Let me just start by stating that I hope my seven days of bad luck are over.
This has been a rough seven days.
It all began on Tuesday night, August 29th, 2006. I receive a phone call right before 10:00 PM, and the caller ID states that it’s Scott. Scott is this guy that I have been friends with for about five or six years now. When I answer the phone it’s Scott’s girlfriend, Shellie. She says that she and Scott have been out drinking and she wanted to know if Spracky and I can come meet up with them so I can ride Scott’s motorcycle home for him, and Spracky can drive them home in our vehicle.
I am a little ticked, because I wanted to watch Miami Ink, which comes on at 10:00 PM. Now, that might seem like a selfish statement, but let me explain. Ever since I have known Scott, I do not recall him being sober for more than 24 hours, and I have never seen him without a pistol, except when he is in the pool. Scott appears to stay maintained by alcohol and feels secure with gunpowder.
But I’m thinking that he must be in a bad way, otherwise Shellie wouldn’t have called. So Spracky and I head to where they are located, it was only a couple of miles away, so I was figuring this would only take a few minutes, no big whoop.
We pull up, and Scott is half way leaning over his bike, and Shellie is waiving us down. Spracky and I hop out of our vehicle and Scott stands straight up, but his eyes are gone. At this time I am thinking that Scott wasn’t just drinking, but he was probably smoking dope and taking his “pain medication”. Scott has always had some sort of pain, some of it I beleive is legit, but for the most part I think it’s in his head.
Right when we walk up it becomes apparent that Scott was not okay with me coming to help out. I guess Shellie must have taken his keys and cell phone and decided to call me…not exactly the position I wanted to be in.
Scott and Shellie start arguing about him riding his bike home, and finally Shellie gives him the key and gets in out vehicle. Once the girls get in our vehicle I went to talk to Scott. I wanted to talk to him alone so he wouldn’t try to act all tough in front of his girlfriend, and I was hoping he would come to his senses.
I start asking Scott if he is really okay to ride his bike home, and he just keeps saying that he is. I figured that maybe I should put the image of a wreck in his head so he would stop just saying that he was fine and to make him think about what could happen.
A little background on how things are between Scott and I. Like I stated earlier, I have known Scott for about six years, and in that time Spracky and I have done a lot for him. We have had Scott over for Thanksgiving dinner; when he was out of work, we would invite him over everyday for dinner so he could eat; when he wanted to build a computer for his daughter that does not live with him, we spec’d it out and order all the parts and I was going to build it for her; when he figured he couldn’t afford the computer that he wanted to build for his daughter, I bought it from him; when his girlfriend (not his current girlfriend) was moving out of her apartment, I helped him move her stuff. But there are a couple of things that you can always count on with Scott, he will almost always imbelish his stories, and he will always have a beer and a handgun nearby. One of the first things Scott told me when I met him was that he used to be a Navy Seal. At first I beleived him, as time went by, not so much. I ended up contacting the U.S. Department of Navy and thanks to the Freedom of Information of 1974, I was able to verify that he was not. But this is Scott, and this is how he was, I never brought it up.
After a while I started to grow tired of his lies and his unreliability, and I think he sensed that because we stopped calling eachother. Every once and a while we would talk, until one day he came over stoned and was drinking. He started to argue with Spracky and I about everything, so I told hime to get out. After a period of time he would call if he needed something, like to borrow some tools or to see if I could walk his dogs. At first I was fine with this, but I started telling him that I couldn’t help him out, I was tired of it.
Back to the story.
So, I was talking to Scott, alone, and trying to get him to just get in our vehicle, mostly so he wouldn’t kill anybody else. Well, I guess his “pain medication” was really kicking in, he got off his bike and started to front up to me and started going off about me kicking him out of my place…this happened 4 months ago. At this point I’m not sure what my options are, I know he has a handgun in the small of his back, and I know he is not in his right mind. I just keep backing up from him, half hoping that he was so out of it that he would just fall on his face. Spracky and Shellie must have noticed something going on and they jumped out of the vehicle.
He starts squaring up to me, and I just keep looking for him to reach his right hand back to his handgun. Next thing I know, he hits me in the mouth with his left hand, which is not as bad as you would think. I immediately put him in a headlock with my right arm and spin him around 180 degrees to the ground. Spracky starts punching him in the kidneys, and I’m not sure what Shellie was doing at the time, but I am pretty sure she was in the pile. I start to realize that I can’t get to his gun due to the way that I am holding him, and I can’t punch him because that would just piss him off even more and then he would definitely go for his gun.
Once I feel him start to “lose steam”, I let him up and he starts going off about something, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Spracky and Shellie start getting in his face, and he pushes Spracky back. At that moment, I had a clear view of his face and I knew I could just punch the snot out of him, but I knew that I would have had to either nail him right in the eye or we all would have probably been dead…so I didn’t swing, I didn’t know without a doubt that I could have knocked him down. It was a very difficult decision…
I told Spracky to get in the vehicle, and we drove off and called the cops, hoping that a night in jail would help cool Scott off. Once we finally met up with the police and told them about our adventure we found out something about Jacksonville law. A little known fact about the law in Jacksonville, unless the police actually see you hitting somebody, you can’t be arrested on the spot. You have to go to the State Attorney’s office and file an official complaint and then they decide if they want to press charges.
The Police attempted to speak with Scott, who had already fled home, and he wouldn’t answer the door, so the police simply wrote up the report and left. Now, Spracky and I are freaked because we know that Scott has several, and I do mean several, guns. We finally decide that he has probably passed out for the evening and we went home, not that I got much sleep.
The next day, Spracky went to work and I recooped from the previous evening’s festivities. I figured Scott was probably realizing what a jackass he had been the previous night, so I called his voicemail and let him know that he needed to return a socket and socket wrench of mine, and he could leave it at my doorstep so he wouldn’t have to speak to me. I picked Spracky up from work and we chilled at home. Right before I went to bed, I opened the front door expecting the tools that Scott had borrowed to be there, but no such luck. But, the ever immature Scott did scratch the word “FAG” on my front door.
The moral to this story is…if you have a friend that you feel you can help, I mean you really feel like this person just needs some guidance…don’t bother staking too much trust in them, because it will bite you in the end…or just punch you.
As a side note, my lip healed up in like 4 days.
Sorry this post was so long, I just wanted to get the official word out there in the blog-o-sphere. There was another incident that made this a “Rough Seven Days”, but I will post that later.
Dax out-
