CHAPTER 11: THE KILL SWITCH

“HOW ABOUT SOME MORE?” Uncle Bob asked his friend Mike, the owner of the bar.

“Sure! Let me pour you another!” Mike said, filling Bob’s six-ounce glass with a megashot.

At 104 proof, peppermint schnapps was quickly getting Bob drunk, which was the point of this particular gathering. Their buddy, Doug Johnson, held up his glass for a refill too. Doug was a hard-drinking, fast-living fighter. He and Bob came from the same North Denver neighborhood and had known each other since they were kids.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon at the Silver Dollar Bar and Grill, hailed as one of the toughest bars in Denver. In Colorado in the ’70s, state law required that bars stay closed on Sundays, so Mike, Bob, and Doug had the place to themselves. Bob worked there on Friday and Saturday nights as a bouncer for Mike. He didn’t work for money but for free drinks and for the sheer enjoyment of the fights that often broke out.

Uncle Bob was born to be a bouncer. He scared me to death. He was no bodybuilder, but he was as strong as an ox. At his day job as a pipefitter for the railroad, he was renowned for being able to move 500-pound pipes single-handedly. No one else at his company came close to his level of power. He wasn’t a man to be trifled with. Like Grandpa, he never worked out but was naturally, freakishly strong.

Being from North Denver and the youngest of five fighting brothers and one fighting sister, Bob had honed his bare-knuckle fighting skills in countless living room brawls with siblings and frequent back-alley fights with gang members.

My earliest memories of Uncle Bob were terrifying. When he’d see me, he’d say, “Come over here, you little —!” And then he’d reach out to try to grab me as I ran away and hid. What he probably meant as playful chiding, I took as a horrifying, imminent threat.

The violent stories he told again and again were like oxygen to him. He breathed them in and exhaled them out to anyone who would listen.

I don’t remember when I first heard the story about this particular night at the Silver Dollar from Uncle Bob, but it was the one fistfight story that had a different ending for Bob —and for our family.

Mike and Doug loved Uncle Bob. He was loyal, fun, and always had your back, especially in a fistfight. As the three buddies sat at the bar downing repeated supershots of peppermint schnapps, Bob and Doug were leaning on Mike to join them on their next escapade. “Mike, I’m tellin’ ya,” Bob said enthusiastically, “we’ll get twelve cases of beer, whiskey, vodka, the works, and we’ll spend ten days in the backwoods outside of Granby. I know this great camping spot just outside Rocky Mountain National Park.”

“I’m not lugging that much stuff into some backwoods campsite,” Mike said, interrupting Bob’s sales pitch.

“Didn’t we tell you?” Doug said, jumping in. “We’re gonna rent pack horses! We’ll load ’em up and ride ’em in. You won’t have to lug a thing! It’s gonna be real Wild West!”

“Fishin’, campin’, shootin’, drinkin’, drinkin’, and more drinkin’,” Bob added, triggering a big group laugh.

“Sounds like fun. But I’m just too busy with the bar,” Mike explained. But Doug and Bob went to the same school of persistence and insistence.

“You need to come hang with the boys!” Bob continued, cursing and pounding the table as he slammed down his empty shot glass.

“I don’t know,” Mike muttered. “I’ll think about it.”

The three were already intoxicated as the late afternoon turned to evening. Especially Doug.

“I gotta get home,” Bob said, glancing at his watch. “Can you give me a ride, Doug?”

“Sure thing!” Doug said enthusiastically, oblivious to the fact that he was drunk as a skunk.

“I’ll walk you guys out,” Mike volunteered.

Unsteadily, the three friends made their way to the parking lot, where Doug’s brand-new yellow convertible Porsche 914 was parked diagonally across two spaces.

“Why’d you park like that, Doug?” Mike asked.

“I don’t want anyone scratching my baby,” Doug explained, gently patting the hood of his car.

Bob’s large, muscular frame plopped down into the tiny passenger seat of the small, sleek, fast sports car. With the weight of his frame, the car chassis sank a couple inches closer to the ground. Bob was one big boy. He looked like an offensive lineman sitting in a go-kart. His head jutted above the windshield, his knees were crammed against the dashboard, and his frame spilled over the center console.

Once Doug climbed into the driver’s seat and rolled down his window, Mike squatted down, resting his forearms on the driver’s side of the Porsche to continue the conversation. Doug was still trying to talk Mike into joining them on the upcoming camping trip.

