Rear Window

I was just telling Curly about how much I'm dying to go to a shooting range and fire off some rounds. She asked me what kind of guns they have at the range, and I suddenly remembered a funny (in a demented way) story from college.

It was my junior year, and my crew and I lived in Gartland, a set of townhouses down by the Hudson River arranged in a Melrose-place type fashion. Each had three bedrooms with two beds each, and on my side, two of the three overlooked the parking lot. I was in such a bedroom, with my roommate Michelle.

Ryan was over one night, and we were sitting in the living room arguing about politics, which mostly devolved into Irene from The Real World (our unofficial roommate) screaming at Ryan while he laughed and said things solely intended to outrage her. Suddenly, we heard screaming outside our window, and rushed into my room to see what the commotion was.

There was a standoff in the parking lot under our window. A bunch of cops had their guns pointed on a young man, who in term had a gun pointed on them. There was a lot of "Drop the gun!" and "Fuck you!"

"Whoa, that's a TEC-9," Ryan said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Semi-automatic, but you can convert it to automatic pretty easy."

"How do you even know that?" Tara asked.

He shrugged. I called him a psycho, and Tara shushed us. Someone made popcorn, and we sat by the window, trying to figure out what had happened. Eureka, a classmate of ours, was on the scene, crying. Someone said they'd heard she was dating someone in a gang, which may have been true, but we were also a Catholic, mostly white school, so as you can probably imagine, sometimes rumors like that got a little bigger than necessary. Although, considering Eureka was in the parking lot with a bunch of cops and a guy with a semi-automatic weapon, there may have been some truth to it.

There was a knock on our door. It was a few of the guys from the soccer team who lived below us.

"Hey," Greg said. "Can we watch out your window? We're afraid we're going to get hit with a stray bullet downstairs."

We made room by the window, munched on some popcorn, and watched the standoff continue. Tara got some pans from the kitchen and handed them out, explaining that if a bullet went our way, we could use the pans as a shield, because apparently we all had ninja reflexes.

"Hey," a very obviously stoned Greg suddenly said. "Isn't that that chick, uh, what's her name? Eurethra?"

Just then, TEC-9 guy dropped his gun, the cops pounced and cuffed him, and he was led away. We were laughing so hard at Greg that we missed most of it. Usually, all we'd be treated to through the window was a certain blond sorority girl who liked to get shitfaced and walk around the parking lot in her underwear, yelling. Don't get me wrong -- she was amusing, but a standoff with firearms was way better.

Ryan's a cop now, incidentally. I wonder if that night was when everything changed for him.