Justice?  I don’t know.  Maybe.
    I don’t think there’s any sort of divine justice.  Unless this crap was His idea in the first place.  Maybe he left it to us to make the justice.  Maybe he set up the rules and said, “Have at it.”  Of course, that would go against that whole “Judge not lest ye be judged” thing.  It’s not the first time the Bible confused me, and it won’t be the last, of this I’m sure.
    Now that you bring it up, there was this one time a guy did something, almost made me believe.  Almost had me thinkin’ there was some law and order to this mess.
    I’ll tell you all you want, mister.  I’ll just ask for two things: a friendly ear, and a fresh drink every half-hour.  Because it’s not a short story, and pourin’ my guts out tends to dry me right up.


    I used to work at a bookstore.  One of the big ones that starts with a B.  I won’t say which, but the place was big enough that they needed a couple of big guys to work in the backroom, packing boxes, unpacking boxes, loading and unloading, that sort of thing.
    I had just gotten out of jail (I was in a bar fight, incidentally, and since I won, they hauled me in.  How’s that for justice?) and a bookstore sounded respectable enough to try to get back some dignity.
    The guys who worked with me in the back room were alright.  There were some really smart guys, went to school, didn’t want to work in a cubicle for some fuck who didn’t want to work in a cubicle but had to, you know?  Others had dropped out of high school.  There was a sort of revolving door for the back room.  No one stayed particularly long.
    So, yeah, the back room guys were cool.  The people who worked the floor, though, they were assholes.  Pretentious jerkoffs who thought they were above working with their hands because of some piece of paper sayin’ they were smarter than you.  Without fail, all of ‘em were pricks.
    Except this one guy.  It turned out that he was pretty cool.
    His name was Paul.  He made a point of coming back and saying hi.  On occasion, he’d come back and say thank you.  If he moved something in the back room, he’d return it.  If he didn’t know where something was, he wouldn’t bellow at you, he’d ask where it was.  When he said something would get done, it got done if he had to stay after to do it.  Paul was a good guy.
    One day, he came back to the book dungeon, and we got to talking about music.  Now, me, I love music.  I’ve been in a couple bands.  Yeah, I play bass.  Mostly southern rock, some old school country/western.  Hank Williams, Dwight Yoakum, that type of thing.  I like my music… rollicking, I guess.
    Try telling that to this fuckin’ kid!  This scrawny son of a bitch, I swear.  Everyday he walked in the store with his bag, this man-purse thing.  “It’s a messenger bag,” he’d say.  Covered in buttons from bands I’d never even heard of.  Punk.  Fuckin’ punk!  You know what a punk is?  A queer!  A prison bitch!  And they wear it like it’s the Medal of fuckin’ Honor.
    Whatever, ‘cause this kid was no punk, in either sense of the word.  He just liked some fucked music.  And I told him as much.
    “That shit you listen to sucks, man.”
    “Is that a fact?”  He said it with a smile, this fuckin’ kid.  I didn’t know whether to hug him or kick his nuts.
    “Yeah, it’s shit.  You’re too young to know some real rock n’ roll.  Skynard, Stevie Ray Vaughn.  That’s the real shit.”
    “That’s really good music, too.  I think they were definitely important.  I just think rock went someplace else.”
    “Yeah, down the fuckin’ toilet.  Christ, I need a drink.  What about you, Paul?  You drink?”
    “I enjoy a snifter of port at Christmas.”  Smile.
    “Well, meet me at the Half when you knock off, we’ll see if we can’t track down a bottle.”


    So, without much in the way of thinking towards my own personal health, I moseyed on over to the 4-and-a-Half Seasons Bar and Grill, and proceeded to scar my liver.  With bourbon.
    After two or three conversations with Mr. Daniels, I felt like being serenaded by those white-trash troubadours I love so well.  And so it was that that coin-fed whore of a jukebox spit Johnny Cash all over the bar.  And I was in heaven.
    I didn’t expect the kid to show up.  At least not lookin’ like he did.  I expected him to come in those stupid tight-ass polo shirts he wore, or those yuppie Izod shirts with the buttons and pink ties.  He came in looking human.  T-shirt and jeans.  I guess I wanted him to be weird.  I didn’t want him to be the same.  Disappointed, I guess, like a Nascar fan when there aren’t any crashes at the Winston Cup.  I’d learn that this kid wasn’t the same.  Nope.  He was different.
