The place was pretty crowded for a weekday evening. It was dim, the only good light was directly under a handful of hanging lamps - the kind sporting beer company logos in simulated stained glass. Outside, it was warm and I remembered smelling a clump of jasmine in bloom nearby; inside, it stank of stale smoke and - what, vomit? Old cat litter? I wasn't sure, it was not pleasant, but at least it was fairly faint. There were maybe fifteen Harleys parked in a row out front, all with extended frontends, garish paintjobs, and far too much chrome.
The crowd at the bar was made up of cookie cutter bikers: all had the same black leather jacket, greasy jeans, and engineer boots; they wore identical beards and long hair, and each sported a handful of silver in his left ear. At least, I thought, they aren't all required to wear the same color bandannas. I chuckled inside my head. If you encountered any of these guys away from his buddies and asked him why he did the biker lifestyle thing, he would almost certainly answer that it allowed him to express his individuality. Okay.
I was glad we hadn't ridden our bikes there that night, although at most bars it would have made our plan a little easier to pull off. Had I showed up alone on my showroom stock British motorcycle, the regulars would have heckled and harassed me continuously until I got fed up and left. And I knew that if someone pulled up on a Japanese machine, he would be baited into a fight, beaten so badly that he would need medical treatment, and his bike would be vandalized to unusability.
We had knocked off a quart of Ron Rico in a public park just before we got to the bar, and I was still feeling my stagefright fade away. I nursed a draft at the bar as I watched what looked like a pair of twins play eightball on the nearest table. There were four tables altogether, and two of them had some fairly impressive play taking place upon them. The twins were the weakest players, so this would have to be where we put on our act; as always, we counted on quickly getting into a game against each other.
A movement to my right attracted my attention. One of the hanging lamps was swaying. Lars had bumped it with his head on his way across the bar. He spotted me without acknowledgement and altered his course to slap a quarter down on the rail of the pool table nearest me on his way to place an order at the end of the bar.
While we waited for the twins to finish their game, I was probably the only one in the bar not staring at Lars. I knew him and still it was hard not to stare.
Tall and rangy and wiry, he spills over furniture, pokes out of the top of any crowd, and bumps his head on hanging things. He's like a scarecrow wearing a Halloween monster mask, a mangy Irish Setter with a bad disposition. Perched on his barstool, he reminded me of a smashed-up piano I saw on a trashheap as a child - straight, hard pieces of wood with ragged edges, a swarm of broken, stinging wires wafting about dangerously in the breeze.
The left twin sank the eightball just then. He let out a hoot and spun around with his fists in the air, like a boxer that had won a bout. Right Twin didn't move, he stood with his cue stick in front of his body, hands clasped on it at about midchest level - sort of at parade rest, I thought. He watched the cue ball lose momentum as it rolled away front its recent violent encounter. Left Twin stopped turning, looked at his opponent, and opened his mouth. Before he spoke, he saw where Right Twin was staring, and as he turned his head to the near corner pocket, the cue ball fell into it.
Before his expression had a chance to change, Lars was up off his stool, had shouldered him aside, and had the balls racked. He pick the heaviest stick from the rack on the wall and chalked his hands as the stunned loser of the last game pulled a big irregular silver ring from his left little finger and handed it to his recent opponent. Right Twin accepted it and slid it on his right pinky. I'll be damned, I thought, they really were twins - mirror images, in fact.
In the course of the game, we made a point of switching balls several times. I had started with stripes, and had shot solids twice since then. I'd seen
opponents switch due to inattention, but never had I pointed it out to them, nor had I ever seen anyone else do so. Here we did it intentionally, blatantly - daring
these grubby sheep to tell us we were screwing up. None of them ever did.
Showtime, I thought, as Lars jerked upright away from the table. He glared at me and shouted.
"What did you say to me, punk?" He was loud and terrifying, and instantly had the complete attention of everyone in the house. His eyes bugged, the inside corners solid red. I thought of glowing coals in a fire ring at the beach - but now was not the time to daydream, the curtain was up.
"I said that . . . " I shouted so loud that my throat hurt. I had no idea what to say that I had just said, but we were past the point where it mattered. I tensed my chest, and at that instant, my right shirt sleeve split. For just a flash, I was looking downward, across the table at myself. I felt a hot gust blow through me, a desert breeze - not soothing, but searing, desiccating.
I must say that I looked pretty intimidating. Cords stood out on my neck; veins bulged in my face, neck, and arms; a gristly, spiderwebbed biceps poked out of the torn sleeve of the arm holding the cue stick. I remember thinking that the shirt ripping from the force of the muscle beneath it was a really cool touch and that we should make it a regular part of our street theater. I had just a heartbeat in which to wonder how I was seeing out of Lar's eyes, and why it didn't worry me. I saw my teeth grit, and the stick snap off where I was holding it, a small cloud of blue dust puffing out from the felt tip, the footlong shaft of wood hanging in the air for just an instant, then falling. Then I was back, looking across the table at my co-star.
