Some of the following names and places have been changed to protect the innocent and/or those likely to be prosecuted.
You learn at a certain point to pay attention to nuance, like when you hear a voice on the phone that sounds a little too eager, or in this case morose. It was a guy whom I trained: a thirty-something-hipster who dug the fight game first as a spectator and then, drawn along by temperament, as a practitioner. He had bought a couple of mats and spread them all across his ten-by-ten-foot second-floor apartment and a couple of times a week we’d roll … through the basics, some catch wrestling arcana, some refinements of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu he had started to study … before we’d just go at it: smashing into the walls, jammed up against the couch, or off mat onto his uncarpeted floor. His unspoken goal, like any good student, was to ultimately kick my ass—an attempt I wholeheartedly supported him trying since his rabid desire for comeuppance fueled my equally rabid desire to never be bested by someone who knew what the hell I knew well after I knew it.
But there was this call. His girlfriend had trained too, wisely not with me, though, and had even scored a W by choke at a company Christmas party over an over-lubed boss who after he had found out that she studied begged her to “come on … show me what you got.” At 5′5″ she most certainly did and he found himself waking up more than once that day; this time off of someone’s floor.
So I figured the call had everything to do with, you know, the perils of Pauline and the rocky path of young love and what not. And I chuckled at, inadvisably, anyone asking me for relationship advice. I chuckled, sipped some tea, and read with great interest an item in the local paper that detailed a street scuffle that had turned violent.
The story was pitched as a sideline to the continuing drumbeat of a story that you seem to read in weeklies all over America about gentrification, also known as: what happens when poor folks live alongside not-so-poor folks who, drawn by the neighborhood’s “color,” move in and start driving rents up. That’s the public story.
The real story is that there are enough poor folk around, of very many colors, to populate a lot of these neighborhoods a few times over, and so it goes, the lost tribes of near-broke post-college types back to back with resentful locals. An uneasy peace seems to exist, except, as the paper tells it, this one night it didn’t, and a local who had, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, pulled his car up to the curb a few blocks from his home in a general mood to party, sat car-side and played his car radio as loud as it seemed like his car radio could be played. At 1:30 in the morning.
And at this point in the story I started to curse the decline in American mores and manners. I decried the miserable me-firstist get-over-itis that infects even our most mundane interactions. As I read on, I found myself desiring some sort of just resolution to what appeared to be unchecked assholism. And it arrived in the form of a nearby apartment resident who appeared on the scene and in the ensuing request to turn down said music got into a fight that ended up leaving the offender dead. I turned the page, finished breakfast, and moved on.
Next week or so I go to my young charge’s house for some training and he’s not much in the mood, and he and his girl are exchanging quick looks and in a blurt he tells me what you’ve already guessed at this point: it was him.
Fill in the details for me. I mean, did the papers get it right?
Yeah, basically. I was sleeping at the time—1:30 in the morning. I sleep in a loft and so I had to get out of the loft, put my clothes on, go downstairs, prop the outside door open, and go outside. I’m pretty easygoing. You know, I’m not a hard-on or nothing like that. I don’t get into fights usually. But he had played about three full songs on the radio. You know how when you’re sitting in your car and you can feel the guy’s music in another car? Boom boom boom boom? It was like that. Only closer. It was right under my window. I later found out it was his fortieth birthday and he had gone out and whooped it up. He had cocaine on him, was having a good time, and I got nothing against someone having a good time. He was just coming home. I think he was sobering up or something. The windows were all down so he probably drove there trying to sober up. It was a cold night. It was February 5, 2003.
Shouting “shut the fuck up” out of your window? Not an option?
You know what? The first thing I did was go to my refrigerator and pulled out some eggs. I went back to the window, looked out at his car and I was going to throw the fucking egg but I said to myself, You know what? That’s only going to escalate the situation. He’s drunk or whatever. He’s in his car. Some beater. And then I finally figured: he knows where I live, this is ridiculous, right out of your own window. So I put the eggs down and I go downstairs. My girlfriend’s awake now and she’s giving me a hard time about how loud the guy is. You know, there had been times before when this happened and she went down and I had to follow to keep her from kicking somebody’s ass. She’s this tiny thing but she’s tough. So I figure this time I’m going to go out because it’s better because I’m the cooler head. I’m Mr. Nice Guy. I mean, I never get into fights.
