Bad Evening Explained in Detail

Okay, since I’ve had a couple of requests for the story of Friday night, I’ll divulge. Me and my buddy got dragged to a club and neither of us are really club people. I tried to explain this to the group at large, but they insisted we come. Against our better judgement we acquiesced and both basically stood there as everyone danced to the deafening music. I can handle bars or clubs with a drinking area, but this one had neither of those and we were both pretty fed up within 15 minutes.

I said we should stick around for nearly an hour because they insisted we come, so we did. But we got fed up pretty quickly and left as soon as I felt it was okay. We decided to go eat, so we went to a shwarma place a few blocks away. We ordered our meal and enjoyed it, having good conversation as any pair of friends would do. It was 2 AM and a few drunken people came in and ordered and left.

As my friend finished his meal (I was still eating) a group of four drunken guys walked in. They all looked to be in their early twenties (could have been late teens) and were big guys; they weren’t football-lineman broad, but they definitely had that sort of build.

The first guy walks by our table and says, “Hey, are you two gay?” Seeing he’s drunk and wanting to avoid trouble, neither of us responds.

As the first guy walks up to the counter a second guy detours to our table and says, “Yeah, do you like guys?” Neither of us responds and he stops at our table. He says something else to the same effect, and again we just sit there, figuring he’ll move on.

Keep in mind at this point we’ve not said anything to them or to each other since they’ve come in the door. However, this drunken lout picks up the napkin dispenser and tosses it at my friend’s head. In disbelief Jason says, “Are you joking me?”

The guy then takes Jason’s plate and bats that at him. Without hesitation he then picks up the table and tips it onto Jason, all the while yelling at us, “You wanna take it outside? You wanna take it outside?”

One of the two drunken guys who hasn’t accosted us then begins pushing his friend away, telling him to smarten up or something up. His friend is yelling that we were calling him gay and that he had to take care of us.

Meanwhile, the two cooks at the restaurant make their way from behind the counter towards our table to break up this potential fight. As it as a Lebanese restaurant we assue both of the guys are Lebanese, and their complexion would support that assumption. As the first one passes the customer side of the customer counter the first drunken guy (who walked up there after first yelling at us) grabs his skullcap off the guy’s head.

He then begins to shake it in the air tauntingly as the cook turns around. As he does the drunken guy stops and says, “Oh wait, that was offensive.” (So the shaking was offensive, but not the grabbing it off his head in the first place. Or the rest of their behaviour in the restaurant.) He then proceeds to sit down on the table nearest the counter. In his drunken state he doesn’t realise it has a leg in the middle, but no middle support; thus, as he sits down he sends the table flipping over and he kind of stumbles, but manages to avoid falling flat on his back, which would have been hilarious.

The second sober friend escorts this guy outside as the first sober one has literally pushed the other drunken guy outside, who is still yelling at Jason and I. The restaurateur makes sure they leave the store, but they hover on the sidewalk. They seem to leave, but a minute or two later the second drunk (the homophobe) burst into the store and begins spluttering some apology to the Lebanese cooks saying, “You make great food. You don’t deserve this.” One of the sober guys comes to get him and drags him outside, as the first drunk (the racist) is still literally being pushed away from the restaurant by the other sober friend.

Now, in the end, neither Jason nor I was hurt and things weren’t too bad. We were both verbally attacked for enjoying a meal together as friends, which is something I’ve done hundreds of times with countless male friends in my life, but neither of us was hurt.

However, these guys were clearly looking for a fight and if their sober friends had had a bit more to drink at the last place, maybe they wouldn’t have stopped a fight. Also, if they were unwilling or slower to respond things could have got ugly fast. These guys were all considerably bigger and stronger than Jason and I and we would have been beaten up pretty fast. Furthermore, we can both be smartasses if the mood strikes us, and we can also egg each other on. If either of us had resisted the urge to bite our tongue and had snapped a comeback at then, which we found out later that we were each close to doing, then maybe the soberer friends wouldn’t have stopped the pair of complete drunks (and maybe would have joined in) and we could easily have wound up pretty badly hurt very quickly.