one of many fistfights

April 08, 2004 - 10:50 p.m.

It was Thursday night at midnight, I was just about to leave work and Mr. Gaybody calls me and says that he's outside my building and that he just got off work and we can take the train home together. Weird. Ok. I go outside and he says, Hey, let's take a cab! And he tells the driver to take us to Wicker Park, late night bar central, also conveniently located near his crib. I was perplexed. He had to work the next morning and it's not like him to go out all late like this. He was being all flirty and we went to hipster Estelle’s where he bought Stoli for me, mmm. We got drunk, of course, and were being silly and taking pictures with his mini-camera on his Sony Clie’ palm-pilot. Jeezus, Gaybody is a dick-tease. I mean vagina-tease. You don’t need to be Freud/Fraud to figure out what was on my mind that night:

We left the bar at 4am and he walked me to the El entrance and we were hugging goodbye, and out of nowhere a drunk came up and started yelling at us, acting like a kook, spewing out nonsense like, “HEY. Whathefuck. You think I won’t punch you? I’ll punch you right in the face.” And I was like yes, yes, rolling my eyes, and then I said something condescending about his wack tattoos (my bad).

He’s ranting and stumbling around us, and we’re ignoring him and still talking and out of nowhere he sucker-punches Gaybody right in the face! And he attacked him and was punching him all over the place! So I jumped in there and tried to pull the Kook away, cuz I can be a violent bitch when need be and the guy turned on me! And this guy was hard to bring down because he was well over 6 feet tall and I was just too short to get the proper leverage and give him the flip like I’ve been known to do with shorter men like Josh.

So instead I tried to put him in a choke hold but ended up just kind of hanging off of his neck like some kind of inflatable dance partner. He’s swinging me around trying to get to Gaybody and he threatened to KILL my ass, stab me, and he was shaking me and shit and then Gaybody calls the cops from his cell phone. The Kook had a friend that came over, apologizing, saying that his friend is just drunk and proceeded to drag him away to their white Bronco (um, OJ?). I was screaming after them like a banshee throwing the F word all over the place, “HEY. Your friend is hitting GIRLS dude. Piece of SHIT. Git him the fuck outta here! ASSHOLE.”

I’m scouring the ground for Gaybody’s glasses which flew off and were broken from the first punch, all the while muttering that I should have busted his face in had it not been for the small possibility that he was actually insane enough to use a knife on me. My little white girl hands cannot compete with a blade. I’m used to being the Shank-er, not the Shank-ee. Besides, my mother would never forgive me if I got stabbed.

(Said Glasses, just moments earlier, still intact):

The cops came and we had to file a report and the whole thing was just BIZARRE. The sun was up by the time I got on the subway to go home.

The ish part of this story was that our assailant was a World’s Biggest Faggot Queer (WBFQ) and it just seemed so out of character for a mussy-haired hipster to go loco on strangers on a sidewalk. He was one of those super-tall, lanky, undernourished, 2-sizes-too-small thrift store t-shirt wearin’ kind of hipster. The kind with slouchy Levi’s and a shirt that rides up, revealing his precious Diesel-esque hip bone. With super-cool tattoos prominently displayed on his pasty stick-arms: A big red heart with an arrow saying MOM (oy) and silly flames of some sort.

And to add insult to injury, we ran into this faggot a few different times in Wicker Park, and he never seemed to recognize us. One night we saw him at Estelle’s, sitting in a booth with his FQ friends, with no drink in front of his sorry ass. We debated about what to do, and I wanted to seduce him, lure him out into the alley and then pummel his ass. However, I was a little concerned because he looks so sexually ambiguous that I was afraid he might be an actual fag. In which case it would have to be Gaybody that did the seducing and he seemed far too pissed off to execute such a travesty. Contrary to what his name might imply, I don’t think he could pull off a gay seducing under any circumstances.

We ended up doing nothing at all, except give him the Piss Eye and talk shit about him to the waitress. Somewhere along the road I lost my appetite for retribution, and couldn’t muster up the care to beat up a skinny drunk faggot. My younger self would shame me, she would have been all in a tizzy, causing a scene. But I guess I’ve mellowed with old age because it just didn’t seem worth it to scrape up my knuckles and allow my beer to get warm.

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