In
the early 1980s when I was in
Australia
and down on my luck,
I
had the occasion to stay a week
or
so in a boarding house for men.
Rent
was cheap and it came with
one
meal a day thrown in for free.
Met
some pretty rough and tumble
characters
back then. One Mid-
Eastern
fellow whom I never heard
speak
was given the nickname, Snake.
There’s
a natural born killer in him
the
others warned. Just look at the
cold
darkness of death in his eyes.
Another,
who spoke of his illicit
exploits
around the world was
known
as Red for the fiery tempre-
ment
which matched the color of
his
hair. No one knew my name.
In
fact, I was so common no one
bothered
to ask mine or give me
one
either. When I was with the
Army
in Germany in the mid-1960s,
the
girls who came to dance and
drink
at the Enlisted Man’s Club
gave
me the nickname, Baby Face,
for
I was fair of feature and barely
eighteen.
A few years ago, two
young
thugs approached me on
the
street in Kansas City and called
out,
Hey, Old Man..! And, as we
stood
toe-to-toe, I offered to slap
the
crap out of them for their dis-
respect.
Lucky, I suppose, for them
and
for me, I had thought about
murder
briefly a time or two in my
life,
but I never did. Come to think
of
it, Baby Face wasn’t such a bad
nickname
in its place and time. Seems
it
was so long ago now since this Old
Man
had left him behind.
Chris
Hanch 5-26-19
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