Last Sunday, when training a young man who is the head coach of one the new breed of masculinity oriented combat clubs, he mentioned the fact that "the grid could go down" and offered me a place to stay in his home town if I could ever make it there in the face of major civil breakdown. He punctuated his offer with the statement, "Taboo men like you don't make it." He then made a qualifying statement that I cannot exactly recall, to the effect that going it alone is not a survivable option.

I briefly responded, in a statement that is expanded and cleaned up in the following paragraph. "I'm here, coaching at this school, and have done so in many other schools, despite my pariah status as a non-martial artist. Our general myth is that the alpha male leader type and the loner or taboo man, are combative equals. In movies the loner wins, in reality the leader wins. But that is only when the loner is an idiot and opposes the leader of the group. I'm not a kempoist and I can't beat the master of this school in a fight. The fact is, in a group of ten men, only three are usually lethal, or even effective combatants. The alpha is usually the top fighter—that aggressive drive to dominate putting him above the taboo man and the beta-male. The leader is not threatened so much by the loner as he is by the beta or the prospect of another alpha. The alpha-male with savvy gathers loners around him that are tied to him through personal bonds and do not have a hierarchal refuge, as a check on those that might climb the hierarchy to threaten his position. With very rare exceptions, most taboo men have practiced diplomacy with leaders rather than opposed them or the hierarchy directly. Many of our modern pursuits are remnants of tribal associations, and in the case of corporate structures, have hijacked tribal psychology to the point where one might well speak of The Money Tribe when describing business in general.

Some examples:

1. A fighter I trained was patched into a biker club ahead of many prospects in order to give the leader an edge. He is resented by the second tier leadership in the club, and owes his position to one man, the man on top.

2. Every time I have been brought in by the top man at a martial arts school to coach in my specialties, I have been resented by the senior assistants, and admired by the junior assistants. This is telling, and I am not the only combat arts specialist to have this experience.

3. Every time I have found myself associated with a group of black men—in work, social scenes or in the combat arts—in whatever capacity, the leader has latched onto me as a personal advisor, a literal stick of knowledge with which to beat the other claimants to wisdom down into their deserved place.

4. As a grunt and consultant in retail food, who is known to have had a reputation as an effective store manager, most managers have declined to hire me, for fear that I might give the owner an in house replacement option. Only the most savvy manager and two owners, have employed me in this capacity, largely as a check on their department heads and assistants. By tasking me to either train, supervise, or assist these people in the middle of the hierarchy, the middle management—where most friction occurs—tends to get really productive in hopes that I will go away, or at least not be called upon to replace them.

What I have described above are all leadership-loner relationships in our own time that reflect the primordial relationship between the chief and the shaman. The alpha-male of any group is both committed to winning approval and support from below and guarding against threats from his own hierarchy. After all, if he climbed it, others can. By not being a member of the hierarchy, and also not being a representative of a rival group [for instance, boxing people shun me as much as martial arts people do] the taboo man offers himself as a personal asset to the chief, and he serves at his pleasure. Since he can be cut loose at any time by the more power-minded chief, the diplomatic onus falls on the taboo man. A lot of this involves having a savvy chief, who will have the sense to settle any differences or dress down the loner out of sight and hearing of those below him in the hierarchy.

Back in 2000, I think, my sparring partner and coworker, Chuck and I stopped into a South Baltimore bar, in the middle of the block on a residential side street, at 6:00 a.m., to shoot pool after work one winter morning. The culture of Old South Baltimore—now almost completely gentrified into oblivion—was that of West Virginia. Men, most white, and some black, took the CSX railroad out of West Virginia, before and after WWII, to get a job with the railroad, with Domino Sugar, or as longshoremen at the Marine Terminals. They all settled here near the grain elevators and behind Domino Sugar, between the railroad tracks and Fort McHenry.

I stepped up to the bar next to a large hairy man who was drinking draft, ordered the ingredients for my Virgin Mary, and mixed it on the bar next to him. He growled in an emasculating tone, “You forgot the Worcestershire sauce, pal.”

“I slapped him on the shoulder as I headed back to the table and said, “Only pussies drink their tomato juice with Worcestershire sauce.”

After choking on his beer, the brute laughed and said, “You’re alright, man.” And followed me back to the table, where he introduced himself, “Name’s Harvey, worked on snow-removal for two days en been workin’ on drinkin’ ma pay since yesterday mornin’—got sixteen bucks left outa two beans. Down ta drinkin’ draft. How ‘bout I play y’all fer rounds?”

Now, every guy that grew up in that neighborhood grew up in a barroom shooting pool. I sucked and Harvey played in a league. This was tantamount to telling me that I would be paying for his drinks. And this would have been the case if it had not been for the sixty or so bottles of beer Harvey had consumed over the preceding 24 hours. He kept scratching on the 8-ball as Chuck tried not to snicker at the huge man.

The conversation turned to upbringing, occupation and age. We were both 36 and he had showed me his driver’s license. When I became the first man in some months to defeat Harvey in 8-ball despite my obvious lack of skill, he said, “You v-eight some’bitch, it’s that juice (it had to be), or you’re damn lucky.”

I handed Harvey my expired learner’s permit. Dark superstition clouded his eyes as he knitted his hairy brows and said, “Goddamn, we got the same birthday. You got ma number! Where you live?”

“In the Northeast.” (on the other side of a 5-mile deep black ghetto)

“That’s a dangerous area. You can’t drive on this. How you get here at night?”

Chuck blurted, “He takes the dang bus if you can believe that!”

As Harvey stood in awe I handed him a “Violence Guy” business card, “I find my status as an honorary African-American enables me to access normally untapped sources for my study.”

Harvey was such a racist that he was incredulous about my claim to have interviewed black men on their own turf, “Ya mean you talk to the homeboys, like you’re Doctor Do Little?”

(Possibly the most racist statement I have ever recorded.)

Chuck interjected, “Not only can he understand what they say, some a the big scary ones even call him ‘ma brutha’ –I seen it!”

Harvey looked at my scrawny little person sheepishly, with glazed eyes, “You one of them stone-cold hillbilly killers; the story-tellin’ kind, like a sorcerer.”

From that point on, as far as Harvey was concerned, I was some righteous white-trash special-ops race-warrior with a mythic edge. I then spent an hour interrogating Harvey as to the details of his violent alcohol-sodden life. He showed me great respect and refused to sit in my presence.

What underlined Harvey’s superstitions concerning me was a rather simple equation.

When I walked in Harvey just saw me as potential prey. I was not large enough to be a credible opponent, I was too different to bond with, and too arrogant to ignore. Even Harvey, though drunk and no doubt the victor in whatever brawl might have ensued between us, had his eye out for the face-saving device. For him it was my bizarre life-style and the fact that I routinely went alone where he was afraid to go, into the enclaves of his lifelong enemies. Harvey chose the enemy-of-my-enemy route to peace among men.

Barroom situations in isolated urban enclaves can be very dicey, as the patrons of these local dives often have the same xenophobic mind set as a medieval villager. Verbal solutions to avoiding and suppressing violence are most effective indoors. Body language, awareness, and other tactical considerations such as your pace, your route, controlling distance between yourself and others, attire, and what you are carrying, count for a lot more out in the sterile wilderness between buildings.