Embarassment

It always makes me laugh to tell a guy he was the “bigger man” after he walks away from a fight. I tell them this so they won’t go back and make my life miserable by trying to make it look like they want to fight again. I tell them this to make them feel better about the decision they’ve made – which gets them out of my life more quickly than arguing with them does.

In most cases, this decision entails avoiding a royal ass-kicking, which is usually why I advocated for it – after inserting myself in the situation and breaking up the almost-fight – in the first place.

When someone claims to be the “bigger man,” it’s something you have to analyze. You have to figure out whether the person who’s telling you he was the “bigger man” is delusional or not. Most people are delusional about something. Some people are more delusional about more things than others. In clubs, everyone is delusional about everything – myself included.

You have to figure out whether this “bigger man” was really being the “bigger man” or not. When a guy can really handle himself and inflict serious damage on the Guido with whom he disagrees, it’s rather noble of him to turn on his heel and walk away from a fight. Most times, however, this isn’t the case. The so-called “bigger man,” in most cases, is playing the “bigger man” role because he’s scared to death. He knows he’s about receive an embarrassing lesson in humility in front of a large crowd of people, some of whom are his friends and relatives, and he needs an out.

A surefire sign that you’re dealing with the latter case is when the “bigger man” takes pains to let you and everyone else within earshot know that he is, indeed, the “bigger man.” The guy who knows he’d win the fight, and so can’t be troubled to go through the hassle of proving it, won’t sit around for a half hour afterward telling you how much class he has. He doesn’t need to.

Something like this happened on Saturday night. It made me feel like an asshole. It always makes me feel like an asshole to stand on the sidewalk telling these retards the decisions they’ve made are correct. You thank some guy for not making a bad decision, because the alternative would irritate the living shit out of you for twenty minutes longer than you want to spend in the company of some useless fucking slapdick with a barcode tattoo on the back of his neck that he thinks renders him impervious to left hooks thrown by some other slapdick with a spider-web tattoo on his elbow. And this is how we make money.

It’s my own fault, right? It’s my fault for still being in this stupid fucking joke of a “profession” that requires me to stand on sidewalks saying such things to such people. It’s my fault for being too much of a jerkoff to slide out of it when I had the chance, and it’s my fault for thinking this many years of bouncing is normal.

Normal on whose scale? Who thinks about this shit? Who, other than bouncers, sits around having clinical discussions about the “bigger man” issue? Shouldn’t we have better things to do? Bigger goals to get after? More substantive things to think about in our idle fucking hours?

Yes, we should, but we don’t. We never do. We sit around, night after night, thinking about this shit. We talk about these jerkoffs as though any of this shit matters. It shouldn’t, and it doesn’t, but we let it suck our time away even though we know it’s pointless.

“Let it go, man,” I say. “You did the right thing. You’re the bigger man.”

Bigger than what? Bigger than whom? The dickhead whose STD-ridden girlfriend he groped? Every other asshole who went through with getting his ass handed to him in a fight with someone he shouldn’t have chanced?

Why do we lie to these people? What good does it do them? What good does it do us?