I had never even shoplifted before. I was crouched down
inside the construction barrel with my cell phone in one hand and the stun gun
in the other. It was 3:45 A.M. I pressed the buttons on my phone every few
seconds to keep the inside of the barrel dimly lit. Every minute or so I pulled
the trigger on the stun gun to make sure it was working. I was convinced it
wasn’t going to work when the time came. I knew I was killing the battery but I
couldn’t help it. I was on the verge of panic.
I knew Dave was up in the hotel room watching the street
from fifteen floors up. He could see every car coming in or going out. He was
watching the street, but I figured he was also staring down at the barrel
wondering how I was doing. I know I would have been. Chris was ten blocks away
sitting in the car – just waiting.
It was 3:47 and still no text from Dave. The previous five Friday and Saturday
nights the bouncer had made it there by 3:45 at the latest. Of course this
would be the night he’d be running behind.
When Dave and Chris and I moved back to Boston from Los
Angeles, after realizing we were never going to get famous, we all got regular
jobs. Dave’s father got him a job through his Union connections. Chris and I
went back to bartending. It wasn’t terrible. Our lives were fine but fantasies
of fame and success had energized us for so long that without them time seemed
to drag. Just about every night when my bar closed I would walk over to Chris’s
bar, which stayed open an hour later, and Dave would already be sitting there.
We’d drink and talk until Chris was done closing up. We’d walk home together
over the bridge, usually, lamenting things that happened, or didn’t happen,
while we were in L.A.
One night while Dave and I were sitting at Chris’s bar a guy
we knew from our neighborhood walked in and sat down with us. He was drunk and
pissed. He had just been fired from his bouncer job for saying something “of a
sexual nature” to the coat check girl. He was carrying on about what a piece of
shit the owner who fired him was and how bad he could fuck the guy over if he
wanted to. We didn’t ask him to elaborate on how he could fuck the owner over -
but he did.
The owner ran seven different bars in downtown Boston. It
was well known to most of his employees that at the end of each night the owner
would have one of his bouncers, who never carried a gun, a knife, or even a can
of pepper spray, drive from bar to bar collecting that night’s cash deposits.
The bouncer would then drive to an office on High Street, go inside, alone, and
put the envelopes into the cash drop safe. He said that after a busy Friday or Saturday night there
could be as much as $50,000 in the drop. After a half hour of angry drunken
rambling he stumbled out of the bar. That night during our walk home we talked
about what it would be like to rob the bouncer. The conversation was fun. We
were all talking fast and loud. It was a lot like the conversations we used to
have about fame and fortune in L.A. Six weeks later I was crammed into a barrel
waiting for the text from Dave.
It was 3:48 and I was about to lose my mind. I was sweating.
My knees and back were burning with pain. Thinking about Dave sitting in a nice
hotel room looking through binoculars sipping a soda wasn’t helping. It was my
punishment for being the shortest and fitting inside the barrel. I was five seconds from throwing the
barrel off of me and running away when the one word text from Dave finally
came: CAR. I looked through the peephole we had drilled into the side of the
barrel and saw headlights brightening the street from around the corner. A
second text: IT’S HIM. The two words knocked the wind out of me. The car turned
onto High Street and he parked right where he always did. A third text: TURN
YOUR PHONE OFF.
The bouncer sat in his car for about a minute before getting
out, but it felt like a long time. It was pitch black inside the barrel. The
stun gun was as wet with sweat as I was. Was that dangerous? Was I going to
electrocute myself? The three of us had spent an hour on the internet
researching stun guns to make sure we weren’t going to accidentally hurt or
kill the bouncer. From everything we read they almost never caused any
permanent harm. Chris even insisted that before we move ahead with the stun gun
plan we check the bouncer out to make sure he wasn’t fat and out of shape.
Chris thought that would make it more likely for him to have a heart attack. We
didn’t find any evidence for his theory, but when the bouncer turned out to be
young and fit Chris felt better.
The bouncer got out of the car and walked toward the door
jingling his keys. Sidewalk construction had been happening on the street for
weeks. Caution tape, the smaller orange safety cones, and the larger orange
safety barrels were everywhere. The barrel sitting right next to the office
door didn’t look out of place at all. He got to the door and was looking for
the right key on his crowded key chain. He was a foot away from me. My heart
was pounding. There was no way I was going to be able to go through with it. I
had played it over a thousand times in my mind, but now everything was
different. He was muttering swears to himself trying to find the right key. I
think he was a little drunk. I lined the stun gun up with the rectangular slot
we had cut in the side of the barrel. The prongs of the gun were 6 inches away
from the side of his leg. All I had to do was reach out. It was just as we had
planned it. I lowered the gun away from the hole. I couldn’t do it. I was too
scared. I would just sit there and wait for him to leave. Chris wouldn’t care.
He had been nervous about the whole thing from the start. He told me fifty
times not to go through with it if anything seemed funny. Dave would make fun
of me, but that would be it. We’d being drinking beers and laughing in the
hotel room within a half hour.
The bouncer finally found the right key and opened the door.
I was trying to decide if I should run away as soon as he went inside or wait
for him to come back out and drive away. He was never in there for more than a
few minutes. I would wait. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The second I decided I
wasn’t going to do it I felt fine. Even my knees and back stopped aching. The
bouncer held the door open with one hand and as he was trying to put his keys
in his pocket he dropped them right next to the barrel. I saw them on the
ground through the stun gun slot. My heart stopped. He bent down to pick up the
keys and said, “What the fuck?” out loud. I closed my eyes and waited. Nothing
happened. He was thinking. I don’t know if he saw me through the hole, or if
without realizing it I had moved and he heard it. It may have been nothing. He
may have just been putting the keys back into his pocket and thinking about
some girl he saw that night. He may have been thinking about a future when he
wouldn’t have to bounce anymore. He may have been thinking about what it would
be like to be rich and famous. There was no way for me to know. I slid the stun
gun through the hole and stunned the side of his leg.
