Never Say...."Go Ahead And Shoot!" Part III

When we left our tale, Marion had just informed me that she had handcuffed poor old Gene to the water heater in the basement of their ancient house.

Needless to say, I was a bit concerned about Gene’s condition so Steve, Marion and I drove over to check on him.

I’m not going to go into minute detail here because quite frankly….I really don’t want to think about it much.

Suffice it to say that he was wide awake, laying as they say…in his own squalor….(how’s that for gilding the Lilly?) and totally pissed off!

Long story short……..we emancipated him and hung around long enough to insure that he wasn’t going to kill her (which, quite frankly I would have done) and then got the hell out of there.

I’ll never forget how on the drive back to the bar, Steve looked at me and laughed.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about those two.”

“You ain’t just whistling Dixie big boy!” I agreed. “I warned him about that girl.”

Well…believe it or not….Gene and Marion made up and things went back to what passed for ‘normal’ for them for a while.

The calm didn’t last long.

The next episode of the Gene and Marion Freak Show took place about a month later.

At the time, the band I was with had come to an agreement with an ancient old farmer in the next county to rent a ramshackled old house on his property. Our ‘rent’ was that one of us had to cut his grass every three weeks in the summer. The house had been deserted for decades but was located beside a beautiful mountain stream which had deep pools which were great for swimming, wading, making love on rocks warmed by the summer sun and well….all sorts of stuff.

Man…what memories!

ANYWAY….we used this old place as a party shack and rehearsal house. We had a bunch of great times out at that old place, playing music, cooking pigs, drinking beer.....yeah…you get the picture.

Believe it or not, we actually bought a roll of wire and illegally tapped into a power pole three hundred feet away from the house! We drove sixteen penny nails into the two dead ended leads on the pole and used clamps to attach our ‘extension cord’!

It’s a damned wonder we didn’t get killed! I get chills just thinking about it now.

However I digress……..

A bunch of us decided to have a big blow out at ‘The Shack’ one weekend. There must have close to seventy people hanging out that weekend and we were all having a ball.

At some point on Saturday however, Gene decided that he was extremely pissed off at his car, an Audi Fox which kept dying on him when he least expected it. He came over to a group of us guys and asked if we wanted to help him ‘kill’ his car.

Now the truth of the matter is that we were all a bit trashed from partying our collective asses off all night and, quite frankly…we were young, inebriated and stupid so……

We all agreed to help him kill his damned car!

Over the next few hours, we proceeded to murder his vehicle.

We took turns repeatedly running it into trees, spinning around in circles and at one point, my old friend Art Fowler drenched it in gas siphoned from the gas tank and drove it off a twenty foot cliff after which he swam to safety while several dozen drunken onlookers shouted their approval.

Yeah…..there was alcohol involved.

Well, one day, a few weeks later, a couple of cops showed up at my apartment. One of them was a good looking large breasted woman named Sharon M. (I later found out that her apparently large rack was actually inhanced by a specially designed female bullet proof vest!)

A WHOLE other story there about me and the female cop!

Remind me to tell ya’ll about the time she had to actually arrest me when we when were, shall we say….romantically involved!

True story.

ANYWAY……..

I was asked to accompany the two officers back to the station to explain my involvement in an ‘Arson of a vehicle’.

Well damn!

Turns out that ole Gene didn’t actually OWN the friggin’ car!

The finance company owned the damned car and Gene still owed a bunch of money on it!

Needless to say, I was quite surprised to find that deliberately trashing a vehicle that was owned by a finance company was a pretty serious ‘NO NO’ in the eyes of the law enforcement community!

Man….I was in a world of shit!

Before I knew it, I was being accused of being the ring leader of the entire deal. To be honest, I HAD told Gene about the time that I had destroyed my old Pontiac Ventura after I had bought a new car. But DAMN!

That old car was totally paid for…it was MINE!

Yeah, I did actually throw a party where a bunch of us young morons DID take turns running that old clunker into tree and YES we did consummate the affair by setting it on fire in the woods behind my house but dammit…..

IT WAS TOTALLY PAID FOR!

IT WAS MY CAR!

Apparently, Gene was so whacked out that he didn’t understand the difference so, he set a bunch of young idiots loose to trash a car he didn’t actually OWN and….of course….the cops wanted to put ALL of us in jail!

Thankfully, that didn’t happen.

After spending the night in jail, Marion bailed me out.

Yep…..Marion.

Gene was still in jail but the cops realized that we had been duped into destroying Gene’s car and that he alone was guilty of any REAL crime.

To make a long story short……..Gene’s parents bailed him out after a couple of days.

I was tending bar a few nights later and Marion came in. She was obviously upset. She had been crying and sat at the bar throwing back shot after shot of Vodka until she finally began to speak.

“I left that dumb sonofabitch sitting on the couch with a shotgun in his mouth!” She snarled. “I hope he pulls the trigger!”

In one of those, “I wish I hadn’t heard that moments”, I asked her to repeat what she had just said.

She looked at me with a weird grin.

“I think he’s getting’ ready to blow his fuckin’ brains out.” She said.

I looked at Steve who was sitting at the bar and he shook his head.

“I ain’t getting’ involved this time.” He growled. “Why the fuck didn’t I buy a fuckin’ 7-11? I had to buy a gotdamned BAR!”

I laughed and told him that he needed to cover the bar while I went to check on Gene.

He ignored me and asked an old regular Grant B. to watch the place for a bit.

Steve looked at me and grinned.

“Who the hell am I foolin’?” He laughed. “I ain’t gonna miss this shit!”

Steve and I jumped in his car and headed over to Gene’s house. When we pulled up, everything seemed to be in order.

I got out of the car and walked up the front steps to the porch.

As stood there and decided what to do, I remember looking through the front window and saw Gene sitting on the couch watching TV.

He held a shotgun across his knees.

I knocked on the door.

Still watching Gene through front window, I saw him snatch the shotgun and point it toward the door.

I knocked again.

“WHAT?” Came the response from inside.

“Hey Gene! It’s Ron!” I shouted nervously. “What’s goin’ on?” I asked.

As I looked through one of the small windows in the front door, I saw Gene level the shotgun at the door.

“You better get the fuck out of here Ron……I oughta blow your fuckin’ brains out!!!” He screamed.

Well…….needless to say….

I was puzzled…

What the hell had I done to piss him off?

To Be Continued…………..