It was an exasperating day at the watering hole when Lazzo and his mentor called it quits almost reeling off balance with intoxication…
Half-way down the street were two women following close behind at a modest pace. He and his mentor were a considerable distance ahead and what was behind them was an unfolding scuffle.
It was triggered by one of the female trio squabbling over the two male companions.   A fight ensued in the midst of the argument over who was to go with who from the watering hole.
There was a sudden bang of shattering glass as the two female pugilists plunged through the shop window!
It was by sheer luck that the gaping large broken glass that was once  a shop window did not slice their skins.
Lazzo reminded his mentor as they quickened the pace to get away from the perimeter of the skirmish.
He urged his mate to hurry on because stopping to look would incriminate them as boyfriends.
Sooner or later, an alert security guard appeared on the scene and the proceedings for the damage commenced.     By now, Lazzo and his companion were a safe distance from the scene of calamity.
It was time to get back to the neighbourhood in a fashion in contemporary language was known as ‘towing’.  Common sense suggests that one can only tow a defunct vehicle due to mechanical failure.
But at the watering hole, ‘towing’ was going home with a companion from the watering hole.
In this instance, the ‘towing’ business had been pre-emptied with the glass shattering fiasco in the city centre.
Drama had just began because out there in the Bronx,  Lazzo faced another hurdle of drifting through the neighbourhood fraught with  night hoodlums.
Here, it was the second time that he had his shoes taken off his feet after his pockets were thoroughly searched with scraps of paper separated from bank notes.
After a spell of recollection, Lazzo began to search his conscience as to why he was going through the turmoil.
One poignant realisation emerged: It was not safe to trudge the depths of the neighbourhood as a lone hunter because there were more risks to contend with than if one was a gangster!
He also noticed that social clusters revolved round groups as the formations at the watering hole indicated if one took a hard look!
He had once been warned by a patron to ignore nagging behaviour because it was safer than starting a fight one cannot finish alone!
The sense in the ‘Where have all the flowers gone?” ballad came to mind and wondered why he could not grasp the truth after the dangers he had survived.
He recalled once trapped in a woman’s home as another boyfriend incessantly knocked at t he door when all along he had thought all was fine and dandy.
It seemed one risk after the other seemed to be some domino effect of adventure and it seemed it affected many more people than just Lazzo who in effect wallowed in the adage ‘to err is human’
Hardly had he escaped the romantic trauma had he encountered a band of night hoodlums who waved a knife in his face and demaded for money.
After establishing that he was penniless, they ordered him to take off his shoes as one of them had a bag strapped on his bag which he used to pack his own shoes as he grabbed Lazzo’s shoes.
He was ordered to match off into the night and was lucky to be spared a thorough beating at the hands of the malcontents.
Lazzo wondered how many people were in his shoes that night as he trampled the ants on the windswept dusty footpaths of the hood en route home.
It was true that man never learns as espoused in another local tune which uses a metaphor to describe the behaviour of a lizard which never gives up irrespective of how many times it loses its grip while trudging the rooftop!

It still gets back to its old ways in its search for prey and this was an apt pointer to many people’s lives…
The fallacy of harping on one mistake after the other also recalled another assertion: How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?…, so espoused Bob Dylan in his lyrics.
Still, Lazzo was ‘smoked out of a relationship’ in the countryside which should have been his citadel of learning a lesson but the dynamics of life led him from one negative facet to another.
He still recalls the sense of helplessness he experienced on a lonely country road after he was jilted by one of the many lovers that came his way.
His mentor however had warned him not to hesitate to flee when the red lights began to show in a relationship.
He had not learnt this fast enough to forestall what he considered to be an embarrassment and one he was struggling to forget.
Lazzo thought he was solving a problem but to his dismay, he had created another mammoth indaba…
It was a bright morning when Lazzo began to feel the pinch of having one pair of shoes and above all, minimal resources to replace the pair confiscated by night hoodlums.
Indeed the outlaws were inextricably weaved deep into the fabric of the neighbourhood and seemed destined to dwell into the future side by side with gracious and innocent folks who got hurt in the process.
The ages adage that those who live by the sword will perish by it could not be overemphasized as Lazzo brainstormed on the recent happenings especially from the  watering hole where he discovered that  rarely found friends there but acquaintances.
He recalled one local proverb which urges  one ‘s wife’ to cook an axe because achievement was born out of trials.  Still Lazzo still found the mind stretching  of traditional thought quiete a treat.
The far-reaching conflicts in Lazzo’s life still remained a mystery by the way he lived through them!