Chapter 9 The Lamb

By Gary O'Brien

So we took a cab over the Church Street. There’s a blues club over there. We could check out the scenery. I would get him to drink more and we’d wait for this little concoction to set him off.
I descended into bitterness, thinking about Jeff Herman’s book during the cab ride. For non-writer’s it’s a compilation of sixteen thousand agents and publishers, all of whom are written up in Jeff’s encyclopedia of the industry for the express purpose of showing off, and trying to dissuade you, the writer, from submitting your material anywhere. Better you should ram sewing needles into your temples than bother these oh-so-busy people.
Within the descriptions of the various literary agents, there is actually a dialogue box for agents to expound on what their dream and hell clients are like.E.g. from Waterside Productions, Description of the Client from Hell: “Fugate: The Client from Hell is unprofessional, confrontational and fails to meet deadlines. Maley: A rude, arrogant, pushy, or impatient person who has completely unrealistic expectations! Wagner: What they said!”
Amazing!
How many people want to be Wagner’s office-mate? Show of hands: Do you turn your back on this guy for a second? Leave your girlfriend with him at a party? Some of those listings have more information packed within the sections of “client from Hell” than anything else.
Jeff even thought to show us that he, like all other agents out there, actually has a human side. One of his questions to agents was “Do you watch the Sopranos?” This violates one of the major rules in publishing, by the way, which says never litter your material with cultural references likely to be meaningless in a week. But no matter: Aside from following the heartwarming theme of “oh yay, we’re kids too!” it’s designed to show you the writer where you stand with people in the lit biz.
WRITER: Gorsh! If you were the sort of person who watches and enjoys the Supranos, maybe you will like my manuscript?
AGENT: Yeah and next a cartoon monkey will spring forth from my groin. I’ll take a picture of it, then, you’ll find it on the postcard rejection note. Flip the monkey over and read, “sorry, not interested.”
In fact, as Chris and I rode downtown, I thought I would really like to be in that office the day the query letter arrived which read; “I saw in Jeff Herman’s book that you like the Supranos too! And I decided, there’s just no two ways about it; this is the agency for me!”
Yes, I wanted to hear the scathing remarks; the cutting, dismissive damnation that flowed when the letter arrived that actually took the bait and mentioned The Surpranos. I wanted to experience the venom as the agents gathered round one terminal to look up this person’s every last detail on the Internet, for the shear sake of amping on hatred.
“I can’t fucking BELIEVE this clown!”
“Is there a picture of him somewhere? We should do a screen capture then send it to the FBI through a Hotmail… accuse him of sodomy on a cat.”
“Yeah, huh-huh, in front of a school!”
Jeff’s book reads; “Editors, Publishers and Literary Agents: who they are what they want and how to win them over.” It does not expressly forbid killing them, but it offers no insight as to how one might do that. In fact, directions on how to murder agents are nowhere to be found in the book. You can learn how to drive them nuts all you want, but not how to kill them.
Anyway, Chris and I made it to this club Red Eye Blue’s Train. As the cab pulled up I summed what I had left; approximately $360 and change. I covered the cab ride. As I glanced at what I had left, it occurred to me that $360 is a nice chunk of change for an evening out. It was a rarity for me. With that kind of mad money you can do what the Miami DEA guys used to call a “Cuban Flash Roll.”
They coined the term in the late 1980s just before the world went hell-bent politically-correct. The agency’s second-in-command in Miami told me this during my research for my first book, which remains unpublished.
Back then a “Cuban flash roll” was a big hunk of cash, mostly twenties, tens, fives, and ones in toward the center, that made you look far better off than you actually were because you book-ended the roll with the crisp $100 bills.
I had just enough money to create a decent-sized Cuban Flash Roll. In any case, now, in cringing, grinning deference to the gigantic suppository of pc fairness we are all so diligently sphinctering these days, I can suppose one would write “an Hispanic Flash Roll”, and then one would have to check the usage so one wasn’t disparaging anyone. Which is to say, one couldn’t use the damned thing at all.
See how that works? Now, a perfectly-good reference is dead. Can’t use it. I can think it, but I can’t say it, and God help me if I write it.
