Spent Shell Casings by David Rose

Author:David Rose [Rose, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Published: 2016-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

16

CLEAN AND GREEN VS. THE GOTH

WINTER 2003

One random Orlando night, while on leave, myself, my dad, a good civilian friend of mine went to a local pool hall. Owned by a friend of my dad’s, I had played in the vacant lot behind the bar as a kid, cautiously pilfering through the encampments of the homeless and chasing around a flock of peacocks that had congregated there for as long as anyone could remember. This was the kind of place that Quentin Tarantino would salivate over when scouting for shoot locations. Placed in the deep shadows of a thicket of oak, it sat happily on the border of where two trailer parks met with the furthest shores of a little southern ghetto.

To enter the bar, before walking through the first set of double doors, one would pass a hedge row. Here a group of men, years later, would hide out to mug drunk patrons. I recall the one night when my friend and I encountered this group. They came out of the shadows the same way moccasins come out of their nests—quickly, but only a short distance. They assessed my friend and me. At the time I’d just gotten out of the military and was roofing houses. There is something about “I work fifty hours a week running terra cotta tile up a ladder with guys with 110% Peckerwood inked on their back” that apparently screams “fuck with the next guy.” My buddy was no slouch either, though slimmer than me and void of much of the underworld dealings that I had accrued. He and I had just finished reading the Black Medicine series and were anxious to try some tricks out on someone.

A few nights prior, after all the bars had closed, we found a man sleeping in his truck outside a day labor office. Figuring it a great chance to practice some jiu jitsu and maybe even some takedown defense, we asked him politely to exit his vehicle. After much coaxing, we convinced him we just wanted to borrow a lighter. His intuitions correct, the moment his back was turned I drunkenly went in for the takedown. Perceiving a savage robbery, his fight-or-flight kicked in with enough adrenalin to slip out of my hold and run madly into the street. He immediately flagged down a passing cop, resulting in our most frantic egress.

Anyway, these muggers, possessing those innate analytical skills that human predators often do, retreated back to their bushes and shadows. About twenty minutes later, after my cohort and I had worked ourselves into a good game of pool, a group of three came bursting in, blood spewing from one of their heads, claiming they had been beaten and robbed.

I recall the taste of satisfaction and pride; years of the hard road had etched itself onto skin and demeanor, and those muggers had seen it. I was all the more tickled that the victims looked like the soft white kids that spent a month’s pay at FUBU, all to be decimated by the very street arch-type they so desperately tried to emulate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.