That Time I Brawled Wee Man in a Bar Fight, and Other Memorable Tales of Violence

Fighting is a stupid thing to do, but it makes a great story

It sounds like something out of a fake Instagram video, but I really did brawl Wee Man at a dive bar. He was my most notable opponent, but unfortunately not the only person to feel my alcohol-fueled wrath.

Some deserved it more than others. But you can be the judge of their degree of responsibility.

It’s me, hi, I’m the asshole, it’s me

Henry Sherman: I don’t think you’re an asshole, Royal. I just think you’re kind of a son of a bitch.

Royal: Well, I really appreciate that.

Royal Tenanbaums

I was pretty much an asshole my whole life. I had a lot of fun being an asshole, but I had to give up the life after having kids.

I say things like “Oh my gosh,” now when a mom friend relates how her son learned to wipe himself and avoid talking about doing shrooms at Disneyland or watching live sex shows in Amsterdam while sipping sparkling water with the good parents.

The old me is still in there, and sometimes she emerges to teach the kids the subtleties of sarcasm and humor, but without alcohol the adventures that make the stories great are absent.

Being an asshole doesn’t mean you’re mean just for the sake of being a miserable jerk. An asshole makes it funny. An asshole doesn’t care if you don’t like her.

Assholes keep it real. The only way to do that and still have friends is to make people laugh. And if the person you are sticking it to is smart, they will laugh too. It’s really a test to see how seriously someone takes themselves. To see if they have a healthy sense of humor.

For example, my friend Megan was almost as much of an asshole as I was. We bartended together at a Redondo Beach restaurant with an Iowa transplant named Brady. He had long, greasy hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and cinched his server pouch so tight it disappeared in the folds of his generous belly.

He claimed he was a black belt and boasted about his sexual abilities. All us girls would throw up a little in our mouths when he felt generous enough to share the intimate details of his bedroom prowess.

Anyway, when I walked into work one afternoon I couldn’t figure out why Brady kept smiling at me with that little sparkle in his eye like we shared some secret. I had drank too much the night before, but there’s no way I could have drank that much. No way.

But I did get those panicked butterflies in my stomach for a hot second considering the possibility. Like that feeling you get when a cop pulls up behind you and you’re waiting to see if those lights are going to flash.

Whatever was going on between us was super creepy until he mentioned at the group meeting before opening the restaurant that he wanted to share the sketch he drew of me the night before. The brick in my stomach was the only thing that kept me from running.

That night the girls never let up. I couldn’t stop to put an order in the computer without hearing that old song, “Blake and Brady sittin’ in a tree.” Even my boss gave me the elbow nudge. It took me a while, but I finally noticed Megan was having a little too much fun relishing my night of horror.

I cornered her in the soda room.

“What’s so damn funny, Megan?”

She could hardly get the words out. Her mascara was running down her face.

“Check your phone!” She was almost on the floor. “I took your phone last night at the bar and texted Brady that you couldn’t stop thinking about him since he told you how good he was in bed.”

I let her drop. It was pretty funny. I wasn’t mean enough to ever tell Brady he was so cringy that we used him as a joke, so I had to swallow my self-respect and go into work every night allowing him to believe I had to change my panties every time his owl face came into view.

Megan’s trick was an asshole move. Without it, I wouldn’t have this story. And I loved her even more for it.

The wrath of Wee Man

I grew up in the South Bay, an area of Los Angeles County encompassing the southernmost beach cities straddling the Santa Monica Bay. We have our fair share of celebrities willing to pay $3 million for an average home in Manhattan Beach.

The South Bay music and nightlife culture attracts movie stars, sports legends, and rock stars. We’re not all millionaires, so fortunately there are pockets us normals can afford to retreat to in the area.

Celebrities have never tickled my interest as much as a lot of other people if the sales of all the celebrity rags at the supermarket are any indication of the attraction. Back in my asshole days I was convinced I was pretty awesome. Cooler than any famous jerk anyway.

So a couple girlfriends and I were sitting at the bar at one of our local dives in Hermosa Beach. We came in most nights after work so it was one of those “where everybody knows your name” kind of deals.

This night a friend’s popular punk band happened to be playing so the place was packed. About halfway through their set, the crowd’s attention shifted to the back door. The place buzzed with news that Wee Man, the little person from that horrible Jackass show, was there.

I didn’t bother turning around. I didn’t care enough to look. It annoyed me to be honest. He was just a guy that did stupid stuff. Why do we have to treat famous people like they are better than us?

He walked up behind me and my friends and started with the “hey ladies.” My friends giggled. He was with a few other guys from the show who had that same look on their faces like they already owned us.

“Wanna buy us a drink?” he asked.

I still didn’t turn around. It seemed to bother him.

“What’s her problem?” He used his head to indicate he meant me.

I shifted to the side so the bartender could hand him his pint.

“I get it,” Wee man winks at my friends. “She’s your charity case.”

Everyone within earshot erupts into laughter. These idiots, I thought, don’t they realize it’s not 1723 anymore? The king isn’t going to guillotine you if you don’t laugh at his jokes. I guess not being part of the in-crowd in the 21st century is comparable to being stretched on the rack back in the good old days.

