The Man's Guide to Fights and Beatdowns

Watch out for the Rugrats they are always the most dangerous,
 it's the low center of gravity.

There are few things that you can count on in your life. One, you will pay taxes, you will catch the common cold, you will die at some point, and you will get in a few fights. I’ve long been a fan of not fighting, I just think it’s the most pointless shit in the world. A few things about fighting have always turned me off: 1) It hurts to get punched, 2) Fights rarely end when they end, and 3) You never know who you’re fighting. Every time I think to myself, “I think I can take him.” I get this flashback memory of The Hangover and I imagine a Chinese guy hopping out of the trunk of my car and beating my ass with a crowbar. Truth be told, by being a mature adult you can pretty much keep yourself out of trouble for most of your life. There will be a few occasions over the course of your life that will require that you fight and for that you must go to the mattresses. But for the most part you can avoid fights altogether by never leaving your house, never drinking alcohol, never partying in a place where someone else there may or may not be using steroids, never being in a place where there are attractive women and other men who you do not know or are familiar with, never getting angry about anything that bothers you, even if it offends you, and hiding under your desk at work.

Yes, I think that about sums it up. The point is, you’re going to get in some fights at some point of your life. So I’ve decided to break down the various fights and why they are either hilarious, stupid/foolish, or necessary evils of Man.

He spent more time on his back than a two-bit whore.

1) Incompatibility-related beatdowns

Growing up I had this dude who basically was jocking just about everything I did. I went to a new school, he needed to go to the new school. I started playing the keyboards and now he wanted to play the keyboards. I didn’t want a typical Madness keychain, I wanted a neon green joint to go with my uptempos, now HE has to get a neon green keychain. On the surface it appeared that we were friends, but each time he copied something that I was doing to set myself apart, I would think to myself, “I wish you would just go somewhere.” Anyway, tension began to build between us and one day on a crowded bus afterschool, he started jone’ing on me about something and I don’t know what it is about young black boys in DC but we love to say this, “Hit me and I’ll steal you.” For a boy under the age of 16, that’s just about the same thing as saying, “I will shoot you.” Well, would you believe this fool hit me in the face?! Oh hell no, I may have been all of 5’4 and 125 lbs, but you wouldn’t have known it that day. He hit me and then I turned red, and then he had this surprised look on his face. I push him back across a seat and I started punching him with a flurry. It was like a TKO but since this was an afterschool fight nobody broke it up. He tried to roll off the bus and so he kind of made his way to the back exit and before you knew it to add insult to injury, I kicked him off the bus. I take nothing back about that situation, he had that ass whipping the first day he showed up with the same shoes that I took my ass all the way out to Tyson’s Corner to get before anyone else would cop them the next Saturday.

Ricky Hatton's wife after he got knocked out in a Casino.

2) Love Interest-related beatdowns

I was dating this girl one time and she had a nice rack, nothing she could do about that, she was born that way. Problem is she would never do anything to cover them up, they were always at least 2 feet in front of her and standing up near her chin. Occasionally when we’d be out a guy would say something disrespectful to her and she’d look at me as to say, “What are you going to do about that?” I looked back at her like, “All those damn mirrors in your house and you didn’t think anybody was going to say something ridiculous to you about your ridiculous cleavage?!” I wasn’t about to get in a fight over that. Now in addition to that, I’ll come clean, there’s a few things that I won’t fight a guy over when I’m with my chick; if he says anything off the wall about her, I’m likely to walk away, and also, call me what you want, but I’ve never been the type of dude who flips out because another dude flirts with you in public. As a matter of fact, tell him you’ll take two drinks at a time and get your boy a Heineken for the road. However, there is a time when we all have to fight over our lady’s honor and that’s only and I do mean, only, when an onlooker says something about you. If I’m walking down the street and a guy says, “Damn ma, you sure do know how to pick them, you got a perfect chump.” Now we gotta fight. I can’t have that. That’s like written in The Bible, “Thou shalt not be a bitch and let someone call you a bitch.” Now fighting for your woman’s honor is a little touchy. There’s only two ways to do it. You either have to know you can take the guy, OR, you know that you had no chance to beat this guy anyway. For example, I’m about to fight this 6’5”, 240 lbs guy who’s clearing drinking Muscle Milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I got to do what I got to do, but I’m not looking forward to winning this one. The reason why this is so key is because if you get your ass beat by somebody who is an equal opponent than you, your girl will never respect you for that again. No matter how many times you say, “But baby he has silver gloves!” she will still look at you like the little bitch that you are.

3) Family-related beatdowns

I love my family dearly but if it’s anything that you can never mess with is a man’s family. This is a one way ticket to a beatdown. I know a guy who was locked up for 3 years on a petty breaking and entering charge. About 3 weeks before he got out he found out someone called his mother a bitch. This guy waited three weeks to get out of jail, he came home, went in the kitchen and got himself a knife and went out in the parking lot of his apartment complex and stabbed the guy 10-15 times in the back. He didn’t kill him though. He is back in prison for another 10 years now. He wasn’t free 36 hours before he was headed back to jail.

4) Obligatory beatdowns

There’s things that happen from time to time and I don’t really find them offensive but just because of the principle, I have to do something about it. A couple weeks ago in NYC, I was walking out of a nightclub with my boys. And you know what, this may have been my fault. I need to stop going places where I’m the only … well nevermind. Basically, I come out of the nightclub and this white guy is in front the club, drunk out of his mind talking about the n-words who were in the club tonight. He may have said it seven times. I turned to my white friend and said, “Did I just hear that?” And he did what I’ll talk about a little later on, he just got quiet and said, “Wow.” Because what else could he say? So I had to do what I had to do. It was no way I could tell somebody a story that goes,

Me: So this white guy is calling people the n-word out front the club
Spearmint: Yeah so what did you do?
Me: I walked over and explained that you shouldn’t use that word to talk about Black people.
Spearmint: You’re a bitch, you know that right?

