Brett Vs. The Nazi Werewolf Berserker

I had only met her in person ten days earlier, and we were inseparable. Ruby Cardona, 'pirate wench of the gastronomic sea,' was my love, and she fell in love with me the very first night when our bodies were intermingling and I kept making Borat jokes about "mah WIFE!" Three days after we met, I got to meet her four-year-old son when he returned from his biological dad's place, and it was pseudo-step-fatherhood for me at first sight. We loved each other immediately, and it was beautiful. But on that tenth day of meeting, shortly before Thanksgiving Day, 2019, I accidentally proposed marriage.

"Honey, would you like to share a smoke with me?" I asked, picking up my jacket to step outside into the late November snow and taking a cigarette from my pack, which I put, unlit, in my mouth.

"I love sharing things with you!" She responded enthusiastically.

"Then you'll have to share my life with me!" I said, earnestly and eagerly.

"Did you just propose marriage?" She asked. She asked. She asked....

I was nonplussed. I stared at her and my jaw dropped, as my brain madly scrambled to figure out who up there was in charge, someone named something like "executive functioning..."

As I stared, like a deer in the headlights that were the importance of my next few words, the unlit cigarette fell from my stunned open maw and bounced on the floor.

"Well, I didn't...I didn't realize that was what I was saying," I fumbled, then made what looked to be a life-altering decision and said firmly, "But....yes!"

"Okay!" She said, and we laughed and stepped out to share our bad habit. We were in such love, and she accepted me despite my sleep disorder that makes me need 14-16 hours of sleep a night, or else I become mentally and physically unwell. She loved me despite my bipolar type 1 disorder, which I generally stay medicated for but have had other side-effects.

Over the next few months, I basically lived at her place, and helped raise her son, who I took to calling Lil' Guy.

Lil' Guy loved taking baths, and one day I was sitting him while she was out running errands. He had gone to the bathroom, and it had been a little too long, so I came up to check on him. He was small even for one of his age (his biological dad is a short guy). When I found him, I burst out laughing with the deepest of love. He had climbed up the counter and was sitting in the bathroom handwashing sink taking a bath there! He was so adorable...I didn't think I could love him any more than that...

Covid-19 hit, and we were in lockdown. Meanwhile, my place was a house that a writer friend named Daedra had bought the summer before. I had my own room, but the other housemate had moved out because Daedra had fallen into mental illness and bad alcoholism. He trashed all the house except my room, and had gotten three cats he couldn't take care of. There was cat poop everywhere, as well as broken glass, and after a few weeks of lockdown, Ruby had fallen into a deep dark place and Daedra had tried a meth binge and lost his mind further. For weeks beforehand, I had been having premonitions of my own death, and when Ruby's light went dark, she became emotionally abusive...it was awful. I came terrifyingly close to taking my own life, as my world caved in and the stock market was in free fall...somehow, by the grace of God (and I truly mean that), I had managed to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, and they saw me through.

I found a home to stay at with my friend and his mother, for a month and a half, before I got my old room back at the rooming house I had lived in before moving in with Daedra.

I hadn't given up on Ruby, but our relationship became an on-again off-again thing and we were no longer engaged. It didn't matter to me, though, because she had a beautiful son I cherished and forever will.

In December, she got a new boyfriend and a new job at almost the same time. She was training in to become the kitchen manager at a burger joint that was opening up, and she needed a babysitter. I met her boyfriend just before she started the job, and was pretty flabbergasted that she was with a guy like him, but in a way it made sense, in a sickening kind of way.

Before I met him, Ruby had confessed that she was having sex with "a Nazi." When I met her new boyfriend, I thought that that was the Nazi she was referring to, and only months later found out it was a different guy, but the title stuck in my mind and seemed to make sense...

He refered to himself as a "Werewolf." It might have been a name for his team back from his days serving in Iraq, I'm not sure. He was an amateur MMA fighter, although I didn't know that either. What I did know right away was that he was a big fan of Donald Trump, was a bully, and was emotionally childish and physically ugly as sin. He sold streets drugs and emotionally abused his elderly father who he lived with. He was a big guy, and was into satanic magic and the bad kind of voodoo. He had an air of dark power to him, and when I shared this story with my best friend Ralston, who had tried to be his friend several times but failed, he said, "He's the kind of guy who would have been a Nazi in the Third Reich and gone all the way with it." He had a lot of hatred.

He was like a Viking Berserker in the wrong era too. He loved the glorification of violence and loved to be the "badass." That was really his whole schtik.

The first night I was going to stay over and watch Lil' Guy while she was going out to spend the night at his place in the woods 30 miles away, I wanted to pick up my electric guitar and a small portable guitar amplifier, as well as a toothbrush. He drove me there. His car had bobbleheads made of bones on the dashboard and bumper stickers of hate on the windows.

