Duke Nukem – Unleashes Hell

Duke Nukem took a pull on his Tiparillo, exhaled and provided context. “My wife and I went to the movie theatre at the local mall to see some action movie. It was an afternoon showing and the place was relatively empty.  We had good seats, far enough back but not too far. We are in the two right aisle seats in the center row: viewing perfection.”

Nukem finished his 16 ounce, crushed the can, and handed it to me. I stuffed it into my back pack.

“Want another?” I asked.

“That would be fabulous. This is better than a Raven’s game.” Nukem, already buzzed out of his nominally straight gourd, now started his second 16-ouncer at 11:22 am. The Duke was feeling loose.

Three of us were sitting on a long log alongside a picture-perfect mountain lake. We had the entire lake to ourselves. The serenity, the beer, the weed, it loosened the taciturn man’s tongue. He just needed some prodding. Nacho prodded…

“So, what happened?”

“Yeah…not good…right before the movie started the empty seats in front of us were suddenly filled by a foursome of loud-talking swaggering dudes. Not kids. Guys in the their 20s.  They bang down hard into their seats, running their foul mouths the whole time. And sure enough, here we go….”

Nukem’s voice trailed off, he reached behind the log, took a huge pull on his 16 and then hide it. “This is beautiful. Thank you for taking me here. I could come here every day and zone-out, chill, if this were my neighborhood.”

Nacho was insistent. “Tell him what happened at the movie!”

“Nacho, you are bringing me down – I am mellow and beautifully buzzed, and I don’t want to dwell on violence…”

“Well I want you to dwell on violence – just finish the goddamn story.”

Nukem moaned and shifted from sitting on the log to sitting on the ground. He leaned back on the log and watched the hawks lazily surfing the mountain thermals, not 50 feet overhead.

“So, the lights have not gone down for the movie. The place is not that full. The obvious leader of this crew sits in the aisle seat, right in front of me. He’s big and right away he is blocking my view. I am about to tell my wife we need to get up and find new seats when the smallest idiot second from the left, leans across to address the supreme leader.

In a really loud voice he starts talking street jive punctuated with the F-bomb every third word. My wife goes, “Hey watch your mouth! There are children here!” and the skinny smart ass goes – “F#*K YOU BITCH!” And then the other three whip around in their seats and start yelling profanities and making hand gestures.”

I was on the edge of the log dying to know what happened next. Nacho looked at me and made small circles with the index finger of his right hand next to his right temple while mouthing “He’s Crazy!”  Nukem emptied his second 16 ounce, handed me the evidence and continued.

“I had been on Defcon 5, the highest alert level, the instant these four salty dudes sat down in front of us. My wife was just babbling on an on, oblivious to anything other than whatever inane bullshit was in her head at that instant. These guys were not real gangsters. They were like suburban faux toughs, they probably dealt weed or X, pretend gangsters with all the purchasable trappings.”

“What was the plan of attack?”

“Luckily, I still had on my work boots and luckily the leader was on the aisle. While they were busy turned and screaming profanities at my wife, I bounced out into the isle and squared up. When the head ganagsta whiped around to see what I’m up to – POW! Front mule kick flush to the face with my work-boot. I remember the sneer on his face right before I rearranged it. Caught him flush and hard. Unconscious. One down.”

“The second in command was next to the boss and took time out from frightening a 130-pound woman to look over to see what was happening to Number 1. He then turned and looked up at me just in time to see my right cross smash his nose. Flush. Two down.”

Nacho was visualizing it. “So, after the left leg mule kick, you were perfectly set, cocked, ready to throw the hard, straight right.”

“Exactly. It was like punching a pumpkin.” Nukem balled up his right fist. It had a nasty tear of skin on the two predominant knuckles. “Number three or four did not want to fight. Three melted onto the floor whimpering. I wanted to get my hands on that little F#*k You! Ass. Dude, he started it all; he and his pal skittered away, backwards like a crayfish.  They wanted no parts of me.”

I handed him a third 16 ounce. He popped it and after looking around for the game warden took a long pull and set the can behind the log.