So I knew I could take this guy and although he was drunk, I was obligated to do something. So I picked up a water bottle that was still full and I threw it at him, knocking him back onto a ledge and then I went over to exchange cordials (a push in the face). You will never believe what happened next, and I’m going to talk about this later too, his boy comes out the club and -- it’s a Black guy! I looked at that Black guy and said, “Is this your mans? No, wait, is this your mans? Ask him why he got his ass beat.” The Black guy sighed and walked his friend to safety, but then he said this, “Yo man I keep telling you to stop saying that word.” That disappointed me so much I just left the situation alone after that.

5) Cautionary beatdowns

From time to time you are not sure if you need to fight or not. My daddy always had a rule, “In times of uncertainty, hit him first and then figure out the rest.” There’s always going to be a tense situation where you’re standing face to face with a guy who you got beef with. You’re breathing heavily, your palms sweaty, you could pass gas and not a person would hear it that’s how tense your ass is right now. You’ve both got something to prove and it seems like it’s not just 10 or 12 of your friends looking on, it’s THE WORLD! So you have to just do what anyone else would do in a similar situation, just swing on him and see what happens.

That's not really me.

6) We was just having fun beatdowns

I used to get in a fight every year on St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t really get violent when I drink Henny, but when I have too many shots of Jameson, I get ignorant. I don’t know if that makes me Irish, but I dig redheads so we’ll see what happens. And I’ll tell you how it all goes down too.

Everybody’s pounding back beers and shots. There are women there. There are men that we don’t know all that well there. For some strange reason when they play, “Born In the USA” in a bar, I usually try and get my ass out the way. If you ever want to know what this scene looks like, think about when they play “Move Bitch” or “Bia Bia” in a black club. That’s actually what it looks like in a bar when they play that Springsteen song. I fight may break out, we’ll all scuffle, the bouncers will all throw us out and we’ll go to Johnny Rockets and tell the war story while eating fries dipped in smiley face shaped ketchup.

When you said, it was over race I totally missed the memo.

7) I’ll have to sit this one out beatdowns

So above I spoke about a situation where race was involved. Well, there’s this time where I had to sit a fight out because I couldn’t get in the middle of it. There was this night in college when one of my really good friends, a white guy, said the n-word. Yes, these things happen. He was trying to tell a story and a famous basketball player who wore number #15 just happened to be walking by and it got real. Somebody was drunk, or something was going on. PAUSE.

I enjoyed NC17’s post about, Can A White Girl Say The N-word? I thought it was kind of on point, but there was one thing I told Spearmint earlier that applies here: “I'll put it like this, my white friend said that shit around me once and I was like. Yo don't say that shit. Honestly, I don't think it's fair that Black people use it and then y'all can't. But rules is rules. The problem is this... if you get your ass beat, I am going to look like an ass, turncoat and Uncle Tom for jumping in, so I gotta let you get your ass beat.”

UNPAUSE. So at this point it’s two black guys, a Mexican, a white kid, and a few members of the basketball team in a staring contest. I took my ass in Acropolis and said, “Man this ain’t my fight.” I watched from inside the restaurant and there was pushing and shoving, a little squirmish and an article about it in the school paper the next day. Thing is one of my friends, the black guy, stayed out there with him, so you know the next day people were like, “I can’t believe [such and such] let that white kid get away with saying the n-word.” People said, “Matter fact, where was you Jax?” And I said what anyone else would say, “I wasn’t there. I was in Toxicated.”  That's actually a real place, there's a location in every city.

(Just to explain this story all the way to its end. We actually are all still friends and that’s going to make a hell of a chapter in my book, but basically we just told my friend, the black guy, to say he said it and the whole thing was a big misunderstanding. No sooner than the second he told everybody, “Actually I was the one who said it.” It went away.)

Haitians and Jamaicans ain't never gonna get along.

8) This ain’t over yet beatdowns

This is actually the reason why I don’t fight or like to fight. Fights never end. They just don’t. If you fight someone and you’ll see that person again, please believe you’ll be fighting every day until one of you is dead or too embarrassed to come back for more. And since nobody wants to be the bitch, once you fight someone, you should just plan on fighting them every time you see each other for the rest of your life. I got two cats that I grew up with, in high school out of nowhere my boy comes to me and says, “Yo you seen Rob? I’m gonna beat his ass when I see him.” I ain’t know what it was about and so I was like, “Word? Nah I ain’t seen him lately.” Turns out Rob f*cked my boy’s girlfriend to “prove” she was a hoe. Funny thing about my boy’s girlfriend she was pregnant. That happened like 11 years ago. Last year at the Block Party around my old way we all sitting around drinking Budweisers and talking about old days and Rob shows up. My boy was a little liquor’ed up and he walked right over to Rob and knocked him out. Rob could never fight, but Rob had the heart of a lion. Rob got back up and squared off and we looked at these two fools fighting in the middle of a Block Party. Oldheads were looking on like, “Those two youngins still fighting over that.” And we like, “Yeah, I doubt they ever stop fighting over it either, at this point, it’s off principle.”

And there you have it, those are 8 types of fights or beatdowns that always come up in your life. I’d be interested to hear some of your war stories. I’m sure this list gets almost beyond hilarious when you factor in women. Women have epic fights and beatdowns. Nothing like grabbing a fistful of hair and spinning that girl around like a top as her entire weave unravels and still losing the fight because she was lighter on her feet.