---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ ISBN# issue/book “Excavation” cc&d, v309 (the May 2021 issue) Order the 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the book What If the cc&d May-August 2021 magazine issues collection book		get the 426 page May-August 2021 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

The Man Who Threw The Punch

Robert Collings

    My father used to gripe about the people he’d encountered over his lifetime who deserved a good punch in the head. “I would have slugged that sonofabitch if he’d said another word!” he would always say. I don’t think he realized I had heard him use that saying a thousand times before. I had always heard it from others, too. This particular sonofabitch really got around.
    I took a trip to Hawaii in the seventies with this other guy. I didn’t know this guy very well. Every word he said, every utterance, was accompanied by a broad smile. He had these tiny teeth with gaps between every one of them. When he smiled, his gums sort of ran out of his mouth straight at you. He kept going on about how girls dumped on him all the time. I was depressed about ten minutes after we hit the hotel room. This wasn’t a good sign when you have another two weeks to go.
    We did a lot of drinking. My friend knew some guys who were also in Hawaii at the same time. They were from his hockey team and they had all gone over to the islands on some junket or other. I don’t know why my friend had not gone with them, and it doesn’t matter anyway. They were there and he was there and I was the odd man out. We ended up hanging out with the hockey players, although I never felt comfortable with any of them. My friend had an easy rapport with these guys that I didn’t have. He acted a certain way when it was just the two of us, but he became a whole new person when he got around his hockey buddies. His voice and his laugh and his whole manner took on an edge I had never seen before. There was something vaguely sinister about this hockey group that I found difficult to pinpoint. It was like they were all members of a club who shared a dark secret that no one outside the club could ever know. My friend laughed and shared in-jokes with his buddies and I felt like a complete outsider.
    The hockey guys were all bigger than I was, and stronger, too. They bragged about the weights they lifted in the gym. They bragged about their hockey fights, and how the blood froze to the ice and had to be scraped off with a shovel. They were all territorial around the women we met. We had only known this group of girls for a couple of days, but I had the impression the hockey guys were just itching to spill more blood on the ice if anyone messed with their property.
    I was used to fighting with weapons like sarcasm and a quick wit, but that sort of thing did not fly around the hockey guys. They had their own way of keeping score. I had not known any of these hockey players before, but I knew guys just like them when I was in high school. In high school you tend to mix with everybody and sometimes you really have no choice. These jocks in school would jokingly push you around and grab you by the arm and do all these physical things that were supposed to be playful. But the subtext was never in doubt. Mess with them, even a little, and your words become like idle silence. I did my best to avoid the hockey guys in high school, but I couldn’t avoid the hockey guys in Hawaii.
    Less than a week into our holiday, I found myself in a hotel room where a few of these guys were staying. The room was full of people. I could see a few of the hockey guys circling around the women, all inching closer with big smiles. My friend was laughing away with one of his buddies, and I was wondering how long I was going to be able to last before I had to take a plane home. This was one vacation that was just not working out. Suddenly, one of the hockey guys announced that everyone had to leave the room. I wasn’t sure of the reason for this. The guy had raised his voice and he was now yelling over everyone else.
    “Okay, okay! Everybody out! Now!”
    Everyone heard this guy, but no one seemed to be moving. To speed things up, the hockey guy decided to single out a person in the room in order to show the group he meant business. That person was me. Before I knew it, he had made his way over to me and he was pushing me up against the couch.
    “I said get out!” he commanded. “Move!”
    I knew the crowd I was in, and I didn’t want any trouble. “I’ll finish up,” I said. “It just seems like - “
    I was in mid-sentence when he slapped the beer out of my hand. The can went flying across the room, spewing beer all over. All the hockey guys and all the girls stopped talking and they were all staring. The big guy just stood there, glaring at me with a half-smile. He knew I wouldn’t fight back and he was right. I left the room. I did not say anything more, and I did not look at anybody. The next morning, I took the first plane home and I never spoke to my friend again. I don’t think either of us felt any great loss. I have always had the feeling that my only hockey buddy was secretly thrilled that another hockey buddy had put me in my place.
