After I wrote about my camping experiences the other day, my friend Milo commented: “I am waiting for the follow-up piece on Things You Can Destroy with a BB Gun…Including Front Teeth”
Ask and ye shall receive!
Five Things I’ve Helped Destroy with a BB Gun . . . Including Front Teeth
And for the record, I did actually have a genuine Red Ryder BB Gun (although there was no compass in the stock).
1. A front tooth – For the record, I didn’t pull the trigger that fateful day, but it was my other BB gun (a Crosman “ten pump” air rifle—what can I say, my dad liked for me to have guns) that was involved in the notorious incident. We were going to play “army” and with more soldiers than toy weapons, like any eager tween back in the 1970s, I was able to convince my mother to let me bring my BB gun to “play.” (Try that nowadays, kids!) To this day, I swore all the BBs were out of it, but as you’ve already figured out, that wasn’t the case. My friend Kurt asked to use the gun, and while we were milling around waiting to play, another kid, Craig, jokingly said to Kurt, “Go ahead, shoot me!” Kurt pumped it up a few times, and thinking he was only going to shoot air, innocently pointed it at Craig’s face and pulled the trigger. The moment is burned into my memory—I was only 4 feet away when the shot went off. Craig immediately recoiled, spit out chunks of white, grabbed his mouth and ran home screaming. Kurt and I did the responsible thing—turned and ran away as fast as we possibly could! I went home, put the gun back in the gun rack in the basement and then went out and hid behind the shed until my mother found me later … you know, after Craig’s father had called. Craig got a false tooth for the rest of his life and I still feel awful to this day. Lesson learned: Make love, not war!
2. Lots of model boats – The backyard of our house on Linwood Street would flood regularly, which provided a great place to sail stuff. Like any normal child, I also enjoyed blowing things up, but when fireworks weren’t available—which was the 51 other weeks of the year outside of the first week of July—I turned to other methods of destruction. At some point, I remember thinking “Hey, why just *look* all these battleship models I’ve built when I can *destroy* them?” So I did. It was actually a challenge to shoot a plastic replica of the USS Missouri enough times to make enough holes to sink it, but we didn’t have Super Mario or YouTube to stunt our attention spans.
3. Tarzan, the Ape Man – After I deep-sixed every warship I had, I turned to other models I had painstakingly assembled and painted. One that brought a lot of pleasure to Milo and me to destroy was this one of Tarzan—
(Wow, you can find anything on the internet!)
For some reason, we insisted on calling him “Starpan,” and laughed ourselves silly as we shot off his head, arms and other appendages. Nothing more hi-larious than maiming the Lord of the Jungle, right?
4. A rat – One day a bunch of us were swimming in my next door neighbor Rick’s in-ground pool, when we surprised by the sudden appearance of a live rat taking a dip with us! Of course, some mild hysteria ensued, during which I decided to run home to get my BB gun. By the time I got back, the rat was out of the pool and on the stone patio. Standing at the far end of the patio—and with visions of being the hero dancing in my head—I pumped up my gun, took aim at the cornered rat and fired. I missed the first shot, so I pumped and fired again—and this time, my BB found its mark. Unlike on the countless TV shows and movies I’d seen, the rat didn’t simply just fall over dead. Instead, it flopped and thrashed and squealed and died one of the most horrible deaths I’ve ever seen any living thing die. I swear it seemed to take hours to expire, but I’m pretty sure it was only a few seconds. No one ever said being a hero was easy, right? Ugh.
5. My mother – Let me be perfectly clear: AT NO POINT HAVE I EVER SHOT MY MOTHER! My father, however, can’t make that claim. When he was first teaching me to how to shoot (and the general rules of “gun safety”) in the basement of our home on East 2nd Street in Brooklyn, New York, we would set up a target at one end of the space, which was only a few feet from the washing machine. One night, while we were shooting, my mother was doing the laundry. At some point when my father was lining up a shot, he glanced over a few feet to where she was reaching deep into the washing machine, leaving her … “flank” vulnerable. Temptation was too much. He aimed and … well, let’s just say that nearly 40 years later my mother still seems pretty angry about the bruise it all left on her posterior.
I’m just glad it was only her butt I helped ruin and not their marriage. Guns are dangerous, kids!