Basically, at that stage in my life my goal was to get as much pussy as humanly possible: most of this probably happened when I was nineteen.

Bridget was the older half-sister of Tony. She became a stripper and was partying. She was right nice looking, blonde, not huge tits, but decent size, shapely—basic stripper build. Vida was her friend. They had an apartment together at Taylor Park Apartments—a stripper apartment, parties all the time, stripper friends. I loved it, was getting all kinds of pussy in there. They got kicked out of there so they get a place in Tall Trees. Probably something to do with Vida—she was from Essex.

Vida was a brunette, nice looking girl, nice breasts and ass and child-bearing hips. I preferred Bridget. Me and Bridget’s brothers and different friends often would go over and party and stay the night, sometimes several nights. Being strippers, it was always about alcohol and drugs and getting fucked up with other strippers. Pot and cocaine—a lot of cocaine, a big stripper drug. The important thing is they would get drunk and high and we would get laid. Bridget was setting her brothers up with these other strippers.

I was riding with some guys to work, I’m eighteen-nineteen. I had a car, but it is common to carpool to sites. We went in to Escape [a strip club on U.S. Route #40] and the guy that was driving had a few drinks and wanted to go, so I told them I would stay and get a cab home. I was having fun. I was getting a good grove going on with this one blonde dancer. I’m groping her, she’s groping me. The problem happened when I started getting drunk and this other blonde dancer, who kind of favored her, came up and I grabbed her and she jumped back, said, “That’s not allowed—asshole!” and called the bouncers over.

One at first grabs me by the right shoulder while I’m sitting on the barstool, so I came over and smacked him in the face with the whiskey glass and slit my [left ] palm open. I think we were both cut. They were big redneck, weightlifter bouncers. I hadn’t been paying too much attention to them. They were all over me.

My first sensation after that was being on the ground and they had my arms and legs and around the neck—five of them on me—they threw me out that fuckin’ door like a duffle bag. My face hit the parking lot and got all scraped up. I got up and challenged them to a fight and they told me they had called the cops, so I just left. This was before cell phones, so I start walking west on Route Forty.

If I woke up with a black eye and a split lip and a fat chick next to me I knew I had a good night.

I was planning on walking down to Golden Ring to catch the Fifty-Five over to Hamilton. At some point, I see the railroad tracks and went over there. I had railroad people in my family and was drawn there and went to sleep next to the tracks. I used to dream about hopping a box car when I was a kid. I grew up with country music. My grandmother had Box Car Willy’s ten-inch LP.

I wake up in the weeds on the embankment next to the tracks—I was really fucked up. The sun come up and I woke up. I walked down to Golden Ring, a few miles, two at least, caught the Fifty-Five, this would be a Saturday morning. This was when the mall was still there, before the Walmart and the present situation.

I looked like a hell of a mess. Everyone on the bus probably thought I was nuts. I rode over to Harford Road, got off and walked home. I went and laid in bed. I woke up a little while later and the damage assessment really hit home. I went in the bathroom to take a shower and was picking gravel out of the road rash on the side of my face. That’s when I started seeing ticks all over me—I was covered with them, hair, crotch legs, arm pits—on the sack! I got tweezers out and started plucking and the water in the toilet ended up black form all the ticks. There were hundreds of them. I went out into the living room and asked my mother to pull them out of my scalp. Ticks are always around tracks and they must have come out of the woodwork to feed on me.

