I had when I saw them. Something to think about. What was probably more relevant to the matter at hand was the fact that when they saw me looking at them, their eyes bulged from the eye holes on their masks, and they were staring back at me like I was some kind of ghost. For a moment there, I almost thought I was.
“Can I help you?”
It was an awkward moment, so I didn’t know what else to say. I had a pretty good idea of what they were planning on doing the second I saw them, so in retrospect I guess I should have thought my reaction through a little more. The markings on the wall were pretty clear. But call it panic or simple jitters, I just didn’t know what else to say.
Of course, there was the possibility that even if I told them to get off my property, they wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to listen. These guys weren’t exactly burly men, but from the POV of a seventeen year old 5’6 Asian dude with lanky ass arms, they were definitely intimidating. Not to say that I was afraid mind you. Just cautious.
One of them, the one who’d previously been picking at my door, turned to one of the guys behind him.
“What do we do?”
The first guy behind him answered, “He’s seen our faces.”
“No I haven’t.”
“No he hasn’t,” came the brash, third man in the group. One wearing a brown leather jacket over his all-black garb. “We’re wearing fucking masks.” He stepped towards me, standing at about six feet tall. “Listen man. We can either do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”
“Do what, exactly?”
“Get in the house,” he ordered, whispering so close to my face that I could tell he had his dinner from the Denny’s stop about five blocks from my street. I supposed it made sense. These guys must have been parked outside my house for hours, waiting for me to shut the lights out before making their way inside. That meant a lot of waiting, and a lot of late night trips to the diner.
“Or what?” I asked, maintaining my calm.
“Or,” and he brought something to my attention. A gun. A pistol. A Sig I believe it was. But the jacket man didn’t call it that. “This,” he said. “Is the hard way.”
He cocked the slide for emphasis. Tough leather jacket man leaned in. A little too close for comfort. For a moment there I actually worried he might try and kiss me. His mask did have open lips after all. But hopefully that wasn’t why they were here.
“You ever fire a gun?” leather jacket asked me with an act of intimidation.
To which I calmly replied, “Yes, a matter of fact I have. I’ve fired a Beretta M9, a Browning HiPower, and a Hi-Point Compact. I think what you got right there is a Sig P220. I’ve never actually fired one myself. German, is it? Or was it Swiss? I can’t remember. Either way, it’s a pricey sucker. A guy I met in prison told me that the recoil springs on the Sigs tend to wear really bad though. But I wouldn’t really know anything about that.”
The three stooges before me wavered on a reaction. First to thinking I was full of shit, then to starting to believe me (albeit slowly, and with some noticeable trace of fear), then reverting back to mocking disbelief, until finally, eventually, settling on the possibility that I was, in fact, speaking the truth. And that tiny old five foot me was probably a little more than met the eye.
These guys weren’t pros. And they didn’t have it in them to kill. I guess that that above all else was what made talking to them so easy. Well, that, and I knew I could take them.
One of them, the second one (who was a little on the pudgier side) even took a few steps back until he asked of his leather jacket leader, “What do we do?”
While I didn’t exactly mean to do it, it was clear I was stealing jacket man’s thunder, so naturally he was pissed at me.
“We kick his ass,” said jacket man, seeking to reclaim his honor.
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so,” I told them, and I stepped out in front of their leader (our chests just centimeters from unsafe male touching), and I shut the door behind me. “You guys should leave.”
Bless me I was in a good mood. Leniency was practically fueling my soul. And yet despite this, jacket man didn’t seem to take too kindly to my warning.
“Is that right?” he asked, daring me to give him a more compelling reason to leave.
“Hey man, let’s just get out of here,” came his other, thinner compadre.
Jacket man turned around.
“You guys fucking serious? Are you both afraid of this little chink?”
He turned around and looked at me, sizing me up, then down. I was getting a little tired of all the homoerotic taunting, so at that point I decided I’d put an end to our little meet.
While he was busy checking me out, I grabbed jacket man’s pistol from his hands and stuck the barrel at his face before he could even realize what had happened.
“What the fuck?”
“The fuck is that I have your gun, so if you’ll please…”
I stopped. Something was off. The weight of jacket man’s pistol was lighter than any gun I’d ever held in my entire life. It felt like I was holding plastic.
Of course. This wasn’t a real gun.
I pulled the trigger. An orange pellet left the chamber and hit him on his cheek.
“Ow,” he moaned.
A BB gun. And it looked so real.
Jacket man returned, “I am going to kick your ass.”
He threw a punch at my torso, which I narrowly dodged with the strafe to my left. His knuckle hit the door. Jacket man recoiled in pain, and I took the extra time I had to grab the pistol by its handle and smash it across his face. The gun didn’t quite break, but the plastic did get loose. Cheap Chinese crap.
Jacket man staggered back and rubbed his face for any bleeding. There wasn’t any, though his lip didn’t look pretty.
Jacket man turned to his friends.
“Kick his ass!”
They did, or at least they tried to, and unsuccessfully at that. It wasn’t hard to see that their hearts weren’t really in it. They were slow and uncoordinated. Easy to dodge, and easy to counter.
The first to make his way towards me was the fat one. He flailed his arms at me once he got close, and with a swift kick to his gut I was able to stop him on his tracks. He held his ribcage and groaned in pain. Then came the second man. The thinner of the two. The one who’d tried picking my door. I shot BBs at his face to slow him down. The gun was one of those blowback semiautomatic types, so luckily I didn’t have to cock it after every shot. Bullet after bullet made contact, leading him to shield his face with his hand. Once he stopped paying attention to what was going on in front of him, I stuck my leg out and caused him to trip, making him slam headfirst onto my door. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt. He did a 180 spin to swing his elbow at my face. The disorientation he was feeling made it even easier to dodge his blow, and it blinded him from my knee, which I used to trip his legs for the second time.
It worked. The second man fell headfirst onto the ground. Then, coming at me was the leather jacket. He bull rushed towards me, fast and aggressive, seeking to pin me down with a grapple. He must have realized that that was the only way they could have won. With jabs and punches, they were much too slow for my solid reflexes. But with me stuck in one place, they wouldn’t have to worry about speed.
I switched my handle on the gun so I was holding it like a hook. I timed jacket man’s speed so that at exactly the perfect moment, I could bash his teeth in with the BB gun once he came within range. He did, and in the end, I did. Leather jacket stopped, and he started to howl at the moon.
Pudgy man number three urged them to “Stop!”
The second man, and for once the boss, listened.
“We’ve gotta get out of here man,” he said. “The neighbors could have called the cops by now. Five oh could be coming in at any minute now.”
Leather jacket man relented, and shot me his index finger.
“This isn’t over.”
I lunged just a little bit forward, and he flinched. He turned to face his crew.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They stormed out to the curb, to where a blue Mercedes Benz was parked. Strange. The car looked exactly like the one my English teacher Mr. Stevens usually drove to school. And didn’t he live about three blocks away from here?
The three stooges drove away with the top down, and the ignition on full speed.
Anyhow. That’s what happened to me today. My home was about to be robbed by three complete strangers, and I fended them off completely on my own. And that’s why I’m still awake at three in the morning. Because if this doesn’t make for the greatest true to life story ever told, then I don’t know what does.
Based On A True Story Page 2