bang, bang.

In actuality, it was only one bang. But “Bang” was never a song by Sonny & Cher and covered by Nancy Sinatra…geezy-peezy I love that song. And Kill Bill Volume 2 with which it will ever be associated. Back to the action.  It was not my baby who shot me down, nor was it I who was shot down, but it could’ve been! (Not really. We’re asking Truth to scooch down a bit so that Drama can join us on the couch.)

I arrive at my DOWNTOWN LOFT last night around 11:15 PM. Sarah, Roommate Temporalis, was chilaxin’ on the couch, watching some Atonement. She asks the perfectly legitimate and not at all paranoid question of, “When do the lights in the parking lot go off? Because I feel like they already are and that doesn’t make sense.” She’s right. It doesn’t make sense. Enter Danger.

BANG.

Waco is not a buzzing metropolis. The central Texas pace makes it quite easy to forget that Waco is still crazy dangerous. There’s a hopping drug trade and a substantial amount of the population lives below the poverty/desperation line. So when a girl hears a gunshot outside the window of her DOWNTOWN LOFT, concern may furrow itself across her brow.

Me: “Uh. That was a gunshot.”
Sarah: “Yeah.”
Me: “Uhhh. It was pretty close, huh?”
Sarah: “Yeah.”

We did the only rational thing: we ignored it. We did not go to the windows. We did not freak out. Sarah continued to moon over James McAvoy and his sepsis while I tried to wash a shift’s worth of steamed milk off my shoes. Then we heard the sirens. And saw the pretty lights. And realized they were gathering our parking lot.

According to my count (punctuated by a lot of “Ooh! Ooh! There’s another one!”’s) there were no fewer than eight cop cars, ten cops, 30 yards of yellow tape, two witnesses, and four frantically sweeping flashlights. Shortly after arriving, one cop ran back to his car and took off after someone/something.  Since I’m a cat owner, sudden movement and rabid intensity after no perceivable threat doesn’t faze me, but I’m sure he was riding to the danger zone.

At this point Sarah and I are huddled at my bedroom window, trying to peek without really peeking.  We don’t know what happened. We don’t know if anyone was hurt. We don’t know much. But we do know this: our mother’s never need to know that we live at ground zero. And life in a DOWNTOWN LOFT is substantially more exciting.

 

Filed under life i guess | Comments (2)