Except for that picture I’ve seen of you fighting those guys at the Dirty Three show.
Hey, man, that wasn’t my fault. These assholes were getting kind of surly with the woman I was there with when they asked everybody to sit and they refused to and she couldn’t see from where she was sitting behind them. So I got into a fight with these two guys. I mean, what is it? I’m like a magnet for assholes. Anyways, I go down, I got slippers on, for chrissakes. Just pants, no underwear. No shirt, even. Now I can see him. He’s looking kind of dozy. This makes me not nervous. I’m thinking to myself, All right. I’ve dealt with alcoholics before. And they can act violent but usually they’re pretty dopey. They don’t usually start throwing punches, and if they do they’re really wobbly and it’s not hard to contain them. So I ask him to turn his radio down but I’m having to pantomime and scream because he can’t hear anything, but I’m making the motion like, Hey! C’mon. Gimme a break. Turn it down. Now instead of just turning it down he opens up his door and starts moving around the back of the car. I walk, simultaneously past him toward his now-open car door. I’m in the street and his car was parked. He follows me back to where I’m standing by his car door.
Did you look at him as you passed each other?
I don’t remember. I just thought he was a drunk so I wasn’t really paying attention. But he’s now screaming at me to not touch his radio and now I’m not cool anymore, really. I’ve lost my cool. I’m screaming at him now because he didn’t just turn the fucking radio down. But I’m nervous about getting into his car. I feel like I want to just reach over and turn the damn thing off. Grab his keys, something. The guy shouldn’t be driving anyway. But I don’t want to turn my back to him. So I’m yelling at him, he keeps coming closer, we keep yelling at each other, and out of nowhere—and I really didn’t see it and I think I’m pretty savvy about things but he was pretty fast—he comes up with a left hook and hit me in the temple with his keys in his fist. Now, I didn’t see his fist so I didn’t know what he had in his fist, all I know now is that my head’s bleeding and I didn’t know this but head wounds bleed profusely. So it was flooding. Flooding over my eyes. It freaked the shit out of me because I thought I was being stabbed. And he hit me multiple times. Maybe a half a dozen times. So I close the gap, get a bear hug and tackle him by hooking my foot behind his leg. He was a lot stronger than I thought he was going to be, for one thing, but I thought he was just going to be a drunk but maybe he was a little amped up on the coke. We were about the same weight and height but I get him to the ground, I pass his guard [a Brazilian jiu-jitsu maneuver whereby you escape from the encircling legs of a downed opponent], sit on his stomach, and just start teeing off on him. Probably about the same amount of times as he hit me. Then he rolled over on his stomach, giving me his back, and I held him until the police got there.
So you put in the choke.
[Silence]
Okay. So what happens when the police get there?
Well, the whole thing took about three minutes. It seemed like an eternity but I’m pretty sure that if we had wanted to, we could have probably held our breath through the whole thing. But I held him down and another guy from a car that had pulled up is helping me hold him down and the cops show up not thirty seconds after that. People had called the police. I was yelling for people to call the police. And there were tons of witnesses at this point. All the neighbors and so on. The police come, I step up off the guy and I’m thinking, Arrest that man, you know what I mean? He just fucking assaulted me. There was no excuse. When I came out I didn’t even come out yelling at him. But then I see the police pull a yellow sheet over him and I’m thinking this doesn’t look good.
What did you see when you stepped off of him?