Aside from opening myself up to hate-crime charges if I do, I also date myself to the year 1991. So it better be within a work of historical fiction where one of my characters says it or thinks it, doing my little dirty work of mental racism for me. But then, the year 1991 isn’t interesting to the historical fiction market just yet. It’s too soon, unless you’re writing a whacked-out script about the Gulf War, which I was not. So there Cuban flash roll sits in my book collecting dust and silverfish, ever-waiting in my poisoned mind to leap and strut its hour on the stage; to garner a chuckle from a reader then fade into nothing again.
Anyway, I came up with a juvenile plan to attract females using my flash roll, of whatever stripe. This would induce a bull-moose response in my companion to attempt to outdo me. He would quickly immerse himself head to toe in alcohol, and start shitting out yards of cash. At least that was the idea.
I paid the cover charge and started shuffling the tens, fives, twenties and ones. But my attention shifted to the action on the packed dance floor, so I stuffed the cash in my left-hand pocket before I could get the bills all arranged just so in the wallet.
The place was going-off! You could smell the cash, the booze, the hormones oozing from the walls and floor. Sick Willie was on stage, and he’s blek but Chris didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Chris says what he says when he wants to say it, and isn’t careful about any of it. It hit me then, he really doesn’t see race when he enters a room, despite being raised to view himself as superior because of it. No Chris Naughten’s prejudice went beyond that: everyone else on earth was inferior, in his mind, because they weren’t Chris Naughten! Race had nothing to do with it.
Blek and proud, Sick Willie is about fifty-six. He wears a bowler and deep, two-tone prescription sunglasses and bears a resemblance to Bo Diddly, although he’s lean and lanky.
I recognized the tune Willie lit into as Couldn’t Stand the Weather by Stevie Ray Vaughn. A white kid with curly red hair approached the mic and mimicked Stevie Ray’s voice in a way that was so dead-on it was eerie. After the second verse, as you know, there’s that tearing solo riff and Sick Willie tore the ass out of it in a good way, dusting and pounding it out so fast his hands were blurs over the strings and frets.
The place was packed with youth; much of it female, a good portion of that stinking drunk. Tan skin, cotton, lycra, denim, swaying bodies, bent cigarettes, college stubble on the guys, THC acne bubbles everywhere. Midriffs, bellybutton rings, people heartily jamming on the wall of sound Sick Willie threw off the stage at us.
“Man, this ish fucking excellent!” went Chris Naughten. Great, more reason to like him. More conflict and guilt for me.
“I noticed you’ve taken your wedding ring off, Gareee,” Naughten said.
I smiled; “Yeah, but I haven’t pulled my pecker out yet, so it’s all good. No harm, no foul!”
“Remainsh to be sheen, Garreee,” he slurred with a Cheshire grin.
I would not need my Cuban flash-roll to entice him to action, then. Within a minute Chris was on the dance floor with a gorgeous blonde. It went like this.
“Dansh with me. I have weed!”
I have weed. Shit. Why had I never tried this in college? I have weed, dance with me.
Of course. Less is more. Even if you didn’t have weed, this approach would probably work. Then all you had to do was FIND weed after you danced.
She was a healthy girl in a blue dress, high heels; just shy of thirty. He liked ‘em chunky, then.
I could see an angry boyfriend, or would-be boyfriend, stalking around the edges of the dance floor waiting to have a word. He was a thick-torsoed type with bristly blonde hair. If he had his way he would spawn little football players – perhaps an entire defensive line -- with the object of his affection, no doubt. Breed them right there on the dance floor, after he beat the living shit out of the faggity guy dancing with HIS woman! Yes, in his cartoon world, surely, that was how it would go down.
His head has flat. He was obviously someone who frequently drove his truck over living things for pleasure. How was it the pair knew each other, I wondered? What line-dancing saloon had she wandered into on a lark to snag him as a bloodhound? He wore his jeans in the manner of an overweight plumber. His dirty, yellowed T-shirt bore the image of a Snook on the back, a rebel flag over the ‘dip’ pocket in front, with the logo for some sport fishing charter intertwined within that battle emblem.
