"The hair of the dog that bit you."

Barney Mancuso feared going home sober—home alone to his crackerjack box apartment—after seeing his ex-wife, nearly as much as he used to fear coming home to her sober from his shit homicide job. That job, that one nagging loathsome burden, was at once his pain and his pill; that which provided his purpose and identity and at the same time robbed him of everything else. Although he often drank on duty to smooth out the edges and the rough spots, work generally kept him sober more reliably than anything other than sleep.

And so it was that Barney found himself downtown at the Golden Terrace, drinking and watching the naked girls dance. This was like a time machine for him, a reverie on his youth, for he would never touch a woman again. He was done, off the market. He was married to a nice Mexican girl who changed her dresses with every purchase. It would be wrong to say he was in love with her, but rather that Tequila was simply the girl with the taste to tease him and the soft touch to plug up the hole in his soul. It was also untrue that he was a good husband—even to Tequila—as he often cheated on her with a fine Russian lunch date and the occasional Irish girl…

The barmaid—past her prime, getting heavy and fading, and therefore inestimably attractive to Barney, who was geometrically all of those things—placed her hand on the back of his. “You want another, Sweetie?”

Barney nodded ‘yes,’ and she smiled in a worried fashion, because she seemed to care, and poured him another.

“Hey, Sweetie, you’ve been coming in here for two years now, and I still don’t know your name. You just smile—but not today. You’re obviously a cop. But I don’t know a thing about you, never even heard your voice. What gives?”

He said, as smoothly as he could manage, “I like to hear you say Sweetie, Helen. I’m good.”

She nodded with wide open eyes and backed off with a smile. It was sometime around nine he supposed, and he was still East of Sober, that dry-feeling place that did not permit him to leave the worries of his day behind. The screeching wreckage of his marriage continued to echo in the back of his mind as the world outside on the street was finally darker than this one. He drew the ankh and the eye on a spare napkin with his pen, over and over again in different sizes

The lawyer next to him was continuing to get obnoxious—but he was buying all the drinks, had won a big malpractice suit and was spreading it around. He leaned over and kissed Barney on the top of his balding head and slurred, “I love you guys! You guys are the bessss!” spit spraying down over his head and across the back of the hand that Barney reflexively used to cover his glass when being spoken to by spit-flingers.

The tall young lawyer then staggered toward the men’s room again, and once again entered the dancer’s dressing room. Helen was yelling at Tito the bouncer, “Jesus Tito, could you stop him already!”

Barney had not a care in the world, just looked up at the little automaton-like Korean dancer as she crawled buck naked up the twenty foot pole to the ceiling, the crystal in her clitoral ring sparkling in the spotlight.

Tito was carrying the lawyer out as he mumbled and drooled and said he loved everybody. Then Helen shouted “Wait,” just as the Korean girl spun down the pole like a falling flower petal to reach out and take Barney’s tip with a plastic smile, “bring him here.”

Tito hauled the lawyer back from the front door—the man’s feet never touching the floor—and held him out over the bar. Helen pulled out a credit slip, stuffed the lawyer's credit card back in his shirt pocket beneath his suit-jacket, put a pen in his hand, and commanded, “Sign on the line, Sweetie.”

The lawyer signed. Helen took back her receipt and pen, and then nodded to Tito, who rumbled, “Off you go boss,” and carried the man outside.

Helen winked at Barney, as she shut the till drawer, and came to lean on the bar before him. “Can you believe that guy? He spent forty-eight-hundred in four hours—in this place. His wife needs to kick his ass.”

“Hey Sweetie," she said, as her smile ignited on cue as ‘the pork rind eater’ shuffled up next to Barney. This man rarely stood next to Barney. He never sat. Every night, after the boxing gym above closed, he came downstairs with a bag of barbecued pork rinds, drank one Miller Genuine Draft with his snack, left a dollar for Helen, and walked out. Barney made a habit of timing this fellow, as his trade was one that leaned heavily on observable habits. If this guy ever murdered someone Barney would have his ass in a sling in two days flat.

The fellow was about forty, a mixed-race Asian/black military brat if he ever saw one. He was a trainer at the gym, and talked freely to those who would listen about his trade, among which Barney did not count, as he had limited patience for a repetitive idiot who was not cuffed to a chair.

