Dateline: college. In my earlier fraternity pledge hell week blurb I wrote about my 2 'pledge brothers' Tom & Marty. The following revolves around both. Read that blurb if you haven't, it's a barnburner.
Both were, ah, unique people. Marty had been an MP in the Army, in Germany. Years older than typical college student, he was mid 20s. Tom was also a few years older than me, unusually thoughtful & well-spoken for a college freshman, relative to me anyhoots in my own semi-'bro' full on stupid / impulsive phase (which lasted years). Tom came from a farm. Started most of his sentences with 'I'm not naming names but here's a good story...'. He was good like that. Not naming names.
Tom knew odd people as friends. Maybe from his job, at a nearby warehouse or tooling plant. He worked & went to college. I guess I did that also. Let's focus.
Our story revolves around a Tom friend. Tom brought his friend to the fraternity house one day. There was a house party that eve, a mile away. The house of an alumnus brother, then in law school. Anyhoots, here's Tom's friend, who I met & chatted with. He apparently sent from Hell's Angels central casting. Older, like 40s? Recall we're in college. That's old. Black leather vest, black tshirt, jeans, boots, bushy beard, fat.
Oh and, wait for it: an actual wooden leg.
Not the fancy kind. It was a round piece of wood like an oversized broomstick. He rolled up his jean to show us, which is how we knew. Well, he showed the 5 of us holed up in a room at the fraternity house. But here's the rub. Biker guy had a parlor trick he did at parties. He would get into a pretend argument with a cohort. A loud, nasty argument. Would get worse & worse. Then the other guy would pull out a knife and stab him in the wooden leg. Ha ha great trick! What could go wrong?
At the house party, nice mellow scene, maybe 20 folks there. No other biker types. I have vivid memory of that day & night. For example, I was playing 8 ball pool at the party. No big deal, but for some reason I was shooting the best pool game of my life. I was actually running the table. Surely it was luck, just one ball left then the 8 ball. Maybe the reason I recall that moment is twofold: partly that I was running the table. Moreover, at that exact moment I heard this very loud yell from 10 feet away in the adjacent room:
YOU STABBED ME IN THE WRONG LEG!
My first thought was this was part of the act. Then, a girl screamed. I quickly walked over and there is biker guy right in front of me, standing in a 3-foot-wide pool of blood. Not even 10 seconds had passed. The guy was instantly bleeding like a faucet.
My roommate Mike had the good sense & wits to lay him down flat, take off his own shirt and wrap around the guy's thigh for a torniquet. Rather amazingly there was a big hospital close, Midway Hospital, maybe a mile away, near the corner of Snelling & University, for those of you familiar with St. Paul. I recall Mike issuing orders: get the car, we're taking him to the ER, etc. Biker guy was loaded up in back of Marty's piece of shit Gremlin car and driven to ER. I joined another car heading there.
I remember being in the ER, talking to Marty, who was white as a ghost. He had just stabbed a guy, in his one good leg. Oh, by the way, for some reason Marty didn't use a small pocketknife. He used a big chef's knife, or something with a long blade. Someone at the ER said it went all the way through the guy's leg, front & back. The parlor trick of course was to stab the wooden leg, leave the knife sticking out, hahaha great party trick.
Hey everyone! Let's mix a big knife, intentional stabbing, and plenty of booze together and see what happens! Fucking morons.
I don't know what happened to Marty, if the cops came, or what. Most of us split. I don't even remember much of Marty in general after that, but he lived well off campus anyhoots. I'm sure there were no assault charges because biker guy invited all this to happen, then added the booze etc. Genius move.
Stabbed in his one good leg. By invitation.
Just another night during my college years.