I met Randy at a martial arts school, where he had been assigned to negotiate cross training between his school and my pickup group by his senior instructor. Randy is 40% of the composite character from The Sunset Saga, Randy Sterling Bracken, who appears in the following stories linked on this site. The fiction pieces below feature a character who speaks in the same style as this man who I interviewed six times and trained with on as many occasions.
Randy was six foot one and weighed in at only 160 pounds and was heavily tattooed. He was one of those lean guys with a real deep voice and his favorite saying was “All in Krishna, baby.” My initial interview was extensive and took place in his Highlandtown apartment, which he rented out above the Maryland Democratic Club.
He Said I Was Midnight Describing the Randy Bracken character
The ‘78 Pinto Recounting a word-for-word story of a visit to a whore house, in which I only changed the location and the identity of his friend.
Another Human Shield From Den of The Ender
From Beyond the Ember Star
Trent Jackson’s Profession A short story about a reader who hates the character.
The Introductory Interview
“I’ve been in a few gangs. The first one was when I was in Korea. We army brat kids had a gang that fought the Korean kids. You definitely did not want to get caught by MPs or Korean cops. By the time I was living back here I had it down to a science. I have never been caught by the cops.
“Number one is to always wear two different shirts when you go out to commit a crime, and a hat. After everyone runs you toss the hat and one of the shirts.
“Number two is you do not run but walk. Your stupid friends are running, let them draw the heat. It is the reason why you have friends to begin with, so you can get away with your crime. And, let’s face it; most criminals are pretty stupid, particularly young ones.
“Last, but not least, is you walk toward the sirens. The cops will just blow by you. A school book is a nice touch if you can swing it. You just have to stay cool, brother.”
“Sometimes you don’t run. The reason to pack up to begin with is that the Muds pack up, and they pack up because they are weak and group-oriented. So, separate them from the group, and the deed is half-done. Patterson Park was the hunting ground, where each group tried to catch the other unawares, out in the open, by themselves.”
He walked me past his water pipe, sprawling like some many-tentacled beast on a low glass table in the middle of the room, and over to a makeshift closet where his over clothes hung. The floor had a dull worn carpet, light green, I think, perhaps grayish blue. He tugged the lapel of an old bomber jacket, and, as it spun on the hanger, reached just inside the left collar and grabbed a sewing machine toggle, a little wooden gear without the pegs, just the wholes the pegs went into. He tugged the toggle and out came a foot long stainless steel shish kabob skewer, with very old age-blackened blood streaks and drops, dried to it. This was a fully serviceable long shank made from less than a dollar's worth of material scavenged from a lady's kitchen drawer and sewing kit. The toggle fit snuggly in the palm and the skewer protruded almost a foot from the fist as a punch dagger, the steel rod couched between the index and middle fingers just under the knuckles.
“I assure you, brother, that this is the original Mud ball juice from shanking one in the park, jammed right up into his nut sack. You should have seen the look on his face. The sound was surprising. I did not expect a hollow popping sound. I gather it was the jeans popping around the seam.”
[The isolation interview on this single account was done later, and is included in the book Don’t Get Boned, which owes its title to this encounter.]
“I asked you here to speak because I know about your studies and did not feel comfortable speaking about such things in the dojo. I also want your true opinion, as to the stick and knife stuff. I know you are doing your own thing. But still, you are using the rattan, the blade configurations of the Flips. I’ve trained with Raphael and worked the Wing Chun with him, because that’s Chinese and their civilized Northern Asian. Likewise the Koreans—I was raised in Korea by a TaeKwonDo instructor—I consider them closer to white than brown. And there is a purity to the Japanese, so I embrace their arts. But this, this rattan stick, it has always smacked of a Mud art.”
As he twirled my sticks with some skill I explained the foundations of Modern Agonistics, and that we were not an FMA club, and that I had no FMA affiliation or instruction, but saw nothing wrong with fighting against and training with FMA practitioners. We then scheduled an interview concerning his youth and his journey from punk, to skinhead, to born again Christian to a “devotee of Lord Krishna,” which would include a trip to an Indian temple near Washington D.C.
Randy was a practitioner of the two-handed hand shake, where he checked the back of your shaking hand with his off hand. He gave me such a handshake before we left his apartment together, and as we walked down the stairs to his small boxy SUV, said, “Brother, I am truly blessed. I’ve been adopted out of ugliness more than once, and can now see a clear path. Celibacy has been a friend to me in my search, so we’ll start with that* next time.”
*The whorehouse story in the second link above.
Notes
Going into this interview I had heard that Randy had been a member of Baltimore Area Skin Heads or BASH, a group who had a platform member named Thad [his real name] who was black. I knew one of the BASH platform members in the late eighties, and he tried to have me killed for punking him out in front of our black coworkers.
This mixed race aspect of Baltimore area skin head groups has held true for the 4th Reich and DMI ‘Brotherhood, Loyalty, Respect’. This aspect, the taint of Thad, gave me a fact to check. Randy nodded “yes” to the Thad fact, but did not want to discuss it. I never asked him about the guy I knew because I did not want this to be about my past, but his, and to this day do not know if Chad, the guy who tried to have me killed, was affiliated with Randy on a personal level, or if they even knew each other at all, as Randy entered the group later than Chad and both were hazy about when they entered, not really having heads for dates.
One day I hope to relocate Randy and do a wrap up interview. He was a really class guy. The vicious aspect of the fictional version of him came courtesy of the other ingredients of the composition character. He himself, was much more calm and deceptive when his ruthless side showed.