His hair a bit long and curly, the smallish man seemed fit and pleasant enough if banality was your thing, and stayed for precisely 14 minutes every evening, his digestive track apparently working in perfect synchrony week-in week-out, despite what he was shoveling into it.

Then life got interesting again.

A deep Motown voice that should have been crooning an extinct love song came over his left shoulder as a long black-sleeved arm reached out for the shoulder of ‘the pork rind eater’ with a massive calloused dark brown hand, “Pork Eater,” said the voice of this later day Barry White, “we have business, upstairs.”

The eyes on the man bugged out as he choked on his unhealthy snack, and then quickly turned with a respectable recovery, “What you need Poet? That new white collar boxa I sent ova work out fo ya?”

Barry White as a Black Panther growled, “Oh he was white alright!” and dragged the man away.

The tall muscular man—not real big, but well-sized for the level of menace he projected—was dragging the boxing trainer out through the front door past Tito, who was holding up his hands fearfully and shaking his head like he had no problem with the abduction. Barney turned to Helen, who was at the bar behind him, “What the hell?”

“He comes in occasionally to talk to that Emanuel. Never drinks. Never speaks to a white. Tito knows him—some trainer from another gym.”

Tito was pulling the door shut by the time Barney managed to get off the stool without ripping his pants and left a tip for Helen, who was asking him to stay.

He felt it necessary to flash his badge to Tito, “What is that about?”

Tito, shifting side-to-side like every brother who did not want to be taken for a rat, answered without making eye contact, “It’s a boxing thing, over some shit Emanuel done. Dat dude is a Black Muslim and Emanuel done sent him a white boxer—a federal cop—as kind of a joke. Ain’t no one gonna get kilt over this dumb shit. I figure Emmanuel be gettin’ bitch-slapped over dis shit. I told ‘im it was a dumbass idea.”

Tito waved in a couple of patrons and then eased back against the wall as Barney considered things. That’s my guy, I know it—fits everything that twerp Kersarge said, fits the description of the vigilante that just happened to mention the same name as the kid I found dead while he was stomping another one out—no, no! That’s it. I died of a heart attack at the library downing the Smirnoff. This is Kersarge’s goddamned novel and I’m his doomed private eye. Shit does not work like this in real life!

Tito began rambling, “He a good dude really, old school guy, original rapper—rhyme’s his words en shit. He jus’ wit dat Farookhan crowd, don’ like y’all white folks. Emanuel was out a line wit dat shit—sent some buff Secrete Service mofo over dare ta spar. I mean da idea was funny as shit. But Emanuel ain’ laughin’ no mo.”

“Thanks Tito,” Barney said as he pushed out the door and turned on the sidewalk and gazed up to the gym above on the second floor just as the light flicked on upstairs, yellowing the unwashed window; a window, that once, many decades ago, displayed women’s finery, men’s hats, shoes….

One could not see into the gym from down on the sidewalk, but Barney did hear a resounding slap so loud that it recalled a bundle of tar paper being dropped by a roofer.

Another, louder, slap came and then the sound of a body hitting the canvas-covered plank floor of a boxing ring.

He looked back at Tito, peering worriedly from the strip-club door, as if he, a heavyweight boxer and bouncer of some repute, feared that this ‘Poet’ character would slap him as well for being the most reviled thing in Baltimore a black man can be, ‘a snitch.’

“Later Tito,” he said as he tipped his non-existent hat to the bouncer, who smiled a smile of relief.

“Later,” said Tito.

Barney Mancuso, Homicide detective with the makings of a multiple-homicide closure serendipitously dropped into his lap, sauntered with confidence—as well as a fat man could manage, that is—for the first time in ages it seemed, across the dark summer street to his car. On the far side he paused long enough to see a small man with curly hair bounce off the ropes up in the show window ring, only to be cuffed, like a mouse by a cat, by the hand of the hard dark-faced man they called Poet.

“Ah, Mister ‘Poet,’ I hope you mind your manners better than all that when ‘Big City’ Mancuso comes knocking on your door.”