By A.C. Thompson

If violence is a kind of dust that lies inside the house of the soul, there does not seem to be any way to sweep it out the door. We can only sweep it to one corner or another.

Eastbay Rats leather jacket flic of Trevor Latham.
photo by Lori Spears

William T. Vollmann

JAN. 29 , 2005. Dozens of motorcycles are parked outside an aircraft hangar-size warehouse located in the postindustrial lowlands of West Oakland, in a zone the locals refer to as Ghost Town. There are gleaming, chopped-out Harleys, ancient Honda CB 400s, and a bevy of heavily modified, matte-black Japanese sport bikes. Few streetlights illuminate this particular block, and on this jet-black night the area is draped in a near tangible darkness.

My tour guide, clad in a leather vest and a black Oakland A's cap, worn at an angle, meets me a few feet from the front door of the warehouse. He's a member of the East Bay Rats, the punkish clique of motorcycle freaks who are throwing tonight's shindig. His name is Alex.

Tonight is fight night, an annual Rats event, and we are here to take in the spectacle of humans doing bad things to one another. We are gonna watch people get pummeled. Watch blood spew from their faces. Watch their poor little brains short-circuit as they get KO'd. This, in many ways, is the real-world equivalent of the movie Fight Club – subtract Meatloaf, Ed Norton, and Brad Pitt's hammy ass, and add in a real-life cast of hundreds of pugilism-loving spectators and a horde of brawlers, some skilled, some not so.

Yeah, I know: It's ugly. It's twisted. And yet, for some reason, I can't wait.

• • •

Alex leads me past the throng at the door and into the wide-open enormity of this giant sheet-metal structure, a building I'm told measures 25,000 square feet. The ceiling is easily 30 feet up. Stacked here and there like oversize Legos are steel land-sea shipping containers, which look as if they've just been hauled here from the Oakland docks.

We plow through a dense crowd – 400? 500? 600? – to get to the action. It's a scene straight outta one of the Mad Max flicks, with spikey-haired retro-futuristic punkers, dreadlockians, bikers, and hip-hop nationals howling at the gladiators pummeling each other in a plywood-and-plank boxing ring cordoned off by brown twine ropes, illuminated by the glow of halogen lights. Scanning the audience, I estimate that at least 80 percent of the crowd is wearing black.

In the ring, two young women, one a skinny white chick, the other a heavier black woman, trade wild, furious blows. "The girls be getting brutal tonight," comments Alex, a muscular, well-inked Oakland native who favors the sound of doom metal (think: slow, loud, and evil) and drives a cab for a living. Somewhere behind me some guy is screaming, "You fight like a girl!" and thinking it's clever.

Standing in the shadows roughly 30 feet from the ring, Alex introduces me to Trevor Latham, the burly president of the East Bay Rats, who is celebrating his 33rd birthday tonight. Latham's large, shorn head is covered with a fine layer of stubble; a mustache and goatee hang off his face. A nightclub bouncer by trade, he looks more substantial than his six-foot-two, 200-pound dimensions would suggest.

"The first time we threw a fight party was nine years ago. We were more into grappling then," Latham explains. Grappling is the violent science of grabbing someone and forcing them to "tap out" by twisting their limbs into horrendously painful positions or throttling them – the kind of stuff that goes on in Ultimate Fighting Championship cage brawls. Grapplers, who are typically skilled in jiujitsu or wrestling, fight bare-handed or in light, fingerless gloves.

Earlier this evening Latham saw combat in a grappling match. "I choked the guy out pretty quick. I had him in a guillotine right off the bat."

These days, though, most of the fighters at the Rats' parties are wearing 14-ounce gloves and hewing, at least to some extent, to standard boxing rules with three-minute rounds and a minute between each round. "Boxing is more exciting to watch. For the common man, there's nothing better than seeing one person hitting another person in the face," he says, adding that the general public doesn't appreciate the strategy and technique that go into putting an arm-splintering submission hold on somebody.

When the Rats throw a fight party, anyone can show up and fight, but Latham is no Tyler Durden – "The eighth and final rule: if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight" – so you aren't required to jump in the ring and battle until bloodied. And he has no problem with people blabbing about the parties so long as they aren't giving directions to the Man.

Back in the ring, the African American woman lands a particularly potent right hook on the cheek of her opponent. "Wow, they're really going at it!" Latham enthuses.

