On Faith and Fighting

It has occurred to me that I am a bit like a Jack Russell Terrier. I’m small, weak and testy, but I bark like I can tear everyone else apart. I fancy myself a tough guy, imagining all sorts of scenarios where I crack someone in the jaw, land a spinning back kick or give one of those great head slams like Mel Gibson did to Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon. But when it comes right down to it, I have weak, gimpy hands that can’t hold a punch well at all, I’m not terribly agile or flexible and I’m pretty sure I’d get a concussion if I slammed my head against someone else’s. But still, it’s nice to imagine.

Early on in life I found, much to my despair, that I didn’t really believe in anything ethereal or spiritual. Oh trust me, I wanted to. I’m not pleased at all with the concept of mortality and I would be totally psyched to find that not only is there a heaven, it’s got beer and a kickass jukebox, but I’m not holding my breath. All I know or trust is the physical world; all I have faith in is people…which is a problem in and of itself because I pretty much hate everybody.

I think that’s why the idea of fighting has always been appealing; you get the rush and the affirmation of your “aliveness” through intense physical contact, and you also get to exercise your distaste for your fellow man. In a perfect world, every single night of my life would end by way of the bar fight scene in Hooper: my friends and I would get into a huge brawl with a bunch of strangers, and then we’d all laugh and make friends while lying in the street after being thrown out by the establishment. Then we’d fall asleep at my place drinking beer and watching videos of my old stunt gags.

But it’s not a perfect world. You can’t even get into a fight in a bar these days, you get tossed to quickly. Plus, most of the people I like enough to want to fight with don’t understand why my wanting to punch them in the face is a compliment. Nevertheless, I do what I can. I have a long-running slap fight with a couple of friends. It’s no fight club, but it does add a certain spice to one’s evening.

The truth is, I have been in a few fights in my life, but they weren’t pleasant. There was no bonding or catharsis; hell, I didn’t even fight back. There was only pain, humiliation and anxiety…hardly the stuff of a Hal Needham film. Here’s how my fighting career really went: I spent five years with someone who hated himself and hated me, he occasionally hit me, sometimes kicked me, destroyed some of my paintings and even once beat me with his shoe. (It would take too long to explain why this went on for five years. Suffice to say, imagine all the times you’ve felt like you had to punish yourself and then imagine doing it by way of a relationship.) In one particularly comedic instance — well, comedic to me as I have a horrible sense of humor — he broke his hand hitting me in the head. Yes, someone broke their hand over my head. That should be a cool story, but it isn’t.

These fights did the exact opposite of what the movies taught me fighting should do. They made me feel weak. They made me lose faith in the world around me, not to mention myself. They made me feel stupid. Ever since that relationship ended, I’ve been trying to redevelop the image of myself I had in my head, to reconnect with the bravado that had once informed my relationships and infused them with a reckless joy and playful fury. Slapping a friend every now and then, threatening to take them outside and kick the shit out of them, it’s all part of this warped way of reminding each other that we’re alive for now and capable of doing something ridiculous and unexpected. For me, it’s also a way of reclaiming the violence that marred those years of my life; to reassure myself that if ever put in that situation again, these gimpy hands of mine could take the fucker apart. Then I’d walk out the door, throw a match over my shoulder, and Remo Williams my way out of there.

I suppose I want to fight because I want to heal. I’m still angry and ashamed. I pick fights with my friends because I want to remember what it’s like to trust people to not really hurt you…or more to the point, to trust them to hurt you just enough to make you stronger. Is that healthy? I doubt it. But this is a matter of faith; I’ll work on mental health later.

Why I'm Only a Man

When I was a kid, one of my teachers asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. My response was, simply, “A boy.” When queried further I explained in what I can only assume was an exasperated tone, “Because girls can’t do anything!”