He started shaking and he spits up blood. Blood came out of his mouth, like about eight inches. A stream of it. A spurt. I could see it from twenty feet away, which is where they had hustled me to after they came. And I thought, Good. Now that fool can go to jail. Then, I stopped paying attention to him but next thing I know they were putting a yellow plastic sheet over him. That doesn’t seem like what you take a person to the hospital in, is what I thought to myself. I was pretty fucking freaked out at this point. The police were relatively cool. I mean they got kind of a gallows humor, and all the way to the station I got called “tough guy” and “bruiser’” and stuff like that. I’m like, “Dude, the motherfucker’s dead … c’mon. You gotta have some respect for something.” On the other hand they were pretty sympathetic and they said, “You got it bad, man, because anybody would have done what you did. You just defended yourself.”
But they took me downtown. It was so early that the detectives were still asleep. I had to wait in a holding cell there and I was like show-and-tell for the cops. I got a bandage on my head, blood all over. And the cops would bring guys through and it’d be like, “You see what happens? This guy was now just minding his own business and now some fool is dead!” And guys in there are looking and me and asking, “Hey, man? You know some kung fu shit?” I’m getting big respect in this little holding cell with these penny-ante criminals—guys who steal bikes and shit like that for their crack habit. And the cops are trying to turn it into some kind of cautionary tale. Which, of course it should be, but nobody in there was about to start paying attention to any cops. Most of them were in there for stupid shit, but some of them had been in there because they had gotten into fights. And so the cops were like, “Look. This is what can happen.” I mean, most people, who get into fights, the first thing they think is “What’s the worst that can happen to me?” Well, what if the opposite happens? What, if you punch this fool …
Look, I read about a guy who that happened to because the same time that this happened to me I was hyperaware of these stories in the paper. But this kid in high school gets into this fight in the parking lot. Just kids getting into a fight. He hit the guy ONE TIME. The other guy falls back and hits his head on the bumper thing that the car parks against? Dead. One punch. And people want to file murder charges against this guy. I’m thinking, Murder? Who is thinking these kinds of things? At best he was thinking he wanted to push the guy’s nose in or something.
So was it like a cop show after that? A single bulb in a room with an extremely shaky camera or something?
It was kind of like a cop show. Two detectives. But the photographer came in first and started snapping pictures. Two or three rolls of footage. All sides, bruises and cuts. I still have a scar across my back from the keys. They went pretty deep. He wasn’t holding back. Neither one of us were holding back. But the detectives asked me, “How hard did you hit him?” As hard as I could. Turns out that was the right answer. The honest answer was the right answer. The fact that I had been training turned out to my advantage also. I had no police record and I had been training and so the detective was saying that if an ordinary person … I mean, the amount of damage that happened to this guy was not consistent with how it’d play out with a normal person. I trained, so of course he was going to get hurt worse than he would with some guy who does nothing.
So they take the pictures. Then what happens?
A lot of nerves for like two years. I have to give blood, they swab your mouth, test under your fingernails, your mucus membranes. But I talk to them until about eight in the morning and I got to make a phone call and I found out later that the phone I was talking on was not tapped but I was being videotaped as I talked. And the room was being tapped and I was being monitored. But you know my feeling on all of this is that it is a cautionary tale. I’ve read your writing before, I know your whole bit about how it’s better to take your lumps and get your ass kicked standing up for yourself than to have to walk away and feel the shame of that for the rest of your life. And I had always agreed with that. Now? I have a different take. Now I feel that, and I don’t want to make myself too heroic in this whole thing, but I feel like the Duke in The Quiet Man. That’s how I feel.
I don’t want to fight. Now I’d like to start training a little bit again, but for a long time I saw violence everywhere. I couldn’t watch The Simpsons without cringing at Homer throttling Bart. Even people yelling at each other on the street about minor parking things … I think everybody’s too sensitive about stuff. Somebody cuts you off in traffic, or cuts in front of you in line? Shit, man, these are perceived slights. Have a little largesse and stop being petty motherfuckers who look for this shit. Because what if you do some shit and the guy dies? And then what?
