Fight Club! – Fringe League

Happy Tuesday, everybody. Wanted to post earlier, but got held up by errands and ran into a…well, an adventure.

Y’all, this one is fresh off the presses!

So, allow me to set the scene:

I’m with my mother at a local Grocery Outlet (one of those errands I mentioned and for previously stated reasons) doing what you might expect – grocery shopping. We’re browsing the produce and cold cuts, when a white chihuahua runs by without a leash. My mom sees it and laughs. She asks me where it could have come from, but I told her about the man I saw holding it a minute prior. He was a bigger dude (around, not tall), with stringy brown hair, and a white shirt – details that will come back later. Just picture a Brett Gelman with about fifty pounds and twenty years of heavy drug use on him.

We finish up her shopping and are heading up one of the aisles towards the checkout lanes when I see that same white chihuahua run passed up ahead. I hear a grumbled voice say…something, and then see the dog run back the way it came. What was a grumbled voice grows pretty suddenly into adversarial shouts.

My mom stops and I walk ahead to the cross-section of aisles where an older gentleman who looks exactly like Michael Harney (I’m serious, I almost stopped for an autograph) is shouting a good ol’ Mr. White Shirt.

I don’t quite hear what was said at the beginning, but the pretty unmistakable gist was that Grandpa Michael said something about Dirty Brett’s dog, and Dirty Brett wasn’t having it. A store manager walked up to the commotion and she started doing managerial things – asking what the problem was n’ so forth.

Dirty Brett, like a gentleman, starts raining F-bombs on her like it’s the Shelling of London and he’s psyched to play Germany. Grandpa Michael steps up, calling him an asshole, presumably to defend “the lady’s honour.” Dirty Brett decides he’s totally right and directs all his further barrage of cusses right at Grandpa Michael. Grandpa gives him the ‘put-up-your-dukes’ posture and Brett does the same.

A couple of things before we go on.

Firstly, I got to recognize, in the moments to follow, a particular privilege I enjoy in life. I’m 6’4″ (a question I get asked all the goddamn time by strangers) and float anywhere between 200 lbs and 245 lbs depending on motivation, the time of year, alignment of the stars (you get it). When it was “dunk a freshman in the garbage day” in highschool, I got passed right over on account of my height. For context, the only other fight I’ve been involved in or have had to break up since grade school was defending my girlfriend Amanda from a crazed neighbor (Short version: diagnosed schizophrenic off her meds, shouting “You bitch!”, charged Amanda in our apartment complex’s laundromat. I got in between them immediately and the imposing height was all I really needed to diffuse the situation – or at least keep Amanda safe.).

Secondly, in real life, people that think they’re so ready to fight do not know how to fight. This is coming from someone (me) who readily accepts that he’s utterly delusional in his martial prowess. Does the voice in my head tell me I could bite the ass off a bear and stop a charging leopard with a well-time front kick? Yes! And that’s the problem! But I accept that I’m probably incorrect here!

So Grandpa Mike takes his stance, Dirty Brett wastes no time in throwing a punch, and the two clash.

Now, when I say “clash,” I really mean- well…picture a fight between seven-year-old’s on the playground. Are you imagining how they throw “punches”? Do they have their heads way back, faces pointed away, throwing sideways hammerfists with their fingers half-curled? Then you got it. That’s precisely how the first and only “punches” of this Seniors’ League brawl were thrown.

That’s partly what made me feel safe jumping in between them to break it up. I sure as hell know I’m not trained in how to throw a well-executed punch, but now that I’m just as sure these yahoos don’t either, well…those are odds I’m happier with.

I stand between them with my back to Grandpa Mike looking at Dirty Brett. I found this moment fascinating for a couple reasons. For one, it was oddly reminiscent of the laundromat incident. Having about nine inches of height on Dirty Brett, his eyes never came near mine (I mean that in the way of eye contact, but I guess physically too- ah, you get it). Secondly, I shouldn’t be in between these two guys, but I was. Like, what the hell? I’m not the type at all to intervene in public brawls. I lay all the credit with them both being long in the tooth and little-kneed, respectively (and we’ll get to what I mean in a second).

Management and customers are around us now, and Dirty Brett tries to throw a kick passed me at Grandpa Mike and I slap it out of the way. His bones must be hollow like a bird’s, because even though he really put his body into it, there was zero power behind it (hence my theory about his little knees).

