An open letter to the small Arab man who took a swing at me tonight.
Dear Sir,
Once upon a time a really small man met an equally petite woman and they fell in love, or were introduced just before their arranged marriage took place, please fill in correct phrase.
So as I was saying, these two presumably wonderful and diminutive people were married (I'm assuming they were married since neither of them appear to have been stoned to death before they were able to breed) and as happens, they had sexual intercourse and a few months later the woman grunted you out into the world. The doctor (or village handywoman, whatever the case may be) presented your parents with a small wrapped bundle and said "Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. ShazamalammaLam (sp?), you're the proud parents of a healthy 3 1/2 lb boy, with ten little fingers and ten little toes. Now get out of my hut."
A lot of that is speculation and casual racism on my part. For all I know your family name is something much more ridiculous than ShazamalammaLam, you were born in a modern metropolitan hospital and you weighed five lbs.
I guessed at some stuff.
Here's what I do know. These are facts, son. Facts weigh a lot.
1) It was instantly and piteously obvious that you have zero fighter training, no fight experience whatsoever, poor decision making skills when intoxicated and know virtually nothing about physics.
2) When all I had to do to defend myself from you was to reach down and grab a handful of your shirt and straighten out my arm, you should have been able to hear the ghosts of your ancestors crying out "Dude!"
But you didn't.
3) When you swung at my face, missing it only by 6 inches or so, I realized that if you'd been standing on a stepstool, you might've actually connected. Luckily for you you left it and your platform heels at home. Things might have gone less goodly for you had you been wearing one or carrying the other.
4) I would've been perfectly within my rights knocking you back into Biblical times, or what you refer to as 'last Tuesday'. I chose not to do this because it was far more humiliating for you to be conscious as I carried you out in a full nelson like an angry, hissing bearded seven year old who been at the
5) There are ways of escaping a full nelson, none of which are foolproof. There are substantially fewer ways of escaping a full nelson that's been applied by someone who's done it many times before, is well over twice your weight and strength and while your feet are no where in the vicinity of the Earth.*2
6) I know all of the tricks to get out of this hold and had you attempted any of them, I would have quickly and with very little concern for your well being, executed the following series of actions.
A) Rotate 90 degrees and smash your wee grumpy goat face into the nearest available wall.
B) Withdraw your face from the drywall it is imbedded in.
C) Step smartly one pace to right or left (depending on wall availability)
D) Repeat steps A and B. Check for continued resistance, then repeat steps as necessary or until I run out of wall or you run out of the will/capability to fight.
7) Despite the horribly emasculating experience of being carried out of a strip club like a naughty toddler with its little feet kicking impotently, I regret that I didn't have the presence of mind to enhance your abrupt exit and my enjoyment of it by whispering any of the following statements in your ear:
A) "Daddy likes it when you kick around like an unwilling goat. Struggle for me, that's right. I feel like I owe you $20, you give good struggle."
B) "Oooooh! Iz'm Mummie's widdle man all an-gwee? Ooooooh! Him so wiggly when him mad! Who's a widdle mad guy? Who's a widdle mad guy? That's right, you are! Him a widdle mad guy all struggly and cuddly! All fuzzy like a Teddy bear! Momma's widdle smoogums gets picked up because him all cwabby and needs to go sleepy time! Awwww! Widdle man still twying to get fwee? So cute! Now snoogums get to meet Mr. Sidewalk!"*3
C) "Snobar! Addiss!" The only two words of Arabic I learned while working at a middle eastern restaurant. They mean tomato and pine nuts. Bear in mind all you authenticity loving, fact checking ghouls out there, I was drunk a lot of the time I was there, I'm not sure of the spelling of course and I don't know which word means which anymore.
Right. Now that that's out of the way you may be wondering what led up to this whole situation. Well, I'll tell you because that's kinda the point of this blog and I enjoy helping other humans.
As everyone reading this undoubtedly knows, at most strip clubs photography and videoing are strictly prohibited. Some of the girls may well one day run for public office and they don't want any compromising videos of them to surface at a critical campaign moment. Totally understandable.
So I catch my little brown friend just openly videoing with his phone. Wide openly. Like Spielberg. So I go over to him and say 'hey man, you can't video or take pictures in the club, I need you to delete that please. DO NOT DO IT AGAIN.' When I say that last bit he gives me this look like a constipated badger that just had something slimy and gross ooze across its paws. Like I was beneath contempt and if I lived in his country I would have all the rights and respect normally shown to shit-stained furniture.
I didn't hover over him and watch while he deleted the video like I would normally do because the dancer he was filming never even noticed him doing it and because I fucking hate her in any case. Cheap bitch.
So as far as I was concerned it was the end of the saga, although I had stored the look he gave me for future consideration.
About a half hour later I was out on the patio enjoying a cool, refreshing cigarette thinking to myself how great it was to be alive, when my 'lil friend and his equally small but much smarter friend came out and lit up. I kept my distance and pointedly ignored them, but there's always a bit of tension in the air when you have to be in close proximity to someone you issued a stern warning to.
