In yesterday's post, I commented that it has never occurred to my better half and me to shoot at people who turn around in our driveway or mistakenly ring our doorbell.
There was one episode that wasn't so innocuous when I lived in a downtown apartment.
I had a neighbor next door — I'll call him John, since that's what his parents did — who does not rank among my favorite neighbors. He and his friends were into heroin, and I'm quite sure that his apartment was the source of the cockroaches that kept getting into my kitchen. (The statutes of limitations have run out on anything I'm about to post here; and by now, John and his friends have straightened up, served time, or overdosed.)
We shared a back porch off our adjacent kitchens.
One summer afternoon, I was watching TV in my living room. I had the kitchen door open on the latch to let the outside breeze through the apartment since I didn't have air conditioning, when I heard banging noises coming from the kitchen.
It was one of John's druggie friends trying to force the screen door open. I was furious confronting the guy, who backed off, saying that he had mistaken my door for John's.
John, who wasn't home at the time, later apologized profusely to me for his friend's behavior, inviting me to party with them and offering to introduce me to one of his druggie friends who happened to be gay. Suffice it to say that I was not at all interested in any of it, up to and including the apology (which, at least, contained no blather about "continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards" or any such bullshit.)
All things considered, however, we were all alive to tell about it afterward because at no point in this story was there any gun involved.
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