Catch up on Part 1 here and Part 2 here

I took my phone back from Kimberly. The song she put on the jukebox was over and the bar was awkwardly quiet.

“What’s your name, guy?” I asked the head biker from McWhiPeePoop.

“You think you’re fucking funny, boy?” he responded while putting his hand on the butt of the gun on his holster right away. This dude didn’t fuck around.

“Yo, let’s all chill!” Coyote jumped in, nervously, like a bitch. “He means no disrespect. This is our…negotiator. He came to mediate this deal. He doesn’t know you but he’s a…like, a neutral party, you know? His name is Classy.”

The big white guy’s eyes got wide when he looked at me.

“Hahahaha! Please don’t tell me you’re The Classy Alcoholic? I’ve read your racist blog. You’ve been spreading hate and anti-white sentiment for years!”

“Is it because I always write about how Mexican food is the best food in the world? I’m sorry I don’t give enough credit to your boiled chicken breast and mayonnaise rice dishes. That’s so culturally insensitive of me. My bad.”

“I knew that if I ever met you, you were gonna piss me off,” the white guy said as he pulled his gun out of the holster. “My name is Guy Von Schneider.”

“Ohhhhhh, okay! I get it now. Anyhoozle, I’ll be with you in a minute, Guy. I just need to make it less quiet in here.

I put another song on the jukebox. It was “Ven Conmigo Cariñito” by David Olivarez. The sound of the Tejano-style accordion and the cumbia beat made all the McWhiPeePoop bikers cover their ears in pain. Guy Von Schneider punched the jukebox with his gigantic ham fist and left a hole in it. He stopped the song dead in its tracks like a reverse Fonzie. (Ask your grandparents.)

“I’ve had enough of your bullshit, Classy! Where the fuck is our drugs?!?”

Possum and I locked eyes. There were drops of blood coming out of his tear ducts. He had his gun in his hand and I had a strong feeling that he was ready to go to hell tonight.

“Tell him, Possum,” I said. “If you want. I ain’t no snitch.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Classy?” Coyote asked me.

I turned to Kimberly. She was scared and had nothing to defend herself with. I pulled her toward me and hugged her. I was close enough to smell the shampoo on her hair. Those three minutes and fourteen seconds of the Intocable song that we danced to almost twenty years ago came flooding back to me. I knew exactly how long the song lasted because I listened to it a million times for years after graduation.

“Get the fuck down,” I said to her. “Shit’s about to go bad.”

Kimberly laid down behind the bar. I grabbed a bottle of shitty tequila off the shelf and took a big swig.

“Hey, Guy Vonderwhateverthefuck!” I slurred. “SAMMCOP doesn’t have any drugs to sell you. So get the fuck out of here, bitch!”

Every member of both biker clubs pulled their guns out and pointed them at each other.

“I knew I couldn’t trust you pieces of shit,” Guy said as he pointed his handgun at my head.

“MAAAAARGE!” I yelled. “Bring out the Fireball!

Marge the Bartender hobbled out from the back holding a Remington XP-100 bolt-action pistol that fired .221 Fireball cartridges. Which is a legit real gun that you can google right now in case you think I’m lying.

“Don’t move!” she said to both of the biker crews. “I’m just trying to keep the peace and you don’t want to see what the Fireball’s stopping power looks like.”

For a second it seemed like everyone was going to put their guns down.

“FUCK IT!” Possum yelled as the blood coming out of his eyes started flowing heavily.

He shot Coyote in the head.

And then the rest of the bullets were let loose. I jumped behind the bar to cover Kimberly from the shots that flew above us. I felt the shattered glass from the bottles of tequila and whiskey falling on my back. I peeked up to watch Marge expertly shooting guys in the head like a woman who had killed many Vietnamese people in the 70s but who may not have ever actually served in the Vietnam War.

I waited for the noise to die down before I stood back up. Every single biker was bleeding out on the floor.

“Goddammit, Classy!” Marge said as she hobbled over with her Fireball gun to make sure everyone was dead. “The guys from McWhiPeePoop were my best customers!”

“They would’ve burned this entire place down with all of us inside and you know it, Marge.”

Kimberly stood up from behind the bar, crying, when she saw that her entire biker crew was dead.

“What the fuck happened here tonight, Classy?!?” she asked me.

“Burrito put half of the meth y’all were gonna sell into a bunch of condoms and swallowed them all. He was gonna shit them all out before the deal with McWhiPeePoop went down but the drugs burst in his colon when he was in the bathroom with me and that’s why he died. That same thing happened to my Cousin Chico’s friend Eddie. The blood coming out of his eyes was my first clue. He wasn’t actually murdered.”