    When I ordered a snifter of port, both the bartender and the kid laughed.  Ordinarily I hit people for that shit.  Paul either didn’t notice or didn’t care.  He ordered a beer for himself and another Jack for me.  And he fuckin’ smiled again!  That prick!  How the fuck can a dude just grin and make it alright?  Pissed me off.
    So, we proceeded to get rather intoxicated, and we debated music.  We talked about my personal beef with punk: the lack of solo.  Rock and roll, blues, all music worth listening to, all have (or should have) the guitar solo where it’s supposed to be.  What could be better than hearing depraved, over-sexed rock gods destroy the strings of a Fender Strat with their fingers, teeth and violin bows?  I mean, fuckin’ Jimmy Page.  Slow Hand Clapton.  These guys taught themselves, and they became fuckin’ virtuosos!  Let ‘em loose on a fuckin’ guitar, and they’ll take you away from all this working class bullshit.  They’ll take you someplace you want to be.
    Could I tell that to this fuckin’ kid?  Since then, I’ve realized that he wasn’t contradicting me just to be a dick.
    “Punk isn’t about talent.  You don’t need talent to live, to breathe and eat and fuck and sleep.  Anyone can do that.  In the face of the excess of the 70’s, the materialism of the 80’s, there were people who wanted to be somebody, just as those with talent wanted to be somebody.  They picked up guitars, and they learned a few chords.  And they made themselves heard.  They didn’t have talent.  But they were loud.  They were obnoxious.  They said what they thought, dressed in what clothes they had, made what money they could, and lived any place that would have them.  These were nobodies.  But together, they became somebody.”
    I didn’t want to admit it, but the kid made sense.  I told him that there’s no reason to listen to music if it’s not good.  He smiled that fuckin’ smile again, and he came up with what had to be the gayest idea I ever heard.
    “How ‘bout this?  You and I, next day we got off, we’ll go to Amoeba records.  You pick out an album that I need, I mean need to have, and I’ll do the same for you.  It’ll be our Buddy presents to each other or something.”
    I laughed right in the kid’s face when I heard that.  Three drinks later, I agreed to go.


    I’d never seen a record store like this, man.  It was literally a warehouse.
    The entire thing was one huge room.  The racks lined the walls and stretched across the building with barely enough room for two people to stand shoulder to shoulder between them.  Even little narrow shouldered fucks like Paul.
    Categories as obscure as “Baroque” and “Acid Jazz.”  I mean, give me a break.  I looked for Jerry Lee Lewis in “Rock” and I found him in “Rockabilly.”  I guess it made sense, but hell, if I wanted some “Acid Neo-Nu-Modern-Pseudo Queer Metal” I’d fucking look in “Rock.”  Fuckin’ snobs, man.
    Anyway, I looked, and there was a section called “Psychobilly.”  I listened at one of the headphone set-ups (which was pretty cool, I think), and Psychobilly sounded just like Rockabilly, except they sang about necrophilia and other sick shit.  That, and it was performed by tattooed cartoon characters of Elvis.  Not that it was bad, but it was nowhere near as good as it had been.
    I could have stayed there for hours.  I picked out what the kid needed.  What everyone truly needs.  I picked out Led Zeppelin IV.  Epic.  Powerful.  Just cerebral enough to appeal to his obvious literary sensibilities.  It is the greatest album ever made.
    I took all this trouble to come down, put down good money for an excellent work of art, and not only does Paul want to leave quickly, but he gave me a piece of crap.  And I said as much.
    “You haven’t even listened to it yet,” Paul said.  But the cover was so fucking lame!  Three pale dudes, wearing black suits, with black shirts and ties, standing against a red background.  They were wearing sunglasses.  The Alkaline Trio.  “Real fucking inspired.  They must like batteries.”  The album was called “Good Mourning.”  A pun.  Clever.
    We left the store, arguing the whole way.  “I gave you the best work ever done by man.  Fucking Rock and Roll!  You gave me some punk derivative crap.  This shit was your idea, too.”
    “You haven’t listened to it.  Maybe you’ll like it.  They got some catchy hooks.  They’re influenced a little by the Misfits.”
    “Those Elvis wannabes?  I don’t know if that’s a bragging point, man.  Anyone can suck.  It takes a special kind of asshole to suck while copying someone awesome.”
    “I got news for you, old man.  The rock train kept chugging, even after 1977.  It made some exciting stops, too.  So don’t act like your brand of awesome is everyone else’s cup of—“
    “Fuck out my way, punk!”  This huge, tatted-up cholo fuck shoved Paul right into a brick wall.  His head snapped back and biffed on it, with this sickening thud.  I was ready for blood.