Then you have to go to court and see the guy’s daughter in a puddle of tears. I had to sit across from her, and she’s bawling, you know? She was about eighteen. And his son was about sixteen. They were estranged and he had kind of abandoned them, but he was trying to reconcile. He was a chef, too. I learned that his family were good people. He had had problems. Alcohol and drug problems but he was trying to work them out. He had violence problems, issues in the past, starting fights in bars and so on. He was working on himself and went out and whooped it up and he got into a fight that he shouldn’t have. He’d probably gotten into plenty of fights before but never came out of any of them dead. You only do that once.
What happened with the court case?
This was civil court. Criminal charges were never filed because the DA’s office found that were no grounds to do so. It was mutual combat, or mutual combatants, or something like that, but that didn’t go anywhere. But he died of multiple traumatic injuries, the coroner decided, and so the family went after me for wrongful death, but it was also dismissed. The criminal case is always open, I guess, until they bring charges, but as far as I know we’re done.
So now that you have this whole Kwai Chang Caine thing going on, how’s it been going being this minister of peace?
Well, I’ve had four incidents since then. One happened a little bit after this whole thing was over. My girlfriend and I were riding our bikes up the street. We’re going to see a movie and it was a sketchy neighborhood so I should have known or suspected. But down in the distance we see this couple at a cab and it’s like she’s going to jump in the car and he’s goofing with her. It’s like they’re teasing each other. But as we get closer we can see that she’s trying to get away from this guy. She’s kicking at him and he’s going into the back of the cab and he’s trying to hit her and stuff. The cabdriver’s doing nothing. He’s scared shitless. I’m now at the front, near the driver’s side and I hit the hood with my hand and I hold up my phone. You see, the phone is the thing. So I hold up my phone and say, “Do I have to call the police?” That’s what people need to know, that the phone is the thing. Just pull out your phone. “Do I gotta call the police? I mean I can do that while I run away from you.” So he pops his head out of the car, lets go of her, and the car drives off but now he’s up in my grill and he’s pissed. And this is two weeks after the other thing and my girlfriend is now scared to death. The guy starts talking about how it was all the girl’s fault. I mean, I’m a nice guy and so if he’s willing to talk I’m okay. And it was over in two seconds. I just told him, “Look, you don’t want the kind of trouble I just had. You wanna hit somebody, you do it in the privacy of your house because the reality of it is you can’t hit somebody in public without the public getting involved. But if you’re standing out in the street and you’re hitting somebody? I’m going to call the police.” And he just walked off.
The next one was at a café. This girl sees these guys out of the corner of her eye as she sits at this café. She feels bad. She feels guilty because she’s white, they’re black, and so she doesn’t want to put her purse away because it’ll seem like she doesn’t trust them. But these guys were sketchy as fuck. I mean, if you see a white guy all tatted up with prison tattoos you’re right to maybe not trust him. Your spidey sense was tingling and you ignore it, so I don’t feel sorry for these girls at all. But I find this all out later. Apparently she had her purse out and these guys snatched it off of the back of the chair. So now I’m walking down the street and I hear “Stop, stop! Those guys got my purse!!!” Then I see these two guys running in the bike lane and these two girls chasing them. Now they take off across the street and, hey, I’M not going to get involved. I mean, I got my own problems. I’m not going to be a superhero. Honestly, I did not want to get involved in this, BUT … the fool ran right back across the street, right in front of me, and about three yards in front of me he’s dumping stuff out of the purse and stuffing the money into his pockets.
But this time I’m right on top of him and so I grabbed him and I just say, “Gimme the money.” So now his friend comes over and his friend is a foot taller than me but I still got the first guy and so I grab the second guy by the wrist so I can control him and I’m just trying to explain to these guys that I don’t want any trouble but I’m thinking to myself, “How do I get into this kind of shit?”
So the guy starts in with, “We didn’t do nothing” and I say, “’Hey, I’m not the police, man. I got nothing to argue about here, I just want the money. I WANT the money. Give it to me. There’s no judge or jury here. We’re not going to trial. I just want the money. Either that or these girls are going to call the police and I guarantee you I can hold on to you, at least one of you, until the cops get here.”
