"The Night I Stuck My Hand in My Face"

The 6 & Davidson Series-Part 3

This part of the “6 & Davidson Series is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The author assumes no responsibility for the loss of consciousness, life, bladder control, loved ones, or sanity.
ANY resemblance to actual events, locales,  persons living, dead, or anywhere in between, IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.
Because it is written as a first person account does not mean in any way this happened to ME, or that any of the places and people are not as stated-”A product of the authors Imagine Nation“.
Due to the content of this story…it should not be read by just anyone:
you agree that this story and related materials will not be rented, leased, loaned, sold, transferred, assigned, broadcast in any media, publicly exhibited, reproduced, copied, recorded, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise.
It has course language
Adult situations..
And just bad-craziness.
It will be rated accordingly
…stop reading now!!
“The Night I Stuck My Hand IN my Face” (By; Roberto Dilemma)
   

    Now this takes place in another time, at another place. Same characters, but earlier in, “The folly of youth.
    One night Dean and I met a person. This person we ran into twice.
The first time being while we were sitting on the playground at, “The School”. A lot of kids/young people hung around the school. In the summer there was summer Rec. This stood for summer recreation. It was usually overseen by a couple college kids, a young man (that seemed old to us then,) and a young woman.
This made it so the gym would be open, They would also be able to close off this little street and open a fire hydrant with an attachment on it that caused it to shoot straight up in the air. This was done on hot days. It keep us kids cool, gave us something to do. You see, I personally didn’t know of anyone with a pool at that time.
    This would also be where we sometimes took our little three piece band to “Jam” in the gym. A lot went on around this school when it was closed. Sort of a hang out, or meeting place.
    Anyway, we were in a stranger part, the place in the big field.. Where the grass grew a little too long and it met this, “Other Stuff”. Not gravel, Not sand…something ground up and organic, fine, but not that fine, weeds had a lot of trouble growing through it.
Well we were on the edge of the grass, both playing folk guitars, singing, practicing harmony.
    I had gotten these two colorful buttons or pins from a black dude I got mushrooms from. Good shrooms, dried. The man was a Devil worshipper . Paranoid, as fuck. I met him through a friend/middleman. I was always trying to cut out the middleman. I heard all the shit. He doesn’t want to meet anyone. He’s paranoid, weird,  kind of a freak, devil worshipper.
    Believing all these things were just meant to deter me from cutting him out of upping the price, pinching the stash I would not give up.
    Finally the guy says, “your both freaky, I’m getting spooked out by this mother fucker…and you and your brand of…whatever it is you believe. Well I told him about you and he’s willing  to meet you”.
    I was kind of aware of the area where this guy lived. Sometimes I’d have to drive with my, “connect” (middleman).  there and park around the block or whatever, while he went to, “get the shrooms”
    When I’m Introduced, we talk philosophy, comparative religion, theology. We touch on Occult issues, having read, “The Confessions of Alleistor Crowley” and thought it completely gross bullshit.  Having researched Automatic writing. Direct writing, ectoplasm, materialization . Played with A Ouiji Board, been involved in séances. I seen photos of what was supposed to be spirit photography.  I also tried (in vain) at the time to obtain the level of a “trance“. Plus I seriously looked into the more famous Mediums & Psychics.
This being as it was, I could carry on a intelligent conversation with the man.
    I didn’t strongly let him know that although I was somewhat versed in these subjects, I really put no stock in what the belief system represented. In other words, “Fucked up bullshit”. The flip side of the religious coin. If I wasn’t going to get sucked into the myth that was socially accepted,  and “supposedly positive“.
There was no way in hell I was gong to be persuaded into this macabre crap.
As I grew older and my balls got big and brass. I became better informed through research, I’d blow these mother fuckers out of the water like any other fanatics.
    Now I was green and youngblood, just after some shrooms, so I’d patiently listened till I satisfied his urge to run his mouth, then  proclaim my tardiness for a preplanned event.

Part 2...be patient…I’m leading up to something.

