kontextmaschine:

Oh shit, is it “tell stories about the fights you’ve been in” day? I’ve got a great one. It’s kind of long, because it’s got a bajillion digressions, but they’re all worth it.

So this is back in LA. It’s the only bar fight I’ve ever been directly involved in (I broke up a few others), it started with getting suckerpunched and ended in total victory, I absolutely fucking had it coming, and I’m proud as hell of it.

So two things first to establish some context. First, at this point I had been training in an MMA-style dojo for two years. The sensei had been raised into fighting the same way that the Williams sisters had been raised into tennis, by his USMC boxing instructor dad. Then he did BJJ under Royce Gracie down around Long Beach when MMA was first becoming a thing, but realized that all the other guys were a few years younger and didn’t have bad knees from high school football, so he decided to go into training instead, though first he studied American Kempo under this guy from Pasadena (a kind of glory hog who might have been the inspiration for the Cobra Kai sensei, though a serious master who had, in turn, studied under Ed Parker, the founder of the school and popularizer of karate in America). So he’d not only picked up from these three masters a lot about fighting, but a lot about training, and he was the best sensei you could ask for. I’d been realizing I needed to take up some physical activity to get fit when he moved into a storefront dojo just down the street in Echo Park. Went to one session and he worked me so hard I had to go outside and vomit in the gutter, and then I kept coming back three or four times a week until I left LA (with the exception of a few weeks after a particularly devastating punch broke, or at least cracked, one of my ribs).

The second thing is I’ve had wicked insomnia that comes and goes and it had finally gotten so bad I went to a doctor and got put on Lexapro, which is an antidepressant SSRI. Well, it worked I suppose - I was sleeping 14 hours a day, and when I was awake I was completely disinhibited. Always been kind of reclusive and socially anxious, but I became outgoing as all fuck, starting conversations with complete strangers and quickly turning them into friends (or enemies - during this period I pulled more tail than I ever have, but I also got slapped in the face several times). It’s weird, antidepressants really do change your personality. My sexual tastes changed, even. I could never talk dirty before but now I could do it like R. Lee Ermey’s audition tape, nonstop for minutes at a time without repeating myself. Which was nice, because that was now the only way I could get off. Also on top of this the drug and alcohol amplified each others’ effects several times over - I had used to be a kind of quiet, maudlin drunk - which was particularly interesting since this new personality had a taste for straight brown liquor.

OK.

So my friend was moving to Hawaii, so we all piled in a car and went up to this house up on Red Hill for a party, I brought a bottle of Jack and drank at least half of it there. Then we got in a cab to go down to Mountain Bar in Chinatown for a pre-party for FYF Fest. This was I think the first year they changed the name from “Fuck Yeah Fest”, to make it easier to get media I guess? Which is weird because an alt-weekly that won’t print the word “fuck” really defeats the point and why would you want to cater to people that get their information from people who suck, but then I suppose people who value pride and integrity over fame and money don’t long last in LA; for example me.

So Mountain Bar. I think there was maybe a bar on the first floor but the dance floor and another bar were on the second floor up a narrow flight of stairs, and oh before this I should talk about my hat. I was wearing a leather hat - I don’t know what style it is, people just call it my “Indiana Jones hat” which is pretty correct. Got it from a Russian leathercrafter on Melrose. Went into his shop one day and he’s working in the back on these big old ‘60s machines, KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK, and he stops and comes out.

“What you want?”

“I’m just looking.”

“Okay.”

KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK and I try on some hats he has on a rack, look in the mirror, settle on this one.

“What you doing, you say you just looking.”

“Well, I like this one.”

“Ooooh. You like that hat, maybe you like this hat.” I try it on.

“I hate this hat. I want THAT hat.”

He quotes me 60 dollars, I get the sense he’s Old Country enough to haggle, I walk out with it for 40.

Anyway so I’m wearing this hat, I’m drunk, I’m on Lexapro, the dance floor is crowded, the temporary bar is at the far end, and I just swim through the crowd with a breast stroke - hands forward through the crowd, shove people aside to force an opening, if one of the people I was pushing was a cute girl, grab her ass on the return.

Which was a thing I’d been doing. You wondered how I was getting slapped in the face? You wonder how I was pulling so much tail? That’s one of the things that really shocked me about the whole disinhibited experience - I grabbed a lot of random asses in bars those two or three months, and the ratio of positive to neutral to negative responses was like 2:3:1.

