Two Plus Two Newer Archives - Trip report: fight in Internet cafe

I had a perfect session last night playing from 10.30pm to 3.30am at the 24 hour Internet cafe. I deposited £62 and withdrew £392 for a win of £330. I didn't play higher than $0.50/$1, either.
When I walked in, the poker player I'd talked to the previous night was asleep in the corner. When I spoke to him later, he told me he'd been there two days. He was waiting, he said, for a tournament. And for Godot, I suppose.

I sat at the back, and noticed the man sitting in the corner next to me was watching porn films. Another man was looking at escort websites; someone else was on Gaydar.

Around 2am a stout, cheaply dressed, gel-haired young Englishman with a cheap sports bag started shouting at the middle-aged lank-haired semi-destitute Pole sitting next to him, telling him not to look at his screen. He was pushing, shoving, and yelling in a high-pitched, chippy, common voice. He asked the Pole to come outside to fight, then pushed his chair so he fell over hard onto his back.

The young Turkish man from the front desk came over and stood between them, and tried to escort the English thug out of the door but he refused to leave, demanding a refund. He said "Go on, call Old Bill if you want", and I guessed he was and would continue to be no stranger to the inside of a police cell. I walked over to watch and so did all the other guys, forming a scrum at the front of the store.

The Polish man was hiding behind the counter, protected by the store owners from the English thug. I missed what happened for a fraction of a second. Suddenly the English man was curled up on the floor and the Turkish man, no doubt being from the fighting class himself, had lifted a large metal stool above his head and was about to bring it down onto the thug's thick head. I felt my heart race and desperately wanted him to do it, but his colleague held him back. The English thug got up, and I saw the bridge of his nose was bleeding. He said he was going to call the police. The Turkish man had by now reached behind the counter for a three-foot long steel pole, and was wielding it as if he meant business. He called the Englishman a "little dick" and invited him to come and have a fight. Golly, what fun!

The English thug finally was convinced to go outside, and he paced outside shouting, telling us "You've got weapons? I've got weapons too" - though I guessed his cheap sports bag contained nothing more than packed lunch and P.E. kit - and said he would be waiting for the Turk when his shift finished. I found myself telling the thug to get lost, and that he started it. Someone else observed there were thirty witnesses who'd speak against him. Finally we saw him get on a bus.

Fifteen minutes later two policewomen arrived, called by the thug or the store-owner I'm not sure. As the ladies walked to the back of the store, the man in the corner unplugged his headphones and we heard a loud UH - UH - OH - YES - YES from the porn film he was watching; the place erupted in laughter. The policewomen interviewed the Pole, but since the thug had gone there wasn't much they could do.

An amusing night!