Bar fights, and correct actions in them

The BBQ Pit
1

This isn’t a rant, because I don’t really have the energy for it, but I wanted to vent.

I’m bartending at a local bar, a real after work and neighborhood place where, generally, everybody knows each other and most of the sales go to regulars.

Sundays are generally pretty good nights, with people trying to stretch out the weekends and just hanging out until midnight or so. It’s a small place, and having ten people in the bar on a Sunday is a fairly busy night.

At 6, when my shift started, I had this guy sitting at teh end of the bar, drinking Coors light and generally being quiet. He kept talking to me, and, I ought to make this clear, he was a putz. Not the brightest bulb on the tree, argumentative but not belligerent (he kept insisting that HTTP is a programming language, and wouldn’t believe me when I told him it isn’t). Well call him “G”; I don’t know the guys real name, but I’ve seen him in there a few times.

A regular walks in, and starts hanging out and talking to some of the other people. This regular is an okay guy, but he’s one of those loud people who has to spread around false cheer, talk loudly, and just generally be obnoxious, in a mildly annoying but harmless sort of way. We’ll call him “Quad”, because his nickname is pretty close to that. His brother-in-law is in, and he’s this high-strung, pent up guy; he’s from Boston, and acts the role of a Southie (I have no idea what Southies are really like, but he makes a pretty big deal about it, so that’s how I’m describing him), acting like he’s always about to take a swing at some one. We’ll call him Southie. So far, so good; conversation ensues. In walks another friend of theirs, and a fairly regular Sunday night guy. This guy always displays the characteristics on someone snorting his paychecks; quick mood swings, intensified personality, tendency to forget he has already tipped me, white powder on his mustache, stuff like that. We’ll call him “F”, because I don’t know his name.

G is sitting at the end of the bar, drinking his Coors light, and making occasional conversation with me while I wash glasses. Quad, Southie and F are talking about going to another bar. A small crowd of regulars is at the far end of the bar.

G picks up a pool cue, and sights down it, to see if its straight. He is standing at this point.

Quad jumps up off his stool and starts screaming at the guy. “What the fuck are you doing with that pool stick? You were going to take a swing at him! Get outside!”. G puts down the cue, kicks his stool back, and starts backing up. Two of the other regulars are between Quad and G, holding both of them back, they’ve made it to the door, and I vault over the bar and get in between them.

G is standing outside at, I shit you not, a parade fucking rest (he was in the Marine Corps) while Quad (who is 6’4" and maybe 250) screams at him. Two guys are holding Quad back, and his two friends are behind him.

Okay, here’s the first real part of my rant. A lot of people, I’ve found, become real badasses when they’ve had a couple of drinks, ** if they have a couple of friends with them**. Give most guys a three-to-one advantage, and a belly full of (sorry, Coldie) Dutch courage, and it’s amazing how tough they get to be. Just for the record, everybody who’s ever gone looking for a fight backed up by a couple of buddies is a flaming fucking asshat who ought to, at least, not fucking drink.

So, we’re standing between them, while G reaches into is front pocket (he’s wearing a sweatshirt) for his cigarettes. Quad starts screaming “What, you got a gun or something, is that what your going for?” This goes on, and brings me to point two: everybody seems to need to believe they live in a fucking movie or something. Yeah, the most likely thing he’s going for is a gun. He’s been sitting in a bar, and playing pool, with a gun in the waistband of his sweatpants. Because, you know, that’s comfortable and inconspicuous. And the best thing to do believing he’s got a gun, is to try to provoke him. Dumbfuck.

So, while this guy calmly reaches in and pulls out his smokes, dumbfuck, I mean Quad’s friends are doing the over the shoulder trash talk. You know, the “he’s gonna fuck you up, get the fuck out of here” talk, with all the fucking pointing and shit that goes along with it. This is point three: I’ve seen this in ever fight I’ve ever seen. The people who do that are chickenshit little fucking cowards. They are always doing the “let’s you and him fight” fucking thing, and there ought to be a special law that deals with them, in particular, something like being a little shithead with intent to drive me bugfuck or something, with extra penalties if found do be doing so while in possession of a small penis.

So, one guy’s screaming, the other guy is standing there quietly, and that brings me to point four. I didn’t pay much attention to the quiet guy, and I should have. But my point is, if you really want to beat the crap out of someone, don’t stand there and scream and puff yourself up. I’m sick of the people who act like their all badass because they know that nothing is going to happen, that there are always going to be people in between them and the guy they’re threatening. If one is dead set on fighting, if it is time to turn to the last refuge of the incompetent, then shut up, calm down a little, wait for the intervening peacemakers to move, and take a swing. The blustering blowhard thing is just fucking annoying, and should only be done by high school students. If one does not like those rules, one ought to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, instead of trying to convince everybody of how fucking tough one is.

