My FiRSt BAR FiGHT
I don’t know, it just occurred to me that every story on here happened more than three years ago.
So what’s English Teacher X done lately?
Here’s a recent story.
May, 2003. I had been living in the provincial Russian city, which we’ll call Vodkaberg, for nearly three years. I certainly hadn’t been planning to settle down. I’d just rolled into a crack, gotten comfortable and stayed.
The job is better than most – I like the students, and I usually don’t have to work in the mornings – and the salary allows me to live a fairly pimp lifestyle and still save a bit.
And I’d found a lot of amusements.
Vodkaberg is a city of over a million people, and it has a decent smattering of bars and clubs. Russians do like to party.
Our local frequent hangout we refer to as The Degenerate Bar. It’s known by reputation among the Russians as a “gay cloob” but in fact it would be most accurate to call it a bisexual bar. I’d begun going there with a couple of bisexual female friends back in 2001, and always had a good time. There were lots of girls there, straight, gay and bi, as they enjoyed the fact it was pleasantly free of the flat-headed, square-booted louts who infested most clubs.
And, I’d found, were quite amazed and pleased to meet a foreigner.
It wasn’t, isn’t, even a permanent club. During the week it’s the cantina for an office complex. About eight tables. On Friday and Saturday nights they bring in a sound system and a few lights, and sell bottles of beer, cognac and vodka. It’s small and dark. Intimate, perhaps.
It’s cheap. Entrance is three bucks for women and two bucks for men. Beer costs about 90 cents, a shot of vodka costs about 60 cents. (But you should avoid the vodka, which is clearly bootleg stuff with a yellowish shade and full of strange clouds.)
And it’s cheerful. Most Saturday nights by one a.m. it’s packed with dozens of bodies sweating and writhing to crappy pop music, the toilets full of people frantically groping, people grinding at each other’s crotches on the dance floor and jamming tongues down each other’s throats in the corners. Alcohol flows.
We always had a good time there. You know you’re going to make out with somebody, usually somebody you’ve just met. Probably you’ll get to second or third base, not much doubt. I made out with four girls in one evening once. Once I made out with two at the same time. It’s that kind of joint.
Thing is though, you absolutely MUST be completely hammered to have fun there. Not just tipsy, not just a bit tight, I mean absolutely shitfaced, staggering, dancing like an idiot and whooping, one-more-drink-and-I’ll-vomit DRUNK.
So we were. I can’t remember that much about the lead-up to this particular evening. Probably we’d been drinking straight vodka in somebody’s kitchen, that sort of thing.
I was on the dance floor pawing a little strumpet with jet black hair and gypsies lips. We stepped out to get some air. It was maybe 3:45 or so, a.m.
I saw another girl that I knew, sitting on the ledge outside the coat check room. She was an insane drunken bisexual. She was having an argument with one of her many girlfriends or something like that. I think she was crying and yelling. In short everything was like normal.
Then the Armenian came up.
Nobody had seen him before, nobody has seen him since. He was dressed like most of your lowlife Russian thugs. He had a bristly cropped head, and he was wearing skinny-legged jeans, a track suit top, and square-toed boots.
He went up to the insane drunken bisexual girl, and tried to talk to her.
She began screaming at him and tried to shove him away.
He grabbed her by the hair and began smashing his forehead into her face.
I reacted with all the speed and fury that someone of my state of sobriety could: I stood there and gaped. For some reason everyone else was doing the same thing, too. This didn’t encourage me to rush into action.
Finally the guy turned around and briskly walked outside. The girlfriend of the insane bisexual girl, a butch type, followed him out, squawking at him in Russian.
The insane bisexual girl raced by me crying, her nose bleeding. I asked if this Armenian was known by them, and everyone said no.
I was dumbfounded by this sudden and unexpected violence. I supposed some action was required but I wasn’t sure what it was.
More violence, maybe?
I stepped outside, where the Armenian was standing there arguing with the insane girl’s butch girlfriend.
Finally he made to grab her roughly and hit her, both of them still shouting.
Without thinking about it, I grabbed the Armenian from behind and attempted to choke him to death.
I was 33 at the time. I had never been in a serious bar fight before, despite hanging around in some awful dives in a lot of awful places since I was 18 or so. I had, however, taken two semesters of judo classes in college. I wasn’t especially good at it, but I had learned the choke hold.
Banned by every police force in the United States, the choke hold is an excellent way to murder someone within a minute or so.
