Da, da, da, da-daaaaa....I'm loving it - Page 2

I'll throw one of mine in, again, with the caveat that it's nowhere in the same arena as JCassady's.

I used to tend bar at a Ruby Tuesday's near Baltimore. We had our fair share of crazy homeless guys that would come in and out. Some would panhandle customers, others would get in arguments with their shoes , then hide in the bathroom for hours*, but the scariest was the No Bum.

No Bum earned his name by walking up and down the street in front of the bar, staring at the ground, angrily muttering "NO!NO!NO!" under his breath. My co-worker once put it best when he said it sounded like the guy was having a heated argument with God. I should also mention that No Bum was a gigantic bald black guy. He actually looked like Kimbo Slice, or the guy in the "You Gonna Get Raped" picture.

So, one day, half an hour before my shift, I'm sitting in the bar eating my lunch, when No Bum stormed into the bar (which he had never entered before), got right up in my face, and we had this exchange:
No Bum: "Did you hear?"
Me:"....did...what?"
No Bum:" DID YOU HEAR?!?!"
Me: "did I hear what??"
No Bum: (screaming) "HOW I KILLED THE WHITE MAN!!!" (turns, storms out of bar)
Me:"No..I...I didn't hear....."

Worked there for another year and a half, never saw the guy again.


*This guy actually got a write-up in the sun when he passed away. I also once saw him argue intensely with a newspaper, and then eat it.

Hahahahaha I completely forgot that I yelled that -- but I totally did! To no avail.

Why does this happen? I used to work at a record store, and there was one homeless guy who used to come in and take a copy of LA Weekly, rip off a page, crumple it up, and eat it.

I know it wasn't just hunger, because the first time I saw him do it, I offered him a slice of pizza and he turned it down while he continued to munch away on the paper.

From what I observed, it appeared he felt the only way to win his argument was to eat his competitor. I think it's a risky, but sound debate tactic.

This is exactly why I always had gloves with me while traversing the streets of the Tenderloin in San Francisco and bouncing in nearby bars. You'd be surprised how much less you care about crazies accosting you when you don't have to worry about actually touching them.

officially crying with laughter

Once in a McDonalds saw a burly black lesbo get smacked upside the head with a plate of hotcakes and sausages by a black pre-op tranny with a bad weave.

I live in a small town with exactly one bum - a crazy guy who sits in Burger King and talks to himself all day, and have no interesting stories concerning him.

However, once after a concert in Atlanta a homeless man stopped the group I was with. The other four kept walking, but my friend, his date, and myself stayed to talk with the bum. He kept asking for money and saying, "DON'T YOU KNOW I'M A ______!" and would put a different career there each time. He claimed to be a preacher and a poet, so I gave him five dollars to marry my friend to his date and to write me a poem. He did both, the poem being some incredibly cliched shit about how, "True friends are there for one another until the end."

He then gave us all hugs.

No Bum sounds alot like The Nutty Giant, who was our huge enormous homeless guy who'd wander the streets of Forest Hills when I lived there. He was easily 6'7" and not just tall, but big. Always wore red suspenders. And he'd wander around either screaming, "I DID NOT! I DIDN'T, AND I TOLD YOU I DIDN'T!!! AARRRRRGGHHHH!!!", or doing this little mousy squeaky voice and mincing while he walked. He was most famous for what I'm probably guessing was narcolepsy. You'd just be walking to the dry cleaners, and - boom - there he'd be, fast asleep in the middle of the sidewalk. Or, more famously, he'd always sit on this fire hydrant outside this convenience store. He'd be wide awake and talking to himself when you went inside. And I swear, in the time it would take you to buy a pack of gum, you'd go back outside less than a minute later, and he'd be fast asleep, still sitting on top of the fire hydrant.

Incidentally, this wasn't Cassady's first entertaining run-in with a homeless guy. One particularly memorable meet and greet was while we were in college. We were upstairs playing video games (Jon, correct me if I fuck up the details) and there was a knock at the door downstairs. So JC runs off for a few minutes and comes back. "Who was that?" we asked. "Oh it was just Homeless McGee," he says.

Now I realize that smacks of "you had to be there," but the even funnier part was that Homeless McGee became a character in our lives, much like Mavis on FRASIER, to the point that Jon created a character in his WWF wrestling game for N64 called Homeless McGee, whose signature move was the Dumpster.

I'm telling you, kid's a fucking comic genius. And this kind of shit always happens to him.

I've got a good McDonalds related story but there are no bums in it.

Right, last year I was on a night out and towards the end I was drunk enough to think that I needed to get some food from McDonalds. So I've got my cheeseburger and I'm standing outside eating when I hear quite a commotion back in the McD's...there is full blown brawl going down!
There are at least 10-15 lads all knocking the shit out of each other, the customers come streaming out of the door, knocking each other over in the process. I'm still watching through the window and some of the brawlers jump over the counter, none of the staff were in sight now, and continue the fight there. I see a police van come flying around the corner so I decide to make a sharp exit and try and find my mates, didnt want to be there once the pepper spray starts flying.

Later on after catching up with my mates we are walking past the McD's and there are about 10 police cars and about 30 policemen putting up scene of the crime tape, we thought it was a bit much for a street fight. However, in the paper the day after there is a story about it. It turns out one of them had jumped over the counter, grabbed a knife and stabbed someone who he was fighting with!

The fight had origianlly begun in a strip club over the road and after being thrown out by the bouncers they had brawled their way into McDonalds, which reminded me of the end of Blazing Saddles, a bit.

I was a bit shook up after reading that, I was only 1 minute away from being caught up in it

Thread of the month for June 2008.