Fight Club

writing something that got their son to start reading again. Or their husband. Or their students. Other people wrote letters, a little angry, saying how they’d invented the whole idea of fight clubs. In military boot camps. Or in Depression-era labor camps. They’d get drunk and ask one another: "Hit me. As hard as you can….”
    There have always been fight clubs, they say. There will always be fight clubs.
    Waiters will always pee in the soup. People will always fall in love.
    Now, seven books later, men still ask where to find the fight club in their area.
    And women still ask if there’s a club where they can fight one another.
    Now, this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue-collar nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven’t already done …
    In the mountains of Bolivia—one place the book has yet to be published, thousands of miles from the drunk cowboy and his Haunted Tunnel Tour—every year, the poorest people gather in high Andes villages to celebrate the festival of "Tinku.”
    There, the campesino men beat the crap out of one another. Drunk and bloody, they pound one another with just their bare fists, chanting, "We are men. We are men. We are men…”
    The men fight the men. Sometimes, the women fight one another. They fight the way they have for centuries. In their world, with little income or wealth, few possessions, and no education or opportunity, it’s a festival they look forward to all year long.
    Then, when they’re exhausted, the men and woman go to church.
    And they get married.
    Being tired isn’t the same as being rich, but most times it’s close enough.