So, Quad gets lead back into the bar, and I walk G off the premises, telling him that, as far as I could tell, he hadn’t done anything, but if he went back in, there’d be a fight, and I don’t get paid enough to mop up blood. He asked if he was 86’d for life, and I told him not as far as I was concerned, but I didn’t want him to cause trouble with Quad. He displayed no signs of inebriation, understood what I was doing, shook my hand, and walked off. Figures; the quiet psychopath guy is the one who politely wanders off.

So then I walk back into the bar, and tell Quad to get the fuck out; he’s cut off for the night. He starts screaming that he didn’t do anything, that he prevented a fight, and that, and here’s my favorite part, he did the bar a favor. I didn’t know who started it, and didn’t care; the rules are, if you don’t know who provoked it, kick them both out. Oh, and point five: the more loudly one protests ones innocence, the less likely I am to believe one. People who didn’t do anything, in my experience, quietly say “I don’t know what happened, but I am sorry that there was a misunderstanding”. People who start shit always have great reasons why they suddenly got up and started screaming. It isn’t that they had a couple of beers and decided to let out their inner assholes that bothers me, it’s the fucking stupid self-righteousness that, without fucking fail, they manage to pull out of their asses and spew from their mouths that pisses me off.

So, I tell him I don’t care, he’s got to go, and he and his friends start screaming at me (“you know what, you’re an asshole”) etc etc etc. Very tiresome stuff. Newsflash guys, I don’t get paid to argue with drunk people (although, to be fair, they hadn’t had enough to drink to be drunk - I think they are just asshats by nature), and I’ve found that it doesn’t work.

So, then of course, I had to call my boss and wake him up at 11 at night and tell him I just kicked out a regular, that I had broken up another bar fight, and that Quad would probably come complaining to him. Now I have to sit around wondering if I’m going to get fired, which pisses me off because I like this job.

You know, the bar I work at is supposed to be some bad-ass OG latino gangster bar, and I do get my share of heavily tattooed guys, fairly dangerous looking guys coming in and drinking Tecates. But, and I hate to sound racist, in my experience, it’s the middle class, middle income, middle age white guys who seem inclined to try picking petty little stupid fights, and the multiple-gunshot wound victims who seem to be polite and well behaved.

This is my first rant, so I lack some of the strings of creative expletives that make for the great ones. I’m too tired to rant correctly, but I wanted to vent.

2

I’ve noticed this too. COPS is actually a fine example of this. The somewhat guilty guys are always quiet and, yes, decently embarassed that they’ve gotten arrested. The VERY guilty guys are always the ones who run from the cops and have to be wrestled to the ground, always shouting “I DIDN’T DO NUTHIN! I’M INNOCENT!”

3

bashere:

Thank you for the rant. It brings back memories of the late 80s when I bartended in New Orleans.

My best story concerns this group of three middle-aged mustached guys with beer guts that used to come in every Wednesday night. They’d stay for about two hours and drink about six beers apiece. I liked them because they tipped me ten dollars when they walked in, and I made sure there beers never hit bottom without a replacement standing by.

On the nights my story occurs there were some College guys there with their girls, fairly big guys, and rambunctious. I didn’t much like them because they were ordering complicated and time consuming drinks; Long Island Iced Teas, Daquiris, Frozen margaritas. Why the hell can’t people just order well drinks.

Seeing as they weren’t tipping and were a pain in the ass, I fell upon my old standby of trying to make lousy drinks, you know, poor a bunch of grenadine in the daquiri so it was sickeningly sweet and they wouldn’t order any more of them, but they didn’t seem to notice.

I’m not exactly sure how it started, but somehow the college guys (there were five,) got into an argument with the mustached guys. One of the College kids challenged one of the mustached guys to go outside. The guy laughed and offered to buy the kid a beer, at which point the kid prodded the guy in the gut with the blunt end of a pool cue, and cursed him out in fuckspeak.

I was about to say something, but the mustache guy smiled and said “Ok. We’ll go outside. But before I do, I better let my friends hold my gun and my badge for me.” Sure enough he took out a gun and a badge and handed them to his friends, and then he smiled at the kid again.

