AM I LOOKING FOR a fight? Do I want my go? Would I like a knuckle sandwich? I tell you what, why don't you go ahead and ask the guy who once kicked me full force in the ass when I was walking home from town at 2am with my friend Clare about five years ago. Go ahead, yo - why don't you just ask that one guy what went down that night after he kicked me in the ass. Why don't you ask him if I want my go, and see how you feel about taking me on then, asks John Butler
It all began while I was inside a phone booth on the top of Grafton Street trying to make a call. It was animal hour, that time of night on the weekend when the clubs begin to disgorge lonely drunks back onto the street. These are the ones who haven't quite made it to the bitter end. In pursuit of eternal happiness on the dance floor, either the booze has caught up and overtaken them, or they've plain struck out, suffering from a fatal lack of charm. Clare was waiting for me outside the phone booth, and maybe they saw me and saw her, put us together and thought that I was one of the lucky ones. I wish.
In animal hour, all that's left is the prospect of squirting kebab meat down your shirt front or picking a fight, and being caught in animal hour is something of a vicious cycle, because there's nothing particularly attractive about a pugilistic drunk with a kebab in his hand. As I fumbled for coins inside the phone booth, they began knocking on the glass pane, laughing and making threatening gestures.
As the voice on the other end of the line spoke to me, I tried laughing along with the guys outside, but it was easy to tell they weren't merely trying to charm me with their keen sense of japery. After I hung up and left the phone booth, they threw a few rum suggestions after me, none of which appealed.
Then they began to follow Clare and I towards Kildare Street. At the first set of traffic lights, I got the kick in the ass. I turned to face them down. And then . . .
Getting kicked in the ass as a 30-year-old feels utterly ridiculous. After a certain age, the notion of fighting acquires the kind of absurdity that it should have at every stage of life. I once heard a particularly poignant story about a 20-year school reunion which ended with two men of age 38, one rotund, the other bald and be-spectacled, both in suits, rolling around on the gymnasium floor, wheezing and using each other's ties to gain traction as around them the canapes lay scattered. It is pathetic but it is also poignant, because some people can find it hard to heal the scars of their school days.
More than one classmate of mine took particular delight in menacing me, and it was hard not to feel a frisson of pleasure when a few years later, he retreated from another fight he had himself started with someone else and lost. I can still recall him bawling "you've made your point", as he ran for the bus. Part of me wishes it had been me who raised my fists and asked him whether he had met Simon and Gruffness. But who's to say that with me it would have ended thus, and not with me cowering and squealing "not the face", as the blows rained down?
Rolling around on the floor at your school reunion sounds ridiculous. But in childhood, you spend a lot of time avoiding trouble, plotting a route around the potential beatings that one could receive in the course of any given day. Avoidance is perfectly fine and good, but the way I see it, it's important to get beaten up as early in life as you can manage. If you haven't been beaten by early adulthood, the threat of it grows in stature, and the future impact of it appears impossible to overcome. If you don't get yourself a nice little beating early doors, then those who regularly give and receive beatings will become more potent than they should in your eyes, like the guy who kicked me in the ass.
If you do manage to find him and ask him what went down that night, he'll tell you that I looked at him, took a few steps back, then turned away. That's right folks, nothing happened. A hundred yards down the road, a man begging on the street congratulated me on my restraint and told us that this guy had been approaching random guys for an hour and kicking them in the ass, looking for a fight. Apparently, he had delivered quite a beating to the last guy who responded to the provocation.
I was delighted to hear it. Now I could congratulate myself on my decision not to open a can of whup-ass upon him. In advertising, they call it post-rationalisation. Having done a little of it on the football pitch, I'm not scared of fighting per se, but I have a deep- seated terror of having my beautiful aquiline nose reset by a tiny Filipina nurse who will giggle at my hot tears.
This terror far outweighs my slight aversion to getting my nose broken in the first place. So yes, I have a philosophical belief that violence solves nothing, but this conviction lends a kind of moral legitimacy to the fact that I don't fight because it scares me. I know which part is stronger - the head or the heart. But you'd have to beat it out of me.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com