“I’m telling you, I bashed his freakin’ head in!” Phil Reagan said, for perhaps the fiftieth time since he had entered the Grand Café. He was on his third Rock and Rye, had yet to take his coat off, and he was sweating profusely.

“I heard you,” Bernie said as she refilled the coolers under the bar with bottles of beer. “He was a perv, huh?”

“He has his pants down around his ankles, you’ll excuse me for sayin’, and his helmeted avenger was at full attention, if you get what I mean. I had no idea when he rolled down his window and asked for directions what he was gonna do. He wanted to get from Green Street up to the expressway, he says, so I started giving him directions.” He drained his glass, washing it down with a third of his beer.

“I gets halfway through and I got too close to the car, the guy reaches out and grabs me by my future dynasties, you hear me? Right through the car window!” His hands unconsciously gravitate toward his crotch. “He grabs my belt and tries to pull me in through the freaking car window!”

“Perhaps he wanted you to drive.” This was from David Gray, known to the patrons as Wavy Davy. He loved a good argument, almost as much as he loved scotch, but there was nothing he loved more than scotch.

“That’s just pure bull, he wanted somethin’ else!” Phil was not to be denied. “He was jacking his jukebox and tried t’get at mine, so I opened the car door and then slammed the rat fink in the face with it. He let go for a sec and then I grabbed a brick, and I smashed him with it, right in the face!”

“Your mother must be so proud.” Wavy Dave said with his usual sardonic sneer. “And did you then call an ambulance for the now-bleeding cur?”

“Ambulance, why would I call an ambu…” As the realization of what might happen to him should the pervert with his khakis around his hush puppies end up croaked for real. Prison meant gang rape, he knew, the thought now crossed his mind that he may have prevented one unwanted homo only top put himself at the mercy of dozens of them. “Oh, sweet mother of mine.”