Robert E. Brown. Tales from the Land of Entrapment

Everyone takes a beating sometime.
Part III. Never execute a smart plan with a dumb man (finale in red)



I leaned into the front door and grabbed Alex by the collar and drug him into the doorway.
"Dude, you have got to get these guys out of here. It's going to be a bad scene."
"Yeah. Uh, no, no they seem alright.... Don't they?"
"Alex, use your head. Look."
We turned into the doorway and looked into his living room. One had popped himself onto the couch with his feet on the coffee table, a nervous teenage skater sandwiched on one side and a cowering dyed haired betty on the other. The second one was in the kitchen hunched over the open fridge pulling out beer and the third had corned Jen who was sitting on the stair well, blocking her escape with his arm leaning on the wall. He was obviously, aggressively hitting on her and she looked mortified. Most of the kids were already starting to congregate in at the far end of the room like jittery deer. You could feel the thick tension.
"Uh, no it's cool. Just let me feel them out" he said.
He walked over to the one talking to Jen.
"So uh, I'm Alex."
Without turning his head the vato said "Yeah?"
"Yeah, uh, this is my girlfriend Jen."
"Shit Bro, she could do better." Still not taking his eyes off Jen.
"Ha, uh so you want to smoke?" Alex said offering him a joint.
The vato took the joint, lit it and continued to ignore Alex who stood there awkwardly for a moment.
Annoyed by the lingering presence, the vato turned to him and said. "Homes, can't you see I'm talking to the lady?"
"Oh, uh, sorry." Alex retreated leaving Jen with a "please help me" look in her eyes. As he turned and walked back to the doorway, the vato on the couch casually winged a freshly emptied beer can past his head.



Out side I huddled with Alex and laid out a newly hatched plan. "Look, we get in the car, drive to a pay phone and call the cops on your party. When the cops arrive, everyone leaves and the VKC are out of your house. Then we go to the river."
"But they're all minors, I'll get busted."
"Not if you come with me. There won't be anyone over 21 here but the home boys. The pigs will just break up the party. The vatos won't think you dissed them."
At first Alex resisted my plan. Just the mention of cops didn't sit well with him, even though he had sold off most of his weed and there really wasn't anything for them to discover in his house. But he knew he was really fucked and the clock was ticking before the rest of the gang bangers came looking for their three friends. I instructed him to grab Jen and my little brother and meet us at the car where I went to wait. Jennifer and I got into the beat up impala and I started it up.

About 5 minutes went by and suddenly all of the teenage skater kids were wandering out into the street. What the fuck is going on? They were walking to their cars and talking in the middle of the road. Alex and Jen got in the back seat. "Alex, what the fuck is happening? I blurted, "this isn't the plan."
"Yeah, uh, I really didn't want the cops here so I had another idea" he said with confidence. "I told them that we were leaving to go to a party. But I didn't tell tell them WHERE the party was." He grinned. I banged my head on the steering wheel. Where was my little brother? I could see the gang bangers walking down the steps of the porch. They were slowly cluing in on the fact that they were being snubbed and were calling out to the kids trying to get someone's attention. The wolves were realizing that they had spooked the sheep.

By now everyone had pretty much gotten in their rides. In the rear view I could see my little brother heading towards us. Good. Looked like we were going to make it out in one piece after all. "Oh shit, I need to tell Heather something" Alex said and got out of the car. I banged my head on the steering wheel again. The vatos were in the middle of the road and by this point they knew their chance to start some shit was almost over. "Yo homes, where's the party?" Alex zipped passed them ignoring the question and Jared got in the back seat. Alex conducted his business and started jogging back. The exodus began and I sighed with relief. "I think I gave Chili Dog the wrong directions" Jared said and before I could respond he exited the vehicle. I stood out of the car and screamed my objections but he didn't turn back. In the confusion of multiple vehicles pulling out, Jared glided past the them on one side and Alex slipped past them on the other and got back in.

The home boys were trying to wave down the fleeing kids, now clearly pissed that they had been dissed. My little brother finished his quick communication with the last car as it was pulling away and headed back towards us with the three very large mean mother fuckers right in his path. My heart sank into my stomach because I knew what was going to happen next.