“My wife was in shock. First, she just wants to see a movie with her husband when suddenly she’s being verbally assaulted by four gangbangers two feet from her face. Then her husband starts murdering these guys, she is seeing violence and carnage up close, unleashed by her insane looking husband, blood is flying, people are screaming., its anarchy at the Multiplex. Debby is leaning back, shrinking from the carnage, freaking out, frozen.”

“Number 1 gangster is unconscious and likely going to the Emergency Room. Number 2 is moaning with his flattened nose. I reach in, grab her right arm and yank her into the aisle. I look her straight in the face ‘Take the car, go home. I’ll be back later, go NOW!’ She snaps out of her shock, wheels, and runs up the aisle just as four movie employees come creeping down the aisle towards me.”

Nacho waved a finger. “Those guys were looking to make a citizen’s arrest. They were going to hold you till the cops showed up, maybe they’d duct-tape you to a folding chair – what’d you do?”

Nukem blew a perfect smoke ring with his Tiparillo. “I booked. I ran fast as hell and hoped those well-lit exist doors they have on either side of the movie screen weren’t locked or chained. I hit that door full steam and it about flew off the hinges. Now I am trying to get my bearings. I am outside the theater in a parking lot surrounded by a fake redwood fence. I am running like a rhino. I head out into a quiet suburban neighborhood.”

Nukem was always in great cardio condition: he was in preseason training. He played both ways, linebacker and center, for a bad-ass Baltimore semi-pro team. “I still got four theater employees in black pants, white shirts and Snap-on red bow ties, chasing me – they are wearing street shoes. I got 50 yards on them holding steady. But they were game. So, I said, okay, let’s take this to the next level, so I start running through back yards, hopping chain link fences, running through clotheslines…”

“Just like on TV! Like an episode of Cops!” Nacho was fired up.

“Now the fat guy dropped out, but the other three were in good shape and doing good handling the obstacle course. After what, ransacking through six backyards trying to shake them, I am getting pissed!  I was not so much tired as frustrated. I wanted this to end. We’d been running for 15-minutes by this point. I had no goddamned idea where I was, other than that it’s a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood. During our chase-fest we’d only seen two people and they were old and didn’t have a clue as to what was going on.”

“What happened?”

I led them between houses and dead-stopped. I wheeled around facing them, pulled myself to my full height and I start yelling like an insane person, “DO YOU REALLY WANT TO CATCH ME??!!” over and over. Their ringleader, I guess the boss, he was an in-shape middle-age guy with a bad hair-cut. His eyes bugged out of his head and he stumbled backwards like he’d just discovered I was radioactive. I kept stomping towards them. None of them weighed more than 170.”

“Bad news for them. Plus! they’d already seen your mayhem handywork and what you were capable of!”

“And now I was pissed.”

“And now you were pissed….”

“I really didn’t have time to get pissed before I tied into those ‘gangsters’ in the movie theatre. I had to act before they got the drop on us. If my wife hadn’t been there running her mouth non-stop, I would have gotten up and walked out or walked to a different seat.”

“What happened with the chase?”

“The two dweebs looked at their boss, pleading to stop. I am stomping towards them promising to catch one of them and pull their arms out of the socket. They were horrified…they backpedaled, turned, and ran and did not look back. Then the boss turned and ran. I stood and watched them until they were out of sight. I started jogging and after 15-minutes finally popped out on Pulaski highway. I had to follow it for, oh, another mile…”

“Alongside cars going 70…”

“Oh yeah. I finally get to an exit and a gas station and a payphone and called my wife to come pick me up.”

“How’d that go?” Asked Nacho.

Nukem spit out the end of his cigar and said with considerable exasperation, “Nacho you know how that went.”

A pregnant pause hung in the air. The only sound was symphony of crickets in a bed of reeds 15 feet from our log perch.

“Oh yeah, that’s right, sorry….”

Nacho turned to me a whispered. “He got served with divorce papers.”

The spell was broken. We gathered our empties and left.

To read more about the eclectic REAL men that have crossed my path over the years check out the posts below. 

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