The BB and the Ass

            by Matt Stewart-Cohn

 

            It all started on a normal summer day on Telegraph when I was sixteen. I was hanging around with some friends, when we ran into a few more. It was a pretty routine procedure of seeing another group of people. Everybody mingled together, made conversation within the group, and basically was uneventful. Except one of my friends had something that intrigued me. It was a mini, three inch silver BB gun with an orange tip that came from a dollar store down the street. I’ve owned and used some BB guns before, and they were always fun. Always. And I had never seen one so portable and cute. Bottom line was I wanted one. Or two.

            I didn’t go out and purchase one of the little, plastic firing guns that day, but it stuck in the back of my mind, and on a later date, I thought to myself, “One of those little BB guns sounds like quite a nice purchase.” So I bought one. It wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, but shooting anybody’s exposed skin within my territory kept me amused for the long, hot, boring summer days. I would be sitting in my neighbor’s house while they played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and being inconspicuous as possible, I would aim, and fire, causing instant weltage on a random hand. It stayed in my pocket unless I went out somewhere where a little BB gun just wouldn’t be appreciated or any use. Like swimming.

            I went to Oregon for a baseball tournament, and came back. Exciting. The very next day, on a sunny Monday morning, I made my daily routine of waking up, putting on pajamas and slippers, going out the side door, crossing the short width of the street, and walking straight into my neighbors house. The Garcia’s are my neighbors. Jose and Azael Garcia are the reason I go over there everyday. Azael, Aza for short, is not quite two years younger than me, while his older brother, Jose, is three years my elder. Their mom is the best cook I know, so I try to eat there as much as possible. She can make anything, not just Mexican food. She can make a mean chili-cheese dog. Scrumptious. If they have extra food for breakfast, I eat there. If not, chocolate chip waffles from my crib. After a large breakfast of potatoes, eggs with cheese and bacon with corn tortillas on the side, the day begins.

My other neighbor, Fred, who is two years older than me, walks into the upstairs part of the house with his friend. He lives in the same house, just the downstairs portion. He’s black, lanky and six foot three, and his friend, Jason is basically the same, so they tower over everybody in the house with ease. We all sit down for some quality TV, which consists of SportsCenter, BET and VH1. After a bit of nothing, Fred stands and announces he’s going to the movies. “I’m goin’ to da movie. I‘ll be back,” it went. Him and his friend leave and drive off in his cream colored, old school Mustang with a rev of his engine. Me, Aza’s and Jose’s day continues without them. A good amount of time passed, which was taken up by a lot of Madden, GTA, deli sandwiches, and the pop of my mini dollar store BB gun hitting something solid, like the back of a human head. One of the easier targets. After me never getting hit with a flying, welt-wielding BB, my neighbors got angry. They decided to buy mini, dollar store BB guns, to match mine. By that time it was around 4:00 in the afternoon, and the only way to get to the dollar store on Telegraph was by car, since I live on the opposite side of town than Telegraph. We hopped into Jose’s shining gold scraper, with twenty inch chrome rims, and immediately started slapping Lil’ Wayne with two twelve’s in the trunk. Weezy was the only artist that got any playtime in his car, and still would be if his woofers and Ipod didn’t get jacked on the Mission while he was out clubbing. Tragic. I grabbed shotgun, mostly because I was bigger than Aza and he couldn’t stop me. He sat in the back, and Jose drove.

We arrived shortly after leaving and parked across the street from Telegraph. I collected the proper amount of money from my neighbors, ran across the street, bought two more BB guns and extra bullets. One was identical to the one I had, and the other was just black. I made my way back to the car and hopped in shotgun again. We pulled around, already on our way home, and started going down Telegraph towards campus when we saw a couple familiar faces towering over the people on the curb of Telegraph and Durant. Fred and his friend Jason saw us at the exact same time. We pulled over to greet them, guns in hand with full clips ready to unload at a twitch of the finger. After a few seconds of plastic BB’s flying at them, we let them get a word in. “You goin’ to da crib?”

”Yup. Get in.” They hopped in, with Fred taking left nut, Jason at right which left Aza stuck with bitch. The journey home began.

A car full of bored, rowdy teenagers with BB guns is never a good sign. We did what seemed like the obvious thing to entertain us at the time. We shot things. “Ay, Matt. Bet you can’t hit a sign while we drive by.”

“Watch me,” I replied to the voice coming from the back seat.

“Don’t shoot while in my car,” says Jose. “If you get caught, I get in trouble.”

