After spending a winter without heat in the dive apartment, Ron Bone and I moved into Bone Head’s house that spring, and the corner of Bayonne and Bella Vista became a scene of a party every night but Thursday. The parties were “bring your own bottle.” As the host, Ron Bone drank some of this and some of that.

His gorgeous girlfriend, who was Italian and Indian, [I’ve known one other Indian Italian mix and she’s beautiful too, even at 70] and a figure skating instructor, would come over on Thursday night while we drank the left over beer and I cleaned my AR-7 and 20-guage and sharpened and oiled my bowie knife and meat hook. We went out shooting at what he insisted was a legal range, every Thursday afternoon. It turned out to be some drug dealer’s property, which I found out when Bone Head and I ventured there on our own one day and ended up looking down the barrel of an assault rifle.

Ron’s girl was only allowed to wear a shirt. No panties, leg covering or footwear were allowed. He used to beat her savagely when I wasn’t around, and she would keep coming back. He had a cat who smoked pot and drank, which he named Charlie Manson and he had trained to attack her legs. When he sent her downstairs for a beer the cat would wait and she would sneak until the cat pounced and then she was off and running for the beer, and back up the stairs. Ron Bone explained that she was “funny about her legs” since she was a figure skater, and that this method of his served the greater good because it entertained Charlie and made sure his beer was cold.

One night I came home to an empty house and heard Ron Bone’s plaintive voice from his bedroom. I entered and saw him sprawled across his water bed. He sat up with a huge knot on his forehead. Apparently, his girl had refused to go for another beer after Charlie got her once, and when he began to rise from the bed to make good on his threat to throw her down the stairs [one time he threw her down the stairs and as she stood out on the lawn and cussed him, threw stolen graveyard statuary at her from his bedroom window] she picked up his favorite reefer ash tray, a star-shaped glass thing that weighed “pounds” and hit him in the forehead with it, and left him out cold.

He admired her for the spunk and thought what she had done to him was commendable and hilarious. She would be back. Rone Bone had something that few males beyond the equine order possessed in such abundance, and she never seemed to break that spell.

Well, with his girl out of the picture that week, he broke his promise to me and invited dozens of people over that I did not know. I took my guns and knives up to my tiny bedroom which had no door and was next to the bathroom, and cleaned and sharpened my entire collection. Eventually, unable to get to sleep, I went downstairs and confronted Ron Bone about the crowd and the noise. He seemed contrite, even backed away from me in fear, and asked me to please not be mad.

I returned upstairs, then after about five minutes, I felt kind of bad about ruining his night, and beside, had noticed a girl that I fancied who had been looking at me while I confronted him, and decided to go join the party and commit to waking up to a hangover at six in the morning while Ron Bone filled the toilet to the flush mark with a night’s unreleased urine.

I went downstairs, putting my shirt on first, so as not to seem like such a nutty hillbilly, and stepped into an empty living room with half drunk beer bottles all about. Ron Bone was standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open—the door to our ever-empty beer cooler—with a big grin on his face, humming his favorite Yes song to himself and stamping his feet as he made his selection.

I asked him where everybody went.

He said, “Well, Mork, after you went upstairs someone asked me who you were and why you were so pissed. I said, ‘Oh, that’s my roommate, the one that lives at the top of the stairs and cleans his guns and knives all day. He was pissed about the party.’ It took them thirty seconds to clear the house—they left enough beer for the week!”

It was a set up from the beginning, so I grew wary of Ron Bone including me in anything. I was becoming the psychotic maniac who lived with the cool party host.

One day, Ron Bone, having borrowed his girl’s car, offered to drive me around and run whatever errands I needed done, so we did so, getting myself a new pair of work boots. Then, as we sat at a traffic light, he said, “Hey, Mork, John is meeting me at this guy’s office. I lost track of time—need to be there in ten minutes. Could you come?”

“Dude, is this a drug deal?”

“No, I wouldn’t do that to you, Mork—promise.”

We pulled up at the first office building in Towson off of Joppa Road, just past the Black and Decker building. John, a biker, was there, with a Hobart meat scale in the bed of his pickup truck. Ron Bone picked it up like it was nothing and asked me to hold the door for him, as we walked toward the door that didn’t need held because some dude in a suit was holding it and John was grousing in the background about some “crazy shit.”

The suit walked us to an elevator in this posh building and let us in. When Ron Bone and I were in the elevator he said, “Are you packing one of your knives?”

“No, I was going shopping for shoes!”

“Do you have any kind of weapon?”

I palmed an ink pen, the first time I can recall imagining a writing implement as a weapon since stabbing this big dude in front of Mister Richardson on my first day of high school.

He frowned, “Can you stop someone with that?”

“Unlikely, if he’s as fit and alert as the guy in the lobby.”

I was pissed and he was literally sweating, worry written on his face.

Another suit ushered us into what was not an office, but a penthouse apartment, where a wimpy looking thirty-year-old dude with soft brown hair and watery blue eyes, who was dressed like some rich brat on vacation, sat on a couch. He motioned for Ron Bone to place the scale on the coffee table in front of him, as the second suited guy, a dude with a blonde crew cut and a thick neck, who I figured would make short work of me, stood with his back to the door looking directly at me as I paced back and forth, his hands folded before his belt buckle.

Ron Bone and this watery-eyed rich guy had a low muffled negotiation which I did not want to hear, and tuned out, while I glared at the muscle guy in the suit who was blocking the way out while I paced back and forth. Eventually I heard friendly words, saw a hand shake out of the corner of my eye, and felt relief as Ron Bone’s giant hand came down on my shoulder and the man before us stepped aside to let us leave.

When we got into the hallway Ron Bone ran for the stairs and I followed, running down behind him, hustling out through the lobby, and getting into his girl’s car and pulling off as quickly as possible. I never knew he was that damned quick. As we pulled off I was relieved but angry, and just glared at him. He apologized, pulled over, showed me 17 hundred dollar bills, and gave me one. I took it and resolved to use it as part of a security deposit for my own place, making a mental note never to go anywhere with Ron Bone again.

I soon stopped drinking, moved out, got a place with my wife to be, and then realized, I had left my shotgun behind at Bone Head’s place, and that, it being a perfect home defense weapon, I should retrieve it.

I had a wool army surplus blanket to wrap it up in, and walked the two miles to his place. When I knocked on the door some big, tattooed, bearded, biker I did not recognize answered the door. I just said, “I came for my shotgun.”

He nodded and let me in. There were about five bikers lounging around smoking and drinking with five mostly naked chicks who looked like they should have been in high school, not with a bunch of bikers ten years older than me.

They were watching the Mel Gibson movie The Road Warrior.

I picked my way through the alternately dainty and leather-clad bodies, saw the 20 gauge still on the rack in the dining room over Bone Head’s 1898 8 mm Mauser, wrapped it up as the lead guy watched, nodded to him, and walked out past him, assuming Ron Bone was bedded down with someone upstairs.

That was not my last dealing with Ron Bone, but after standing next to him in that elevator as he sweated and contemplated selling some stolen merchandise to someone he was afraid of, I was done with Ron Bone as a friend.