I have been in exactly one fistfight in my adult life, and that particular encounter only constitutes a fistfight in the most technical sense of the word.
A few years ago I picked up a second job as a prep cook at my favorite bar. My first job was (and remains) public defender, but I wanted some extra walking-around money and to get out of the house and do something a little more concrete than endlessly banging my head against the walls of the American justice system. I was not particularly good at this job; I am not entirely incompetent in a kitchen but am slow at activities like “chopping vegetables,” “following a recipe,” and “wrapping pickles and cheese in wonton wrappers,” which made me an unideal prep cook. Yet the restaurant was having a hard time hiring anyone at all (as most restaurants were at this time) and I was pleasant to work with and came to work on time, so the arrangement was tolerably successful for the three months or so it persisted.
What happened was this:
I was sitting at the bar at the end of my shift, polishing off a second beer, when my good friend the bartender came over with a frown on his face—
It’s at this point in the narrative that I have a choice to make. I can either refer to the participants in this drama by titles, perhaps with fun adjectives in front of them like rejected Fallen London b-sides (The Anxious Bartender, The Pint-Sized Cook, etc.) or I can pseudonymize them so as to maintain an air of professionalism and detachment. If I pseudonymize them, however, I must choose the appropriate names; names which will be sufficiently distinct from the actual names to create deniability and distance, but which nevertheless convey a similar vibe; my friend the bartender could plausibly be an Erik or a Jeremy, possibly even a Tom or a Jacob; he is certainly not a Stanley.
—so anyway, my friend Stanley the bartender told me that he was contemplating kicking one of the patrons out of the bar, because he appeared to be bothering our friend Sally. I did not pay a great deal of attention to this, as Stanley has been a bartender for a long time and is entirely capable of handling difficult patrons, but I strove to make the appropriately supportive annoyed-and-concerned noises and then returned to scrolling through Twitter or picking at a book or whatever it was I was doing while he made another drink and mulled over his options.
My intentions that evening were to finish my beer, tell myself to go home, have a few more beers, walk home, tell myself to go to sleep at a reasonable time, and then stay up too late playing silly videogames on my phone. Yet after a few minutes it became clear that this guy was indeed pestering Sally, and that Sally was getting animated about it.
Sally, you must understand, can be reasonably approximated by the stock character that is the Tiny Woman Who Is Very Nice But Works In A Kitchen And Will Absolutely Kick Your Teeth In If You Cross Her. (In real life, of course, she is not a stock character, she is a real human being with all of the attendant depth and complexity that belongs to all of God’s children, but for the purposes of this story, you may replace the actual person with the caricature without doing any violence to your understanding of the narrative). I did not fully understand what was going on, over at the other end of the bar, but I perceived (and have since had this perception confirmed) that he was very drunk and harassing one of her young-and-attractive friends and amping up his boorishness, and Sally was becoming loudly protective. I sensed that the situation was about to become untenable and for some reason I elected to intervene.
What I should have done, as Mike Birbiglia would say, was nothing. Stanley was undoubtedly seconds away from solving the problem and, as he was the bartender (and therefore the captain of the bar, vested with divine authority) and also much bigger than I am, I should have just let him do that and minded my own business. But at some point in my life I decided that I was the sort of person who was good at calming down agitated drunk people who were about to get into a barfight, so I began to approach Sally and the guy.
In my defense, I have, in fact, a pretty good track record of sticking my big nose into impending fights and calming everybody down, usually by getting in the way and offering to buy everybody a drink, and this situation did need calming down. Whatever my other flaws, I am the polar opposite of an angry drunk and, except on the rare occasion when something really gets my dander up (when I become an asshole like everybody else), an inebriated Bill is a friendly Bill, a sort of jovial, clumsy goofball, like a three-legged Maltese puppy. When, on a night on the town, drunk Bill sees some bros squaring up in the middle of the bar, his sudden appearance in the middle of the fight either reminds everyone that life is precious and that the bar attached to the Holiday Inn is a stupid place to get particularly angry about anything, or just confuses everyone enough that the conflict simmers away.
