“Hey man,” said the dude at the head of the kitchen table at a house in East Tulsa. We were expecting a party, but when I walked in the door it was only him and four hard looking motherfuckers playing cards. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was built. Angry looking, but not angry. Eerily wise looking in spite of the angry expression on his face. Hardcore. This dude was the real fuckin’ deal. He pointed at an ice chest by the table. “Get a beer.”
It was Christmas Night, 2001.
My buddy, an artist from Brooklyn, was with me. He was oblivious to the tension. A girl he met the night before at a dance club on Brookside where I bounced gave him her number. He convinced me to come over here with him.
I knew the girl, and helped her out when she got in some trouble once. She kept rough company. My friend didn’t care about that. His brain wasn’t thinking; his dick was.
My friend was a small guy. Not above 5’7”, muscular, but covered it in loose clothes that mimicked something Picasso would’ve worn. Paint spattered jeans, Etnies, a loose hoodie, and a parka. His hair looked like chia sprouts left untended. He wore fingerless knit gloves. You wouldn’t have thought this guy was a master pussy hound. But he could hook ’em, fuck ’em, and still keep ‘em as friends afterward. I think he fucked everyone he met in Tulsa.
Well, almost everyone.
He had no clue how small of a place Tulsa is. There are always micro-political forces at work in a place this interconnected. But he didn’t sense that; the lure was too strong for him. I was his sidekick that night. His protection from himself, in some ways.
I scanned the room when we walked in. Immediately, I felt a need to piss. Nothing seemed right about this scenario.
The girl was nowhere to be seen, and the dudes sitting at the table were fixed on us. They didn’t stand or make any threatening gestures. They were totally silent. In front of the big guy sat a 9mm pistol and a bag of peanuts.
He was tapping his foot. Right above it was an ankle bracelet. Dude must’ve been fresh out of the joint.
That “no oxygen” and gnawing urge to piss myself got worse when he brought some shit up from almost a year ago:
“Yo,” he said. He threw his arm over the back of his chair and leaned back. “You were there when my homie got his ass kicked?”
Suddenly, it clicked: He was talking about a guy that got beaten viciously on New Year’s Eve the year before. The attack was so bad the guy went into a coma. It happened at a nightclub where I was working the door.
That’s why he looked familiar: they used to run together. Dude wanted answers. I can’t blame him. I didn’t have any answers, only the truth of where I was when it went down.
Everyone’s eyes were on me, except my artist buddy, looking down a hallway for the chick whose number he’d got. He didn’t give a shit that we might get shot. He wanted pussy.
Some clanging from the hallway leading to the bedrooms broke the tension, and out of the opaque gray lighting came the girl my buddy came to see. She went over to the dude questioning me and put both hands on his shoulders. He looked up at her for a second with a satisfied grin before he leaned forward on the table with his elbows, tapping the handle of the pistol with a finger.
“Yeah, I was there.” I said, knowing that if I had any other answer, I would be dead.
It’s not like the dude had the gun pointed at me or anything. But when you’re outnumbered and there’s a thing that can kill you before you hear it, you tell the truth. You give some respect.
Meanwhile, my buddy was smiling at the chick. And in return, she started blowing kisses at him and making little snakeish flirtations while her hands were still on the dudes’ shoulders.
So now I have this oblivious little guy behind me doing Benny Hill shit to this siren behind the motherfucker that could kill us both, and I’m trying to choose my words very carefully.
“Where were you that night?” the dude asks. “You there, right? Did’ja let those motherfuckers in?” He’s calm. No emotion. No give.
“At the front door, man,” I say. I keep my hands in my coat pockets, lips tight, not breaking the eye-to-eye thing going on between us. “A girl told me after it happened. I didn’t see anything other than the blood all over the back hallway and the ambulance loading your homie in when I got to it.”
Sweat’s building up on the top of my head. No way I'm going to move from where I’m standing or change how I’m standing. The adrenaline is overriding the discomfort.
“That’s what I heard.” Dude sits up straight. His elbows are still on the table. Contemplative. He looks back at the chick, then back at me.