After a pale silence the kid said what have got to be the dumbest words I have ever heard. “What? Do you think that scares me?”

The mustached guy, now revealed as a Police Officer follows the kid and his friends out the door. A moment later the other two cops walk outside.

The three cops come back in about thirty seconds later. Apparently as soon as the kids got outside, they ran away.

4

Great opening post.

Just one question if I may to get some clarification?

The quiet guy called “G”? He was the one who checked out the pool cue to see if it was straight yes? Did I get this right? He shook your hand at the end of it all and simply walked off into the night not causing any further trouble?

He wasn’t some psycopath vengeance dude who beat the crap out of Quad later with a baseball bat or something? He simply copped it all sweet on the chin and moved on without any further drama?

If so, he might have been a “putz” but he also looks as though he’s got at least a bit of redeeming cool streak in him.

Now… as for myself and bar fights etc. Personally, I say this with a great deal of pride, but I’ve never been in a fight in my life. On one or two occasions I’ve been in the presence of some drunk morons who really wanted to take a swing at me, (or anyone if truth be known) but I’ve always been able to look 'em straight in the eye and say “Sorry my friend… I don’t want any trouble… truly. I’m just gonna move on…” and that seems to deflate their rage somehow. But that being said, I suspect the single GREATEST reason I’ve never been in a fight is because I simply don’t hang around “prime asshole zones” - and no offence to the creator of this thread because I understand that everybody’s gotta work and that’s cool, but shit, it has to be said, bars where bikies and gang dudes hang out are just plain troublespots looking for some trouble and action.

Like heroin, I know enough about that scene to know that it isn’t MY scene.

Great opening post though. I really enjoyed it! :smiley:

5

Very interesting rant. I’m with Boo Boo Foo in being confused about the way you describe “G”, who seemed to be an innocent party, and Quad, who seemed like a raging fuckhead. When you said that bit about the “quiet psychopath guy,” I was expecting you to later find Quad’s severed head in a dumpster, or something.

Anyway, minor quibble. That was a very cool OP. Hope you get to keep your job.

6

Bashere, you have my sympathy, and my congrats on a job well done.

I worked as a bouncer in a nightclub in Glasgow. Actually, is bouncer a word you’d use in the US? It’s the guy whose job is to control entry to the club, as well as to break up any fights and eject any trouble makers. I did it for two years, as it was one of the few wellpaying jobs suited a students hours.

This was a club on one of Glasgows more popular (and legendary) roads, called Sauchiehall Street - a long road, liberally scattered with pubs and clubs. This is an area fairly notorious for drunken mayhem and carnage, so it was quite an eventful job. Less eventful than the east end working mans club I worked bar at, but that’s a different story.

There would be 10 bouncers on duty on weekend nights, with 3 on door, 6 on the floor and the nights boss in an office. The management had a very simple policy in which fights we tried to break up - we’d only get involved in fights that started in the club, or as punters left the club.

One of the more entertaining ways to pass the time was to bet on who’d win fights that started out on the street. After a few months or so of picking form you noticed one overwhelming trend - the party that did less talk on the run up tended to win.

You also noticed that one type who should be ranked at slightly better odds to win than ninjas or cyborgs was skinny, quiet guys who said nothing, but stared all the way through the preamble. They’d absorb punches from 20 stone, shipyard working behemothes and fell them with blizzards of knees, heads and bites. Skinny necks that should have snapped like twigs would suddenly be hatred swelled messes of tendon and wire. It would routinely take 4 of us to pull one such guy off their poor victim, and we’d be damned polite as we did it.

From this I can only offer 3 pieces of advice:

  1. There are few situations where you will ever make yourself look more noble, smarter or sexier to women by having a fight.
  2. If despite this you decide to have one, remember to say nothing.
  3. Should you have picked an opponent who says nothing but stares at you like you’re the first decent meal his skinny frame has seen in a decade, roll up into a ball quickly. It won’t change the outcome, but an open coffin might still be an option.
7

I guess I have to jump in the brawl here on the side of G. Maybe it’s just an artifact of the way you chose your words, but it sounds like you have an anger at G that is not fair with actions that you described he did. It’s kind of personal with me I guess, because I am a quiet, ugly guy who people seem to want to blame for something, and have been kicked of out of bars, cities, states, and countries because it was the easiest solution. If he trully did nothing but try to avoid the fight, and reluctanly leave when you asked him, then please make that clear to your coworkers and bosses. Don’t blame him for simply minding his own business around assholes.

