"My Rock Bottom? You've Probably Never Heard Of It" By: Charlie Kasov

Why do drunk people pick fights?


Theory: When you're at your fattest, odds are you are at your highest tolerance for alcohol. All that extra alcohol you can now tolerate does its best to fill your body's corpulence coffers. I think the aggression that drunks display is partly a result of the frustration of having to spend so much money in order to get drunk, and partly a result of the frustration of being turned into a bloated sloth. But other factors contribute.


February, 2006. I was 23, living in an overpriced fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side, and I owned a surplus of purple (loud grape, really) button-downs from the Gap. And I was way too fat for Gap clothes. I had been doing stand-up comedy for a year, but my act was still as ill-suited to me as my clothes were. Five minutes of my act consisted of impersonations of my opera-singing mother catching me masturbating and my cokehead ex-girlfriend blowing an imaginary line of cocaine off the mic stand (my penis). That should already suffice as my bottom. But one night my roommate, Tal, enlisted this purple people eater as his wing man to Williamsburg.

Tal and I were like Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau in "Swingers," except more emo and Jewy. He managed to sleep with several attractive women, but he still managed to think he was ugly and cry all the time. Did I mention his favorite band was Radiohead? I just didn't go on many dates. When I did, I would either manage to profess my undying love for my new acquaintance the first night, or I would explain why I didn't mind paying for her because it was a tax write-off if I put it on my business credit card. I'm not sure which would make a woman less comfortable with me, being the victim of deluded love at first sight, or being tax-deductible.

Six Jamesons deep at the Laila Lounge that night, I was watching Tal strike out with a punky, hipster bartender who looked like Maggie Gyllenhaal in "Stranger Than Fiction" with 62% more body piercings. No one in the bar spoke to me except Tal, and he did only when the bartender had other customers. Three more Jamesons kept me occupied until she gave him her phone number and told him never to call it.

Watching my friend, who got laid reliably, be rejected so cleverly made my alienation that night seem for naught. Suddenly, I hated her, I hated hipsters, and I hated Williamsburg. Problem was, minus the vital fashion and body-weight components, I was actually quite hipstery. I loved obscure bands and even more obscure political causes, I had what I thought were progressively detached notions about sexuality and human interaction, and I really believed that Wes Anderson was Ingmar Bergman trapped behind a Hollywood camera. On a Williamsburg web forum, I would have held my own.

Inside my drunken mind, my hatred for hipster snobbery and my earnest need for approval duked it out until my stomach intervened with hunger and nausea. We walked toward the Bedford L station, and I managed to eat some pizza despite having the spins.

In the pizza place, surrounded by men dressed like Waldo from Where's Waldo and women dressed like they were ready to act in Elizabethan theater, I decided the only way I was going to make it home awake was to embrace my anger and let it lead me. In my mind, the hipster-wannabe had been curbed, "American History X" -style, by the scorned preppy. I began muttering my way out of the pizza place and onto the train, slurring words with spit that more closely resembled the mozzarella cheese I had just eaten than any normal, watery saliva.

Sitting on the train, Tal leaned against the rail next to the door and tried to fall asleep while I sat to his left, still muttering. When he closed his eyes, I turned to my left and saw a frail white twenty-something sitting by himself. I wanted a fight, and even Drunk Charlie knew that this was one of the few opponents I could handily beat. "Hey Tal, look at this fucking hipster," I slurred to the hipster, elbowing Tal. "Oh, I watch Wes Anderson movies and wear skinny jeans. I watched "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and just picked out the wardrobe." (It's worth noting that I saw "Steve Zissou" twice in the theaters.) "Look at him, Tal, he's a skinny little hipster pussy. I could kick your ass." While I was offering these provocations, I mistakenly thought I was at least two feet away from the guy. As Tal explained to me later, I was almost touching him and was most certainly spitting/drooling on him.

But rather than react with any defensive maneuver or concern, the guy squinted at me, confused. Then the squint disappeared, signaling that his confusion had gone as well. "Haven't I seen you onstage a few times before? You do stand-up comedy, right? You're pretty funny." If my face hadn't already been beat red, it would have turned so then. It turned out that we both frequented the same music open mic in the East Village, one that I had actually been well received at. I awkwardly bullshat with him about the mic for three more stops, feeling drunker and more embarrassed every minute. I had had every intention of beating him senseless, but I was so drunk that I didn't look serious to him. And because he knew I was a comedian, he assumed I was just being goofy.

There were two firsts in that story. The first stranger I ever picked a fight with happened to be the first stranger to ever recognize me off-stage. As far as drinking goes, that was definitely my bottom. I rarely drink now, and I quit the Gap entirely. I've had many a night since then in which I've been liberal with my saliva, but no more belligerence and no more self-hatred. And no more self-hatred disguised as hipster-hatred. I've since learned to channel all my anger towards whomever trendy political blogs tell me to hate this week.