We did not know, when we agreed to follow the girls to the party, that it was in a cow pasture. Looking back, the cowboy boots they wore sockless with summer dresses that left their shoulders bare should have been a sign that the night would end on a bad note, but boys in lust are fools, and none of us were exceptions to this rule. Saturday night in flyover America and we're looking to get less lonely. And, if there is one truth that needs to be told, we're always looking to get less lonely in whatever way arises, those of us walking upright, which is a thing so obvious I shouldn't have to say it.
     So we followed the three girls out beyond the city lights and into the dark heart of the matter. Stars appeared like holes shot in the night. In the back of Chris's Explorer was an ice chest and in the ice chest were beers and already we were throwing our heads out the windows and howling at the stars. Already the alcohol ran through us and made the outlook we had for life tilted like a carnival ride, the kind that spins so fiercely you think for a moment it's going to throw you, and you welcome it, the throwing, because it's only the landing that hurts, and that comes later.
     We could see the light from the bonfire long before we arrived, like a spark set against the dark we were slowly making our way toward. It looked like a barn had been ignited, or a house was burning down, possibly with people still inside. The three girls in their pick-up truck swerved wildly around corners. The houses were far between and few. They had little mailboxes out front that looked like the house, which made me want to burn one down. There were few things I hated then more than mailboxes that looked like the house they sat in front of. And maybe it's time to say that I drank too much back then and some nights woke in the dark hurting in a hundred different ways. And when I hurt, I sometimes want to hurt someone else. I've burned whole cities in my mind, a hundred thousand houses with little mailboxes out front. And some nights, waking up hungover in the dark holding your head, the only way to keep going is to either raise the bottle beside you or try to find some assignation, some skin to skin contact to help you forget all the ways you hurt.  
     So we beat on into the darkness, borne ceaselessly toward a bonfire in a cow pasture. This was Arkansas. Tornado Alley. Bible Belt. Chicken houses. Farmland laced with manure. One girl's name was Skye, is what I'm saying. Sky, with a silent E stuck on the end, like a vibrator without batteries—it can get the job done, but it's a lot of extra work. The other was Aimee, two fucking EEs, like her parents didn't know how to use a Y. The third was Angie. Aimee, Angie, and Skye. They sounded like a '60s folk trio.
     The problems began as soon as we parked. The side of the road looked like a Chevy truck commercial, Sierras and Scottsdales and Silverados, all with mud tires and gun racks. Said racks held guns. We assumed they were loaded, which would have been a fine time to fishtail it out of there, but Skye. Skye with her long blond hair and extra E. I'd recently broken up with my girlfriend of three years. Eventually we'd get back together and marry each other for 20, but that night Skye's extra E seemed like a puzzle I needed to put together.
     So we parked and grabbed a few beers from the back. We had to climb over a barbed wire fence, which should have been another sign that maybe these weren't the droids we were looking for, but this was Arkansas and all of us had scaled a few barbed wire fences in our time. We were not strangers to drinking in the open.
     Another warning sign should have been the hats. We were the only guys there without hats, either cowboy hats or John Deere ballcaps. Their belt buckles looked like the prize in championship wrestling. I don't mean to judge people based on the clothing they wear, but I'll bet all the stale beer in the world none of these guys had ever owned a suit. And our clothes—early '90s grunge flannel, like we'd raided a Goodwill, which we had—set us apart as well. We knew upon seeing them standing in the light of the big bonfire that half of them would work in a factory the rest of their lives and the other half would smell like cowshit the rest of theirs. And they knew we were solidly middle-class, the kind of men who take everything for granted, always hurting with what they think they don't have, not knowing what they want is always there for the taking.
     Couch said "Fuck me," when they all turned to look at us. Aimee and Angie and Skye were already taking shots of Jägermeister around the fire, which looked like an entire tree had been dragged into it. I looked at Couch and Couch looked at Chris and both of them looked at me.
     "Don't start anything," Chris said.
     That last remark was given to the air in general, but may have been aimed at me. Chris was a big guy but was far too lovable to ever start trouble, and Couch just wanted to drink some beers and maybe find himself in bed later with someone whose body was curved. And me, well let's just say I may or may not have had a bit of a Napoleon complex. I was shorter than Chris and Couch by six inches, and that kind of thing weighs on a man. Walking around in a world where size matters, where all the weight rooms and athletic lockers in the world can break out into anger at any moment, the only way to survive as a smaller form is to hide or allow your hatred to grow stronger than everyone else's. What I'm saying is, I had been known to throw fists, often over reasons that in retrospect might seem silly to someone who doesn't know what it meant to go a school where first-day hazings of lower classmen were encouraged by a few faculty members, and everyone in the school got a "deer day" when the season opened so they could shoot a hooved animal and call it sport.