Doug was so focused on his drunken dialogue with Mike that he somehow failed to notice the drug-crazed man who had jumped onto the hood of the Porsche and was standing on it ranting incoherent threats to no one in particular.

“What are you doin’?” Bob yelled. “Get off the car!”

Still clueless, Doug turned to Bob and asked, “Why are you screaming?”

Bob pointed to the man who was now bouncing up and down on the car hood and incredulously asked Doug, “You gonna let this guy jump on your car like that?”

“Get off my car!” Doug screamed.

Bob’s street smarts kicked in, and he opened his door to get out, assuming the inevitable. As anticipated, the maniac jumped off the hood in Bob’s direction and took a swing at him.

Big mistake.

Bob threw the man up against the building and threatened him. “Get out of here, or I’m going to break you in two!” Thinking the incident was over, Bob pushed the guy away and headed back toward the car.

“Not so fast!” Doug yelled, lunging full speed toward the guy who had desecrated his prized possession with boot marks.

In a flash, Doug tackled the stark-raving-mad man. Curse words flew like fists as they went at it on the ground. Bob and Mike, like trainers during a boxing match, barked out advice to Doug.

“Get on top of him and pummel his face!” Bob yelled.

“Headbutt him!” Mike urged. “What are you waiting for?”

In the evening shadows of the building, it was hard for Bob and Mike to clearly see what was happening. But once they caught sight of the blood, they realized this was not a typical brawl.

The enraged, psychotic man had pulled out a knife with a five-inch blade and was slashing away at Doug as they rolled around on the ground. The parking lot wrestling match had turned into a bloodbath.

Mike got to the pair first, with Bob close behind. In a flash, the perpetrator scrambled to his feet and stabbed Mike in the gut. Then wheeling around, he set his sights on Bob.

Bob, who knew plenty about street fighting, instinctively realized that he needed to get a little distance between him and his knife-wielding attacker so he could get his bearings and figure out how to get the knife away from him without getting stabbed himself. Even in his drunken stupor, Bob knew if he could somehow draw the man away from his two bleeding friends, then maybe he could keep the guy from stabbing them again.

So as the man came at him, Bob swept his legs out from underneath him. But when the crazed man immediately jumped back up, Bob turned and ran, trying to draw the guy away from his friends. After a few seconds, he checked behind him to make sure the man had taken the bait and was chasing after him.

He wasn’t.

But thankfully, he wasn’t attacking Doug and Mike, who were moaning on the ground from their stab wounds. Instead, Bob caught sight of the man as he disappeared around the back corner of the bar. Never one to let a perpetrator escape, Bob followed in hot pursuit.

Rounding the corner of the building at full throttle, Bob was surprised to see the crazed man cowering against the graffiti-covered back wall of the brick building. Bob kept running, his large frame picking up momentum with every step. Like an unstoppable freight train, he ran straight at the guy, hoping to get to him before he realized what was going on. Cocking back his long, strong right arm, he swung it like a catapult toward the man’s head. Bob’s giant fist hit the guy so hard that his head bounced off the brick wall like a rubber ball before hitting the concrete curb below.

But Bob didn’t stop there. With a mixture of adrenaline, terror, and alcohol surging in his veins, he kept punching and punching. Bob was terrified that this guy still had the knife. And he was horrified that two of his best friends might be dead from their stab wounds.

With every punch to the guy’s face, his skull would fling back with a jolt. But Bob kept dropping his fists on him like a sledgehammer until everything was drenched blood-red —the man’s face, his shirt, the curb, Bob’s hands, his clothes, and his boots —everything.

The kill switch had been flipped.

It was the kill switch that made my family so dangerous. When most men get in a fight, there’s posturing and threats first. Words are exchanged, eyes are narrowed, voices are raised, and chests are puffed. Before things ever escalate to throwing punches, there’s usually some sort of pushing match first.

But not in my family. When the switch was flipped, my family acted. Like a muscle car that can go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, my family got to unbridled rage in no time flat. When the kill switch flipped, only one thing was in view: the utter and absolute destruction of their enemy.

No one really knows how long it was before the cops arrived, but by the time they showed up, lights flashing and sirens blaring, the guy was gone —his eyes had rolled into the back of his head.

