'Blackjack' Crossing...

…got shot at and hit sometime in 1969 in a faraway country called Vietnam. I’m sure he could tell you the exact date. When he jumped from the chopper he didn’t realize at first that the place was a huge field of reefer on fire and as he hot-footed it for cover he went down shot in the leg, hobbled...the North Vietnamese were mad as hornets, all their weed up in smoke, and AK-47s rattled away, but the helicopter came back and retrieved Lance Corporal Crossing, so he got saved and discharged with a disability pension. ‘Nothing excites me since Vietnam,’ he once told me, ‘…murder can be fun…’ I wondered. How can all this happen to a homeboy and then he returns to work in a jewelry shop pushing a broom…there’s little exciting there…

I pick up the morning paper and there in the police blotter is our boy Blackjack busted for B & E in the nighttime as he breaks in through a skylight to a supermarket and when the cops bust him he’s standing at the produce counter eating an orange with about a 100 dollars worth of steaks in his pockets…’I was hungry…’ he told the cops, ‘...couldn’t wait til they opened…’