Guys (and some women, apparently) will do anything but go to therapy. [Pt 3]

"Yo. Your tooth."

Rat holds it out with two fingers, arm stretched out, looking away like a dead cockroach in his grasp. The man on the ground rolls onto his back, wheezes, takes the tooth and studies it and places it in his shirt pocket.

The back door of the bar opens once more, and a bartender peers out, towel on his shoulder, uninterested in anything that happens outside.

"Dan. If you're going to bleed, bleed off my property."

"Yes sir."

The door closes.

"Dan," Rat says.

Dan sits up, spits red saliva on the concrete floor and smiles, exposing the new gap.

Finally Marcus blinks, after about ninety seconds of watching everything happen around us. Looks at me like coming back from somewhere and needing to be brought up to speed.

"Bro," he says.

"Bro," I answer.

"Bro."

"I know, Marcus."

I realize then that we are not alone anymore.

Four, five people have walked out of the bar and are standing in the alley, sipping from their bottles even though they aren't allowed to. No phones anywhere. And that's the weirdest part. Like it's agreed upon not to show the video somewhere else.

A woman in Dallas Cowboy's windbreaker steps closer and points her beer at Rat.

"How much did he pay you?"

"Two hundred," Rat says.

"For one punch?"

"For that punch."

She looks at Derrick, the six foot seven giant with his jaw swelling up and does some calculations I can see in her eyes.

"I've got sixty on me."

"For what?" Derrick says.

"For him," she points at Dan. "He obviously wants it. I obviously need it."

Dan is getting up on his feet, getting up like the man who hears his name called over the intercom at the job he loved once.

"Ma'am, I'm not going to hit a woman."

"That’s fine, honey, but you couldn’t touch me if you tried."

And suddenly something happens in the alley, the way it clicks together. It's not chaos, that's the thing I can't get over. Expecting it to become chaos but it doesn't. It becomes a line. People start to form a line and somebody's boyfriend is taking the money. Derrick again, instinctively acts like security and is patting people down to make sure nothing egregious happens if things get out of hand. Rat starts to announce rules out loud.

"Sixty dollars. One shot. Body only, he's already lost a tooth."

"Body only," she agrees.

She punches Dan in the ribs. Not a good punch, but his face softens with some sort of gratitude.

"Again," he says.

"All I have is $60."

"That one was worth twelve or so. Do it again for free."

She does it again, but better this time. He groans and laughs at the same time, and I understand that standing there with my hands in jacket pockets, and my keys digging into my palm, that I'm watching a man getting medicine.

Marcus lights his second cigarette from the first one, his hands shaking so much that he needs to try three times.

"You good?" I ask.

"I'm the best I've been in like a year and a half," he answers. "It's insane. Because I've been picked up like a suitcase."

"You paid three hundred dollars to be picked up like a suitcase."

"Yeah," he smokes and continues. "Yes, and I'd do it again."

"Marcus."

"I didn't say it's good, D. I'm saying I've been sitting in that office for eight months making twice what I made before and I couldn't tell you a single thing I felt there. Nothing." He points at Dan who is bent over now, hands on his knees, breathing heavily and being told by a stranger to shake it off. "That man is the only honest guy at this bar."

Derrick comes over with bills in his hand, returns Marcus's hundred dollar bill.

"What's this?"

"Your money is no good. Rat only earned two."

Marcus looks at the bill like it's a trick.

"You could've kept it."

"Yeah." Derrick shrugs. "But I don't want to be a man who would take your money. Instead I am a man who put you on the ground. I prefer being that man."

He leaves to check somebody else's pockets. Rat lingers for a moment, blonde dreads covering his face, counting damp cash.

"For real though," he tells me, "tell your boy not to do that again. Not with strangers. Nine out of ten times you'll catch someone who doesn't have a Derrick."

"And the tenth time?"

Rat thinks. "The tenth time you'll catch me," he says, and he's clearly proud of himself.

—---------------------------------------------------

I drive home at 12:40 AM, park my car across the street, shut off the engine, switch off the headlights and wait there because the light in the kitchen is on, and that means she is awake. I just need a moment to mentally recap what the fuck just happened tonight.

The thing is, I keep playing it through in my head, and it's not the punch that stayed with me.

What stayed with me is the line. These people did not come outside because there was a fight. Fights start all the time. In fact, that's why we were leaving. They came outside because there was a price. The minute there was a number involved, it stopped being an ugly mess done by two stupid guys and became a game where you could take part in. Sixty bucks make it a transaction. Transaction makes it equal. Equal makes it okay.

Everybody in that alley wanted it already. Every single one of them. Rat has been cracking his “big brother's” teeth for years for free. Dan walks numbly around, his boots wearing out. Marcus is here, paying money to feel his heart beating. All that was left is the permission slip, and the money is the fastest one ever invented.

That is the ugly little truth I drove back home with. Not that money makes people violent. People are violent anyway, and they are polite about it, and money isn't the cause of anything. It's the door. Break it an inch, and you'll be shocked how many well-behaving, tax-paying, working adults will walk through it, with their beer still in their hand.

And I know that. I know it because I'm sitting in my car in front of my own house, with my wife inside who probably things that I slept upstairs in the guest room. I have $340 in my checking, and water bill on the counter. I'm not thinking about how insane the alley was.

I'm thinking about how much would it have taken me to go to it.

I'm thinking $300. Maybe $250.

I go inside. Whitni, surprised to see me, asks me where I've been. I tell her Marcus needed to talk about work.

Which is true…