Whether this is actually a skill I have or whether I have just been extraordinarily lucky is, as yet, an unanswered question. On this night, certainly, it didn’t work. (The problem may be that I wasn’t actually drunk and therefore wasn’t in the appropriate canine headspace.)
I put down my phone or my book or whatever it was and walked towards the situation, intending to loudly encourage everyone to calm down. I believe Stanley was calmly ordering the guy out of the bar at this time, though my memory on that point is hazy. Yet as I approached, hoping to both convince the guy to just leave with his to-go food and to convince Sally not to rip out his larynx like Patrick Swayze in Road House, the guy locked eyes with me and took umbrage at my entire being.
The tenor, if not the exact words, of his statement, was: “What are you going to do about it? Oh, is this guy going to do something?”
I protested that I was not, grabbed the styrofoam plate that contained his to-go burger, and approached him further. I had intended to say something calming like “hey, man, it’s no big deal, why don’t you just take your food and go home and it won’t be a Whole Thing,” but I got about as far as “hey man” before I was in a fistfight.
He knocked the styrofoam plate out of my hand, knocked off my hat and took the world’s clumsiest swing at me. He barely made contact with my chest; it was the lightest, most butterfly-kisses of punches; I have been perfunctorily kissed goodbye with more harm to my body. I laughed and spun around, but also began to square up. I distinctly recall articulating the sentence “Well, you are now in a fight” in my head.
I had not been in a fight since middle school, though I had been in quite a few at that time and it is technically correct that my parents pulled me out of Niver Creek Middle School because I got into one too many fights. But I hold no illusions that my middle school scrapping adequately prepared me for a grownup barfight, and I harbor no secret martial arts skills. Nevertheless: I was in a fight, and I was resolved not to embarrass myself, win or lose. Also, this guy was clearly hammered, and I was not, so I had some hope that I would at least do okay.
I did not get the chance; my ability to beat drunk jerks in a fistfight remains untested. As I mentioned, as I finished turning around, I began to square up. I say “began” because I did not get all the way through raising my fists. Instead, at that moment, Stanley slammed into the guy at approximately one hundred miles an hour and knocked him to the ground.
It did not occur to me at the time but, in the years since, I have realized that in order to get from where Stanley was standing behind the bar to where he ended up, shaking this guy like a rag doll, Stanley must have traversed the entire length of the restaurant twice; once behind the bar, and then again in front of it. This had the added benefit of giving Stanley a full head of steam; he hit the guy like a freight train. I didn’t even have time for an adrenaline spike, because the fight was over as quickly as it began, and my concern immediately switched from “winning the fight” to “making sure Stanley did not kill this guy.”
Stanley didn’t kill him, the guy was banished from the bar without any material injury, and the rest of the evening passed with me already laughing about it and assuring my friends that I was fine and that it wasn’t that big a deal. It’s a funny enough story, and had it happened to a more reasonable person, that would be all it is: a charming anecdote I can tell and laugh about at parties; certainly no one’s favorite story of the night, but a pleasant way to kill a few minutes.
Yet it didn’t happen to a more reasonable person, it happened to me, and I can’t stop picking at it, because I am dissatisfied with the way the story ends. Looking back on it, I don’t want Stanley to have Falcon Punch-ed my opponent to the ground; I want to have beaten him myself. I want that story to end with me breaking the guy’s nose and forcing him, held by the scruff of his neck, to apologize to Sally and her friend. I want the takeaway from that story to be about how surprised everybody was that Bill is secretly a badass; I want it to be the sort of story I nobly refuse to tell, but which my friends awedly whisper about behind my back.
This is because I am a man, and as Phil Christman pointed out in his banger essay “What Is It Like to Be a Man,” the experience of masculinity is often typified by an “abstract rage to protect.” Like many men—like, possibly, all men—I harbor fantasies of doing something physically courageous in a crisis, maybe even dying heroically in the attempt. Reading about yet another mass shooting, I find it difficult not to wonder what I would do if one happened in my presence, and from there the only reasonable thing to do is imagine myself bludgeoning the shooter to death with a chair.