“Did you know that the whole time?”

“I mean…not exactly. I had my suspicions but it didn’t come together until I saw Possum holding on to his stomach after I punched him in the gut. And when his eyes were bleeding too I knew he had swallowed the other half of the drugs and was going to betray Coyote. He was gonna let the white power bikers kill Coyote so he could take over SAMMCOP and then shit out the meth later in order to make a new deal for himself.”

“WHAT THE FUCK CLASSY? That means you killed my boyfriend!”

“No! I mean…obviously I wouldn’t have punched him in the stomach that hard if I knew he was hiding drugs in his colon.”

I walked over to Possum’s corpse and poked him with my foot. I needed to make sure he wasn’t playing dead.

“You’re a fucking asshole! I haven’t seen you in almost twenty years and the only two things I know about you from your blog is that you love booze AND you love drugs!”

“Yeah, but not fucken meth! Even I draw the line somewhere. Just do cocaine in the bathroom at a party like a normal person!”

I expected Kimberly to slap me in the face, like so many other women have, but she punched me in the sternum hard enough to knock me on my ass.

“Fuck you, Classy!” she said before she walked out of the bar. I heard the sound of her driving off on a motorcycle while I laid there, drunk, on my back, on the floor of the most disgusting bar in Tucson.

I saw Marge standing over me with her walker.

“Do you want another round, you fucking prick?” she asked.

“Yeah, Marge. I’ll take a Fireball. Either/or.”

The End.

Read Part 1 here

“Don’t listen to this sonofabitch, Prez, he’s trying to fuck us.” Possum said as he pulled a handgun from the back of his jean waistband. “Let me ice him right now. Ice for ice.”

“Chill for a second,” Coyote said. “Your old lady knows something about him so let’s hear what she has to say. Who is this guy, Kimberly?”

I hadn’t seen Kimberly Suarez since I graduated high school. I was closer to forty than not these days and I surprised myself with what I remembered after two decades of high functioning alcoholism. I was whatever the teenage equivalent of “in love” was back then. I vaguely recall coming home from school and thinking about her all night as I listened to Luis Miguel love songs for hours on my cheap CD player that skipped like a motherfucker if I didn’t hold it steady.

She and I shared a few classes together. She would occasionally ask me to help her with her algebra and history and chemistry and geography and trigonometry and pre-algebra homework so we’d talk all the time. But she had a boyfriend all throughout our senior year and that dude would constantly bully me. Believe it or not, I wasn’t always the confident, charming, handsome, brown stud I am now. Back when I was a kid I was a shy, nerdy loser and talking to any girl was terrifying. Especially Kimberly.

The longer I sat there with my hands tied behind my back the clearer I remembered that one time Kimberly’s boyfriend shoved me onto the muddy sidewalk just for fun. And I remembered that she broke up with him not long after that. I remembered going alone to prom despite wanting to be anywhere else. And I remembered Kimberly asking me to dance with her to a slow song.

While we danced she told me that she was so mad at her ex-boyfriend because of how he treated me. She told me I didn’t deserve any of that because I was such a nice, smart guy. She gave me a hug at the end of the song that I held for longer than I probably should’ve. Then she told me to take care of myself after graduation. And I said nothing other than “you too.”

Almost twenty years later she was standing in front of me again. And she was probably the only reason I was still alive.

“His name is The Classy Alcoholic and he’s a very popular blogger. I’ve read some of his stuff. He likes drinking heavily, doing drugs and committing crimes. But he also follows Batman rules which means he doesn’t believe in guns or killing.”

“Except I’m even better than Batman because I don’t trust cops,” I chimed in. “Now that you know who I am, who the hell are y’all? You already said you’re with SAMMCOP but that doesn’t mean shit to me.”

“It stands for ‘Sexy Ass Mexican Motorcycle Club – Old Pueblo.’”

“Okay that’s actually kinda fucken rad. And it sounds like you were planning on doing a drug deal which I would never interrupt on principle. I can help y’all figure out what happened to your stash but I need to talk to Kimberly privately.

Possum clearly wasn’t a big fan of that idea. He put the barrel of his gun under my chin.

“Why the fuck are you wanting to talk to my old lady alone, pendejo?”

“Maybe ‘cause she’s the only person in this entire place so far without an itchy trigger finger, dipshit.”

Possum was about to fly into a rage but he stopped and held onto his stomach, nursing the area where I punched the shit out of him. He tried to recover quickly but I knew he was hurt.

