[The following is a fictionalized
account of an actual conversation.]
1996
It was a
lazy Saturday afternoon in Pasadena. A friend and I, we’ll call him Cassidy,
and a friend of his, let’s call him Gates, had been chucking a baseball on a grass
field at a local school. Having exorcised this urge we retired to the nearby home
of Gates’ mother. With cups of cool water in hand we absconded to his former
bedroom, a room he had vacated more than a decade ago when he had left for
college, yet the room remained as it had been after his final day of occupancy.
During a lull in our nonsensical conversation, Cassidy noticed something unusual
in the closet through the doors that were slightly ajar, something pink.
“Dude,
what’s that,” asking his pal Gates with an unexpected amount of excitement in
his vocal inflection.
“Oh,
that’s a pink Uzi. Want to see it,” having reached into the closet and
retrieved the Israeli-made submachine gun, he was holding it out to us.
“No
thanks,” Cassidy and I declined on cue wanting not to contribute our
fingerprints to such a highly illegal possession.
The room’s
window blinds were mostly drawn, but the bright late afternoon sunlight oozed
through well enough to clearly see the gun. Pink, yes, it had been spray-painted
pink, but the black metal did show through in the numerous scuffed areas. He
was handling it with the familiarity one might handle a baseball bat well honed
after many hours of swinging at pitches.
“You know
it’s illegal to own that, don’t you,” cautioned the knowledgeable Cassidy who
was like a databank of reliable information when it came to firearms.
“Yeah, I
know, but there’s no way I’m going to give that up. Besides, even if I wanted
to, to whom do I deliver it and what do I say,” countered the gun-bearing
Gates.
“Where’d
you get it,” asked Cassidy.
“I’ve had
it for a few years, since I was in college,” said Gates holding our interest
with a long pause.
“Go on,”
I prompted being enthralled now with the tale that was being spun.
“When I
was in college I let someone borrow my car,” he began. “They returned the keys
the next day, this was on the floor of the back seat,” he said as he rewrapped
the machine gun in an old jacket and placed it back in the closet. “Turns out
they let someone else borrow the car, unbeknownst to me, and the third party
had, what I’ve always assumed, was probably a drug run. Maybe they left in
haste at the end of the night and forgot it.” Cassidy and I eyed the Uzi but
said nothing. He continued.
“I
usually just keep it in my old golf bag, but I went golfing last month. Luckily
I remembered to remove it so I wasn’t lugging it around the links all day, and,
so, I left it in the closet wrapped in this jacket.”
Nothing
more was offered. Cassidy and I, not knowing where to continue the questioning,
simply let the subject go. We went out for milk shakes then parted ways. The
Uzi was forgotten and not discussed at length until now.
-klem
[It turns out that time has taken advantage
of my powers of recall. I spoke last week with the above mentioned Cassidy
regarding this long ago Saturday afternoon. This Gates did, indeed, find a
firearm in his vehicle after someone had borrowed it. But it was a rifle, not
an Uzi, and he did keep it. When asked by the car borrower, Gates avidly denied
having found the rifle. The pink Uzi that my brain remembered in its place was
from a subsequent conversation that immediately followed the telling of the
actual sequence of events involving the rifle. The pink Uzi was merely an item
Gates strongly desired to own, but in no way managed to accomplish ownership.
Over 16 years my brain simply transposed the rifle with the Uzi.]
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