As Jared was crossing the street he kicked a beer can, bouncing it onto the sidewalk. They blocked his path.
"Yo homes, Did you just kick that can?"
They surrounded him.
"Do you think you can just kick a fucking can on my block mother fucker?"
Jared stood frozen.
I leaned down into the car, reached past Jennifer and grabbed the still full bottle of wine that I had opened on the porch.
"No one leaves this car" I said.
I stood out of the car with the door still open, holding my wine bottle club behind my back and shouted out to them over the roof.
"He didn't mean any disrespect."
In the time it took the vato to ask "What the fuck did you just say mother fucker..." they had crossed around the car, surrounded me and Jared had jumped into the back seat. I stood wedged between the car and the open door with one behind me and two in front.
"I said what the fuck did you just say?"
"We're not looking for any shit. He didn't mean to-" and one clocked me straight on the bridge of my nose. Blood squirted, I fell back against the car and then straight to my knees. The bottle dropped from my hand and shattered on the ground behind me. Both girls started screaming hysterically. The dude hit me so hard that I was stunned for a second and didn't even register that I was getting kicked in the ribs. I turned away on my hands and knees trying to pull myself into the car but this put me in a perfect position for the home boy behind me to start smashing the car door into my head. Ever slam a car door on your finger? Well it feels like that, except it's your fucking head.

Then I heard "Hey guys, let's all just be cool."
Suddenly the blows stopped coming and for a second, the girls stopped screaming. I pulled myself up by the steering wheel. Alex had exited the vehicle on the passenger side and was standing surrounded in front of the car.
"Seriously guys, it's all good. Just-" and they shoved him over and began slamming his head into the hood while punching him in the face. The girls began to scream again. Disoriented and bleeding I paused for a moment. Then I sighed, took a deep breath, put the car in gear and slammed my foot on the gas.
One vato jumped out of the way, the other two were seriously clipped. It seemed strangely comic, the way their giant bodies just rolled right up the hood, the windshield and then out of sight. It was also morbidly amusing that Alex managed to hang on for another 15 yards before he kinda peeled off the hood into the street. I slammed on the brakes. We were almost at the VKC house and all the screaming had brought their party into the street. A dozen more home boys were heading towards us. I made a recless U turn through a lawn, pulled up next to Alex and my little brother pulled him in. The three vatos were picking themselves up off the ground and I floored the gas. They lunged out of my path. So, finally, we went to the party at the river.

I didn't get back down to Lost Cauces for four months. I assumed either seriously bad shit would have gone down after that or Alex would have just broken his lease and moved. But I was wrong about the power of Alex the pacifist.
"No, it's cool, I just bought a QP of weed off of them the other day. They won't fuck with good business." Alex said with a dumb grin. "But they want to fuck you up for running them over." I couldn't believe my ears.
"What can I say man, I'm a lover now, not a fighter."

My Company

Robert E. Brown. Tales from the Land of Entrapment

Everyone takes a beating sometime.
Part II. Alex the pacifist.

After Alex's wounds healed he never looked quite the same. He was never an attractive man, but like the post car crash Mark Hamill, he just looked kinda.. not quite right.

With the fight beaten out of him, Alex discovered his sensitive side. His hair slowly morphed from Dee Dee Ramone to a tame Robert Smith. Still dirty, still dyed black but it slowly took on a mushroom form. While the guys were sitting in the yard drinking 40's, Alex began hanging at the kitchen table with the girls, quoting Smith lyrics and listening to the Cure. This new kinder and gentler persona (along with the shit load of drugs he began dealing) created a small entourage of hot chicks around him. "What can I say man, I'm a lover now, not a fighter." This culminated in Alex scoring a full fledged hard bodied jailbait trophy girlfriend on his arm. Jen was absolutely every bit as bitchy as she was double take beautiful. None of us could wrap our drunken, drug addled brains around this new hippie emo Alex or his pornstar bodied knows she's hot shit girlfriend who seemed utterly in love with him. We called it the Jen riddle. A simple one question quandary. "Why are they together?" They stayed a couple into their late 20's and for what ever reason Alex continued to stick around a crew that now smelled his weakness.

After all the bullshit Alex the Bully had put everyone through and the confusion and irritation over the Jen riddle, Alex turned from lil' general to court clown. Over the next few years his nick names included the troll, the nome, rat boy and the littlest pussy. He worked with several of our crew at a deli called Baggin's and they dubbed him Bilbo, placing a sign in the kitchen saying "you must be this tall to work the grill." Of course it was 3 inches taller than Alex. People would stick notes to his back at parties and pee in his litterbox. He never fought back again, even when it was in his very best interest to do so.

