Double Flee A

Another fight story from Riverside Military Academy.

Dave Wilbanks was well known to be a skinhead, so the administration of the school gave him a black roommate. His roommate's name was Armbruster, who I think was in the band. It's kind of weird that they would have had a band member away from the rest of the band, which was housed securely in a dorky haven of personal safety (unlike the rest of the school) in HQ company, which sat by itself at the top of a hill, away from the fighting and drinking and craziness. So I'm now thinking he wasn't in the band, just some other special group like the band that I've forgotten about. Anyway, Armbruster wasn't accepted by the rest of the black guys. He actually didn't fit in at all. It was like he was gay or something. Dave Wilbanks knew the administration was screwing around with him by putting him there, so he didn't get worked up about it. It was the cost of doing business as who he was.

In 1990-91, the black guys were the most powerful single minority group in the school. The next year that somehow changed and it became the egyptians, but that year they talked pretty loud all over the school. Nathan Scott, who you may remember from before, was not a part of this group. Nobody outside B and C companies really was.

There was kind of a silent contract between the blacks and Dave Wilbanks. He didn't pick on any of them, and they didn't provoke him. There was the danger that Dave had people that they just didn't know about, and so the power balance remained, uh, balanced. Out of the big black guys, there were about three you really didn't want to piss off at all. The two I can remember were Manley and Laurent. They kind of "ran shit" around B and C companies, which were adjacent.

I don't know what happened here. There's no back-story that I know of. I just know I opened my door and there was Armbruster getting the beating of a lifetime.

Laurent had Armbruster up against the railing and was uppercutting him like crazy. There were three of Laurent's friends there saying "show that nigga what time it is!" over and over. You may have seen this on television at some point. I guess they're cheerleaders. And Laurent was showing him what time it was, and it was time to get your ass kicked. Once Laurent had beat him till he was on the ground, they left, and Armbruster lay in a pile of lonely, bleeding blackness in front of my room.

I want to tell two more of these. The time they beat the shit out of Kligman, if that's his name, and the time I got beat up by a guy who fought on the side of Christianity.

Off to Elko.

posted by dale @ 7:00 PM