“I’ll stop after a few times.”

Driving down Bancroft above Oxford gives you plenty of potential targets. Stop signs, bus stops, and one-way only signs were all present. After a few shots that looked like a good time, the whole backseat joined in the fun. We reached Milvia and Bancroft, and hit a right, and then a left on Allston. By then shooting signs had lost its touch. We wanted moving targets. “Ay. Let me see the gun. Bet I hit that person walking up there.”

“You ain’t got a chance.”

“Watch me.”

No BB’s came close to the innocent pedestrian. That day on Allston, there seemed to be an amazing amount of people walking on our side of the street, which was good for us, and bad for them. “Damn, I just missed.”

“Bra you weren’t close.”

“Gimme that thing.”

“Let me try”

“Hold up.”

It wasn’t until right above Sacramento when Aza, who had to lean over Jason and aim out the window, shot at a young couple walking down the street. “I GOT HER!!”

“Say swear!!” asked Fred.

“Why you lyin?” inquired Jose.

“I really did,” Aza pleaded, “right on the leg.” Nobody believed him, especially me. I had given up my gun only once and took the most shots. I knew how hard it was to hit anything and how impossible it would be from the middle seat. “No more,” exclaimed Jose. “For real this time. No more.” We traveled farther down Allston and hit a right at some random street. Nothing happened for a time. Then the opportunity of a lifetime appeared just north of North Berkeley Bart. Two bikers, a boy and a girl, were riding side by side in front of us, going in our direction. “Please do not shoot them,” said Jose. “Don’t.”

            I did.

            The BB seemed to move in slow motion. I aimed carefully at the ladies back tire, not wanting to hit her because she was on a bike and could potentially ride us down, depending on her biking capability. When she was ten feet in front of us, a couple feet to the side, I pulled the trigger. I saw the flight path of the bullet clearly. It seemed to going directly at the back wheel, then at the last possible second, rose six inches and hit her straight in the left butt cheek. “AAAA!!! He got her!!” screamed Jason, while the whole back seat screamed and laughed. “I told you not to shoot them!!” said Jose. “Where you get her??”

“On the butt.” I replied.

            We did the logical thing that anybody in that situation would do and started heading home immediately and call it a day. To get to our house’s we had to hit a left. We took the first left that we passed. Immediately we knew we made a big mistake. It was a dead end street. We drove to the end and hit a u-turn when we saw them. The two bikers were at the end of the street, which was our only way out. We knew that the chance of escape now was dismal, with the angry pair blocking the end of the road and being accompanied by a stop sign. We had no choice but to drive buy them. “I fuckin told you not to shoot them!!” said an angry Jose. I rolled up my window as we approached the angry couple, not wanting to be seen. The man, about in his mid twenties, was holding his cell phone in his hand while typing in our license plate number. “Are you going to call the police?” Jose asked the man, as we pulled up next to them at the stop sign.

“You just shot my girlfriend in the ass!!” he exclaimed. Shit.

            In no hurry to get home and face our consequences, we drove slowly. Nobody said anything except angry curses about our luck, until Jose said, “Ay Matt?”

“Yeah?”

“You know that you gotta take the blame if we get in trouble.”

“I know.” The news wasn’t very shocking to me. I, after all, like a smart young man full of common sense, was the one who shot the lady. I wasn’t really worrying that much. What’s the worst that could happen?

            After what seemed too long a time for the short drive home, we turned onto our street at around 4:45 pm and parked in front of Jose’s house. I walked to the other side of the street to my house and deposited my BB gun on my desk. When I returned back across the road everybody was already sitting on the front steps. We knew the bikers got the license plate number, unless some miracle happened and they mistook the letter ‘O’ for a zero or something like that. We also knew that if the miracle didn’t happen, the cops would show up at the house at their own leisure. They decided to pull up around three minutes after we positioned ourselves on the steps.

            The cop car stopped in the middle of the street, glanced in our direction, and then parked. The officer stepped out of the vehicle and started walking towards us. He seemed to be in his early thirties, white, and completely bald. And had braces. It’s hard to take an older man seriously with braces even if he does have pepper spray and a heavy stick that would most definitely hurt if you got hit with it in the wrong area. Not to mention a gun. It seemed to take him forever to reach us. When he finally did there was an awkward silence. After a good while, the officer finally opened his mouth of metallic wires, and asked a simple question. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“Does it have something to do with a BB gun?” asked Fred.

“Basically. So who did it?”

It was my turn to talk. “Uuurrr…that would be me.”