I had just turned 21, barely in Albuquerque for a year. Most of the Lost Cauces gang still lived in... Lost Cauces. I had shacked up with Jennifer and we regularly made the 3 hour journey to visit them in her beat up hand me down station wagon. We heard Alex and Jen had moved into a barrio downtown and we set out to find the party. We turned onto his block in the hispanic ghetto where there was a street party going down. We slowed down just long enough to see about 20 pairs of white wife beater tee shirts and tan dickies all circled and fixated on a low rider in the driveway, hydraulically bouncing up and down to a vibrating booming beat. "Uh, yeah, wrong party." Alex's house was at the opposite end of the block. But his party wasn't what what I expected at all. The door was open and there was probably about 14 guests in the front yard and living room. About 10 of them were girls and 4 were guys, including my little brother. All underage, most in high school still. They all jumped up and greeted at the sight of a townie elder statesman and in proper fashion I ignored them. "What the fuck are all these kids doing here?" I snapped at Alex.
"Nah, it's cool. I know them." He mumbled with breath that reeked from pot.
"Where's Jeremy and Keith?"
"They're at a party at the river."
"Where's John?"
"Everyone went to the river."
"Well ditch these kids and lets go to the fucking river."
"Dude, Brian and Vic are coming back in an hour, then we'll all go."

Irritated and refusing to socialize with these inferior minors, I went outside and took Jennifer to the far end of the porch. With my back turned to the party I popped open my cheap bottle of wine. About 3 minutes later I heard over my shoulder "Yo esse, the Vario King Cobras are here to welcome you to the hood."
I turned around and three very large old head vato gang bangers were walking inside. They were older, in their late 20's-early 30's with standard issue goatees, shaved heads and covered in latino gang tats. They were bouncer big, at least 250 lbs each and they had just crashed Alex's underage jailbait party. There were wolves wandering among the sheep.
"Shit, those dudes are VKC." I whispered to Jennifer with urgency.
"I thought you guys were friends with VKC?" she asked, a little confused.
The Vario King Cobras were a local hispanic gang. We had friends who were members but that didn't say much. VKC was a generational barrio gang and whole families and even neighborhoods were members. Through those friends we had brokered drug deals and even attended VKC parties, but it always felt tense and unsafe around the older, more serious members.
"If I try and drop names, they'll just accuse me of trying to suck up. It'll just give them an opening to stomp me."
I had seen this situation played out plenty of times before. They would fuck with people at the party until they got bored. Then there was a 100% chance that someone would get their ass kicked and a good possibility Alex's house was going to get trashed. It was just how it worked, our crew would have done the same. But our crew was absentee and these were only the scouts, there was a whole yard full of drunk homies right down the street.

I though extracting the gang bangers from the house without bloodshed would be tricky. But with Alex as my backup, I found it would be impossible.

My Company

Robert E. Brown. Tales from the Land of Entrapment

Everyone takes a beating sometime.
Part I. Alex the Bully.

"Everyone takes a beating sometime." That's a statement that everyone in Lost Cauces New Mexico understood. Living in a desolate desert, in a college town close to the Mexican border bred boredom, frustration and anger in a cultural environment of extreme machismo. Everyone got their ass kicked eventually. In my late teen's and early 20's fights were readily the nightly norm, and they were never fair. Being a skinny 140 lb. loud mouth shit talking punk rock kid scored me plenty of beatings and I learned after a while not to open my mouth unless I had numbers behind me or a clear escape route. That might sound cowardly but if you have been around enough real street fights and bar brawls, you know the bitter truth about fighting fair. Unfortunately for my friend Alex, that balanced "choose your battles" lesson was never learned. Alex let the pendulum swing from bully to pacifist. Both tactics seemed to get him beatings in the end.

Alex was a mean little Hispanic kid who was smoldering with Napoleon complex angst. He stood at an impressive skinny 5'2" and always adorned with a bad, dirty black dyed Dee Dee Ramone hairdo and the standard issue black leather jacket & combat boots. The first night I met him I was throwing one of my regularly occurring "father's away on business" house parties. Mobs of high school kids drinking shitty beer and even shittier wine while listening to poorly dubbed Black Flag cassettes on a beat up sticker covered boom box. A kid named Tony showed up with a new leg cast earned from being too bold on a half pipe and said something this new guest didn't like. I walked into my kitchen to find Alex using Tony's nose as the center target for his newly found flesh and blood punching bag. Tony stood defenselessly held up by two crutches as the little shit carefully took face shots that Tony had no way to block. The kid just stood there bleeding as he received at least 5 brutal rabbit punches before I came in to break it up.

