This week, Dave requested that everyone from the group tell a revealing story about themselves from our past that “draws a straight line to our current emotional state blah blah blah pigfuckerWhocaresWhatever”. You ain’t cracking this shell, but I’d be more than happy to regale a fine tale of my youth just for shits and giggles. I’ve got plenty. Pull up a chair.
This here is the story of Jack: the infamous, diabolical, and most bizarrely terrifying piece of white trash to ever walk the earth. And this is how our paths crossed for just one night, for just a few terrifying and ultimately perplexing hours. Be warned, it ain’t pretty.
Back in my college days (yes, I spent five years at a prestigious community college achieving the highly sought-after 4-year degree in Communications…but I don’t wanna brag) my good friends and I often put together what we liked to call “Drink-till-you-puke-and-punch-someone-fuck-fests”. Other short-sighted and less creative people called them “parties”, but we never held that against them. My friends and I just knew what we were looking to achieve and everything starts with a name, so… Anyway, to set the scene, me and six other guys lived in a decrepit piece-of-shit rent house about a mile from college packed in a low-income, decidedly white-trash neighborhood off Ballentyne Road (that name is important to know, trust me). And that description is not open for debate. I mean the guy across the street lived in what looked like a pile of painted wood and drove a jacked up Dodge with custom exhaust stacks and Confederate flags across the back window and on each mud flap. He named that truck. It was “The Outlaw”. He named his wife too. “Bitch-Whore”. Guess who he loved more? And that guy was considered “the rich snob” of the neighborhood. When you drove through our block, that “Dueling Banjos” riff from “Deliverance” just played on repeat in the back of your head. In fact, these people probably consider “Deliverance” a promotional vacation video:
“Ahh, Momma…I want to go there and make a man squeal like a pig too!”
“Maybe next year, honey…Daddy gets out on parole then. Now wash that lice shampoo outta yer’ head.”
Point being, it was an interesting place to live. But we pretty much kept to ourselves and they did the same. We had giant fucking keggers every other weekend and they didn’t call the cops. Every other house on the street was a meth factory ready to blow but we didn’t say shit. Worked out pretty well. Pretty well…until one of them decided to mingle into our world.
It was probably around midnight when, through a half-drunken haze, I noticed a rather old-looking biker-type guy in the corner of our living room. We had probably 150 people crammed in this fucking shack, but this guy still stood out-primarily because he had about 25 years on every one there. Short, missing-tooth grin, slicked black hair, leather everything, a bizarre fanny pack around his waist, pock-faced, skinny John Waters mustache…a real looker. Looking back, he was a spitting image of William Forsythe in one of his grittier roles. He looked drunker than shit and fucked up on something (yeah, I’m guessing meth) and was getting the queer-eye from everyone at the party but, at the time, he seemed to be behaving himself quite well. I asked some roommates and he apparently just slid in undetected but the beer-bitch (the roommate that gets stuck manning the kegs and taking the money for plastic cups) said he paid so…fuck it. He was ogling every chick that walked past him like they were hanging from a stripper pole, despite the fact they were all young enough to be his daughters (and probably, some were)…yet, he was surrounded by horny 20-year-old men doing the same fucking thing. Creepy? Yeah. But tolerable.
The night progressed into a fog and people finally starting filing out sometime after 2am, I think. Maybe later. But at some point, he was pretty much the last guest there. Him and his teenage lackey. We never got the story on that kid, but he was from the neighborhood as well and just hung around this guy. Quiet, thick glasses, and classic inbred facial features (common for these parts). Total fucking stooge. The old guy suddenly began striking up conversation with us in the kitchen and said his name was Jack while his lackey remained stoic and nameless and once Jack got rolling, he would not fucking shut up. Rapid fire motor mouth, cackling laugh between every sentence (umm…meth?). The kind of guy that thought every thing he said was fucking gold and “why the hell ain’t you laughin’?” And he had a slight tremble to him, like he could just fucking blow at any time, so we were hesitant to push him along. Finally and abruptly though, he said a rather heartfelt thank you to all of us and left with his stooge in tow. Me and another roommate collapsed on the living room couches and slowly began to recap the night while we faded. Curtain ready to fall. Good night. Or so we thought.
This is what happened next. Follow me now, cause it all happened like raging dominos. About five minutes later, our front door was suddenly shoved open and Jack and his sidekick came bolting in like Walmart on Black Friday. They rushed into the kitchen before I could even connect what was happening and then the screaming and swearing started, followed by some very loud slaps. Someone was getting their ass beat. Fuck me. We jumped up and ran into the kitchen to see Jack slapping (not punching, slapping) the shit out of some young kid I didn’t know but stayed from the party. Come to find out, he was a neighborhood local who lived in the area but his family could somehow afford (yeah, I’m guessing meth) to send him to college (and a prestigious COMMUNITY college at that) and he took some classes with one our roommates. This kid, I’ll call him Neil (’cause his name is Neil) and his father apparently knew Jack or something. And apparently Jack’s meth-induced paranoia led him to, when he left our party, to NOT ACTUALLY LEAVE OUR PARTY but instead creep over to our open kitchen window to listen to what Neil was saying about him. I guess Jack was very keen on rumor control. I also guess that Jack was tweaked out of his mind on meth (did I mention that before? I think I may have mentioned that). My roommate had innocently asked Neil about Jack after he “left” and Jack didn’t like what he heard. Maybe they thought his mustache came off as too “film school” pretentious? No one truly remembers what was said, only that is was incredibly bland and brief. Not to Jack, though. Anyway, when we and the rest of the housemates all met in the kitchen to see what was happening, we managed to push them apart just long enough for Neil to launch into a string of high-pitched curses and a truly perplexed “what the fuck is wrong with-WHY ARE YOU HITTING ME!?” To which Jack responded with his own string of vulgarity and then launched back into a smacking fit. Again, not punching him, SLAPPING him. It was both violent and comedic…and strangely paralyzing. Then, as quickly as it began, Jack suddenly stormed out of the kitchen and out the front door, muttering some kind of apology. Okay, fucking weird. We all let out some nervous laughter until we suddenly realized his stooge hadn’t left the kitchen. He was just leaning against the wall, which is where he had silently been during this whole affair. I looked at him cockeyed, about to ask him why the fuck he was still there…and then I caught his eyes…and saw a small smile crack face. What did he know? In a flash and out of nowhere, Jack was back in the kitchen and smacking Neil again. It was like a fucking rerun. What the fuck was happening? Neil responded in kind.