    Well on one  venture to score some shrooms. I get to the guys house. Now I’ve been there quite a few times now. He always had a buzz going. Always burned the best hash. But this time his eyes were straight up pupil. He was sputtering, Cheering, Chanting blindly, like the ghost god himself. Now his claim was he had continued communication with he Devil himself through a full leant, rather large, Black Mirror.  
The Mirror was on a wooden and brass stand of sorts.
Now he blabbering and he wants to show me. I’m more then a bit freaked out. Not of the mirror, but of him. What was in his head. What he might believe. Me being a sacrifice was not something I didn’t consider.
    He had all kinds of strange looking things around his house, many being knifes with bizarre symbols  on them.  Needless to say I turned him onto four, ten milligram Valiums. He was talking fast and that white shit built up in the corners of his cotton mouth. I handed him my  half of bottle of, “Wild Irish Rose”.
I told him, “go ahead and kill it”.
For this he seemed grateful , It smoothed my way for a hasty exit. Before I left he rummaged through a dish, a crystal bowl of sorts and gifted me with two pins or buttons. They didn’t say anything. They just had weird looking, kind of psychedelic faces on them. They were about as big as a nickels. I pined one on my jean jacket pocket flap. The jacket had a funeral flag sewn on the back , and a Stones “Lapping Tongue” on the sleeve.
The other I put in my pocket.

Part 3, Getting Back to the Point…

    I never returned to his house again.  Don’t know what ever became of him. I thought of him now and then. I’m glad I made a good decision. In my gut I knew this.
Upon seeing Dean my friend, I told him the story.
In a minute by minute life of bad-craziness, who’s to say if he remembers?
Anyway…I gave him the other pin. He was my best friend. My partner. There was no one I trusted or respected like Dean. He thought it strange, funny looking, and pinned it on his jacket. Each pin had a different face on it..
     Well we were playing and singing and this, semi-hip looking stranger comes walking across the field. From the backstop of the baseball diamond. We had a long time to study him as he approached.
He came, sat cross legged, politely let us finish the song we were playing and immediately asked where we got those pins. I made the long story short, and told him they were a gift from some freaky dude I knew that fancied himself a Devil worshipper.
    He said, “they are very negative”.
    I asked what he meant.
 He said, “They are not intended to do you good”.
    I replied, “what do you think we outta do?” and continued, “It don’t really mean shit to me I just thought it was colorful and funny looking”
    To which Dean added, “Just a weird pin”
     Then I said, “Fuck. We’ll just throw them out”
     The stranger says, “You have to destroy them”
Then he offers, “Give them to me, I will destroy them”.
    Well the guy found a couple of big rocks, took a walk over to the curb, beyond the fence. He spent at least a half hour mashing and bashing these things up. Then he dug a hole, best he could with just a rock, and buried them. He patted the dirt flat. Tried as best he could to make it so you couldn’t tell anything was ever buried there.
    We watched. We were somewhat amazed at the trouble this guy was going through.
     Then he comes back over to us. He sits back down, pulls a fat jay of “good-ass-smoke” out of his jacket pocket, fires it up; take a long toke. In the voice of a man trying hard to hold in a big toke of good weed he says in a deep kind of hushed voice, “good move with those pins”.
     He didn’t mention them again. He finished the joint about half way with us, said, “Finish it off, gotta go” and he left.
   
5. “It Just Get Weirder”?

