chendo – 462 da f@#K

what a town.  our local newsbird came in the bar today and started flapping his gums about being in shenandoah and seeing the FBI arresting the town police force.   he’s a teller of tall tales, and this is certainly tall stuff.  turns out to be true. 

there’s no doubt in my mind that the cops coaxed the kids to get them through the rap on that murder case.  and while the feds were investigating that, they noticed that the cops were taking from the bookies.   bookies in shenandoah are famous.  word has it that one once put together a scheme to offer a better price on the state lottery. 

the lottery has three buckets of ten balls which can be picked to yield numbers 000-999 (or 1,000 different results).  the lottery commission pays half of what they take in (500-1 for an exact match).  so, local shopkeepers and underground entrepreneurs would take action on lottery results and pay out 750-1 to folks that hit, taking $250 per $1,000 in action for themselves.  which, if you’re an old lady playing the daily number, yay. 

but, the state of PA has lottery data computerized and noticed the dropoff in action.  so they investigated. 

i’m not sure i believe it, but, we are talking about chendo now . . . .

i used to play street hockey up there, and it was like driving into a bad neighborhood in brooklyn twice a week.  i remember one game where some fights broke out, and the ambulance came to pick up the fallen with a stretcher.  they trotted right onto the court, went right up to the guy and trotted right back off without him.  it was comical.  then they came back with a gurney.  guess they needed something more stable.  we finished the game with a puddle of blood to the left of the Villan’s goal. 

don’t feel bad for the fellow either.  he’s on the short list of people i absolutely cannot stand.  in fact, when he dies i’m buying a round because the world will be a sunshinier place without him. 

in the end i’ll probably find out if the cops were squeezing the bookies, or if they were offering a blind eye for a taste of the action.  doesn’t matter to me, but it sounds weird that paying law enforcement doesn’t have its perks. 

the CNN reporting on the racial murder strikes me.  they set it up that the fighters were hurling ‘racial slurs’ during the altercation.  heh.  ever been to shenandoah?  if you have an obvious race/ethnicity and you’re in a fight,  you’re getting called on it.  and if they can’t figure out what slurs to throw your way, you’re gay.  well, in less polite terms.  lol, come to think of it, maybe the fighter isn’t doing the jawing, their women will be doing the bantering while egging on their beloved in a bout of fisticuffs. 

i played hockey with some of the guys from shenandoah in a city league.  frustrating experience, but whatever.  we lost our goalie one year.  he was in State College and died when a barfight spilled outside and his head got whacked off of a curb.  nothing ever came of it.  bettinger turned into a corpse, and no one even got a citation.

my memories of the town are just . . . well, it stuns me.  i can easily see a group of guys beating someone up and having it all end in ruin.  i kindof seen it before.  the racial slurs, that’s a no brainer.  whether the beating was because he was hispanic i could go either way on.  it wouldn’t shock me if the answer was yes.  it wouldn’t shock me if he owed money, he knocked up someone’s sister, he got loaded and pissed on the wrong grandma’s petunias on the way home one night, and this group of would be thugs decide to, in their minds,  teach him a lesson.

instead they kill him, and the cops cover it up as best they can.  priceless.  oh, and the cops are on the take from the bookies (or are they squeezing the bookies?)  either way, they’re about as crooked as you can imagine. 

 did i mention our high school football teams used to play each other.  instead of throwing eggs or snowballs at the bus on the way out of town they’d throw rocks?  and once the fights on the field and in the stands merged, it was decided it was best just to stop playing against each other.  that, was many, many moons ago. 

i know that there are good people in chendo, but man, the idiots have run amok.  no wonder we have the joke . . .

> “Why wasn’t Christ born in Shenandoah?”

> “They couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin”

they had a reunion street hockey game this past fall.  there are some guys that i would have liked to see again.  but i thought about it for a moment, and decided that i made it through those years and the worst i got was a broken nose.  i rode that horse already; the league fell apart and there’s no sense tempting fate at this point. 

oh, in case you’ve never been, if you ask someone from Shenandoah where they’re from, they’re say “462″.  as in my phone number is 462-pdqk.  and they use the phrase “da f@#k” the same way Monica Lewinski uses the ”like”.  “I was, like, getting my hair done when, like, my like, phone, like rang”.

December 15, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized

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