Rodney's Greatest Story Never Told - Until Now
Rodney's Greatest Story Never Told - Until Now
Or: A Man, A Stanza, A Train, And A Printer
For years now I’ve been promising to tell the “last Rodney story”. I woke up this morning for the first time in my new house, and I think today is the day to finally share this story with all of you.
Serious Trigger Warning for my decent and moral friends here on Substack. This story contains: group sex, breaking of the law, alcohol and drug consumption, drunk driving, the explicit mention of various other perversions, and serious misuse of a Hewlett-Packard laserjet printer. Proceed at your own risk. I mean it. ACF is generally meant to be a family Substack. None of that applies to this one story.
Dramatis Personae, major
Jack Baruth: your humble author, thirty-nine years of age at the time of the story, who lived in Powell at the time with
Vodka McBigBra: henceforth styled as Vodka. Former stripper and ne’er-do-well, a fit size four and wearer of a 32G “Fantasie” bra, just turned forty but still getting it done in her own way.
Jaci: Wife of a scout sniper, girlfriend to Jack, mother of two, thirty years old, a little zaftig but not worrisomely so, one of the finest people I’ve ever met.
Rodney: The man, the myth, the legend, chronicled here. Black, six foot one, forty-six years old.
Sammy: Long-time friend to Jack and Rodney, best man at Jack’s first wedding, respected long-distance shooter, ran a property management firm, forty-three years old.
Part One: “She Used To Fuck Black Guys”
Let us begin. It was the Year Of Our Lord 2011, and Rodney hadn’t worked in years. His last job, a promising management-track position with Speedway, had come to an end when a regional manager showed him minor disrespect, at which point Rodney handed in his keys and left. The job before that, he’d knocked a woman out. The job before that, he had threatened to beat the shit out of a female co-worker for the crime of correcting his math in a customer transaction. Since the woman in question happened to be my mother, I had mixed emotions on the subject.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” was how he answered the phone.
“Rodney, I know how you feel. I’ve been there too. But I need you to do me a favor in the future. Either just beat her ass, thus paying her back properly for throwing away all my stuff when I went to college in 1989, or keep your mouth shut around her, alright?”
The job before that, he’d been fired for telling his white female boss that "you need to get a black cock up that ass and maybe you’d calm down.” The saving grace of that particular termination was: a female coworker who had already received said Roto-Rooting at Rodney’s hands paid his bills out of sympathy for a while post-firing before Rodney beat her 17-year-old son’s ass outside the Marcus Crosswoods Theatre in Columbus, ostensibly for the crime of disrespecting him during a popcorn handover.
You get the idea. Rodney was not necessarily good at keeping a job. Which wasn’t the problem you might think, because he’d lived rent-free at his mother’s Section 8 housing since being fired from Jim Keim Ford in 2002 for, ah, throwing a hooker down the stairs, which is a different story entirely. But when his mom got too sick to keep her job, Rodney decided that some income was necessary. So he went to see Sammy.
Sammy and I went way back. He sold me my first rifle, a milled-receiver Chinese SKS from the original Norinco vintage batch, in the winter of 1991-2. We did all sorts of competitive shooting together until he married into money and gave it up. By 2011, he was running a residential property management company. Sammy was surrounded at all times by just the kind of fine women you’d expect to see in apartment-complex management. Rodney hooked up with one of them, I hooked up with two of them, my pal Javier hooked up with five of them, exclusively choosing the oldest and/or fattest ones (“I like very much the feeling of a big woman on top”) and often causing considerable drama among the staff — but Sammy was a saint, completely devoted to his wife. I never understood him.
Sammy knew Rodney pretty well, because we’d done a few seasons of mountain biking as a little group. He agreed to hire Rodney, against not only his best judgment but in fact against all available judgments, for one of his, ah, urban properties. The two stupendously attractive white women he had working over there had been reporting considerable harassment from the tenants. It was thought that Rodney’s presence, all six-one and two-forty of him, would dampen that behavior a bit.
Rodney’s first day was a Monday, and it went pretty well. He’s a charming motherfucker when he wants to be, and handsome besides. The following day he actually helped one of his two female co-workers lease an apartment to a new customer. Sammy’s call to me afterwards was little short of ebullient: “He hasn’t punched either one of them!” This called for a celebration — so Vodka and I invited Rodney to join us for the first part of our usual Tuesday night.
At the time, Tuesday nights worked like this. My girlfriend Jaci would take her kids to the sitter, confirm that her former-Marine husband was passed out on the couch from 150mg of Oxy or whatever, then she would drive over to my house to meet me and Vodka. The three of us would have dinner then go to a bar in Delaware, Ohio where I would sing a few songs with a local band. Then we’d return to Powell, go three ways for a couple of hours, and Jaci would go home once she sobered up. Sometimes, if the sobering-up was long in coming, I’d take her home in my car then drive to Honda, where I was working the 6am shift doing production support.