He shrieked and sprang over the table at me, looking for all the world to be some enormous bird of prey, a charging bull, an enemy dirigible clearing the nearest line of hills - breaching the last hope of defense. I swung the broken stick at him, pulling my hand in and down to touch my sternum - a movement a majorette makes just before flinging her baton skyward; the cue's big end drug against the floor as though I were trying to strike a gigantic match, then it came free and arced upward so fast that there seemed to be quarter of a large wooden disk wedged between us. It struck him just above the left ear as he cleared the near cushion. The stick broke with a sound of a gunblast, a nearby lightning strike, a bat sending a baseball out of the park, over the freeway, out past the suburbs, and into a cornfield somewhere far away. The impact popped loose the rubber bumper on the fat end of the stick, and it sailed up and lodged in one of the acoustic tiles of the bar's hanging ceiling. Grandslam, I thought, as I felt - more than saw - everyone in the bar flinch. I stepped to my right, out of his way, and Lars fell in a heap against the bar, legs skewed to one side, one arm limp over his head.
It was so quiet, I thought. Had I gone deaf? No, not a soul moved. They were shocked: they had just seen someone die; for if there is one quick, sure way to kill a man, it is to break a cue stick against his temple.
They had seen a brief non-fight, and now it was over.
But they were wrong, it had hardly started. I looked down at the heap on the floor and scowled. I dropped the remaining center section of cue stick onto the pile of arms, legs, and corduroy.
"Is that all you got?" I taunted. I saw a couple of the bikers look a bit ill. That would change quickly enough.
With a screech like metal giving way in an auto crusher, the dead giant sprang straight into my stomach and knocked me up onto the pool table. Landing knees-first on my chest, he clutched my throat. I slammed down my heels, arched my back, and flung him off into three petrified onlookers at the near end of the bar.
Now we would start to have some fun. The broken stick was doctored, but only Lars and I knew that. Hardly anyone moved in the next few minutes as he and I threw each other across the bar, on top of tables, and into stunned onlookers. They had seen me break a cue stick by squeezing it with one hand, then break it again an instant later in a move that should have killed a mortal man. And they had seen Lars, huge and hideous to start with, rising - unkillable - to fight on. They were too stunned to stop us, too slow to get out of our way.
I ripped a chair apart with my hands to free a leg to swing at Lars. I "missed" him and hit some fat biker in the brisket by accident. Once, Lars swung a fist - with a beer mug in it - at me and missed, downing a muscular redhead wearing a leather jacket that boasted the word Prez in violet stitching across the back. I'm pretty sure that the guy lost at least two teeth. About a minute into our "fight," Lars decided that we hadn't broken enough liquor bottles behind the bar, so he lifted and threw me back over it, then vaulted after.
Smashing the glassware and liquor bottles is one of the more satisfying parts of our show, but also the riskiest. It's hard to roll on the floor thrashing hard enough to break things on the shelves without getting sliced up on the shards. Also, it's chancy to spend very much time on the other side of the bar from all the onlookers. We're less of a threat with a bar shielding them, and if enough time passes without us being threatening, the watchers will unfreeze and might try to interfere.
Back into the crowd we went. He landed face up on a table. I landed on his chest and the table collapsed.
As we went down, I managed to clip some poor bastard in the chin with my heel; Lars threw back his arms and his left wrist caught some slow mover on the nose - blood spurted from it in a sudden scarlet bloom.
I was too tired to go on. My face and sides ached a little, too - despite the adrenaline high that was still subsiding; we actually did land blows on each other, which - although they were mostly show - had the mass of two very large young men behind them. We jumped up and sprang away from each other, pausing ever so slightly. That hesitation was enough for the few undamaged onlookers to unfreeze. We dropped our shoulders and let the crowd tackle us.
I think that night - at that bar - we broke six of the ten tables, four cue sticks, two noses, four teeth, at least twenty glass pitchers, fifteen half gallons of name brand liquor, eight chairs, two ribs, thirty plus beer mugs, one of the four by eight foot bar mirrors - which happened when Lars pitched a seven ball at me, several three-gallon bottles of pickled eggs, the cash register, and the slate on one of the pool tables.
Whenever we let the crowd stop us at the end of a performance, I was afraid that everyone was just aching to kick the crap out of us for ruining their hangout, and I expected that we would be killed. But this time, as always, they simply restrained us. No one hit either of us; no one kicked us. They just stayed piled on. After a couple shouts and a half-hearted struggle, we both subsided. We sullenly let the locals talk us into calming down. People started to buy us drinks. Others started to clean up all the broken glass and chairs. A woman dug out the firstaid kit and started tending to the wounded. One fellow tried to find and sort out the billiard balls. Good luck, I thought. I had thrown three of them out the door and another into a wall so hard that it probably popped through into the business next door.
Half an hour later, we were drinking buddies, singing some old spiritual (Swing Low, Sweet Chariot - I think it was), walking out the door with our arms over each other's shoulders - a little awkward because of the almost one foot difference in our heights.
Now I look back stunned. We did our bar trashing show at least fifteen times that I remember. Always the same: We would come in separately - pretending not to know each other, play pool, start to fight, then trash the place and beat on the locals.
Never once did anyone call the police. Never once were we ejected afterwards. Never once did anyone try to hurt either of us. Never once did anyone ask us to pay for whatever or whoever we had broken. Never once was either of us told to not come back. No one ever seemed to notice that neither of us suffered any real injuries at all. We were usually treated like heroes afterward, swarmed over by all the unattached women, and we sometimes left with the girlfriends of our victims. We always got free drinks and no one ever suspected that it was all a show, all just a trick. My God, I never realized just how much I really miss those days.