[This morning, discussing bee bee gun use and technology, Dan admitted to an extremely cool form of juvenile delinquency… Dan took me to this location and took the photo of his punkhood island which serves now as my phone’s wallpaper.]

This probably started in eighth grade. We would go down to the DuPage River and there were woods around it, pretty substantial wooded area, wasn’t a forest preserve or anything. We hardly ever ran into people unless they were on the river canoeing or snowmobiling. There, down a little ways from where houses were, there was an island where the river split and went around it on both sides. It was pretty big, you couldn’t just see across it. It would take a few minutes to walk across it and it was heavily wooded.

We walked right across the water in the summer. At the deepest it was only like thirty inches. There was a current. In the summer we would wade. In the fall we would take, Dwayne’s two-man inflatable boat with paddles. When it froze over we would walk across the ice and sometimes you could hear the ice cracking and we were like, ‘Oh shit,” and run across.

We set about building a fort and brought whatever hand tools from home: mainly a bow saw and a hand ax for notching wood like Lincoln logs. We didn’t want to cut down trees anywhere near the fort and we didn’t want people to see it. So we would cut down trees near the water and bundled them together and towed them down the river to the spot where we put the fort up. It was probably eight-by-eight. Maybe four feet high—we never put a roof on it. We spent hours and hours building that thing.

In the winter we used to grab whatever food we could, like hot dogs and baloney, and have a fire and cook hot dogs on a stick and have a whole day there until it got dark. We shot a lot of birds just for target practice. It didn’t matter what kind of birds, whatever was around. One time we went out there and all of our fuckin’ logs were lying there in a pile—someone had taken our fort apart. When we put it together, each thing we did custom and the logs were different, it was like putting a puzzle back together and we had to figure out the exact combination. That kind of sucked.

Jimmy helped us build it two—those were the only three people that were ever out there. We never brought anyone else out there. They built houses all around there, all the woods that were around there is all houses now. We can drive by there—there’s a frontage road. We used to play a game we’d call Rambo, and one of us would hide with a spear and the other two would go and try to find him and you would ambush your friend. One time I walked right into a fuckin’ buck, and I ended up face—to-face with this fucking buck, and I was like, ‘Holy shit’ and it just took off. I was surprised at how big it was. I didn’t see it as I was being quiet and trying to sneak into the heavier brush with my spear. When we did Rambo, we all had spears. We didn’t sharpen the points or anything stupid like that.

We had been reading Conan, I had seen Conan, the greatest movie ever made, to this day, unsurpassed, unarguably, when it is clearly something subjective. All three of us would read those books. And Rambo was big.

[We watched Conan the barbarian last night and reconnected with the inner barbarian.]

By Dwayne’s house they had built a new subdivision and all the dirt from excavating the basements was piled up in mounds and the roads were in for future houses. We had been to Missouri with Dwayne’s parents and bought a bunch of fireworks and took them home with us. We were by the dirt mounds shooting off fire works and our bee bee guns and two squad cars pull up. I took off running and made it to the treeline, just down from where our fort was, knew those woods at the back of my hand and knew they wouldn’t find me. But I looked back at the treeline and Dwayne stood there and I didn’t want him to have to be interrogated as to my identity, so I just walked back.

The cops said that somebody called and we were shooting automatic weapons, which we both laughed at, the rediculousness of it. There were two cops, Shorewood Police. [They were thick as flees as we drove there before writing this.] We showed them that we had some left over fire works from the 4th of July and we were just shooting our bee bee guns and the guy was a total dick and said that any type of toy gun was illegal in Shorewood. I had this very cool, fully automatic bee bee gun that looked like a Mach 10, that I ordered out of the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine that ran on a can of compressed air. [a Christmas present fo the PIG’s son no doubt.] It would shoot a shitload of bee bees, but they only really had anything on them for like fifty feet. Didn’t get any birds with it—just shot my friends with it in our bee bee gun wars.

So when the cop grabbed it from me I tried to show him how to unscrew the compressed air can so it wouldn’t fire and he’s looking at it like its and extremely deadly weapon and the can of compressed air with ACE Hardware on it should clue you in that it’s pretty harmless. A cop should have some basic firearms knowledge. He said that I could get a lawyer and try to get it back after ninety days and I laughed and said, “I’ll just order another one for forty bucks.”

I was reading my usual Soldier of Fortune, as one does in eighth grade. I couldn’t order it to my parent’s house. It’s not like I could write a check for it. I mowed lawns for five bucks a pop and saved up that way. I bought a money order and had it sent to Dwayne’s house—whose parents were way cooler than mine. I never did get another one.

We had a one pump rule for our battles. I honestly don’t remember what kind of bee bee gun Dwayne had—am I honestly that self-centered that I only cared for my own losses and have no idea what kind of gun Dwayne had taken from him?

[Laughter]

I seriously don’t remember. There might have been a chance that he didn’t bring his and we were playing with the fully auto bee bee gun. You would put a “half pint” milk cartoon of bee bees at one time.

We didn’t get arrested. They just took our shit and left. Fireworks had been illegal in Illinois for along time, you had to go to Wisconsin, Indiana or Missouri.

We would shot at each other with bottle rockets by lighting the fuse burn down and throw them up in the air and we called them niցցer chasers. [1] When we were way older we had a roman candle war and Scott got shot in the chest with one and he got a burn mark in the center of his sternum. It’s kind of funny that when guys get together they are always shooting each other and throwing shit at each other.

We used to shoot at snowmobilers. We climbed up a hill on the opposite side, uphill maybe fifty feet and we made a snow blind and set up there and shot at snowmobilers going down the river. They had helmets and snow suits on so that’s how we justified it. Sometimes they stopped, knowing something had happened, but didn’t know what.

We just got older and when everyone was able to drive, and working, and partying and chasing women, we didn’t go back to playing in the woods—so probably sixteen. I went out there with my friend Robby one time to show him. He had a blowgun and I had a pump style bee bee gun and we’d turn the darts around backwards and shoot each other with the blow gun.

When paintball came out this same group, we used to go paint balling, with the single shot guns and the science class googles. Not enough of us showed up, so they put us in the general group, and there were these biker dude that were dressed in camo and had fancy guns, so we were getting destroyed and they would cheat. Bruce, the smallest guy in our group, threw his gun down and went and tackled this big fat Vietnam guy and broke his gun and there was a lot of pushing between us. We got banned and had to come up with money to pay for Bruce’s broken gun. The place was called Doc’s, in Wilmington.

Notes

-1. New York friends have told stories of hunting blacks with bottle rockets and other fireworks in NYC and calling them by the same racially ballistic term.