I did the right thing, the gentlemanly thing and ordered myself rum and coke, which I cradled in my arm as a neared him. I timed it so his furious pacing would make it all seem like a plausible accident.
Chris and his new friend were outside before the victim looked up from his stained shirt.
“Dude, man! I am sorry, didn’t see you there.”
“Yeah…..dude…” he said, wiping his chest. I had to admit there was an unexpected bit of irony in his voice, mocking my surfer’s slang. I thought I’d hear a hard southern accent yet his was only vaguely so, and difficult to place. He was educated, obviously. You never can tell.
Dude Man was too smart to be given over to immediate violence with me. His clear blue eyes scanned furiously for his arm candy who, buy now, was likely leaning up against a brick wall in the alley next to this place, getting high, maybe even getting felt up by Naughten. Educated or not, the look on his face said Dude Man would be seen in the coming moments making a complete ass of himself, perhaps swinging at my new business associate.
Things were moving faster than expected. We hadn’t even been in the room more than ten minutes and already there was a situation that could erupt into a 911 call.
I heard Dude Man hiss the words “fuckin’ bitch” under his breath as he continued searching. Soon he was surrounded from behind by an amused gaggle of office girls dressed to kill, insolently, innocently sipping tropical libations watching his dilemma. Somehow Dude Man’s very presence was ruining their “girls night out” and they delighted in his misery. I almost felt sorry for him, but not really. Being on-task and on-mission, I knew his pain and suffering served my needs perfectly.
Dude Man turned to the gaggle and blurted something that sounded like; “This is just fuckin’ typical. I don’t know WHAT y’all said to her….”
This subset of the crowd he termed “y’all” would be her friends and co-workers, I rightly guessed. I went further and correctly assumed they had been trying to get this girl - I thought of her as a Heather at this point - to dump Dude Man for some time, if for no other reason than he hadn’t a clue about how to dress.
No doubt he had other friends who were around the room here as well. These would be buddies in support roles whom he did not want to “look like a pussy” in front of, and on some level all guys can understand that but this get-up of his was taking things too far. He looked like he could be out on a job moving office furniture. This is no way to bust in on “girls night out” in an effort to cull her from the gaggle. He should have known better, and therefore brooked no mercy from me.
By now Chris and “Heather” came back in, ignored everyone and went right out on the dance floor. I had moved to the stage at the 12 o’clock position. Dude Man was facing the stage on the other side of the dance floor at 6, with the gaggle arrayed behind him. Chris and “Heather” circled round avoiding Dude Man, and cut into the floor at the 3 position, sending a wave of smiles up from the gaggle.
Oh, they loved Chris. He had newer gadgetry, a smaller and shinier cell phone that he was clacking shut at that moment. And he was well dressed. He had some bling-bling happening with that fluted pinky ring of his, that faux Rolex; which, after 11:30 p.m. on Friday, looks like the real thing to Stetson University sophomore.
Sick Willie took center stage and jumped into Mustang Sally which was every bit as good as Wilson Picket’s original. They were joined by saxophonists who knew just when and how hard to hit it, and three gorgeous chicks - two blek and one whoite - who stepped forward for the harmonies.
Some of the folks didn’t – well, let’s say it, most of them older, corporately afflicted, self-conscious whoite people – didn’t know how to dance to this song. So the dance floor thinned out giving the couple nearly the complete mosaic of disco-ball light patterns to tread upon. They slid right out to front and center as if they owned the place. And I will be double-dawged damned if Chris Naughten didn’t dance every bit as good as a blek man, if not better. White Kaffir was cooking.
Speckled Lady on Crack was kicking in now, along with the weed he and “Heather” had just smoked.
Naughten’s eyes were smoky, glazed pans of tears, rounded with red. He was severely stoned and pleased with himself. Caught up in the moment, Heather’s undulations became more sexual, while her plumber-dressed, frat boy, completed the spectacle off to one side. The man was fuming. He looked like something out of a Popeye cartoon. In my stoney recollection, I could see the steam lines puffing out of his ears while his Olive Oil kept right on going at it with Popeye.
