old school

Sometimes you have to do the right thing no matter what

Years ago sometime in the mid eighties, the music died and Westport went thru one serious fuckin change that was to affect a lot of people. During this time I was doing the bouncing thing at this blues club in Westport and a lot of the cats that hung out there were drug dealers, along with a lot of what I would call serious recreational drug users. Some of these people were pieces of shit but more then a few were really cool folks not withstanding the drug thing. Weed and coke were the main drugs of choice and if you needed it, all you had to do was look to your right or left and ask a muthafucker.

As a bouncer I partied with these people and knew some of em pretty well despite not being a user of their wares. The rule of the house that enabled all of us to coexist was that you did or sold your shit outside and if you were caught doing some shit in the bar, that was your ass and you got thumped. When I first started working there, I hit it off good with some of the older cats who didn’t mind talking to someone of my young age and who treated me pretty square, I knew what they were about and they knew what I was about and we all still became friends.

Now normally I didn’t hang out with cats in the drug profession, but back then shit wasn’t like it is now. Fuck, in that bar that was all there was back then when it came to cool people to hang out with, drug dealers, pimps, whores, or musicians. But there was one night when I came in and the bar was half empty and those that were there seemed unusually quiet. I asked someone who the fuck died, and that’s when I found out that just a few miles over there was a huge drug bust earlier in the day. And muthafucker’s were either bumming that they were next to be narked out, or in hiding or already in jail.

Ask any old head about the great Mission Hills drug bust that happened in the early eighties and they’ll tell you that it was the event of the decade. I mean people that you used to see hanging around just vanished and feel off the fuckin earth, and as you walked around you’d hear snippets of conversation. “Where’s so and so?

busted

How about you know who?

busted

What about…..?

busted

One of the people that got caught up in all this shit was this older cat I had gotten to know who was about as old school as they came and a stand up guy.

Legend has it that when it was his turn to go up before the judge, he was told that if he rolled over on his friends his time inside lockup would be reduced. The way shit went down was that when he was given this option by the judge, he spoke out two words in a loud clear voice.

“Fuck you”

The judge tacked on another couple of years to his sentence.

“Fuck you”

A couple of more years got tacked on.

“Fuck you”

So as it turned out this cat who would have gotten off doing some real short time, earned himself the most down time of all. But true to his nature, he never rolled over on his friends.

Back to present day where after work today I went and looked up the guy from back in the day that took the bullet instead of rolling over on his friends. I walked from the bright sun into this dark bar in midtown where I found him sitting having a drink. I reached out and shook his hand and told em I heard that he was under the weather and how was he? He reached out and after shaking my hand in return confirmed what I’d heard. That he was dying of terminal cancer. He looked like shit and stick thin and all his hair was gray but his handshake was still firm and he still had that “fuck you” look in his eye.

He told me that he was dying and he didn’t know how long he had left, but there were no regrets because he had a good life. There was no remorse or sadness in him, just a matter of factness about what was happening to him. We chatted for a while and he told me that he had friends around him and a woman to clean and cook and that he planned on dying at home. But for the near future he just wanted to work on living day to day and seeing how long it would take him to max out his new credit cards that since he was dying soon, he was never going to pay back. So with that I shook his hand and told him that as long as I saw his old truck I’d drop in on him from time to time. I left the bar thinking that it was cooler then shit that he’s saying “fuck you” clear to the end

"and the monkey flipped the switch"