I’m starting to think I’ll never break a chair over a trucker at a roadside bar

Roadside bars existed anyplace that had roadsides, at least according to movies and TV shows of my childhood in the 1970s. Identifiable by the neat rows of big rigs and hogs parked outside, roadside bars teemed with regulars who danced the Pasadena polka, nursed frothy mugs of beer, and slapped waitresses on their rumps, eliciting sassy smiles that said “You rascal.”

These establishments were inclusive — I saw runaway teens, escaped felons, and pet orangutans. Maybe, I reasoned, even little girls like me could be in there somewhere, smoking Marlboros, dominating jukeboxes, hustling pool. But if so, these girls never slid into the frame during the many thrilling fights initiated by either one large trucker or a gang of regular-sized truckers.

At first, I thought the only obstacle between me and an exhilarating slugfest was my size. The smallest truckers were 6 feet — and taller if they wore their namesake hats. Even if I’d had the astonishing lats and deltoids to hoist adult-sized wooden furniture overhead, I’d have struggled to bring down an Amish spindle chair with sufficient force to splinter it over a trucker. This would’ve been doubly true when there was a beer gut to circumnavigate, which was often.

If I’d been a little boy, I could just wait until I was 18 and then embark on the necessary preparations to break a chair over a trucker at a roadside bar. First, I’d enlist in the military or the police force. Next, I’d see some things. And after that, I’d brood. All that remained would be to grow out my sideburns and to not be from around these parts.

Bar brawls were not sanctioned activities even for grown women with bandannas tied around their foreheads. The roles available to women during bar fights were limited to clutching their own hair, jumping onto brawlers’ backs, and screaming “You’re better than this!” I didn’t dream of doing any of these things, though I could brood with the best of them.

I’d come by the tendency much as any loner ex-operative might. Growing up as a girl had meant following orders, being seen and not heard. Yet it also meant learning that strict adherence to standard operating procedure could be catastrophic. As a latchkey kid, I’d committed my share of lawless acts to deter the bullies who whipped acorns at my bare legs or to outwit the flasher in the underpass. I’d seen some things. Still, at roadside bars, it was always the same old script: Girls grow up to become love interests in shapely pants before aging into middle-aged comic-relief bit players pocketing halfpints of vodka.

The world was changing, though — everyone said so. We were the first generation of girls who’d been told that we could be anything we wanted — plumbers, doctors, or even president of the United States. Breaking a chair over a trucker at a roadside bar was, we’d been tacitly promised, just going to be a matter of patience.

So why does there remain an unbreakable Styrofoam drop ceiling? Somehow, despite great strides in the 20th century, women never did flip over tables or swing from light fixtures in equal numbers to men, not even in the 1990s, when women’s jeans were arguably at their roomiest.

In hindsight, there were probably never as many roadside bars as we were led to believe. My own family always made pit stops at uninspiring establishments like Phillips 66 and Stuckey’s outside Harrisonburg.

Moreover, due to unreasonable productivity metrics, truckers these days don’t have the leisure to spend their time swilling Schlitz and antagonizing strangers.

Regardless, I have come to the sad conclusion that to break a chair over a trucker at a roadside bar, even after all these years, it really helps to be a man. Of few words.

Kathy Flann is a humorist whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, McSweeney’s, Weekly Humorist, and elsewhere. She is the author of four books, the most recent of which is “How to Survive a Human Attack: A Guide for Werewolves, Mummies, Cyborgs, Ghosts, Nuclear Mutants, and Other Movie Monsters.” She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.