Party Report: East Bay Rats Valentine’s Fight Party

The place to be on Valentine’s Day wasn’t a restaurant or a lovers’ lane — it was the show and fight party hosted by the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club at West Oakland’s Victory Stables. After a half hour there I started furiously texting my single friends: “lots of hot guys here come quick.”

This was three things at once: a fight night, a party, and a show. The flyer dubbed it a “Valentine’s Day massacre.” Music blasted from the stage, first from Piss Pony, then from Hot Laundry, while people took turns boxing in a ring surrounded by a crowd. The Rats, in their legendary jackets, ran everything, lining the edges of the ring and rotating referee duties, breaking up boxers and calling winners. They also handed out standard gear to new fighters: boxing gloves and a mouth guard. Standing among the Rats was a kid, around 11 years old, with a cast on his arm wearing an endearing scowl.

The crowd was a mix of scenes all stitched together. Punks, skaters, rockabillies, yuppies, metalheads, guys who looked like bouncers, amateur boxers, and glamorous women — all packed in by the same graffitied walls. At the party’s peak the room was so tight people were standing on benches and a halfpipe stashed in the corner (Victory Stables is usually a skate shop/center).

After one of the matches, a beautiful tattooed blonde woman known as “The Cat Sweet” entered the ring to perform — think burlesque meets body horror. She began seductively eating live worms straight from a heart-shaped chocolate box. Always holding them out to show they were moving first. Afterwards she staplegunned playing cards to her face and body. The crowd cheered, winced and screamed. Towards the end of the night Cat entered the ring once again, except this time she boxed another girl. The victor was unclear.

All night people kept saying the party felt like “old Oakland.” I understood what they meant. But this was happening here and now, in today’s Oakland, I thought. I felt my millennial peers were being too nostalgic and missing what was in front of them. Still, the night did feel like “old Oakland” in the sense that it hearkened back to when the Rats held regular boxing nights in the backyard of their old clubhouse on San Pablo (just a few blocks from Victory Stables). The biggest difference was the addition of a few tech-looking yuppies (something unheard of 15 years ago) and all the phones in the crowd sticking up like periscopes.

I decided that something fundamentally human was happening in that room. In our digital age where so much of life is immaterial, sometimes the body does the speaking. And sometimes it says it wants to be punched in the face.

I remember the Rats from the Occupy Oakland days. They would hang around the camp and do security. This was a time when subcultural lines were blurred and insurrectionary anarchists found common cause with the Rats. Both interested in fighting, and both a part of the 99%. I remember the fight night themes of the past: stoners vs drunks, hipsters vs punks. One time a friend of mine got his ass kicked in a “Marxists vs Nihilists” one. The club’s backyard scene held an allure that was written about frequently in the Vice-dominated media landscape of the 2010s.  

This night had no theme. Yet each fight had its own flavor of this vs that. At one point, a short but spry young man with no shirt and green basketball shorts went against a L.A.-style hipster in blue jeans, a vintage tee and long hair. His stylish friends cheered him on from the sidelines. 

Because anyone can volunteer to fight, the tension never lets up.

After each fight, when they ask for the next participant, everyone looks around. Who will do it? Which one of us will become one of them?

Part of the thrill is the collective question hanging in the air: Do I have it in me? Would I win? What am I afraid of? While a fight was happening, I’d hear whispers around me: “let’s go next,” then go quiet when the time came. Everyone flirts with the idea, pushing and pulling in their minds.

The Rats seem to understand that, to a degree, violence is part of life. What they offer is a space for it. Contained, collective, and public. People get in the ring to test their limits. They find out things about themselves in the process. And we watch the transformation happen in real time.

There’s an evolutionary reason humans socialize. But standing there, watching the ring and listening to the crowd, I thought about the human need to fight — to release tension and embrace conflict. Though the kind of violence these fights offer is almost sweet, every match ends with a hug. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I decided that something fundamentally human was happening in that room. In our digital age where so much of life is immaterial, sometimes the body does the speaking. And sometimes it says it wants to be punched in the face.