Sunday, January 5, 2014

Showdown at the Genc Motel: A Tale of Random Youth and Exhuberant Violence

This is the first chapter of the novel; DOPE STORIES that is to be published and available in 2014.

    I was young and certainly naive but I was becoming quickly aware of the strain between two distinct roles within myself. I could see the need for nonviolence of course, and a mutual respect for other human beings. I was also very aware though of an animal inside me; an evolutionary leftover that all my life's socialization had attempted to suppress.  I was compulsively driven by a need deep within myself, a need that had to be quite common among people of a certain age for there were so many others willing to oblige this desire.
  
  As a group, there quickly came a point when the violence was who we were.  The need to fight and to test ourselves dictated all of our other actions. It decided who we hung out with and where we could go.  If you weren't willing to fight at any time, you weren't one of the regulars.  It was what we were known for.  We were admired for it as much as we were hated for it.  Some were just drawn to it.
    On the night at the little rundown motel on the edge of town, all the regulars were there, but for some reason a bunch of people that we never usually hung out with were there too.  They all wanted a piece.  I don't know if these people were looking to prove themselves to our group or if maybe the need for retribution was so electric that the others had caught it.  It didn't matter. It would have been just as bad if there'd only been three of us. Instead there was somewhere around twenty. It was a statement that had to be made.  It said everything about who we were and where we lived.

    We had been drinking our way towards chaos every night for so long.  We had left a wake of so much damage around our town that we were being invited to fewer places every weekend.  It came to a point where if one or a few of us was invited anywhere it was with the strict instruction that the rest of our group could not know about it.  Sometimes we obliged, sometimes we came in throngs and ransacked a place.  We couldn’t even trust ourselves anymore.

    Sid had been invited out though, whisked away by three girls that orbited our group of friends.  They had been invited to a little party at some hotel room by three guys from some other town that nobody knew.  It wasn’t smart of them to go without telling the rest of us but they were smart enough to at least bring Sid along.  The boys at the hotel of course didn’t like the appearance of their uninvited guest though.  They’d probably had big plans and when those came crashing down it was Sid who got the penalty for it.

    When we saw Sid the next day he was more a mess than usual.  One eye was bloody red with a disfigured lump of swollen purple flesh all around it.  The whole other side of his face was swelled up and he showed us the massive bruises on his body.  He’d gotten good and drunk, which was kind of the way of things at the time, so he didn’t really recall how it had all started.  He knew however that these three guys had jumped him and stomped him while he was down until the girls could drag Sid out of there and get back to familiar territory.

    There was of course no way that we could just let that sit. Sid had been my best friend for a long time.  He had never hesitated to include me in anything or to offer me some of anything he ever had.  He’d never questioned or mocked a single thing I’d done and I did tend to do a ton of stupid shit. I think he’d been like that with most people and all kinds of people had been drawn close to him for it.

     The plan just kind of fell together.  The girls, feeling somewhat responsible, were willing to lure these three guys in.  They went to their town to pick them up and brought them right to us.  The story they’d been sold on was that there was a party going on at this trashy little motel.  Everyone in our town knew the motel well.  It was a cheap place to party and it was owned by a Chinese family who didn’t have the command of the English language to bother any of the seedy clientele or bring the police around.  I imagine that all sorts of terrible things took place there over the years.  It was secluded in its own little corner on the edge of town but close enough to our neighborhoods that we could disappear from there quick when we needed to.

    We had people waiting around every corner of the building.  We had people in the bushes.  I remember that one guy that I’d been waiting in the bushes with found a log lying there, and showed it off proudly with a demented grin on his face.

    The girls pulled into the little parking lot with the three guys in the car.  They let the guys out and told them that their other friend was already inside.  They were told to just go on in while the girl’s went to pick up someone else.  The girls were gone again before there could be any questions.  I could see these three guys huddled apprehensively in the center of the parking lot.  Soon they had their courage gathered to walk up to the door of the room that they’d been told the party was in.  As they neared this door, one of the guys who had shown up just for the fight came around the corner like he’d been taking a leak.

    “Hey, you guys here for the party?” He called out.

    One of the guys went over to talk to him while the other two stood close to the door.  This guy from our side started chatting their boy up and as his friends went to knock on the door as the two of them shook hands.  The door was pulled open by some very confused foreigner who had obviously already been in bed.  

    It was as if it all happened in slow motion as the kid in front of the door turned puzzled towards his friend.  Our friend had a hold of his hand.  The kid tried to pull away from what he thought was just an awkward handshake when he was smashed in the side of the face with a left hook just as a horde of us came pouring out of the bushes and around both sides of the building. 

    One of them sprinted off at the first sign of danger like a bolt of lightning.  I don’t think anyone got a single piece of him.  The one in front of the room tried dashing off too but we fell upon him just outside the office.  I was the closest to him and I remember being the first one to him.  As he ran towards the sidewalk just outside the office door I made a jump at him from behind and got the toe of my boot into the back of his knee just as his weight was coming down on that leg.  It brought him sprawling to his hands and knees on the hard concrete.  I could see the terror in his eyes as he looked up to see me standing over him as the rest of the crowd converged on top of him.  Fists and feet, and one proud log came raining down on his body. I dropped the whole weight of myself behind my fist on him, smashing into his cheek with everything I could.  Dull, sickening thuds emanated from him as everyone came pushing each other out of the way, even the women of our group, to get a piece of him.  I got a good angle on him and gave him a punt to the ribs.  

   Somehow he scrambled half way to his feet and pulled the door open, lunging into the office and screaming for someone to call the police as more and more of us squeezed into the tiny office with him to give him the rest.  He tried crawling towards the counter.  People were already running, knowing the police would be there soon.  Some went after his friend who had slipped loose somehow in the melee.  A few of us had just a little bit more to give.  He was crawling for a space where he could get behind the counter.  I brought my boot down on his hand and felt it crunch beneath my foot as his high pitch scream filled the air and he rolled over to clutch his hand to his chest.  The Chinese family who owned the place was all there, watching it happen; too fast and too violent to respond yet.

    It was time to go.  I ran out the door.  People were running in every direction.  Sid was in the street and he yelled for me.  I caught up with him just as another guy did and Sid pointed to a spot along a fence twenty yards off.  Back lit by the highway I saw two silhouettes move suddenly in a dash.  It was them.  They had no idea where they were or where to go.  We had no time to regroup.  The three of us stalked them through the neighborhoods that we’d played games like this in throughout our entire lives.  They got lucky.  They made it to a gas station with a couple of cops inside before we ever got to them.  We could see them begging the cops for help through the large glass windows.  The cops hardly cared, but they were out of our reach then.  We moved on and never saw them again.

    It’s not something I’m especially proud of, but it was something that just had to be done.  I estimate that if things had been meant to be any different the universe wouldn’t have conspired to bring all the pieces so perfectly together for us.  I write about it just to demonstrate the chaos that had become our lives.  This was a fairly savage part of our existence; nearly the bottom of a long running downward spiral for us in those days.  There had been violence before; plenty of it, but not like this. It hadn’t always been like this but we had become addicted to the doom of it all.  I think that Sid and I had it the worst.  This was just before I would finally leave all I knew behind and move far away from all of my friends.  This of course is just how it had to be.  The doom was seeping in hard and we were all losing control.  If the natural course of events hadn’t sent us all on our own way I’m certain now that tragedy would be coming for us all, and for some, on the outskirts of our group, it did come.





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