Tommy Burckhardt

There were a lot of things I didn’t like about Tommy, but I did love the free drinks on Saturday nights. Tommy was the perfect character for a small town like ours. He was the owner of the only bar still standing, and in a town of 500, that bar was the heart of the city.  He was the man who had the nose of every woman in town turned up. If you were a non-local passing through you would swear by his fifty-plus year old virginity. The women in town would confirm. However, in reality there were very few who had not slept with him on at least one occasion. The whole town knew it. Let’s face it, in a town of 500, in the middle of nowhere, with no reason for anyone to pass through, a single woman’s options were limited and who was there on a Thursday night after a hellish day of work when all they wanted was a few stiff drinks and a hard fuck?  Good ole Tommy Burckhardt, that’s who.

 He was there on my first night in town, and thank God he was. The moment I passed that “Welcome to Harlow City; Population 508” with a bullet hole between the ‘R’ and the ‘L’ in “Harlow” and the “U-L” in ”Population”, I wanted to throw it in reverse and peel out of town as fast as I could. As a man who had lived his whole life (up to that twenty-sixth year) in New York City, I probably would have put a bullet in my head the moment I walked into room 211 of Brenda & Carl’s Bed and Breakfast if it hadn’t been for Tommy Burckhardt.

When hell broke loose and chaos swept the town last Tuesday night, Tommy, of course, was right in the center. It all started with a noise complaint.