Chainsaw Magazine

“written from the bottom of a piss-soaked gutter while shaking a fist at the cosmos.“

rock and roll is a blood sport, and the ring is usually a sticky-floored dive bar in Las Vegas where nobody loves you and the air conditioning smells like regret and stale Coors Light.

Picture it. There I was, decked out in my summer uniform—a loud Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flop, and a sturdy wide-brimmed straw gardener’s hat meant for serious labor, not getting your skull rearranged. That bar was my living room, a sanctuary gifted to me by a friend who owned the joint. I didn’t care about the bands. I cared about stretching out, drinking beer, and avoiding the suffocating quiet of my shoebox apartment. Naturally, this tranquility was shattered by a bouncer built like a refrigerator with an attitude problem, who decided my free-pass status was null and void. When I told him to check with the boss, he asked if he was going to have to drag me out. “Set them up, let’s play”, I muttered, turning back to my drink. Next thing I know, the goon clobbered me from behind, trying to haul me out by my neck. It got broken up, he went back to working the door, and I went back to my beer(s), stewing in the dark with what felt like a partially fractured jaw.

Sitting nearby was my self-proclaimed lawyer, a character who goes by El Scorpion. He’s always buzzing in my ear about how I’m the second coming of Hunter S. Thompson. Let me state this for the record, loud and clear so the college boys in the back can take notes: I hate that comparison. Hunter was a fraternity-educated, polished-up caricature who played dress-up; I learned how to string sentences together in juvenile hall. He wanted to write like an outlaw, whereas I was just trying to survive the page. He was trying to be me, and I suppose I was trying to be a real writer like him—meaning maybe we really are just two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Which is why i dont like the comparison. 

I digress, as all doomed men do. My jaw was throbbing, and my inner voice—that cynical little bird that chirps whenever you’re about to do something profoundly stupid—whispered, In for a penny, in for a pound. If my jaw was broken anyway, the ledger demanded blood. I adjusted my heavy-duty straw hat like a cowboy cinching his saddle for a suicide charge against the cavalry, marched out to the door, smiled sweetly at the doorman, and punched him straight in the teeth.

There was just one fatal flaw in my cinematic masterplan: physics, scale, and terrible timing. The target looked like John Coffey from The Green Mile, except if that giant had spent his final years exclusively eating at a Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet—a colossus of pure, unbridled mass. Worse still, he wasn’t standing alone. The guy he was chatting with happened to be the former doorman of the same bar, completely oblivious to the earlier scuffle, i should be mad at this guy for the beating he handedme but in his defense all he saw was some maniac in a floral shirt walk out of the darkness and assault his buddy.

And that, children, is how the universe reminds you of your own mortality. he didn’t just beat me; they dismantled me with the efficiency of a pit crew. My shirt was shredded into confetti, my trusty straw hat was pulverized into mulch, and one of my flip-flops was violently separated from its corporate loyalty. My head bounced off the front glass window like a pinball, ringing a dull, hollow note that echoed all the way back to my juvenile hall days.

So what did we learn today, class? We learned that destiny doesn’t care about your Hawaiian shirt, and gravity always wins the heavyweight championship of the world.

While this isnt the greatest tragedy ever staged in the parking lot of a Vegas dive bar.

When the dust finally cleared and the mountain of a man was standing there wheezing like a ruptured bellows, I was left standing in the ruins of my dignity. I’ve taken my lumps over the years, sure—you don’t walk the paths I’ve walked without catching a few stray knuckles. But this wasn’t just getting beat on. This was a systematic, humbling demolition. My back was thrown out of alignment, my shoulder felt like it had detached from the corporate office, my jaw was fractured, and I was sporting a shiner that looked like a spring violet.

To top it all off, as I stood there tattered and smoking like a downed warplane with one blown-out flip-flop dangling by a thread, who should stroll up for her regular lunch beer at the bar? The girl I was dating, who worked at the weed dispensary right next door. She took one look at my wreckage and asked the only question left in the universe: What the hell happened?

To make a pathetic story complete, my keys and phone had vanished into the ether during the skirmish. I couldn’t even get back into my own apartment. So there I was, leaning heavily for literal physical support on this wonderful woman—standing all of five-foot-nothing—using her as a crutch just to limp down the block to a hotel room.

Which brings us to the grand, immutable lesson of the evening, etched in sweat, blood, and broken rubber: Never leave home in flip-flops.

You can survive a lot of things in this life—bad jobs, broken bones, college-boy writers trying to steal your soul, and giant door men who eat like they’re training for the apocalypse. But you get into just one street fight while wearing flip-flops, and your career as an ambulatory human being is effectively over. Keep those things on the sand where they belong, kids. Because if you step out the front door in open-toed footwear, destiny is going to sneak up behind you, rip your shirt to ribbons, and remind you that the laws of physics and the jungle always has the final say.