In the board & care home. Pokey. I hated that dog with a passion, partly because I was scared of him. He was a Chow who people told us that breed tends to bite. But the front yard was big and the dog ran free. I used to laugh when he chased other residents and bit them. But it wasn’t funny at all when he did it to me.
There were two houses on the property. The husband stayed in the front house with his son and the wife stayed by herself in the back house. The dog used to like laying on the front porch of the husbands house and if you needed to talk to that owner the dog would stare and growl at you. He was unpredictable, you never knew when he was going to bite.
I was there from 1990-95. The owners made a weird couple. The husband was a six-foot tall Chinese guy who when he was younger before he injured his knee competed in world-class judo tournaments and won. The wife was a short, ugly Portuguese woman who (to call a spade a spade) was pretty bitchy. I could never tell what they saw in each other but the man used to call me his “Top Gun” from the movie of the same name starring Tom Cruise (before he went insane).
Because he had bought that movie on a VHS tape and I liked it so much I watched like ten or more times. The entire time I stayed there I was employed (except for one month when I switched jobs.) I also took two classes a semester at the community college the whole time I was there. Only about 3 or 4 of us out of 15 residents worked and I was the only one who went to college.
The majority of the guys just drank and did drugs and not much else. I had just gotten clean and sober about two months before I moved in. So they all looked down on me kind of and I was kind of on my own and I didn’t hang out with anyone else until I made friends with a new resident.
But the owner saw I was odd man out so to make me look good and rub it in their faces he always bragged about me and called me his “Top Gun”. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the other residents, I thought they were alright, and they didn’t hate me or anything, we all were just at different stages in our lives.
I’ve had some mild injuries from my dogs fighting and me breaking it up before. I like the background behind that name, though!