8

Bars I can see. Cities - OK. States - that’s a new one. Countries - ???

You’ll have to start a thread about this. What have you done to get kicked out of all these places? Even if “states” and “countries” were exaggerations, I’m curious as to why you were thrown out of cities.

9

Gary: We call 'em bouncers, too.

10

Quite seriously, and I’m not being ironic for once, I utilize my few years of Kung Fu training when there is a bar fight. I size up the people involved, sense their mood, look for obstacles and defenses, check my feelings, and get out of the way.

Years of training to know when and how to run away: priceless.

11

Most of what I learned of bar fighting I learned from movies or first hand from bars that tend to be populated by frat guys and yuppies so take it as you will. Here are my 10 rules for bar fighting:

  1. Always be the "cool"guy. The Steve McQueens, Clint Eastwoods and even the Segals and Stalones of the world aren’t the guys screaming smack-talk at the top of their lungs. Even if you lose, you won’t be remembered as that loudmouth who got punched in the face.

  2. The guy who throws the first punch always loses

  3. Little guys are scarier than big guys because a) you don’t know if they are crazy, b) you don’t know if they are a master martial artist, c) no one wants their ass kicked by someone half their size b) big fat guys generally seem to rely on their size to push people around or intimidate instead of using actual fighting technique

  4. If you fight a guy over a girl, the guy who loses will always get the girl (I call this the “I hope you’re happy now you big jerk!” syndrome)

  5. Never fight a guy unless he also has two friends to hold him back and talk shit…otherwise he will probably kick all three of your asses. (that’s one ass per friend, not that you are a guy with a triple-ass)

  6. Try to avoid fighting in seedy neighborhood bars. The last thing you want is to have the bartender lock the door from the inside and tell you “…now you CAN’T leave”.

  7. The “fight” is generally concluded when one guy says “these pussies ain’t gonna do nuthin”.

  8. Anyone who talks about all the fights he got into probably wants you to think he’s a badass cause he probably isn’t.

  9. Chances are, the last time the guy was in a fight was in the 8th grade. Unless he’s always coming to work with black-eyes and whatnot.

  10. Crazy always beats big

12

I know a guy who was thrown out of a country. Long story short: big guy with emotional issues + alchohol + placed in a country where everyone is smaller than him = big problems

13

mrsmith : excellent advice.

The gentlemanly, roll up your sleeves, piano player stops kinds of fights are a thing of the past. The problem nowadays is that there are too many guns.

You have to be pretty nuts to get in a fight anymore. Unless you are in a controlled environment and you personally know the other guy and have agreed to the conditions. Else, you will get shot. And that really, really hurts.

14

It’s not as big a deal as I made it sound. Basically people like to give me shit when I am alone, or with friends. Sometimes fights started, and when it became clear to the cops that I(we) hadn’t done anything, they usually decided it wasn’t worth trying to charge me(us) with anything, particularly when I(we) hadn’t even gotten a drink yet. If you are a non local the usual solution in that case is a vague threat that you should go back home. Which was the case with the state(Wyoming) and time with the country(Canada) when the cop just followed all the way to the border to make sure we left.

15

I used to work in bars, and now I work in a High School. I have broken up more fights than I can count (mostly in school.)

Bashere, I completely agree about the asshats that stand around a potential fight and instigate. At times, even as a teacher dealing with students, I’ve wanted to kick them a few times. If I get to intervene before a fight starts, they are the first people I yell at to shut up. It really helps the situation because: it takes the focus off of the two people who may fight; they often shut up because they don’t want to actually fight themselves, and they also tend to be the ones to attract more people who can also start instigating. These people are so manipulative and sad that they really want the drama of others punching each other. They will say damn near anything to get a fight started, usually using a person’s pride and trying to back the people involved into a corner. (The classic lines are, “S/he said something about your Mama…She think she cute…He think he tough…”)

The next thing I try to do is to reprimand both parties equally, also using pride. “Stop acting like you are twelve” sometimes works, or I ask both of them what the fight is about. (Almost always it’s something really stupid, a misunderstanding or neither person can even remember.)

If I physically break up a fight I never get in between the two people. I grab the person who’s winning or easiest to grab from behind and pivot them around and out of the fight. Kids tend not to mess with me having seen me do this a few times. When someone starts to break up a fight and has some success, other people tend to come running in to help break it up as well. Several times we have had students jump in to protect teachers while breaking up fights.

I don’t know how eager I’d be to break up fights outside of school with strangers, at least the kids have been through a metal detector.