There can't be as many fights in Liverpool as I imagine, as my minor fracas made
the local papers.
As you all enjoyed that story so much I thought I would tell you the tale of the last fight I had with a stranger (I can't find this anywhere else on here, but forgive me if I have told you already), back in mid-1990s in Edinburgh. There are some parallels to what happened this week, I guess.
I was in the Pleasance Courtyard talking to some friends from school who had come up to see my show and some girls we had met. We were having a quite jolly time when a fairly drunk, smiling man came up to me.
"Hello," he interjected, "I have to apologise to you. Last year in Edinburgh I called you a cunt!"
"Oh right," I said, "Don't worry, I don't remember, so we'll let it go hey?"
"Well just wanted to say sorry," he replied, although that was a lie as he then hung around to chat some more. I didn't particularly mind. I have always tried to give people a bit of time if possible if they want to talk, even if they have compared me to a female genital in the last twelve months.
So the bloke joined in with our conversation, which I suppose was a little bit weird, but it's Edinburgh and you tend to do this sort of thing and I was being magnanimous by allowing the man who had insulted me back into the fold.
However he stayed with us for about an hour, drinking more on top of the skinful he had had already and then he started making inappropriate and lewd remarks to the girls we were chatting to. Though not exactly sober myself, I was annoyed by the interloper and as you've seen I am a defender of the honour of women, especially ones that I have invested some time in chatting up, so I stepped in and said, "Look mate, it's been lovely to meet you, but I am here with some mates from school that I haven't seen for a long time and we don't know you and I think maybe it's time for you to go back to your own mates now."
I perhaps said this with a little bit of edge, aware that the man was almost certainly here on his own, hence his reason for latching on to us. He stared back at me, dumb-struck and clearly annoyed.
"It's just I think you're a bit drunker than us and I've talked to you for over an hour and I'd like to talk to my friends now, so...."
He carried on staring, fury visibly boiling up in his alcohol addled head.
"Don't stare at me like that," I requested, "That is aggressive and provacative. I am under no compunction to talk to you at all and I've talked to you for ages and I think it's time you went on your way now."
"I was right about you last year," he said, breaking his silence, "You are a cunt!"
"I am not a cunt," I countered, "I don't know you at all and yet I have talked to you for a long time, which most people wouldn't have done, especially after you admitted having been rude to them, but you're being rude to my friends and so you have to leave."
The girls we were with were already freaking out a bit at this stand-off. There was clearly violence in the air and they had assumed that I knew this bloke already and suddenly a gay evening was turning sour. The staring continued and I was steeling myself for worse to come, but the man then walked away.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and I explained to the confused women that I did not know the man and apologised for both the things he had been saying and the situation that had developed. Maybe the evening hadn't been derailed after all.
But about ten minutes later the man came back, holding a pint glass. He went round the entire group of people, saying his goodbyes and saying how nice it had been to meet that person. Finally he got to me and said, "And as for you...." before pouring the contents of the glass all over my head.
The liquid was warm and in the nano-second I had to react to this I jumped to the conclusion that the glass contained urine. This wasn't a totally mental assumption. I had recently been talking to someone who had told me how Arthur Smith had had piss thrown at him by an aggrieved punter and the liquid was warm and it had taken the man a little time to get the glass and its contents and so it seemed likely that he had just gone and done the wee himself, with vengeance on his mind. My first thought was how annoying this was as I would have to go home and change and shower, thus missing out on any chance of Edinburgh seduction that I might have been working towards.
I don't know what he expected to happen. Sometimes in films a bad man gets water thrown over him and he just stands there, dripping wet, making funny kind of spluttering, surprised noises with his mouth. But in reality if you assault someone, especially with your own bodily fluids, they are much more likely to attack you.
This is what happened.
I don't remember much about it. The red mist descended. But the next thing I knew I was about twenty feet away from where I had been, with this man in a headlock, and me aiming weak punches at his head.
"Stop it!" said the man meekly, still holding the empty pint pot, but not even thinking of smashing it into my skull.
"You poured piss over my head!" I bellowed.
"It wasn't piss, it was water," he shrieked pathetically. He must have filled it up from the sink in the bathroom, hence its tepidness.
Although this made a difference it didn't make that much of a difference. It was still extremely annoying and inconvenient and wet and my only real crime had been to be overly friendly to this man, when I should have just told him to piss off.
I am not saying I have never deserved to be assaulted, but it is quite remarkable that on all the occasions that something like this has happened I have been an almost totally innocent party. But I guess that's karma or something and I am just getting payback for the times I deserved to be hit but wasn't. I wish karma would just work on a more practical level of punishing you immediately for your trangressions, rather than biding its time.
Anyway, my fighting technique was no better then than it is now and even though I had the man captive under my arm I don't think I inflicted any physical damage on him. My friend Phil Fry managed to drag us apart and my nemesis skulked off into the night, whilst we returned to our drinks.
Though the atmosphere was broken and the girls, appalled no doubt at the non-transforming Incredible Hulk transformation they had just seen soon made their excuses and left.
But as with now, then over the next few days I would have people coming up to me (they seem to be texting and emailing this time) congratulating me on my fight. Other comics were particularly impressed, I think because they had all been in the situation where some jerk outstayed his welcome and was annoying and they'd never had the balls (or the provocation) to just lamp them one. As with now if they had been there to see the pathetic girly level of my fighting they might have been less impressed, but still....
I should point out that in the last fifteen years I have been annoyed by plenty of drunk men and been in a lot of situations where I have walked away from danger or diffused a situation. Aside from the aforementioned pushing incident with SG Lee these are the only times I have ever physically assaulted someone in my adult life. I am not some maniac who goes beserk if any man interlopes into a situation when I am talking to some girls. Though I am amused by the fact that both my fights have this in common - "Get away stranger - these girls are mine!"
Still the adrenaline is still running through my veins. Today at a shopping centre I attempted to hold a door open for a man coming the other way and misjudged it slightly as I released it to find it closed a bit faster than I thought. "Oh thanks very much," he said sarcastically - just the kind of thing I would have done incidentally. I turned and said "Oh don't worry, any time" rather aggressively, annoyed that he hadn't appreciated that I had done my best to help and that also there was an automatic door right next to the door he was going through, if he was really too weak to open a door. Also I feel I would have had to wait longer than is acceptable to hold the door for him to get through than politeness demanded. Luckily he didn't turn around and make a big deal of it, but maybe I was hoping to recapture the excitement of the other night. Hopefully I will calm down soon. It's a 40 thing I think.
