Me and Mare were meeting Ron and Vance at Putty Hill Station for drinks. I was twenty-six.

There was this petite woman in her late forties who was drunk and dancing.

She started with us right away, but we ignored her.

She starts with Ron and I know it’s going to go south at some point.

She was dancing with all the men.

When we got drinks she would cut in front of us and the bar.

Mare and I were dancing together—you know, our men don’t dance—and she gets right between us.

I told her, “Walk away.”

You have to walk by the bar to get to the restroom and she is dancing in the hallway with these two guys. I say, “Excuse me,” numerous times and she ignores me, so I brushed her aside and headed to the bathroom and she’s coming after me like a banshee.

She’s in my face in the bathroom and I tell her, “You don’t wanna go there. Walk away. Walk away.”

Then she pushes me into a bathroom stall and I fall on the toilet.

That was it: I looked at her, stood up and blacked out.

I come to with her hair in my left hand. I’ve got her backed against the sink and I’m pounding her face, just pounding, pounding, squishing, splashing, spattering—an ungodly mess.

This other woman comes into the restroom and sees this and just starts screaming like some dumb bitch in a horror movie.

Then I came to and focused and her face is just mashed, there is blood everywhere. [makes an outward sweeping motion describing the blood spatter and polling as a cone issuing outward from the woman’s face and spreading about three feet wide on the floor.] So, I grabbed a bunch of paper towels and handed them to her and said, “Please, apply pressure. I told you to walk away”—her nose was definitely busted. The poor woman woke up with two black eyes and probably had a house of kids to deal with.

The bouncer [a man the author used to train with at Loch Raven at this same time] comes in and tells me, “You gotta go.”

I said, “Why? She started it.”

He said, “Just look at her! Leave before the cops get here.”

So, that was my one bar fight, kind of surreal, not as satisfying as knocking out the two girly girls on Taylor Avenue, but you take what you can get.

-The Author’s Daughter in Law