Honor Few, Fear None by Ruben Cavazos

Author:Ruben Cavazos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

7

Angels’ Fall

Dave’s election made it pretty clear that I was a power broker in the club, but I was still more interested in making the club bigger than in holding the reins of power. I still feel that way, but one of the things I learned from working with Dave and with the next president is that power can be a very dangerous thing. I had always thought that Dave wasn’t an aggressive person. That’s what Red Dog had said, and that was pretty much what I had seen. At the time, I felt that his lack of aggressiveness would fit with my idea of where the club should go—or at least it wouldn’t slow me down.

One of the first things I did when Dave became president was to try again to get Cuete in the club. He was still willing, and he had come around the club some more and eventually convinced people that he belonged. Cuete was admitted along with his homeboy Shorty (Alex Alcantar), a young, tall, very likable individual who was also extremely dangerous. That was encouraging.

Red Dog and Junior had fought me about opening new chapters and making the club bigger. I figured that Dave didn’t have enough balls to fight about anything. He would just take advantage of the perks of being president—mainly that people pay you some respect and buy you drinks and it’s probably easier to pick up girls—and let me go on with bringing in new members and starting new chapters. After a couple of years in the club, I thought it was pretty clear what I was trying to do; it was obvious I wanted to grow the club, and it was obvious that Dave was the president only because I had provided him with the votes. But once he was elected, he started making decisions on his own, without consulting the membership. And those decisions were not good for the club.

I hadn’t thought about a couple of things. It’s too bad, but this was really my first experience in taking the lead in an organization. Before this, I had always been able to decide to do something and then do it. When there was work that I felt needed to be done, I just went ahead and did my work. I found out that Dave had not learned about working in that kind of way. The first problem that I noticed was that Dave’s lack of aggressiveness also meant that he was uncomfortable with the club growing very fast and with letting me be in charge of building it. He was not the kind of person who could let other people suggest something good and then just get out of the way and let them do it. His buddies were the Nomads, a group of aging Mongols who didn’t actively participate in the club anymore—they didn’t have to pay dues, didn’t have to respond to calls or anything. They mostly just sat on the couch like Mr. Rogers and bitched about everything that was happening with the club.

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