War Machine Is from Mars, Christy Mack Is From Venus, and Their Story Ended in Simi Valley

War Machine is from Mars. Christy Mack is from Venus. This is what’s made the strange tale of sex and violence from these walking gender cliches so compelling. 

U.S. Marshals caught up to War Machine at the Extended Stay America Hotel in Simi Valley, California this weekend after nearly a week on the lam. If Joe Friday were still working the area, now would be when he’d dryly issue an ironic comment about giving War Machine an “extended stay” right before the iconic music kicked in. 

The cops arrested the mixed-martial artist, uncharacteristically without incident, on Friday at 1:45 p.m. Pacific time. “Inside the room,” they informed, “was a small quantity of cash and some pizza”–this last item, in police parlance, a “clue.” Evidently, the welterweight had resigned himself to the fact that he’d never need to starve and sweat down to 170-pounds again. Succumbing to the junk food signaled that he’d succumb to the police once they arrived. The pizza was the former UFC competitor tapping out. 

War Machine was smart enough to hide out in Simi Valley instead of the San Pornando Valley, where the victimized Christy Mack is often well known in such movies as Hall Pass Ass, Cram Sessions, and Oil Overload 10. Mack’s adult-film friends started a fundraising campaign that has raised $65,000-and-counting to help pay her substantial medical bills (Does a venerable corporation such as Evil Angel not offer health insurance as part of its compensation package?). Duane “Dog” Chapman and the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop’s Harrisons of reality-television fame lent time and money to ensure War Machine’s capture. Strangers showed love to the woman that the man once closest to her did not.

He’s a jerk, an idiot, and a savage. But at least he knows himself. Before the mixed-martial artist treated his ex-girlfriend as a piece of property instead of as a human being, he tattooed “Property of War Machine” on her back. He boasted on his t-shirts, “I do alpha male $#!+.” The man legally changed his name to War Machine, for goodness sakes. Yet, interviews with his training partners and coaches follow the rote I’m-shocked-he-would-do-that script mouthed by the neighbor of every serial killer, child molester, and rapist. The notion that a guy named War Machine brutalized his porn-star ex-girlfriend is about as shocking as Dog the Bounty Hunter’s discovery that he kept snakes as pets. He’s covered in tattoos? You don’t say?

When MMA journalist Ariel Helwani asked Mr. Machine and Ms. Mack about the fate of their tattoos should their relationship not prove so permanent, the now-caged fighter responded: “Well, I told her what I would do is I would just kill her and then I’d get, ‘Rest in Peace,'” next to the “Mack” inked on his neck.

“It’s fair enough, really…. I mean honestly, I would probably deserve it,” Mack responded. Given that her fellow performers witnessed War Machine allegedly cold clock earlier porn-star girlfriend Alanah Rae–setting off a scene of carnage with a who’s-who of xy-chromosomed nudie-talent knocked out, requiring expert dentistry, and looking like Marcia Brady after that football blitzed her face–Mack can’t say she wasn’t warned. But she shouldn’t have said, and nobody should say, she deserves anyone raising a hand to her. As she’s proven in her films, she’s a lover, not a fighter.

But War Machine did something ugly to this beautiful girl. “My injuries include 18 broken bones around my eyes, my nose is broken in 2 places, I am missing teeth and several more are broken,” Mack posted along with several pictures of her that for once averted gazes. “I am unable to chew, or see out of my left eye. My speech is slurred from my swelling and lack of teeth. I have a fractured rib and severely ruptured liver from a kick to my side.” It’s not natural for a man to kick what should be kissed. Make love, not War Machine.

Just as Mack probably didn’t initially grasp what “Property of War Machine” meant to the deed holder, the former Jon Koppenhaver didn’t quite think through what it meant to date a skin-flick starlet. Particularly if you’ve worked topless in a gay bar and appeared in Nurse Jobs, Mr. Chew’s Asian Beaver 5, and several other productions not requiring much in the way of a costume department, you don’t flip out when you catch your industry-employed girlfriend with another man. The absence of these inevitable in flagrante delicto moments might prompt such caring questions as, “What’s wrong, honey?” or “Is something bothering you, dear? You’re not yourself lately.” But stumbling upon a man in the vicinity of Christy Mack appears part of the deal if you seek to be regularly in the vicinity of Christy Mack. According to the adult films database, she’s already starred in nineteen movies this year. Why the site of a “clothed” gentleman in Ms. Mack’s home a week ago prompted her former suitor to do alpha-male $#!+ but viewings of recent releases Baby Got Boobs 14, Big Butts Like It Big 15, and Phat Ass White Girls 7 elicited no such turning of the cogs and gears of the War Machine remains a question with an answer understood only by the man with an IQ approaching his life expectancy. 

That’s the thing with dim bulbs. Try to provide reasons for their unreasonable behavior and one begins to sound as incoherent as they do. One can’t make rational the behavior of a person so inherently irrational. A War Machine lays waste and an AVN Award winner undresses and presses the flesh. Why can’t the one grasp the nature of the other?

Their lives make the characters in Boogie Nights appear as Rhodes Scholars in comparison. When the War Machine-Christy Mack movie hits theaters, the sex, the violence, the unintentional comedy, and the unspeakable monstrosities will make it, like the pixelated presentations of this odd couple of exaggerated gender archetypes, magnets for eyes–and rated “D” for dumb.