After his stunning victory Alex decided to put his new strategy to the work two weeks later. Jonathan sat slumped in a chair all but passed out drunk. Earlier in the night he had been mouthing off and shit talking Alex who had waited to make his move. Jonathan's gimp leg still required the help from a cain so when Alex swooped in for the kill, he made sure to kick it from his victims reach. It wouldn't have mattered. Jonathan was wasted and incoherent. He barely registered that it was his turn to be Alex's bloody punching bag. The next day he had to be briefed on how he received his spit lip.

But don't get the wrong impression. Alex's fighting phase wasn't limited to sparing with the handicapped. He would pick fights with anyone, and for a time it seemed that the worse the odds for him, the better. One night we were at party at a shitty two story apartment building. I was standing outside on the second story walkway with some of my crew. "Oh fuck look" someone screamed. I looked down at the parking lot and Alex was flat on his back with a huge black guy and what we found out later was half the NMSU football team looming over him. They started to walk away and Alex staggered to his feet and said something we couldn't hear. The football player turned back around and jacked Alex so hard that he bounced into the air and tumble rolled for 10 feet.
"Oh shit. Do you think we should go down there?"
"Against those guys?"
"Good point."
And he got up again. Said something again. The football player walked over and hit him again. He stumbled another 10 feet across the parking lot and dropped to his back again.
"Hey Alexander, stay down!" We laughed and jeered.
"No, no get up Alex, do it again!"
He got up again. And we watched the same routine play out over and over again, slowly moving form one end of the parking lot to the other.

But it wasn't a beating from a hulking college football player that turned Alex into a pacifist, it was a beating from a skinny hair metal band. We used to make regular excursions into Juarez where the drinking age was 16 and tequila shots were a quarter. Alex had gone down there with our friends John G. and Kenta. They went to some dank mexican bar where Alex spent the better part of the night bad mouthing and harassing a table of hair metal guys from El Paso about their spandex and matching white cowboy boots. At the end of the night they made the long walk back across the border bridge and Alex spotted the hair band 50 yards ahead. He sped up his pace leaving John and Kenta behind in order to make sure the hair guys could hear his taunts. But as he closed the gap between him and his verbal victims, he left his own crew behind. Suddenly Alex found himself alone at the bottom of the huge bridge in a poorly lit, empty walkway surrounded by some very angry metal heads. Within seconds those matching white cowboy boots were kicking his face in. John G. and Kenta were only a minute behind him, but a minute is all it takes. As they came up on the scene those now bloody boots were casually walking away. Years later I asked John why he didn't go after the hair guys. "Seriously, don't you think it was a long time coming?" He had a point.

The next day upon hearing the news, I went to Alex's house to view the damage. His mother earned a living by using her house as a makeshift daycare and when he came out of his room all ten toddlers began to cry. One of the older children ran over to Alex's mother and while pulling on her leg he sobbed "make him take off the monster mask." Shit, I wanted him to take off the mask too. But that was his face. 40 stitches and a crushed nose on a mass of puffy tissue so swollen that he had to tilt his head at an angle to see out of the one eye he could still open.

In one night at the tender age of 19, Alex the Bully became Alex the Pacifist. The fight was literally beat out of him. From then on you couldn't get Alex to raise his hand and from then on he fancied himself a peace maker. Unfortunately for me, a few years later I found myself in a position where I needed the little scrapper back. But that Alex was gone.


My Company

Robert E. Brown. Baseball Desperate

There is something attractive about desperation. I don't say that regarding individuals, but in collective wholes. Philadelphia is an amazing study in desperation. A city with a historical importance but major self esteem issues. It's regularly voted the fattest, the ugliest, the least cultured. It's hyper violent and is surely one of the dirtiest. But when a desperate city with low self esteem has even a moment to be proud, a moment of hope, it'll take that moment and act... desperate.

