RUDIMENTS, pt. 112
Making Cars
One time I was driving around a corner,
and from the vantage point I had I could
see a small parking lot for a bank. It was
sometime well after midnight, so nothing
was open. Once my light changed, I don't
know what came over me but I decided to
intervene, in my way. These two guys were
really beating the crap out of each other, one
obviously getting the better of the other.
Their cars were rakishly parked, wherever
they'd stopped, and doors were open. Not
reflecting, nor even knowing why (I also
had a passenger), my instant thought was
that I could break this up if I simply drove
into the lot, and rolled right up them and
forced a cessation with the car. This was at
the corner of Avenel Street and St. Georges
Avenue, at the site of what once had been
'Charlie's Sugar Bowl' (a sort of candy-shop
hangout) and since then has been a long
sequence of small banks' offices. Currently
it's a Chase, I believe. Anyway, I barreled
in, not thinking past the instant, and got
right close to these guys, who'd just then
looked up from their struggle to see what
was going on. They appeared drunk, and
furious, and bloodied. At the instant I also
realized my very poor planning had put
me in the dumbest situation I could have
been in - these guys could have turned
their fury on me, or had a weapon, or
knives, whatever. I had given myself no
real escape plan, nor next step. Once
you 'make the move' you're sort of stuck
with it. I didn't even possess a tire iron or
anything with which to bash back. I do
believe my life had just then began flashing
before my eyes when - lo and behold -
flashing lights and a police cruiser comes
barreling in, jamming to a sharp stop about
10 feet from my car. Good stories always
go bad, right? All the cop sees is me, my
car, and these two nitwits. I guess it looked
like maybe I'd arranged the fight and was
illuminating it for them - lights and car.
Meaning to say, I looked culpable surely.
I dare anyone, at one in the morning, in
such a situation, to try and deftly talk
your way out of that, out of being taken
in, being found the culprit, etc. Fortunately
for me, I was not drunk, they obviously
were, and bleeding - and, I think, picking
up teeth too, as if they were identifiable
and could be simply re-planted - and I
really was able to present my case, just
summarizing quickly how my good
intentions had betrayed me to be caught
in such a ludicrous situation. As a further
boon to my case, one of the nitwits blabs
to the officer..."He's not with you? We
don't know who the fuck he was?" That
simple, tortured and out of tense (present
tense and past tense garbled) phrase got
me dismissed, with a warning to not be
such a fool ever again. 'It's police business,
not yours.' Well, OK then, officer.
-
Cool story, right? I often think of that,
and if they saw me then ('don't') but
didn't now who I 'was', did they mean
to say they didn't know who I HAD BEEN,
perhaps Jesse James or Genghis Kahn,
or more likely that they didn't know, at
the moment, who I WAS, and the heck
with who I night have been. See? Have
fun with that one, Officer.
-
So, you, see, you never know what you're
going to rope yourself into by being what
you think is a nice guy - there are any
number of life-lessons to take from this
scene. One being - how you can never
be too careful about your personal space.
In this instance, had a firefight broken out,
their gun versus police guns, in defense or
whatever, dumb old me, and my passenger
perhaps also, could have been shot from
one direction or the other, or both, in
the false impression of it being OK for
me to be in the crossfire since I was one
of them, or them, and part of the scene,
clearly, and instrumental in it too. Dead
men tell no tales. So, be careful.
-
Had I to do this all over again, I wouldn't.
I've seen my share of brawls, bottle fights,
knife fights, and even a shooting or two,
in Biker uniform, overnight parties, late-night
drunken territory bashes, fights over drunk
women, by drunk men. I've seen knives come
out, and guns. I've been shown the small arsenels
kept in vans, on the sidelines, for just such
occurrences. I've had to light out, in a steady
and cold, pouring rain, searching, along with
others, for the guy who has just had his head
split wide open with a ball-peen hammer and
who'd taken out into the high, wind-driven
wet marsh-grasses to escape. With pieces of
his brain exposed too, what little there was of it.
We didn't know if he was alive or dead, or would
be, when and if we found him. Never did. We
just figured he'd get home OK, and let it go
at that. It's just how things used to be.
All that Biker stuff was a few years after,
however, this bank-lot brawl. Little did I
know where the aroma of violence would
be leading me and how I'd follow it. When I
run out of stuff to write about, I'll still
always be able to find another story about
something like this.
-
There was, all in all, a general sense of
maybe sixth or seventh grade levels of
justice underway - within the edifice of
'Biker' world, as the society at large put it.
I got dragged, quite wittingly, into the
middle of it all. A person had to watch,
remain aware, and walk very carefully,
when dealing within these means. The
club and outlaw environment didn't allow
much for mistakes, and retribution was
apt to be grand and inglorious. If you
survived. A person could go down for
any number of reasons - from the most
simple, 'clothing' violation (yes, clubs
and territory codes and who supported
what, oftentimes told quite tellingly by
what 'shirt' on was wearing. Getting
caught 'out of territory' with the 'other
guy's' club-support shirt on could really
hurt), to the more complicated and far
denser violations of sexual protocol,
someone else's 'property' or woman. I'd
seen instances, of, for example, of a guy
getting dragged out and beaten mercilessly
and vividly - red, red blood flying on
new white snow - for violating someone's
16-year old daughter. I daresay, go nowhere,
people, for the stories abound.
-
As I said, all that was yet in my small future,
as the 1990's beckoned. Or 1989 anyway.
This little bank-parking-lot brawl was an
inkling, and should have been read as an omen,
of where I was about to be thrust - and, had I
only the sense to read - how utterly useless
and wasteful the next eight years would be.
Fortunately, for me, as I was already good at
it, I managed to do two or three things, at
different levels, simultaneously, so that I
really lost very little of the good, creative
stuff that really ruled my life, and no one
was ever the worse for not knowing.
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