The Benny Poda Years
21 - Baltimore, Once More
Kevin McGowin
The time had MORE than come for me to fight that bastard Luke Primo.
I did not simply intend to fuck up his shit: I meant to fucking Rape his Corpse, man. I trailed him to a bar called The Rigid Interdiction and sat there for about thirty minutes until he was inside real good, and then I hit the pipe a few good times and made my goddamn entrance.
I caught up with the bastard in the back by the bathrooms, where he was locked in a tonsil-to-tonsil kissing embrace with somebody else's woman, and in profile it was like their faces were ONE, ONE cheek instead of two, and without so much as a word I hauled back and HIT that cheek just as hard as I possibly could, and I nailed it, too. You could hear their teeth breaking off in each others' mouths while they fell back against the Wall, and she just slid right down it but that bastard Luke Primo was reeling but still standing, and that's when I knew I had a Fight on My Hands. And I was glad of it, too, Bub.
When you REALLY want to fight, you don't stand there and talk mano tough shit like John Wayne in the Movies. You just fucking FIGHT and shut the FUCK up. Now, Luke Primo had, to his knowledge, never seen me before in his Life. God knows what he thought, and who gives a petrified weasel's pecker, either. People like Luke better know that sooner or goddamn later, Matthew, Mark, John, and Paul are gonna make a run at them, and that he'd be ready I never had any doubt. So when he pulled his blade, bleeding and still reeling a little, I harpooned him in the balls with the lesser of the two cues Jones had bought me, and when he was doubling over, I drop kicked him in the throat so hard you could hear his Adam's apple pop like a ripe zit, man.
He was choking and bleeding out the mouth like some motherfucker doing a bad Gene Simmons imitation on Halloween. But I had plans for him yet. A pool cue, up the ass, like some poker they reamed out people with in the goddamn Tower of London.
He'd up and dropped his Blade after that kick, so I grabbed it and slashed a gash through his Levis, right down the crack, and was about to just shove that fucker in.
But something happened that only happens in REAL fights, son, the ones where you're fighting for your life and if you feel pain, like I'm pretty goddamn sure Luke was feeling, you become even more of an animal than he was in the first place. He turned around and grabbed the cue and with it against my throat he ran me back, like, 30 yards, man. And he was STRONG. And I'll bet his juices were pumping so hard he could have thrown a Volkswagen across home plate, too. He nailed me into a pool table and I have never, EVER, felt such lower back excruciation. But my hands were still free, and I brained him with the 6 of stripes and he lost his grip and I broke that goddamn cue in half over his fucking SKULL.
Did it knock him out? No. The head is a tough part of the body, son. He grabbed a solid and threw it and it made my nose spew blood like Vesuvius spurted lava. And then he had a cue in HIS hands, too. We were charging each other like Dark Age jousters, and pretty much cancelled each OTHER out with THAT hit. You could hear ribs cracking like a baseball line-drived off a bat, man.
And then he went for a bottle. I think it was a Dickel bottle. And he broke it off. And he was comin'. And I was on the floor and people were just standin' around with their TOUNGUES hanging out, not cheering or any of that movie bullshit.
I did what I had to do. I did what I ALWAYS do. I took a flying leap from a crouching position from the floor and ran RIGHT the fuck at him. He, of course, tried to slash me. I knew, of course, that he would. And THAT'S why, RIGHT when I was almost within slashing distance, I just stopped cold dead in my tracks and the glass missed me by inches. I elbowed his neck so hard I'll bet his Medulla was alREADY in hell. He dropped that bottle too, sure 'nuff, as he splattered on the hard poolhall floor.
I snatched me an 8 of the nearest felt and before he had time to get anything CLOSE to his bearings back, I just shoved that thing in the cut-open crack of his pants and turned my cue around and made the ball crack off that cue like I've never done before or since. And that was the end of Luke Primo's evening, folks. I'm told that in Emergency Rooms people come in with some Pretty Strange Shit shoved up their ass, and I was proud to contribute to the Cause.
But before anybody quite registered what had just happened, even Luke, I'm sure, and before the cops swarmed the place, I was out the door like the Devil out of Heaven. If you want something bad enough, son, you'll probably get it, and if I'd wanted to fuck up the shit of that bastard Luke Primo, I'd achieved my objective and then some. But that was shit under the bridge to me then, as my days in Baltimore were now officially and unequivocally motherfucking OVER. I got in Michelle's Pontiac Ventura, which I'd borrowed, shall we say, and before you can say Three Little Piggies I was down the Open Road.
And Luke Primo? He got what was comin' to him. Never try to steal another man's pussy, son. It says that in the Bible.