebrate the joy of getting, giving, loving, and living the Delicate Science of the Head Whipping.
SCENARIO NUMERO ONE
You step away to take a leak and in your absence a much larger, handsomer, and probably better-hung man presumes to take your:
stool
your drink
your girl and/or
all of the goddamned above
You return and:
Call the cops?
Pretend you’re gay?
Say “So long, sister, you’re on your own”?
or
Slap his drink out his hand and fuck him up.
orrrr
Get your ass kicked. One or the fucking other.
Answer Key
A. Like Travis Bickle said, “The cops don’t do nothing, you know that.” Cops, it should be noted, were also the guys who bounced your head off of the lockers in high school. Just because they operate under the color of authority doesn’t mean they still don’t secretly wish to do the same.
B. A workable solution. Though, it should be noted, you might still catch a beating.
C. Probably the best in the long run, because, after all, where the hell was that relationship going anyway?
D. and E. This cuts to the heart of a thought process that takes nanoseconds, and your brain—like a computer amped by Dutch courage, and what you’re hoping is some sort of element of surprise, and really damaging film precedents (Rocky, Raging Bull, Bloodsport)—switches on the animal. Good. The damaging effects of having to live life under the aegis of having crawled AWAY from this fight will haunt you a lot longer than the actual pain from the beating. But let’s examine why this is the best choice.
Bar fights are typically fought by drinkers. That is, drunks. So play the odds— Stretch Armstrong might actually be drunker than you. The limitations of indoor fights can’t be underestimated either. An errant bar stool either swung or tripped over can be your best friend. And positing the existence of friends of some sort, you might also count on the quick breakup, which leaves you free to posture, scream imprecations, and hope to God nobody takes you seriously and lets you go.
But if you want to fight to win, consider:
You want to lose a fight? Fucking pick one. Every single fight I’ve picked (unless you’re fighting a Frenchman who, given historical precedent, will most assuredly surrender), I’ve lost, and for good reason. No one picks a fight they think they can lose, and so overconfidence is your enemy, and a formidable one at that. Also avoid fights with men with scarring in a few telltale places: over/around the eyes and the ears. Noses are good to pay attention to but any idiot can get his nose broken. Men sporting cauliflower ears and scar tissue on their eyebrows only get that from training. And if he’s training, he can probably kick your ass and at the very least will not hesitate a second to mix it up with you.
And not to get all Donahue on you, but if you don’t have the moral imperative on your side, like say if, for example, you just burned him, fucked his old lady, or smashed into his car, you might want to let this one go because he’s got at least three good reasons to kick your ass and you have, well, none actually.
SCENARIO SEGUNDO
Him: You talking to me?
You: No.
Him: You calling me a liar?
You: Well, no, I …
Him: I should FUCK you UP.
You: Hey, man, I …
Him: SHUT the fuck UP.
SHUT the fuck UP?
Keep alternating between “Well, no, I …” and “Hey, man, I …” until you eventually get hit.
Leave as quickly as your scrawny legs will let you, Chicken Little.
or
Crack him in the mouth as soon as he says, “You calling me a liar?”
Answer Key
A. This works. Except it should be understood that fellows like this are just warming up and they don’t intend to STOP the ritual humiliation until you are fellating them.
B. It is untrue that the longer he keeps up the questioning the less likely you are to get hit. You will get hit as soon as he gets bored, and with this Beaver Cleaver rapier-like repartee, that will, in all likelihood, be sooner rather than later.
C. Animals also love a fleeing target.
D. Why delay the inevitable? Take the fight to him and you might not have to take the fight much further. This is, win or lose, obviously the superior choice. Choose it and …
DON’T GO CRAZY
More fights are lost from the biophysical functioning of stress-induced fatigue than they are from inferior technique. In other words, relax. Like you would for a bicycle crash. Or a prostate exam. If you can fight with as much brio after five minutes (an eternity in fight time) as you can after twenty seconds, you will probably win. So realize time is on your side. While you need to fight with some sort of emotional content to your actions, anything too overboard will fuck you in the long run. I guarantee it.
Your best strike in this instance?
Well, since he’s close enough to be having this conversation with you, go to the grappling card and use:
putting your hand on the back of his hand and pushing it forward slightly while shrugging your shoulders. That’s right. Easy for you, killer for him, and the best part of it is: you can talk to him the whole time.
DON’T MAKE THAT STUPID POST-FIGHT FACE
That fake smile guys do after they’ve had their ass kicked has got to go. It’s the same face guys make when their girlfriend catches them cheating. It’s the face of The Complete and Total Inability to Deal With the Fact That You Might Be Thought to Be a Pussy. And they always SAY the same thing with that fucking smile. They say, “Did you see that?? The fucking guy sucker-punched me. What a bitch.” Then, four hours later you come back and you hear the guy going to some other poor bastard, “Did you see that?? The fucking guy sucker-punched me. What a bitch.” Get over it. Or get the gun from your car and shoot the guy, but for God’s sake don’t keep this shit up.