    “Come back and try that shit with me, asshole!”  That Chicano mother fuck was halfway down the block, acted like he didn’t hear me.  I was gonna charge his ass, too, until Paul put his hand on my shoulder.
    “Don’t worry about it, man.”  He was still rubbing his head, and he sounded ready to cry.
    “The hell do you mean, don’t worry about it?  That wanna-be gangbanger just put his fuckin’ hands on you for no good reason, and he’s gonna learn not to before I finish with his ass.”  I would have gone, too.  I would have put that… that BULLY on his fuckin’ face.  I would have broken bones.  There’s right and wrong, and that shit’s just wrong.  But this kid… this fucking kid.  He told me not to. 
    “I’m fine.”  He wasn’t fine, but he told me he was.  Now, I used to think dudes who just took that kind of stuff were pussies.  I definitely thought that Paul was a pussy for just blindly taking that kind of stuff.  And usually, I would ignore pussies and do what I wanted, and what I wanted was to pummel that self-loving fuck into the ground.  But I didn’t. 
    “Come on, Paul, I owe you a beer.  And if I was a doctor, I’d prescribe something harder than beer for your headache.”  When I gave him a slap on the sore spot of his head, he smiled.


    That shit happened, and I quickly forgot about it.  Paul was gonna be Paul, and I was gonna be me.  We’d never see it the way the other guy wanted to, and that was cool.  We bonded over work and booze, and work and booze is what we did.
    Back then, I had my finger in a bunch of different pies, so to speak, and my weekend gig was security for a music venue.  Sweet deal, work for about 6 hours twice a week, drink more or less for free for the rest of it.  Anyway, I’m workin’ on a Saturday, and it turns out that those Alkaline tools were playing.  I’m not one for delicate, thoughtful gestures, but I thought it’d be nice for Paul and his girl if I got them backstage passes.
    Of course, Paul was down, and his girl Rebecca was cool with it too, her being as big a dork for the Alkaline Trio as Paul was.  He thanked me like I’d just saved his mom from being hit by a train.  What can I say, I’m a wonderful person.
    So I’m in my Security t-shirt, and I’m on the floor watching kids mill around, waiting for the opening band to come on.  Nothing usually happens before the lights go down, so I’m watching the crowd with one eye and watching the clock with the other one.  I was hungover, and that day seemed like a day that just wasn’t going to end.
    I glance up, and I see Paul and Rebecca, sort of in the middle.  People were moving, so I could see them occasionally through the slog.  Before I know it, these three guys move right up through the middle of the crowd, trying to get to the front.  Shit happens all the time, but these guys had been drinking at the bar, and they looked like hard-asses.  Well, they looked like skinny punks who woke up one day and decided they were gonna get neck tattoos and try to look like hardasses.  Anyhow, they tear right up the middle, bumpin’ people on the way.  They had my interest piqued, but it’s a punk show, and most of the people they passed by just sort of accepted that there are gonna be dicks bein’ dicks.
    At one point, they bump Paul’s Rebecca.  They give her a pretty good one, she’s knocked out of balance a little.  It wouldn’t have been much during the show, but no one had started playing yet.  I saw Paul call out to them, undoubtedly saying something about apologizing and it being against etiquette to get violent before the show, you know, trying to talk sense into people who aren’t interested in hearing it.
    It was around that time that one of the kids got right in Paul’s face.  Paul certainly didn’t enjoy it, but he made no move, forward or backward.  His hands were at his side, clenched fists, but his face was calm and trying to explain shit.  Talking sense into these fucks seemed like a waste of time, but you gotta say something about the hopeless idealist, which Paul undoubtedly was.
    The kid right behind the first kid stepped up and put a hand in Rebecca’s face.  He stepped up and shoved her to the ground, by her face.  She crumpled, her glasses went askew on her face.  That was my cue.  I marched toward them, but they were in the middle of the throng.  The crowd smelled conflict and closed around the key players.  I’d seen it before, and usually just yelling “Security!” and flashing a flashlight will get people to move. 
    The crowd started yelling and chanting, “Fight!”  I knew that, even if Paul wanted to fight, he’s got no chance against three wanna-be badasses with something to prove.  I needed to get in there.  I could tell something was happening, because the crowd fucking loved it, gaining in volume after every fleshy beat.  I pictured Paul bloody, on his knees and getting kicked in the ribs by three fucktards.  I couldn’t let that happen to him, so I started yelling at people to fucking move.
