"Gaaaaah!!"

The thing about Sam is that he's a thieving shitbird. You have to keep that in mind, or the rest of it don't make sense.

Big Tony, the manager at the Admiral, liked his rum. Fitting, really - admiral and rum.

Like a lot of places, the Admiral didn't want their staff drinking. Yes, it's a bar. Customers drink, employees don't.

The girls could do whatever the fuck they like. If a couple of snorts of vodka makes it easier to suck some fat guy's sweaty balls in the back room, then have a couple. But of course the girls had to pay. Or get the guys to buy for 'em.

Anyway, this is about Big Tony. Well, Sam, really. We called Big Tony 'big' not because he was big, but because he was bigger. Little Tony worked in the back room, running the stopwatch for the "private" dance booths. All night long, he'd be back there with a dozen stopwatches and a microphone, calling out "Jesse, that's 2 ... Mercedes, that's 1."

When Little Tony came to work for Big Tony, you can see how we gave them the names. Fact is, Little Tony wasn't so little, and big Tony wasn't so big. But what are you gonna do?

Little Tony is important because it was his eye. Sometime way back he was in some kind of car wreck. He never told me nothing about it directly, I just heard it around. But Little Tony drank a lot, and was hooked on pain killers big-time. Not aspirins, either. I'm talking Percs, Oxys, morphine. Big. Time. It seems his back was fucked up, which caused constant pain. And a couple of limbs were bent. And he lost an eye, so they gave him a glass one.

The thing I didn't know about glass eyes, is you don't just get one and wear it forever. They wear out. And your eye-socket changes shape, and a bunch of other shit happens that I don't know nothing about. But I know that Little Tony got a new eye every two years.

Which brings us back to Big Tony, who liked his rum. He drank it with just a little ice, 'cause he didn't want it diluted with Coke or anything. And he didn't want it a shot at a time, either. Instead, he would get a plastic cup - one of those big throw-away cups, holds 12 or 16 ounces. And he'd throw some ice in there, and fill it half-way with rum. And since everyone else at the bar was drinking out of bar glasses, there was no question about which drink was Big Tony's.

But there was Sam, who's a thieving scumbag. He was some kind of sales guy - cars, couches, computers, I don't know or care. He spent a lot of time in the Admiral, but not much money. I guess he like to look, and grab, but wasn't willing to tip. Not much of a surprise that the girls hated him. He'd start off Monday with a twenty dollar bill and a clean shirt, and not change either one before the weekend.

Anyway, Sam was a bit of a suck-up, so he'd try to sit near where Big Tony hung out. In a lot of bars, there's one corner where the manager hangs out. The Admiral was no different, and Sam would make a bee-line for that corner when he came in.

Turns out that part of the reason why was Big Tony's rum. Tony would have that big-assed cup with some ice cubes and a bunch of rum, and every ten or fifteen minutes the phone would ring. Then Tony would go off to answer it, and Sam would take a drink of Tony's rum, and go back to his dollar Coke. Fucker was too cheap to even pay for booze.

Not too surprisingly, Tony figured out where his booze was going pretty quick. And he got a little pissed. But for whatever reason he didn't want to flag Sam. Maybe Sam had an in with the owners, I don't know.

So instead, one day Little Tony was talking about getting a new glass eye. And Big Tony asked him what happened to the old ones? It turns out, nothing. They're medical waste, but not considered any more dangerous than a pair of eyeglasses. So Big Tony got the old one, ran it through the dishwasher, and started leaving it in his drink.

A day or so later, Sam grabbed Big Tony's cup, took a swig, and came eyeball to eyeball with the bottom of the cup.

"Gaaaaah!"