The man didn’t realize he had now become part of the song that Sick Willie was singing. I turned to look up at Willie. And it was then it hit me: Willie had seen the comic spectacle too, perhaps even selected Mustang Sally for his own amusement.
Was that a wink he just gave me? It was hard to tell through those dark glasses. He sure was smiling as he went round on the song again.

All you wanna do is ride around Sally
(Ride Sally, Ride Sally Ride!)

People backed away from the boyfriend like mullet avoiding an injured comrade within the school, flashing away from the stalking barracudas in their midst, who, in this case, were played wonderfully by the beefy bouncers in black shirts. The band just kept egging the situation on. Sick Willie knew there was a fight coming and just didn’t give a damn!

One of these early mornings
Gonna be wiping your weeping eyes.

I bought you a brand new Mustang 1965
Now you come around signifying, woman,
you don’t wanna let me ride.

Guess you betta slow that mustang down…

Now for some reason that will remain a mystery to me, available women only seek to talk with me when I’m intent on something to the exclusion of all thoughts of sex. When I am looking for a conversation with a woman is when I apparently give off some form of skunk musk that drives them away. It’s only when I really could give a shit, at all, that I give off something else, something that actually makes me appealing.
Her name was Robyn. Yes with a “y-n” not an “i-n.” And she told me this in short order. She was short, with a bust-out body in a black dress, dark hair, dark eyes.
“That girl is a total bitch,” she continued.
“Wha..?”
“She’s a fucking cunt. Why do you look at her like that? Do you know her?”
“Wha…?” I said again, bending down to hear her. She couldn’t have said what I thought she just said, did she? Where was this coming from? What was she on?
“She’s got a yeast infection. She’s giving it to everyone!”
“Wha..?”
“Right now I’m working at Altamonte Mall,” she said, blathering on about other aspirations elsewhere. It was the sign of complete innocence and youth. “right now I’m working at…” Young women trying to impress always said this. Why was I worth impressing? It was a crap-shoot for odds. Given sobriety and bright sunlight, this girl wouldn’t squat to pee on me if I were on fire. Maybe it had been my give-a-shit attitude. Maybe she thought I had “weed” too.
“C’mon. Why are you looking at her like that? Are you stalking her?”
“No. No. I’m looking at her, because…” then I pretended it was a trick question on a quiz show.
“...she’s a bitch and I want a urinary tract infection?” I answered.
And to her credit, the laugh was cute; completed with a crinkled nose.
“Well, I don’t know about the last part but she is a bitch and my guess is that’s why you’re looking at her, because you can’t have her. See that guy over there? That guy standing there with a drink on his shirt?”
“Yeah, so?”
“He’s a cop. His name is Tony. They’re supposed to get married next month.”
“Jesus. And, uh, how do we know all this?”
“Because Diane’s my roommate. I can’t stand her.”
Tony was teetering now, but he wouldn’t fall down.
“So Robyn, what do you do?”
“I work at Sunday’s in the mall. I’m a bar manager.”
“And I suppose…?”
“Yeah, Diane works there too.”
I thought for a moment and decided I didn’t like this. This was pushing things too far, too fast. It could get out of control and backfire on me. We couldn’t have that. If something sinister was going down, my steady hand of navigation needed to be on the tiller to ensure the maximum pain and embarrassment was inflicted on my new friend without a stain or drop falling upon me.
“Well, here’s the deal, Robyn. It’s not that I like your friend, but see, my friend is that guy right there dancing with her and if that Tony is a cop, well then we have a problem on our hands.”
“Oh, he’s a real bastard. He’s already called his buddies on the cell. Your friend is dead.”
“Oh shit,” I said, more than a little surprised Dude’s manly, lure-breaking fingers could actually work the buttons of a cell phone.
Meanwhile “Speckled Lady on Crack” was licking at the heels of Mr. Chris Naughten’s soul and from the look on his face, he did not mind all the fires of hell those flames spoke of. I remembered my first rush on the concoction. It was like finding Jesus in the form of a chunky woman languidly dancing in front of you. It was a siren, that lead you to Hell and you smiled as she whiled you down the winding staircase.
