Don't Pick Fights at Bars

One of the most entertaining tricks I know grew out of being grilled by the head lawyer of a company I worked at over a decade ago. It was a small start up and I’d only worked there two weeks when everyone on my team got yanked, one by one, into a small room and questioned about a team meeting. Apparently upper management had had so many complaints about my director that they were jumping on one from a project manager about an inappropriate joke, and they fired him soon after. But the reason this memory crystallized in my head is the lawyer kicked my ass so bad it took me days to figure out what happened, and he did it by sitting there quietly.

After asking me some warm up questions, he hit me with an open ended one. I answered, he sat there. I got nervous and started babbling. He wrote things down, I got more nervous and kept babbling. Rinse and repeat. I walked out of the room feeling like he’d slapped me in the face and taken my lunch money. I was pretty angry, but I couldn’t figure out exactly why.

It turns out that the lawyer employed a simple trick that lawyers, cops, and anyone trying to pressure people use routinely. Just let someone’s answer or comment hang while you stare expectantly at them, and the silence gets increasingly awkward. If the other person doesn’t understand the dynamic they start filling the silence just to make it go away. It’s a cheap trick, and probably won’t work on almost anyone whose read this far because the only thing required for it to fail is knowing what the other person is doing. Once I understood what happened I was still mad, just at myself for falling for something that dumb.

Fast forward enough years for arthritis to kick in and I got to unleash the same awkward silence on a soyboy douchebag at a bar while a punk band set up to play. I wore my, “Make America Metal Again,” shirt, and as usual got a few nods/fistbumps/whatevers. It’s a joke shirt, but niche, fun in that it’s hijacking the slogan of a divisive politician for a light laugh, and it’s not really clear if it’s making fun of the left, right, both, or neither.

\m/

So I was surprised when a dude walked up and opened with, “can I talk to you about your shirt?” He asked what I meant by it, I responded that just because I’m pro-metal doesn’t mean I’m anti-punk. He gestured back and forth between our chests and said he also liked metal and punk. You see? We have something in common! Then he asked me if I was against fascism. I said yes, and he sort of clapped his hands together and said, “me too!” It was like Bluesky came to life and decided to infantilize me at a bar.

I can’t remember exactly what he said after that because I just stared at him. The above “soyboy” crack referenced his build, which was the pretty standard skinny/fat one—skinny arms, blocky torso, not necessarily overweight from the BMI perspective, but no discernible muscles. But it still felt prudent to shift to face him, so I stood there, looking. Just looking. He asked a question, I stared. He asked another one, I stared. Not angry, no attempt to intimidate, no emotion at all. After maybe fifteen seconds of this he asked, “So is this what our conversation’s going to be like?” I stared some more and he left.

Folks, don’t do that. Don’t walk up to strangers and grill them on their politics. And for your own sake don’t do it at a bar. You know, where people get drunk? I’m pretty chill, but that Bluesky McSoyboy had no way of knowing that, or knowing how deep in my cups I was (two beers. The answer was two). His instincts told him it was a good idea to approach a stranger at a punk show in a bar and challenge him on his t-shirt. Those are broken instincts, and this feels like he lost the gift of fear. Manners too, obviously, but definitely fear. I trained years to fight and I’d never walk up to a stranger and start talking to him like he was a child.

I had the chance to replay the exchange many times that night, running through different ways I could have handled it, and I can’t come up with a better one. I’ve spent so many hours talking to people like that that I already know there’s no point. If you’re willing to walk up to a stranger with grey in his beard and performatively clap because you both agree that fascism is bad, there’s no conversational path where you’re going to listen to anything I have to say. Calling an interrogation a “conversation” doesn’t make it one, either. It just reminded me of the scene in Chasing Amy where Ben Affleck grills Amy about the threesome he heard she was in, and she finally snapped.

So … do you like fascism?

Amy: That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? That’s what this little cross-examination of yours is all about? God! Well, next time, try not to make it so obvious, alright? There’s subtler ways of badgering a witness! Am I right?

Bystander: Jeez, man. Even I knew what you were getting at.

I know some readers want to object with, “he wasn’t picking a fight he was just talking!” Right. He was what … just clearing up that I didn’t like Donald Trump? Preparing to set me straight if he found out I did? The odds of that exchange going south were about 95% and I opted for the 5. I don’t know if Bluesky McSoyboy wanted fodder for his social media activism, he thought he might change a heart and mind, wanted to bait me into a fight, or has just spent so many years in the danger-free zone that it never occurred to him that someone might decide to smash him mid sentence, but I’m glad that whatever his weird little agenda was, I bowed out from the get go.