I CAMe HeRE To TEACh EnGLiSH ANd KiCK ASS: A VioLEnT InCidEnT
Vodkaberg, Russia, Fall, 2004
You just never know when some drunk idiot might decide to kick your ass on the street.
That’s especially true of Russia, as there are plenty of drunk idiots on the streets.
English Teacher R and I were just walking out of work at 9:30pm or so, a maybe 5- or 6- minute walk to the bus stop, down streets that are not very well lit, and suddenly we found ourselves faced off against three very drunk young men. They were all incredibly drunk, average sized, and incredibly stupid. They wanted a light for their cigarettes, but seeing the ever-visible ETR -- tattooed and goateed -- they suddenly developed a great interest in the foreigner.
Now of course I knew exactly what to do: keep fucking walking, and don't hesitate for one fucking second. Nothing good is going to come of speaking to drunk Russian young men in the street; at the very least, you will be bored and irritated by them. At the worst, you'll be stabbed to death.
I suppose ETR was just kind of off guard, because these were a particularly stupid looking bunch of guys. But as I said, it was a Monday, we had just finished work, and we weren't thinking about much other than perhaps going home and watching TV.
I kept walking and ETR stayed there answering their questions as they lit their cigarettes.
One of them followed me. He was a particularly nasty-looking one, face covered with zits and a mangy-looking shaved head -- he was wearing a strangely gay-looking blue plastic jacket, though.
He started slurring: "Hey, why don't you want to stop and talk? Huh? You don't like Russians? Well I don't like English people!" and he spit, and so forth.
Now fortunately Crazy Angel, an old girlfriend, had a rich vocabulary of profanity, and she had taught me all the useful ones, so I immediately recognized "Fuck you in the ass" and "Fuck your mother."
I took off my glasses and put them in my pocket. Down the street, English Teacher R was trying to go, but the guys kept getting in front of him and puling his arms.
I suddenly knew: this was it, baby. It was on. A real street fight.
Now as it turned out, we'd been training for just this very occurrence.
Around the beginning of October, 2004, English Teacher A talked English Teacher R and I into joining the gym that he went to. It was a small place, not far from my apartment – but it had a weight room and a sauna, which seemed well worth $40 a month.
And on Sunday afternoons at three, they had a class known as "Real Fight." That was how it was advertised, in English, on the signs -- Real Fight.
English Teacher R and I had been attending these, at the behest of English Teacher A, who had done quite a bit of kickboxing and Muai Thai boxing in Australia.
It was great fun. There was a lot of aerobic jumping around and kicking and punching the air, followed by some pair-work where we practiced some basic ass-kicking moves like dodging a punch and elbowing somebody in the side of the head, or grabbing their head and smashing it down into an upraised knee. Sometimes they had hand-pads to punch and kick.
I loved these classes -- great fun,
But of course, pretending to fight somebody you know in a brightly-lit gym is considerably different than facing down three drunken idiots on a dark street.
The guy that had been following me went back to his friends, who still had English Teacher R surrounded, and then, predictably, I saw the scuffling start.
I dropped my plastic bag,
containing two books on phonetics from the British Council and a DVD of the film
DAREDEVIL, and started to run down there. One of the guys -- not the one
who'd followed me -- came trotting up towards me, all full of piss and vinegar
and vodka, asking the Russian equivalent of "You fucking want some, bitch?"
Now the one useful thing that I DID learn in the Real Fight class -- this mostly
from English Teacher A, thanks for that one, buddy -- was how to put my guard up
correctly for close-quarters fighting. Fists against the forehead.
The guy ran at me and I put my guard up, bracing myself.
He missed me completely and ended up on the ground.
Wow, I thought. I'm really good at this.
I was so surprised I didn't really know how to react as the guy sprawled in front of me.
Shaking already with adrenalin rush, I grabbed him by the arm as he tried to stand up and slammed my left fist twice into the side of his head. The blows glanced off, more or less, but we can hope it hurt -- even Tyler Durden in FIGHT CLUB didn't like getting hit in the ear.