“You got a little stummy ache there, bud?” I asked, taunting the guy holding the gun. “Got a widdle boo boo on your tum tum?”

“Enough of this shit,” Coyote cut in. “Possum, take a walk and let him talk to the girl. Classy, you better figure this shit out quick because the other MC will be here in ten minutes. And if we don’t have the drugs by then I’ll feed you to them myself.”

The entire SAMMCOP crew walked to the other end of the bar and left me alone with Kimberly. She pulled a switchblade out of her pocket and cut me loose. Marge was nowhere to be found so I walked behind the bar to pour myself a shitload of whiskey into a tumbler. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that tonight could end badly so I decided to forgo the bar etiquette. Also I was starting to feel uncharacteristically nervous, like that high school kid I left behind a long time ago, and I needed to kill that familiar feeling as fast as possible.

“So you’re a badass biker babe now, huh?”

“Yeah, this crew had a feeling of community I really needed. After high school I felt a bit aimless. I was dating one asshole after another. Mostly dumb-dumbs. I had the worst luck dating, really. All I wanted was to find a nice, laid back guy who was kind of smart. Like, a dude who maybe understood bar etiquette at least. Eventually I ended up with Possum. And I know he’s not perfect. Most people call him a drunken degenerate but we have fun and I’m in my late thirties. At least he doesn’t have a bunch of kids, right? I don’t know, maybe I lowered my standards but there was a long period where I was feeling lonely and I hate to admit that any guy could’ve given me, like, fifty percent effort and I would’ve been good with-”

“HEY, tell me about that drug deal!” I said, desperately trying to change the subject while furiously chugging on that shitty whiskey.

“Oh that! Right. We’re about to put SAMMCOP on the map tonight. Well…we were. Our plan was to sell a stash of meth to McWhiPeePoop.”

“Wait, what? You can’t be serious! To them?!?”

McWhiPeePoop was a well-known abbreviation in town for “Motorcycle Club: White Peeple Power – Old Pueblo.” And yes, they misspelled the word “people” but what can you really expect from the “Master Race”?

“Kimberly, how can y’all make a deal with white supremacists? Hell, forget that even! What makes you think those skinheads will ever agree to do a deal with all of you brown motherfuckers?”

“Because we brought some really good shit back from Mexico, where McWhiPeePoop would never go. We were about to be the best plug in Tucson. And Burrito was in charge of holding the stash before he was murdered.”

“McWhiPeePoop has left a trail of bodies a mile long! You can’t trust them!”

That’s when we all heard the sound of another motorcycle crew approaching from the distance.

“Time’s up Classy,” Possum said, still kinda nursing his stomach and waving his gun toward me. “Hand over the drugs or I shoot you in the face.”

“Nah, you can’t shoot me without Coyote giving the word, right? Look, Coyote, this shit is way more complicated than you thought. I can maybe get you out of this but you need to trust me. I know you don’t know me but you can’t tell me you wouldn’t trust another brown guy over a group of fucking neo-Nazis.”

The room was getting increasingly tense as the motorcycles grew louder. The other SAMMCOP bikers who didn’t talk were clearly nervous.

“Fuck!” Coyote yelled. “Alright fine, Classy. What the hell do we need to do?”

“Kimberly, take my phone and pick a Mexican song for the jukebox. It’ll help me think.”

“Ooooh, I know a good one. I bet you remember this one from high school.”

Kimberly chose “Soy Un Novato” by Intocable. And she was right. I did remember that one quite well. It was the song she and I danced to at prom. My heart was about to beat out of my chest and I honestly had no idea if it was from the nostalgia or the prospect of certain death.

“MARGE!” I yelled. “GET BACK IN HERE!”

The bartender hobbled inside after a long while of chain smoking on the back patio.

“Marge, I’m gonna need you to break out the Fireball. The big one. You know what I’m saying?”

“Aw shit, Classy! Is that really necessary?”

“Yes it is, Marge. I promise. Shots for everyone.”

The motorcycles outside all went quiet. A tall white guy with a bald head and a leather vest walked into the bar flanked by a dozen of his henchmen. They were all carrying guns.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t the sissy ass mexican motorcycle club. Where’s the shit you promised me?”

To Be Concluded…

The first sip of the shitty, bottom shelf whiskey burned my throat on the way down. I chased it with a big swig of my flat pilsner. The ceiling in this bar looked like it could fall down on us all at any moment. The lights flickered and almost went out about two or three times tonight. It smelled like a sweaty ass crack in here, as always, and Marge was behind the bar. She slowly unfurled her walker and hobbled her way over to me to ask if I was ready for another round. I wasn’t but I felt bad that she made the considerable effort to drag her bum leg those seven feet toward me so I told her to go ahead and pour me one more beer and one more shot.