Visitors of Philly are always confused by it's skyline. For one of the largest cities in the country laid out in dense east coast fashion, the skyline is shockingly small. This is because of the "gentleman's agreement" the lords of Philly's commerce had with the ghost of William Penn. In the early 1900's Philly's magnificent City Hall was built. The huge towering statue of William Penn dwarfed everything at a time when horses and trollies dominated transportation. The unspoken agreement was that no building would ever stand taller than the tip of William Penn's hat. In the early 1980's Penn was betrayed and Philly finally began constructing skyscrapers 80 years behind Chicago, New York and Boston. But they say it came at a high price as the ghost of Penn cursed Philadelphia for it's base betrayal. Philly's low self esteem over it's sad skyline was replaced at the exact same time with sports franchises that suddenly couldn't win a game. The Eagles, the Flyers, the 76er's and the Phillies all became frustrated, even disastrous teams. On rare occasions coming close to a championship, but never coming through. Even that fucking horse Smarty Jones got one race away from making history, only to choke at the last moment.



Then finally, someone had an idea to appease the ghost and lift the curse. Comcast centralized itself in Philadelphia and constructed a huge, immense skyscraper that dwarfed every building in the city and on the very top of the building, they placed a small statue of William Penn. Now his hat is higher than any other point in the city. This same year, the Phillies, a team with the worst record, not just in baseball, but in all of organized sports, won the world series. We all knew what was coming the night they won.

Now I don't give a shit about baseball, but I do love me a good riot. The stories of Philly fan behavior made national news. Families of Tampa Bay fans huddled in restroom stalls as psychotic mobs of Philadelphians dumped beer on their heads while trying to rip off the stall doors. The Tampa fan who escaped the mob by scaling a light post, only to get shot down by a flying Stoli bottle. The Philadelphian who was so overcome with joy that he stripped down to nothing but a tee shirt and lit his underwear and pants on fire in the street. The crowds who ended up in the hospital from clamoring onto plexi glass bus stop roofs only to come crashing through. The flipped over cabs, the demolished fire truck that was overran as it tried to respond to all the fires burning on broad street. (later the police found the the lost wallet of one of the vandals on the truck, he was a fireman) Of course half the windows in center city were smashed, stores were looted and it seemed like everyone had lost their minds.



I rounded up some friends and we trekked out into the madness. My buddy Tracy discovered a huge stockpile of bottle rockets laying on the side walk and we casually lit them off every so often as we made our way into the crowd. We got into the mess after the main blast of mob energy had been quelled by the riot police. We started up Broad street towards Center City through the wreckage in a sea of screaming high fives. Within two blocks my palms were numb and red. Grown men were standing in the middle of the street sobbing and people were swigging and passing random liquor bottles to strangers. There were burning trash fires everywhere and by the time we reached center city, the street was paved with broken glass. Groups of fans would rush over cars jumping up and down, rocking them until one would spot the cops pushing through and then they would scurry back into the undiscernible wall of faces. By the time we reached Center City, Broad street was a fast flowing river of human bodies. As we got closer to City hall there seemed to be a slowage, suddenly the people in front of us veered off to the right and we were face to face with a wall of riot police. We too, promptly veered right. Walking to the side we pushed along with the main river of people still blindly moving toward the police. After about four blocks we suddenly hit another wall of riot police coming from the other direction, sandwiching everyone into the side streets. We rolled back down to South Street where the party had long since moved on. Unfortunately the Phillies had won the night before South Street's garbage pick up. All the trash bags that had been set out were dumped everywhere. The street was completely empty and as we walked down the middle of the road, the damage and trash gave an end of the world feel. We stopped for a moment and I stood on a knocked over newspaper box and surveyed the area.
"You know, it really wasn't that satisfying." I said to my buddy Johnny Franchise.
"Yeah" he said with a sigh.
Then he reached down and picked up a tightly tied off garbage bag and bounced it into the street like a lop sided beach ball.
"Did that help at all?" I asked in a hopeful tone.
"mmmm, yeah... kinda" he said sounding a little unsure.
I contemplated his answer for a second, then stretched out my foot and casually tipped over a garbage can standing next to my perch.
We all stared at the tipped over can for a moment and then headed to Tattooed Moms for a beer.



But it didn't stop with that night. The next day was only a lull for people to nurse hang overs. That second night you could still hear sporadic horns honking through out the city. On the third day philadelphia held a parade down broad street again. 1.5 million people showed up decked from head to toe in their Phillies red, like drunken militia men called to a makeshift army. At 1 am the next morning wasted clusters of fans were still wandering the streets. On the fourth day, I was crossing Washing ave. and a car slowly rolled by. The driver was hanging a copy of the Inquirer's front page out the window with a stern focused look on his face, coasting along, just in case someone missed the news. Philadelphia was like a needy first date with low self esteem who painfully clutches at your arm because you actually paid for dinner and didn't call her a bitch all night. She knows she's going to fuck it all up but doesn't care... because she's desperate.