    Well, about a month and a half later, we’re hanging  out by Dean’s house. He lived on a corner. Side streets,
Well traveled because at one end there was a little shopping center. A K-Mart Dept Store. ( in which we caused minor annoyances on a regular basis) A Super Market, called “Farmer Jacks”. At the end a small Liquor/party store
Named, “Party Center”. I worked there after school as a stock boy. Got Paid $1.10 an hour. Not much. I did it with a good attitude. I was honest, and took pride in doing my job well.
     This was also where I sold my bags of spicy Mexican weed. Oz.’s, Quarter pounds,  everything up to an Lb..
I kept trash that needed to be taken out near the back door. When someone I knew, “WELL”…came in.
They’d buy something, a six pack, whatever. Then they’d give me a sign, “The Nod”.
I knew what each of my few customers always got. I considered myself quite a organized young business man.
I was fourteen years old. This was a good public place. Cops didn’t watch it too well. 
    Now and then they’d pick up shoplifters from K-mart. No big deal, I knew what time it was.
It also gave me a reason for having money. I had a job.
    On the far end of the same street there was a public park.
    Well the same guy we met. The one that didn’t think, “The weird buttons” with the colorful demon faces were , “Cool”. He comes walking by from the K-mart side. He wasn’t carrying a bag. He was smoking a cigarette, You could see a new pack in his pocket. I figured he walked on up there to get some smokes.
It’s been, “Many Moons” since then. I only met him twice. I don’t remember his name.
“It’s on the tip of my brain”…
    Well this time, It was Dean and myself that had some really good weed. Not the spicy Mexican I sold. New
“brands” were starting to rear their heads, raise the quality and prices. I had a sack of “Brown Jamaican”, and a gram of a beige powder that was  called,  “Crystal Tee”.  I’m not sure to this day what the shit was, but it turned you into, “Gumby”. (The Green Rubber Toy guy with wires inside him. He had a horse named Pokey.) One tiny bit in a pipe, either alone, (if you had six or seven screens in it) or on top of a pile of weed. You’d hear the shit sizzle when you lit it. Then your friend took the pipe gently from your hand. You’d drop it if they didn’t. Our preference was on top of the pile of weed method.  It gave the rest of the, “Bowl” a flavor that didn’t just make you “think” you were getting a better buzz. You were getting a better buzz. It was a one “Toke” drug.
     Dean was allowed a decent level of privacy in his room. He shared it with his brother Brian. My younger brother’s best friend. Well Brian and My brother, Rick were, “out and about”.  After cluing our new friend as to what we had. We invited him up to Deans room to, “Get Baked”. We told him, This shit is, “The Bomb”.  That being the ghetto slang phrase at the time for, “real fuckin’ good“.
     The sun was sinking like a ship.
    He took us up on our offer. He’d never tried, “Tee”. He’d heard about it and was wanting to see what it was all about. (The weed was our private stash,) The tee, was $35.00 a gram. We usually sold three dimes, to get most of the money invested back. Never whacked it. (Meaning cut it with something else to make it weaker and produce more…that wasn’t our way) This left us with a considerable amount for only five bucks.
     Needless to say, we all got pretty fucked up. A good time was had by all. After straightening out awhile
The man said I gotta split.
    We said, “it’s dark now, we’ll walk you home”.
    He said, “If you just walk me to Van Dyke that’ll be cool. It’s a big major street and it well lit”
    “Then V.D. it is”, was our reply”.
     (We had our own language/slang, Van Dyke was called, “V.D.”…another street near by was Outer Drive, that we referred to as O.D., Etc..)
     Well in our partying we didn’t realize time was jetting by and it was now, “The Middle of the Night”.
We walked with the dude, talking, getting some fresh air. Straightening out a bit. We had “Turned him on” to a Jay, laced with about a nick of Tee, he offered money but we refused,
    “It’s all good”, I told him.
    It was about a seven or eight city block walk. Short blocks. Not that far really. 

5. “Surprize, Surprize, Surprize”!!!