As a lifestyle and arrangement, it had all the stability of flerovium-114. Neither of the women involved had any genuine bisexual tendencies. It was just something they were doing to make me happy. In the moment, it often made them both miserable, as they each analyzed the situation real-time to see if I was, in fact, more attracted to the other girl. There was often crying afterwards. Eleven years later, old and broken in a rural township, I find it hard to believe that anyone could care about me enough for that, week after week, but who among us is ever grateful in the moment, for anything? At the time, however, I thought it would never end — and that I deserved all of it, plus more besides. Wasn’t I dating a total of eight women across the country, all at the same time? Wasn’t I in the prime of my life, with a little money in my pocket and every day brighter than the next? Reader, I was an idiot.
Back to our story. Rodney showed up at six sharp. He looked good. Healthy. Sober. “I won’t stay long at the bar,” he cautioned me, “I need to be up for work in the morning. I’ll have a drink now, though.” I handed him a bottle of Absolut from the fridge then went upstairs to get dressed with Vodka.
Afterwards, Rodney followed my Town Car up to Delaware, Ohio, driving his mother’s 1992 Stanza. “I’d better drive separate, so I can go home early.” I really respected that. We met Jaci for dinner at Nova, the passion-project restaurant of a local woman who had apparently done nothing but bump coke and watch Miami Vice for years. The place was all blue neon, black wood, and corrugated metal. I loved it.
As Rodney sidled up next to Jaci on her side of our booth, I realized: Oh shit, he thinks it’s a date. This was likely to be a bit thorny at midnight when I explained to him that it would be a Surf City night for me (if you’re not a boomer, that means “two girls for every boy”) and a solo finish for him. On the positive side, Rodney on a date is a Rodney keen to give his best impression, and unlikely to punch a broad.
Two drinks and half an hour of sparkling conversation later, he put his arm around Jaci and murmured, in his outdoor-voice whisper, “You’re a good bitch.”
“Excuse me?!?!” Jaci was not happy, and she recoiled from his touch. “I’m a bitch? For what, exactly?”
“No,” Rodney clarified, “you’re not a bitch. You’re a good bitch. It’s a black thing, you see. It’s good to be a good bitch. Ask Vodka, she’s a good bitch, she knows… she used to fuck black guys.” I did not appreciate this reference to my girlfriend’s first marriage, performed at pregnancy-related short notice in her late teens with a respectable, hard-working Army sergeant, nor did I enjoy the accurate but unsympathetic way in which it was described. The girls could sense that I was genuinely annoyed at that point. So the dinner proceeded in silence for the better part of an hour, then we headed over to the bar with Rodney trailing in the Stanza.
“Your friend,” Jaci told me on the way, “is a real piece of work.”
“Well, yes, but he’s very loyal, once you get to know him. Like a pitbull. Also, he attacks women, children… this is like a pitbull as well. He has all the characteristics of a pitbull, really.” Jaci laughed. We got to the bar and she decided to give Rodney a second chance, buying him a couple of drinks to celebrate his new job.
It was about 11:15 by the time I got done with the band. I miss those days, too. I haven’t exactly run out of voice the way Robert Plant did, but nowadays I sound reedy in my ear rather than fortissimo. Back then I could sing all night, even though I was beat from waking up at five am for the factory. Vodka was tired, too. Even Jaci was tired. Rodney had hustled fifty bucks out of two white boys, playing nine-ball. He came up to me. “I’d better go home.” Seemed sober as a church mouse, although I was certain he’d had maybe eight drinks, counting the one at my place. Meanwhile, Jaci’s phone was ringing. The babysitter wasn’t feeling well. Could she come to the bar and get Jaci, ending the night early? With what I felt to be tremendous magnanimity, I resigned myself to a night of conventional intercourse with a single person. Rodney left, Jaci left. Around 12:30 Vodka and I said our goodbyes to everyone we knew at the bar and headed out.
It was a bit past one in the morning, and we were close to home, when my phone rang from a number I didn’t recognize. Cellphone spam wasn’t quite the thing it is now, so I didn’t hesitate to answer. The voice on the other end was distant, scratchy, panicked. And it was definitely Rodney.
“Jack… you have to come here right now. RIGHT NOW. I’m stuck on the tracks and there’s a train coming.”
“Rodney… why the fuck aren’t you home, dude? You live half an hour from the bar. It’s been, like, three times that.”
“I’M STUCK ON THE TRACKS. The car… I jumped it, then it landed on the tracks and the engine blew up, maybe… I don’t know. There’s a train coming. YOU NEED TO COME HERE NOW.” Vodka could hear most of this from the passenger seat. She was making a flurry of hand motions that conveyed no particular message. I responded with a few of my own, meant to convey stop doing that. From a distance, it must have looked like a slap fight.
“Rodney… where is here?”
“Hold on,” he said. I could hear him talking to someone. “Uh, I’m in…” and he named a city of which I’d never heard.
“Rodney, I don’t even know where that is.”
“Jack, I need you to COME HERE RIGHT NOW… Oh shit, it’s the cops. I gotta run.” And he hung up.