Who shot ya?(Or almost..)

A few weeks ago I saw a movie starring Viggo Mortenson entitled "History of Violence", where a small town man had successfully hid from his wife and kids the fact that 20 years prior he was not only part of the mob but also a stone cold killer, until his past came back to bite him in the ass. I could really relate to the main character, minus the part about killing hundreds of men and the mob ties. I mean, when I regurgitate these stories of violence and near death occurrences on this blog I do so for cathartic reasons, but also because I feel that I might want to keep my ultra violent past hidden from any offspring that I might have, so I might as well tell somebody before I try to erase certain things from my memory.

I would like to be a different man to my kids because the death of my friend really put my mortality in the proper perspective. Sitting in that church amongst 200 of Buddy's family and closet friends, all I thought about was the closed casket, how many scrapes Buddy and I got in the middle of, wondering if I would have died with him that fateful night if I would have went out with him, and how many times I should have met my maker based on my reckless actions. Here are a few occasions where I gambled with the barrel of a handgun, and because I haven't been a baby for 31 years, I guess I am the "fool" that god also looks after.(Even though I feel that my 9 lives "charge card" is maxed the fuck out) Granted, I could have easily named this posts "Times where my black ass almost got shot", but I felt you couldn't go wrong with a Biggie reference.

Just Shoot Me: I have said this before, but the time surrounding my fathers death was horrible for me. Not only did I have to balance the death of a parent, but I was also juggling my mother's breast cancer and I had just got dropped like a bad habit by a woman that I had planned to marry. It wouldn't be an understatement if I said that I wanted to die, and definitely had serious thoughts of helping the grim reaper come decades sooner than he was supposed to. I'm not vain at all, but I try to make myself look presentable whenever I go out, but at that time I didn't care and looked like a ghetto version of Grizzly Adams. Danny knew I was on the brink of death, so he did what any friend would do when he sees that his friend is grasping on to his last breaths, he takes me out and gets me shitfaced drunk.

I don't know how drunk we had gotten, but lets just say that we were buying bottles of tequila and passing it back and forth the same way teenagers pass around a 40 oz of beer. I kept telling Danny, "I love you dear friend, this might be the last time you see me alive." Looking back, I'm glad that I didn't kill myself because that motherfucker ignored my "cries for help" by saying, "Your bitch ass isn't going to kill yourself, just keep drinking fucko!"(I hear the sweet sounds of Dionne Warwick singing, "That's what friends are for!!") While we are drinking our lives away, we get into it with these five dudes who's goal it was to start shit, even flashing us their pistols like they were trying to be the "Doughboy" character in "Boyz in the Hood" and shit. Danny grabs me because for one thing they have guns, and he knows that Tequila + HumanityCritic = 1 black bastard who doesn't give a shit about a dude with a gun. I walk with Danny about 3 blocks and make up a lie that I am going to walk to a girls house that I am going to get to know "biblicly" and we part ways, with Danny looking back multiple times to see where I was really going.

Me, being drunk and somewhat suicidal, I turn back around and go back to the club where me and Danny had just came from. I walk in, see one of the guys who was talking shit and try to detach his jaw from his entire face. The others jump on me and we somehow make it outside, where I am taking a pounding but also hitting dudes in the process. They get off me and I am on the ground, one of the guys walks towards me and pulls his gun out and puts it to his side. I see this, spring to my knees and say, crying because my life was shit, "Please kill me, come on, pull the trigger!" The weird fact I remember is bowing my head and seeing that he had Shell-Toe Adidas and thinking to myself "At least I'll die looking at my favorite sneaker". There was a long pause and I continued, "Come on you pussy, is that a gun or does your punk ass use that as a motherfucker belt buckle? Do it!!" The next thing I hear is Danny, running down the street and screaming "Hey, Hey, Hey!!" in desperation. At this time people from the club are gathering outside the club and the gentleman in question, along with his crew, take off into the bright lights of Norfolk Virginia. I stayed on my knees, on a ground still somewhat wet from a previous rain storm, seeing Danny stare at me with a look of pity mixed with disgust as he walked me to his apartment at the time. I haven't thought about that night much until recently, and that is an example of a story that I want to keep from my children.

Tear the club up: On a lighter note, I know that I have talked a great deal about strip clubs, well this is yet another strip club story. I used to go to a lap-dance joint called "The Flame" religiously. I don't mean a few times a week, I'm talking about every night of the week because I was addicted to naked women dry humping me the same way a girl named Nikki dry humped me when I was 12 years old. I was loved and hated at that particular establishment, loved because I was a steady source of cash flow to most of the dancers, and hated because whenever I got a lap-dance I would pick a long ass Isaac Hayes song on the jukebox that lasted for like 15 minutes and shit. Anyway, between lap-dances I would sit in front of a bar that was positioned right in front of a tinted glass window that you could see the parking lot from. On one night, I think I had gotten arrested for a fight, or maybe I actually found a woman that I didn't have to pay for, but I skipped a night of having a sweaty, glittery woman climb all over me. Lucky for me, because apparently a gentleman that had a particular beef with the club, went there that night and started blasting his 9mm, multiple times, through that glass window that I usually sit in front of. Actually, it was the same spot that I usually sat at while awaiting a dance from some random woman, probably named "Lexis" or Candy", I could have really been shot the fuck up that night. When I went back there the strippers knew that I could have easily been killed, so for a while I was treated like Norm from "Cheers" in that motherfucker. You know that song "Last night a DJ saved my life"? Well, that night, "A pair of tits almost ended my life".