That’s the sum total of everything she has to say when I show up here and meet her and look at her and attempt to tell her everything that I ever wanted her to know.
I “attempted”, apparently.
And why is it, really, that a man can’t wear colorful clothing? Particularly when it’s May but feels like late July and the heat permeates everything; the heat is omnipresent; the heat is like god.
“You look kind of gay wearing that.” She says. Again.
“Just…drive?” I barely mumble.
Tokyo is so hot I pack extra T-shirts in my bag before I leave every morning but up here, just over an hour away by bullet train straight into the abyss, it’s like autumn in New York and I shiver and stare out the window into the blackness of Shizuoka prefecture.
This place is a wasteland.
It’s covered in contrivance but it’s all really just a wasteland. I can’t believe people live here. They wake up, they have coffee, they shit before going to work and then they die. People actually live here and it blows my mind.
She pulls out of Mishima station, turns right onto a dark road and the little car accelerates.I sigh sort of loudly and she reaches over with her left hand and turns up the radio. The J-pop voices croon out of the speakers, my nightmares all realities, and I can only blink dully when the obligatory English lyric in the song is eked out by a tiny tin-like boy-band voice, “Girl, you’re fucking perfect…“
I reach over with my right hand and snap the radio dial off.
“Spare me.” I mutter into the window.
“Nante?” What did you say? She asks in an overly healthy and unaffected voice. Her voice matches the late night contrivance of the surroundings we now rocket past in this desperate little vehicle.
“Nothing. Nandemonai.” I sigh again and run a hand through my hair. “Riku ha? Mo netta?” How is Riku? He’s sleeping already? I ask.
She doesn’t answer me but keeps her hands on the steering wheel, “Ten and Two” and we cruise through the Mishima darkness and I shiver because it’s become really cold even though Tokyo is so warm right now I’m forced to wear colorful clothing. Everyone in Tokyo is wearing shorts. Everyone in Tokyo is going to festivals. Everyone in Tokyo.
The car turns right on to a large, well-lit and absolutely empty, black top highway. We pass a large, well-lit McDonald’s and I look inside as we drive by and it’s nearly empty, abandoned, but there is a young couple sitting by the window in a booth and they are laughing. The guy turns and somehow manages to look right at me as we drive by. He’s still grinning and looks right at me so I turn and look straight ahead at the deserted highway.
I try to think of something, anything to say that might be appropriate but nothing comes to mind so I ask again, in Japanese, “Is Riku sleeping already?”
She focuses intensely on the deserted highway, too big and overly developed for an area that has the pulse of a ninety year old waiting to die in a cancer ward, and then finally after what seems to be a frozen millennium says, ” He should be in bed.”
Then we turn left onto the little street that drops down a hill, passes a lonely 7/11 and then we turn left again and go through a tunnel which is lit with big purple lights and then we turn right onto the winding little mountain road, the only honest road I’ve seen here, that leads up to her families house.
It bends and curves and snakes and whips past dozens of little homes. Some are old and some are new. Some are shuttered up and some are not but everyone has their lights out. Some have little gardens or tiny rice paddies. Some are more western and some have the construction style particular to rural Japan. Some seem warm and some seem empty. We then turn left onto the final stretch of dark road climbing the little mountain up to her place. A place I have been to many, many times.
It’s particularly dark and in the little car now, I’m freezing. I can see my breath come out of my mouth in little faint plumes of smoke and I glance at her and her face is set and she’s so small, almost child like, and I look left out the window and can see a half-moon over the valley; it’s a clear, straight, tired and cold night here and in the middle of the valley is half a bridge that they are building but I can’t imagine to where because the entire place is completely and utterly empty.
It’s completely devoid of life. They are building a massive cement bridge to nowhere.
We finally pull up in front of her house and after she shuts off the engine and pulls the keys out of the ignition we get out of the car and I notice again, as always, that she is tiny; the top of her head coming to, maybe, my lower chest and I am flooded, nearly overwhelmed by an immense wave of melancholy and regret before I breath out into the night, noticing the freshness of the air here:
“Just, spare me, man.” No one replies.
It takes about an hour for us to talk to her parents, who are un-animated, almost mechanical in their disdain for first me but also, clearly for her, and then sign and stamp our divorce documents. I leave the house as soon as possible and wait outside in the cold and dark and emptiness for a taxi I call with my mobile. I don’t get to see my son.
I stay at a business hotel near the station and have two canned chu-hi’s before dropping into a sweaty and restless sleep on a hard bed in front of a huge window that overlooks the depressing town of Mishima.
