The Glock has one bullet in the chamber
and fifteen in the magazine. Roy’s got it cocked and ready.
He bets me twenty bucks he can fire all sixteen while the target’s
coming at him, but that’s not all. He says: “I’ll
alternate – head shot, body shot, head shot, body shot, squeeze
out all sixteen, and make fourteen, before the target’s five
yards out.”
“You’re an idiot,” I tell him. “You can’t
shoot that fast. Nobody can shoot that fast.” I tear the
cellophane wrapper off a box of .38’s.
“Fuck you, you want to bet or not?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say. I drop the wrapper into an empty ammo
box and I load my .357 for when it’s my turn to shoot. “If
you’re gonna be a jerkoff about it, I’ll take your
money from you.”
He puts the Glock down on the tray with three of our other pistols,
a couple rentals, and about a dozen boxes of ammo. He wipes his
hands on the front of his gray hooded sweatshirt. He adjusts his
goggles, his earplugs, and his oily old Phillies cap. Then he picks
up the gun and aims at the target at the end of the range, twenty-five
yards away.
The target’s a life-sized photograph of a mustached terrorist
armed with an Uzi. Not that we’re allowed to shoot at moving
targets, by the way, but the rangemaster is outside catching a
smoke. It’s a slow day here; there are only two or three
other guys shooting. And they’re like six lanes away, so
we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves. It’s
Tuesday afternoon. That’s one of the decent things about
working 3:30-to-midnight at the bubble gum factory: I’m home
every day when Jeff and Shelley come home from school; I can stay
up late, get wasted, and watch ESPN after Peggy and the kids go
to bed without worrying about being late to work the next day;
and I can shoot when hardly anybody else is here.
Roy says, “Let her rip.”
I press the green button. The guy with the Uzi comes whizzing
at us and Roy fires away. First, he completely forgets to alternate
his shots to the head and body. And that was his idea! Second,
he misses so many, it’s a joke. I swear three ricochet off
the ceiling. Never mind firing at a moving target which it says
all over the place you’re not allowed to do. If the rangemaster
had seen Roy shoot up the ceiling, we’d be totally fucked.
And third, if a guy with an Uzi was coming at Roy in real life,
Roy would be dead.
But that’s not why we shoot. That’s not why we come
here every week. And when Roy looks at that target, he doesn’t
see a terrorist anyway. The twenty bucks won’t even cover
the cost of the ammo and targets. But that doesn’t matter.
We come here because of something Roy said after the first time
we came to this range three months ago: “That felt pretty
good, man,” he said. “I guess it beats blowing that
motherfucker’s brains out – or my own brains out for
that matter.”
And considering what he’d been through, I took him seriously.
So I was like, “We should do this again.”
And he goes, “Fuck yeah.”
We used to shoot with my dad at a range near where we grew up.
But we stopped on my eighteenth birthday. That was seventeen years
ago. That was the last time we shot together until we started coming
here – which does not in any way excuse Roy from his shitty
aim today.
“You suck,” I tell him.
“You moved it too fast,” he says. Roy fishes a twenty
from his wallet.
“It’s a button, retard,” I say, taking
the twenty and jamming it in my pocket. “There’s just
one speed – there is no faster or slower.”
“No,” he says. “The problem is it picks up speed
on its way down.”
“Nah,” I laugh, “the problem is you suck.”
The whole time Roy and I didn’t go shooting, we basically
didn’t talk to each other. We didn’t go to each other’s
weddings. I didn’t take Roy out and get him drunk when he
got his divorce. You know, shit like that. It was crazy, because
we’d been best friends since first grade and we lived three
blocks from each other, in the same neighborhood where we grew
up. I’d run into him at Cricket’s Hoagies or Eagle
Hardware or whatever, and it was always like, “Hey, how’s
it going? Alright, how’s it going? Take it easy. You too.” It
was fucked up, but not saying anything would have been more fucked
up. It’s not like we were strangers. You know?
We started talking again four months ago at his son’s funeral.
At first I wasn’t even going to go, but Peggy said I should.
She said if I didn’t I’d probably regret not going.
But if I went, I probably wouldn’t regret going. She was
right, as usual.
I felt so bad for Roy. I didn’t know what to say to him
at the wake. When I walked in it was intense. Roy was in the kitchen
opening a beer. At first we were like, “Hey, how’s
it going…” But that was insane because we both knew
how it was going. And it was different because it wasn’t
just running into each other at Cricket’s. You know? It wasn’t
the same old bullshit. “I’m really sorry,” I
said. I put out my hand.
Roy grabbed me and hugged me. He started crying. “I’m
sorry too, man,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Then
I was crying too. His shoulders shook. For a split second it seemed
like he could have been laughing, but I knew he wasn’t. He
was crying like he never cried before. Times like that, what can
you say? I just held onto him for a while, and we cried together.
Then, it being a wake and all, we got ripped as hell.
After that we were best friends again. Up until then I figured
I might go the rest of my life without ever getting together with
Roy again. The thing of it is: you never know what the fuck is
going to happen; and you can take that to the bank.
* * *
On the night of my eighteenth birthday I got in a fight with my
girlfriend, Denise Brady. That night my mom and dad took Denise
and me out to dinner down in South Philly. So after my parents
went to bed, we go down to the basement where I had my bedroom.
We were watching MTV. I tried to get Denise either to smoke some
weed or give me a blowjob. I don’t remember; maybe both.
I was like, “Come on, it’s my birthday!”
And she said, “We have to talk about something serious.” That’s
when she told me she was leaving me, going to college in some dumb-ass
place in the Midwest.
