Cisco, Private Stock, BB Guns, and Police

Hank was my big brother in Pi Kappa Alpha, and we hung out a lot in college and sometimes got into mischief. This one night in August 1990 was one of those times.

It was the day that two new roommates were moving in with my friend John and me to our Knox Box. There was Chris, who was in PiKA, and his friend and future PiKA, Dan from back home.

Nothing much was going on, so Hank and I picked up a couple of 40s of Private Stock malt liquor (“The malt liquor with the imported taste”) and two bottles of Cisco (aka Liquid Crack).

Cisco would get us pretty blitzed by itself, but it was rough to drink down, so we chased it with malt liquor to make things easier and to enhance our buzz journey.

I think Chris and Dan must have gone to sleep early, because they were already in bed when the Cisco and Private Stock kicked in. In our altered states, Hank and I decided it would be a good idea to take out our BB guns.

Now, since I spent 1989 doing 500 hours of community service, you might think I’d try to avoid doing stupid things that could get me in trouble. That was usually the case, but the combination of Cisco and Private Stock would take me to a place where bad ideas sounded awesome.

So, we had our BB guns, and there was some beef with the guys in the apartment just over a hedge from us. They weren’t home; we were bored, and one of us thought it would be fun to open a window in the living room and take aim at the other apartment.

My conservative estimate is that we unloaded 100 or more BBs into that apartment. The windows were like Swiss cheese. So was their TV. We had a time, and it only stopped when we heard people coming back from the bars.

We quickly closed the window and turned off the lights as the yelling started from these guys, who had walked in on what looked like the crazy shooting scene at the end of True Romance.

That was the end of the carnage. Hank headed off to his apartment, and I planned to get some sleep after hiding my BB gun under some dirty laundry.

But shortly after, there was loud knocking on our front door. I figured it was the neighbors, so I messed up my hair like I’d been sleeping for a long time and walked out, rubbing my sleepy eyes, to answer the door.

It wasn’t the neighbors. It was an officer from the College Park (MD) Police Department. I guess the neighbor guys concluded that only our apartment had the line of sight to obliterate their windows.

I answered the door and turned on the living room lights. The police officer walked in and asked if I had been shooting BBs at my neighbor’s apartment. I acted appalled that he would even ask me that question.

Then, he glanced down at our coffee table, which happened to have dozens of loose BBs on it.

He looked at me, and then at the BBs, and back at me again. I scrambled to come up with a good story.

“One of my roommates just moved out. He worked at a bike shop (which was true), and he sometimes worked on bikes in the apartment. Those are ball bearings from bikes.”

What a horseshit story, but he bought it. He left, and I went to sleep.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The next day, I started getting phone calls from the landlord of the apartment next door. I answered the first time, and he was screaming and yelling that he would have to hire a glazier (I had to look in my Webster’s Dictionary to find out what that was).

I denied it and said it must have been someone hiding behind the hedges, but I hadn’t seen anything because I was sleeping. I hung up, and it was over as far as I was concerned.

The calls didn’t stop, but they did go straight to our answering machine after that. The landlord was increasingly hostile and threatening. He claimed he ran a ballistics test, and the BBs in the apartment he owned matched our “ball bearings.” I knew that was not true because the officer hadn’t taken any of our BBs with him, and I walked up to 7-Eleven and threw them all out the next day.

So, I did what any Gen X delinquent would do… I made a mixtape of a bunch of Hank and my favorite punk and new wave songs. In between the songs, I put clips from the voicemails.

Eventually, the landlord gave up trying to collect money for the damages, and I largely behaved for the rest of that year that I lived in the Knox Box before moving on to the fraternity house.

Welcome to the Knox Box, Chris and Dan. Thanks for not moving out the next day.

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