Chapter 46

The sound: Big Brother & The Holding Company Feat. Janis Joplin – Piece of My Heart, Deep Purple – Lazy, Cream – Badge, Queen – All that I Want, The Eagles – Witchy Woman, Donovan – Hurdy Gurdy Man, Marianne Faithfull – Why’d Ya Do It?, Colin James – Why’d you Lie?

By 1 AM and the closure of the bar I was exhausted. So were the rest of the crew…but hard as we tried we couldn’t get all those drunks out of the bar in a timely fashion so it was close to 2 AM before we got everyone out.

At one point I remember looking up from behind the bar to see two of the bouncers dragging drunk Allie offa the door jamb where he was holding on for dear life in a last ditch attempt to get him some drink…just so they could close and lock the doors

Eventually we found ourselves alone with the doors locked and most of the lights off. I poured us all drinks and then we gathered at the first table below the mezzanine to put our tired, sore feet up for a bit prior to the Herculean task of cleaning that barn so we could all go home.

Me…I wanted me 2 beers, to cash out and to head off to spark a spliff and lay in a hot tub….I was pretty sure that the cashing out was gonna take me some time because we’d just had the best night ever in the bar. I didn’t think I’d seen that many twenty dollar bills in one till before in my life….there’d been so many of them that I’d had to pull wads of them out of the bill slot and hide them in both the 2nd and 3rd drawers over the course of the evening.

Just as I got comfortable in my chair with my feet up and began to raise my first ice cold beer to my lips there was a crash from behind me and two masked men armed with rifles roared into the room from the front lobby of the hotel, pushing the pregnant night clerk ahead of them.

Both of them started screaming at us to get on the floor while waving their guns around. One of them dashed down the 4 stairs from the mezzanine turning to face us and training his gun on us waving it back and forth at shoulder level to take us all in. The 2nd walked the length of the mezzanine with the pregnant clerk in tow and when he got to the second set of stairs down to the main floor he shoved her down to land on her belly.

Two things crossed my mind at once. The first being “you can’t do that she’s pregnant” and the second being…”it’s those fucking idiots Frankie and Bennie and this is the worst fucking joke I’ve seen in a while” so again, almost at once, I started to get outta my chair to give them a well deserved piece of my mind.

I had finally had enough of those two.

Two things happened at once, Penny, the waitress sitting beside me grabbed my sleeve as I started to rise and pulled me off my feet to land on top of her on the floor as Frankie (the moron who was on our level and training his gun on me) let go a round that went into the wall where I’d been sitting.

Had I stood, I’d have been gut shot, and had I remained sitting I’d have been hit in the throat. Either way it was a lose/lose for me…cos I knew he was using a large caliber hunting rifle...something big enough to make that kind of noise and that kind of hole in the wall was something one usually used to bring down moose.