If you ask a bartender the cause of a just-fought brawl, during that excited hush that settles upon a saloon in the moments after the combatants have been tossed, chances are he'll answer, "They were just drunk." And chances are he'll be right. (Bartenders, I've found, usually are.) The science behind this is rather simple: By depressing the central nervous system, alcohol acts as a disinhibitor, making us feel more freewheeling and incautious. This is why, after four of five drinks, you have the courage to approach the laughing blonde in the dizzyingly see-through blouse, but also why you might feel sturdy enough to take on the six-foot-six meathead who won't stop wagging his tongue through his fingers at your girlfriend. "We call that 'beer muscles,' " says Sylvia, the UFC champ.
Recent scientific research has added an interesting wrinkle to the alcohol-violence connection. According to a study published in the January 2003 issue of the medical journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, acute administration of alcohol can induce a rapid increase in testosterone-four times the normal amount, in some cases-in the brains of rodents. The implications for human behavioral and endocrine pathology seem clear: The more you drink, the more your social inhibitions dissolve, but also the more your testosterone amounts-the dipstick level of your co-jones, so to speak-may rise. A chalkboard equation, then, might look something like this: C2H5OH (ethyl alcohol) = negative inhibitor neurotransmitter abilities + 4x testosterone levels = Pop-eye, on a shore leave bender, giving Bluto a big black shiner for goosing Olive Oyl's skinny little rump. Argh argh argh.
Scientific evidence notwithstanding, that bartender would be only half right. If mere drunkenness were the cause of barroom brawls, happy hour at T.G.I. Friday's would be the most dangerous sixty minutes on the planet; you'd have to step over bodies just to order a Tom Collins. If you liken a bar fight to, say, an exploding can of gasoline, then bloodstream alcohol is surely the gasoline; there's no disputing that. But for every such explosion there's a spark that makes it go boom. As Seneca wrote, "Drunkenness does not create vice. It merely brings it into view."
What's the most common spark? To answer that we have to first divide bar fights into two distinct categories. One we'll call Psycho Fights. Plainly put, these are fights that happen because someone in a saloon is a psychotic asshole, and they include fights prompted by out-of-the-blue utterances like Whatthefuckyoulookinat? or Yougo-taproblemwithme? Psycho Fights don't actually require a cause; the presence of the psycho is cause enough. "A lot of guys go out looking for fights," says Sylvia. "They're pissed off at something their wife or girlfriend did, or about something that happened at work. When that guy is looking for a fight, he can't be talked out of it." Bullies are bullies, and they're always uninteresting. Our interest here lies more in the causes of the second category of bar fights, which I hesitate to call Rational Fights, since, of course, no violence is rational, especially after seven Coors Lights and two shots of Cuervo. Let's just call them Non-Psycho Fights.
In order to gauge the top three causes of Non-Psycho Fights, I surveyed a wide swath of bartenders, barflies, bouncers, lawmen, and other folks with some connection to saloon life. Some of the answers were too local for my purposes ("Him," one upstate New York bartender said, cocking a thumb at a surly solo drinker), while others, like the top-three list I received from a retired Mississippi lawman, had a ring of poetry to them: "Women, property lines, and dogs." (The other list that could double as a country music album title went like this: "Drunks, women, and drunk women.") Fully tabulated, nonetheless, my survey results broke down as follows. Cause Number One: women who are present in the bar. Cause Number Two: women who are not present but vividly remembered. Cause Number Three: old grudges that don't officially involve women but might involve them if you scratch down deep enough.
Cause One includes acts of "chivalry"-protecting a woman's safety or honor-but also encompasses acts of rabid jealousy, e.g., pummeling your ex-girlfriend's date. Cause Two is so closely related to Cause One that an argument could be made to merge them, but there is a distinction: In the first case the fights start suddenly, with the attacks unplanned. A lout insults your date; you take a swing. Your ex strolls in with a bumblefuck insurance salesman; you take a swing. Or, conversely: you, an insurance salesman but certainly no bumblefuck, walk into a bar with a hot divorcee on your arm, only to find yourself sucker-punched by her red-eyed ex. But Cause Two produces a slightly different kind of fight, one generated by unhealed romantic wounds, by conflicts that have simmered for a while. To the unschooled observer, a fight that breaks out in a bar because some guy took offense at the song another guy played on the jukebox might seem random and ridiculous. If you'd known that the guy who played the song had stolen the other guy's girlfriend a half-decade before, and that the song he'd played was the Aerosmith ballad that had been on the radio when the poor fella first unsnapped her bra that night by the lake, it might make more sense. "The season of love is that of battle," Darwin wrote. The roots of these fights run deep.
Which leads us smoothly into Cause Three: old grudges. You see this less in big cities than you do in small towns, where the tight confines of the county limits mean that you're forced to come face-to-face, on a regular basis, with the dickhead who fouled you in that high school district finals game way back when, a foul that, though the referee didn't call it, caused you to (a) miss the gamewinning shot, (b) lose your chances for a college scholarship, (c) lose your cheerleader girlfriend, and (d) go to work for your father at the grain mill and marry ol' Brenda who got fat as a house after the kids were born and never does nothing but watch Dr. Phil and complain about the way your boots smell. Years later that same dickhead beats you in a casual game of pool, and it's all too much to take. You snap. (Pool tables, by the way, were a popular survey answer; notable also-rans included politics, athletic allegiances, and, yep, jukeboxes.)
Not long ago, at the Dunes Saloon in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I ran into the novelist Jim Harrison, who offered me this theory: "Most bar fights can be traced back to someone's dog getting shot twenty years before." Some urbanites among you might cry bullshit-it's difficult, though amusing, to imagine two fellows tussling over a dead bird dog in Manhattan's '21' Club-but I can attest to its limited accuracy. Several years back, in Mississippi, a man shot and killed my German shorthair pointer-long story, not worth rehashing. But if I ever come across that bastard in a saloon…well, I swear I'll knock him halfway to next Tuesday. I have warned my wife and lawyer of this pledge, along with the owner of the bar where this knocking is most likely to occur. None of them approves, but the bar owner is a dog lover, so I suspect he'll overlook any damages.
A dirty truth: Most bar fights are just noisy nonevents. The average barroom brawl lasts about two to five seconds, according to Peyton Quinn, a former bouncer in "problem bars" who now operates Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training in Lake George, Colorado, where he instructs bouncers and other security types in the finer points of fistfighting. (Literally, it's the school of hard knocks.) "Bar fights are generally very sloppy affairs," says Quinn. "Once that adrenaline rush hits, people tend to lose fine motor control and just flail at each other-often ineffectually."