A real nail-biter, by Brian Hunter.
“Sometime in the early 1980s I rolled into Barstow, a nothingness located between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the high desert of the Mojave just below Death Valley, put my archaeological field kit away, and tidying myself up at the Sage Motel, I was determined to go explore what was to be my home for the next six months. I was hired to go surveying and excavating at Fort Irwin, as it was re-opened for military madness in order to give similar physical experience for the forthcoming mid eastern world explosions. Empty beer cans blowing down the one main drag served as wind chimes as I pondered which bar to invest self in.
The choices were multiple, yet uniformly similar, so I walked into the first bar I came to….California Country….and was surrounded by crowded smoke and noise, pool tables to the right, a long wooden bar to the left with only one seat open. I sidled into that seat, trying not to disturb occupants on either side of me, and upon ordering a tasteless u.s. beer (hope I got that right for my Canadian readers) caught the eye of the soft spoken gentleman sitting next to me on the left, whose first words were; “I am going to kill the guy next to you.” Figuring perhaps I was mistaken in what I had just heard, and wanting to distance myself from such rancor, I turned to my right to see what manner of being had evoked such hatred, and was confronted with an obvious military gentleman, hard muscled and hard headed, whose first words to me were “I am going to beat you up!”.
Figuring I had just wandered into either a madhouse, or some fraternal organization initiation, I did what I always do in such circumstance, and that was start talking. I explained that pounding me into oblivion would be not much a task for such a fine specimen of manhood as sat before me, and satisfied that punches were not coming at me immediately, I turned back to the left to thank the gentleman there for the heads up on the beast next to me, only to catch, out of the corner of my eye, once again on the right side of me, a pool cue crashing down on the skull of Mr. USMC. Blood was spurting everywhere, and, as if in a slow motion movie, I watched the bartender jump over the bar as the gentleman on my left, who had warned me this was coming, jumped behind the bar pulling out a pair of nunchaku. I asked him, given the extreme pandemonium raging around me, if it was ok if I joined him there, and he said he would have to fight me as his job was to guard the cash register.
So I sat where I was. Turns out the bartender wasn’t so much interested in the marine getting clubbed, as he was in two ladies that had been arguing all night and had pulled razors on each other. The marine’s friends came running and they too wanted to beat me up, but the marine honestly answered that I had nothing to do with whoever blindsided him. Suffice it to say, as if in a well ordered fire drill, and probably one that ran there nightly, the bar quickly emptied, the marine being drug off by his cohorts, the ladies with blades hustled out, just another night in Barstow apparently, and the bartender, the nunchaku man, and myself sitting there, the three of us, deciding it was time to drink something with a higher alcohol content on the house…”
Wow, thanks for your story Brian! You get a $25 Gift Certificate to use at one of our pubs.
Submit your story to blog@vicpubco.ca. If we select your story you will win a $25 Gift Certificate! We will post a new “real people/real story” every Friday.
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