DRAWBACKS: You could kill him and have a whole lot of esplaining to do, Lucy.
SCENARIO III:
Walking along the street, possibly lost in thought, you brush shoulders with someone. Looking up to apologize, you see him turning, stopping, and glowering. He then starts walking toward you. You:
Finish your apology, throwing in a couple of gratuitous “Sirs” for good measure.
Take two steps back for every one of his steps forward.
Start singing your favorite Gilbert and Sullivan number.
or
Crack him in the mouth until he stops moving.
Only if you’re in the army.
It’s called the fucking tango. Enjoy it, Gertrude.
Called the Confusion Principle. It just might work.
Money move, baby! Money move!
HOPE FOR THE BEST, EXPECT THE WORST
Most humans who are not psychotic use a psychological technique called “ramping” immediately prior to conflict. Through a series of words, or “language structures,” they get themselves warmed into the prospect of violent activity until, voilà, they’ve arrived at Fight Time. Get there before they do. And to paraphrase Motel 6’s sage witness, Tom Bodette, “We’ll remember to turn the lights off for you.” Oh, by the way, I totally made up that psychology shit. Doesn’t change the fact that if the dog is barking he’s thinking about biting, though. Preferred technique in this instance?
Big guys usually don’t know how to fight very well because they’re used to using fear as a deterrent. Fight with these guys FIRST because even if you lose, people will think you’re a stud, and who knows, you might actually WIN.
The first point’s unspoken variant: don’t assume that smaller guys are pushovers. Any ranked professional flyweight could brain-damage you into diapers.
Head butts work.
Do ANYTHING enough and you WILL get better at it. And, finally …
Choose friends you’ve seen fight before (and it’s not whether they win or lose but whether or not they’re even willing to go to the post) and make sure they’ve got your back. (You never know who’s going to sit there holding the falafels while you get beaten with poolsticks.)
THE BEST FIGHT MOVIE OF ALL TIME
ABOUT A NOW 85-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO
COULD STILL KICK YOUR ASS
RAGING BULL (1980)
DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE
There are lots of reasons to love this movie but I’ll start off with two. Two zen koan-like tales to burnish an already brilliant legacy of insanity, animal drive, and high culture craft.
Okay, here goes one: Back in the 1970s De Niro dated this woman who was friends with a friend of mine. They were all living down in SoHo before they were all rich and before SoHo had become the stomping ground for them and all the rest of New York’s well-heeled. Anyways, this friend of mine was outraged and wouldn’t be swayed by Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, or even the definitive New-York-that-no-longer-exists-1970s-movie Taxi Driver. De Niro was a piece of shit as far as she was concerned and it went on this way until finally I asked, “Why? I mean it sounds personal at this point?”
And she says, “Well, he used to go out with this friend of mine.”
And I say, “So since when’s that a crime?”
And she says, “Well, when she was dumping him, they were standing on the street corner and he slapped her on the ass.”
“That sounds benign enough to me. I mean, a light slap on the ass, maybe in not the best of taste, but …”
“It knocked her down!”
I murmured apologias for a man I didn’t even know, yet I had to secretly admit, to maybe no one but myself, that that was a money move. Purely because it delivered the unexpected and the untimely in a fashion that was decidedly unfashionable. It was a trifecta and it was like Bukowski said when defining style as “doing a dull or dangerous thing well.” And it was politically incorrect during a time when political incorrectness was measured in grams.
And the second? A friend of my ex-agent and my ex-agent were chatting in a bar with this new “singer” who was being “managed” by her “manager” into a potentially, possibly “significant,” “singing” “career” by none other than LaMotta. And while my ex-agent’s friend talked to the ingénue, LaMotta fumed. Said nothing, but fumed. And my ex-agent’s friend had a karaoke machine to sell her and, dammit, he would not be stopped. So they eventually come to some sort of accommodation and Jake finally pipes up, “You can go through me with that.” And the ex-agent’s friend pipes up gamely, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s light. I can just drop it off and …” And Jake freezes him with a look and says again, “You can go through me with that.” And the conversation comes sliding down like a wall of wet sand. And when I ask the ex-agent if he got the sense that, given the situation, they might have stood a chance if it had come to blows, his answer was quick and definitive: “Fuck no.” Golden years? You’re goddamned right.
Get it? No?
Raging Bull is the greatest fight movie of all time, arguably the best Scorsese would ever make and De Niro would ever act in, and it flies off the screen like you were living it instead of watching it. And this shows: from Pesci’s rib really getting broken in a sparring scene to De Niro really getting good enough with his pre-film prep to purportedly fight three fights out in Brooklyn, if you’re a fan of the fistic arts, this is, colloquially, the SHIT. It’s the truest to life in terms of how fighters fight in the ring and how they think when they think about how they fight in the ring.
Glorious and wrong all at the same time.
Yeah, you should be so lucky.