
Originally Posted by
Daddy-YO
This has nothing to do with Nicaragua, real or imagined. It was provoked from silent memories by the following comment in the threads on 'Guns':
T'weren't no dream. Had a down & out stretch in Baltimore. Not being particularly choosey, my friends were bar flies. 'Friends' may be too strong a word. I was no bum. Never bummed. Drove a 'Good Humor' ice cream truck through the poor, mostly white then, neighborhoods well beyond the interstate highways that make Baltimore another knot in the East coast megagopolis. It was a white pick-up with an ice box (used dry ice) built onto the bed. I rang the bells on the roof of the cab (in order to condition kids to salivate with desire) by pulling a cord.
Chuck Berry's comeback hit "My Ding-A-Ling" played on the jukebox of the windowless waterfront bar I'd sometimes stop at for a cold one and a cheap, but good & hefty steelworker's sandwich that can only be found in such out-of-the-way dives-with-heart. When the police confiscated my ice cream truck one morning and put me in jail (only for a few hours but long enough to do a line-up strip search, me the only white in the group of ten) for making an illegal (during certain hours) left hand turn, I decided I'm no 'good humor' man and quit. (In court later the fine was dismissed cause a slick lawyer before me, who'd made the same mistake, said the sun got in his eyes.)
Got another job in a near-hidden paint factory that I'd happened upon while driving my ice cream truck around Essex. I was hired as an asphalt chemist. (Junior chemist was my title.) I knew nothing about asphalt but that didn't matter, I had aptitude. Basically I formulated new, improved & resistant goo. The game was to hit a viscoelastic target. Successful recipes were used to coat underground electrical cables. The job had high turnover. Compounding high temperature tar all day wears on one. Slum wages were little help, but I managed, living on tuna, crackers & canned beans, in a studio with whacko Nam vet neighbors for drinking buddies.
So, how was it I got in the middle of a gun battle? It was another one of those non-descript bars in a part of the city that progress had totally by-passed. Bar food was boiled eggs & pickled pig's feet; no yuppie peanut-crunchy bowls. I knew of it cause it served the cheapest drafts around. Inside I found an old 'friend' getting stupid. Just the company I thought I needed to help me forget my black, so, so black, sticky & hot job wrestling with the tar baby.
But before long the fool got into an argument with another patron over the sort of nonsense that only drunks think is important. Soon they wanted to fight. "Take it outside!" orders the bartender. I went out with my friend, but before I realized what happened he had drawn a gun, a small tarnished nickel-plated one, from his jacket. The other guy as quickly pulled out a revolver from a shoulder holster under his coat and stood behind a car holding it police style with both hands on the roof of the car. Stupidly I got between them, back to the guy who looked like he knew what he was doing, and talked & talked something like sense & reason to my stupid friend. It was as though I hadn't been drinking at all, the alarming seriousness of the situation had sobered me so rapidly. Either that or another part of my brain took over, a part that the bubble-driven intoxicant hadn't reached, a sanity reserve. I prevailed. He put his piece of crap pistol away. The other guy was an off-duty cop. Police came, summons were issued. I had to go to court a couple weeks later. I didn't recognize my 'friend', all clean & kempt, weary wife & kid in tow. (She thanked me.) The judge threw it out when the guy went weepy repentent. Besides nobody had gotten plugged with lead. ('Plomo' in Nicaraguan, thus plumbers, q.e.d.)
It wasn't really a gun battle, I suppose, more a dumb standoff. All lived to burp through another day. Did we win?
Once my divorce was settled I left Baltimore.
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