Nothing Good Ever Happens in Philadelphia, According to Bones

It’s 9am on a Sunday, and my wife and I are currently 2 hours and 177 miles behind schedule. We’re sitting in a tire shop, with a screw puncturing the side wall on our front, passenger tire, and wondering why they’re blasting old episodes of “Saved by the Bell” so loudly.

There’s a guy directly across from us busy on his phone. He won’t say anything to us for the entirety of our wait. But there’s another guy coming inside, who just finished a cigarette out front, and now that he’s ready to sip his coffee as he sits down at our immediate left and eyes us up.

“Phillies fans, eh” he says. We both have Phillies hats on. This is not an episode of Sherlock Holmes.

“We are!” my wife politely tells him. I can already tell there’s a story here we’re about to get. My wife can too, we both have that weird thing where people look at us and want to overshare, but she’s not exactly in the mood for that and tries to change the subject quickly with, “What about you - who’s your team.”

“I like the Mets.” “Uh-oh,” my wife adds, jokingly. “Yeah, I just couldn’t ever support a team from Philadelphia, nothing good ever happens to me in that city,” he responds.

“Here we go,” I say to myself. My wife taps my leg to echo my thought. Somewhere above us Zack Morris is sweet talking a character named Stacey, that I can’t quite picture but I’ll swear she’s wearing a leather jacket in this scene, and he’s talking her into participating in the 4th of July Miss Liberty pageant. I somehow remember there’s a voting scandal or something in this episode but… ADHD takes back over and I look at the Mets fan who’s about to tell us a story.

He takes a sip of coffee and crosses his legs. It’s like he’s smoking a cigarette without smoking a cigarette in his posture. The room smells like an ashtray and rubber anyway, it’s not like it would hurt the experience if he lit up. He says,

I had to go for an insurance training event.

Right off the bat, the tire store employee - did I mention this guy works here, at the tire store? Not that he’s working at this moment, per se, but his job description clearly leaves enough interpretation that when there’s nothing else to do he’s cool to drink coffee and talk to us, which is fine, but it’s an amusing detail you should know. Clearly, insurance didn’t work out for him. That’s the opening footnote I guess.

Now, I drove a $500 car. A beater. Nobody would touch that car and that was the idea. I always drove used cars and I knew better than to take anything else into a city like Philadelphia where nothing good ever happens to me. But, the other guys at this training session, and we are downtown and locked up for 3 weeks in this hotel, they all brought their fancy cars. Stupid, I thought.

The first day, and we drove in during the morning so we weren’t even checked into the hotel yet, the first day - three of their cars got stolen. Everybody was on edge.

So one guy who was there, I liked him, and on the second day he’s freaking out because he’s got this Camaro and he’s positive somebody is going to steal it. He’s checking on it during every break. I didn’t want him to be upset and I knew cars, so I helped him out.

After one of the breaks he’s telling me how he knows his car’s gonna get stolen, for the 18th time, and I says, “No, it’s not.” He says, “How do you know? How can you be so sure?” And I says, “I know they’re not stealing nothing without this!” And I hold up his [I don’t know what he said, I don’t know cars, but it was small and clearly important], “That car’s not going nowhere, not without this.”

And he’s thanking me so much. That’s just the kind of place Philadelphia is. People stealing cars like that, right out of a hotel lot. That guy was so grateful to me. I told him, “It took me 8 minutes to take it off, it’ll take me 8 minutes to put it back on when the training is over. No trouble. In the meantime, your cars not going nowhere.”

So they had us locked down at this place. No going anywhere else, no doing anything, and nothing even on weekends. Study study study, that’s what we were there to do. Now on one of Saturdays, there was a Penn State game that I wanted to see, but they wouldn’t let us leave and all the rooms had the game on blackout. I went to see if I could find it and sure enough, the bar in the hotel had it on.