The next morning at six-twenty I am standing on the platform waiting for the shinkansen and I’m holding a coffee I bought at the hotel from a girl and her name was “Sayuri” and I read it aloud from her name tag while she made my coffee and she had said “Oh, your Japanese is good.” And I just told her I like her name. And now I look across Mishima from the open air platform and see Mount Fuji sitting there; massive and alarmingly abrupt, covered in snow, it’s backdrop a relentlessly light blue sky that stretches to forever.
I sip the coffee Sayuri made me and the train slowly pulls up so I wait for the doors to open and I board.
Although most movies these days are more about simply making money or driving yet another talentless talking puppet to undeserving-millionaire-idiot status, occasionally movies still teach us a lesson or two. Miami Vice taught me that long hair is still a legit option in male fashion and G.I. Joe: The rise of Cobra showed me that there is something worse than pouring acid in my eyes. Despite these gems, they just don’t seem to make them like they used to.
I grew up watching Conan, god knows how many times, and through literally hundreds of hours spent digesting its contents I have learned seven very valuable life lessons. In fact, I consider these lessons life changing and this is wisdom I can no longer horde greedily alone in my man cave.
I will share these now with you; prepare yourselves for truth…
7. Say Less; Do not pontificate
The Croatians call it “proljev usta“. In Germany they call it “Durchfall Mund“. In the west we have an acute case of it, which experts refer to as “diarrhea mouth-ness”. Everyone wants to talk about everything, all the time. While healthy communication skills might be considered that which separates us from the bands of marauding, disenfranchised, rape hungry unicorns, silence can be better than the blow job you got in the closet at church in tenth grade. Maybe.
Conan the Barbarian teaches us this many times over. It is documented and proven with the aid of Science and the YouTube.
Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of man noise. That’s it.
I’m not a rocket surgeon, but that’s pretty special in my book.
So little chin wagging yet what does he manage to do? Everything. He becomes a master thief, a brilliant warrior and avenges the death of his father and super sexy mother. He even shines ole’ Thulsa Doom on by hacking his head off in a similar fashion to how his MILF was done in the beginning of the film.
That’s class.
In addition to all of that, he also gets the girl, Valeria. How? Obviously not with moves he picked up reading The Game. He’s just an alpha male barbarian with massive pecs, arms and a ridiculously big sword. Sorry skinny guys, chicks like muscle and some quiet time. It’s proven in the video.
It’s proven.
Give me pecs and silence. A big sword is a bonus.
6. If she seems too good to be true, then she is
We’ve all been there, I know I have: You’ve met an amazing girl and things are great. She’s fun to hang out with, she lets you pick where you two are going to eat, she doesn’t bother you when you hang out with your friends and she doesn’t complain about the aromatic complications of you being on a high-protein diet; she’s totally your type.
Then one day it all goes very wrong.
Our Cimmerian friend has experienced it as well and he demonstrates how to deal with this very real life issue succinctly in the movie.
On first viewing, a foreigner in Japan might think this is a warning telling them that frustrated country folk will only give you directions in exchange for sexual favors and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But there is a bigger picture here.
This exchange can be viewed as a microcosm for so many relationships. The initial meeting. The courting. The engaging conversations. The hot sex in front of the fire.
Then, just as our barbarian brother begins to get comfortable, the woman starts babbling incoherent nonsense then turns into a flesh-eating hell cat and tries to rip his face off.
All of this while they’re naked.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? All awash with nostalgia?
Conan shows us clearly how to handle this situation simply by throwing the lunatic slut into the fire. This is the Hyborian age equivalent of blocking her on Facebook and deleting her on LINE. Sure, she might flip out like the she-devil in the video and trans-morph into a blue ball of fire, bounce off the walls and knock over some pictures but then she’s out the door and out of your life.
Whenever I am online it’s a constant barrage of advertisements for 20 minute take your pick.
20 minute abs.
20 minute arms.
20 minute chest.
That Asian guy is always trying to tell me how fat he used to be and how doctors and personal trainers hate him because he has all the 20 minute secrets. It’s annoying and what’s more, it’s bullshit.
This fucking jerk.
Here’s the thing: There’s no such thing as a “shortcut” to being huge and ripped. It takes a lot of work, years of training and heavy compound movements. Again, Conan of Cimmeria shows us this with his true life story.
Hey kids, ready for summer camp?
The Wheel of Pain is the uh, “device”, that Conan is chained to as a kid at about the age of 9 or 10. Ten years later, that’s ten years later, he is a jacked up maniac super man.