You surely do not need me to tell you that I know this is ridiculous. My body does not lend itself to action movie heroics, even in the unlikely event that such would be called for; I am not a retired Special Forces operative, I am a pudgy public defender who reads too much. I am 205 pounds of whiskey, cheap burgers, and Final Fantasy trivia. Even if I had the presence of mind to resist a shooter rather than just cowering behind a wall, it is unlikely that my unwieldy mass would be capable of doing anything other than soaking up a few bullets. Probably I would trip on my own shoelaces in the attempt to rush the guy and knock myself unconscious. But the fantasy remains, even as I know it is absurd, and even as I know that my “masculinity,” whatever that is, is not contingent on my ability to do well in a Die Hard situation.
I love musical theater, I do not watch football, I love Jane Austen, I do not go to the gym. I routinely mock the alpha male gigachad influencers on Twitter, those preposterous men who bemoan the “feminization” of the West and call on the American Male to reclaim his throne by being a troglodyte to attractive young women. Once, in high school, I volunteered to an acquaintance that my then-girlfriend had beaten me in an arm-wrestling contest, an admission made all the more mystifying by the fact that it wasn’t true. I am not, in other words, the sort of person who spends a lot of time worrying about being perceived as a “real man.”
And yet! And yet. There is still a part of me that hates the idea that, in a crisis, I would be too physically weak to stop some evil thing from happening; more than that, more than a mere fear of impotence, there is a part of me that cowers under the ludicrous notion that, if called upon, I could tap into some secret spring of berserker fury and stab a home invader to death with a fork. Why does this matter? It is highly improbable that I will ever face such a situation. Whatever opportunities for heroism my life may afford me likely exist in courtrooms, not battlefields. Further, I’m a Christian, and am therefore not supposed to be eager to inflict harm on my fellow man.
I have even done a few things in my life that could be possibly described as “badass,” such that I shouldn’t need to be so worried about my masculine prowess or whatever, as when I won a jury trial so completely that one of the jurors wrote a letter to the prosecutor urging him to apologize to my client for bringing the charges in the first place. Yet the nagging feeling remains; the sense that, strip it all away, I need to know in my heart of hearts that I contain the potential for violence, even if only deployed in a noble cause. A few days ago I was at a shindig and one of my friends said that she thought she would lose in a fistfight against everyone at the table (a table comprised of office workers, not athletes, to be clear) except me, and I had a hard time coping with that, even as I know it meant literally nothing and was just a silly joke, and possibly even a compliment about what a nice guy I am. I have no interest in getting into or investment in winning a fistfight with this person, who is one of my favorite people in the world, but it was difficult not to take it somewhat personally. My manhood, usually fairly low on the list of my concerns, was affronted.
And that night, in the bar, I had the opportunity to finally, finally, perform this function, a function I otherwise would likely never perform, and my good friend Stanley, my dear friend Stanley, took it away from me. I had the chance to stand against a drunken boor of a man who was harassing a female friend of mine and try to beat him down, to break his jaw in the name of all that was good and righteous in the world, and instead, my friend, the much larger professional bartender who absolutely was the right person to handle the job, stepped in and stopped me. Is it entirely ridiculous that I feel somewhat ambivalent about the whole situation?
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The Substack is back, friends, and with it your ability to gain my opinion every so often, on the off-chance you want it. I will unpause payments next week when I post my next piece, in case you want to get off of this particular train. In the meantime, tell your friends who might like to know that Bill’s weekly (ish) cornucopia of Weird Book Thoughts and occasional pretensions towards Insight is once again available for perusal!
Last summer I had to square off with a right wing drunk who was heckling some of the writers at a Prison Creative Arts Project event. I walked him off the premises while he libeled my friends and repined against “criminals.” I was mad enough to actually hurt him but finally he got a safe distance away, bid me “fuck my mother,” and walked an even safer distance away. Afterward I felt like an asshole for goading him. I suspect that if I’d knocked him out I’d have felt like a bigger asshole. Some things just can’t be fixed!
Both an excellent piece and a satisfying reminder that I'm definitely not a man!