By Bob Kerr
Journal Staff Writer

Just outside Mark's Deli at the corner of Union and Washington Streets, a young man leans slightly forward in the early evening and urinates on a concrete column, mumbling of the need to get rid of some beer.

His girlfriend smiles vacantly at her sweetie's street-corner exposure.

It's fight night, and the streets around The Strand in downtown Providence are alive with youthful splatter. There is a communal release of controls as the young, the drunk and the sexually obvious gather to celebrate the joy of being everything they ever wanted to be.

It's no easy piece of work choosing the defining moment in a night at the fights at The Strand. There is so much there — such an eagerness to shed the restraints of the auto body shop, pastry arts class or the house rules at Mom and Dad's — that the one performance that might seem the showstopper is quickly topped by another. Last Wednesday, a tag team cat fight, with four women pounding on each other in the ring at the same time, seemed the near perfect embodiment of the fight-night experience.

But then there were the four other women, who in response to the desperate pleas of the house social director, jumped into the ring and kissed each other, passionately.

IT HAS been two months since the fights started on Wednesday nights, two months since students leaving the University of Rhode Island campus on the other side of Washington Street have encountered a waiting line that might convince them to retreat to the library stacks.

The word is out: Wednesday night at The Strand is a time when nobody says you've had enough.

Up in the ring, the house social director, a man of medium height who wears glasses and clearly delights in having found work that allows him to say really crude things about women, exhorts the crowd to drink to the point where they'll see multiple sets of headlights coming at them on the drive home.

There is a primitive, defiant, warmly embraced stupidity about fight night. It is a time not to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing. You can't show too much skin or too little intelligence.

It is a brilliant piece of work, a masterfully mixed stew of sex and testosterone that shows an astute grasp of just what the moron culture is looking for. In some ways, it is a throwback to those times when the blue bloods would settle in with good friends and cigars for a fun night of watching the young men and women of the working class do whatever they were paid to do.

Except at The Strand, the talent pays to get in.

MICHAEL KENT, the owner of The Strand who does occasionally settle in at ringside with a cigar, has tapped into a midweek gold mine while satisfying an apparent need to toy with the darker side of human need.

Kent also owns a bunch of downtown clubs and clearly knows what the young and the restless are after. And he works them like a pro.

On two recent Wednesdays, there were maybe 2,000 people in The Strand, paying $5 if they were 21 or older, $10 if they were 18 to 20. And from the paying customers come the fighters. Anyone who wants to fight can fight, on fight night. The fighters just sign up, provide basic personal statistics, sign a liability waiver and wait to be called to the blue corner or the red corner to fight three, 90-second rounds.

The only appealing thing about fight night at The Strand is the fights. Against the backdrop of a crude, cold hustle, there is the basic honesty of a punch thrown to hurt somebody.

The boxers wear gloves and headgear. Some have clearly fought before. Some haven't. Some are clearly in better shape than others.

As Geoff Charles, the WHJY disc jockey who presides at the fights, points out, there is clearly some oxygen deprivation among those fighters winded by the effort of throwing punches and moving at the same time.

Some of the boxers look like boxers. Some look like Russian folk dancers. Some are just very tough people who love the solid contact with another person's body.

Then there are those who walk into The Strand on Wednesday night with no thoughts of fighting and end up in the ring anyway.

DIANE SHERMAN, a kitchen manager at a Providence restaurant, had come to the fights last Wednesday night with her brother-in-law, Frank Iannucci. She had no thoughts of fighting.

But she signed up and climbed into the ring in jeans and an Everlast T-shirt and waited for someone named Gigi to show up in the opposite corner. Gigi didn't show. A last-second volunteer jumped in. She looked as if she had been there before.

Sherman lost her fight, but she was a gamer. She landed a few shots. She doesn't plan to do it again.

"I think that girl knew what she was doing," said Sherman. "I don't think that was fair."

She didn't stay for the tag team cat fight. Her elbow was hurting. She wanted to take it home.

OBVIOUSLY, fight night is a night for pictures. There is so much there, so much human misery and triumph, folly and flops. But Michael Kent, through members of his staff, refused to let a Journal photographer into fight night.

It's understandable. Fight night, even though it draws big crowds and is right downtown, is working the fringes. At times, fights have spilled into the streets and the police have had to intervene. It is not something that is going to be included in anyone's sales pitch for the new Providence. It might speak volumes about where we're headed, but nobody really wants to admit that.

It's a shame, though. The pictures would have been great. You could have seen these things rather than just read about them:

• The blond woman sitting at the lobby bar with a post-fight beer and a cigarette, explaining that she fights to deal with her problems.
• The short, stocky man with shoulder tattoos who shadow boxes at the edge of the ring as he gets ready to fight.
• The Pussycat Girls -- eight girls in red shirts who look like they might have skipped class at middle school --who eagerly jump into the ring to bump and grind at the request of the ever-leering social director.

And there could have been a picture of the very young fighter who was slumped on the floor outside the men's room. He held a bottle of water in his hand as his girlfriend wiped his sweaty forehead. Minutes earlier, he had been vomiting into a toilet.

As a small crowd gathered around him, he quickly rose from the floor and ran to a nearby trash can to vomit again. That was it for him and The Strand. A bouncer took him by the arm and moved him and his girlfriend out the door.

Regardless of how he did in the ring, he could claim a distinction that is damn near impossible to achieve:

He was thrown out of The Strand on fight night for unacceptable behavior.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr@projo.com.