A Bar Fight Story

on unexpected violence & looking like one of them Pixars

As a note: I’ve been posting a free piece every other Friday and a piece for my paid subscribers on the Fridays in between. This has not felt right for some time now because I would prefer to kick off the weeks with my writing. I am moving the publication days to Mondays for now; we shall see if this feels better. Thank you for allowing me to experiment with this newsletter.

TW: a brief mention of domestic violence; a brief mention of self-harm

I knew something was amiss when the general din erupted into shouting.

My friends and I were gathered at a crowded bar. The energy of the room buzzed; I stood behind a couch with a whiskey soda and chatted with C, who’d just had an odd encounter in the bathroom.

“It was a bathroom with one stall,” he said. We were shouting at one another because of the noise of drunken twenty-somethings like us—young adults loosed into the world who were too intoxicated to control their volume. Apparently, a guy entered the bathroom and stared at him. With an assessing, sloppy look, he slurred, “Hey. You look like one of them Pixars.”

“He said that you look… like one of them Pixars?” I repeated.

“I think he meant Woody from Toy Story,” C said.

This was a reasonable interpretation of a puzzling statement. If C was to be mistaken for a Pixar character, it would likely be Woody. Back then, he was in the habit of wearing snap-up vintage Western shirts and jeans. He was even gifted with a mop of what I called “Lego hair”—very thick brown hair that looked like it could be pulled off and on.

But lo: it was the guy who called C one of them Pixars who, for whatever reason, started a bar fight soon after. He threw a man over the couch that I was standing behind. The bar erupted into chaos as C yanked me away from the body hurtling in my direction. Shouting came from all directions. Meanwhile, I looked around to see if my friends were okay. At the time we were all scrawny, aspiring writers living in or near San Francisco, and we spent a lot of time together. I was not interested in seeing any of them punched in the face by a seemingly arbitrary round of fisticuffs; I spotted a few of them backing away toward the walls, which seemed like a smarter idea than what I was doing—which was remaining behind the couch beside the body of the guy who was lying on the ground and groggily attempting to right himself.

Well-prepared for such occurrences, the barkeeps—all women, I noticed—swiftly moved out from behind the bar and tore the fight apart. The scrapping men were too drunk to argue when they were thrown out of the bar, but even after they left, the bar remained at a high-pitched volume due to the startled witnesses, most of whom had probably never seen a bar fight before. I certainly hadn’t.

What surprised me about the bar fight, which remains my first and only encounter with such violence, was how suddenly it started and ended. There was no time to see who was punching whom or what had instigated the rumble.

Based on a study published in the journal Aggressive Behavior [2013] by Dr. Michael Parks et al: one-third of bar fights are typically broken up by bystanders, and bar fights are more likely to be broken up if the fighters are men. In fact, 65% of bar fights between men are shut down by third parties, as opposed to only 17% of bar fights between men and women—even though fights between men and women are more common. Parks chalks this up to the fact that fights between men and women are less likely to escalate to a degree as highly. violent as fights between men, so bystanders tend to not get involved with the former.

This conclusion perplexes me because when I picture public violence between a man and a woman, I’m much more likely to be worried about the woman than I would be if I witnessed a fight between two men. My assumption would be that the man and the woman were experiencing domestic strife, and I’d fear that additional violence when they got back home would be far more damaging than any violence witnessed in public. My hypothesis is different than Parks’s: to me, bystanders avoid stepping in with such fights because of the age-old mentality that a [major air quotes] “lovers’ tiff” is not meant to be interfered with. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in 1871 that a husband could not beat his wife; at the same time, domestic violence wasn’t taken more seriously by police until the 1990s. Plenty of people still have the notion that a man is well within his rights to discipline his wife or female partner.

But let's return to the bar fight I witnessed over a decade ago, which was between men of similar size and shape.

Later, when I got back to our apartment and looked in the mirror, I realized that there were splatters of blood on my face and neck. I had no idea how they’d gotten there, but there they were: evidence that I’d been in the vicinity of some men who decided that getting rowdy in a bar was better than simply enjoying a drink and some company. I doubt it was a fight that started for any good reason. Maybe one had called the other a kind of cartoon character.

Sometimes, when I’m seized by an anger that I don’t fully understand, I feel the desire for violence. What stops me is the understanding of consequences; when it comes down to it, I don’t actually want to hurt anyone. A part of me is jealous of the man who started the bar fight that night. He was drunk and unafraid of consequences, I am fairly sure, and whatever demons were bothering him that night seemed to be expelled, if only momentarily, before he was thrown out. Instead of punching a stranger, I follow the gendered tendency of women to self-harm when they’re upset or angry, turning the anger inward. Instead of splattered blood, I end up with raised scars—a habit I’ve been unable to shake since I was thirteen.

And so I’ll admit that the night I was caught up in that bar fight was somewhat exhilarating. I am not a fan of violence. I do not think that violence is the way to solve problems. I think that being drunk and angry is not a good excuse to hurt someone. But that wild, animalistic impulse is one I envy. We can’t always want things that are good for us.

Come along with me on a journey through The Unexpected Shape education portal, where we provide both free, low-cost, and premium offers. I’ll walk you through the path that we recommend; of course, you can always simply select the things that you want in any order. The education portal that this video walks through is right here.

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Today’s Links Love will only have one link. My former assistant chloe almeda has embarked upon a creative endeavor that has me absolutely gobsmacked. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s called a home for creating, and for $4/month, you can dip into her magical universe of voice notes, videos, recommendations, community life, and so much more.

In fact, it’s such a one-of-a-kind space that I’ll just share what she has to say about it:

This community membership is designed to support and inspire your own creative process through carefully curated resources, voice-notes, artwork, recommendations, mini workshops, community conversations, bookclub discussions, creative project updates, journal entries, monthly digests, a library full of archived content, and whatever else we're feeling especially inspired by, could use more support in, or are doing our best to make sense of…

a space for creating & taking care while in community

Have a look. I can’t wait to see how much more it grows.

Trazadone. Frilly wildflower tucked into a mason jar. Plotter notebooks. Fountain pens with extra-fine nibs. The cool summer breeze. Nature by Tommy Pico. Water with plenty of ice in it. Holding hands with C. Feeling like I deserve to be alive. Long phone calls with M. Daphne’s velvet belly. The fledglings that visit our yard, now with the beginnings of feathers instead of fuzz. Finally learning how to manage the money that comes in and out of the business. Encouragement. Tangerine juice from the corner grocer. You, the reader. Thank you.