Compound movements. Pushing this thing is chest, triceps, lower back, quads and calves so basically total body and it’s heavy. Also we can deduce that the work load was progressively more intensive. As seen in the video, as time goes on fewer and fewer people are assisting with the clearly arduous task of pushing the wheel hence resulting in a gradually increasing workload on Conan himself.
That’s how you build lean mass; heavy loads, gradually increasing over time; week-in and week-out for several years.
This is important for life. Too many people are looking for the short cut and the easy way out. For that which is most worth having in life two things are almost always necessary; Risk and Commitment.
Throw in some forced marches, beatings and a slave trader shooting primabolin in your ass because it’s hard for you to reach your glutes while chained to the original nautilus machine, and you have a powerful Alpha male physic, the envy of gay lords and “natty” bodybuilders the world over.
4. Know People
The standard image of Conan of Cimmeria would be that of a loner. The lone wolf traveling the world in sandaled feet; broad sword always near by. Asking nothing from others and living by his own means.
Is the Barbarian a loner? Yes and No.
Perhaps he likes to think he is. But we also see him continuously adopt other so-called loners as friends throughout his epic journey.
In this clip, we see Conan meet and free the thief and archer known as Subotai.
Not only does Conan free him, but Subotai and he travel together and set up a fairly enterprising little B&E operation and sack the Temple of Set grabbing the “eye of the serpent”. That makes them pretty fast friends if you ask me. Conan released him from his chains for no other reason it seems, than for a bit of company and good thing he did because when Conan is hanging from “The Tree of Woe” , chomping on bird neck, compliments of Thulsa Doom , it’s Subotai that comes prancing over the hills to his rescue.
Pays to have friends. Real ones.
Next, there is “the Wizard”, expertly portrayed by Mako, who not only tells him the way to Thulsa Doom’s “Mountain of Power”, but actually performs a goddamned dangerous magical ritual to bring him back from the dead.
Tell your friend to keep the Starbucks point card he’s trying to give you, which doesn’t use anyway and save up to keep you out of the pits of hell when the time comes.
If he’s really your friend that is.
The point is to know people and have friends, genuine friends. If you take stock and come to the conclusion that your life is for whatever reason devoid of these, maybe you should start out by being open to new people in the oddest of circumstances. Also, make sure to balance out your party with a thief and at least one magic user in addition to the Barbarian and the rogue or you’re fucked when you get further into the adventure.
Don’t bring a sword to a giant pharaoh-boss fire-spitting fight.
Conversely however, you should remember to…
3. Trust No One
In this life, if you want to get something genuinely amazing done, if you want to accomplish something beyond what is considered reasonable, in short if you want to be outstanding, you will usually have to do this alone.
This is because most people you know are lazy, tired and bitter; in that order.
From a very early age our Cimmerian is taught this by his father, albeit with different words and cloaked in a religious fable.
So, lets ask ourselves, “What is the riddle of steel?”
At this point it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters if you’re totally committed and fully believe in what you are doing; beleiving in something: a cause, a dream or just yourself. Belief that something can and will happen is what propels us forward. Also, it is necessary for this inspiration to come from within you. For something to be a true calling, it has to be forged by your own hand, it cannot simply be cookie cutter or canned material cynically spit at you from some trumped up authority figure. This is another point within his fathers lecture: Follow only yourself. Do not trust others to help you, enlighten you or support you. It is perfectly possible, despite where you took them, what you gave them or what you did for them that in the end, they will turn their backs on you.
Don’t believe me?
Just ask this guy.
2. Stuff is not important
“Civilization” has two pillars upon which it stands and nurturing this obsessive desire to have more; more money, more possessions or more physical things, is one of them. It’s the proverbial, age-old rat race and denouncing it is the second most profound message found in Conan the Barbarian.
In life, be it here in 2013 or in the Hyborean age, there are certain things we need to live comfortably. But these things do not need to cost a fortune and they shouldn’t require the surrender of the majority of our lives and dignity to obtain them. Our obsession with junk we do not need is a sickness that has locked us all into a scheme that smothers us and leaves us feeling barren, lost and unfulfilled. Why? Because however much you get, the world you exist in is constantly taking it away and showing you someone who has more than you. It’s an endless cycle and no matter how high you climb, you just get deeper into the hole. King Osric preaches truth below.
