Early Body (or something) Confidence

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away....that would be New York in the summer of 1980, specifically at Maxwell's Plum. For those of you who did not have the good fortune to live in New York in the late '70's and early '80's, Maxwell's Plum was an upscale pickup joint on the upper East Side of Manhattan. It was decorated in a hyper-thyroid Victorian theme, it served over-priced drinks and it probably kept the antibiotic companies in business. In those days...there wasn't anything that couldn't be cured with a couple of doses of penicillin. Anyway, on a hot summer night, I was there with a girlfriend. We probably were just doing a pub crawl...I don't even remember. I do remember that I had just lost a fairly significant amount of weight. I don't know how much, because I embarked on a weight loss program (my own, by the way--it was eat less, walk a lot) without owning a scale. I figure I lost 20 pounds, but who knows? So, it was crowded at Maxwell's Plum, which it nearly always was. My girlfriend and I were at the bar, and it was so crowded that we were sharing a bar stool. Is that strange? I feel like that was fairly normal in those days. After a while, the guy next to me finished his beer and got up and left. I looked around...no one was lunging for it, so I sat in his place. A short while later he came back. He said, to the woman who had been next to him, but was now next to me, "You have to be fast around here. Oh, well, she had enough to put there, anyway." I saw red. No, "Excuse me, that was my seat, I just went to the men's room," in which case I would have said, "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize," and gone back to squeezing onto the bar stool with my friend. No....it had to be, passive-aggressively, "You're rude and have a big ass.' To the other woman, so he could look like a big man to her. I realized there was nothing I could say that would not come out sounding ridiculous, but I also didn't want him to get away with it. At that moment, the bartender brought him a fresh beer, in a glass mug, and I saw a fresh, unopened pack of cigarettes on the bar next to it. (Yes....in those days you could smoke in bars, too). So I said to my friend, "Drink up and get ready to go when I tell you to," and she obediently chugged her glass of wine. .....and then I picked up the pack of cigarettes, and opened them. I shook out half the cigarettes and stuffed them in the glass of beer, and then shook out the other half and stuffed them in too. They looked very pretty, with little bubbles rising up around them. No one said a word. Not the man, not the woman. The bartender poured a fresh beer and whisked that one away, and I said, "Let's go," and we walked out, granted, at speed. Was that body confidence, or just confidence, or just stupidity? I will grant that there is no one-to-one comparison between insulting the size of someone's ass and having your cigarettes stuffed in your beer, but it felt right. I was angry because he chose to insult me rather than talking to me. He chose to insult me for something that for one thing I didn't even think was true (if anything, in those days, I had a lamentably flat ass) and he chose to insult me in a stereotypical way. So I showed him he wasn't the big man he thought he was.