Natural Born Killers

A guy once held a gun to my brother’s head. It was in the desert just south of Yuma, Arizona, on what was known as the Mesa. My brother and I knew the guy from junior high school. We hadn't seen him for several years. I found out later he’d been in juvenile detention for four years and had a short stint in prison as an adult. He’d just gotten out the night he threatened to kill my brother. I’ll call him Joe. Joe was with two friends, two burnt-out tweekers, and his girlfriend, a brunette with giant eyes bulging out of her Skeletor face. Her eyes were nearly completely dilated, black-eyed with a tiny layering of hazelnut brown like a butterscotch ring around a black hole. She was weirded out, hungry for trouble, and Joe was raging with testosterone and crank, itching to direct his rage at someone. Natural born killers before Natural Born Killers.

I was with a couple friends, we’d heard about a party at the Mesa so we drove out. My brother was there with two truckloads of friends, maybe four or five guys. They had just driven up right before us and were walking toward Joe and his group. There was a fire going, Joe was sitting on a motorcycle, wearing a white tank top, and his woman was standing next to him. The tweekers who were fiddling with the fire squared up and started talking shit, incoherently but with malice. Joe hopped off his bike and walked toward my brother’s group. I saw Joe had a silver-plated handgun stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

I yelled out, “Hey Joe,” and waved. Joe didn’t hear me. A moment later there was a roar of laughter from my brother’s friends. My brother, I’ll call him Will (short for “Willful”), had apparently said something, something derogatory, because Joe pulled the pistol from his waist and aimed it at my brother’s head. I was approaching rapidly. I’d sped up my walk and I was almost on them, a couple feet away. The gun, a .357, was leveled at my brother’s forehead, in between his eyes just above the eyebrows, the end of the barrel maybe an inch from his skull. Joe had fury burning in his eyes and power throbbing through his body. His fist clenched around the gun with his forearm rippling and his bicep bulging. He extended his shoulder and his neck tightened. No one made a sound and I could hear Joe's teeth grinding.

Will stoically stood his ground with his eyes staring straight ahead into Joe’s. He never blinked or flinched. My brother’s chest expanded and contracted slowly, regularly, at ease and relaxed. I stood adjacent to Joe, only a foot away. Thoughts raced through my mind. Maybe if I decked him as hard as I could with my right I could knock him out before the gun went off or maybe I could knock the gun from his hand or deflect it away. But, no, neither would work without the gun going off. I wanted to kill him, rip the flesh off his face with my bare hands, jackhammer my fist into his eye socket and grind it to dust.

Instead, I calmly, slowly, and amiably said, “Hey Joe. It’s Mike, from the manors. We used to go to junior high together, remember? We smoked weed a few times. In fact, you got me high the first time in my life. You had a bowl you'd made out of a tire gauge. Ingenious.”

“Fuck you. I don’t know you or this dickhead. What the fuck, walking up to me and talking shit to my face, motherfucker?! I’ll kill all you fucking pussies!”

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him. I couldn’t stop thinking that. I could barely contain my rage. I channeled it into a plea. “Hey, man, it’s not worth it. There’s no threat here, man. We’ll all cruise. We’d just heard some people talking about a party out here but we were wrong. We’ll take off.”

His girlfriend shrieked, “Shoot that fucking pussy! You gonna let him get away with that shit?!” I wanted to snap that scrawny bitch's neck. I wanted to kill both of them, not just kill them but fucking torture them for weeks and then hunt down their families and kill all of them as well. Motherfucker! The bitch kept screaming, "Make him swallow the fucking gun and blow his fucking head off!"

Joe kept the gun steady and Will remained relaxed. My brother seemed bored, like he was watching a rerun of a show he'd seen a hundred times. I said to Joe, very calmly, "Look, whatever happened, it ain't worth going to prison over." This somehow registered with the tweeking tramp and she said to Joe, “He ain’t worth it, baby. Save the bullet. You just got out, you know?” For whatever reason, that brought Joe out of his hate-filled trance. I saw a flash of recognition, a remembrance of horror, of something he never wanted to experience again. Until that moment, he had been a lion, an unrelenting beast in total control, but with just the whiff of the idea of prison the lion was tamed.

Joe lowered his gun and we all made our way warily back to our respective vehicles. I don’t remember where I went next, what happened the rest of that night. I remember casually mentioning it to my brother during a conversation years later. He didn’t remember it. I couldn't believe it. How could he forget that?! I asked a friend I thought had been there with me. He didn’t remember it, either. My brother asked a couple of friends of his who I thought were also there. No memory. I thought I was having some sort of false memory, but it seemed too real to be just my imagination. It freaked me out for a while. Eventually, the topic came up between my brother and one of his wilder friends—may as well call him “Kooky”—and Kooky said “Hell yeah, man! That was some crazy shit! You just stared him down and he backed off. Some real fucking Zen Buddhist shit, motherfucker. You were badass. I sure as hell wasn't gonna fuck with you after that shit. You were fucking crazy!”

I never heard another word about Joe after that. For all I know he was shot within a week. A guy like that? He couldn’t stay alive or out of prison for too long. Just the way it is. …