I translated because I was the only person who spoke both French and Spanish. My friend managed to get his hands on the helmet and shouted, “That’s not true, the helmet’s mine!” And so it began. Suddenly all five men had their hands on the helmet; they weren’t throwing punches because no one wanted to let go, but it was clearly headed that way. The men lurched around the room grunting in two languages and gradually deforming the helmet until my friend yelled, “Para! Para! Para!” and everyone stopped. “It’s starting to rip!” my friend said, pointing to the helmet.
They were destroying the thing they all wanted, but no one would let go. It got very quiet. They all stared at each other. Finally my friend turned to me and asked, in his most elegant and formulaic Spanish, if I would take his place at the helmet and defend it with the full honor of my family and my name. I was still calculating how long you have to know someone before you have to back them up in a bar fight—hours? Minutes?—but I told him that I would. My friend withdrew his hand from the helmet and replaced it with mine. Now I was in the ring facing three drunk Moroccans, and my friend was over at the bar conferring with the bartender. It had all the hushed formality of a sidebar conference at a criminal trial.
After a moment the bartender straightened up and pulled a screw-top jug of red wine out from under the bar and handed it to my friend. Complete silence now, and a kind of theatrical slowness to things, as if we were all acting roles that had been scripted long ago. My friend approached the absurd little circle and filled the helmet with red wine. I remember it reaching my fingertips and staining them red. Then with great fanfare the Spaniard placed one hand under the helmet and told everyone to let go. We all looked at each other and one by one released our grip. Now my friend stood with the helmet in his upturned hand, red wine slopping over the brim. He turned and addressed the most aggressive of his adversaries: “You are a guest in my country,” he said, as I translated. “So you drink first.”
He offered the helmet to the Moroccan, who accepted it and drank from the brim, wine running down his neck, and then passed it to his left. Each man drank and passed the helmet clockwise, and when it came to me, I did the same. The helmet went around and around, and when it was empty it got filled up with more red wine. The other patrons started to go back to their drinking and their conversations, and eventually the former combatants skipped the helmet and started passing around the jug itself. Pretty soon the jug was empty and another one was sent for, and that was passed around as well. I got drawn into other conversations and an hour or so later I looked over to see all five men standing in a line with their arms around each other, singing songs in their two languages. The helmet was forgotten under a table at their feet.
What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. It’s almost as if they are two facets of the same quality; just change a few details and instead of heading toward collision, the men head toward unity. There seemed to be a great human potential out there, organized around the idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict. I once asked a combat vet if he’d rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy.
“Oh, an enemy, a hundred percent,” he said. “Not even close. I already got a lot of friends.” He thought about it a little longer. “Anyway, all my best friends I’ve gotten into fights with—knock-down, drag-out fights. Granted we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that.”
He shook his head as if even he couldn’t believe it.
There’s no use arguing that modern society isn’t a kind of paradise. The vast majority of us don’t, personally, have to grow or kill our own food, build our own dwellings, or defend ourselves from wild animals and enemies. In one day we can travel a thousand miles by pushing our foot down on a gas pedal or around the world by booking a seat on an airplane. When we are in pain we have narcotics that dull it out of existence, and when we are depressed we have pills that change the chemistry of our brains. We understand an enormous amount about the universe, from subatomic particles to our own bodies to galaxy clusters, and we use that knowledge to make life even better and easier for ourselves. The poorest people in modern society enjoy a level of physical comfort that was unimaginable a thousand years ago, and the wealthiest people literally live the way gods were imagined to have.
And yet.