A Funny Story, and A Not So Funny One.

"The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living." -- Cicero --

When I first got in the nightclub business, I was a bouncer at a Tejano bar. It was pretty wild and woolly. (As luck would have it, at 5'8" and not quite 170, I was by far the smallest bouncer, so I was always the one some drunk Texican would get froggy with, but that's another story. :-) Besides, I was still in the Active Reserves of the Corps, so I considered it all just Good Training)

Anyway, the manager was this, this, no other word serves as well as, maniac. He carried a Browning Hi-Power. (9mm automatic, to any of you non-gun lovers that are still reading) His idea of the proper way to carry it was one round up the spout, safety off, and on *half-cock*!!!!

Well, every Sunday night was Drink & Drown. (They were still legal then. No longer) Five bucks to get in, all the well whiskey, wine and beer you could suck down from eight until midnight.

The club held about three hundred people, and every single fucking Sunday night a brawl would commence with about two hundred of them. You could just about set a clock to it- the festivities would get underway two minutes either side of 12:15, when all the happy campers finished chugging their last free drinks.

Typically, some dude would get mad when he saw an ex-GF dancing with some other dude, and start some crap, shoving and shouting, a wild haymaker or two, yatta-yatta-yatta. We'd charge in, with overwhelming force, (there were about three of us, plus two managers, two off-duty cops, about half the bartenders (i.e.the male ones,) and the barbacks), break everything up, and toss the malefactors out of the club.

Since most guys don't really know how to fight, most especially when they're wasted, in most cases, no real harm was done. Simple, eh?

No. That place had an unbelievably regular customer base, and Tejanos tend to got out partying in groups of friends and relations. It wasn't uncommon to be breaking up a quarrel between Dad and son-in-law. Just about everybody knew everybody else, (yes, to include the biblical sense), and a lot of the patrons were loosely aligned in coalitions.

Think Afghanistan.

So you'd be running this guy outta the bar with his elbow up between his shoulder blades, in control, dog's in his heaven and all's right with the world, have him halfway to the front door, when all of the sudden some drunk boyfriend of his sister's best friend from junior high would come flying out of the woodwork to try and take you down. Then his friends would pile on, people that didn't like the pile-oners would pile on them, and all the sudden you have a world class fracas going down - to include regulars that we were friendly with, doing their besotted best to help us.

Of course, in nearly all the cases, we couldn't have told the players even if we had a program, so that lent itself to, what would, under other circumstances, have been comic relief, both the Good Guys and Bad fighting each other, etc. ("Goddammit, Rusty, that's my arm you're yanking on. Lemme go, you dumbfuck!")

So, whattya do when there's a riot goin' on in Cell Block #9? Like all riot police, you break out the chemical weapons. This one bouncer Rusty was the Mace-usin-est mo-fo on the planet.

If/When the brawl would reach critical mass, say 10-12 folks, Rusty would wade in with his Mace, spraying loddy-doddy-everbody. Of course, that was not his aim, but his aim was usually hindered by all the Crown and Michelob he'd drank. He would usually manage to get most of it on the primary perps. That would usually get things broken up purty quick, as it gave all the macho men an excuse to disengage with honor intact, perhaps bloody, but unbowed. We'd toss out whoever we could figure out was a quarreler and not a queller, then run to the bathroom to wash off the Mace.

The Macing of the Place pretty well served to clean out the rest of the club, too, as it wasn't that big, so just about everyone packed up and left when the gentle aroma of the gas circulated through the club. The show was over, anyway, and everybody'd gotten to enjoy Sunday Night at the Fights. We didn't care that much, as we didn't sell much whiskey between midnight and closing anyway, so as the number of patrons dropped down from the hundreds to fifty or so, most of the staff could officially get off-duty, get on the outside of some whiskey ourselves, and get down to the serious bidniss of figuring out who was gonna zoom who that night.

Life was purty interesting at that place. One of the owners was a little bitty guy known all over Houston as Fast Eddy. He was one of the guys that started the Crystal Pistol, one of the first and most legendary topless bars in Houston. Anyway, he knew lotsa shady Characters, and several nights a week these characters would show up after-hours, and there'd be a dozen or more dancers, bookies, pimps, dealers, etc., sitting around the bar, along with the staff and whomever we'd harvested from the customer crop to join in the party.

One of these characters was a bookie named Frank, who owned a topless club called the 5757. I used to go there on my night off, as I was sweet on this one dancer of his named Sherri. An absolute showpony, intelligent, funny, sexy, sweet as can be. She was a marvelous dancer, with a boodle of athletic moves, like doing back flips on the stage.

I took her out a few times, but never could seem to break through her shell. She had a drug problem, coke, I think. She eventually quit working at the 5757, and I lost touch with her.

In the course of my life then, I somehow, for some undoubtedly moronic reason, had mentioned that I went to the 5757 to my mom. I don't recall why on earth I would or should have, but I did.