(Eventually I decided to go off Lexapro because in my more introspective moments I realized this shit was fucking ridiculous and not really in keeping with my sense of self. That’s one of the reasons I’ve self-diagnosed as type II bipolar - apparently if you give us antidepressants it doesn’t level things out but makes us flat ridiculous. Never bothered to get an official diagnosis ‘cause what’s the point? Not like I want to treat it. Like so many creative geniuses, I find the hypomania very useful [how do you think I’ve been churning out quality posts these past few days?] and I can structure my life to deal with the downswings.)

Okay, so do that a bit, get a few more drinks, and then someone taps me on the shoulder, and I think it’s one of my friends so I turn around and woo, punches coming at my face. Right hook and left hook and right hook, and the guy’s only really punching with his arms and maybe his shoulders so he’s clearly not a trained fighter, I instinctively start blocking and I stop a bunch of them but then he gets one around and lands a good one, hitting my nose, upper teeth, and cheekbone all at once.

The first time, back in the dojo, I took a hook to the face I literally spun around like a tornado and fell down flat on the floor. The second time I just fell down. After that I learned to keep my head. It was a good hit and staggered me, knocked the hat off my head and one of my contacts out of my eyes, but I caught myself, bent over at the waist. I looked up and saw the guy clear for the first time. Very post-frat boy, he literally had an open striped shirt over a pink polo with a popped collar, gym muscles, already confident in his victory, turning away from me to brag to his girl.

Man, I love fighting guys who lift. They all think they can fight. They’d come into the dojo every so often and sensei would invite them to go through the program - maybe 40 minutes of exercise, 20 of technique, an hour of sparring - and they’d never come back. There were still a bunch of locals around from when the neighborhood had been rougher who’d had a bunch of streetfighting experience and they’d put up a better show but even then training won out. If they really needed to be humbled sensei could have them spar against Emma, who was a small 12 year old girl, but was also a genius child of JPL rocket scientists who’d been training basically since she could walk and could beat the shit out of any of us - she actually got her second degree black belt this past weekend. But I digress.

Anyway, my nose felt runny so I wiped it with the back of my hand and looked down, there was blood on it. I looked up at the guy. I’m a very wordy person, I think in words. I remember this is when I thought the only word I thought during the whole fight.

“Alright.”

I launched myself at the guy. I only remember going straight into an uppercut, but I tried reenacting the memory once and the blocking is all wrong for that, maybe I did a 1-2 jab first. I caught him off guard but he started to put his hands up to block. Time slowed down, this is the only time I’ve actually experienced that and it works just like they depict it. I could tell I didn’t have a clean shot anymore, so I brought my right fist back to my left collarbone, turned the uppercut instead into a right elbow cross, uncoiled on the guy and connected with his jaw.

He spun around and fell down flat on the floor. I guess he didn’t have much practice fighting.

I looked around for my hat, picked it up off the floor, shook it off, and put it back on, keeping an eye on the guy ‘cause it would be really embarrassing if he caught me out the same way I just had him. He was writhing a little but not getting up, and at this point I see two guys coming through the crowd of hipsters - big, 350 pound dudes, black pants, black turtlenecks, black knit caps, black skin, clearly the bouncers, heading this way and I’m like

“Welll, fuck, they saw that and they’re gonna be pissed, aren’t they.”

And they walk up, and one dude lays a meaty hand on my upper arm, and I’m like

“Welll, fuck.”

And he looks at me, and in retrospect he probably saw my bloody nose, and he says, in this real deep voice,

“Was that dude fuckin’ with you?”

And I’m shocked for a quarter second but you know what, okay, yeah.

“That dude was fuckin’ with me.”

“Aight, we got this. Go get yourself a drink.”

And they walk over to him, still on the ground with his girl hovering over, and each grab one of his arms, pick him up, and frog-walk him to the exit.

And I’m standing there, adrenaline wearing off, thinking “man, I don’t know how all those guys are going to fit down that stairway”, and they just get to the top, line him up, and each kind of toss him down and I put my hand to my mouth, like ohhh, shit. All that just happened.

And so I get a drink and we stay another hour or two, and I end up leaving with the friend who’s going to Hawaii, and we decide not to wait for a cab and walk, which was kind of a mistake because you don’t realize how far distances in LA are until you try to walk them, but by the end of the night I’m almost wondering whether that actually happened or it was some sort of drug hallucination. When I wake up in the morning, though, it’s confirmed by the pain in my mouth and the bruises.