I liked being able to hit back. It was a new feeling for me. I didn’t care how hard they hit. I didn’t care if they won—the other bouncers would show up sooner or later anyway. I only cared that I could hit back. I liked that my size, my reputation, the look on my face when I was in the club, made me feel safe.

I was angry. I was tired of feeling sorry for myself. Which is really the same thing, but anger provides a comforting lie: that you’re safe, that you have self-respect.

I’d been hit as long as I could remember, by more adults than I could count. That I know a flyswatter hurts more than a belt is hardly unique to my upbringing. There are few codes held more deeply among the poor, the religious, and the uneducated than that it is good and healthy and wholesome parenting to hit your kids. That their kids grow up with anger-management issues, who like hitting almost as much as they like getting hit, is not taken as evidence that maybe they’re wrong here. It’s right there in the Bible: “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” The Bible also says, “Violence begets violence.” But the Bible says a lot of dumb shit.

   It may not be as visible a mark of your class as bad teeth, but a history of violence being acted upon you by those you love is just as effective at keeping you from climbing too high. Violence isn’t so much a belief system as it is a symptom. The Bible only serves to provide a necessary excuse, because the truth is, you can’t afford the cure for the disease you inherited. It was passed down from your parents who still don’t believe in therapy. They inherited it from their dads who came back from France with shattered nerves and screamed at night, sucked it up and went to work. So what if a man hit his wife when she stepped out of line. Just the way things were. She didn’t leave because she couldn’t get a fucking job. Go back one more generation, if that, and the only wedding gift that might’ve done any good was a rape whistle. But no one would’ve answered. We barely care now. The good ol’ days of battered wives and children didn’t change all that much, not for those whose only inheritance was anger.

It wasn’t only our stepdads. When our moms were working long past exhaustion, just to get by, no chance of getting ahead unless they met a good man, always one slipup, one cruel act of God away from disaster, and their fucking kid broke her glasses, lost a jacket, forgot to return a library book, is it really so shocking they lost their shit? Throw in a little addiction, plenty of mental illness, and a justifiable anxiety level that would kill you if you could afford the funeral, you end up with what we call “anger-management issues,” because goddamn if we don’t believe in personal responsibility.

   A lesson I retained better than most: violence is, if not the answer, always worth a shot. When adults were angry, frustrated, scared, when the stress got to be too much, they hit me. The stress and fear for me were near constant. Being hit will have that effect on a kid. I’d hold it all in until I exploded in panic, and I expressed that panic exactly as I’d been taught: I hit someone smaller than me, usually my brother. I’d see the fucking terror in his eyes. And I’d fucking hate myself. But I couldn’t fucking stop. Until one day he got big enough to hit me back. With no one else to hurt, I found another target for my rage: me. That is, until Badlands.

Maybe it felt good to protect someone else, a younger, smaller boy. I could fix it. I could make it better. I could protect him. Maybe it helped that I knew he’d been bullied, though he never said as much. Sometimes it was clear just from the fights he’d choose.

One of those times, Lil’ Joey managed to piss off a guy who looked like he’d played some ball in high school and was now working on getting fat enough for his future as an assistant coach. He had Lil’ Joey by the front collar, screaming spittle and threats. I got in between them. And the future coach tried to reason with me, assuming I had any more authority. Lil’ Joey had thrown his drink away. It wasn’t fair. He was a paying customer. The usual. I was thinking I could walk him outside to talk and shut the door after him. Problem solved. But Lil’ Joey wasn’t having it, kept calling the coach a bitch, taunting him. The coach took a swing. And like I said, I liked fighting.

Most bar fights don’t last long anyway. Most of the time, they’d rather you break it up before they hurt themselves. When a fight does break out, no one has to deliver a knockout blow to the chin. One drunk will swing and fall. Or the other drunk will trip and fall. And everything happens in slow motion because everyone’s drunk or high. If someone does land a punch, they’re more likely to break their hand than anything else. But I started remembering all those moves bored marines taught me way back when, mostly how to put someone on the ground and not risk breaking a hand. And goddamn if it’s not fucking satisfying.

* * *

—

   Our head bartender, if not by title, then by age, was a woman I’ll call Amy. And god help me, she was probably only thirty-five. She wore black vests, sans shirt, and black eyeliner and kept her boyfriend, who worked the light show, a casual footnote to those who didn’t need to know she was straight. Sort of straight anyway. But since she kissed like she was auditioning for a threesome in a Showtime soft-core and her boyfriend expected to join, her orientation was irrelevant to me.

Amy was living, breathing proof of something I’d known since I was a kid begging for change on the street: that is, that the only people who will ever help someone and expect nothing are those who’ve been poor.