“Wha-why are you…STOP SLAPPING ME…I’M SO FUCKING CONFUSED!”
I looked at the stooge again. Same smile. Same knowing smile. He’s been through this before. As Jack’s little bitch, he knew what were only just finding out: this was far from over. My stomach dropped a little. Then the sound of white-trash biker hand slapping terrified young skin brought me back. Fuck this. Jack Slap-Happy was going down and getting carried the fuck out of our house. But before we could close in on him, the whole fucking world just tipped down the rabbit hole. Jack took Neil by the neck and dragged him to the corner of the kitchen, where he began the most awkward and perverted dialogue my still-young ears had ever heard and I’ll just paraphrase out of a sense of decency (and yes, this is the extremely edited and tamed version, folks):
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO YOU IN PRISON, BOY?! WE’D PASS YOU AROUND LIKE A CARTON OF CIGARETTES, YOU PIECE OF SHIT! WE’D ALL FUCK YOU IN THE ASS! WE’D MAKE YOU SUCK ALL OUR DICKS!” He grabbed Neil’s head. “SUCK MY DICK RIGHT NOW-”
“Holy fuck, I’m gonna puke!”
I don’t remember who said that, but it pretty much summed it up right fucking there. We had an ex-con male rapist in our kitchen assaulting a guy we didn’t know and attempting to obtain…umm…oral satisfaction from him. They don’t have manuals or standard operating procedures for this stuff. I don’t care who you are. If that kitchen had been full of hardened, Special OPs Rangers they would have been equally horrified and perplexed. Do we attack? Do we run? Do we start screaming like little girls on a haunted hayride? I looked at his stooge, still leaning against the wall. He looked me in the eye and mouthed “he’s crazy, man. He’s craaaazy.” You think? Do ya’, fuck face? Do you think your perverted rapist biker buddy is just a little head-fucked? Then the stooge took us to the very bottom of the rabbit hole. He nudged his head toward Jack and his fanny pack.
“Gun”, he mouthed.
I think we have all had times of extreme stress when we truly wished, regardless of what we have achieved to that point, that we had never been born. That, right there, was example numero uno. You see, we were already paralyzed by the fact that if any of us attacked Jack and somehow got our ass beat…it might not end there. This guy had already made it VERY clear what his little hobby was. And now there was the very real possibility of a gun being pointed at someone’s head in the near future. The room began to spin. The “Dueling Banjos” were in full, thunderous swing in my head. Neil suddenly looked like a very young Ned Beatty. I found myself wishing for a well-aimed arrow to whip into Jack’s neck from the bow of a very spry Burt Reynolds. Then, unexplainably, by some lucky twist of fate, Jack’s meth levels must have leveled off as he suddenly threw Neil to the side and rushed out of the house again. This guy was like the male “Cybil”. Okay, we know where this was going this time. I grabbed the stooge by the neck and forced him out the front right behind Jack, slammed the door and quickly dead bolted it. I turned around and we all stared at each other. Every face was pale. Every mouth wide open. Neil was slumped against the wall still whining to himself.
“What…the…FUCK…is wrong…with that guy…a carton of cigarettes?”
Before any of us could say another word, we heard Jack screaming from outside. I carefully peeped my head into the window and saw Jack standing in our yard, arms extended.
“If I ever catch any one of you out here..I WILL FUCK YOU IN THE ASS! WELCOME TO BALLENTYNE, MOTHERFUCKERS!”
And he was gone. We honestly didn’t know what the fuck to do. Call the cops? We just served alcohol to about 100 underage kids. Neil was already gone, out the back door and back to wherever he crawled from. We had no idea where Jack lived or if his threat was valid or just the last remanents of a drug-fueled rage. Jack held all the cards…and we never saw him again.
What ever became of Jack is still a topic of debate among us boys to this day. Maybe he’s dead and gone, a victim of the crazy world of leather, meth, and fanny packs. Maybe he one day saw the light and cleaned himself up. Maybe he has his own WordPress blog talking about the virtues of sobriety and the dangers of selling people for cartons of cigarettes. Or maybe…just maybe…that really was William Forsythe, partaking in a little role research with some unsuspecting college punks. But what he definitely was and is…is a fucking legend. Pure lore.
Now what do I believe? (pause for dramatic effect…I’ll wait) I’ll just say this…I LOVED you in Duece Bigalow, you crazy old man.
The Rant Machine 