And it was at that moment that I felt my ego squirt itself into the situation. I’m not fucking kidding you when I say that Jason Stathem’s voice began narrating my thoughts. They went as follows:

“Okay, you son of a bitch. The punch was strike one. That kick? Strike two. Try something else, anything else, and I get violent.”

Now, that was about the end of the fight anyway. In total, you had some shouting, a failed punch from either side, a kick from Brittle-Bone that got swatted away, and that’s it. Management told both men they had to leave, we got in line, mom got her groceries, and we left.

The real point to this whoooooole thing, the real meat of it, was the examination of the immediate aftermath and the perceptions of the event, including my own.

Remember that Stathem soliloquy we had a few moments ago? Well, the way I figured it, I was serious. Now that I was between them, if he threw another aggressive action my way, intended for Michael Harney or not, I was going swing back. The way the mental movie played out in my head is that Dirty Brett moves forward, I plant, and front-kick him to his tummy; or the same, but I drop and take him down, swing to his back as he tries to stand, and I snatch his neck with a rear-naked choke.

“Evan,” I hear you begin with a questioning tone, “are you a fan of the UFC?”

“I follow combat sports, yeah,” I would say back. “MMA being the big one. And there are other promotions out there – Bellator, ONE Championship, Rizen, WSF, PFL, etc – but that’s besides the point. Yeah, that’s why I know some of these terms and think I could look-see-do recreate them in a street fight. But, I would also stress that earlier (and much more grounded) point of ‘I’m super goddamn delusional with regards to my martial capabilities!'”

That leopard example? That wasn’t a joke. That was a real-life reference. Coworkers and I had a MONTHS-LONG debate over whether or not I could physically fight off a mountain lion.

But back to the point at hand. Let’s examine any of the outcomes Jason Stathem’s voice told me to try:

1. I take him down and choke him out.
   Likely ways that plays out: I grab his legs, he falls, and he cracks his head against the linoleum. Now I’m part of the police report this just turned into. Or he goes down, I take his back, but since I’ve never applied an RNC, I get over the face instead of under the chin, and he bites into my arm with his dirty-ass teeth.
2. I front kick him as he charges in.
   Likely ways that plays out: It works. He comes at me now angry, but I channel my inner Darren Till, elbow him upside the head, and he drops. That’s bad because a) if we’ve forgotten, I have my mom with me, she doesn’t need to see her son like that; b) it’s another scenario where I become part of a police report; and c) I don’t need to know what that kind of deliciously terrible power feels like just yet.
   All of that, or, I go to kick him, I slip (because I’ve never fucking done it before), and Dirty Brett soccer-kicks me in the head. Again, my mom doesn’t need to see that, plus now my glasses are probably broken and I can’t drive us home.

Now, as I’m going over all these reasons in my head as to why I’m glad the fight didn’t escalate, we pass by a gentleman who saw the whole thing standing in the parking lot talking to management.

“And here’s the young man who got between them,” he says as we pass by. “Deflected that kick, too. Like some of that UFC, eh? Ha-ha-haaa!”

(Quick side note, here. While after he said that, I just laughed politely and nodded at his joke…y’all, I wanted to hug that man, take him to the side, and start asking, “Did it really look that cool?? Was it like this? Or like this? Do you think I could have taken him?” Probably one of the best compliments I’ve gotten in months.
Anyway…)

While we laugh, another older gentleman who saw things unfold came up. “Yeah,” he says, “I was just thinkin’ that if he tried anything else, I’d jump in there and knock him one.”

“Yeah?” I laugh with him, thinking he’s joking too.

“Oh, yep. And I’d ask him, ‘how’s it feel to get punched in the throat by an old man, huh? Haha! Punch him right in the throat, yep.”

I…I just…

I solidly learned a lesson today, and that lesson is this:

As people on the street, as a whole, we think fighting is way easier than it actually is. Just like Grandpa Michael Harney, most of us think we can just walk up with the option to kick someone’s ass. If you try that, that someone will probably kick your ass right back. I am supremely confident that Grandpa Harney thought he’d crack this disrespectful prick and that’d be the end of it. I’m just as supremely confident that, if left to their own devices with no intervention, Dirty Brett – even with his light-ass bird bones – would have set his chihuahua down and gorilla whomp’d on Old Man Harney until we needed all the king’s men to put him back together.

So, just, unless you’re actually trained in self-defense, be careful about your estimation of your abilities; and I’m guessing that if you’re a trained fighter in any capacity, you don’t need me telling you any of this.

Anyway, that was today’s adventure. Take it easy and we’ll be back Thursday!

Ciao!