Shame on the macho men

I was at the Empty Bottle the other night with some friends when I found two of them embroiled in a losing game of pool against two meatheads — real Anglo-Saxons, one with a shaved head and the other with tattoos on his neck. The apes were beating my friends pretty badly and getting excited about it. After the game the Alpha Anglo started hassling my friends about playing another game for twenty bucks. He had bulging eyes and thick veins running up his neck. His arms were muscled and sinewy and hairless. I told my friend to take the bet, but with me as his partner. The ape said something about how if I was some sort of shark he would beat us up with his pool cue in the parking lot after we left the bar.

I found myself delighted when our competitor came back just before his break and said that his girlfriend had mandated that we lower the bet to ten bucks — I gathered she was bankrolling his wager. I had seen them conferring moments earlier and imagined their conversation being something along the lines of, “Babe, you know I’ll beat these pussies.”

The Alpha man broke and didn’t make anything. I ran five balls and then sewed up Alpha’s partner with a savvy safety shot. The partner still managed to make three balls before my partner knocked our last two in, and then the eightball. The game was short and sweet and devastating to the egos of our testosteroney victims. The lead Mongoloid clapped ten bucks into my hand with a frown and a mumble, and my friend and I relished breaking into the circle of wound licking that the two players and their girlfriends had made so we could shake their hands under the pretense of good sportsmanship. The girlfriend of the lead male was scowling at her mate. The moron had lost her ten bucks and looked like a loser. He was thoroughly shamed. He was an asshole, and probably will be his entire life. He was cocky and macho and not smart, and it was a pleasure to make him look like a pitiful ass in front of the girl he wanted to impress.

I love making people who threaten me with physical violence look like idiots in front of their girlfriends. It’s a much-preferable retaliatory method than actually punching back.

For some reason these sorts of things happen often around pool tables, where I spend quite a bit of time. Another instance along the same lines happened in Lawrence, Kan., a couple of years ago, and also involved a tough guy trying to look hot for his lady, who undoubtedly let him sleep alone that night.

I was making my rounds around an eight-ball game against my friend Tom, who was at the front of the bar buying some beers, when I heard from a booth near the end of the pool table, “Hey, nice fucking shirt!” The guy was staring at me. I looked down at my relatively tight and high-necked all-over-print t-shirt featuring San Francisco landmarks, looked back at him, and said thanks. I really did think it was a nice shirt. Still do. I continued shooting pool, then the guy said, louder, “Nice shirt you fucking faggot!” making sure I knew for certain he was not complimenting me.

Okay, here we go.

I stood in front of the booth in which the yelling dude had sat with a girl next to him and a guy and a girl across. Yelling dude rose, stood a few inches from my face, attempted to establish whether or not I had a problem with him (although I was sure we were past that mattering at this point, as I explained to him), and he went on to air his grievance: that I, in the process of leaning down to shoot a pool ball into a pocket, had stuck my ass in his face right in front of his girlfriend.

Ah, the girlfriend ticket. She was sitting with a facade of nonchalance in the booth, looking nice and mediocre. I started making sarcastic remarks to the man seething in front of me. His friend was just over his shoulder, ready to pummel my face, and just as the situation was about to explode into sloppy, drunken violence, my friend Tom walked up and smashed a full glass bottle of beer on the edge of the booth table.

This may sound crazy or irrational — the act of smashing a glass bottle — but it was actually the most perfect action anyone could have taken in this situation. No one who really wants to stab a person with a jagged stump of bottle breaks that bottle on a table. If someone is really up to stabbing, they break the bottle first on their adversary’s head, then commence thrusting whatever’s left into their skin. Breaking a bottle on a table is a threat — but a pretty tame one. It’s meant to diffuse a situation — to let the people involved know that things could get very serious momentarily, and that they should consider the far-too-infrequently-considered-in-drunken-bar-situations option of thinking before they act. Did this guy really want to fight me because I stuck my ass in his face on accident? Probably not, but he was going to do it anyway, until Tom smashed a bottle and made things potentially consequential.

After the bottle broke, the guy standing in front of me — whose gaze formerly purveyed totally concentrated, manly aggression — assumed a much more hesitant continence. Beer from the bottle had splashed all over his girlfriend — admittedly an unfortunate case of collateral damage — and she said something about glass in her eye, which apparently was not that serious because she was fine, albeit shocked, moments later. The attention of the entire bar turned toward us. Tom dropped the bottle stump, I stood my ground, and the bar’s security goons descended to separate the involved parties. I explained to them my side of the story, in which I was a victim of jockish antagonization, and they ushered the two aggressors out the back door, their ladies in tow. Tom and I were instructed to finish the unbroken bottle of beer and leave quietly out the front.

The guy who had tried to fight me was a buffoon. I am dismayed that his girlfriend was covered in beer and may or may not have gotten a shard of bottle in her eye. But, in the end, it probably taught her a lesson: Don’t continue to date the moron who caused this situation in the first place. As Tom and I ambled on to our next destination, gleeful from our victory over a stupid ass and energetic from the excitement, I could only imagine the defeated tough guy stomping down the alley home, ignoring his irate girlfriend’s repeated admonishment: “What the fuck were you thinking?”