And it was true at the time. That same year I became the first girl in my town to join—well, infiltrate—the all-boys recreation center basketball league. The coach saddled with me was so infuriated by the very notion that he tried to cobble together a “separate but equal” girls’ league, where the fundamentals seemed to take a backseat to slapping and screaming. However, I refused to play in the girls’ league and stuck with the boys. My teammates and competitors hated me, but the first time I harassed the basketball out of the opposing team’s hands they realized that maybe a girl player was good for something. Especially when it came to playing defense. I was tenacious. I would steal from a gay orphan with one leg if you gave me the chance.

But I digress…I was talking about my youthful notion that girls couldn’t do anything—not anything worth doing anyway. At best, they could only hope to follow the boys. To illustrate how I came to this conclusion, let me give you a rundown of my three favorite movies as a kid:

1. Lone Wolf McQuade starring Chuck Norris and David Carradine
   I can’t really remember the plot of this film, but suffice to say, the shit goes down, the bad guys kill McQuade’s dog, and he rains a world of hurt down on them. Now, I know these days it’s all the rage to show ass-kicking, leather-clad hot chicks flying through the air and destroying anybody within spitting distance. But when I was a kid, girls didn’t do that in movies. (And now that they do, let’s be honest, they’re just so snotty about it. Always with a quip or an emasculating flirt before they tear some guys face off.) Lone Wolf just did what had to be done. That’s what I’m talking about.


2. KIDCO starring Scott Schwartz
   A twelve-year-old boy and his four sisters create their own fertilizer business by composting the manure from their parents’ horse farm. The sisters were entirely incidental to the success of the company; mere shit-shovelers, really. The boy was the visionary. And why? Because he tried a hundred other schemes and failed before he came up with the big money-maker. In fact, until he hit it big one got the impression that it was the mere thrill of the pursuit that drove this kid to try and try again. Typically, his sisters took the piss out of him whenever they got the chance, but as soon as the money started flowing in, boy were they ever on board!


3. Watership Down starring animated rabbits tearing each other apart
   The story of an epic journey in search of freedom. Needless to say, all the rabbits that embarked on this odyssey were male, with the exception of one female in the beginning who wandered out into the open to eat some frou-frou flowers only to get her ass snatched up by a hawk. But who didn’t see that coming?

So maybe I was warped early on. All I know is, I’m jealous of men and always have been. I idolized my older brothers, even though they often tortured me and never let me play army with all of their friends in the woods near our house. I find the world of men mysterious and impenetrable. A few times in high school, I even snuck into the football team’s locker room while they were practicing and just wandered around, mostly marveling that such a smell could linger when no one was in sight. Seriously, what the hell went on in there?

All of this leads me to my love of the phrase “I’m only a man,” and the reason why it happens to be the name of this column. What I like about that particular sentence is that women can’t say it, and what’s more, there’s no suitable feminine equivalent. Saying “I’m only a woman” is something entirely different. It sounds self-loathing and pathetic. Saying, “I’m only a human,” sounds like you aren’t actually a human at all and you’ve just revealed too much. It’s a sentiment that belongs to men and men alone, thus it both compels me and pisses me off to no end.

If you’re reading this and you’re a man, say it. “I’m only a man.” Say it right now. Seriously.

Ok, now say it again, but this time say it defiantly, like someone has just questioned your integrity simply because you made a mistake. Say it like it means something.

“I’M ONLY A MAN!”

It feels good, right? It’s the simultaneous acknowledgement of human fallibility and the unspoken weight that you, as a man, are meant to carry. Instead of being weak, you’re self-aware. Instead of being inconsiderate, you’re earnest. Instead of being wrong, you have a RIGHT to be wrong. Damn you, you lucky bastards.

In conclusion, I obviously never realized my goal of growing up to be a boy. And to be honest, I since have found that there are certain desirable elements to being a woman. Nevertheless, I still find myself occasionally wishing I could get into one of those great bar fights like in a Burt Reynolds movie. I’d break a chair over someone’s back, crack a pool cue on some guy’s head and then get thrown through the front window into the street. And when I’m sitting there covered in blood and breakaway glass, someone, perhaps a disappointed Sally Field, would walk up to me and ask, “Why do you keep doing this?”

I know my answer. But something tells me she won’t get it.