As long as it is applied correctly. Being as I was attacking with all the ferocity and coordination of a sloth on ketamine, I didn’t manage to do so.
I managed to get my forearm under his chin, but couldn’t get it locked with my other arm. The Armenian ripped at my arm with his fingernails. He was a bit taller than me, too, which made my position awkward. We scuffled. I kept trying to get behind him. He scratched at me again.
And he must have stomped on my foot a couple times.
I actually have no memory of that. But he suddenly bolted and ran away, and when I took a few steps after him, I found that I could barely walk.
He sailed up the street, with the butch lesbian in close pursuit.
I staggered back inside, blood streaming down my arm from the scratches he’d given me. After locating some of my acquaintances, I told them what had happened, hysterical from the adrenalin rush.
They took me to the bar and got me a beer, which I slammed down, and then another.
Then we went outside, only to find the butch lesbian returning down the street, her face a bloody pulp. One eye was swollen shut and she had a large bite mark on one cheek.
I became even more hysterical. I began shouting that we had to gather together a search party, find this guy, and kill him.
Then I fell over. I couldn’t put any weight on my foot.
Finally a friend dragged me into a car. I was taken home and the butch lesbian was taken to the hospital.
Must have been 4:30am or so.
I staggered into my apartment, limping on the sore foot, and fell into bed.
I was awakened by the phone the next day at around 1:00pm.
One of my colleagues. “How are you there, Rambo?”
“Uh. I don’t know. Foot hurts.”
“Can you move it at all?”
“Well, yeah, I can move it, but it fucking hurts.”
“I think you’d know if it was broken. Anyway, come down to the outdoor café by the river. We’re all here.”
I looked at the foot. It was blue, and swollen. It hurt. Maybe it was just stiff, though. Needed some exercise. I showered, jammed it into my tennis shoes, and limped outside.
The thirty minute walk to the river took me nearly an hour.
“Hey, there he is,” said my three colleagues. I got a round of applause. “The hero!”
“Fuck off. It hurts like hell. I’m afraid it’s broken.”
“I’ll get you a beer.”
It was a beautiful spring day, and seemingly the entire population was down by the river. We settled in for some serious beer drinking. One of my Russian friends had been a medical student, and she looked at the foot and opined that it wasn’t broken. Over the course of the afternoon she had a few of her friends and another guy who was a dentist look at the foot; they all said it didn’t seem to be broken, just badly bruised.
“Yeah but it hurts like fuck!”
Six or seven beers later, after the sun went down, I got a car home and staggered into bed. I slept little, the foot was throbbing so much. I elevated it and packed it in ice, as the dentist had recommended, but it throbbed like a bastard.
The next day I couldn’t stand on it at all.
I sighed and called the translator of our school.
“Uh, I had a little accident. I need to go to the hospital. I think my foot is broken.”
“Oh. That’s terrible. I’ll call the owner, and we’ll make some arrangements.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
“Your health is more important. See you.”
Well. That’s nice, anyway, that my health is more important.
One of the owners of the school arrived a few hours later, with our feckless little female translator in tow. I hopped down the steps to meet them, in one shoe and one sock, as the foot was now so swollen it wouldn’t fit into my shoe at all.
“So what exactly happened?” asked the translator, as they drove me to the hospital.
“Well. Uh. Somebody was trying to fight with a female friend of mine, and I tried to grab him, and he stomped on my foot.”
“Oh! You were a hero. Nice of you. Where did this happen.”
I told her.
“My god! That place! Are you crazy, going there?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
We got to the hospital. I knew I wasn’t going to be taken into the building in a wheelchair or anything, but somehow was still a little surprised when I had to hop up two flights of steps.
“The doctor apologizes, he says they have no crutches handy,” said the translator.
I waited a while, and got a couple of x-rays.
The doctor came out and told me the foot wasn’t broken just badly bruised. I should stay off it for at least a week, and two if possible, and keep it elevated and packed in ice.
“So, does my insurance pay for this?” I queried.
The translator consulted with the owner.
“No, your medical insurance does not include injuries sustained while drunken.”
“Well but. . . I mean, I would have done the same thing if I hadn’t been drinking, I think.” Though maybe I’d have done it better. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have been at a sleazy bar at four a.m. if I hadn’t been drunk. Cause and effect.
She shrugged. “This is what your contract says.”
I was considering pressing the issue, but the total cost for the x-ray and consultation and some medicine and a bandage was around eight bucks.
I did have to hop all the way back out to the parking lot, though.