It was dead as hell at Frankie’s Saloon that night. I was in a shithole, divey, redneck, biker bar that was walking distance from my apartment. If you know me then you know The Classy Alcoholic loves drinking rare craft beer and expensive cocktails at upscale bars in Tucson. But unless you really know me then you don’t know that I also like getting overserved pints of flat macro beer and house tequila at the shittiest bars I can find. One of the reasons I come here is that I need to hold on to the last remnants of the local watering holes near downtown Tucson that are gonna disappear as my neighborhood keeps getting gentrified. The other part is that sometimes it’s nice to go where nobody knows your name.

Whenever I’m here I look forward to getting drunk enough to take over the digital jukebox with the app on my phone. Every time I walk in I hear some variation of country and/or western songs playing. So after a few rounds I load up money on the app and play a bunch of reggaeton or rap songs about butts ‘cause I know it pisses everyone off. I try to be sneaky about it but I’m pretty sure they know it’s me.

Not that I’m always the only brown guy here. More than a few times I’ve heard some drunk as fuck dudes slurring in Spanish while playing pool. I go hard on the Tejano songs when they’re around because they’ll love it when I play Bobby Pulido or Intocable and I know Marge and the rest of the Necks will be less likely to suspect me.

I always come to this place pretty late and the biker gangs are usually gone by the time I’m around. But this night I heard the roaring engines of a few hogs outside. I know Tucson has a few Mexican biker gangs and there was a slim chance it was them outside. But Frankie’s is like a box of STDs. You never know what you’re gonna get and whether it’s gonna kill you or just make you uncomfortable enough to quietly run back home and lie to your wife about where you were all night. I closed out my tab and went to the bathroom to take a piss. I walked past a wall full of a bunch of shitty boomer bumper stickers that said things like, “I’m not crazy, the voices in my head are!” and, “Exercise? I thought you said ‘extra fries’!” and “Glory be to the white race.”

The bathroom at this joint was either exactly what you would imagine or worse than you would imagine but never better. I did my usual quick breathing exercises before I walked in so I could hold my breath for as long as possible so as to avoid sucking in the black mold in the corner and then ran to the urinal that was barely hanging onto the wall. There was a toilet next to it that I would never sit on even if it cured my grandpa’s cancer. But, to be fair to the toilet, my grandpa is an asshole.

There was a live cockroach inside the urinal and I would’ve been disgusted if I didn’t take it as a challenge to try and pee on it as it scurried around. The walls of the bathroom were thin enough that I could hear the commotion as the bikers walked into the bar but thick enough that I couldn’t tell if they were white or not. I used this opportunity to find another Tejano song on my app to play. I added the song “Sergio el Bailador” by Bronco to the queue thinking I may piss somebody off outside.

“Eyyyyyy! ES BRONCO!!!” I heard a drunk ass Mexican guy yell as he kicked the flimsy bathroom door open. I guess that was one mystery solved. He was wearing the standard leather biker cut with some patches I couldn’t quite read. “Oh shit I’m glad we got two things in here ‘cause I gotta piss real bad. You don’t mind right?”

He smacked me on the back hard enough to make me miss the cockroach with my stream.

“Yeah, go ahead,” I said, turning away enough so we didn’t make eye and/or dick contact.

“Thanks, hermano! My name is Burrito. What’s yours?” he asked as he peed into the toilet, badly.

“I’m…Classy.” I gambled on him never having heard of me and it paid off.

“Classy! That’s a cool ass name. You with an MC? I’m with SAMMCOP.”

“No. I’m not,” I said, still trying to catch that roach and trying to ignore this dude who was too fucked up to be just drunk.

“Man of few words. I like it! Coyote is too! He’s the prez. I’m the Sergeant at Arms. We’re about to do a deal real quick and then we’re gonna party all fucken night! You seem cool, Classy. You can join us if you want. The more the hairier, that’s what I always say!”

Burrito cackled out loud as the lights in the bathroom flickered on and off again.

“Thanks for the invite bro but I-”

The lights went completely out before I could finish my sentence. I felt a stream of piss hitting my pants leg and I honestly had no idea if it was mine or Burrito’s. I finished up my business and put my junk away and walked over to the door. I tripped over something and fell on my face and took a quick second to think about the most efficient way to kill myself right then so I didn’t have to live with how close my mouth came to the floor of this disgusting bar.