One of the cops who knew Bob from the old neighborhood rushed him and tried to throw a choke hold on him. But Bob’s explosive rage instantly shifted from the perp to the police, so he turned on the cop and slammed him onto the hood of his own squad car.

Then all the cops rushed Bob at once and got him to the ground. After handcuffing him, they took off his blood-covered boots, perhaps as evidence, or perhaps to slow him down if he tried to escape. Then they threw him into the back of the squad car, slammed the door, and left him there. An ambulance pulled up, and two EMTs jumped out.

From where he sat in the back of the squad car, Bob watched the EMTs doing chest compressions on the man in a desperate —and futile —effort to get his heart kick-started again. They finally put him on a gurney and wheeled him to the ambulance as fast as they could.

A cop came back and opened the squad car door. “He’s dead. You’ll be charged with manslaughter,” the cop told Bob before reading him his rights.

“In that moment,” Bob told my family later, “I started weeping uncontrollably. I wept for the man I’d just killed. I wept for my friends who might die of their stab wounds. And I wept for my own life, which would soon be lived out behind bars.

“But it was there in the back of the cop car,” Bob explained, “where I called out to God for the first time since I was nine years old. Way back then, I’d put my faith in Christ after hearing a sermon on hell in church. Then in my teen years, I drifted from God and got caught up in the violence and partying all around me. Now, here I was in my twenties, and my life was a big fat mess. I figured I was probably headed to jail for a good part of my life for killing some guy.”

But even though Bob had drifted from God, God had not drifted from him. God was right there in the back of the squad car with Bob the whole time —waiting, longing, and never giving up on his wayward son.

Faced with the stark reality of what had just happened, Bob called out to God, “God, forgive me! Help me! Rescue me! I’ll serve you for the rest of my life with everything I got.”

Humbled and broken, Bob spent the night in jail. “There, in the midst of the other felons, I didn’t sleep a wink,” Bob recounted. “I prayed for my friends who had been stabbed, hoping they’d somehow survived. And I trusted my future to God, no matter how bleak. I thought through the life I’d wasted and wondered what would happen next. The one thing I did know was that, in jail or out of jail, I was all-in to serve God for the rest of my life.”

And when my family says they’re all-in, they’re all-in.

Around noon the next day, a police officer came to Bob’s jail cell. “Come with me,” he said curtly. Then he escorted Bob up to the fifth floor of the building and handed him off to a detective.

“The guy you beat up last night was fully resuscitated,” the detective said.

“What?” Bob asked in disbelief. “He’s still alive? Last night, the cop said I killed him!”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought at the scene,” the detective explained, “but the EMTs got his heart beating again in the ambulance. At the hospital, the doctors discovered the knife hidden on him that was covered with your friends’ blood.”

“Are they okay?” Bob asked.

“Both of them are gonna survive too and should be out of the hospital soon,” the detective said. “But that guy you almost beat to death will be in recovery for a long time. We were already looking for him ’cause he stabbed a cop earlier. The guy’s a nut job.”

“So what about me?” Bob asked.

“We’re dropping the charge of manslaughter and releasing you,” the detective said nonchalantly, not even bothering to look up from his paperwork.

“I was stunned,” Bob told us later. “I walked out of that building a free man in every sense of the word.”

And true to his word, Bob started living for God. It had been years since he had been in a church. But one thing was for sure: he didn’t want to go back to his parents’ old Baptist church full of blue hair, walkers, and the smell of Mentholatum ointment. Bob remembered Uncle Tommy and Aunt Carol telling him, “There’s lots of pretty girls at Yankee’s church. You should check it out.” And once he did, it was game over. Bob found where he was supposed to be.

It wasn’t just the pretty girls, the worship, the building, or even Yankee that impressed him. Yankee told corny jokes and preached long sermons. What captured Bob was the simplicity of the message and the urgency of the mission. Yankee made things crystal clear, especially the message of salvation. He’d use his hillbilly charm and simple but effective visual illustrations to break things down so that they came alive in a way Bob could understand and apply to his life.

But most significantly, Yankee helped Bob understand that he had an important job to do —that he was needed. Up until then, Bob’s only job was pipefitting and throwing drunks out of the bar. But Yankee repeatedly prodded him, asking, “Everyone can do something to reach someone with the gospel. What are you going to do, Bob?”

Bob’s initial response was blunt —he had no idea.

But Yankee had an idea.