    Now I had my own sonofabitch, just like my father. I hated myself for being a coward in front of the others. For years, I had nightmares about that awful moment and I would wake up in a sweat every time. I would lie there in the dark, going over and over the imaginary punch that I had never thrown.
    This is all a way of introducing the story I am going to tell you because I thought it was important for you to know my own frame of mind before we meet the man who threw the real punch.
    I was working in the produce department in a supermarket. I had just finished my English degree and I was writing every chance I got. I would write in the evenings after work. I would write on my days off. There was no Sunday shopping in those days, and I would write all day Sunday. My screenplay was getting better with each draft. There was no doubt I would soon land an agent. These things always take time, but I had time. I might not land the best agent, but the agent I got would show the screenplay to another agent, and then it would all flow like water over Niagara. Once the best agent took a look, there would be a call to the studio head and my screenplay would soon turn all of Hollywood on its collective ear. I would insist on a share of the gross profits, not the net profits like all those other writers got. They were all clueless and they didn’t know what they were doing, but I had read every book on Hollywood that had ever been published. I even had my acceptance speech at the Academy Awards all prepared, just in case. I could just imagine that cretin who knocked the beer out of my hand and all the other people in that hotel room now watching me on television. I would show them all. And before I thanked Steven Spielberg, I would thank the most important people in the world, and these would be all the guys at the supermarket. This would get a big laugh, and it would show an audience of 48 million that I had never forgotten the little people.
    In the meantime, I was working in the produce department in a supermarket.
    One day, a new guy came to work in the produce department. I don’t think I have ever met anyone who gave off such an immediate impression of complete passivity. Brent Randolph was small in stature and pale in complexion and he looked nervous. I thought he was nervous because this was his first day on the job, but I quickly found out this was not exactly the case. He was always nervous. He spoke in a low monotone and he would never say anything except to answer a question. Even then, he used as few words as possible. Putting fruit and vegetables out on display for purchase by the public does not require an advanced degree in Agricultural Science, and Brent quickly learned the ropes. But he was still nervous, and he was always quiet. He looked to be in his late twenties, and I found out he had never worked in a supermarket before. Most of the guys I worked with had started out as part-time bag boys in high school, just like me. So I wondered what path had brought shy, pale Brent to the job at such a late stage in his life.
    The produce manager had assigned us to the lettuce wrap in the back room, and this would always take a while. Brent was standing beside me, silent as ever, and I thought I would find out a little bit about him.
    “What did you do before this job?” I casually asked him after a long silence.
    “Oh, you know, a couple of things.”
    He did not seem interested in talking, but I pressed him. “Oh? What sort of things?”
    “Well, I was a teacher.”
    This surprised me. “What, you mean like a teacher of kids?”
    “Yep.”
    “High school kids?”
    “Nope. Elementary.”
    This struck me as odd, because he had started the job in February, and the school year would still have been in progress. “You take some time off or something?” I asked.
    “Ah, no. I had to quit halfway through the year.”
    “What happened?”
    Brent did not answer right away. He continued to wrap the lettuce and I had the sense that he didn’t want to answer any more of my questions.
    I said, “If you don’t want to get into it, I mean I didn’t want to pry or anything.”
    “No, no, no. That’s okay. I couldn’t control the kids, that’s all.”
    “You mean, like eight-year-olds?”
    “Yes, you could call some of them eight-year-olds.”
    I knew exactly what had happened to Brent. He was the sort of person who a class of elementary school kids would eat up and spit out. High school kids would have been even worse. He had chosen the worst possible career for a person with his personality and now he was working in a supermarket, wrapping lettuce. I didn’t ask him any more questions, but Brent volunteered more information anyway. He knew I had understood, and I think this made it a little easier for him to talk.