“I don’t like famous people,” I said with glacier-like calm after turning in my stool and looking him in the eyes.

I imagined he’d move along to a more receptive and adoring audience and turned back toward the bar. My friends just smiled and shook their heads. They knew me.

But Wee Man couldn’t let my defiance slide. Just as I began to take a sip of my beer, I felt him pull the back of my pants away from my skin and pour in his entire pint.

Within seconds I was on him. My friends would say later they never saw me move. I was just sitting there, then I was clinging to him as we rolled around on the filthy bar floor.

I may have gotten a punch in, but it was chaos once I left my seat, so it was hard to tell who I hit. He was enough of a gentleman not to hurt me. But he did try to protect himself.

Poor guy. I don’t think he was expecting me to go from iceberg to raging inferno before he even had a chance to let go of the back of my jeans.

Once we were separated, the crowd, made up mostly of my friends, turned on him. And he and his entourage got kicked out. I stayed at the bar satisfied I’d won despite having to spend the rest of the night looking and feeling like I’d peed an entire pint into my jeans.

I’ll take 60 percent responsibility for that stupidity.

It wasn’t that I hated a person just because they were famous. My best friend was the niece of the leader of the iconic punk band Black Flag and his brother, the famous artist Raymond Pettibon, who we spent many a forgotten night in Vegas with.

Some people are capable of surviving the mind fuck that having faceless hoards fighting to take pictures of you buying gum at a liquor store must be. But knowing what merely being popular in high school does to the delicate delusion of our ego, I imagine even a taste of celebrity is enough to poison a person to reality.

At this point in life, I always give people the benefit of the doubt. Why not? I’m sure Wee Man is a good person. I think the poor guy just caught me on a bad night.

The Jesus of butt pinchers

I was walking through a club one night looking for a friend when I felt someone run their hand down my butt and hook itself between my legs. I snapped around and stared into a smirk so sleazy it made Ron Jeremy look like Mother Teresa.

“What the fuck?” I yelled over the music.

He was sitting on a stool with a group of guys surrounding him like he was the chump king. They were all laughing at how cool the king was for feeling me up.

“Hit me, sweetheart,” the sleaze bag said, pointing to his cheek.

One of my best friends during those drinking days, Louie, used to say I was small, but I had a lot of heart. And fueling that heart was a fire only mildly contained by some hazy instinct to be part of society.

But every once in a while, the right conditions appeared to turn the flame into a blaze. I let out a little laugh and narrowed my eyes at my target.

Mother Teresa must have been with me that night because I socked that chump with supernatural precision and strength. My two big knuckles made contact with his face on the inner part of his cheekbone.

He fell back out of his stool holding his eye and landed on the ground with a thump. Immediately his friends turned on him. As I walked away, they were crowded over him, pointing and crying.

When I think back now, I imagine walking away like a badass from a movie strolling away from an explosion. I’d toppled the king. It was awesome.

That reaction was so successful the first time that it became my m.o. whenever a guy would touch me uninvited. There was only one other guy dumb enough to tell me to hit him, but the funny thing was those guys were just as surprised to get hit in the face with a knuckle sandwich as the ones who didn’t encourage violence.

I was like the Jesus for guys who didn’t know how to keep their hands to themselves. I walked around curing them of their disease.

When I deserved it

Sometimes I wasn’t the hero in my story.

My best friend and I were in the front of a large crowd at her brother’s punk show at a local club. Some girl with a camera kept standing in front of us taking video. It annoyed my friend enough that she started to knee the camera girl in the butt.

The girl wouldn’t move, but kept turning around and yelling at my friend to stop who just smiled back at the angry girl and continued kneeing her in the arse, harder each time.

Camera girl endured maybe her sixth knee when out of nowhere some female version of Nacho Libre flew out of the crowd at me WWF style. I’ve never been sure why she targeted me when my friend was the knee-er, but it was clear she was intent on flattening me.

My friend Danny would later tell me that I was in fighting stance before Hulk Hoganna made contact with the ground. I stepped to the side and landed a knuckle to the side of her head as she fell forward.

I’m pretty sure it hurt my hand worse than her cement head because she was on me in an instant. The only advantage I had over her size was speed, but that had been taken away by the tight crowd.

Luckily neither of us were hair pullers. I had met a worthy opponent who didn’t stoop to the level of Vaudeville catfighting.

As soon as the crowd peeled her off me and stood me upright, someone handed me a beer. My best friend, apparently ignored in the fight and forgotten as the instigator, yelled at the band to start playing again.

My right hand swelled up for a few days and one of my favorite shirts had been torn like I’d had a run-in with Freddy Krueger, but the incident made the night, out of thousands of other nights, memorable.

It gave us a story. It gave everybody there a story. These kinds of stories make up the meat covering the skeleton of our forgettable, everyday lives.

Depending on whether Wee Man made pouring beer down girls’ pants a habit, I’ve no doubt our scuffle at the bar made for an entertaining story. The kind of stories that create the web that bonds friends together.

Strangers are just people we don’t share any stories with. And I’m grateful to every other asshole in my life for playing at making stories with me. Some of them were worth fighting for.