I like to think that I was once involved in the perfect bar fight. This was about eight years ago, in Mississippi, back when I was spending nine or ten hours a day in a second-story saloon on the town square, a time in my life for which I bear a certain hungover nostalgia. My opponent, in this case, was my best drinking pal, a longhaired South Carolinian a year or two my junior. The cause of the fight was, naturally, a woman-in this case, one present in the bar. For a while she'd been my girlfriend, and then she wasn't, a change in status that I seemed unable to reconcile in my head. No one else had much liked her, and the judgment of pals was that, by splitting with her, I'd escaped a grim future-a judgment endorsed, adamantly, by the South Carolinian. Yet I was drunk, moony, unsure, second-guessing my fate as old Tom Waits songs crackled on the bar's hi-fi. An hour shy of last call, the ex approached me in the bar, and, forgive me, I thought this might be my one thump-hearted chance to woo her back. That's when the South Carolinian appeared, butting into the conversation in a way that I might liken to a circus clown crashing a Middle East peace conference. Scram, I told him. He scrunched up his face and made nonsensical noises. The ex-girlfriend, who'd long lamented my lack of maturity as well as my choice in friends, rolled her eyes and made motions to leave. I mean it, I told him. He crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out to one side. I grabbed him by the neck. He grabbed me by the neck. We began throttling each other, muttering mean curses. No punches-just throttling, growling, bared teeth. I don't recollect how long this went on, but at some point we looked up, simultaneously, to see the entire bar population frozen in a baffled stare, watching us choking each other. And the ex? Nowhere to be seen.
We looked at each other, sighed, shrugged, dropped our choke-holds, took two stools at the bar, and bought each other beers. We've pledged to finish that fight, and perhaps someday we will. In the meantime, though, we drink in peace.
Jonathan Miles is a contributing editor to Men's Journal and Field & Stream, and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review. His work has twice been included in The Best American Sports Writing anthologies. A longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he now lives in Warwick, New York, and is at work on a novel.
Coda
This essay was actually assigned as punishment for punching a Men's Journal editor at a staff party at an East Village saloon-the magazine journalism equivalent, I suppose, of having to write "I will not punch my editors" one hundred times on the blackboard. I won't bore you with the details of the scuffle though I will note the following: (a) tequila was involved, and (b) truth to tell, the editor had it coming. Let me add that this is strenuously unusual behavior for me. I am a happy drinker more prone to sloppy hugs than frothy fist-throwing, but, again: When you mix tequila with a blowhard editor, things can sometimes fall apart. My starkest memory of the evening is the sound of the locks clicking shut on the door after I'd been ejected from the bar; they seemed to go on forever. As a fresh transplant to New York from the South, I didn't know a door could have that many locks.
Naturally there were consequences: For one thing, I had to write this essay. Bad behavior has always fascinated me, though the subject of bar brawling arrived with its own set of difficulties. The line between bad behavior and sociopathic behavior, in this case, is terribly thin. I have zero interest in the kinds of fights bullies engage in to puff up their frail sense of machismo; that's just violence for violence's sake, and it happens all too frequently and odiously around the world. What interested me, instead, were the kinds of amateur bar fights ignited by overdoses of passion plus liquor. That is to say, bar fights fought by otherwise reasonable (or semireasonable) people for concrete (or semiconcrete) reasons. Broken hearts, political differences, grudges, and slights, that sort of thing. Obviousness aside, I wondered: Why does liquor-and a bar setting-prompt people to violence? What exactly causes people to snap? And why do so many of them rip off their shirts before fighting?
As to my essay's happy presence in these pages, I must confess that it rarely occurred to me to think of bar fighting-at least of the amateur, one- or two-punch, black eye-resulting variety I tried to focus on-as a crime, though I suppose it certainly is. The ideal bar fight should be quick and for the most part painless enough to never require police attention but, true, it's assault and battery, no matter how loose and saggy the punches. I'm reminded of the time, ten years or so ago, when I was fired as a reporter for a small Mississippi daily for listing a man's legendary bootlegging past in his obituary. Huffily, the publisher informed me that the paper was not in the habit of noting people's crimes in their obituary. "But bootlegging isn't a crime," I protested. "It's a…service." I believe my newspapering career ended at that very precise moment.
I no longer touch tequila, by the way. (A pal of mine smartly calls it "felony juice.") Nor do I punch people. I am, however, still inexorably drawn to saloons where folks do both. As they say: One thing at a time.
Lawrence Wright
The Terror Web
from The New Yorker
For much of Spain's modern history, the organization that has defined its experience with terror is ETA, which stands for Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty). ETA, which was founded in 1959, has a clear political goaclass="underline" It wants to set up a separate nation, comprising the Basque provinces, in northern Spain, and parts of southern France. Although ETA has killed some eight hundred people, it has developed a reputation for targeting, almost exclusively, politicians, security officials, and journalists. Over the years, the terrorists and the Spanish police have come to a rough understanding about the rules of engagement. "They don't commit attacks on the working class, and they always call us before an explosion, telling us where the bomb is situated," an intelligence official in the Spanish National Police told me recently in Madrid. "If they place a bomb in a backpack on a train, there will be a cassette tape saying, 'This bag is going to explode. Please leave the train.' " And so on March 11, when the first reports arrived of mass casualties resulting from explosions on commuter trains, Spanish intelligence officials assumed that ETA had made an appalling mistake.
At 7:37 a.m., as a train was about to enter Madrid's Atocha station, three bombs blasted open the steel cars, sending body parts through the windows of nearby apartments. The station is in Madrid's center, a few blocks from the Prado Museum. Within seconds, four bombs exploded on another train, five hundred and fifty yards from the station. The bombs killed nearly a hundred people. Had the explosions occurred when the trains were inside the station, the fatalities might have tallied in the thousands; a quarter of a million people pass through Atocha every workday. The trains at that hour were filled with students and young office workers who live in public housing and in modest apartment complexes east of the city. Many were immigrants, who had been drawn by the Spanish economic boom.
As emergency crews rushed to the scene, two more bombs demolished a train at the El Pozo del Tio Raimundo station, three miles away. By then, Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister, had learned of the attacks, which were taking place at the end of an uneventful political campaign. The conservative Popular Party, which Aznar headed, was leading the Socialists by four and a half points in the polls, despite the overwhelming opposition of the Spanish population to the country's participation in the war in Iraq. It was Thursday morning; the election would take place on Sunday.