    “You see, you can’t discipline kids anymore,” he said. “You can’t hit them.”
    I tried to inject a little humor into the conversation. “I think the Victorians had the right idea. Take out the cane and beat ‘em if they look at you sideways.”
    Brent was now staring into the pile of lettuce and I didn’t know if he had even heard my comment. He said, “I would take one kid aside and tell him to stop goofing around, and the rest of them would stand behind me and yell out jokes and things. Then, I’d turn around and give them what-for, and the first kid would get a group behind me and they’d start to act up and yell out. They just kept going back and forth. I couldn’t stop them.”
    I could see in an instant the nightmare this would have been for Brent. I could just imagine all the sessions with the school principal about shaping up. This would be friendly chit-chat at first, with a little constructive advice thrown in. Then the meetings would become lectures as the weeks dragged on and things were still going terribly wrong. I could see the after-school sessions with the other teachers, all sympathetic, all with a bit of helpful advice about children, or child psychology, or how they learned to cope during their first year. Then, the agonizing nights towards the end, waiting for the next day when it was clear all was lost and the next day would surely be worse than the day before. I didn’t want to force Brent to recount all of the torment, but he kept going.
    “My last day was terrible,” he went on. “Just awful. I couldn’t go back into the class. My last name is ‘Randolph’. Did you know that?”
    “No, I didn’t know.”
    “The kids started calling me ‘Ru-doph’, just like the reindeer. That soon changed to ‘A-dolf’, just like Hitler.”
    I didn’t want to hear any more, and I couldn’t wrap the dammed lettuce fast enough.
    “They would all call me ‘A-dolf’, and it didn’t matter if I told them to stop,” Brent continued. “I would tell them to stop, and they’d just run off, ‘Adolf-Adolf-Adolf’. My last day, I was having lunch in the lounge and a bunch of the kids were marching down the hall. We could see them through the open door. They were marching the goose-step and they all had their hands out in the Nazi salute, and they were all going ‘We hate A-dolf! We hate A-dolf!’ You see, you can’t hit them. You just can’t hit them.”
    Nothing is certain in this life, but I was certain Brent Randolph would be wrapping lettuce until his retirement.
    We worked with this big guy named Dennis L’Heureux. Dennis fashioned himself a bit of a comedian. For laughs, he’d impersonate a French-Canadian hockey player who was lost on the ice and wanted to go home. He reminded me of one of those hockey players in Hawaii who had gone to seed. I had never told the supermarket guys about the beer-slapping guy, but it was uncanny how Dennis L’Heureux would go into his demented hockey player routine whenever the Hawaii guy crossed my mind, which seemed to be all the time. It was like he could read my thoughts. By then, I had become terrified of my obsession, and I didn’t dare disclose it to anyone. I kept telling myself that my knee-jerk hatred for hockey players couldn’t be all bad because I had always made an exception for the Midget and the Pee-Wee leagues.
    I never knew what path led Dennis into the supermarket, but he probably started out as a part-timer like the rest of us. He was now a full-time guy with a wife and kids. He was a glib sort of guy. He was always joking around but always complaining about something in the same breath. Every produce manager we had was an idiot. Our store manager only became a manager because he’d hung around long enough and didn’t steal the office furniture. The union local was corrupt and full of lackeys who only wanted to line their own pockets. On and on he would go, day after day, always on about something. Of course, Dennis would also be wrapping lettuce until his retirement and I suspected he knew this, and it drove him crazy. I had known guys like this before, and I had often thought that all the talking and all the joking was a ruse to cover up a hidden rage that was just smouldering beneath the surface. We never saw any rage from big Dennis, but he would never stop the yakking, and he would never stop the joking, either. I had always tried to keep my distance from malcontents like Dennis L’Heureux.