I was like, “What the fuck!”
And she was like, “I told you. I’m going.”
She told me there was nothing to discuss; her mind was made up.
That’s what really got me. She’d made up her mind without
even telling me what she was thinking! And she wouldn’t listen
to what I had to say. I snapped. I pushed her, and she pushed me
back. It got worse and worse, you know? Finally, I got so pissed
I hit her; I smacked her in her face.
After that, Denise bolted. She ran upstairs and out. She ran three
blocks, all the way to Roy’s house – not for Roy, but
for Roy’s sister Liz who was Denise’s best friend.
Roy answered the door. He took one look at Denise’s bruised
face and he knew I did it. I mean, he knew Denise had been over
my house, and it’s not like girls got mugged in our neighborhood.
And the thing of it for Roy was his dad didn’t live with
the family anymore on account of beating the crap out of Roy’s
mom. That situation had gotten way out of hand before the old man
finally left. Once he put Roy’s mom in the hospital. And
more than once social services showed up at their house.
So that night, on my eighteenth birthday, when Roy saw Denise
all banged up, it’s like Peggy says: that must have pushed
his button, because he flipped the fuck out.
After I hit Denise and she ran away, I stole a bottle of vodka
from my parents. I went down to the basement and drank about a
quarter of it. Denise and I had been going together since tenth
grade. Here it was the end of twelfth; we were supposed to go to
community college together, and bam! She dumps this on me. I was
supposed to take business classes at community. We were supposed
to move to this place on Lake Michigan – she had family there.
I was going to save up and buy a fishing boat, be a charter captain,
take people out fishing for lake trout and salmon and shit. We
had it planned.
I sat in bed drinking the vodka, thinking about Denise, and feeling
like crap. I cried like a baby for about an hour, and I guess I
fell asleep.
When I woke up it was dark. I was on my back; my forehead felt
cold, like someone was holding an ice cube against it. Then my
eyes adjusted and I saw somebody standing over my bed, pointing
at me. Jesus fucking Christ! A gun! A burglar! No. It was Roy,
holding a .38 revolver to my forehead. I tried to say something,
but nothing came out. I thought I was going to throw up. I looked
up at him. I moved my lips; I could hear my teeth chatter. But
I was so freaked out I swear I couldn’t even talk!
Roy goes, “Close your eyes.”
I shivered.
He shouted, “Close your fucking eyes!”
I thought, this is it – Roy’s fucking crazy and this
is how I am going to die. I scrunched my eyes closed. There was
nothing; just dead silence.
“Please don’t kill me,” I managed to say. I
couldn’t breathe.
“Three…” said Roy.
“ Roy, please, man, I don’t want to die…Please,
don’t…!”
“Shut up!” he said. And then he said, “Two…” and
then he said, “One…”
Then there’s nothing, except for me shivering and slobbering
like an idiot. And finally, Roy goes, “If you ever lay a
hand on her again, you’d better never fucking fall asleep.”
I didn’t hear him leave. But when I opened my eyes he was
gone. I ran up the basement steps and opened the kitchen window
in the back of the house. Roy was two houses down, almost at the
end of the alley. I grabbed an empty beer bottle from the kitchen
counter and threw it out the window at him. It missed him and smashed
against the Fitzgerald’s garage door. “Motherfucker!” I
yelled into the darkness. By then Roy was gone. I know I shouldn’t
have hit Denise. After that night, I never hit anyone again – never
even spanked my kids. So it’s not like some good didn’t
come out of it. And like Peggy says, it wasn’t really me he
was pointing his gun at. But at the time – and for a long
time after – it was like, what the fuck was that about?
* * *
I never saw Denise again. Before the next Christmas break her
dad died and her family moved to the Midwest, where her mom was
from. Community college sucked. I dropped out after the first semester
and got a job at the bubble gum factory. It’s pretty decent,
good benefits and that’s where I met Peggy. She worked there
summers and Christmas breaks while she got her teaching degree.
Roy and I pretty much avoided each other until I heard about his
son. That poor kid got run over by some dumb-ass drunk driver out
on Route 1 where he lived with his mom and her new husband. For
the first couple weeks after the accident, Roy was on some heavy-duty
drugs to help him keep his shit together. Even then, just about
all he could talk about was killing the guy who killed his son.
And when he wasn’t talking about that he’d talk about “just
fucking ending everything, everything...” Roy’s mom
told me her brother was going to take Roy’s guns out of the
house. That definitely sounded like a good idea. I told her I’d
keep an eye on Roy.
A couple weeks later, when we started talking about the old days,
about the old shooting range, and Roy said he wanted to try out
the new range, I figured it would be good for him to blow off some
steam, you know?
* * *
I load the .357 magnum with .38 bullets, because the .357 ammo
has way too much kick for a little guy like me. Hell, Roy’s
already done enough damage to the ceiling of this place for one
day. And besides, the rangemaster’s back in his booth, so
we can’t do any more stupid shit. I tape up a new target – a
standard bull’s eye – and move it out 15 yards. I raise
the pistol, set my sites on the bull’s eye, take a deep breath,
let it out slow, squeeze the trigger, and blast a nice big hole,
right through the middle of the target.
“Good shot,” says Roy.
I answer with five more rounds – BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! – emptying
the revolver.
Now the range is silent. It’s that buzz in your head after
there’s noise – guns, jack hammers, packing machines
or whatever. You hear it even after it stops. You feel it against
your eyelids and your temples.
The guys in the other lane pack up their stuff. The rangemaster
flips through the Daily News. Roy wipes his Glock with an oily
rag, and I reload my .357.
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