Large Fierce Mammal

The events I am about to recount are drawn from personal experience, and played out in a family restaurant located in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. As with my May 2016 piece on Bullies and Their Vital Role in Education, I do not offer this tale as an act of bravado nor an expression of badassedness. Rather, my purpose is to illustrate some of the concepts of self-defense as I am revealing them in my ongoing series, The Goode Fyght.

It was late in March of 2013, and my radiantly beautiful Mrs. LFM had only just become visibly pregnant with our first son. People we didn’t know were beginning to beam at us as they expressed their congratulations; a thing we found oddly funny because, as you know, we LFM’s adhere to the standard that one must never imply a woman is pregnant unless there is an infant emerging from her at that very moment. By this point, we were both awaiting the inevitable laying on of hands, and had long since established our continuum of response.

The restaurant is laid out with strips of booths down each opposing wall, and divided into thirds by two additional double strips of booths with the space between occupied by movable table and chair seating. The restaurant was busy and filled to about 75% capacity. Mrs. LFM and I are known to the staff there, and our predilection for sitting side by side in a booth facing into the restaurant understood, so we came to be seated at a corner booth.

Figure 1

For illustration, Figure 1 (courtesy Alex Upholstery Shop) shows a layout similar to the one I’m referring to with but a few small differences. Our seating position would be in the far booth on the right, backs to the wall with me nearest the aisle. To the left of the large window (to my right if seated there) was a fire exit leading to the outside. Instead of windows to our left (right wall in this picture), there would have been a four foot high partition with matching booths on the opposite side, and over which one could see the bulk of the restaurant which was filled to capacity at the time. The remaining booths on our side of the partition were unoccupied.

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows the matching booth layout on the opposite wall, however in the actual restaurant, the wall on the left is windowless. The booth in the near left of this image, located at 2 o’clock from my seated position, was occupied by a group of six boys ranging in age from about 10 to 14. The movable tables and chairs in the space between the booths had been pushed together to form one long table to my 1 o’clock, accommodating a party of ten — adults of varying ages and one young teenage boy.

As I studied the menu, I caught a movement out the corner of my eye and looked in that direction to see a small tub of butter bounce off the floor before rolling under one of the seats of the booth immediately behind the one occupied by the group of boys (the next one down in Figure 2, at my 2:30). They were all laughing as one got up and started looking for where it had gone.

Then another movement as the older member of the group began tossing another tub of butter higher and higher, clearly doing the same thing that had led to the first tub going astray. Seeing this, I looked at the table full of peopled who by now I knew were celebrating the birthday of one of the oldest people seated there, in search of someone who might be their keeper. Nobody there seemed interested in what the boys were doing, with a thirty something male with a buzz cut seated at the table’s corner that was nearest me so perpetually riveted to his phone that absolutely nothing going on in the restaurant was registering on him.

I could remain silent no longer.

Getting up, I stepped close to the boys, leaned in and said, “The butter you’re looking for is under the bench behind you, and if you keep it on your table from now on, you won’t have to look for it.”

They all had that deer in the headlights expression as I scanned them with my disapproval face before rejoining Mrs. LFM, and as I turned I noticed something else interesting – the teenage boy at the aforesaid large party table who happened to be immediately to my left as I chastised the other boys was sharing the same facial expression, as was the young woman at the end of the table sitting directly across from Mr. Buzz Cut who was still oblivious to everything. As soon as my eyes scanned them they both quickly averted theirs to stare at the table in front of them. Clearly, they were connected.

Back at my menu, the boy who had been searching for the missing butter began looking again. The fucking thing was bright yellow and blatantly obvious from my vantage, yet he couldn’t seem to detect it. If it hadn’t been for my own first hand knowledge to the contrary, I would have taken it as evidence that masturbation actually does cause blindness. Anyway, from my seated position I said, “Hey kid, it’s there!” as I simultaneously pointed directly at the butter.

He began a series of stooping and neck craning manoeuvres that succeeded in making him look even more like a dolt, but still failed to yield results.

