As I mentioned earlier, in 1984 Darren and I were both home from college. At least he got himself together and went back eventually. But for the meantime, it was just him and me. It was the start of all the fun...
Somewhere in this time frame Darren started dating a girl (she was still in HS, I believe.. can't remember her name at all) who lived in the Trails (down at the corner of Nerge and Plum Grove). Don't know where he met her or what happened other than they eventually broke up. On a side note, her father had a DeLorean. This was even before Back to the Future made them cool(er). I vaguely remember that I might have gotten a ride in it, although I also remember her sitting on D's lap in the passenger seat, since those cars didn't have back seats.
In the fall of '84, Darren got a job at the Rolling Meadows Ice Arena on Friday nights as a DJ for the open skate. I would go with him, help him set up the record player up at the top of the stands and skate for 2 hours for free. This was after my becoming friends with a guy at Madison who was on the two-time Wisconsin state Catholic League HS hockey championship team, on their top line. He taught me to skate and I was really into it for a few years... even got my head noogied by Gordie Howe after he picked the puck off my stick... skating was probably the only thing I really learned at college, sadly.
Anyway... I digress...
So we came up with this idea for Friday nights DJing at the rink... we'd get a set of walkie-talkies, I'd skate around and the other skaters could come up to me and make "long distance dedications" which I'd relay up to him. We were absolutely GIDDY with our own brilliance. We make plans, and early on Friday we head to Toys 'R Us to pick up something that would work. Of course we get totally lost in the store, and by lost I mean we start goofing around, checking out all sorts of things besides the walkie-talkies, when we come across this aisle with toy guns. We would make this a regular trip, because Toys 'R Us was a freakin' blast, and weeks later we'd find the first ever motorized water gun that could shoot a stream of water 30' on a dime. (I used that to terrorize my brother Greg when he'd walk down the hallway). But for this first stop, we find a full-sized, made out of metal, Magnum .45 cap gun. This thing had to weigh 5-6 pounds. No orange tip, so it looked and felt real, or as real as we thought it might be. Today, we'd pull that thing out and end up a story on the 10 o'clock news after being justifiably shot by a cop, but back then, nobody cared.
Of course we bought it. With glee. Visions of Dirty Harry bouncing around our bad-ass imagination...
Back into the car we go with our walkie-talkies and this monstrosity of a "toy". He starts driving and I start unpacking. I pull out the caps that load into it; they were easily three or four times what were normally sold with a fake gun for kids. Loaded.
Darren keeps driving, and turns onto the frontage road along the east side of Rt. 53 at Algonquin. I'm not stupid (well...) so I roll down the window and stick it out, and without thinking, pull the trigger.
BLAM!
I've pulled the trigger on a 1/4 load stage pistol when I directed Oklahoma! and was shocked at how powerful it was. This "toy" gun was pretty close.
So the shot, no where NEAR the level of what a toy cap gun should be, reverberates through the car. My ears are instantly ringing and plugged. Darren swerves back and forth a few times and gets us back in our lane. We are simultaneously laughing as well as screaming. Showing my bad-assery, I frantically cram the gun under the front seat to hide it from any Johnny-Law and slink down so I'm not discovered. TOYS 'R US SELLS WEAPONS WHAT THE HELL!!!!
We pull into the ice rink and pretty much decide to not talk about it to anyone, because then they'd know we had a real fake weapon under the passenger's side front seat and we'd end up in jail. Darren's girlfriend meets us there, the walkie-talkie's are a complete success. And to top off our thug-moment, Darren starts making cracks on the sound system about a break-dancing contest which was huge back in the 80's. I go to center ice and his GF spins me around a bunch of times and I exit into a perfect break-dancing end pose on my side, leg up, head on my hand.
Nobody else did any break dancing.
But they did have me send numerous Long-Distance Dedications to be played by Spin-Master DT.
Thus ended our night of gangsta'ing.
But damn, we DID have a lot of fun with that cap gun...
Yo, back off... we are packin'! I believe that is TWO Star Wars blasters, homie.
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