Also, if one watches this tale of life closely, in the beginning we see Conan’s village in Cimmeria. It seems to be a peaceful, productive place with various parties engaged in various forms of labor. A little more research reveals to us, based on the Conan books written in the 1930′s by Robert Howard, that in Cimmeria “no man or woman went hungry, yet no one had more than they needed.” In addition to that, based on the way Conan’s super hot mother handles a broad sword and keeps a cool head under the pressure of a bloody massacre, the women of the village had training as well. This all points to a collective commune type existence and before the inhabitants are all but wiped out, it seems a very tolerable place to live.
Conversely, the wealthy and powerful King Osric’s throne room is a dank, dreary old place that nobody would seem to be comfortable in. Surrounded by riches, he is a man drowning in them.
The conclusion this tale draws for us is simple: Eliminate the unnecessary.
The things you own end up owning you.
This will not complete you.
This might.
1. Destroy the System; Define your self
No other theme is so strongly apparent in the tale of our melancholic Cimmerian than that of Anarchism. From the beginning to the end it is the destruction and abandonment of one system, designed by someone else and imposed, after another.
In the previous point we talked about the two pillars of “civilization” and this is the second one: control of the masses by the elite. The destruction of mechanisms of control becomes a central theme in the film early on.
Conan’s evolution is almost a metaphor for the path of every man. He is born in a sort of anarcho-primitivist-commune; in Cimmeria all people rule together, labor is equally distributed even amongst men and women, few go hungry unless all go hungry and it seems logical to assume the concepts of “policing” or “taxation” would be laughably absurd. He is born pure.
Tranquil Cimmerian Village: Purity.
This primitivist existence is stripped away when Thulsa Doom and his troop of pranksters show up and murder everyone, having Conan’s father mauled to death by dogs and his mother stylishly beheaded. He is then taken south and chained to the wheel of pain. He is now a slave, the bottom rung on “civilizations” ladder.
Telemarketing; the modern-day equivalent of the wheel of pain. Except you just get fat and it’s so much more soul stripping.
Ten years later Conan is purchased by a man with amazing red hair and is thrown into the pits as a gladiator. Again he exists on the fringes of society killing other slaves for the crowds amusement and the financial gain of his owner. Decadent? Yes, but Conan embraces it with a nihilistic approach explaining that to him it meant nothing.
It makes perfect sense that after losing everything and enduring the numbing ordeal of ten years forced labor that Conan would become a nihilist.
But this is not where he stays. Although anarchism and nihilism might go to the same parties this doesn’t mean they are room mates.
Conan is soon released from bondage by the man with amazing red hair and after some escaping from wolves and finding of old swords he becomes a thief, ostensibly under the tutelage of Subotai. During their travels Conan consistently remarks about his negative impressions of developed areas and “civilization”. And although they embark on a stealing frenzy, while stealing the “Eye of the Serpent” we learn that in fact, Conan still longs to find those that destroyed his village. Instead of mere revenge, it seems more likely that what he is seeking is some sort of understanding. This is not nihilism.
Finally, after a failed attempt at infiltrating Thulsa Doom’s organization, the pivotal point in the story arrives. Thulsa Doom and Conan discuss the “Riddle of Steel” and the nature of power.
This is, for all intents and purposes the answer to the “Riddle of Steel”. After this, his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection Conan himself embraces this philosophy and turns his back on all but himself and his belief in one man’s ability to be extraordinary without structures but simply through his actions.
While he and his gang of fun-loving rogues infiltrate Doom’s temple, we see the full decadence and decay propagated by the system and it’s leaders in the form of a massive cannibal soup orgy at which, ole’ Thulsa Doom morphs into a big goddamned snake. Because why not, right?
Cannibal soup orgy: Not Pure
From the pure and innocent beginnings of a primitive snow-covered forest village to the debauched apex of civilization, what comes next almost seems a foregone conclusion.
Having all his questions answered Conan now turns to simple actions (revenge) and finally the most symbolic act of system deconstruction, the beheading of Doom in front of his followers at the mountain of power.
Not only does he kill Doom, but he resists, he fights against and wins the battle for mental control that his mother, and clearly hundreds of thousands of Doom’s followers have lost, and then decapitates the shit out him. Conan then holds the head high for all to see, re-enforcing his disregard for the authority figures (priests, clerics, teachers, presidents, police, meter-maids, celebrity figures etc) the system imposes on us before throwing it down the stairs of the temple, then, chucking a lantern into the place and burning it to the ground.
A total and complete analogy for the abandonment if not the complete destruction of systems of power that intend to force laws, codes, rules or even thoughts upon us.
A more clear message would be hard to find and even harder to convey.
Be like Conan friends.
Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and read more by GAIJINASS:
Everyone gets caught in these cycles and it’s just this thing that people do. People move right and left or they go straight or they go north or south and they make choices and they chose this or that or whatever and it’s all this disambiguation.
I got on the train. I was on it. It rumbled as it does through Tokyo. It moved quickly and it made a noise and I heard it but I didn’t.
The summer heat is something that people know but in Tokyo it permeates everything; it makes a statement; it has a conversation with you. Sometimes you talk with it but sometimes you don’t and if you have lived in the city, and you know the features and the vibration then you might get it, but if you haven’t then you can really only try to embrace some of the colors and concepts and dreams and finally the emotions but without that dreamers spirit you will likely be lost.
I am on the Fukutoshin line, and it’s rocketing through a tunnel someplace and I am ignoring it.
I wipe sweat away, again. My wash cloth I carry is damp, it’s moist. My sweat has saturated it. The long day. The drastic heat. The intense humidity; it all leans on you heavily. I look around and people are in various states of subterfuge. It’s very different from other countries that suffer through a jungle summer. In Japan, they like to pretend like we are all living in Canada, or Maine; “No problem here, the heat is just one of the temperate seasons.”
A falsehood.
I see her before she gets on the train. She’s not old, but she’s not young. She’s maybe 28. This woman doesn’t look at me through the thick glass of the train doors but behind my aviators I’m looking at her and then I notice her carry on; a little girl.
She looks how little girls should look. She’s tiny. Her hair’s ridiculously all over the place and it’s nearly down to her lower back. Her skin, which everyone I know would want, is heavily tanned and dark. She stands next to the attractive almost thirty year old woman but they don’t touch and immediately I think, I know, that they rarely touch.
A chime goes and the door hydraulics go and it all slides open and I move aside.
A lot of people get onto the hot train which is less hot than outside at the indoor station in Higashi-Shinjuku.
They get on, the once very attractive woman and the little girl burnt by the sun from so many afternoons on playgrounds and in parking lots and who knows where.
I don’t know why they caught my eye but well caught it was and I couldn’t help but look on, guilty as I am. The woman, I sigh for her now, but she was as so many people can be that exist in that realm; near to Kabukichou. Existing in that equation and to them that is reality, and everything she said to the world physically was that she had ridden that ride already and had the T-shirt and it was all done and now, there was something else.
That something else was the little sun brown dwarf not on her thin arm.
I take both of them in greedily. The woman, tall for Japan and well-built with breasts and hips and an ass and all the trappings of someone who could turn heads but lacking any interest. She’s not looking. She’s not looking because of the little kid that is being transported with her. The little brilliantly brown dwarf that won’t touch her Mama. Even when I look at her and smile, she doesn’t touch Mom. She doesn’t touch she just angles slightly. That’s it.
The system has been in place for some time; don’t touch mommy on the train, ever.
This is not a baby sitter. Only a mother could be this cold to her own.
And in the end what the fuck am I? Who am I to catalogued this? What am I recording?
When the train arrives at Ikebukuro station, the doors slide open and they both get out. I do too and I walk slowly behind them, watching them not touch, or even converse or communicate at all, as we all approach the escalator.
I step onto the escalator slowly. Then, I look up at the ceiling creeping by and let out a long sigh. My weight now feels immense as we just creep along.
When I look back down, I see the little girl in front of me, a couple of steps up, and her mother in front of her. The girl is looking at the long steel median between our escalator and the one across from us and her little tan hand is hovering over it.
All my attention, every part of me, all the fibers and components, the focus of complete celestial bodies all wire in and become transfixed on her little brown hand. Her tiny fingers are dancing lightly over the shiny steel divide; prancing lightly up and down drumming out some rhythm that only she knows. I don’t look away but I know her lips are moving and she’s singing a song to herself.
Her fingers keep dancing lightly over the steel and her nails are incredibly white and clean.
At the top, her and the mother get off and walk away. I scan my card over the ticket gate and walk through the station passing a thousand people as I go home.
It isn’t until later that night, in the dark as I’m walking down a hot street covered in sweat that I finally decide what it is that the little brown fingers with the honest fingernails and lack of damage mean or represent and it’s not a set or fixed value but if I had to choose I’d say that my analysis is correct.
I have this habit of forgetting that I’m not, in fact, John Wayne.
Nor am I Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood or Sonny Chiba. I am not an action star and I’m not a super hero. I’m just a guy that has traveled around, run his mouth, and continually has forgotten that he is not blessed with anything that will allow him to saunter into an altercation with the odds stacked staggeringly against him and walk out unscathed. It must be some kind of chemical imbalance.