Sweet Jesus.

All of this happened in much less time than it takes to tell it, and I was just thinking both that this was a lot of involvement on my part for something so fucking trivial, and how amazingly easy it is to get drawn into other people’s shit, when I noticed an obviously tense conversation going on between the previously mentioned frightened looking woman at the table and the thirty something buzz cut phone addict opposite her. His head abruptly snapped in my direction and he loudly said, “Do you have an obsession with something?”

I looked at him. He was red faced, obviously offended, and clearly someone who should have been supervising the butter boys. It didn’t escape my notice that he had taken a long time to step up and obviously had no idea what was going on. I replied calmly but firmly, “Those boys can’t seem to find the butter they tossed so I’m pointing it out for them.” Pointing at it again, I added, “It’s RIGHT THERE!”

That’s when a number of things happened in rapid succession — With a viciously angry expression on his face, Buzz Cut shoved back his chair, jumped to his feet facing me, and took a step forward. For my part, as soon as he started to rise I locked eyes on him, subtly shifted my weight and foot position for a rapid egress from my booth that would position me between him and my pregnant Wife, and reached out to grip the handle of the heavy mug full of beer in front of me, the contents and substance of which would figure prominently in his future if he crossed my trigger line.

The subtlety of my movements notwithstanding, they were not lost on my new friend. As quickly as he had stepped forward, he reversed course and stepped back with such suddenness that he actually overran his starting point in his retreat so his ass nearly overturned every drink on the table he’d been sitting at. Then, to his credit, he kept it almost in contact with the edge of the back of his chair as he leaned toward the booth whereunder the butter lay, still invisible to all but Mrs. LFM and me, to conduct his own ineffectual search.

Finally, and now having attracted far too much attention from what was still a very packed restaurant, he tried to save face by turning back to me again and angrily spouting, “I can look after my own kids, thank you!”

I replied by silently staring at him with no change of facial expression or body position.

He soon grew uncomfortable with that and turned his wrath on the butter boys saying, “This behaviour is unacceptable! I just had to deal with somebody over there (he pointed behind him in my general direction) because of you! Knock it off!”

“Dealt with.” I wasn’t really feeling “dealt with”, but what the hell.

With that, he went back to his table following the same path he had taken from it, and never looked at me again. Sitting down, he grabbed his phone and became completely reabsorbed in fucking with that while he went back to ignoring everyone and everything else. This, I concluded, was most likely going on at the outset, explaining why he had no idea what had led to me speaking to the boys. My meal with Mrs. LFM went off without further incident beyond periodically catching nasty glares from the butter boys and the teenager at the table that were quickly averted whenever either of us looked their way.

A few observations then. This was not my first rodeo, and it was obvious that the “father figure” was acting more out of a sense of needing to do something to man up in the face of his posse than any motivation of parental responsibility. His abrupt backward shifting of body position at my reaction to his suddenly standing up, turning to face me, and stepping forward told me that at least as far as things had gone to that point, he was all bark and no bite, but notwithstanding that, I was fully aware of how many witnesses were in the place and that whatever he did, and I did to him, would be reported in as many different versions as there were onlookers. Knowing nobody who wasn’t directly involved had any idea what had led up to buzz cut’s outbursts, I was positioned to be the reasonable man with the pregnant Wife who, though he had offered offense neither by word nor deed, was left with no choice but to put an inexplicably violent loud mouth on the ground. Hence, at his statement of being able to take care of his own kids, my stopping short of saying, “You can start any time,” as I reflexively wanted to. He was already humiliated in front of his family and a restaurant full of confused onlookers thanks to his own behaviour, and while he deserved to feel the way he did, such a statement would have constituted provocation and possibly led to a delay in my getting the ribs I so badly craved. My work with Dogs has long since taught me the perils and pitfalls of an improperly managed “fear biter”.

We ate our meal and left, walking between the butter boys and the table of ire, the occupants of both of which had better things to look at than us. And so another day of peace passed thanks to clarity of communication.