Naughten’s shirt was soaking through the armpits and he was gabbing a mile a minute. Whatever he was saying to Diane, formerly known as Heather, at this point she was also getting off on it. Sweat was running down her cheeks. She was laughing so hard I thought she would spot her bloomers at any second.
Did I dare allow this situation to continue?
Soon it became apparent that Dude Man, AKA Tony, was not about to back down from this situation. He would not saunter off into a corner and sulk into a pool of booze as everyone hoped he would; all of course but myself and Sick Willie. The Snook on his back should give his actions away to even the least astute fisherman watching.
No, someone who stalked Snook and Redfish for hours would stare holes into the water waiting for the right moment. And there Tony stood, drunk or no, staring holes into the back of Chris Naughten’s head.
A bouncer approached from out of the crowd and sidled up to Tony. He began whispering sweet, macho nothings into the side of Tony’s bristly head. Stuff like; “She’s not worth it. Leave her. Don’t get out of control, man. C’mon.”
But Tony was hearing none of it. The man in the black shirt talking to him wasn’t there. Tony’s ice lasers grew colder. Who had given him that drink? What was it? Likely Jack and Coke.
And bam; down into the furnace of rage it went; the whole plastic cup upended. Bam, just like that. One second, the sweet, stingy amber liquid was there visible in the cup, next it was gone.
“Care to get me another one of these …… man?” Tony said derisively, now finally looking at the bouncer, finally deigning to address him as a fellow human being on planet earth and doing so in a way that bespoke complete disdain for his station.
The bouncer just shook his head, kind of gave off a little titter of disgust, as if to say, ‘well, I tried.’
“Sure man,” he said at last. “I’ll send someone right over.”
“Yeah, you do that. You SEND someone right over,” Tony said, and it came booming out. People were backing away from Tony again. They couldn’t get away fast enough.
His arm candy was oblivious, as was Chris Naughten.
“I can’t believe her. She’s supposed to get married to him next month and here she is with this guy…”
I shook my head. “Well hell, you got me. I’m stumped too, Robyn with a ‘y’. How the hell am I going to get him out of here now?”
“You think that shit’s funny ASSHOLE?” someone said behind and to the side of me. “You getting off on that shit? Fuckin’ browneye? Are you?”
“Browneye? What the …what does that mean?”
“Why don’t you and your brown-eye buddy just get the fuck out of here, man?”
“Oh so, you’re implying there’s some sort of homosexual relationship between me and my friend over there….”
“Just keep that shit up, man. See if I don’t fucking knock you out; just see if I don’t. Punk-ass bitch!”
I turned to Robyn. “This is one of Tony’s friends, I assume?”
“That’s Dave. He’s a dispatcher with the St. Lucie Sheriff’s department, soon to be EX-dispatcher, if he doesn’t BEHAVE himself.”
“How did you two meet all these wonderful people?” I asked.
“Just you never mind that shit, Mr. fuckin’… BROWEYE!” went Dave.
“They all fish together; I think they all graduated from the same training program or something during one of the conventions last year. They started coming into Sundays. Tony and Diane hit it off at first but he’s pressuring her so bad. She just hates it. Every three or four weeks they get into a fight. Now this.”
Now the band changed gears. Before Mustang Sally was dead, Sick Willy cut into a Santana song, Flor de Luna. It’s a slow number that women love. They usually don’t know the name of it at first, but they all recognize it and nearly faint into orgasms of emotion when it’s done right. The first seven notes usually do the trick. Sick Willy at work, it’s a slow song; a very slow, romantic song. At least it starts that way, then builds like good sex.
Chris and Diane got closer, embraced and began to dance.
I didn’t really see what happened, but somehow Tony ended up on the floor with blood coming out of his nose. It looked as if he took one step forward toward Chris when the bouncer he had been talking to, swept in and leveled him with a popping jab.
It went crack! Just like that; like someone slid right up and dropped a fast-ball on Tony’s face. The only sound you heard before the pop was a slick sound like a sweaty arm greasing through the crowd, brushing off someone’s shoulder.
