In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Try it now.” Of course the engine wouldn’t start, but at least he looked like a man. Now the guy says, “Call Triple-A. I don’t want to get my cuticles dirty.”
    It’s the same thing with fighting. Guys used to have stories where they said, “This son of a bitch spilled a drink on my old lady at the bar, so I got in his face and said, ‘If you’re looking for trouble, you found it. You’re in for a world of hurt.’ ” Now dudes tell stories that go, “I honked at a guy and he got out of his car so I called 911. But I got a busy signal, so I locked myself in and hit the OnStar button.” What happened to the bullshit factor where you at least pretended to be a guy?
    Here’s a good fight story. And it’s all true.
    I was about twenty-one and was with five buddies looking to get laid at a party. It was a nice house in the hills and someone’s parents were out of town. The problem was I was the only one not getting laid, because I had hooked up with a nutty chick. So I wanted to leave. As I was walking down the stairs exiting the party, the chick told a group of tough guys who were just arriving that I had hit her. I had done no such thing but now I really wish I had. So they followed me down the stairs and were threatening me.
    It was like some multicultural gang from a bad TV show—a big husky Mexican guy, a brother, and three white guys. I said I couldn’t fight because I had arthroscopic knee surgery three days earlier; I still had stitches and just took the brace off. But the big Mexican guy responded, “I’m gonna break your other knee.” I was drunk, so I said, “Okay, it’s just me and you, right? You’re the one with a beef. If your friends promise not to jump in, I’ll fight you.” He agreed, so we headed out to the street and I started beating him up. I was a good boxer. I was just hitting him and he wasn’t hitting me back. Eventually I whacked him hard; he fell into his group of friends and didn’t come back at me. Then I made the mistake of taunting him. “Hey buddy, you wanted it. You were Mr. Tough Guy on the stairs. You begged me to fight and now I’m out here kicking your ass, so come on, you pussy. I ain’t done. Bring it on.”
    Mid-taunt, I felt a sting on my left shoulder and heard the sound of breaking glass. One of his buddies had thrown a beer bottle and it broke when it hit me. Six inches higher and I’m sure it would have ruptured my eardrum. But this thing just shattered and fell to the ground without so much as a scratch. But then out of nowhere his buddy, a guy I later found out was named Terry, took an aluminum baseball bat, came up behind me, and took a full swing at my knee. Maybe he was trying to keep his friend’s promise to break my other knee. What the fuck is wrong with people? Who thinks, “I have no issue with this guy, I’ve never met him before, he just had knee surgery, but I’m going to come up behind him when he’s not looking and take a full crack at him with an aluminum bat like they used to kill Joe Pesci in Casino”? He took a home-run swing, but thankfully it wasn’t at the knee with the stitches in it. Instead he shot high and hit the fleshy part of my thigh. All it did was sting and make me curtsy. Then all five of them jumped on me and one of them hit me with a good uppercut that busted my lip open and spilled blood all over my nice white button-up shirt. I found the guy who hit me—it was the black guy, and interestingly enough he was the kung-fu guy of the group. We started going at it. It was one in the morning on a street in Studio City and we were reenacting a scene from Enter the Dragon . While we were trading kicks and punches, the cops arrived and it broke up.
    In the end those guys thought I was a maniac because I had a beer bottle broken over me, been hit with a baseball bat, and after all five of them jumped on me and busted my lip open, I was screaming for more. The guy who wanted to fight in the first place was much