Don and the Bikers

The Wonder Bar
Boston Mass
Oct 2004

Oh my God, I ran into Kevin Ryan again. He winced at the sharpness of the handshake, but it is the handshake I give to those I consider friends. I had stopped into Bunratty's again to re-examine the place where so many things had happened around me. Funny but he was never a part of the "scene". He was the ghetto landlord where I made my living whilst I partied and lived the nascent Boston Heavy Metal scene. He never knew the people who populated the scene. He never new Abel. I was staring at the bullet holes in the ceiling that killed him when a stranger walked up to talk to me. After a few forgettable sentences he excitedly told me that "Kevin Ryan was downstairs". He then proceeded to lead me down to the basement bar of what was now the "Wonder Bar" to reintroduce me. I have no idea how the out of the blue leap of the strangers conversation to Kevin Ryan even occurred. I walked up and sat next to him without notice as the stranger stood by. He began to stare with amazement. "Danny Pride" he said with a sudden twinkle of Irish Eyes?

He was as blown away as I.

Like two Irishmen we were quickly to drunk to talk and spent most of the evening in a good natured stupor. But somewhere near the beginning he exclaimed.... "Don got out a while back and he's working for me again". I stumbled and said "what do you mean "Got out"... how's he doing anyway" ? "Oh, you didn't know" ? he queried with a puzzled look. "He's been in prison for the last ten years or so". "WHAT"??? "Yea he got into an argument with a guy in an apartment and it resulted in a fight and he killed the guy, hit him on the head".

About thirty seconds later I groaned. Oh no... Oh shit.

My first reaction had been to Don dealing with prison... then the second thought of the incredible guilt he would be living with. Don had been Kevin's maintenance guy and general all round fixer. He was also a friend of mine. Now another, yet another, murder had breached my world and connected me to it.

The flashback was to Don's house down somewhere near Mattapan, maybe in 1988, I think. Kevin had stuck me with a House in Roxbury at an inflated price, his ego reacting to my humanity towards his tenants. Don was trying to show me how to make it work. He was away that day and I had been frantically looking for him. The dump Kevin stuck me with had broken a sewer line, Two kids lived with the couple of squatters on the first floor. The one guy who had the moxie to go at the problem was no where to be seen for hours, Around late dusk he showed up all in a tizzy. He reminded me of someone who had just won an Oscar and had dodged bullets on the way to the stage to collect the trophy and was now back home to tell friends about it.

"Oh My God you won't believe what I just did". he exclaimed! "I just faced down a whole gang of Bikers and threw them out of the place". He paced back and forth, agitated at all the excitement. "It was incredible" "It was awesome" "I just saved Kevin six months on that building". The adrenaline of the moment added more sentences which pass by my memory... but I remembered trying to call him up short. "Don that was fucking stupid as shit" I poked at him with all the words I had learned growing up near a race track. "You got away with it this time but what if they had pulled a gun back and then one went off or something". "You never know what can happen" I advised "What if you get into a struggle someday and it gets out of hand, you hit the guy and kill him....what then...then you gotta live with it.". In 1988 the words seemed to have an effect. I did bring him up short on it that day, Now they came back at me, it was like the conversation in the Door to the Lobby of the US West Yellow pages building in Denver with the columbine shooters all over again.

Ryan had helped him after it was all over,

Character is more than a building.

This is just one of the Paranormal Events surrounding
King Solomon's Gate
The first Archaeological Proof of King Solomons Life

Don and the Bikers

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