But before I could end my life the lights came back on and I saw two other Mexican bikers standing over me. One of them had a shitty tattoo of a coyote on his neck and the other one had a shitty tattoo of a possum…also on his neck. I tried to stand up but the possum guy punched me in the face and knocked me back down.

“You sonofabitch!” the biker said. “You killed Burrito!”

“Wait, what the fuck? Who the hell are you?” I was drunk enough to barely feel the pain in my jaw but I could taste the blood in my mouth mixing with the remnants of the shitty liquor.

“We’re SAMMCOP. And so was he.”

The guy pointed behind me and I turned to see that I had tripped on Burrito’s body laying on the floor inside the bathroom. He wasn’t moving and had blood coming out of his eyes. That motherfucker was dead.

“Okay but I don’t even know what that means.”

“Don’t play dumb! Are you with another MC? Are you trying to mess up our deal?!?”

“How about we all take a breath for a sec? I’m just a rando patron at this bar and I don’t know shit about shit.”

“Maybe you’re police. You don’t wanna know what we do to cops. SAMMCOP don’t trust anybody.”

I slowly stood up and got my bearings. Apart from the possum tattoo guy and the coyote tattoo guy there were about half a dozen other bikers from their crew in the bar; all brown dudes. The few customers that were hanging out when I got there were all gone. I looked the possum tattoo guy dead in the eyes.

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my life. A drunk fuck. An insufferable drunk fuck. A drunk ass fucken fuck. A piece of shit drunk fat fuck. A fat drunk piece of fuck. A piece of fuck drunk fat shit fuck. And none of that bothers me. But I won’t EVER let anyone call me a fucking cop!”

I punched the possum guy in the gut hard enough to make him keel over. I was about to punch him in the head when the coyote neck tattoo guy pulled out a handgun and pointed it at my head.

“You just made the biggest mistake of your life, cabrón.”

Coyote guy bashed me in the side of the head with the butt of his gun hard enough for me to feel it even through the beer and liquor shield I was working on all night. Everything started to get fuzzy. But, like, fuzzier than alcohol fuzzy. A couple of the other bikers zip tied my hands behind my back and dragged me to an open area inside the bar.

“Lock the door, Marge!” the possum guy yelled once he got his wind back.

“Goddammit, Possum, I don’t need no police in here!” the bartender said.

“Don’t worry about that. We’re gonna finish this real quick!”

I was starting to think the guy with a neck tattoo of a possum was actually named Possum.

“Stop, please!” A woman’s scream broke through the noise. “The Classy Alcoholic would never kill anyone!”

I looked around to try to find who said that. My head was spinning so I could only make out the silhouette of a Mexican woman with long hair and a biker vest. She knelt down and put her hands on my cheeks. My vision adjusted enough for me to recognize her bright blue eyes and her beautiful, thick lips.

“Kimberly?” I asked.

“Holy shit, you do remember me,” She whispered.

I hadn’t seen Kimberly Suarez in over twenty years. I hadn’t thought of her in over a decade. But at that moment I realized that I never truly forgot her. I was about to ask what the hell she was doing here when I noticed the leather cut she was wearing. It had an ironed-on patch that said, “Property Of Possum.” At that point I knew for a fact that the guy with the neck tattoo of a possum was actually named Possum. I had an idea what the guy with the neck tattoo of a coyote might be named but I didn’t want to say it and be wrong. I’d look dumb.

One of the lower ranked bikers searched through all my pockets but couldn’t find whatever it was they were looking for. The coyote tattoo guy kneeled in front of me, gun still in hand.

“Let me make this real clear to you because I don’t have a lot of time. My name is Coyote.” Hell yeah. I had guessed right. “I’m the President of this motorcycle club. Typically I have enforcers who help me deal with guys like you. But I’m kind of a hands-on president. Which means that if you don’t cough up the drugs you stole off of Burrito I’m gonna blow your brains out myself.”

“Well it sounds like you have a bigger problem than me right now, Señor Coyote. Because I didn’t steal shit from you and I didn’t kill your guy. But I can help you find out who did.”

“The only people in this bar right now other than you are my crew, Possum’s old lady and Marge the bartender. And none of them would ever betray me.”

“Are you willing to bet your entire deal on that? If so then go ahead and shoot me because you’re gonna come up empty handed. Unless you let me go and let me figure out who did this.”

Coyote looked back at his group of guys. He tried to play it cool but doubt is one thing most people can’t hide if you’re watching them closely.

“That’s right,” I said through a bloody smile. “Trust no one.”

To Be Continued…