A year or so later I was living in Florida, talking to her on the phone, when she asked me about the place, didn't you used to hang out there? Yea, I did. Well, there's this big story on the front page of the Sunday paper about that place. Really? UmmHmm, it was raided, the police describe it as a notorious den of drugs and prostitution, and claim to have broken up a gambling ring that operated out of there. Well, gee, Mom, I didn't see any of that.

They say it was a topless place. Didja see any of that? Well, uhhh, uhh, mostly I went just on Tuesday afternoons, 'cause they have a free steak buffet, and the staff there, they're good customers at my bar, so it's sorta like PR, and uhhh...

UmmHmm, she says.

I'm afraid she knows me all too well.

But I digress, as I am wont to do. Back to the story.

One night, there was this guy that gave us hell. He wasn't much to look at, just a raggedy wetback looking guy, not much English. I forget why we were tossing him out, but he was giving three of us fits, as we generally tried not to use excessive force, wrestling guys instead of punching, etc. He was strong like a bull. We finally get him out the front door, but a few minutes later he tries to come back into the club. He's standing there trying to tell me why he needs to come back in, to get a friend or something, not really doing much else, when Rusty gets frustrated and just whips out the Mace and gives him a good three second burst right smack dab in the kisser, enough to take down *anybody*.

He was completely unaffected. The guy just stands there, wipes it off his face and onto his shirt, and says something like, "You shouldn't a done that."

Then he proceeds to try and kill Rusty. I jump on him and try to pull him off, while the cavalry comes in person of Don the Hi-Power Maniac and a coupla barbacks. The guy is chokin' Rusty to death, I'm trying to pry his hands free so I can get him is a wristlock or something, to absolutely no avail. The other guys join me, with little more success. So Don pulls out his loaded, unlocked, half-cocked Hi-Power and starts beating the guy over the head with it. It glances off his skull and hits me on the elbow.

That hurt.

My arm goes about half-numb, and the Mace rubbing off the guy has already been killin' me, and the light bulb goes off in my head about the safety concerns involved with pistol-whipping somebody with Don's gun. Time to disengage. So I say fuckit, you want him, you got him, let go of the guy, roll out of the dogpile, and head for the restroom, cussing Don the entire way.

They finally managed to get the guy outta there, I'm sure not in very good shape. When I see them later, Don, Rusty and the other guys involved are all splattered with blood, not theirs. We're sitting around about an hour after the bar closed, drinking and rehashing the day's events, when I start ragging Don about carrying his weapon as he did.

Actually, I called him a fucking idiot. He is pulling it out of his shoulder holster to show me something in an attempt to defend himself, when he stops and says, "Goddamit, look what that motherfucker did to my pistol!" He turned it around to show me. The rear sight was broken. He had actually busted it on that guys head.

That guy was probably the toughest guy I ever ran into in the course of my bouncing career.

A few months later, Sherri was at a party at someone's house. Don was there, and ended up passing out on the couch. Several other people crashed there, to include Sherri. He sat his pistol down on the coffee table as he fell asleep.

He awoke early that morning to the sound of a gunshot coming from the bathroom. Sherri, feeling bad, no doubt crashing from who knows what sort of high, had shot herself in the stomach with that Browning. She died in his arms while they waited for the ambulance.

I sometimes wonder why might have happened if I had ever gotten through her shell. I never knew what flavor of demon she wrestled with in her life, that made her resort so heavily to drugs - she wouldn't talk about it.

Chalk it up as another episode in what has been an interesting, if not always enjoyable, life. It bothers me that a woman that sweet was so tortured, and that by now, she's not even much of a memory, just another Forgotten One.

So far as the world is concerned, she left no more of a hole than your hand does when you pull it out of a bucket of water. No child, not any family that she ever mentioned, no lover to mourn her passing or put a flower on her grave, maybe just a few lonely guys that used to like to watch her dance.

Well, here's to ya, Sherri lass. I hope you found the peace that eluded you in this life. Wish I'd have been better at being your friend.

Pyramids, Epitaphs, and Apologies In Amber

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing."

Benjamin Franklin

There are many different sorts of blogs - political, special interests, online diaries, and the omnipresent catblogging. :-)

I cannot speak for all, but as for me...

I'll blog on many things, and even have different blogs for different reasons.

But, what I like best is just telling stories. Some of them are even true. :-)

While most of the stuff you're reading here is completely true, some of it is completely made up, and some of it is an amalgam of fact and imagination, with the proportions depending on my mood, and estimation of what makes a better story.

I'm not going to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Some stories are too good not to be true, and create their own reality.

In some of his later novels, Robert Heinlein wrote of a theory concerning the author as a creative force in the universe; that as stories were written, universes were created in which that story was "real."

This is not as outlandish as it may seem at the first glance.

Which person is more "real," any of the nameless billions that have gone to their graves, unheralded, unremembered, as lost to us today as if they had in fact never existed, or, say, Captain Ahab, Romeo, or Odysseus?

In one sense, an anonymous 11th century peasant is more real, as we can be sure that she did in fact share in the same sort of fleshly existence we now do. We most certainly wish to believe that we are real, do we not?

