I turned around to tell him to fuck off, but stopped mid-sentence.
This guy was a bit taller than me (I’m 6’2), kinda lanky, very well dressed. He was also covered from head to toe in blood. Like completely drenched. I thought he’d been in an accident so I dropped my tough-guy act and starting asking him if he was okay, needed an ambulance, etc.
He calmly responded, nah he’s good. He just wants to find his brothers. I was like “umm, are you sure your brothers are here?”
He insists that they are here as they told him they’d be in X city (not anywhere near Toronto where the club is located).
After his complete obliviousness to what city he’s in, the fact that he’s soaked in blood, and his intense stare (dude wasn’t blinking), I called my boss up.
When my boss appeared, I gave a quick rundown of what happened. He talked to the guy very briefly, then told him he’d assist. He went and got some patrolling cops.
When the cops appeared, one of them lightly touched the bloody guy on the shoulder. That’s when he started screaming incoherently and tried slashing at him with a small knife that had been concealed in his pocket.
The cops, my boss and I subdued the guy until he could be cuffed and placed inside a cop car. The guy was screaming loudly and struggling to hulk out of the cuffs (as the cuffs cut deeply into his wrists) the entire time.
To this day, I still have to clue what the hell that was about.”
13. SHE’D HUNG HERSELF FROM EXPOSED WATER PIPES
“I did my basic military training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Our barracks were old, dating to around the 1950s or 1960s. Every night, a number of recruits were assigned ‘fire guard’ duty, which was essentially trying to stay awake for an hour and mopping the floor (or buffing it) until the next soldier came on duty.
The fire guard post for my platoon was at one end of a long hallway, directly under a set of speakers suspended from the ceiling. Whenever the drill sergeants made an announcement, you’d hear them through the speakers. This is how they communicated reveille (wakeup) and other instructions where they had to talk to the whole building at once. Usually these were communicated in blistering shouts, rendered staticky and nearly unintelligible as they blared through the ancient sound system.
One night, about halfway through basic (so sleep deprivation really hitting hard by this point), I was sitting in a chair under the speakers, trying to stay awake. The speakers crackled to life, and I immediately perked up. Unusual for an announcement this time of night, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
The voice was soft, barely above a whisper. A woman’s voice: ‘Private, get everyone outside. Right now.’ The comm line remained open, a low hum hissing through. The voice again: ‘Right now, Private. Everyone outside.’ Weird. Not that it was a woman’s voice—-it was a coed basic training and we had a couple female drills. But for it to come across so softly was very strange. When the brown rounds used the intercom, it was at full, shouting voice.
I headed down the length of the hall to where 2nd platoon had a fire guard on duty similarly situated. Asked him if he heard anything, got a negative response. I made a decision: I’d chalk it up to my imagination and tiredness and not risk having the entire barracks furious at me for disturbing their sleep in error. If it was one of the drill sergeants messing with me, and I got in trouble for not waking everyone up, at least I’d be the only one getting smoked.
Nothing happened the rest of the night, and I put it out of my mind until the very end of basic, when we had our three-day field training exercise. We made it through, and the drills started treating us like real humans (almost) again. As we completed the last day of the exercise, which was a near-live fire night march-to-attack scenario, we all gathered around the fire.