Of course, they gave up all the money and they walk off and the girls told me all of what happened and I was thinking, Dude, if I had known that you were so stupid, I would not even have stepped into this.
The last two were at a nightclub in Oakland where me and my new girlfriend went dancing. Two altercations in one night. At the same place. We were having a good time and we threw our coats and things on this pile. So we decide we’re going to go out and have a cigarette and so we grab our stuff and some guy comes up to me and accuses me of taking his girlfriend’s purse. Now, my girl is in the bathroom and this guy’s facing me outside the bathroom, trying to get the purse from me. So he says, “Yo, you took my girlfriend’s purse.” And so I tell him, “I don’t see any girlfriend.”
This is going on for a minute or two with him telling me how he’s going to kick my ass and I tell him he’s going to HAVE to kick my ass to get this purse because I’m not going to let him steal the purse of the girl I’m with.
Now, this is not a bad guy, right? It’s just some guy who is trying to get hold of a purse that he thinks belongs to his old lady, right?
Turns out it is. Fuck. Let’s just say I was buying drinks later and he was very cool about the whole thing because his girlfriend comes out of the bathroom, I ask her to open it and show me it’s hers, and it’s hers, and at this point my girl has come out and says, “That’s not my purse.” I had no idea. And I was telling the guy shit like, “You know, if you even HAVE a girlfriend, which I am having a hard time believing … well, IF she comes out, we’ll see.” And I’m talking to the guy like this while the guy is up in my grill telling me he’s going to kick my ass.
But afterward we’re making friends, right? We’re laughing about it actually and I lean back and knock some guy’s drink over on top of one of those tabletop video-game things. So I say, “Dude, I’m sorry.” But he gets up and he decides that he’s going to be a hard-on because he was watching the whole purse thing and there’s this electricity in the air and, you know, fights break out all the time at other fights. I mean just because everyone just gets so amped. It’s like a spark from a fire. I’ve seen it before. Especially with girl fights for some reason.
Now, I already bought these other guys drinks but I offer to get him one but he tells me no: “I want money,” he says. I just start laughing at him. And all these people just jump on him. He was making a big show out of “Hold me back, hold me back” but everyone there seemed to know that if he was let go he was going to get his ass kicked. I mean I’m not a big guy, I’m 175, but this guy is smaller than me. Meanwhile I’m having to hold back the first guy I almost got into a fight with because now he’s my new best pal. He wants to kick this guy’s ass.
It doesn’t seem like there’s an overriding message here, though, is there?
Well, it’s better to walk away, I think, but just because I’m a pacifist doesn’t mean I have no responsibility to prevent harm: a woman that’s getting her ass kicked … you know … I’m not a eunuch.
Do you have these like Vietnam screaming nightmares?
No. Well, I had nightmares for a long time, though. Definitely. Not now, though. I was very nervous, though, and my girlfriend at the time couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up at nighttime and she’d be crying. It was hard.
Do you think it had anything to do with the end of your relationship with her?
[Pause] Might have. It’s hard to separate out that stuff, though. From my perspective it seemed to strengthen our connections to each other because it created a bond. Maybe like going to war with somebody. So if she wants to run off and get married to my best friend, well, screw it, she’s entitled to some slack, because she went through a lot.
THE PLACES TO LIVE MOST LIKELY TO GET YOU THE KIND OF FIGHTS YOU SO ARDENTLY DESIRE: TO THE DEATH!
Sure, sure there are some Johnny-come-latelies that you may try to argue ON the list (Sudan, Rwanda) but the following list was compiled after carefully culling State Department travel advisories and looking at stats going a few years back that were connected to violent crimes, and the kind of interpersonal struggle that really is momentously measurable: loss of life.
So for a vacation test of your ULTIMATE skills may we invite you to peruse the possibility of sudden death in these fine vacation hot spots. Leave your troubles at home. And bring lots of cash.
Angola
The Balkans
Colombia
Côte D’Ivoire
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Israel
Nigeria
Pakistan
The Philippines
South Africa
United States
Uzbekistan
Venezuela
Zimbabwe