One of the two guys who were double teaming ETR, the toughest looking one,
noticed that his buddy was on the ground and came running over.
I backed up, holding up my fists, and started shouting violent threats in English.
The guy helped his buddy up, and though I didn't understand his Russian exactly, it seemed to be, "Oh, yeah, now where are you going? You afraid?" They stood there shouting at me and I started backing up the street, raising my fists, calling them a couple of bitches in Russian and shouting "Come on!"
(I'm still not entirely sure that calling a man a "bitch" in Russian carries the same weight and implication it does in English, by the way -- it may just make no sense whatsoever.)
I had two goals in backing up the street: I wanted to get them towards the brightly-lit intersection and away from English Teacher R, and I also had the vague hope that maybe I could toss one of them in front of an oncoming car.
They were hesitantly moving
forward; obviously the friend thought I must be a real badass at having taken
out his buddy so easily.
Then I saw ETR break away and run across the street; I ran across the street,
too, and the three guys went the opposite direction, shouting still, pausing
only to pick up my plastic bag.
I ran up to him at the bus stop, breathless more from excitement than exertion,
and he was bleeding out of a split lip.
"You okay? Need a doctor?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Did you get any shots in?"
"It was mostly a wrestling match. This " -- here he indicated his bloody lip -- "was the first one; he sucker punched me."
I told him what had happened to me.
"You have a knack for not being
in the middle when the trouble starts," he said.
It was particularly galling, all the times we've been walking around drunk
asking for trouble, and here it comes when we're walking along minding our own
business.
I thought of my plastic bag. Those books weren't even mine; they belonged to the British Council.
Naturally I called ETA
immediately; he'd been itching to kick somebody's ass lately. He promised
he'd come immediately in a taxi.j ETA, as I said, is a former kick-boxer
and weighs 100 kg.
We flip-flopped a bit; obviously there's no great percentage in going looking
for a fight on the dark streets of Russia -- you might end up with a blade in
the spleen or a broken bottle in the eye. ETR finally decided to go home
and clean up his split lip.
I waited for English Teacher A. I decided I wanted my goddamned books
back. And perhaps, having had a taste of it, my reptile brain was
screaming for more violence.
I drank a beer at the produkti (Russian equivalent of 24 hour convenience
stores, mostly specializing in alcohol) while I was waiting for him; he got
there about ten minutes later, with a 14 inch piece of iron rebar in his gym
bag, ready to dispatch vengeance.
We went back to the dark bus stop.
We found ETR's baseball hat, and one of the two books.
(Fortunately ETR found the other book the next afternoon in the grass.)
The DVD was gone.
Naturally it galls me to think of those guys relaxing
with my DAREDEVIL
dvd.
We walked the length of the street two times, eyes peeled for the thugs.
We discovered there was some kind of large street party going on in the parking
lot of a cinema nearby, probably a university party -- there were drunk
teenagers everywhere. I doubt I could have picked the guys out of a lineup
anyway, except for maybe the one with the blue faggy jacket. In any
event, we didn't see them.
ETA was very eager to pound them into the ground and said it would be the work of only a minute or so, they obviously knew less about fighting than even ETR and I.
He'd been under a lot of
stress. He wanted to hurt somebody.
Finally we gave up and went to the pool
hall for a few after-battle beers.
A couple of guys we knew were there, with a couple of slutty-looking chicks.
I, flowing with adrenalin, was happy to re-enact the whole incident four or five
times for them. ETA went to the bar to buy more beers and ended up
drinking six shots of vodka with a Russian guy at the bar. The Russian guy
was finally ejected from the bar. ETA felt fairly proud of himself for
that.
The next day he discovered he had lost his telephone, and I managed to lose my hat and one of my gloves in the taxi. Alcohol turns out to be an even worse enemy than drunken thugs on the street.
The next day ETR and I vowed to redouble our efforts at the Real Fight class, but after a few months we sort of gave it up; three o clock on Sunday was an inconvenient time, as we were either too hungover to do it or we'd already started drinking again.
However, the thugs never came back and we survived.
It must have been a good day. . .