“Clinically referred to as -I don’t give a fuck-”
So, this is why I can’t be surprised that things went so terribly south during one particular evening in 2003.
I ended up, through an acquaintance at the gym I was boxing at and working at part time, Tommy’s gym, accepting a security gig at a bar down the street. The occasion that warranted the security was a special TSOL concert. The lead vocalist, Jack Grisham, had decided to run for governor of California, and the show was part of his efforts to “drum up support.”
At this point, it would be a fitting maneuver to explain a little about TSOL and Grisham for those of you who don’t know, because without any knowledge, the need for security won’t make sense and the idea of Jack Grisham running for governor won’t be nearly as entertaining.
TSOL stands for True Sounds Of Liberty and had its genesis during the ’80′s hardcore-punk explosion in Los Angles alongside other well-known hardcore staples such as Black Flag, The Circle Jerks and punk mainstay Social Distortion.
Henry Rollins once said, on his paramount and fantastic Spoken Word Album Get in the Van, that what Black Flag had created was a soundtrack for a full-blown riot; TSOL is little different.
Some concerns should have set of alarm bells in my mind. I was working five nights a week at a big nightclub, The Shark Club, in Orange County and we had trouble regularly. I had worked at clubs all over Palm Springs, L.A. and O.C. but despite this experience, I walked into a very volatile situation like I was going to a picnic with my Grandma. Perhaps it was the 50 dollars I really needed so that I could eat. Or perhaps it was the chance to see TSOL live, or maybe it was both. But I learned quickly that when one adds TSOL, a load of ex-convict skin heads, Da Hui guys and Dennis Rodman, things can go well array.
“Eddie Rothman, one of Da Hui’s founders.”
The place was packed. I had arrived shortly before 1800 to help out and check things out and now, at 1845 it was already packed. Working the door with “Mark”, the guy masquerading as the security manager and who, a few months later, would violate his parole for possession and domestic disturbance, I was checking people out as they came in and was pleasantly surprised; lots of blondes, lots of beach bodies, lots of mellow looking cool people. With a proximity so near to New Port beach, this seemed to fit.
We weren’t doing pat downs like we did at my normal club because the owner of the bar had said it wasn’t necessary, and Mark clearly wasn’t taking this too seriously. I had already seen him put down three beers in the space of fifteen minutes. I convinced myself that this wasn’t something to worry about. Personally, I never drink when I work security or protection. It’s just a bad idea and it’s unprofessional. This isn’t as much of a hard and fast rule as one might think however, not with other bouncers and bodyguards I have discovered. Mark was proving that right in front of me by crushing another Budweiser can and tossing it into the bin near the front door.
The atmosphere started to shift, and clearly, at around 1910 when the skin heads started to arrive. They showed up in packs of five or six and were what you might expect with lot’s of tattoos, lots of grizzled faces and generally unpleasant expressions. They assaulted the bar immediately, although it was clear most of them had been drinking before they showed up. Their long jean shorts, wife beaters, wallet chains and the occasional swastika tattooed on deltoids or a bicep contrasted starkly with the fake palm trees and mellow cabana lighting inside the bar.
These guys raised my alert levels and I made a mental note of my fellow security guys. Mark was across from me shaking hands and letting people in and the Brit, “Scott”, an amateur boxer with a nearly impenetrable cockney accent, was floating around near the toilets smiling at the collection of tanned and beach blonde women mulling around.
Later, when all hell broke loose, Scott would actually be in the toilet with one of those bleach blonde women and hence, of no help at all.
Fairly dark thoughts were forming based on our lack of experience together and no real SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) in case of a throw down and I was about to step across the entry way and speak to Mark when the focus of the entire place shifted sharply and I turned and saw Dennis Rodman standing in the doorway.
I’m a big man, but Rodman dwarfs me. This wasn’t the first time I had met him though. I had spoken to him briefly at The Shark club six months early and we had talked about Mixed Martial Arts for fifteen minutes and he was a fairly regular fixture in the area. He lived in Newport beach, really just down the road, and his reputation and propensity for trying to “Keep in real” meant that he showed up at all sorts of shit he really had no business at.
Here I have to shake my head in disappointment at myself. I let Rodman and his wife showing up on that ridiculous moped distract me from what were the early warning signs of a storm brewing over by the bar. Bottles of beer being passed out and consumed. Narrow eyes looking passed thick lids just scanning the territory. A lot of scar tissue and calcified knuckles.
Shortly after Rodman and his lady moved into the bar is when the third part of this chemical explosion showed up; Eddie Rothman and the Da Hui boys.
