Page 7 of Jackass

Road names were a funny thing. Some were descriptive, like Tank or Blade. Some were ironic, like Jingles, who never made a sound when he moved.

Then you had a name like mine, that was said so much whileyou prospected that it just stuck. The name given to me when I was a baby was Charles Williams. It was the name of the firefighter that found me.

My parents didn’t want me. My mother gave birth, then dropped me off at a firehouse. No name, no birthdate, no nothing. I grew up in the system, bouncing from one foster home to another. People believed babies in the system got quickly snatched up by parents desperate for a child. That wasn’t the case for me.

I was told I was sick as a baby. Anytime a family took me in, they figured out soon enough that I was more trouble than I was worth.

None of them wanted me.

I frequently slipped through the cracks in every aspect.

I wasn’t good at school. Hated being there.

I was always getting in trouble, playing pranks, and took nothing seriously. When I prospected, all those habits just stuck around. When the guys got frustrated with what they deemed as my lack of sincerity, they called me a jackass.

It stuck.

Thankfully, by the time I patched in, the guys had shortened the name to Jack. Most people assumed I didn’t have a road name, which was fine with me. I was never a Charles or even a Charlie.

Jack suited me just fine, despite how I got it.

“Hey, Jack.”

Blade sat down at the bar next to me and motioned to Tank for a beer.

Blade was the best friend I’d ever had. We met when he was eighteen years old. A few of us were at a bar one night drinking and this scrawny kid came in. The bartender never questioned his age, but I could tell he was young.

I could also see he had it rough.

Like noticed like.

I watched him throughout the night, curious to see how he handled himself. I watched as a woman walked up to the bar andhit on him. A woman that I knew was there with someone else. When the guy she was with went looking for her, I knew he’d find her with the kid.

This was a big guy, close to Tank’s size, and the kid was no match for him. I stood from my seat and walked toward the hallway I had seen them sneak down. I wasn’t gonna let this kid get hurt because some skank wanted to cuckold her old man.

Turned out the kid could take care of himself. By the time I’d gotten to the hallway, the kid was gone, and the guy was on the floor with a slash across his face and his chest.

I walked back out to the bar, grabbed the guys, and we headed out. We walked to our bikes, talking and joking around. Hearing a noise, I turned around. The kid was there with a guy on the ground and a knife at his neck.

We’d never heard a thing, but the kid must have seen the guy trying to sneak up on us. He took a chance and saved us from an altercation where one of our guys could have gotten hurt.

When I thanked him, he surprised me by saying he’d seen me come into the hall to have his back. The least he could do was to have mine.

That right there was the type of guy we wanted in the club.

I talked him into prospecting, and I became his sponsor. The name Blade was a no-brainer when we learned just how fast and accurate he was with that knife.

To say we were close would be an understatement. This man was my brother beyond the club. The only thing we didn’t share was blood.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“There’s a new waitress at The Diner. Thought we could grab a bite to eat and check her out,” he said as he spun his beer bottle in his hand.

“You interested in her?” I asked, looking over at my friend, knowing he wasn’t.

There was only one girl for him.

Unfortunately, that girl thought he was dead.

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