He doesn’t seem to give a shit that my buddy is still doing his best to keep the girl’s attention. He wants to get answers. If he doesn’t get the right one, he might want other things. “Tisk, tisk…” He says, sandwiching his chin between his thumb and index finger. “You sure?”
Out of that bouncing crew that was there that night, I was one of maybe three that hung onto our jobs. I don’t know if the whole thing that night was set-up or not. Rumors about that night moved through Tulsa’s bar scene. I didn’t throw chum in the water. Sharks fed on why this beating happened. A lot of cocaine and anger produced hundred of theories by jaw-jacking dunce-caps who thought it was cool to light this situation up, rail by rail, until an outlandish solution was reached and they thought it would be cool to corner one of the bouncers on the crew and interrogate him before laying out their sweaty fucking blueprint.
Two facts, and I use that word sparingly, about that night still appear to me. It took someone inside to open the doors at the right time and get the guy who was the target to that hallway and not move from the door so he couldn’t escape back into the club.
It took planning.
If it wasn’t planned, it had to be the worst luck in the fuckin’ universe that this kid stumbled into this coincidence.
From what I put together, it was one of the bouncers. The guys who were let in were homies of some of the guys on the crew. The guy who was targeted was dating the ex of one of the dudes who were let in. “Let in” from the inside at a specific time into a place locked from the outside of each door is a pretty good indication that it had been set-up. Nobody “got in” without help. Something happened in that dynamic, but that’s where I would cut the conversation short. I didn’t want to know. It could be me next if I stuck around long enough to listen. As tough as I tried to play at that time, seeing the silhouette of a person under the red shadow of his own blood was a good reason not to talk and not to listen. That’s shit I don’t need to know if I’m walking out of it alive.
“Shame that happened.” I say. “Nobody deserves that.” I mean it. I never know why people come to fuck someone up… or maybe I do, but I know that I ain’t sayin’ shit either way. I bow respectfully to him and each of the guys around him. “We’re gonna go. Good talking to you.”
The dude nodded. My buddy was still in a trance. I pulled him by his coat as we backed out of the house as discreetly as possible, but just before we reached the door, the guy stood up.
“Hey man,” he said. Fuck, I thought, is it time? Are we gonna get whacked on Christmas Night? “You took care of my girl when she was in trouble,” he said, pointing at me, but not thanking me. He gave me a quick nod. I expected the worst, but it was a fuckin’ gift I didn’t expect.
Once outside and in the car, my buddy said, “Why are we leaving?”
“Fuckin’ call her later or something, dude.” I looked at him, befuddled. “Asshole. We almost got killed.”
“I didn’t see that at all,” he said. He had this intoxicated smile on his face from whatever song she was singing to him. “She’s so hot…”
I moved to LA the next year. Since I only knew a handful of people, I spent most Christmases alone. I was fine with that, after the events of 2001.
The first year away from Tulsa, I spent Christmas Night at Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Blvd., reading books I didn’t usually have time to, since I was always working.
As the years went on before meeting my wife in 2007, I made friends and spent some Christmas Nights getting fucked up. Once, I woke up the day after Christmas with two hookers who took me home and put me to bed after I apparently beat the shit outta some guys harassing them at a bar called Red Rock that sat on the corner of where Sunset Blvd. meets Holloway. I didn’t fuck either of them, they didn’t steal anything from me, and we had breakfast and talked about how television had become boring since rollerskating died out as a fad.
I never forgot that Christmas Night in Tulsa. Even if I had Christmas plans, I would go to Jewish Delis, since I knew they’d be open, and I would read for an hour or so, each year. Knowing that there wasn’t a gun and a group of dudes that could kill me made me appreciate each quiet moment more.
I’ve been back in Tulsa since 2019. Christmas is spent working at The Merc. I watch people, protect them, and give words of comfort to those who have nothing. At the end of my shift, I get in my car and sit for about five minutes. I wait to see if anyone is waiting on me. It’s half-paranoid, I know. The floor heater warms my feet. I adjust my mirrors to take a last look before pulling out of the parking lot.
It's Christmas Night. Time to make a change and find another route home.
