blurring_the_edges_40_time_lapse_photography birdmad Since your 21st birthday, you quit trying to hide your cigarette habit from your mother, now hiding only the extent of it. She thinks you only smoke a pack-and-a-half when the reality is you smoke more than three packs a day, a rate which outstrips even your father's chain-smoking. How you have any cardio capacity at all is a fucking miracle, Alex. It's probably just as well you spend as much time as you do in the gym although doesn't it strike you as counterproductive to break for a cigarette or two after completing a circuit? In a fit of pique after fighting through the tangles all day, you cut off almost all of your hair, going from shoulder length to a military style high-and-tight. You wonder about your ethnicity when you awake to discover that your newly chopped and washed hair becomes so curly as to resemble velcro, which in contrast to your vaguely Native American features seems an odd juxtaposition. Going back to the bar one night, you are unaware of the very large occupant of one of the booths just off from the center stage. The dancers are all fond of you because of your tendency to behave like as much of whatever passes for a "gentleman" in a place like this. When you have to, you pass through the dressing room without gawking at them, prompting a couple of the other bouncers to comment behind your back that you might be gay, as if gayness would make you any less capable of beating someone to a bloody pulp if the situation called for it. You help them with their cars if they need a hand, you've even babysat one of them through her own bout of heroin withdrawal, paying her out of your own pocket for a portion of the time and money she lost in tips. Ha-ha, you're a regular saint, buddy. Anyway, there is four-hundred-and-seventy-three pounds of large, scheming biker improbably squeezed into a booth against the wall from the center stage waiting to bust your ass for snapping his little brother's ankle in the parking lot and at the moment, you are not aware of it. No matter, he is aware of you. Randi, the waitress lets out a quick, stunned yell and drops a tray of drinks as a very large hand reaches out and smacks her across the butt. The crashing sound and the torrent of curses from Randi's mouth is the cue for you and your gossipy comrades to check it out. As improbable as it seems, you are the smallest of the bouncers here. At six-foot-two, two-hundred-eighty-seven pounds, you never thought you would be the smallest anything anywhere again after you outgrew the kid who made you miserable in junior high and won his absence by pinning him throat first to the lockers in the hall about three inches off the ground after he decided it would be cute to run up behind you and bounce your face against the lockers, breaking your glasses. Anyway, as you intervene, taking your cue as the runt of the pack of bouncers, you step up to the table and ask if there is a problem "Well, little man, we don't have a problem, but you sure as shit do" He stands up, nearly tipping the booth table as he does and you are singularly impressed by how ridiculously large he is. Holy Jesus Henry Christ on a turbo-charged pogo stick, he's a fucking mountain. "That's him, Meat, kick his ass." Meat? Oh shit. Vince and Dave, nearly as tall but nowhere near as wide decide that it is not worth their asses to cover your back and you almost can't blame them since you don't particularly see yourself coming out of this mess alive. The music stops and the girls on the stages disappear to the dressing room, all eyes are on you and Meat who stands about a good six-seven and is twice as wide as you. You figure he must be the owner of that wild-looking trike chopper out in the lot. Meat pushes the table aside, and stands in front of you looking down. Part of you is saying you should run like the wind and get the fuck out while the getting is still good, the other part figures you are probably a dead man either way so you might as well put on a good show. "You're Meat, huh?" "Yeah, that's what they call me." His voice seems laid back, as if he is either supremely confident that he will destroy you, or as if he is the type that never gets particularly worked up over much of anything from the knowledge that he is big enough to have few known predators in nature. "Do what you gotta do, but i stand by what i did to your brother, I gave him the chance to behave himself and he blew it." "He can be an asshole," Meat replies, "but did you have to break his ankle?" "Hey man, he didn't take the first couple of times i put him down as a hint, i wasn't gonna give him a third chance, this ain't fuckin baseball." "Well, he is my baby brother and i can't let people go fucking him up like that without getting some back for him, even if he is an asshole sometimes." Wthout warning, he grabs you by the shirt with both hands and shoves you with all his weight the same way you would slide a heavy box across the factory floor. Not having the horizontal base of a heavy box, though, you lose your balance and fall backwards, taking