Them's Fightin' Words

I totally forgot that I was kind of in a bar fight last week! Well, the fight mostly belonged to my friend, Amy, but I was sitting next to her for half of it so I feel like it was my fight, too, by association. And I made it worse at the end which means I can totally claim bragging rights to having had a hand in the brawl. Win!

Out Da Way

It all started with a call from Amy on a Tuesday, saying that she was on her way to The Phoenix Club (the Irish pub right near my apartment) where she would be meeting up with her boyfriend/fiancé, Matt. She invited me to come down and hang with them, which would be the perfect chance for me to return the pirate “undergarments” that I had borrowed from her for Bay-To-Breakers (long story involving my participation in a Louisiana Crawfish Boil group costume). It took me a little while to get to the bar and by the time I did, all hell had broken loose.

According to Amy, the saga started when she was pulling into a parking spot on Valencia St. and a car pulled up beside her. The female driver yelled through the car window that the spot was hers...and Amy best move out da way. Amy stated the obvious, which was that she got there first and that the spot, clearly, belonged to her. The other driver (whom we’ll call KrazyGirl for simplicity’s sake) disagreed and unleashed on Amy, bad.

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A Self Respecting Jersey Girl

At this point, Amy felt nervous that if she did park there, KrazyGirl would key her car the minute she walked away to meet Matt. So, like any self respecting Jersey girl, Amy casually flicked her off and found a new spot. Hopefully, Matt would already be at The Phoenix and she could tell him all about the showdown when she got there. Well, when she walked into The Phoenix, not only did she see Matt, but guess who was sitting at the bar? Yep, KrazyGirl!

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Before Amy had the chance to tell Matt anything, she overheard KrazyGirl complaining to the bartender about “the self-entitled blond bitch who tried to steal her spot.” Not about to stand by and listen to herself be smacktalked, Amy marched right up to KrazyGirl and told her that she was, well, krazy.

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As you can imagine, KrazyGirl did not take kindly to this and ripped into my friend for thinking she had any right to take a spot from “a local.” It turns out that KrazyGirl lives on the block (which makes her my neighbor—eek) and believes that she has first dibs on every spot between 19^th and 20^th streets, even if she gets there after someone else has begun to pull in. We could spend time dissecting this curious logic, but let’s just move on, shall we?

Who? That Douchbag?

So Amy, amused at how ridiculous this was, starting laughing and Krazy girl got upset…at which point she accused Amy of stalking her and called the PoPo. While they were waiting for the police to arrive, Amy explained to KrazyGirl that she had planned to meet her boyfriend at this very bar which just so happend to be located on KrazyGirl’s personal block--no stalking involved. KrazyGirl then glanced in Matt's direction, pointed at him, and commented, “Who? That douchebag?”

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So the police arrived and interviewed everyone. KrazyGirl told her side of the story and added that Matt had tried to hit her. Huh? Ummm, no. The police took everyone’s information and made both Amy and KrazyGirl promise that they would not speak to each other for the remainder of the evening—like two kindergartners relegated to separate time-out corners. KrazyGirl was confined to the bar area and Amy to the cocktail table area. It was at this point that I walked in...and returned the pirate panties to their rightful owner.

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The Professor

Fast forward to the end of the night when KrazyGirl is walking out of the bar. As she passes our table, one of us (I wonder who?), yells “byyyyye!” and she immediately flips out (oops!). It was at this point that she educated us about how we are all huge losers and how she is smarter than all of us combined since, after all, she’s a math teacher at a community college. (How she knew we weren’t at the bar for a MENSA meeting remains a mystery.) And just to prove it, she held up a text book and shook it at us.

At this point, we started to feel sorry for KrazyGirl. She was just so krazy, poor thing. But before we had time to act on our sympathy, she dropped an insult that really crossed the line. Before I tell you what it was, it’s important to remember that, over the past 3 hours, Amy’s parking spot had been taken from her, she had been called a bitch, she had overheard Krazygirl talk smack about her to the bartender, her fiancé had been called a douchebag and she had been forced to spend 30 minutes getting interviewed by the police. All this, and she was still in moderately good spirits.

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Things Escalate

As she was leaving, KrazyGirl announced that if there was so much a fingerprint on her car when she returned from wherever she was going (maybe to teach an Algebra II class? Conic sections?), Amy’s car would wind up in a ditch in Hunter’s Point. Despite this weirdly violent threat, Amy kept her cool. But then KrazyGirl swung below the belt adding “and I bet you don’t even know where Hunter’s Point is, being from the Marina and all!” It was this comment that sent my friend over the edge.

Background: For those of you who don’t live in SF, there has been a long-running battle between these two diametrically opposed neighborhoods. The Marina is known for being upscale with a more conservative residential crowd (think Upper East Side) whereas the Mission tends to attract the artsy, intellectual crew (The Village meets Hells Kitchen). As you can imagine, all sorts of associated terminology and feuding have come out of this division, most of which make excellent fuel for insults. Basically, calling someone who is not from the Marina a “Marina girl” is akin to calling an ethnic Afghan a “Hazāra,” with the intent of pissing this person off. In other words, it’s really bad.

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The Return of the PoPo

So Amy and Matt pretty much ripped this girl "up one side and down the other" as they say, and KrazyGirl huffed her way down the block…with her math book. Not 10 minutes later, the police came back and asked what happened. Turns out, they had been called again. The funniest thing about this part of the saga is that the police were now interviewing Amy and Matt, who were sitting on stools at a high cocktail table, through the window of the bar (see above pic for set-up). “She called me a d-bag!” Matt relayed. “And threatened to drive my girlfriend’s car into a ditch!” “Wait!” Amy added. “She called me a...Marina Girl.”

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And with that, the interview came to a screeching halt. I could be wrong, but it appeared as though the cop was horrified on Amy’s behalf. He put away his notepad and made us promise not to interact in any way with KrazyGirl if she returned. Then he went back to whatever he was doing before he started interviewing us through the window.

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And that, my friends, was my first bar fight of the summer. Moral of the story? When you're out in the Mission, it's all fun and games until someone is slandered with the nastiest two words in the hood: Marina Girl.