    Like the kids in Brent’s elementary school class, Dennis had Brent’s number from day one. On Brent’s first day, Dennis had finished his shift early and he stopped off in the back room of the produce department before he went home. I was in the cooler stacking boxes and I could hear Brent and Dennis just outside the door.
    “So Brent,” Dennis said. “What are you doing after work?”
    “I will go home and spend time with my wife,” Brent muttered.
    “Well, I was thinking,” Dennis continued, “How about you and me hitting a few gay bars tonight?”
    “I’m married and I’m not interested,” Brent answered. “Besides, you’re married aren’t you?”
    “Well, the wife and I have an open marriage.”
    “I’ve heard about these things. I’m not interested.”
    “You gotta live a little, man. Anything goes, if you know what I mean.”
    “You mean you do these things in front of the whole world?”
    “Hey, I’m not ashamed! What the heck?”
    “I’m not interested,” was all Brent could finally say.
    “Come on! Be a swinger!”
    “Please, I’m not interested.”
    “Pick you up at eight, Brent baby!”
    As soon as he left, I felt obliged to tell Brent that Dennis was only joking. Brent seemed to be perplexed by this news.
    “Is this how guys joke around?” he asked. He was dead serious, and I just nodded.
    I couldn’t help noticing that Brent had placed a few ink pens in a neat row in the upper pocket of his apron in case he had to write down something important. He kept those pens in his apron the whole time I knew him.
    I got to know Brent a little better as the weeks went by. He told me he had been married only a few weeks before he got the job at the supermarket. His wife was named Esther, and they were members of the same church. Brent volunteered that he and Esther would tithe a certain percentage of their earnings to the church. She worked as a dental receptionist. Brent also volunteered that Esther was a little “on the heavy side” as he put it. He was quick to tell me he would love Esther forever and she would always be his “dreamboat”. There was a pause after he had said this, then Brent blurted out, “Actually she’s my tugboat.”
    Brent had no sense of humor and I think this comment startled even him. “Don’t tell her I said that if you ever meet her,” he begged. “Please don’t, don’t, don’t.”
    I promised Brent his secret was safe with me. He was in love and he had a happy marriage and these were all good things. But I still couldn’t help feeling sorry for this guy. I tried not to laugh when the others teased him, but Dennis would not let up. He kept asking Brent out on a date, and this would always rattle Brent even though he knew this was supposed to be a joke. One time, Dennis went up to Brent and lowered his voice, as if to let him in on a secret.
    “Brent, do you want to advance with the company?” Dennis asked him.
    “Of course I do,” Brent responded, in what was now a familiar monotone.
    “Well, I heard a little something that might interest you. Me, I don’t care because I think they’re all a bunch of assholes anyway. But this might be an excellent opportunity for you to, um, you know, advance in life.”
    Brent had probably been told by his wife and his family that the supermarket job was a new beginning for him and just might be the break in life he had always wanted.
    “Oh, what’s that?” he asked Dennis.
    Dennis lowered his voice even more. He was just loud enough now so I could overhear. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but there’s a new position opening up in the produce department here. Seems like they’re gonna create a new position of Regional Lettuce Inspector. I think you’d be perfect for the job. Lettuce only, of course, but this might lead to bigger things. The thing is, you gotta ask the manager right away, because I know there’ll be a whole line-up of guys at the office door as soon as word gets out.”
    Brent then dropped what he was doing and hustled out the swinging doors to go ask the store manager to consider him for the new position of Regional Lettuce Inspector. Dennis was laughing and I was laughing with him. Poor Brent soon came back through the swinging doors, head down and all dejected.
    All he said was, “You guys all think you’re hilarious.”
    The full-time guys all had to do a three month rotation on the night crew. This shift started at midnight and went to 8:30 with a half-hour lunch break. There were usually four guys on the crew. This was the worst shift in the store and I hated doing it, but I had no choice. Shortly after Brent made his hapless pitch to become the new Regional Lettuce Inspector, we both found ourselves on the night crew for a three month hitch.
