I’m not going to lie; I did not react well to this. In fact, I straight-up snapped. My head lunged forward and I said some incarnation of “What do you know about business, given you’re clearly unemployed?” The “oh shit!” reaction from the guys confirmed that I was somehow right that this guy didn’t have a job, which didn’t even make sense to me since he had a lot of money for steroids and lilac shirts. I’m pretty sure I said it because it was an old roast joke I had in my back pocket about The Situation from the Jersey Shore that was dying to finally get some airtime.
Now, look. Most of the time I’m pretty humble and willing to be wrong. This was not one of those times. I believe that when you get into an altercation with a stranger, you find out who you really are, because your brain has no point of reference about who this person is. It’s like being face-to-face with a wild animal, which I have also had happen. One time I woke up and saw two coyotes in my yard. I know a lot about coyotes because they’re rampant around L.A. and many of my friends have lost small dogs or their cats to them. Trust me, the first couple times I saw them, my instinct was to feed them, try and take them in, domesticate, and “rescue” them. But in fact it turns out they’re sociopathic vampires masquerading as adorable dogs but who are nothing like dogs. They don’t have empathy and they haven’t evolved to read human faces the way dogs have. Learning to accept the limitations and motives of a coyote versus those of a dog helped a lot in learning to accept the same in the guys I dated. I often have to say to myself, “This guy is a just a coyote. He’s always going to be a coyote. Stop expecting him to behave like a dog.” And yes, most people call men dogs as a derogatory term. Not me. If I call someone a dog, it’s the highest compliment I can give and basically means that person gets to live in my house forever and eat way more expensive food than I do as long as I can constantly take photos of you while you sleep.
So when I saw the coyotes, my civilized conscious mind took the day off and I had a total out-of-body experience. My dogs were in the house, so my momma bear pack-leader mentality eclipsed any sanity I had on deck. I snatched some deer antlers that my dogs play with off the floor, ran outside, and swung the antler around, flailing toward them. My phrase of choice to yell? “How dare you!” with a weird Katharine Hepburn type of accent.
“Howww dahhhh you?!” I kept yelling. The coyotes just stared at me, unfazed. They looked more embarrassed for me than anything. I was two feet away from them before they actually fled, and from the way they ran off, it seemed like they were doing it just to make me feel better. To this day I still hear the coyotes up in the hills howling, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound exactly like mocking laughter.
So that’s how I usually handle conflict with packs, but in the case of the Vegas tools, while my primal brain knew these heathens could kill me, my conscious brain figured they were so lathered up with self-tanner and cologne that their skin was very slippery, therefore I could probably slide away pretty easily if I had to. Amidst whatever yelling we were doing at each other, the guy with curly hair who worked very hard for his hair not to be curly said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” When I heard this, I did indeed shut the fuck up. It got very quiet in the hallway. Fireball! I walked up to him, as shut the fuck up as one can be, and got close enough to get a whiff of his Cool Water. I leaned in, almost close enough to get rug burn from his impossibly coarse stubble, and delivered a line that haunts me to this day.
“I would like to see you try.”
Uh, what?
It got even quieter. The guys looked very confused. I also looked very confused, but I knew I had to be intimidating, so I raised my eyebrows, narrowed my eyes, and cracked a slight smile because that’s what I’ve seen gangsters to do in movies.
One of the guys told me to shut up; then I told him to “try.”
To what? To shut me up? Nobody knew what I meant, including me. Whenever I say something stupid, I have this Darwinian reaction to double down and believe in myself even more. Maybe it’s a natural animal instinct to avoid showing any weakness, because in that moment I was very much losing the fight as well as embarrassing my entire gender.
I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but I did hear one of them yell the word bitch in my direction. Now, the word bitch actually doesn’t bug me that much, mostly because of how unoriginal it is. It’s borderline played out at this point. If you’re still running around calling a woman a bitch, you might as well be on Friendster.
To be clear, I absolutely am a bitch, but these guys had no way of really knowing that yet. They could have maybe deduced that I was nervous, unhinged, reckless, and a sartorial train wreck, but I wasn’t quite acting like a bitch yet. If you’ve known me a couple months, you can call me a bitch and chances are I’ll agree with you, but if you don’t even know me, I’d rather hear a fresh take. Like, if I were this guy, seeing a girl storm out of her room in pajamas and stomp toward five giant drunk men, yelling “I would like to see you try!” like a mobster from the forties, I wouldn’t dismiss her as a bitch. I’d say something like “Ma’am, you seem mentally unstable. Can I help you find your medication?”
Since bitch has become the go-to insult for any female who expresses an emotion and since for the most part it signifies that the insulter has run out of jabs, the tension deflated and I was snapped out of my adrenaline response. Once such a boring insult was employed, my amygdala realized I no longer needed its services because for me bitch is like the chloroform of words.
Hearing bitch also calmed me down because whenever a guy calls me that in an argument, it’s usually because he’s losing or is all out of interesting angles. In a moment of clarity, I realized that I wasn’t in a televised political debate. I didn’t have to keep arguing with these animals. I could just calmly call security and have them removed. I always want to give people the courtesy of telling them I’m calling security so they can at least get their shit together and have a fair chance of leaving with some dignity. These guys probably had duffel bags full of Axe body spray and toupee glue to gather up, and I wouldn’t want them to forget anything on their way back to (probably) Miami. I calmly said, “Anyway, guys, sorry about all this. I’m gonna go call security.”
I had taken no more than two steps when I heard one of them yell, “You know what you need? Some dick!”
The guys exploded in laughter.