My Company

Robert E. Brown. The 2 Street Chronicles

Tommy Trouble Part II: That's Not Slow Gin, That's Blood

The owner was the first generation of the family to move away from his Irish south Philly heritage, after buying into several other shady businesses he had become a man of means and settled his family in a wealthy suburban estate in South Jersey. He did his best to sequester his three daughters from their 2 street roots. Two of the daughters were true New Jersey debutants, but the middle daughter Katie had her grandfather and her great grandfather's blood running through her. Only in her mid twenties, Katie had multiple DUIs, assaults and even a high speed chase under her belt. All buried at great expense in lawyers fees, favors and bribes by daddy. You could take Katie out of 2 street, but you couldn't take 2 street out of Katie. She was an ardent drunken barfly and just after I started, Katie fell in love... with Tommy.

While Tommy was no prize, neither was Katie. It was clear that he saw dollar signs. She saw... well I don't know what she saw, she was perpetually cross eyed drunk. For a month after discovering his daughter's forbidden love, the owner would sit at the bar gnawing on his cigar, beet red and staring at Tommy while mumbling "how did this happen?" While they were the grossest, drunkest, ugliest couple I knew, they were also one of the smoochy smoochy cuddliest. In 2 street fashion, that can only mean trouble.

I had gone back to New Mexico to visit my family. I came into the bar to cover a day shift on a Sunday morning only to find the bar trashed and the manager arguing with the cleaner. As I walked in I heard the cleaner yell through his three teeth "That's not slow gin, that's blood."
"No, no, don't worry it's just slow gin." the manager said in a persuasive tone.
The bar was trashed. There was broken glass everywhere, a broken chair and pools and splatters of what was clearly blood.
"What happened? I asked.
"I don't know, the place is a wreck, the money was left in the register with a note from Jon saying he and Michelle quit. I can't get them on the phone."
Just then Jon burst through the door. "I can't take this fucking place" he screamed. "I didn't sign on for this." He pointed at the red all over the walls and floor. "You see that? That's BLOOD."
"Told you." mumbled the cleaner.

Now, I've always likened the incidents at this bar to the way Vietnam vets describe combat. Hours of tedious boredom marked by minutes of sudden terrifying madness that comes at you from all sides. From the way Jon described the night before, he would agree.

Jon leaped at a chance to work my Saturday night shift so he could be near Michelle. With her silky waist long black hair, huge tanned breasts pouring out of her low cut tank top and the little belly ring winking from her washboard stomach, everyone was hypnotized by Michelle. Unfortunately so was Tommy. The bar was packed and Tommy and Katie were drinking for hours. With each beer Tommy's eyes became more fixated on Michelle's cleavage and his tone became more flirty. With each beer the fumes of jealousy steamed off of Katie's butter face. But on 2 street you don't take it out on your partner, you challenge your rival. Katie had enough and followed Michelle into the kitchen. Jon heard screams and found Michelle cornered by a kitchen knife wielding Katie who was bellowing "Back off my man." Jon pulled the knife from Katie and as Michelle ran past her, Katie grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head into the door. Michelle wiggled free and bolted out the bar with Jon in pursuit attempting to console. As they exited they passed three Columbians coming in. There was no catching Michelle and when Jon returned he found the situation in the bar to be much worse. When the old manager had taken the coke deal fall, it was under the stipulation that all parties involved were to send cash each month to soften the pain of imprisonment. Tommy hadn't sent a dime in six months and the Columbians had stopped by to give Tommy a stern message. Jon had bolted back into the bar to confront Katie and ran straight into the barrel of a revolver held by a Columbian who assumed the huge steel worker was running through the bar in order to try and stop Tommy's brutal beating. Katie had already been neutralized. She had lunged at them in his defense and was met with a bitch slap from a .38 and was laying stunned on the floor. Jon stood with a gun to his head for a full minute as he and the rest of the bar watched Tommy get bottles bounced off his head and his ribs kicked in.

And in one night, the manager's plan to staff the bar with a new generation of non 2 streeters all but died. "I guess you're probably going to leave me too." he said crumbling onto a stool as his brother walked out.
I thought about it for a moment and said, "the only thing worse than having a job is looking for one."
I lasted 8 more months.

My Company