    I got to know Brent even better during those three months. The other guys on the crew generally left him alone, and I would talk with him as we worked together in the same aisle, stamping prices on the cans and stocking the shelves. We talked about a lot of things, but the main thing Brent wanted to talk about was his wife, Esther. He loved Esther and she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. They dreamed about buying a house. They dreamed about having children. They dreamed about each of them doing well in their jobs and making more money. Next to his church, Esther was his inspiration and his whole reason for living. I never mentioned the “tugboat” joke and Brent never brought it up again. I think I was the only person he knew who would listen to him go on about Esther and his life and his faith in an everlasting life after our life on earth had ended. He always liked to talk about all of this, and I always let him talk.
    One night per week, there were only two guys designated to work the night shift. On this night, there were no items to be priced and no stock to be put on the shelves. Two guys would “face” the whole store, meaning you started at one end of the store and brought all the products to the front of the shelf, so in the morning the whole store looked like it was full and no one had yet purchased a single can of soup. This was called “face night”.
    Towards the end of our three month stint on the night crew, Brent and I found ourselves together on face night. Brent was always punctual to a fault, but on this night he came into the store about fifteen minutes late and I knew immediately something was wrong. He had dark circles under his eyes, and he looked like he had not slept at all since our shift ended at 8:30 that prior morning.
    “What the hell happened?” I asked him.
    “Esther left me,” he said. “When I got home first thing in the morning, she had cleaned out the apartment. She must have had some movers come in when we were at work. They worked through the night.”
    One never knows what to say in these circumstances, and I didn’t know what to say. All I could say was, “Brent, I’m sorry.”
    “She left me for this guy at the church,” he said. “I should have known.”
    Brent didn’t say anything to me after that, and we worked most of the night in silence. We were all alone in the store. I figured if he wanted to talk about what had happened, then he would bring up the subject. But he never said anything. We just worked together, busy in our own thoughts, facing each shelf, each aisle, and listening to the music from the small radio we had running through the store intercom. At around seven that morning, Dennis L’Heureux was at the door, knocking on the glass with his key. He was there to set up the produce department, a procedure that usually took a couple of hours before the store opened at nine.
    “That’s Dennis,” I said. “I’ll let him in.”
    “I hate that guy,” Brent muttered. This was the first time he had said anything in hours.
    I let Dennis into the store and I returned to the aisle where Brent and I were working. I just had to break the silence. “You shouldn’t say you hate anyone,” I told him. “You keep talking to me about forgiveness, and how Christ’s message of forgiveness has changed your life.”
    This did not impress Brent. “I hate him anyway,” he said.
    Those were the only words he spoke. A few minutes went by and then Brent stopped what he was doing and he walked out of the aisle. I didn’t know where he was going and I assumed he had gone to the washroom. Another minute or two passed, and then I heard screaming from the produce department. It was Dennis. He was howling obscenities like I have never heard before from another human being.
    I ran over to the produce department and I saw Dennis pushing at Brent with his big hands and screaming he was going to kill him. They were pressed together and Brent was taking tiny steps backward so Dennis would not run over him. Dennis was screaming his brains out and snatching the pens out of Brent’s apron pocket and tossing them all over the apples and the oranges on the dry rack. Brent took a step back, another step, and then he made a fist and socked Dennis right on the jaw. Dennis immediately stopped his screaming. He looked surprised that Brent could have ever worked up the nerve to do such a thing. This was a nothing punch, more like a little slap than anything else, and to a man the size of Dennis it would not have had the slightest effect on his rage, or his strength, or his determination to kill. Dennis had a startled look at first and then his eyes started to burn and he glared at Brent. He was hovering over him with that sweating, red beef-face and those crazy eyes. I did not hear what Brent had said to him, although I had always suspected Dennis had the capacity to snap. He was a scary guy in a lot of ways. People snap, Dennis snapped.