I've spotted a bunch of biker crews in attendance tonight, and given the fractious nature of most bikers – disturbing the peace seems to be threaded into their DNA – I ask Latham if we should expect any conflict out of the ring. As if on cue, two Hells Angels in full regalia approach Latham, flash a pair of toothy smiles, shake his hand, and wish him a happy birthday. No worries, he tells me.

• • •

Latham's right: the women really are going at it. Tonight an all-female two-on-two bout, the competitors a quartet of conventionally attractive twentysomethings, is a case study in feminine brutality. One of the fighters, wearing a pink hoodie, has one of her foes on the ropes. Her rival, who has a half-braided head of long dark hair and kohled eyes, swivels her head outside the ring hoping to avoid the blows Pink Hoodie Lady is raining on her face. The move doesn't work so well. Pink Hoodie snaps Half-Braided two more times in the mug with vicious punches, trying to finish her off. Now the mob is roaring. Somebody somewhere is screeching, "Kill her," the words wafting out of the general din.

And so it goes for four rounds, during which no punches are pulled. As the slug-athon concludes, it's unclear who has triumphed; the refs, a pair of Rats, yank all four women's arms into the air, suggesting they've all won. All of the fighters look worked but happy as they hug one another and slip out of the ring.

A few minutes later, I find Half-Braided and a friend standing in line for some water. Turns out her name is Samantha, she's from Concord, she works as a receptionist, and she's 20. "It was fun," she tells me.

How did she feel in there? "Like I was gonna die 'cause I smoke too much weed," Samantha replies.

She's obviously a pale woman under any circumstances, but at this point she's looking pallid and slightly green and a little shaky. "Sorry, but I have to – " and with a quickness Samantha pivots, drops her head, and starts hurling throatily into a plastic trash can. "Are you OK?" the friend asks. "No," Samantha replies. I leave her to vomit in peace.

On the opposing team, Kim Giannone describes the experience as a classic journey of self-discovery – could she really put on the gloves and go the distance? – as well as a stress reliever.

Giannone, a twentysomething Philadelphia native, recently moved to San Francisco from the East Coast and has been going through the requisite stresses of transplantation, most notably hunting for a job and a cheap apartment and decent folks to hang with. So here she is taking advantage of a rare opportunity to physically harm a stranger without going to jail. "I came out and beat the shit out of some girls," Giannone says. "I'll feel bad if you quote me on that, but I definitely beat the shit out of them. That was some primal shit."

Heading back toward the ring, I run into a Buddhist meditation teacher who leads group therapy sessions for troubled kids. "Great party," he says. For a second I ponder the weirdness of a Buddhist enjoying this exhibition of senseless violence. Then I let it go.

Eduardo Rocha is standing nearby. An expert in Brazilian-style jiujitsu, a particularly savage variant on the Japanese martial art, he teaches classes in Oakland. Rocha, a native of Brazil, comes equipped with thick, cabled arms, a cement jaw, and a history as a pro fighter in Vale Tudo matches, a type of very-few-holds-barred martial arts contest.

In the ring, two guys, one of them dripping blood from his face, are smacking each other around. I ask Rocha about their form. "It's terrible," he says, laughing. Would he consider getting in there and conducting a clinic on somebody's face? "No. It's bullshit. I'm a professional, dammit," Rocha snaps. "I don't do this for fun."

Slaaaap! As we're speaking, the two guys somehow manage to belly flop through the ropes and onto the concrete floor. It's about a four- or five-foot drop, and it looks painful and unpleasant, and it takes the duo a couple of moments to scrape themselves off the ground and climb back into the ring.

A college-age dude named Francisco is taking in the scene. He made the drive from Concord to watch the fights because he "had nothing better to do." "It ended up being pretty fun," he admits. So is he going to get in the ring? "Yeah, right. That's not fun. I don't fight unless I got to."

A voice comes rattling through the room via a well-endowed P.A. system: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to witness a grudge match extraordinaire!" In the ring are six S.B. Freaks Motorcycle Club "prospects" – potential members who must undergo a hazing initiation before joining a club. The S.B. Freaks are the hip-hop generation's motorcycle crew, a pack of baggy-pantsed, multiculti sport bike aficionados, not unlike the wheelie-popping nuts in the Ruff Ryders videos. The prospects, wearing black leather vests without the embroidered S.B. Freaks insignia, are broken up into two teams.

Alex, who's been off snapping photos of the mayhem, strolls up. "These fools are fighting their prospects," he says, meaning no disrespect – Alex calls everybody "fool." Apparently if the prospects, who are from two chapters, survive with some semblance of honor intact, they'll become full members. Alex knows about this sort of thing. "East Bay Rats get 'jumped in' by everybody in the club. You can fight back, but it's hard. It's, like, 20 people beating your ass," he says.