But we can know no more than that about her, or any of those lost ones. We are forced to, like an author of fiction, to imagine the details of her life; her plot and her character, even her very name, are as much a creative work as any of Homer's. (Or perhaps even more so, as we can reasonably surmise that there was a Helen and a Paris and the whole rest of that crew)

As your imagination of her will be different from mine, or the next person's, and so on, her "reality" is not fixed, but amorphous. She becomes no more than a tabula rasa for our imagination.

So in what way is her existence real? She has no way of now influencing us; she is as irretrievably barred from affecting today's news as if she were on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole. (I know Hawking now claims that some stuff does in fact escape, but allow me my metaphor, OK? Thanks.)

Meanwhile, we are moved to weep for Romeo, rejoice with Odysseus as he triumphs over his foes and reclaims his home, and marvel at Ahab's iron will. Their stories, their characters, and those of the thousands of other people that never "lived," save in the life of the mind, first of their creator, then in his readers, continue to move and instruct us, shaping our way of thinking, and thus our way of life.

One of my favorite passages in all of literature is from Ahab as he challenges the gods, and mocks them in their inability to influence him, because as a man, he possesses free will...

"Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run."

The first time I read that, as a teen, I was still too young to fully appreciate all the layers of meaning in those lines and the complete passage in which they are found, but even then it inspired me to live my life in accordance with my will, not that of a god I had already ceased to believe existed, or a culture that, given free rein, would be happy to dictate my life's path.

Some will argue that it is in actuality Melville, and not Ahab, that continues to have real power to move us today. That seems reasonable.

But if we are to argue that a creation, be it Ahab, or you, or me, has no independent intrinsic existence, but is just an artifact, a secondhand manifestation of the creator, where, in fact, does that leave us? For if that is true, then we ourselves have no more reality than Ahab does, for we must be the product of some creative force, whichever label your personal beliefs may want to pin upon it, so once again, Ahab's "realness" is as valid as our own.

This leads us to an uneasy conclusion. For our lives, our reality, to continue after we have shuffled off this mortal coil, we must somehow have the ability for our existence to have mattered, or, at the very least, to have it be remembered.

This is the force that motivates wealthy men to donate millions of dollars to charitable foundations, with their name attached to it, that caused ancient kings and causes modern men to erect great civic monuments with their names and deeds engraved upon them, and why, on a much smaller scale, we put names on the headstones of our graves. So that we will not become one of Orwell's "unpersons," erased from history, our lives washed away by the passage of time.

To return at last, like Odysseus after decades of wandering, to our subject, I think that is why we write our blogs, and why, more than anything else, we fill them with the details of our lives.

It's been said that once something has been put on the internet, it is impossible to remove. This is true. Were I to completely erase this this blog, it would till be around in search engine caches, on the backup tapes of the web servers, and, since you're reading this, on your machine, too.

There is every reason to believe that it will be around as long as our species is alive and kicking. Given that we finally get up off our lazy duffs and colonize space, so that when Ellie comes around to give the planet a mortal conk on the noggin, she misses some of us, that could very well prove to be, for all practical purposes, eternity.

This is an entirely new thing in the human experience; the average Joe now has a chance to commit his thoughts and his life to paper, err... electrons, and have a reasonable assurance that they will be around for many generations to come. Even my pets will have the chance to have a durable epitath that will far outlast the pyramids of even the mightiest Pharaoh.

We are the mayflies of the universe. As long as life may seem to us in a subjective sense, we are here and gone again in less than a blink on a galactic timescale. We know this in our hearts, and there is in humans some primordial need to shout "Hey, look at me! Remember me! I was here once! This is what I was like!" out into the eternal void, and hope that someone eons down the road will hear our faint voices.

I confess it to be one of my primary motivations. I don't expect I'll be making millions of dollars to endow an university or charitable trust. These entries, and maybe a few pictures will most likely be all that remain of me a century from now.

I don't think that's the prime reason, though. There is another that spurs me each day to write.

As my life has turned out, I have a daughter that does not live with me, and has not for years. It is unlikely that we will ever even live in the same state before she is an adult.

I sometimes think of this site as an extended letter to her, something for her to read after she is grown, an explanation, perhaps even an apology, for the way the twists and turns of life have taken us away from each other, and a way for her to come to know me in a way that few of us ever get to know our parents.

I had so many dreams about my fatherhood, of being there to help with her homework, to teach, to make her laugh, to play games, to help her through those tough adolescent years, to sing with her and watch over her at night.

The reality is different. I watch her life as through a telescope, from afar, and our time together is telescoped into a few days each year around holidays and such, and talks on the phone that do more to drive home the vastness of the gulf that divides us than they do to bridge it.

Perhaps someday this can be that bridge, and I can become more real to her, so that she will not have to resort, as we do in contemplating that long dead and forgotten peasant woman, to clothing the bare bones of my life with the fanciful flesh of her dreams.