I got in a bar fight once. It was about a year and a half ago. My then-boyfriend (ex-Doper SolGrundy) was invited to a friend’s birthday, being held at a bar on Market street in San Francisco. I’d met the friend twice before, at parties and such, and each time, she’d been waaaay drunker than anyone else at the party. This time was no exception. There were already five guests at the bar, who were all at the “one or two beers, just slightly buzzed” stage. She was about one or two beers short of an episode of Girls Gone Wild. We get there, she runs out of the bar and gives Sol a sloppy kiss, then starts dry humping his leg. Ha ha, fun! You have a problem!
We go in, we have some drinks. It’s a nice place. Fancy, high-end clientele. Birthday girl is on a first name basis with the bartender. Big surprise there. Lot of gay guys. I remember checking out one standing near us, because he looked kind of like the guy who plays Apollo on Battlestar: Galactica, but skinny and not as butch. Not nearly as butch, as it turned out.
We’re there for twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. Birthday girl finishes her drink (her second since we’ve been there, and she was blitzed when we showed up) and as I watch, she fishes an ice cube out of it and squeezes it between her fingers until it squirts out and zips across the bar. It just barely misses Femme Apollo, who proceeds to completely lose his shit. He gets right in her face, and starts screaming, “Did you just throw an ice cube at me? You bitch, did you just throw a fucking ice cube at me?” He grabs a full martini glass off the bar, and throws it in her face. Then he throws the glass at her, but since he’s all of six inches away, it doesn’t work up much velocity, and just bounces off her chest and shatters on the floor. The thing is, the guy is so screamingly, stereotypically gay, it’s more hilarious than threatening. It’s like being menaced by a pomeranian. He’s so shrill, you can see cracks in the bar mirror forming just from the sound of his voice. He starts hitting the birthday girl. You remember the end of Blazing Saddles, when the big street brawl crashes through into the set of the musical? Remember that one queeny old guy beating on the chest of the burly cowpoke, screaming, “You brute, you brute, you vicious brute!” That’s exactly how this guy fights. He’s put a pretty good scare into the birthday girl, because being that close to Crazy is always intimidating, but he’s not actually hurting her much.
Finally, the “Don’t hit women” circuit clicks for one of her other friends, and he tackles the guy and starts raining punches on him. He gets off three or four before a bunch of other bar patrons pull him off, and he gets pushed outside to cool off. I know some of you are thinking, “Why didn’t anyone, including you, do anything while he was attacking a girl?” And I honestly don’t know. It was just so absurd, and so out of nowhere, that no one knew how to react. We were all sort of looking at each other, silently asking, “Is this really happening? Are you seeing this too, or is it just me?” It wasn’t until that first guy responded that the rest of us all sort of realized, all at once, “Oh, hey, we should be doing something, shouldn’t we?”
Once his attacker is removed, the human pomeranian bounces right back to his feet, and starts yelling at us all again. The gist of is, “How dare you people come into my bar and throw things at me! Get out!” Birthday girl is in tears. We were sitting in a corner of the bar, and pomeranian boy is between us and the door, which makes getting out kind of difficult, as no one wants to get too close to the little rabid gay man. Sol engages him, and tries to get him to calm down and back off. I’m standing just behind Sol, with my back to the rest of the group, so I don’t know if someone said something, or did something to set him off again, but all of a sudden he lunges at birthday girl again. Sol gets pushed against the bar, and his glasses come off. I get in front of the guy, push him back, and start trying to distract him while Sol tries to find his glasses. The bartender is begging with us to just leave, because we’re causing a scene, and pomeranian boy is apparently the place’s manager! Great managerial technique! I’m sure lots and lots of the other patrons there became regulars after watching the manager physically assault one of his female patrons!
I manage to convince Apollo the Pomeranian that we’ll leave as soon as my boyfriend can find his glasses, and he storms off into the back, leaving us alone. Except, we can’t find them. Fucking things are just gone. Sol’s so angry at this point that his hands are shaking, so he goes outside to have a cigarette and calm down. Me and two other guys keep looking for another half minute or so, before we go outside. During this period, every single gay man in the bar who hadn’t just thrown a hissy fit makes a pass at Sol while he’s having his cigarette. (Which ended up doing wonders for his ego. He still went home with me, though, which did wonders for mine.) We come back out and tell him no luck on the eyewear. He decides to duck back in so he can give the bartender his phone number, in case they show up.
Bad decision. Apollo is back, standing behind the bar, and the shrieking resumes immediatly. I hear it from outside, and duck back in, in case Sol needs help. He’s already turned to go, without leaving a number, because he doesn’t want to deal the guy. He’s exiting the building, with his back to the bar. I’m just entering the building, so I’m facing it. So I see Apollo grab a pint glass off the counter and throw it at us from across the room. I’m not sure which of us he was aiming for, but he hits me.
Remember, this is the guy who makes Richard Simmons look like a R. Lee Ermey. His limp-wristed, overhand, from-the-elbow throw deposits the pint glass in the middle of my chest with all the force of a wad of tissue paper. Now, this is the first fight I’ve been in since the fifth grade. As weak and ineffectual as the throw was, the guy still just threw a freaking pint glass at me! I want to kick his ass, but I’m not entirely sure how to go about it. At the very least I have to figure out how to get around the bar, and figuring out the logistics of that slows me down enough to recognize that just getting over the bar is more effort than is worth expanding on the guy, to say nothing of actually catching him and beating on him. So, I end up taking a couple of (what I like to think of as) menacing steps towards him, then just turn and leave. He stays behind, screaming at me that he’s going to call the cops and have us arrested for trespassing. I’m certain the cops will be entirely uninterested in the bits of the story where he assaulted three people, one of them a woman. It’s the guys who were “trespassing” in a public bar during normal operating hours that they’re going to want to bust.
The rest of the party decided to find another bar. Sol, frustrated and blind, wanted to go home, so we hailed a cab back to his place, where we discovered a pleasant way to work off all the adrenaline we’d generated at the bar. And that’s the last time I saw a fight in public.
At least, for a fairly generous definition of the word “fight.”