“Ok. Can you go get the gun for me, please.” I went to my house to retrieve it while my neighbors got theirs. When we passed him the plastic guns, he put them in evidence bags, except for one, which he tried to make-work, failed, and quickly put it back with its brothers. The officer walked away with the firearms, back to his car while radioing in. Within thirty seconds another cop car pulled up and parked in front of my house. This time, a latino man in his early forties, pot bellyish, and sporting a bushy mustache stepped out. He started walking towards us looking serious and menacing, while the other cop with braces walked by his side, ruining the effect.

“Hello there!!” He said to us. He seemed happy. Too happy.

“Mmmmm…” we all responded.

“So which one of you did it?” He asked in an up beat tone that didn’t match his expression.

“Me.”

“You do know that this is a serious crime? It could be considered an assault with a deadly weapon. That’s a felony”

“A dolla store BB gun?” inquired Fred.

“I once saw an egg be a deadly weapon.” Was he bragging? About an egg? “It wasn’t even hard boiled,” said the cop.

“Mmmmm…”

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?” We didn’t lie to the cops, just didn’t tell them the whole truth. We left out the whole drive down Allston and other parts that we were sure that we could get away with. The police nodded and wrote notes down on separate pads. They asked us questions when we were done, like ‘what were the seating arrangements?’ or ‘do you know the name of the dead end street?’ and wrote down our responses.

“Doesn’t that match the description of the paint balling car, except white, that was reported terrorizing Richmond?” the latino cop asked his partner, while pointing at Jose’s dad’s big Suburban. “I’ll be back,” he announced, and promptly left back to his car, talking on his walkie-talkie, which left us with Braces. We never did catch his name.

“Shit, all I want to do is go home to my wife, watch TV and eat some Mac-N-Cheese,” muttered Braces under his breath. Amen.

            After five minutes or so of waiting for something to happen while joking around about how Jose and Aza are going to get in hella trouble and have no MySpace for a week, yet another cop car pulled up and parked. It was shortly followed by a CSI van that parked down the street. An old man who looked on the verge of retiring came out of the CSI van with a tin box of equipment and began to search the crime scene, Jose’s car.  An oldish white lady cop with gray hair stepped out of the police car. She looked like one of those nuns that don’t allow people to step a toe across the line of righteousness, or else it’s ruler time. The two original cops immediately joined her, filled her in on what was going on, then walked back to us, still chilling on the stairs.

            Then my mom arrived home walking from the BART. Swell.

“Is that your mom over there?” the latino cop asked me, nodding in my mom’s direction, who was looking at the scene from the other side of the street.

“Yea.”

“Lets go talk to her,” he said, no longer happy, beckoning me to follow him across the street. I took my time, in no rush to reach my curious mom. Thankfully the cop took the responsibility of telling the story to her. She didn’t look very happy, to say the least, but left her comments to herself. She would later voice her opinions to me about the whole situation freely.

“He said that he was the one who committed the actual crime. This could lead to serious consequences, the worst being juvi. It’s all up to the police officer who is running the investigation, and if the victim decides to press charges. So let me ask you again son. Did you do it? Think hard about the answer. A felony stays on your record even after your eighteen, and future jobs will see it on your application. So, did you do it?”

“Yeah.” I responded, trying to convince myself that life in juvi couldn’t be that bad.

“Are you sure you’re not covering up for one of the other people?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. Ok. I’ll tell you this,” said the cop in a weary tone of voice, while looking me straight in the eyes. “ We are ninety-eight percent certain that you did not do it. The lady said that she saw the black kid, Jason, in the back of the car laughing. We also think it’s him. Are you sure it was you?”

“It was me,” I said, now a little peeved that he didn’t believe me and that they blamed it on the black guy who sat behind me, even though he barely even touched one of the BB guns.

“Ok. If you’re sure it was actually you and not the other kid. Don’t make a big mistake. You can join your friends again.” I walked back to the stairs, where everybody asked me what happened, and listened to the story. Fred instantly got angry and started preaching about black rights and racism, loud enough for anybody in the general area could hear if they cared to listen. “Well you guys are free to go.” I looked up, surprised, and saw the two original cops standing in front of us. “We decided not to press charges today, but we will be in contact with you and can still bring this case back if we get new evidence. Have a good day,” and they departed with their whole entourage.

“Ay Matt. You know that the lady had to get a picture of her ass taken at the station where she got shot, for evidence.”

“Swear?! Fuck it. Let’s go inside. I desperately need TV and a glass of Kool-Aid.”