I showed him my bigger guitar amp and that guitar. He wrongly assumed I didn't know how to play at all, so he showed me how to play an Ozzy Osbourne song, and made some pretty disgusting sexual comments about how playing it would make me feel. "Make your d#$k so hard!" He said. He said it at least twice.

We drove a block back before we had to stop because someone had let the air out of one of his tires. I took my stuff and hiked up the hill to her place.

The next day, he warned me, "I'll kill you if you F$%# her." Then he told me to look him in the eye and said, "Did YOU let the air out of my tires?"

"Dude, you were with me the entire time," I said. "How could I have?"

"Well, I don't know..." he said.

The Covid-19 vaccines weren't available yet. He refused to wear masks in public or anywhere as a statement of his hatred for Michigan's governor "Big Gretch" because under her orders, people in nursing homes weren't allowed visitors, and his mother in the nursing home hadn't been allowed to see family in her final months of life. Although she wasn't lucid in those final months and was dying anyway, he blamed Big Gretch for his mother's passing.

Ruby worked a ninety hour week and when not at work, she was mostly with him, so I was babysitting the entire time. I had essentially become a cuckhold, although I somehow didn't know that term.

I was trying a new medication to help with my hypersomnia, and checking in with my mental health team every day, because there was a chance it could make me go manic...

I digress.

More than once, I saw Ruby in radiantly beautiful states of love for him, and didn't realize it was because of the drugs he was giving her, I just thought she loved him.

But I didn't like him and I didn't want it to last between them, because I didn't want this guy to be a father to Lil' Guy. I saw her yell at Lil' Guy once with a meanness in her tone, something I had never seen before, and I started to worry about it all, about the stress and drug use behind that bad tone.

One morning she was back home and he was out and about and she warned me, "He punches people." Of course. He was a bully, and he made damn sure everyone around him knew he was top-dog.

I wasn't able to sleep much because of the new medication, and when lying down trying to sleep, I started praying all night for guidance. I didn't think he was right for her, but I hadn't been certain that it wasn't my selfish desire to be with her telling me that. I prayed for guidance all night long, but found only more questions.

It stretched into another week at the same pace. A few days in, she came home with a Blu Ray for me to play for Lil' Guy and with the news that she had left her job.

"I really need a break, this is killing me," I said. I wasn't used to parenting like this. With things being on-and-off with her, I hadn't been in practice with parenting, and I had never parented this intensely before.

"Just one more night," he said, and I acquiesced.

So, he was into horror movies and worked in a local game and movie store, and he gave her a movie she wanted me to share with Lil' Guy because she knew he'd love it. It must have been a black market copy, because when I put it in the Blu Ray player to play for him, the previews were scenes of ultra-violence from other movies and couldn't be skipped. Thank God Lil' Guy was too busy playing with toys, because it would have scared the bujeezus out of the poor now-five year old. That night, I made up my mind that something had to be done. I thought hard and I prayed on it. It was my sincere hope that it wouldn't have to come to blows--I'm a pacifist myself, so if it did come to blows, I couldn't imagine how I could "win" when I simply cannot let myself knowingly hurt a person. I planned on us having serious talk about things, including his carelessness emotionally endangering a five-year-old.

That next morning, I was falling into what seemed like mania. I put on one of his shirts he had left on the floor and one of her tank tops over it. It felt like rediscovering lost parts of myself. Then they came home.

He wasn't in the mood for a conversation, and they knew I was a bit manic. He said, "Brett, your mood is 45 right now and I need you at 7." I didn't say anything but stepped outside for a cigarette knowing he would be joining soon, and while I waited, something told me, "It's now or never." I wasn't going to be at a mood of 7 for him. I was going to be me and if he had a problem with that, because he couldn't control that? He may have thought he was top dog, but I thought that was awful, because I believed--and still do--that we should all be equals.

I saw myself reflected in the glass of the back door. I looked beautiful, I looked fierce, I looked handsome, I looked young and ancient at the same time. "It's now or never," I thought. I had to stand up to him.

He came out, and I just looked at him with a "cut the shit," look, with a look of "I can see through you to who your true self is, and this ain't it."

It was about thirty degrees Fahrenheit and I had my slippers on and otherwise was now just wearing my own shirt, because after he saw me wearing his shirt and hers, I had changed because I was getting ready to walk home finally anyway.

It's important to understand that I had never been in a fight. Between the ages of 8 and 16 I had studied Aikido, which can be described as a martial art of nonviolence and conflict resolution, but I was lousy at it. Now that I was 33, I was also 17 years out of practice. It had been a long and intense 17 years and I had spiritually and intellectually grown incredibly in those years. I had hitchhiked across the country and rambled homeless, and I had had unbelievable highs and terrible lows, and had been tested by deep troubles and challenges many times. A friend had even given me the nickname "Fearless" for some of my acts of bravery. But I had never been in a fight, and when I had tried using Aikido in play fights with people who weren't practicing Aikido, my Aikido knowledge hadn't transferred over to match their styles at all. But I had been praying to my strange Hindu god and guru for hours on end the previous few nights, and I had faith, which was the backbone of my very fearlessness itself. I even thought that Hanuman had been the one to let the air out of his tires!