down a couple of tables near the stage. Well, if Meat doesn't kill you, it's almost a given that you are gonna get fired from this gig. Staggering up, you make like Meat's brother and come charging at this giant beast of a man. You connect shoulders and head into his belly, rocking him back and stunning him, but not knocking him off of his feet or really hurting him. You feel a clubbing blow of his forearm against your back and a knee in your gut. Wow, for being so incredibly flesh-bound, he's got some snap in his blows. It's as if he knows how to put all that weight into every little thing he does to you. You have a moment of recogniton and realize you've seen him before. The guy was part of some low-rent professional wrestling exhibition you passed by while shopping for knives at the swap-meet over on 35th Avenue near your grandma's house. He picks you up onto his shoulder and smacks you hard into the floor and it is only by sheer luck that your whole upper body caught the blow, but your shoulderblades feel like absolute shit from the impact. Jesus, now you know why they call that move a spinebuster, if there had been anything between the floor and your back, you would now be paralyzed from just below your the middle of your back. You are winded by the impact and sucking air when Meat picks you up under your arms and drags you near the door. As you reach the exit, you get your wind back and manage to trip him up after writhing around a bit. He fights it in vain and you feel a small measure of satisfaction as his face smacks into the countertop of the cashier's station at the door, his head catching the blunt corner of the cash register with enough force to trigger a satisfyingly comic "cha-ching" from the old mechanial NCR machine. In the doorway, you hop in him and start punching him in the face, for some reason, his biker pals are still hooting and hollering as if he still had the upper hand. Maybe they're just entertained in general by the whole fight. Who knows? Hassan has annexed the storefronts on either side of this little would-have-been strip-mall and is getting ready to expand the club. Meat helps out with the annexation by shaking you off and picking you back up into a bear-hun and ramming you back-first through the opposite wall from the cashier's counter. The impact seems to happen in slow-motion and you can practically see every particle of drywall and scrap of the paper that coats it come flying around in a chaotic swirl as your back goes through the wall. Lucky for you, he got you mostly between the wall studs, but your shoulder is nearly dislocated and you feel a sharp pain in your ribs which is making it awfully hard to breathe. Meat staggers up to you, shaken himself by the force of the impact and likely still woozy from denting the register with his skull "Hey, little fucker, you give up yet?" "Fuck...No..." you gasp. Your adrenaline isn't overcoming your injuries but it has overridden your sensibility. As he goes over to you, you try weakly to punch him again but he catches your fist in his huge hand and sits you up against the wall. "Dude, it's over," he tells you, "I could go all day at this if i have to, but you were actually gonna make me work for it... i like that. Shit, I don't remember when was the last time anybody ever even got me off my feet." In the nearer distance, you can see Martin, the leatherman, looking stunned as Meat walks you to a chair and buys you a beer. He gives Meat a look that signals no small amount of betrayal and disapproval. Randi and Jeannette, the house-mother take you to the emergency-room at Baptist Hospital which, while out of the way, is a little closer than PGH, which is gearing up to close down by the end of the year. You get your ribs wrapped and your shoulder checked out. It's badly bruised, but not dislocated or sprained, same for your ribs, they are not cracked or broken, but deeply bruised on both the front and the back. You've told your mom you took a moonlight gig as a bouncer, you just haven't said at what kind of bar and dealing with what kind of people. She is visibly upset when you get home and are moving like you are injured. After a half hour of talking to her and holding her hand, you convince her that you are okay and that you can handle yourself. It's going to take a few more of these episodes, perhaps to finally convince her that while you may be her youngest, you have not been a baby for a very long time now. God knows, if she knew everything, she might think, and perhaps rightly so, that not only are you not a baby anymore, but maybe you are even something of a monster. You want a cigarette, and as you light it up, sitting at the kitchen table just before dawn on a Saturday morning holding your mother's hand to calm her fears, you are struck by how suddenly crappy the cigarette tastes and make up your mind to quit. When you finally get to sleep, you wake up an hour later and realize that your back is incredibly sore and you can feel a weird pinched sensation in your left leg. Well, shit. This isn't fun. 030518 what's it to you? who go blather from