I Am the Coolest Man on Earth, Pt. 11

Shoes: check. Hair: check. Clothing: check. What now? What else: go out to clubs all the time. We all liked music, dancing, clothes, stimulants…it was how you’d win friends and influence people. Like Ace Face in Quadrophenia, you could be a bell boy in the daytime, but at night you could re-birth yourself as whatever you wanted to be.

But my time as a bell boy, I mean retail record store employee, had its upside. I was able to keep up on the latest releases and dig out old chestnuts. Plus, “samples” always made friends happy. It also taught me the great lesson of blood. As stated in part 1 (see http://bit.ly/1vAO2Or), bleeding is cool.

During a Saturday afternoon lull at the shop I worked at on Lexington Avenue between 85th and 86th, I decided it would be a good time to take a deposit to the bank. I never got there. The two fellows standing by the bus enclosure pulled out a pistol and clocked me with it before I could get there. They were a few thousand dollars richer and I had a knot in my head.

Barely a week later, a cute cashier and I went to see Eight Eyed Spy at Tier 3. One of their guitarists worked at the same shop as us so it wasn’t really a date. Somehow or another, in the cab on the way back uptown, she says something about how she hopes I never have to get held up again, and before you know it…

Through this experience I learned a few lessons that have always stuck with me. First, I learned that getting pistol whipped isn’t like in the movies where people are immediately knocked out cold. I fell to the ground but I was still conscious. I started to get up but the gun wielder immediately pointed the gun at me. It was the international signal to stay put. I fully agreed with him that at that moment it would be safer to stay on the ground until they got away.

The second lesson was facing down guns can get you laid. It could get you killed too, but what a way to go?

© Curt Weiss 2014