Rothman came in and immediately gave a business card, and fifty bucks each, to myself and to Mark. I had no idea who he was, but I had heard of Da Hui, a team of pro surfers that travel the world essentially carving waves and getting in fights. He was well-built and was followed into the bar by between 5 to seven guys, all of whom were big, heavily tanned and muscular.
The tension between the skins and the Da Hui guys was immediate, but within ten minutes the show started.
“Surely this man would never incite a riot.”
TSOL was immediately and intensely off the chain. They rocked. Hard. It was a really heavy show and they were going for it. Grisham’s vocals were awesome and the entire bar was alive in a huge, huge way.
In the center of the floor, in front of the small stage that was set up, a mosh pit had quickly formed. The action inside was rough but nothing over the top. I’ve been in some brutal pits over the years, the worst ones back in small town no-where-land when cranked out skins were literally head butting chicks in the face and then brutally kicking the shit out of their boyfriends when they tried to step up and on their way out they would smash car windows; just because. This pit was rough but contained, and in retrospect this should have clued me in. This wasn’t an MXPX concert, and skin heads don’t come to these for exercise and networking. They come to fuck shit up. The fact that they hadn’t yet was disturbing.
The skin heads were going round and round, but weren’t physically making much contact with other people. It was like they were just ramping up their vibration for an onslaught and there was a clear and unmistakable hum of menace to the entire place. This all went nuclear when TSOL finally played Code Blue.
Within thirty seconds of the songs initial cords it was like the skin head guys had decided to let the battle begin and the mosh put doubled in size and everyone was getting crunched. Girls, guys, big people, little people. Didn’t matter. The entire bar was beginning to get razed. Rodman grabbed his wife and they were out within a minute. It looked that bad.
Mark and I tried, truly in vain, to get these guys to calm down but we might as well have hopped into the Gorilla inclosure at the zoo and asked the boys there to let us just “hang out here for a while.”
I had to grab two girls that got planted by the rotation and current of the pit and I pulled them toward the door. It was right about when I reached the door and saw Mark gesturing for people to go through, most of the “normal” patrons had decided to call it a night, that the band said “Thank you, we’re fucking out.” And on hearing that, Mark and Iwent outside to try to clear a path for all the other patrons to exit.
Rodman was standing out there and we all started talking to him. He was on fire. “Holy shit those motherfuckers aren’t kidding!” And we were all laughs and joking until this very petite little blonde woman came up to me and asked, “Uh, are you guys like, the security?”
We all stared at her and Mark and I both said together. “Yeah.”
“Well, they’re fucking destroying that place in there.”
We looked at each other for a second and then both took off for the door and into the bar.
Inside it was absolute and utter bedlam.
There was no longer “a bar”. Within the space of 3 or 4 minutes, they had completely torn the bar out of the floor. Two windows at the back of the place were shattered. No table remained standing. Someone had lit a fake palm tree on fire. I had five seconds or so to take in the scene and it was fights wall to wall. A massively built, brown Da Hui guy effortlessly slammed some skin heads face directly into the pool table to my left with such velocity that the guy bounced off it and landed completely motionless on the floor.
Then, across the room I saw it; a group of guys, at least six of them, surrounding one body that was in the corner, on the floor between the wall and the stage, and they were completely kicking the shit out of him. I grabbed Mark’s T-shirt and yelled “Stay on my back!” and I bound forward across the club. I would later learn that Mark, who had spent a couple of years in prison, had extreme survival instincts, took one look at the situation and said “Fuck this,” and had turned around and walked out. Thanks.
Well, I reached the group just as some other guy, neither a skin head nor a surfer grabbed my neck, as if to shove me, and I simply smashed my forehead into his face and chucked his head toward the opposite side of the room and he went flying into some turned over tables.
I stepped up to the group and could see nothing but boots flying into the prone body on the floor. I dropped my right hand low and shot a hook into the kidney area of the guy closest to me. I hit him really hard and this stood him up straight and I grabbed his chin with one hand and covered his eyes with the other and snapped his head back sending him slamming heavily into the ground. The next guy in the group I just fish hooked, turned him and then bodily shoved him away. Amazingly, the group had somehow cleared and I saw the guy on the ground, his face covered in blood and I moved to kneel down to help him up when I got rocked.
Whatever hit me felt like it was a lead pipe. It propelled me six feet to my left and turned my body 45 degrees. I must have blacked out on my feet for a moment, because the next thing I remember is that I was leaning, my hands holding me up, against the low stage, looking up I saw two really attractive girls, one blonde and one brunette on the stage, holding each other, terrified. In the next moment I felt my head bobbing forward and realized that someone was punching me.