The six-man melee is a pretty crazy scene, a blur of fists and arms and leather, with guys accidentally socking their own teammates. It's an exhibition of street-style scrapping: all passion, no combos, no ducking or feinting, no footwork, no tactics beyond blitzing the other guy with as many haymakers as possible. Roughly 10 minutes later, the fight tapers off as the combatants grow weary, lactic acid flooding their tired muscles. As far as I'm concerned, none of the six got punked, though obviously none of them came off looking like Mike Tyson in his pre-ear-eating glory days.

Alex and I stride past the ring, out a door, and onto an outdoor slab of concrete where stunt rider Darius Khashabi is spinning one-handed pirouettes on a sport bike while some guy on a tiny 50-cc Honda blips around doing wheelies. While checking out the stunt action, I introduce myself to Dragon, an S.B. Freak, who leads me to another Freak named Dizzle, who offers to provide some background on the club.

Warmed by a bonfire licking at the air from a 55-gallon drum and the beer he's swilling, Dizzle, 27, tells me he's the secretary of the Tracy chapter of the Freaks. "We've got chapters all over, from the Bay to Sacto," he says, adding that he's been riding motorcycles since he was two, before rolling into a semi-drunken riff. "It's not just a club; it's a family. It's all about love. Love is a large category" – an apt comment given what we've just witnessed in the ring.

I notice his ear is starting to "cauliflower," meaning it's developing lumps of scar tissue from being abused – a common disfigurement among boxers and martial artists – so I ask about it. "I do a little bit of jiujitsu and a lot of everything else," he responds when there's a boom! Evidently somebody's dumped something flammable on the fire, causing it to bomb out and nearly torch us; instantly we're uncomfortably hot. "Get the fuck back!" another Freak growls, grabbing Dizzle.

• • •

Whenever somebody gets tagged in the dome, there's the risk of serious damage. "Most of us who study brain injuries don't think boxing is a good idea," says Linda J. Noble, Ph.D., a researcher at UC San Francisco's neurology department. "The problem with brain injuries is that the brain can swell," smooshing cerebral circuitry against the inside of the skull, leading to, in some rare cases, "fairly rapid death."

But even less potent punches are dangerous. As Noble puts it, "You don't have to be knocked out to have brain damage."

The risks are highlighted by the Toughman Contest series, a slightly more above-ground corollary to this fight party organized by a Michigan promoter named Art Dore. Held in Indian casinos, hotel ballrooms, and high school gyms from coast to coast, Toughman fights are unregulated, unsanctioned boxing matches open to just about anyone. This year Toughman will visit at least 20 cities and towns, including a November stop in the Central Valley burg of Lemoore, home to the Lemoore Naval Air Station.

Dore, a slick-haired tuxedo-wearing impresario, has reportedly gotten rich off his creation; competitors, meanwhile, have gotten dead. By the calculations of the Detroit News, which has charted Dore's career, 12 people have died in Toughman events, and at least 5 have experienced permanent brain damage. Toughman's "fatality rate is more than quadruple that of organized amateur boxing," according to a 2003 News story that blames the carnage on "poorly trained personnel," uneven matches pitting "aging or inexperienced fighters" against skilled boxers, and the "sheer brutality of Toughman" fights.

There's a decent amount of brutality on display when a dreadlocked Rat wearing a T-shirt that says, "I LIKE YOU, I'LL KILL YOU LAST" steps into the ring. His name is Big Mike, and it is a fitting moniker. He's a towering character with a pair of thick arms and a head like a boulder.

He hastily dispatches his opponent, a similar-size fellow in a gray long-sleeved shirt and jeans, dropping the dude in less than two rounds. After a couple of near knockouts that leave Gray Shirt Guy woozy, Big Mike connects with a lights-out punch. The blow leaves Gray Shirt Guy on the ground for at least a minute before he stands up, wobbling, and is helped out of the ring.

So far, though, it seems the lone serious injury to come out of a fight party thrown by the Rats is a torn ACL ligament suffered by a grappler. In part that's probably because many of the people boxing tonight are fighting their friends. And unlike Toughman, which often offers prize money, there's no dough up for grabs, which undoubtedly translates into less incentive to completely pulverize an opponent.

• • •

So just what propels a person to risk humiliation and bodily damage by stepping into the ring? If there's no money, no fame, and the most remote tinge of glory at stake, why are all these people here? How could Samantha tell me, just before hurling, that this was "fun"?

