A Place for Savages

However it happened, David managed to be the only blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid in a neighborhood. Mind you it was a neighborhood full of Mexicans. We were all twenty-something and preoccupied with being tough. David had a fascination with martial arts and lifting. He was probably about 5′ 9″ but he was built like a gorilla. All the Mexicans in the park district gym swore he was Russian. Dave was just as mestizo as any Mexican. He just happened to be glow in the dark white. I think everyone thinks of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Heat or Dolph Lundgren in Rocky  IV when they called him Russian. 

He could probably bench 400lbs with one arm. Because of his asthma, Dave had no endurance of any kind so he practiced Aikido. He was strong as shit but couldn’t run a block - at least from what I could tell. 

He was a little bit of a tough guy and quite a bit of a lady’s man. One time, to fuck with him, I went through the phone book and paged him with a bunch of phone numbers from abortion clinics and facilities that specialized in STDs. I eventually let him know it was me and we had a giant laugh about it. We were all a giant bunch of douche bags. 

The UFC became popular at the time and we were fascinated. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were compelled to fight each other. It was Dave’s Aikido against my kickboxing and wrestling. I would light him up with my stand up, then eventually he would grab a hold of me and fling me to the ground. At that point, I would just wrangle him for a sub. After all that we would walk around talking about how tough we were. Dave would do a Tony Montana routine and we would laugh. We were a bunch of tough guys. 

Dave had a bad habit of acting like a tough guy. He didn’t gangbang but sometimes he acted like he did. I stopped hanging around with him because of it. That behavior attracted too much attention. Sure he got some beautiful girls but he got in a few scrapes because of that too. 

A year after I stopped hanging around with Dave, I found out he was killed. From what I was told, he was chatting up some girls out in the neighborhood. He had a confrontation with some guys in a car. They probably threw up some gang signs and he probably responded with some tough talk. He would stick out his chest and tell his opponents to step to him. He would kick back his head and look down at them. It’s a game of intimidation. All us guys do it to avoid a confrontation. It’s a stupid strategy but it worked most of the time. I don’t know if Dave had the capacity to take anything seriously. I wasn’t there when it happened. I just know that David was murdered.