Some people want you to get high with them. I just said "No." But I was a heavy drinker so I had that going for me. I tried weed a few times. it just wasn’t for me. It’s not my thing. But as far as the War on Drugs, it [drugs] ought to be legal. But you’ll never see that because so many people have their careers hanging on the backs of junkies: law enforcement, parole and probation, prisons, lawyers, rehabilitation industry—the methadone manufacturers and the prescription drug industry. A lot of people go to college for a career that hinges on dealing with drug addicts. Addicts aren’t going nowhere. And the amount of money involved means people in the government are profiting off of letting all these drugs in. These college people make their living from the backs of the heroin addict, a wretched creature. You know people in the government are wetting their chops on the money. It’s too much money for people to not get involved, especially people in the government—there you’re talking about blood-suckers anyway. If they legalized the hard drugs think of all the people they’d put out of work—it’s a multibillion dollar industry. These are decent paying jobs, secure government jobs that pay a pension, even the number people to monitor the whole thing—so drug addiction ain’t goin’ anywhere. The cure to all this has to wait until the dollar comes crashing down. How many dollars can they print—there is going to come a time when too much is too much and it’s all coming home. Greedy people all go to the well one too many time. Some day there will be a reckoning—It’s a runaway train, can’t do nothing ‘til it crashes. All it will take is for the U.S. dollar to crash and people will be getting skinned on the street.

We—Eddie and me—met Sandy, who worked at Memories or Gails—one of the places on Northpoint and she lived with three of these other dancers and we got together with them at their place. My goal was to try to fuck these four girls, nice looking strippers dancing around smoking and drinking, only a couple years older than me. They had this other girl who was drunk and had run over a mail box and someone called her tag number into the police. She lived there—one of the roommates. The cops come knock on the door. She went and threw the damned door open and the cops smell the pot and come on in. They come in and start arresting everybody. I had maybe one beer. I tell the cop, “Hey do I look high or drunk? I know you’ve been trained in this.”

He called his sergeant over and said, “Hey, he doesn’t look like he’s under the influence.”

I thought I was going to get out of it and the sergeant says, “Arrest them all.”

Got booked at the station and had to go to court. I had to wait ten or twelve hours to see the commissioner and he let me out on my own recog and I received a court date in the mail. I went and pled not guilty to possession of marijuana and they found me guilty. I got a year probabtion. The interesting part about that was when I went to the probation officer in Towson he knew one of my dad’s cousins. I got a real easy time out of it. Instead of giving me a piss test once or twice a week, he let me come and say high once a month. The important, tragic part, was that I never ended up fucking any of those strippers.

Louann, I met when she was walking down Harford Road and I just walked up to her and talked to her—I used to get a lot of pussy doing that. She was a blonde with a huge set of nuts [breasts], nice ass, good dancer stock. I started going out with her. She was a dancer, I would pick her up after work, She worked at Club Chez Joey on the Block [Baltimore Street] I was about twenty, she was a little older.

It was probably Fall, because I had a BDU jacket on. I was driving the Chevy Cavalier, headed downtown to pick her up after work, I got down there about quarter after two a.m. I would pick her up usually at exactly quarter after. She’d call me at about one-thirty and wake me up. It was Friday night. It’s always nuts down there on Friday night and I remember I was pissed that I had to work the next morning. I was turning from Water Street onto Baltimore, traffic is backed up a little bit and there’s people running back and forth across the street—It’s chaos when people are getting out of the bars and the girls are getting off work.

There’s a dindu standing right there in front of me. I stop and he kicks the grille and slaps my hood.

I had a piece of one-inch electrical conduit—in was a stainless steel pipe, sixteen inches—that I had poured about four inches of hardened cement into. I had made this on the job and had this under my seat for just this kind of occurrence. When transporting pussy of Louann’s obvious quality, one could never be too well prepared for dumb shit from dumb dindus.

I grabbed it from between my legs under the seat with my right hand, threw the door open with the left and was headed out to use it. I was taught that when you commit to violence you do the deed and don’t give them any room to breathe.

I step out behind the door, walked around the door and confronted him.

My keys were in the car—I didn’t say it was perfect.

It was idling in park.

I would say this guy is in his late twenties—early thirties.

My father taught me that with blunt objects [used as a weapon] you thrust first so that you don’t give them any reaction time.

I’ve got the conduit at the ready and I walk up and stab him right in the face with it.

He threw his hands up to grab his face and I brought it up and hit him on the crown of the head.

Have you ever seen in a boxing match where I guy’s head goes down forward and then his legs go and he falls back?

That’s what happned, he was [stemming from nervous system shock] on the ground.

So I hit him again. That’s when his head opened up—opened up like a wedge—like someone hit him with a hatchet.