I spun around in time to get a fist directly in my mouth. Then another in my shoulder, one in my head, another in my collar-bone area. Three skin heads were standing in front of me having a workout. The visual woke me up and I started swinging wildly, still getting hit, and mostly hitting them in areas that didn’t feel important but I knew that if I went down I’d be sleeping in the hospital that night. This wild barrage gave me enough space to roll up onto the stage, pick up the mic stand and drill the heavy base directly into the lead guys teeth. I was dizzy and the entire right side of my face felt wrong. The blonde that was on the stage grabbed me and screamed, all sense of culture or control or civility now gone “Get us the FUCK OUT OF HERE!” She had a crazed, dangerous look in her eye’s and spit and drool was coming out of her mouth.
I took in the scene again while trying to ward off two angry skin heads from on top of the stage. The room a swarm of violence. Several prone, motionless bodies on the dark floor. Music equipment all over. Just then some little guy came dashing toward the stage, past the skin heads and leapt, head first over the stage and out a back door that I hadn’t realized was behind me, that was blocked by sound equipment.
The girls and I moved to the far end of the stage and in the process lost the remaining skin heads, jumped down and pushed through the crowds to the front door and out into the parking lot. The parking lot was no better. People were all over, two fighting between two cars to my right. I grabbed the brunette girl and asked her, roughly “Look at my eye, is it OK?” She was sobbing. “What do you mean?” I lost it. ” I mean is it in my fucking skull or hanging out of it?!” I screeched at her and she just sobbed uncontrollably. I couldn’t see out of my right eye, and I couldn’t feel anything on that side of my face and had assumed the worst.
I then saw Mark by the front door and just then a girl, stereotypically blonde, cute, wearing a tight white t-shirt showing off her 24-hour fitness body with little jean shorts came stumbling out of the bar covered in blood. Her nose was clearly broken and gushing crimson and she had a wicked black eye.
I then went completely mad, walked back into the bar. Mark tried to grab me and I shoved him back, I picked up a pool cue off the table, took a step forward and hit the first skin head type that I saw, some guy who was actually trying to leave the bar, squarely in the face. A second later Mark, and a few other people were dragging me out of the bar and I was screaming and cussing and completely losing it.
A few minutes later I had calmed down and saw across the street, four police cruises parked, engines idling. The cops had been called by the owner of the bar, and they came, but they decided not to do anything. Fights went on for a quarter-mile in both directions up and down the street.
Forty Five minutes later, the Da Hui guys were gone having escaped in some piece of shit little sky-blue van someone had. Rodman was gone; he and his wife had taken off on their bedazzled huge white moped. TSOL had been the first to split when they realized that this show to drum up support for a bid at governor hadn’t worked out as planned, and finally the cops came strolling in.
I was sitting on the pool table by the door, a bag of ice over the right side of my face when the worst case scenario came waddling up to me; a short, offensively fat cop, balding, stupid mustache, white as a ghost and then said with a snarky little laugh “So, what happened to you there, buddy?” I tried to say nothing and failed horribly. “Just doing your job officer.”
His smile vanished. “What did you say?” I removed the ice from my face and looked at him. “I said, good work officer.” He was now a shade of red. “Watch it son, you really need to watch—” I cut him off. “You’re a real fucking hero. Thanks for the help.” And with this totally unnecessary jab, I got off the table, went and found the owner, who was in bad shape and totally distraught about everything and told him to give me my money because I was leaving.
“Jesus, can you drive? I think you need to go to the hospital.”
I sighed. “Just pay me man. I’m outta here.” I lightly touched the swollen, misshapen right side of my face and said, nearly a whisper. “I am totally fucking out of here.”
And he did. Actually he gave me 100 dollars, double what we were supposed to be paid. Then I walked down the street to the gym in the dark where I had parked my truck, got in and with a high level of difficulty drove home.
When I got to the apartment in Dartmouth Court, right next to the UCI campus, I walked in passing the big pool glowing yellow and gold and blue in the center of the attractive apartment community, got out my keys, went inside, ignored my girlfriend, drank a half a bottle of NyQuil, took several Ibuprofen, put a bag of frozen peas over my face and passed out for 13 hours.
Long night, but at least I made 150 bucks. Less than six months later I would be getting off the bus from Narita Airport at the West Exit of Shinjuku station knowing nobody, with two bags and a thousand dollars to my name and I’ll never forget what the city looked like. Different.