Via e-mail, UC Berkeley sociologist Loïc J.D. Wacquant offers the answer that fighters are driven by "the redemptive sense of having faced that risk and gained some measure of honor (sometimes even by losing: if you've shown bravery in battle and moral fortitude in jumping in the fray)."

Wacquant, who has both studied prizefighters and sparred with them, fleshes out this notion in an academic paper titled "The Pugilistic Point of View." "The emotional acme of a boxer's life," he writes, is reached "during the official bout itself – and in the hours and minutes before and after confrontation between the ropes."

"Like other 'edgeworkers' such as test pilots, high-speed boat racers, and sky divers, boxers insist that fighting has ineffable qualities that cannot be captured and conveyed linguistically to outsiders," Wacquant continues. "And they doubt that any other pursuit could give them the thrill of fistic battle. You have to experience in your own flesh the coeval anguish and excitement of 'going toe-to-toe.' "

Wacquant's observations, gleaned from interviews with pro boxers at a gym on Chicago's South Side, are echoed by the fighters punishing each other here for nothing but pride. Their comments sound like dialogue from Fight Club, painting combat as a personal proving ground, a break from the banality of everyday life, a rare moment of singular focus in a multi-task world, a life-affirming jolt of adrenaline.

Charlie Remsen, a 29-year-old San Francisco carpenter and biker, thinks of the experience as a little slice of anarchy in the sterile, scripted lives most of us lead. "Nowadays everything's so controlled. It seems like in the '60s and '70s things were wilder," he says.

Remsen didn't plan on fighting, "but I got a couple of beers in me, and I was sitting at ringside watching, and I was just hungry to get in there" – and pretty soon he ended up in the ring. When you're boxing, Remsen explains, "you're so focused, so intense. You're definitely focused on the present. You're not thinking about what you did today or what you're going to do tomorrow. It's a release."

Fighting is "testing yourself," says Iren Matsuoka, a 25-year-old woman who has thrown down at several fight parties. "I had this one match, and I swear to God, the chick terrified me. Her name was Rhonda, and she was huge – she had a bald head and looked like a man. It was so fucking challenging."

This time around Matsuoka left the ring with a fractured nose and two black eyes. "The next day I was walking around Safeway, and people thought I was a domestic violence victim, that I'd been abused. I'm like, 'I'm sore, and I look fucked-up, but I feel great!' " She's already planning for her next bout.

• • •

About 50 brawls took place on fight night, with fisticuffs going on for a solid eight hours, from eight at night till four in the morning. I missed what Latham considered to be the main event of the evening, a five-on-five battle between members of the Rats, an event my colleague Matthew Hirsch describes as "something perversely beautiful, like an ancient warrior dance" with "fighters ducking and weaving amid a mass of staggering bodies." Like Don King or any other promoter, the Rats slapped a theme on the fight, dubbing it "Drunks Versus Stoners," and in the end this little tiff left one nose bloodied and one jaw dislocated.

Alex and I catch a video of the semi-organized chaos a week later at the Rats' clubhouse, an eviscerated building that once housed a barbershop on a sketchy stretch of San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. Footage of fight night is projected on a barren wall in a low-ceilinged room packed with bikers. A weight bench and a pile of iron sit in one corner. Motorcycle helmets, most of them black, are scattered all over. People sit in a couple of barber's chairs, relics left behind by the previous tenants.

Outside, dozens of Rats chop it up noisily, about 25 of their salvaged, spray-painted, stickered, and duct-taped machines taking up space on the sidewalk.

In the video, little Amariah Fuller, who weighs in at 130 pounds and stands a mere five-feet-seven, is motionless at the center of the ring, surrounded by a swirl of beefy guys firing off missile punches. He's got a look of pure ecstasy on his face as the tornado of flesh and leather storms around him. Then he quits smiling and starts swinging.

In person tonight Fuller laughs, noting that he escaped major damage: "I was fighting all these motherfuckers who're huge. I think they were taking it easy on me 'cause I'm little."

Another Rat, Jason, chimes in, "Everybody comes out of this with a bloody lip and a smile. Remember the way you used to romp around the house as a kid? This is the adult version."

As I step outside into the Oakland night, a low-pitched, high-decibel rumble bludgeons its way through the air; it's the kind of sound you feel in your diaphragm as much as you hear. It's the sound of a Rat riding a wheelie down the street at 40 mph and swerving at the last second to avoid a car stopped at a stop light and then screaming off into the darkness as his friends laugh.

Additional reporting by Matthew Hirsch.

E-mail A.C. Thompson