     When we reached the fire Skye made the introductions. She gave the name of the town we were from and the guys in their big belt buckles and baseball caps eyed one another solemnly over their Skoal. And I knew from the set of their shoulders that here was a good chance for violence to occur, but I'd killed three quarters of a beer just crossing the fence and so analysis of any situation was not my strong suit at that particular time. We stood there in the warmth and light and stuck out our chests and grunted like apes, scratching our hairy selves as we uncorked our beers and drank them like jet fuel or the fortitude we'd need to survive all the ways we wound one another. And it was fine, because someone had set up speakers and even the country music we hated seemed right, there in the dark, there in the night.
     So we made our way to the keg and back to the fire, little pockets of conversation shifting like the firelight washing up against our small frames. Some guy pissed in the flames. Somebody tapped a second keg. Couch had cornered some girl we didn't know but she didn't look like she needed rescued, and Skye was dancing in the light of the fire. I remember this moment clearly, the way the fire lit the tops of the trees and flickered on the wall of the old red barn. Some song came on that everyone knew, about being whiskey bent and hell bound, and we sang it until our throats hurt. We drank more beer. The night sailed smoothly overhead.
     But this wouldn't be the right story if I didn't give you the violence I've been promising all along. Who knows why men are the way we are? Looking back, I can see the class divide. And the fact that we were from different towns, which stirred up our old provincial prejudices, our protecting of our territory. But the rest I must attribute to Y chromosomes. It's as if us men think we own the world and at the same time don't understand why it isn't ours. As if we've been told over and over we are the future and yet keep trying to fuck up the past. Our hairy forebearers, standing on some distant shore, would scratch themselves and turn away, disappointed we still haven't developed any further, as if they can see across the waves our insides, and all the ways we've managed to kill ourselves, a little at a time. 
     In a break in the music, in a clear moment of reckoning for who we are, one of the guys put his hand on my shoulder and said, "He's cute. Maybe I'll fuck him in the ass later."
     This was not, dear reader, an admission of his attraction. It was instead a profession of the need to emasculate me. Which is a strange tact, considering how much we straight men claim to value women, even as we constantly objectify them.
     But after the fourth or fifth beer, all reason is lost. So what I did was, I simply turned and knocked the guy out cold, one shot straight to the chin. We could have just left, of course, but I decided to take the shortest route to ending the evening. I could claim to have been defending the rights of daughters I didn't yet have, but the truth is there's violence inherent in the system. There's that whole masculinity tale, the idea that we cannot allow ourselves to be seen as weak. I spent half of junior high stuffed into a trashcan by bigger boys, and each time my anger gew so great I thought it would erupt. Even now, going gray and growing a gut, I'm angered by the man's words, even though neither of us were men, just boys in men's skin, pretending to be the patriarchs we'd seen all our lives. It's not the words that anger me, but the idea of dominance behind them. Being called a girl is meant to be weak, and weakness is, in the code of male bravado, subordination, which is why so many men rail so hard against homosexuality—our culture has taught them that being on bottom is unacceptable.
     What happened next becomes blurry. The guy I hit fell hard to the ground and then I fell hard to the ground, helped there by several of his friends. Suddenly six of them were kicking me, cowboy boots digging hard into my ribs and spine. I curled up in a ball, protecting my private areas. I might have been killed had Couch and Chris not come running, appearing like saviours out of the air. Skye, with her extra E, held everyone off long enough we could escape, over the fence and into Chris's Explorer.
     Still we almost didn't make it. They surrounded the SUV. Dozens of them now, saying they were going to kill us. One of them picked up a rock the size of my head and aimed it toward the window. They began rocking the vehicle, and I thought we were going to die there, so I told Chris to run them over. He revved the engine and a small gap appeared and he shot through it and then we were gone, rocketing down that dirt road, leaving behind the light of the fire.
     I'd like to say men are curious creatures. I'd like to say we're complicated, and it's our desires that destroy us again and again, so we never quite know who we are. And I want to say that you should forgive me for my anger. That I'm not the same kid who once knocked out another kid in a cow pasture, under the light of distant stars. That I try to be kind to others. That I hold the door for people at the grocery store. That I once helped up an old man who overturned his scooter and couldn't stand because of his 88-year-old knees. That I cry sometimes watching Friday Night Lights, not when the football team wins State, but when one of those hardass men shows kindness. That I love my daughters with all the light in the world. That my father and I talk once a week about the weather, but really we're just holding each other close against the time when we no longer will be able to.
     But I'm not sure I believe that men like me will ever completely control our desires and our angers. There's too many of us, dragging too many trees shaped like crosses we must bear over the fields we've fucked up. We are each of us one small fire against the darkness, and we keep pissing on the flames, trying to extinguish them. And though lately I've begun to believe that the fire might finally go out, I'm working hard to convince myself that if it does the stars will still shine down, illuminating our small sacks of blood and bone standing there in the darkness, wondering what we've done. 
      

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"Fire" is part of a collection of essays on men and (toxic) masculinity. I had been writing about the ease with which men fall into patterns of violence, and needed to confront my own adherence to that pattern, so this came spitting out. Chris and Couch are still mad at me. We've never been back to that town.