Timeline: 07:57h Tuesday August 28, 2018
Flashback Tuesday:
There used to be this place, The Cimarron Ranch. I’d end up there on the odd Friday or Saturday night back in the mid-to-late ‘70’s. I know it was somewhere in Putnam Valley. Couldn’t name the road it was on to save my life. I never saw it in the daytime.
It was a hard-drinking/half-biker/rowdy-music/”I-got-friends-in-low-places” kinda bar. I usually had a good time when I was there, but my antennae was always up. I was constantly on alert ‘cause I knew I was about to back into ‘that’ guy, spill his beer and get my clock cleaned.
I didn’t really belong there.
One night I was in the parking lot, on my way in. The Cimmaron had an elevated porch or deck. On this night a beer bottle got knocked off the railing and onto the windshield of a pickup truck. The owner jumped out, yelled “what-the-___!!!” and grabbed this…thing. Bolt cutter? Tire Jack? Spud wrench? Whatever it was, it was large, steel and lethal.
He took the stairs two at a time and came right at the perps. Three guys squared up. Two large ones flanking a smaller one. I saw they were wearing trench coats, which was odd because it was high summer.
Then I recognized the smaller guy: it was Freddy Stevens. I hadn’t seen him since Lakeland Middle School, where he terrorized me every day in 7th and 8th grade.
The place went dead quiet.
Just as the two parties were about to collide, Bobby Spost stepped out of the shadows directly between them. He apparently knew the guy with the hammer. I know he knew Freddy very well.
Bobby said something very quietly to Hammer-man. Very quietly. It took five, maybe seven seconds at most. Hammer-guy nodded once, turned around, got in his truck, drove off.
That was The Cimmaron. That was Bobby Spost. That’s my Flashback Tuesday. |