    Well on the way back, Dean and I were talking and laughing. We expressed a bit of wonder as to where the man might live. We talked about it. Decided we both liked him.
He was smart,. Which meant well read to us. We were always reading something. Useally a, “Bear”, which is a big, dry book that we learned something from. We also read a regular book for entertainment, distraction, or just plain fun. To this day I know I read a lot. I’m sure Dean does also.
    The guy was also funny. We thought, maybe he’s got a wife, and he wouldn’t like her to know he’s hangin’ with “Youngblood” and getting buzzed up. Or hell maybe he lives with his folks? No matter.
    Then crossing an alley two blocks from Deans house. We’re strolling along, diddy-bopping just like back on the block. Laughing.
    When…
    I see this *MAJOR WHITE FLASH! Like lightening went off inside my head.
    Then I feel a pain in my face. I stick my hand up to my cheekbone, and my fingers go right inside my face.
I’m wearing a short sleeve shirt, it was a warm night. I look at my elbow and BLOOD is just running down my hand and arm,  pouring off my elbow. I’m starting to turn around, I never hit the ground…( being stoned delayed the big pain?) good thing, as you read on you’ll understand why. On my way to turning around I get it once more in the back/side. (not quite my back, not quite my side)
     I see the source of this. It’s an older man. Lived across from, “The School”. He’s getting ready for another swing of these police/milatry  issue Nun chucks (Traditional Okinawan weapon consisting of two sticks connected at their ends with a short chain or rope) I had seen this type before. Some type of black painted aircraft aluminium. Twist once right, pull, twist left, pull, They come apart, connected with a short strand of thick cable covered with a plastic of sorts. They were like two “Mag Lights”. I grab one.
I didn’t want to be hit again.
     I see this other man. He’s standing there with a 9mm automatic pistol . “Glock”?
He is shaking, shaking a lot. His eye’s are big and wide. He’s pale. It appeared to me that this mother fucker did not really want to be here. Either that or the shit was happening so fast, perhaps this isn’t what he expected.
The man that hit me was giving orders in a direct but quiet voice.
    “Come with us”
     “Come with us or I’ll beat your fuckin’ ass to death right here in this alley”
    We weren’t quite in the alley but we weren’t quite in the street. There was a big street light shinning down. I am not letting go of the other half of this weapon.
      I look from the guy that hit me, very quicky to the guy shaking with the gun. Then I look at Dean. He’s a true friend. He’s not going to leave me in this alley with these freaks. I figure, he could have taken off anytime during these streached out seconds of violence.
     Now on the streets I learned something at a very early age. “There’s a time to fight, and there’s a time to run”.
    This was most defiantly a time to run.
    So without letting go of the half of stick I had. While still listening to orders being hissed at me by some madman.
    “Just fuckin’ come with us, and you might live”!
     Might Live?, I’m thinking fast. I don’t like the sound of that, “Might”. I figuring, we’re going someplace close, to be tortured and killed. NEVER GO TO A SECOND LOCATION. Another street lesson.
When I figure the guy thinks we’re actually listening to him, considering his orders, I feel the confidence.
In his mind. He believes he’s in complete control.
    I let go of the half of weapon with my bloody slippery hand, and stick a bloody elbow in his ribs as hard as I can .
I look at Dean and holler one word loud and clear while the Nunchuck weilding Lunatic is doubled over, still holing the sticks with one hand and rubbing his side with the other.
Streached frozen seconds of fear.
    We run our asses off.
    Now I had already learned, in another hard instance, that fear out runs anger.
Now there’s hesitation with the psychopath, he’s not chasing, although I’m not really looking.
I hear him from the same spot, frantically urging his shaky gun holding partner.
“Shoot ‘em, Shoot ‘em”
    No shots were fired.  Even if he would have fired, he’d of had to be a hell of a shot. Quick moving targets, in bad light. Anyone that’s fired a pistol knows, it takes quite a bit of pratice to even hit a man size taget from ten meters. Within seconds we were much farther then that.
6. The results of this encounter.
   Well not wanting to bother Dean’s Mother, who had to wake up for work in the mourning, and the fact that my Ma lived about a half a block closer; I go to my Ma’s house. - Then I was not really liked to well there.  Only semi-welcomed about seventy percent of the time. Never  had a key. Now this is another story in  itself, not for now.
I knock on the side door. The side light goes on and my brother answers. He wasn’t sleeping.
    He says, “Holy Fuck you look super fucked up man”!
    I reply, “No shit eh?, I need a ride to the hospital”.
    “Man I’m gonna have to wake Ma up for this shit dude”, then he disappears.
    I can hear some talking going on upstairs. Still being scared, Dean and I step onto the landing. It leads to the basement and up three stairs into the kitchen. I shut the outside light off, close and lock the door.
    I guess my brother conveyed the gravity of the situation to my Ma pretty good. She comes down dressed. We’ve stepped up the stairs, into the kitchen. I’m holding a kitchen towel on my face. It’s already soaked in blood, it’s dripping on the floor.
    My Mom’s got a , “Not too good” expression on her face. I can’t read it.
    Then she says, “Let me see”
I take the towel off my face. My brother exclaims, “FUCK”!
    Mom is saying something about insurance. I’m not hearing. Rattled…She’s grabbing her purse and keys.
    Next thing I know we drop Dean off at his house and we’re on our way to the nearest hospital. It isn’t far, maybe a mile…tops. We get there, she’s talking to some person in the E-Room Admitting, and I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. They take me in the back faster then they ever did before.
    My Ma comes in and she’s saying, “I kinda faked you in with an expired insurance card. We gotta see how this plays out. One inch higher and you would have had trouble finding your eyeball.”