    I pause here to make a little observation. We have all seen the movie where the little guy finally works up the nerve to stand up to the bully. The bully gets the message and backs off, never to bully again. The little guy earns respect in the eyes of his peers, and he starts off on a whole new life of confidence and success. The observation I make is, the movies are lying to you.
    Dennis made his own fist and I watched him hit Brent in the face so hard that the blow lifted him right off the ground. I had never seen anyone punched Iike that in real life, and the punch made a sound that you never hear in the movies. It was a sudden, loud, thud-snap and it had no echo to it. It was like the sound had reached your ears full-force , but then died away before it had travelled another foot. Brent went down and I knew immediately he was dead. He could no more survive that punch than you could survive a shotgun blast at close range. I ran over to him but it was no use. His body was crumpled on the linoleum tiles with one leg bent at right angles behind him and his arms spread out like a scarecrow. His hands were open, with the palms facing upwards in a gesture of surrender. One of his eyes was half-closed and the other eye had rolled back inside his skull so there was only a reddish welt where the eye should have been. His whole mouth and jaw had been shifted to one side from the force of the punch. They say a dead body doesn’t bleed, and the only blood I saw was a thin stream of blood and water seeping out of his right ear.
    Dennis was staring down at Brent’s limp body, expressionless.
    “You killed him, you bastard!” I yelled out. “I saw it! You killed him!”
    Dennis began to gasp like a drowning man. “He hit me first,” he insisted through a sudden flood of tears. “He hit me first, you saw it...”
    Dennis’s humility did not last very long. By the time the police arrived, the tears had all dried up and he was playing the role of a passive victim who’d been provoked. It was a role he would assume right up until his sentencing in criminal court, which I will get to in a moment.
    I made a point to attend Brent’s funeral. Everyone from his church showed up. I recognized his mother and his father right away. I was struck by how much Brent looked like his mother. People often look like their parents and this should not surprise anyone, but it always surprises me when I see it. There was a lot of crying. A lot of nice things were said about Brent. I sat at the back and I did not volunteer to say anything. Towards the end of the service, I noticed a chubby girl seated near me and I knew this had to be Esther. I had never seen her before, but it was impossible this could have been anyone else. She was crying, and there was a guy sitting beside her with his arm around her shoulders, giving her comfort. This had to be the guy from the church. I know it’s not nice to say these things, but this guy looked exactly like a tugboat with a beard. I had an immediate picture of him sitting on Brent’s furniture, watching television with his feet propped up and stuffing his mouth with salted bar snacks, and saying to Esther, “Well, it’s a tragedy, you know, a real tragedy.”
    Dennis’s sentencing came much later, and I made a point to attend that, too. He had pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, or some such offence. I learned when you plead guilty there is no trial, but there may be a hearing before a judge to determine the sentence if the lawyers can’t agree. That’s what this was, a sentencing hearing. I didn’t have to testify, but I heard the prosecutor read out the statement I had given to the police the morning Brent was killed. The statement was exactly as I remembered it: Brent leaving the aisle, the screaming from the produce department, Dennis pressing up against Brent and threatening to kill him, the throwing of the pens, the slap-punch from Brent, and then that awful, obscene, killer blow.
    I was anxious to hear the defence lawyer speak because I wanted to find out what Brent had said to Dennis to put him into such a psychotic rage. I thought if anything was important to the amount of time Dennis had to spend in prison, it would be the comment that started the whole thing. Even the judge thought this, because he interrupted the defence lawyer in the middle of his impassioned plea to ask about it.
    “Wait a minute,” the judge said. “Just hold on here. What did he say that upset your client so much that he had to punch him to kill him?”
    The lawyer was obviously not prepared for such a question. “Well, Your Honor,” he stammered. “My client doesn’t really remember. This whole experience has been too upsetting for him.”