When it opened up it was like a blood factory with pink cottage cheese coming out. The blood was thick. It was really dark blood, but this pink cottage cheese—which at the time I thought was brains, but it was probably fat—really left an impression. I “split him to the white meat,” as the dindus like to say.

I hit him again, getting ready to.

I felt myself getting punched in the body behind the left elbow, to the left side.

I can’t tell you if he came up squared as a southpaw behind me or if he came to my side as a righty.

I spun around with the weapon [with checking left hand half-extended into a low wing block] and he turned around and tried to take off.

I spun and threw a hail Mary swing and clipped him on the back of the head, clipped him to the outside right of the skull and he went down.

I didn’t think I got a good purchase on it, but it was enough that he dropped.

He fell back towards me and started rolling over onto all fours to get back up.

I hit him on the back of the neck or head at the base of the skull.

I didn’t want to get away, I wanted to win, wanted to destroy these fucking guys! [emphasis imparted quietly]

This whole time this happened I didn’t notice any weapon of any kind.

He goes back down and the attention turns to my car, the engine on, the door open.

He’s on the ground grabbing his head, covering up.

It’s literally dozens of people crowded around yelling, dindus, windus, the whole nine yards.

I jumped over him, got in the car, shut the door. There’s people chest-to-chest they’re so crowded and I’m in my car behind the wheel before somebody stole it.

People are all up a against the car and I start moving it, towards the police station at Gay Street.

Traffic is clearing, people are being pushed along by the car. The guy in front of the car I really tried to go around. I was already afraid that I had killed him, that I had beat his brains out.

But people weren’t stepping aside—were yelling in at me, hands on the car.

I ran over the first guy’s with the split open head legs with the car.

The car made a “do, do,” motion like a speed bump.

I was getting the hell away from the scene of the crime.

I ride down and Louann—what a body she had—is standing on the street waiting on me.

I pull over.

She gets in and the first thing she said is she thought she saw me outside the car.

Then I told her I was in a fight and that’s when I realized I was covered with sticky blood and realized that I was stabbed.

I started pressing off the steering wheel and pressing back hard against the seat to stop the blood. It was a lot of blood, jacket covered, pants and socks and shoes were full of blood.

I drive north on Gay Street, making that left turn at the police station, and headed out up Harford Road. She was crying and screaming because by then it was a horror show in the car. I told her, "If I pass out just push me over and drive the car to the hospital."

I drove myself to Good Samaritan over on Loch Raven across Cold Spring Lane. I pullup at the front of the emergency room. I got out and told her to go park the car.

I didn’t realize it but my lung got punctured and it popped loose and blew out as I walked in. By me keeping the pressure on the seat—according to the doctor—had kept it from popping.

I told the nurse I had been stabbed as I lost my breath.

It got real tight, I couldn’t breathe.

I was still standing.

When I told her I was stabbed they jumped into action. The first thing they did was cut all my clothes off and bathed me down to find the wounds and did what they had to do to get the blood to stop. I was telling them what was going on—how it felt. They stuck a needle up between my ribs with a hose on it and inflated my lung.

Then there was a series of tests. The nurses bathed me and gave me some medicines.

Louann, I had told to take the car home and park it. I don't imagine she was thrilled about sitting in all that blood. I thought I was gone to jail for murder, thought I had killed the guy.

I talked to a police officer—standard procedure in the emergency room.

I made up some story about being jumped.

They released me early in the morning the next day. I had been stabbed three times. They said it was like an ice pick, but longer like a sharpened screwdriver. They stitched the lung with saline stitches that dissolved and stitched the opening of the wound. The other two wounds they didn’t stitch just patched them, they were deep—but only the one hit the lung. It was three stabs, the lung, shoulder, and tricep.

Louann and I dated for a while after that and I moved on.

After that—and this was before the internet—I checked the paper to see if someone had been killed. I really thought I killed him.

That was before cell phones and when those bars let out everybody was drunk and high, so I suppose the police didn’t have anything more to go on than a big white boy.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival