I had been living next door to Scott for longer than most marriages lasted. We’d been friends since high school and sort of gravitated together when the adult years found us. And when a vacancy came up in his sleepy apartment complex on a dead-end street in North Hollywood, I had naturally grabbed it regardless of the crazy white trash family in the house across the way. Seeing each other every day kept us both young, grounded, tethered to immaturity like two brothers constantly racing for the front seat. No matter how many years passed us by, or how far high school stretched behind us, seeing Scott jingling his keys into his door from across the woodsy courtyard at night made me feel like my teenage self was always handy in my back pocket.
Like any two fully grown, teenage-minded men, Scott and I made a competition out of everything. It started with chess, then Scrabble, then Gin Rummy. Then watching Jeopardy on TV, where the competition evolved into keeping wagers and scores on writing tablets. From there we competed with women we slept with, amounts we spent on dates, quickness of hand-eye reflexes, names of actors in movies, and home furnishings. But it wasn’t until about my fourth year at the complex when the competition took a perilous turn.
I’m not too sure which one of us bought the first BB gun, or even why, but the fourth year at the complex found us both with CO2 compressed air pistols, itchy trigger fingers, and keen eyes. The warzone was our U-shaped two-story complex, where a 10-foot by 30-foot courtyard of dense fig trees and foliage separated our two sides of the battleground. I’m not sure really why it was, but I remember taking the first innocent shot at him as I watched him sorting through his mail on his way up the stairs. From the vantage of my second-floor balcony, I was nearly hidden from sight. The fig trees between us were enormous, and their massive, flopping leaves practically walled me in. I could make out each step his black slacks took through patches between the large leaves, and once he reached the top step I released the safety on my pistol and fired. It was only a leg shot, but I heard a loud yelp just before his screen door slammed open and he jumped inside his apartment, slamming the door behind him. I couldn’t help but laugh harder than I’d ever laughed before, which I’m certain reverberated within the U-shape of our serene complex and carried itself straight into Scott’s front window to console him as he rubbed out the sting in his thigh.
I felt a great sense of accomplishment, and I lit another cigarette on the balcony as I waited for the impending phone call asking why I had taken up arms during such a peaceful time. But that phone call never came. Ten minutes had passed since that first shot rang out, and as the sun slowly set on our little Gaza Strip I couldn’t help but wonder why Scott hadn’t called to either chew me out or demand a truce. But a silently slid-open window and a tiny, noiseless tear in his screen soon quelled my concerns. A BB zipped by me and into the wall exactly one second before another pinged me in the shoulder. The elusive bastard had been watching me, and because he didn’t have a balcony of his own he improvised and sniped me through a window. I got to my knees and crawled into the apartment, slid the drapes closed, and assessed my wound. He had gotten a good shot in, and it stung like the dickens. A welt was beginning to grow right below the deltoid. Another BB hit my balcony screen before I returned fire with a pop at his front door. It went on like this for another 40 minutes or so, until the night came and took away our vision. But I knew that he was watching, waiting for me to let down my guard and take my customary drive to Del Taco for dinner. I knew he’d be standing at his window with his gun drawn, ready to spray down copper rain at the back of my head when I ran to my car. And he knew that I’d do the same to him if he dared try. We could have called a truce, but we never did. We just both went hungry that night and learned to pick up our drive-thru dinners on the way home from work.
That taste of combat had sparked awake some type of warfare gene inside me, and I began romanticizing the hell out of my BB gun. I spent my evenings with the pistol tucked into the back of my pants, even as I cleaned dishes, watched TV, and did my push-ups. And every day at work I’d miss that cold metal feel of it jabbing me in the lower back. Luckily, the days passed by rather quickly at Dales Jr. Mini-Market, and before I knew it I was back home again each evening—gun in the back of my pants and cabernet breathing on the kitchen cabinet, eagerly awaiting the first shelling of the night.
It was that next Thursday that changed the course of the war for me. It was a typical day at work, stocking the beer and wine shelves then jumping behind the register when a customer came in. Dales Jr. was a small liquor-store-turned-market that specialized in European beers and kitschy local wines as well as basic grocery necessities and lotto tickets. The majority of people who came in walked there from any one of the hundreds of nearby apartment complexes, and most were semiworking TV actors with a few musicians and alcoholic deadbeats thrown in.
It was Studio City and everybody knew everybody by name, except for the 300-pound black man who walked up to my register with a single can of Budweiser on that day. He gave me $2 and asked for a little bag to put his beer in. Upon giving him the folded bag, he opened it, returned it to me, and calmly said, “Now fill it.” My blank stare must have been enough for him to realize I hadn’t seen the silver .38-caliber pistol pointing at me from under the cuff of his shirt, so he wiggled it for me. I saw it then.
“Put the money in the bag,” he calmly said again, glancing anxiously over his shoulder at the two women in line behind him.
My own safety didn’t register right away; my initial concern was that I hadn’t deposited the majority of the cash in the drawer into the drop-vault under the register, which I was supposed to have done every time the tally reached $200. And as I grabbed handfuls of bills from the drawer and shoved them into that little brown bag, I realized that this son of a bitch had come at the perfect time and robbed the perfect employee, because he was going to be walking away with close to $600—about $400 more than he should have been, had I been doing my job correctly.
Strangely, he said thank you before walking casually out the door. As I hammered the silent alarm button beside the register, the 40-something woman who was next in line placed a four-pack of wine coolers onto the counter and cupped the mouthpiece of her cell phone.
“Just that,” she said and went back to her call.
The adrenaline finally kicked in when I realized she hadn’t seen a thing, and my heart began to race at the thought of coming that close—unnoticeably—to getting a .38-caliber bullet in my stomach. As I plucked a wine cooler from the four-pack on the counter, I thought it peculiar that the entire robbery had happened so coolly and only now, a full 10 seconds later, was I beginning to feel the galvanizing energy of the adrenal glands kicking in. And as I charged out the front doors with the glass wine cooler bottle in my right hand, I could feel my rational mind constricting and the animalist, adrenaline-fueled rage beginning to take over. I owe the terrible aim of that hurled wine cooler to the adrenaline fury, but its startling velocity and blazing impact against the concrete wall beside the getaway car somehow made up for it. The 300-pound assailant glanced at the wet explosion then at me before crawling into the passenger seat of that little Corolla and speeding out of the parking lot.
The police came about 20 minutes later and filed a report. My boss came 30 minutes after they left and demanded I finish the remaining three hours of my shift, which I did before stealing $25 of my own plus Canadian cigarettes and a bottle of Polish vodka. That was my compensation for nearly losing my life for $8 an hour.
When I got home, I brought the vodka and a two-liter of Coke out onto the balcony and chain-smoked cigarettes until I was good and drunk. Scott’s lights were still off and I assumed he was out on a date somewhere, most likely spending more on dinner than I ever had, just so he could spite me. I wanted nothing more than to tell him about the day I’d had, and how I had come closer to dying than he ever had—and how I had won this particular competition. I laughed a little out loud and accidentally splashed my drink onto the plastic patio table beside me, where the BB gun still laid from last night. My eyes instantly fixated on the weapon, and I saw it differently than I ever had before. What was the allure of a weapon like this? Why were combat and crime and causing harm so inherent to human nature? I wondered if the 300-pound robber ever sat on his balcony with a vodka and Coke and his pistol sitting next to him on a table. Did he think about stuff like this? Did he question himself? Did he question his ability to take another life? Would he really have killed me if I hadn’t given him the money? Did he play with guns as a boy? Did every boy play with guns growing up? How could a species be so indifferent to death and hope to function? How could a species survive with this sort of nonchalant mentality toward taking a life?
Headlights then appeared from the driveway before extinguishing into the courtyard of fig trees. A car door opened and shut. Black slacks began to walk up the steps to the second floor, illuminated in the midnight ambiance by a yellowed overhead floodlight. I had every intention of reaching for the phone to call Scott and tell him of the robbery the moment he walked in his front door, but I picked up the BB gun and shot him in the thigh instead.