Crack and it was over. Tony landed on his ass and before he knew it, he was being hauled backwards toward an exit. Before I could appreciate the beauty of that fluid motion that stopped Tony, someone had their hands on me. They were beefy hooks, one at the wrist and twisting, the other jammed into my armpit forcing me forward to wiggle free of the pain. Then, just as suddenly, a hand clamped behind my ears. My head was shoved through the maze of dancers at about hip level.
I got the sense, as I passed Chris and Diane, that Chris was involved in a quick bloody scuffle, as well, and came off slightly the worse for it. He went down hard on his side, with a trickle of blood coming from his nose. But he was smiling. He thought it was all too hilarious. I went through the throng down the little breezeway and out the front door, which they kicked open just in time.
A group of innocent collegians parted with grimaces of uneasy disdain at my passing. It was then I realized I was being hauled out by a bouncer! Dave, the man who had called me ‘browneye’ came right behind me, manhandled by two bouncers who had been watching him.
Doing credit to his grasp of the obvious Dave was going “What? What? What?”
There were already clutches of combatants flailing. Tony fought four bouncers working two at a time like pistons, shoving him down the street. Their commander was a Mediterranean looking fellow with thick Portuguese stubble and a long flowing moustache.
Tony tasted the worst of it for his efforts, as he flung himself at the four bouncers as they tried to push him further down the block and away from the front of the bar.
“Get the fuck out. Get the fuck out. Go on!”
“Do you know I’m a cop? Do you know I could have you all arrested?”
“Hey stupid; why do you think we ain’t called up more cops to come arrest YOUR dumb ass?” said the lead bouncer, with an accent that pure, sweet Boston. “We don’t want no trouble with the cops, asshole. Now just leave! Be a man, realize you lost and walk away! ‘Sides you ain’t ‘n uniform. As far as I’m concerned you’re just another asshole making a scene.”
“I’ll be looking for you!” threatened Tony. “You an’ me, bitch. This ain’t done. Not by a long shot!”
“Yeah, whatever man. Go soak. Go home and whack off, you got such a hard-on for me. Do whatevuh. Do whatevuh…”
Now, my two bouncers were pushing me down the street, in the opposite direction of Tony. Pointing skyward in Hitleresque salutes in an obviously time-honored rhythm point… shove … point … shove …point
The man named Dave had not taken well to his handling. He wedged himself up against a Ford van, refused to move it along and was being punched in the gut and ribs repeatedly for his belligerence.
Dave kept trying to get his hands free to swing at the bouncers and every time one of the hands seemed like it was almost out, there came a grotesque thudding sound. Finally one of the two bouncers went ahead and kneed him in the balls and he went down.
“Okay smart guy. Show’s over. You’re out of here,” said a third, directing me down the street again.
“I’m waiting on my friend.”
“Go.”
“I just want to make sure he’s okay”
“Go. (shove ..point) You’re getting a break tonight. No trouble. No cops. Just go.”
Out of the bar popped Chris Naughten finally.
“Right, right I’m going, mate. Just let me collect myself,” he said with a bloody smile.
“Fucking wanker. Jesus.”
The two bouncers continued pummeling Dave. Every time they placed a hand on him to drag him away from the van he had somehow selected as home base, his turf, he bit at them, so they punched him into submission. Chris stepped around the little throng unharmed but for his bloody lips. He pulled out a smoke and with one hand, flapped open a soft pack of matches and cracked one lit with his thumb.
“Chris?”
“Yeah, Gary! You’re not going to believe this, man. Before they could drag me out, I got her number!”
My disappointed thought was “you just had to scream it didn’t you?”
Hearing this, Tony went apeshit. He became three times the man he had been before Chris’s trophy was announced; a thrashing, red neck silverback dressed in a fishing charter T-shirt. I heard the predictable sounds down the street; the thudding of fists on flesh; saw the story played out through the silhouettes of blue halogen street-lights off the red brick walls of the bar and the backlit shadows on the cobblestone street. Tony knocked down three of his opponents, avoided his last bouncer with a fair impression of Tampa Bay’s former linebacker Mike Alstott, and zeroed in on Chris.