    That’s when the strangest thing I’d ever observed happened.  The crowd, you know, just kind of fell silent.  They stopped yelling.  A couple of people held out with the yelling, but they were soon quiet.  The only sound I could hear was the periodic sound of flesh-on-flesh, that hollow thud that sounds like nothing else but someone getting their ass pummeled.  It was as if there was some hallowed event happening, something that everyone agreed was good and right without having to talk about it.
    I renewed my efforts to get into the center of the mass of sweaty bodies, less now to break up any sort of goings-on, than to just see what was happening.  I couldn’t see over anybody, and no one was talking about it.  The only indication that they were seeing anything, the only way I knew something was happening, was that about three or four bodies deep from the center of the group, everyone had linked arms, a sick cross of a rugby scrum and a fight circle jr. high students make when there’s a fight in school.  I couldn’t get past, so eventually I stopped trying.
    After about 10 minutes (of course I can’t be sure because I wasn’t timing), I saw a hole open up in the mob from the center.  Paul walked out, face wet with sweat and tears, blood staining the front of his jeans, his knuckles shredded almost to the bone.  He was hand-in-hand with Rebecca, whose face was dead of emotion.  They walked right by me without acknowledging my presence, or my calls.  I walked in to the center, and I saw the three hardass punks, looking like they’d been through a piston-driven internal combustion ass-kicking machine.  Their faces were unrecognizable masses of tenderized meat and blood.  Eyes were swollen shut, noses were smashed against faces.  They were all on the ground, in fetal position, looking for all the world like they’d been beset upon by a cricket bat-wielding team of riot cops.  The only movement I saw was gentle, slow breathing, as if it was painful to breathe.
    “Jesus Christ… how many of you fucks did it take to do this?” I said to no one in particular.
    No one said a fucking word.  They just looked, calmly, and the three beating victims too much in pain to writhe.
    “Seriously, guys, the fuck just happened?  How many of you did this?”
    A blonde girl, couldn’t have been of drinking age, didn’t even look up.  “It was just that one kid.  He did this.”
    “Bullshit.  That kid’s a pussy.”
    She looked right into my eyes.  She looked right into my eyes and shook her head.  “If you call him a pussy again, I will tear into you.  No man who is capable of this much right is a pussy.”
    She was a buck-twenty if she weighed an ounce, but I get the distinct impression that she would have tried anything to get me on the ground and looking like those mouth-breathing gutterpunks did. 
    I called up an ambulance, and the kids were taken away.  Their parents (they were brothers) sued the bar.  They wanted to sue Paul, but no one working there had seen him, or knew who he was.  Apparently they’d gotten ahold of some of the kids at the show, but they refused to cooperate.  I was subpoenaed to show up at the trial.  I refused to bear witness, but I did get a treat.  I was present when the ER doctor read off a list of their injuries.  All together, they had three broken noses, 13 spit-out teeth, one broken jaw, seven broken ribs, two broken wrists (same kid, apparently the kid who shoved Rebecca), one ruptured stomach, one perforated kidney, one punctured lung, and one subdural hematoma.  That’s a bleeding brain.
    After the ambulance had left, I ran outside to see if I could catch up with Paul.  He was leaning against a wall, Rebecca leaning against his chest.  They were just standing there.
    “Hey Paul, man, you alright?”
    He just looked at me and said he was fine.
    “Jesus, man, did those guys have that shit comin’, huh?”
    He looked away.  He squeezed the girl a little tighter.
    “Hey, you know, I could probably sneak you backstage, if you want to come back in.
    Paul said, “Naw.  We’re gonna go home.  I’ll see you at work.”
    

    I never did though.  Word was that he quit the next day, didn’t even give two weeks.  The last contact I had with him was a note on a Post-It attached to a pint of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.  It just said, “Later.” 
    So I don’t know about justice.  It seems elusive, and it seems to change, and not everyone who deserves to meet justice will get it, mostly because those who can mete it out don’t want it to be necessary.  That was a jacked-up sentence, but you get my point.  I have no problem putting someone’s teeth to the back to their head if they deserve it, but most guys don’t deserve it around me.  It’s the meek kids, the 90-pound weaklings who don’t need to be harassed, who do their best to stay out of people’s way, whose last thought would be to bug someone, who just want to go about their business and be left alone.  These kids will be met with injustice, and they won’t do anything about it.
    Well, most of the times they won’t, I guess.
    It’s late, friend, and I’ve got work in the morning.  Get me one for the road, and I’ll be on my way.