    I knew this was a lie. Whatever it was Brent had said, it seemed Dennis was willing to risk some extra prison time so he would not have to reveal the details. I suspected Brent had said something so piddling and so trivial that Dennis felt he’d be a laughingstock if he ever revealed what it was. Dennis L’Heureux was the sort of fellow who would go to the gallows before he’d ever admit to anyone that he went into a killer rage because some wimp had dared to call him a fat dummy.
    The prosecutor asked for a sentence of ten to fifteen years. The defence lawyer pounded the table and insisted a sentence of two years less a day was appropriate. After all, this was nothing but a sudden outburst from a man with a wife and two children who had no criminal record and who had been provoked into committing the ghastly act.
    Something struck me after the defence lawyer sat down. If he did not have the details about the exact nature of the provocation, it seemed to make a lot of sense to me that he would explain to the judge why he didn’t have those details, and why this shouldn’t make any difference in the sentencing of his client. Go get an expert if you have to. After all, this lawyer had even run through all the sports Dennis had played as a teenager, as if this information was supposed help reduce his sentence for killing someone twenty years later. Hockey was not mentioned, by the way.
    I wondered how many thousands of dollars Dennis and his family had paid that lawyer. I would love to comment here about some lawyers and their lack of preparation for certain things, but I eventually became a lawyer so I will resist the temptation.
    The judge must have been in a foul mood. Perhaps another driver had honked at him on his way to work and he was going to extract his revenge on the first target in his sights. The judge ordered Dennis to stand up. He didn’t use his first name, nor did he call him “Mister”. He just said, “Stand up, L’Heureux!” Dennis slowly rose to his feet, and everyone in that courtroom knew it was all hopeless for him now.
    The judge called Dennis a gutless coward. I agreed with this, but I was still surprised by the language. I have since learned that judges are pretty much free to make whatever comments they want during a criminal sentencing. Then, he departed from the recommendations of the lawyers and he gave Dennis 20 years. The judge banged his gavel and everyone stood up. The judge left the courtroom, after which the two sheriffs led Dennis out in handcuffs to begin his sentence. Dennis looked at me briefly just before he reached the side door. For a man whose entire life was now ruined, there was no sadness in his eyes. Still, I will never forget that look. All the lawyers in all the courtrooms in all the world could not describe what passed between us in that split-second. Convicted felon Dennis L’Heureux was then taken away and I never saw him again.
    We all began to filter out of the courtroom. The prosecutor looked pleased, although she probably wished she had recommended a longer sentence in the first place. But the defence lawyer was outraged. “Show me the Court of Appeal,” he ranted to his assistant. “I will not rest until we are in the Court of Appeal!” There was an appeal, of course, but Dennis was stabbed to death in jail two days before the hearing date, so this saved everyone a lot of hassle. The guy who stabbed him was a born-again Christian and he was angry that Dennis had used the word “silly” when they were discussing the New Testament. The last I heard, his wife had married a meat cutter who worked in another supermarket.
    People like to brag about how they would do everything the same way if given a second chance. As for me, I will always be ashamed of a lot of things from my past. I’m ashamed that I wasn’t nicer to my sister when we were growing up. I’m ashamed that I ever thought I was clever by being a sarcastic potty-mouth in high school. I’m ashamed that I laughed at Brent along with the others, and didn’t even have the jam to run between Dennis and Brent that morning and take whatever lumps that may have been coming my way. Some quick action might have saved Brent after all.
    I am ashamed of all those things, but I am ashamed more than ever that I did not throw a punch at the guy in the hotel room in Hawaii back in the seventies. Brent had the guts to throw the punch I never threw. He put his own life on the line so he would not have to face the unspeakable stigma of backing away from a fight. But I know exactly what I would do now if some blood-on-the-ice, hockey-playing sonofabitch ever marched up to me again and slapped the beer out of my hand and demanded that I leave the party.
    I would leave the party, as I have always done.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...