The Peanut Gallery: Nando and Gieke

My TV won’t be here until Friday – Best Buy fucked up as usual. YAY!

Comic World News is giving away free Elk’s Run Bumper Editions as is Mark Fossen. Just go to the sites, follow the instructions and you can get you some free Elk’s Run. Here’s a peek at issue 6 that doesn’t give away much of anything but gives you an idea of what Noel’s doing for this issue – it’s fucking sweet:


Also, there’s a review of the Counter Culture Festival up that made my day – it’s nice to see all the planning and preparation paid off.

Story time…

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Nando and Gieke guys were the neighborhood’s equivalent of “Good Cop, Bad Cop”. They were cousins that lived around the corner on Columbia Street – I don’t really remember them from the younger, younger years so I assume they weren’t there until later on. In the teenage years they sort of popped in and out of my life, sometimes as friends and sometimes as…not…friends.

Gieke was the one I never really liked – the kid just had such an evil streak to him. You never knew what to expect, he was either going to be cool hanging out with you or power-trip and get all tough. Sometimes we’d play some handball and everything will be fine. But when Nick confronted me about allegedly stealing his tag (he claimed that he was always Maze), Gieke was right there with Nick, ready to kick my ass when the signal was given.

It never got that far, however, because Nando calmed Nick down.

Nando was always a good kid, quite but funny – he was always the dude that held Gieke at bay. He wouldn’t hang around as much, I seem to remember him having a different set of friends from another neighborhood, but when he was around it was usually with Gieke. He was just a good dude, everyone liked to hang around with him. He didn’t get into trouble, didn’t like to fight – hung out with some of the wrongs cats (like Nick) – but for the most part he was chill.

Gieke always seemed to take issue with my reluctance to get into a bad situation. The gang fight, for starters. When Nick stole a car and invited me to go to the Red Hook Pool with them I declined – Gieke was the one that told me to “Stop being a pussy.” (In retrospect, I sort of feel like if I was to go with them something really shitty was going to happen to me – at the time Nick was growing cold towards me and Gieke was already a douche.) But Nando was with them and that made me feel comfortable, Nando wouldn’t let any bad shit happen to me.

One year we were hanging out for Halloween. It was David, Gieke, Nando and I. We had some eggs but I didn’t want to go out egging, this was when Halloween was bad and my ass was the definition of “target”. We just sort of hung out for a while, David eventually decided to go in and I wanted to go home as well and let Gieke and Nando do their thing.

When decided to walk me home I realized something was up. But Nando was there, everything was going to be all good.

We get to my apartment and I walk up the stoop, Nando and Gieke are standing at the bottom of the stoop, staring at me, hands behind their backs. I was anxious, obviously, but Nando was there – everything was going to be all good.

I open my front door and the eggs start to fly. I manage to get inside and close the door after only taking a few shots. I hear my mom yelling out the window as Nando and Gieke run off. I honestly crumpled down in my hallway and could do nothing but try not to cry (partly because I thought I had Nair in my fucking eye or some shit - nothing scarrier than getting egged in Brooklyn during that time) – that was tough, you know? These guys were supposedly friends, at least Nando was. That was some hard shit right there.

Explaining to my mom what happened was a bitch. “But I thought they were your friends?” Not fun.

Nando and I were downgraded to “acquaintances” after that, I have no idea what happened to him. Gieke was downgraded to “Big fucking douche” and I kept track of his life like I do all “big fucking douches” I ran into over the years.

He married knocked up his cousin-by-marriage and married her. This chick was easily 250-pounds and about as attractive as an asshole that was wiped with razor wire. Obviously, I smile every time I think of that.