Not two minutes later one of the other Floor Tribesmen comes out to the patio and tells the same little guy that he needs to delete the other video he took while I was eating and paying him no mind. "That tiny fuckwit." I thought to myself and moved in to box the small Middle Easterns between our imposing Anglo Saxon frames.
The other Floor Guy's name is classified, I'll refer to him by the codename Strider because he's 68% leg. Strider's one of the nicest Floor Dicks around. He's very good at establishing a camaraderie and fellow feeling with most of the club patrons on all strata of the titty ecosystem. He is one of the best of us...
Anyway Strider's trying to get this guy to delete videos, the guy brings up the videos and then suddenly the phone powers down. Drunk accident, right? I was willing to entertain the notion, just this once, if only for the novelty of it. Strider flashes me a look, I raise an eyebrow and then the story continues.
When his phone turns back on, he shuffles through his apps like he just can't remember where he left that pesky camera function and then, lo and behold, his phone mysteriously shuts off again. "Motherfucker" I hear Strider say. I look up in mild surprise because he doesn't normally swear at customers until we're way deeper into the "How Much Of An Asshole Can I Be?" game. I raise my other eyebrow at him. I'm ambibrowstrous*4 like that.
Strider's clearly getting kinda shitty, and no wonder. I know it doesn't seem like much when you read the above paragraphs, but this went on for some time while we pretended our little Arab friend wasn't doing it on purpose and tried to remain polite about it. At this point in similar situations I've been in before, a Floor Guy would just grab the phone out of the dude's hands and either he'd delete the videos or pics in question, or we'd be fighting because the dude got all attacky when we seized his fucking phone. Hell, I woulda already grabbed his phone if I had even the slightest notion of where the incriminating stuff was, much less how to get to it.
Picture me stomping around a smashed phone with my arms beating my chest while I made enraged chimp noises and you're not far off.
Finally Strider says "Goddamnit dude, give it to me! I know how to do it." And he makes a grab for the phone. The little bastard twists violently away from him, sheltering the phone away from Strider. And then his phone mysteriously turned off again.
That was it for me. The camel that broke the straw's back. I said, "that's it gentlemen, you need to leave the club" and I put a hand on both of their shoulders and very gently nudged them toward the door. The smart one was on the same page instantly. He was very apologetic, which was refreshing really.
The other one, our little amateur Scorcese, decided violently knocking my hand off his shoulder was a much better plan than just leaving and going home to enjoy whatever poorly lit, nearly useless bits of video he had successfully fled the club with.
I felt he was wrong of course and unsurprisingly, physics agreed with me. I really hate when people do this but when they do it gives me the justification to protect myself. I did this in this instance by pushing him so hard that for all intents and purposes, he teleported six feet away.
And I could've gotten much more distance if it wasn't for that meddling wall...
I'll give him this, he got back up fast and came right the fuck at me. No hesitation at all. Like an emaciated Wolverine who was lacking every single attribute that made him tough except the anger control issue. I saw right away he was gonna try to hit me because he'd raised his fist immediately on rising and was coming at me with it held fingers forward somewhere far behind his shoulder. Like a classic example of how you should never, ever punch someone.
At that point I just stood there and let him run into my left hand which I had sorta put out there in front of me like a smallish oak branch. When my hand met his chest I grabbed a huge fistful of shirt and chest hair and extended my arm out while leaning slightly back as his poor engineered fist came sailing by my nose, smelling of fattoush.
It was insanely easy at that point to pull him in, duck under his right arm and snake my right arm up and around his to land the full nelson. Then all I hand to do was stand up and it was goodbye ground, hello embarrassing-mobile-powerless-hissyfit exit from titty bar.
In other news a drunk bitch lost her keys tonight and no one cared even though it was obviously someone else's fault, not hers. She was just the victim here and couldn't possibly be blamed.
Contrary to the average 'Herder reader's opinion, I am not a monster. I will and have cared about the trials of hammered strippers in the past and fully expect to do so again at some point in the future. But when you're one of those girls who's fucking wasted two out of three nights she works, I'm done at like the third time in a month. At that point I will gladly load you into your car, start it for you, put it in gear and run for my life.
Like a majestic yet ungainly elk.
We're adults. If you can't curb your occupationally sanctioned alcoholism to like once a month or something, then I can't curb my apathy for even a night.
God Speed, wasted chick. May Dog have mercy on your bowl.
Have a great repurposed pagan holiday,
-The StripperHerder
*1 More casual racism. I apologize for degenerating into this kind of narrative chlamydia but at the same time am going to leave it in. So.....
*2 Believe it or not, getting caught in full nelson applied by a person of superior size and strength used to happen so often in ancient warfare that the famed Chinese general and author of The Art of War, Sun Tzu, had this to say on the subject:
"Endeavor not to let this happen."
And
"If it does happen, surrender because you're fooked, boyo."
*3 The problem with all of these is that he was really Arabic and either spoke very little English, or was good at pretending he didn't speak any. So I may very well have wasted some effort here.
Still, would've amused me.
*4 [Ambibrowstrous] The ability to arch either eyebrow at will, thus conveying more information than a five minute phone call or three pages of cleverly worded text.
