A Never Say Die guy
We called him Gross Bob. Member of our class at the Cornell Business School. He had livid raised red scars on his face. He was happy to tell you the story. Got pulled over by the state police in Florida on a party night. They didn’t like his off-handed answers, his obvious disdain for their authority. So they beat the crap out of him with their nightsticks. He said he got in a couple of licks too.
He was smart. Good student. But he hadn’t given up partying. So one night a handful of us went to Trumansburg after hours, to a place with a bad rep but a late closing time. You know. Being at Cornell in the middle of nowhere makes you a risk taker unless you’re an Ithaca drone. So we drank, played pool, drank some more. You know the place. Dark, dirty, wide bar with muddy mirror and a lot of resentful locals who don’t like the uptown outsiders on principle.
Which is why, as Gross Bob was starting on his umpteenth scotch, some local got in his face. Which was a mistake. Bob looked like he might be kind of soft, with that middle bulge and all. But it’s the same kind of build heavyweight fighters from the fifties had, and he decked the guy in two seconds flat. Then the others joined in, and Bob was laying them out like a scene in the movies. The action moved back toward the bar and the bartender brought out his baseball bat. So Bob hoisted the guy he was in the process of punching out and hurled him over the bar, into the bartender, and thereby shattered the muddy mirror.
Which kind of brought everything to a halt. The bloody faced bartender was on the phone to the cops. The little Cornellians were ready to flee. Honestly. They wanted to leave Gross Bob behind. I told them we couldn’t do that. So we gathered up Bob and sped off into the night before the police arrived.
The next day, Gross Bob had a cheery grin. “That was some fun last night, right?”
Yeah. It was. Why so many lesser folk are roaring behind Trump. The Gross Bob of 2016. Time to smash the mirror behind the bar. Don’t you think?
Shidooby.