     Then things get hushed as some medical people come and start working on me. Just getting the fucking bleeding under control till a doctor gets there. The Doc get there and talks his mumbo jumbo, and  I get some X-rays taken of my face. After that he makes a similar comment about my eye. He informs us that my cheek bone is broken. He explains that I’ll be admitted and tomorrow a plastic surgeon will have a look at me.
   He says, “If something isn’t done your going to end up looking like a monster”.
Crazy as I was in those days, I’m thinking about my girlfriends. I don’t think either of them is going to be attracted to a monster.
   Early the next afternoon this Doctor comes in. He real sharp. He explains to me that a staple of some type of medical steel will have to be put into the cracked bone. If this isn’t done my face will collapse and bone will over lap. It will distort the shape of my face and the alignment of my left eye. He also mentions that the scar won’t be that hard to put together. He assures me he's good at what he does and within a few years it will hardly be noticeable.
He explains quite a bit more. I’m not feeling all that hot,  it runs right over my head. Never got in the first ear.
7. What the FUCK!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
    So I find this man that busted my face is in his early thirties. He works at an auto Plant, U.A.W.(Union Man) He ran an over head Crain. He made around twenty four dollars an hour- “Straight Time”.  Time and a half on Saturdays, and double time on Sundays.
He had a good job and made a lot of money. Remember this was the 1970’s.
He had a cool car, and a very cool motorcycle.
    He also had a friend named, Walker”. Now this cocksucker looked like “Gollum” (from “The Lord of the Rings”) on a bad hair day.
    My Karma was slightly fucked up. I was NOT the man I wanted to be at that time. I didn’t have a clue who that man was.  I was busy living down to people’s expectations of me. Young, stupid, It would take another fifteen years of hard living and intense depression before I became the artist I dreamed of being. It would be longer till I was returned love.
    "The Butterfly Effect"...That butterfly lands and takes off from "The Karmic Wheel".
    What I’m saying is. I was a fucked up drug dealing, punk-ass, ghetto mother fucker. If I could go back in time, I’d go back just to kick my own fuckin’ ass. I can trace every bad feeling and nasty mistake to a bad Decision I alone made.
    Although I choose my friends better now. I “Try” to make sound decisions. I still make mistakes. I’m Human.
   The doctor was right, he fixed me up good. Within three or four years even the scar where my skin was busted open and stitched & taped inside and out... it didn’t look bad.
The guy that swung those sticks that day.
     A couple months later, he kills a co-worker. The Guy gave him one hundred dollars to get him a quarter pound of good smoke. Instead of doing that he almost emptied that nine on the guy. The man was sitting in the backseat of his car. Oh…he left one round in the gun,  had his friend, Walker blast him once.
 His thinking being, if Walker shoots him too, then he won’t be so fast to run his mouth about me.
They dump this poor mans bloody body near a school. It was shortly after a snowfall, one of those clear, crisp winter mourning. I heard about a hundred kids got his license plate number.
    I get  this call, the cops are starting to crawl all over his house.
    This was my stomping ground, this was the, “Hood” where my bro’s lived. News traveled fast.
So I go there to check it out. Cops already looked at the back seat of his car. Blood, blood, blood.
Then all these cops with their guns drawn right on his front door, a cop standing off to one side knocks on the door.
    He shouts in a clear commanding voice for the guy to come out with his hands on his head.
He swings open the door, stoned and cocky. The god-damn gun is right on the end table. Right next to the door. His hands were not on his head, but he quickly rose them into view. I am still surprised he wasn't shot twenty times in the head and chest. The bad guy, glances at the gun for a half a second. Oh that would have been suicide by police. He probably never put in a fresh clip or re-loaded.
Within seconds, he’s face down on his own porch getting cuffed.
    Of coarse the guy he shot was already dead when he handed Walker the gun. What the hell was Walker going to do, say, “Hell no man, I’m not doing it”
    We can assume that last shot would have been in Walker’s forehead. He was riding shotgun.
    Walker blabbed his ass off.
    Hell yes I called the police when he busted my face.
    Hell yes I told them the story, just about how I it's written here. You got the word of a punk ass minor (mostly) pot dealer, and a middle age hard working factory worker...yea
    Did they do anything. Fuck No!   Someone might be alive if they did?
    Dean and I were  a half a block from his house, in between his street and another street.   He told the cops he busted my face because I was breaking into his house.
    I filed a victims compensation form.
The city will pay your doctor bills if you were a victim of a crime that you were in no way involved in. They did.     My first GOOD Karmic move, get that doctor paid. He done me right.
     I heard some years later that my mother sued the Fuck out of his homeowners insurance company  for making that claim. She gave me fifteen hundred bucks of that coin. Three or four years later. (which is a whole different fucked up story) No telling what she got.
    Well the guy does eight years in prison for cold blooded murder.
   With a ignored former  violent assault charge. (Fuckin’ Lawyers?)

    And I think,... good thing he didn’t have the gun in his hand that night.
     Good thing that guy I never seen again busted up that Mojo Curse Pin. Some weird, "Guardian" came out of the blue to lighten my luck…and I used to think the world was, “A Flying Mud Ball”. Dirt, water, floating, spinning, flying in space.
Then I was reminded of the hot stuff in the middle…Now I know, the world is a baby star, waiting to hatch.


-The End-

Roberto Dilemma/ copyright 2009
* that, "white light" of pain when he hit me with those sticks, I saw & felt that much worse, "like a storm in my head"...just pulling an infected tooth I had. "Don't ever do that" (but I did a nice job)-