I don’t even drink but the bar TV had it so I ordered a soda and sat a few stools down from some guy who was keeping to himself. In the lobby there were signs for this big wedding. A big Italian wedding. Lots of Italians. And, this is downtown Philadelphia, they were - connected Italians - you know what I’m saying? Yeah. Like that. All over the hotel.

And the people hanging around outside, they were there too. The people who were stealing the cars, probably, and they were a crowd on their own. Now the street people start talking to the Italian people for the wedding and you can feel the tension in the lobby behind us. I’m just at the bar, watching the game, with the one other guy, and we both keep sort of checking the situation behind us.

All of a sudden somebody says something and a weapon or something comes out because there’s screaming and blood and a full-on race riot happening in the lobby. I’m just trying to watch the game, and - a race riot! Philadelphia. I know it’s not safe and I have to get out of there, but the bar lets out into the lobby and people are getting cut up in there. Blood is everywhere and people are shouting. It’s going to be a while before any cops come too. This is not the place the cops want to come break up a fight.

The guy who’s near me at the bar looks at me and says “Let’s get out of here. Follow me.” He’s calm and I’m listening. I can tell he’s seen some stuff, you know? So he reaches into his boot and pulls out a knife. He’s not scared, and maybe crazy, and that’s all I know, but he says to me, since now I’m staring at this knife he just pulled and I’m starting to have some questions, “Oh yeah, I’m a marine. It’ll be ok. We just can’t stay here - let’s go.”

So the marine is holding up the knife and he just - parts the crowd of bodies as we walk out the bar. Just, he’s got that thing where he puts his hands out, with the knife, and people see, you can’t mess with him, and they let us through. There’s craziness happening all around us. Between the street people and the Italians, this is a war. This is a race riot. And we’re walking through the middle of it [he is laughing telling us this, totally transported back to the experience, and he still doesn’t believe it].

The marine gets us to the elevator bank and he presses the button to call it. I’m just looking around like “what the…” The door dings like normal and we get in. I have no clue where he’s taking me but he hits the button for an upper floor and then the door close button. The doors close out the sheer chaos in that lobby. You’ve never seen nothing like that. And so the elevator starts, and after we get half a floor up, he hits the stop button and the elevator emergency brakes, jarring us about, because now we’re trapped, in between the floors, and he says, “Now, we wait.”

You gotta admit, it was pretty smart. Nobody was getting in or out. Probably the safest spot in the hotel. I wouldn’t have thought of that, you know?

So it’s at least half an hour before any cops arrive, we can hear it all outside, and even longer before they figure out the elevator is stopped and stuck with us in it. We get out and there’s blood everywhere, and me and the marine walk past and back into the bar. Nobody stops us, nobody asks us any questions. We finish the game more or less in silence. Penn State won.

I thank the marine and ask him what he was doing there anyway, why would anybody stay at this hotel, and he says he was just passing through and wanted a drink and to watch the game. He wasn’t expecting a race riot either. He just walked out the front door and went off to wherever he was going.

When the training was over, literally the last day, I went to put my buddy’s part back in his car to start it and they had busted up all of his windows. All that time and they couldn’t steal it, but I guess that made him mad. He was so upset. “What are you gonna do?” I told him. He had to get it fixed before he could leave. I just drove back home in my $500 car. Not a scratch that wasn’t already there on it!

Anyways - only in Philadelphia. So I always said to myself, I just could never support a team from a city like that, a city where nothing good ever happens.

“That’s a pretty good reason,” I tell him. We got more stories from him too, but that’s enough for now. Before we paid and left, without ever getting to the end of that Saved by the Bell episode mind you (so I still don’t remember what happened!), we were standing at the counter with him and he asked us to fill out a feedback form about our experience at the tire place.

And if you need to let them know who helped you, which would help me, tell them Bones helped you. That’s what everybody calls me. Nobody knows me by my real name. Even my kids call me Bones. If you tell them Bones helped, they’ll know it was me.

We got out and where we needed to be. No more car troubles. Thanks Bones. Sorry about the city. Go Phils.