Chris couldn’t even see Tony coming, walking toward me as he was with the smoke in his mouth and a shit-eating grin. He didn’t know he was about to be eliminated. Given his speed and weight, Tony would kill Naughten in three or four more steps. He would body-block Chris’s spine in half then beat him to death.
“Chris, duck! Get out of the way!”
In a low crouch I rounded the right rear quarter of a punch-boogie VW, ducked slightly so Tony couldn’t see me coming as he tried to cut between the beetle and the car behind it. And miraculously, I clothes-lined the bastard; tackling him around his neck with an outstretched left arm, locking his head in the crook of my elbow. We went down with a crunch between the punch boogie and this shity little Sunfire or the like. I didn’t wait. I rolled over in a half crouch and jabbed my fingers into his eyes, nose and mouth to subdue him as he squirmed, then reared back and knocked Tony’s bristly head to the pavement with my fist and elbow in a right cross.
One of the bouncers clipped me from behind on what must have been a dead run, sending me up and over the punch boogie. It all happened so fast for a second it felt like a dream. I was flying, stars filled my eyes with the rush of wind from my chest, as the sparkly, cold pavement stretched on for what seemed miles between my face and the wheel of that Volkswagen beetle. For an instant I couldn’t move. All I could do was lay there and watch the bouncer move in for the kill through the reflection of the VW insignia on the wheel.
My daughters have a little poem they say whenever they see one of these cars. They slug each other in the arm and chime:
“Yellow punch boogie, no punch backs, zip lock”
What does it all mean I wondered?
“Oh, you mother fucker!” the bouncer hissed with hallowed solemnity, letting me know all niceties had been cast aside. Able to crane my head around now, I could see it in his eyes. I had broken some cardinal rule of street fighting or football - no neck tackles, no facemasks! - I had written my own death warrant.
But before he could carry it out, Naughten kneeled and wheeled in a karate stance and slugged the son of a bitch in the balls just as hard as he could, erupting in a freakish animal howl as he then grabbed and twisted the target organs.
Their temporary union was appalling as violent, public sex. Exchanging grunts of pain and confusion, and breathy exhalations of determination; each fought over the rights to those crucial pieces of flesh. The victim went to his knees, finally, with a dying groan. Their eyes met as Naughten stood. His pale blues registered nothing; the bouncer’s filling with betrayed dread as he was overcome with agony.
I stumbled to my feet muttering “no man, no” but Naughten wouldn’t hear me out on mercy. He reared back, balled his fists at his hips and healed the kneeling man square in the nose with all his weight behind the kick. An angry gout of blood spat to the window of the Volkswagen accompanied with the most disgusting sound I ever heard. The bouncer went limp and fell over; his legs bent akimbo beside him like a yoga master’s with his heels jammed in his armpits, his hands still on his own crotch. The man’s eyes were wide open. It looked as though someone shot a hole in his face above his lips.
“Jesus, I can’t believe you did that!”
“Life’s a bitch sometimes,” Naughten said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Chris Naughten and I turned and ran. The tired bouncers failed chase after a few seconds and returned to their unconscious friend. They also had easier quarry in the form of Dave, who would not move despite a horrendous beating.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked.
“Who, the bouncer? Nah. A broken nose will make you pass out, though. Hurts like a bastard! Never look the same, that one, but he’ll be fine,” he said matter-of-factly.
“It’ll give him something to talk about for years,” he added. “Your man got the worst of it the way his head hit the pavement.”
“Yeah, well he was going to kill you.”
“Yes, I expect mine was about to do you in as well.”
The last thing I clear image I carried from our altercation was seen from a safe distance. There in the gutter, in front of the Red Eye Blues Train, two bouncers continued clubbing Dave with both of Dave’s own shoes. They had obviously stripped the shoes off his flailing feet in attempting to drag him away from the front of the bar toward an alley. Dave’s hands held the iron grate of a storm sewer. He refused to be removed.
“Got to hand it to him,” said Naughten as we cut across a darkened strip mall parking lot toward the bright lights of a Circle K somewhere near International Drive.
“That’s one strong browneye,” I said.