He saw me staring at him, and said, "Brett, you're manic!"

I laughed a kind of child-like giggle. He shook his head in disbelief, wondering, is this weirdo for real?

"Brett, you stink!" Fair point. I had been stressing so badly for days that my hygiene had fallen to hell, which he had noticed the night before, but I had been able to clean my pits this morning. I giggled harder, right at him.

I shook my head and laughed, saying, sincerely, "I love you, man."

"You love me?!" He was incensed. "What, you like wearing women's clothes? You're a tranny?" I couldn't believe that this was supposed to affect my sense of self-worth, so my laughing became a high-pitch chortle. "What, you wanna F#$% me?!" He was going full-on drill seargent.

"You think people like you, but people in this town f$%^ing hate you!" It was so ridiculous, like I care what his hater friends who never matured past high school thought? The best people in town are my friends, and they do love me, and I love them! I giggled/chortled harder, in my distinctive almost-effeminate way, and I did it loudly!

His drill-seargenting obviously wasn't working. I'm such a free, goofy artistic type that a drill-seargent trying to instill fear and discipline in me was the funniest idea in the world.

He slapped the cigarette out of my hand menacingly and it fell to the ground. I nonchalantly picked it up.

He hit me with the butt of his hand, in the head. A little dazed and with a headache, I slipped my slippers off and looked back at him. "I love you," I said.

It was pretty beautiful. I deflected and dodged more attacks. At some point, he got me in a headlock. I can't remember if he was trying to choke me out or simply subdue me, but I got out of it. He threw more punches and there may have been some kicks, and at some point he threw me, but I did an Aikido roll and was fine. After that first hit, nothing else he threw at me landed.

Finally, he kicked my backpack and my guitar bag and I began singing. I started singing Loudly, but with crystal-clear clarity and a beautiful voice, a song I would sing for Lil' Guy, with trills and embelleshments, "Thaaaaaaank you! Thaaaaaaank you! Thaaaaaaank you, thank you, thank you."

He stepped inside and was confused. I grabbed my stuff and waited around. He went out through the front of the townhouse, and started warning the neighbors that I was manic. I called 911 and put the phone on speaker mode so the dispatcher could hear him yelling "I'm going to f#$^ing kill you!"

They told me to get to safety right away. I walked a little ways away and went into hiding in the woods where I awaited the cops' arrival and called my mental health team...

Nothing came of it, legally, for anyone. I told my friends how I had stood up to him and became a bit of a local hero. When someone posted on a local facebook group a picture of this guy's car on the local lift bridge, parked and with black smoke billowing from it, my local-legend musician pal commented, "I didn't know Brett had a bazooka!"

Ruby broke up with him shortly after that incident, and got clean of street drugs. When she saw the comment about the bazooka she laughed her head off. Hanging out with me, she confided that he couldn't stop talking about my "crazy eyes" and that it hadn't gone as expected.

And it worked. Rumors spread that local goofball Brett had taken down this bully, he became something of a laughing stock for a while. Before she had finally left him, she had seen him abuse his dad, who had also secretly warned her about going out with him. The cops started seeing him as a something of a clown.

But I felt I had to watch my back for the next 10 months, until in late October of 2021, Ruby informed me that he had shot himself dead.

I've had mixed feelings about it. He may have been a bully, but I never hated him. I hadn't ever tried to hurt him, even when he was attacking me. He was certainly an anti-hero after he got back from Iraq, but he was a veteran, and some pretty decent people were good friends of him. And although I am relieved that I no longer have to watch my back for fear he'll hurt me, I'd much rather it be from him simply learning his lessons and finding happiness and compassion.

My alcoholic mentally-ill housemate friend Daedra sold his house which then got repaired, and sobered up and is now on psych meds. I helped orchestrate all of that, and we live in the same house now and he's one of my best friends.

Anyway, that's probably the Brettest story that ever happened.

As for me, I came out of the fight with a headache and two deep scrapes under the knuckles of each of my big toes, but my guitar and the contents of my backpack hadn't been damaged when he had kicked them. But damn if my ridiculousness and faith hadn't pulled me through that. I was taken off of the new med after the fight and my hypersomnia returned and I came down from the mania, but not before the day after the fight when my best friend had me in another headlock--that I also got out of--because I was beginning to think I was Jesus Christ and wanted to be President and he was afraid I was dangerously mad with manic powers, until I explained to him that my vision was to be "President Jesus Christ of the United States of America, member of the Galactic Federation in good standing," maybe in thirty years or so...

On the third day, having been in two headlocks in two days before, I saw a doctor and got muscle relaxers for my neck. And even though Ruby and I aren't quite together right now, Lil' Guy now proudly tells people, "I have two dads! Da Brett is my dad also!" I'm so proud of him.