Sam's Boat is a nice, blue collar Bar and Grill in the Memorial Hill area of Houston. Though the bar held a capacity of several hundred, I had been the only bouncer working the entire evening. It had been a busy, yet uneventful night, which was just how I liked them.
I'm not a big guy. On a good day I stand 5'7¾”, and walk around at about 160 pounds... and that's with shit in my pockets. I was 34 years old and I had bounced in at least one bar or nightclub everywhere I had lived since I was 21. I learned young that I was not Patrick Swayze and that there is nothing romantic about getting smashed over the head with beer bottles in some shithole nightclub. (Ok. It can be a little romantic... but that's a story I'll tell another time) Nowadays, I was all smiles and mellowness. Which was good, because I was also a damn Shit Magnet.
On this particularly hot summer night, the crew and I had met at the nearby apartment of a co-worker. We had been there a few minutes when some more people arrived.
“Anyone here have a black pickup?” announced one of the new arrivals. My ears perked, and I rogered up that I had one.
“There was a tow truck sitting behind it, checking it out a second ago.”
When I asked what the the truck looked like, he said there were a bunch of stickers on the back window. He used two words to describe them: Military, and Pinup.
Well, hell, that was my truck.
I hustled out of the apartment and around the corner. There wasn't a towtruck in sight. Wait. Scratch that... I saw him.
He was parked several hundred meters away, at the other end of the parking lot. He must have seen me walking to my truck, because I heard his engine rev.
I sprinted. Reaching my truck, I swung my door open and vaulted myself into the driver's seat, starting the ignition as I shut the door. The towtruck driver pulled up perpendicular to me, behind me. I leaned out my passenger window, and politely asked the driver to move his truck, to which he responded with a nice, “Fuck You” punctuated by an extended middle finger that looked like it belonged on an Ogre.
With the, the tow truck maneuvered, and positioned itself so we were ass-to-ass. Not my personal position of choice, mind you. For a moment I was baffled, then I heard the sound of metal hitting concrete. At the time, I didn't know what, exactly, a Quick Pick Integrated Lift was... but I knew I was being screwed.
If he got my truck onto whatever contraption that was, I knew my cake was gonna get left out in the rain. I'd done two enlistments (One in the Army, one in the Marines), I'd been a Cop, and I had gone to Iraq with a Private Security Company. In short, I had been fucked enough by weenies both big, and green. I wasn't having it.
I threw my truck into 'drive', and pulled forward, onto the grass.
Leaping from my truck, I pranced around on the grass like an NFL running back that had just scored the game-game winning touch down.
“You like that shit?” I taunted, “What are you going to do now?”
His response was very simple. He stated:
“We'll see what happens when the Cops get here.”
It was then that I realized I had engaged a numerically superior enemy and that it was only a matter of time before I was outflanked and taken down.
Fuck that. Time to break contact.
I turned to my friends and thanked them for a wonderful night.
“You guys might not want to watch this.”
But I was kind of hoping they did.
There were only two points of entry large enough to allow my Tacoma Prerunner enough room to get back onto the parking lot, and one of them had a towtruck in it.
I was going to have to squeeze between a fire hydrant and some sporty car that looked more expensive than all the money I had made in my life.
Jumping onto the truck, I threw it into drive and gunned it forward. My adversary had planned ahead, he must have already been in drive. The gap between super-expensive-please-don't-hit-it car, and the Quick Pick was closing faster than the mouth of an exogorth. He couldn't get an angle sharp enough to block me with his engine block, so in a move of tactical brilliance he opened his driver's side door.
The Millenium Falcon tilts on her axis as the giant stalactite teeth close in....
Now I ask you... what woud my friend Jungle Recon do?
Right. Punch it, Chewy.
I was accelerating when I hit the driver's side door. I cut the angle, and made my escape leaving the door skidding on the pavement next to a puddle of truck-driver tears and failure.
A few days later I got a phone call from the wrecker company. They wanted compensation. They wanted to press charges. They wanted an apology!
I told them to pound sand, and that they're driver tried to trap me. They advised me that they had the entire incident on dash cam.
