SHOTGUN

Sometimes - ten past two on a Saturday morning, maybe - life is what is happening up the block when you are otherwise distracted.

That Otherwise breezes out of Oxford's door, a palomino pony with a smirk ready to go and an unlit smoke held by her right ear as she comes around.

"Light me!" she insists with the smile and all the confidence in the world that there is a lighter just waiting to come out and flicker for her.

She has high cheekbones, a tan complexion and taut smart features and the smirk on her face is permanent because, as it turns out, she's a Dorothy.

"Kiley," she claims.

"Steve."

"Live around here, Steve?"

"Live here," in fact.

Her eyes narrow as she looks dubious and asks,

"The bar?"

"The building," next door, at 640.

"Cool."

Three pint-size gals are in a cheerful little huddle curbside. They wear baseball pants and sponsored tees the same two shades of blue. From inside Oxford's Pub a keen mammillarian cheer, a yowl spikes out into the night and goes, perhaps, several stories up toward the moon. All three break their confab long enough to answer it in kind.

"Girl midget baseball team," Kiley makes an explanation. And further poses, "Celebrating....First win of the season. With a crawl."

"Down from the Park," presumably.

She enumerates the stations,

"Jeremiah's Tavern; Monty's Krown; Spike's. And, then, here."

"Almost think they'd have gotten further along by this late."

Her look is pointed and admonitory.

"It was an over-time victory, Steve."

"Extra-Inning victory."

"Extra-Inning, over-time - point is they were late starting."

"So, late and - short."

Her eyes narrow, once more.

"Y'er not - " she hesitates to ask, "prejudiced against...midgets, are you, Steve?"

"I've nothing against Little People," he allows, but adds, "Long as I can keep an eye on them."

"Right, cuss y'lose track of a midget y'never know where it'll turn up."

"Or, what it'll be grabbing on to when it does."

"'Xac'ly," her head bobs agreement and her chin makes tight circles at the same time. She tells him, "Nice to know we see eye to eye, Steve."

"Course, either of us was a midget, t'other of us would have to stoop to do that."

"'Xac'ly."

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!" a voice up the block booms.

A party of something like a dozen departing Oxonians, graduating out into the night, had been a door or two down Monroe toward Oxford Street for some time a little earlier. Several fancied themselves comedians. When some friends pulled up to the curb in a car retrieved from the parking in back of the block some one or other of the gang on the walk called out that he wanted shotgun.

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!" this one hollered down at the car already almost full of girls gone almost wild on their way home.

"Y'can't!" a voice of near reason interjected, "Y'can't call shotgun if somebody's already sittin'!"

"I call shotgun!" yet another outsider bellowed.

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!"

It had seemed wildly funny to those who were there on the curb and even to the girls in the car and mock contention had gone on for quite some time. Finally, after much hilarious getting in and getting out and bodies sprawled over the hood of the car, the original girls going home and several very unsteady guys - not nearly the whole or even the half of the crowd on the sidewalk - drove off. Those who remained continued to circle and sway about one another and to move something a little more than glacially on up the Avenue.

Now,

"SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!" the catch-phrase is, apparently, revived - with for a moment a manic gale of male laughter.

And, then, with a dark scuffling that begins and sudden angry and struggling imprecations,

"SHIT!"

"THE FUCK...!"

Followed by a woman's frightful shrilling,

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"

Up the street that the shouts are filling a sudden tangle of shadowy figures toil together and surge as a dusky body away from the parked cars at the curb and lurch toward the nearest shop-front, Poster-Art, to collapse there in a pile and sprawl all over its broad step-up recessed doorway.

"Y'ER KILLING HIM!" she screams after them.

Throwing herself onto the pile, tearing at bodies, the girl succeeds in throwing off to this side at least one slender form, a young man with bowl cut hair.

"GIDDAWF'IM! GIDDAWF'IM!" sh's crying as she throws herself back into the rescue.

There is another girl the other side of the fallen struggling pile, and she turns from standing over them just in time to throw herself with both hands into the chest of some large guy in a leather jacket returning on the run from the corner.

"GIDDOWDA HERE! GIDDOWDA HERE!" she urges him alarm.

Because, now, and suddenly, there are cops - the Blue-and-whites are pulling into the curb their overheads spinning and throwing up red-white-and-blue color on darkened building fronts. They are there before anyone noticed them coming. After 2 A.M. on Monroe it is the easiest magic trick going. You don't have to rub a lamp or stick your hand into a hat to get Blue Genies to appear. They pop up for trouble like icons on a screen.

The stick figure pulled off the pile had fallen back on his ass. With the short announcing skirl of a cop siren and the flashing of overhead light, he is up like a shot and running head long down the alley alongside Poster-Art to the back parking lot. The guy and girl the other side, too, are running, making for Oxford Street. The girl, on heels, goes south looking north over her shoulder and with her purse swinging on its strap in every direction.

The pile sorts itself out a little more slowly. Some trot off but others stay as the officers come on the scene.

Steve admits,

"I gotta go. It's kinda like...business. Have nose will butt in. Professional rubber neck...."

"So," Kiley smirks more than ever, now, "that's how you're bent. I was wondering."

In the time it takes to walk halfway up the block to Poster-Art the situation has been resolved to the extent of one guy confined to the rear of a patrol car. Another in a tank top paces the walk with the preoccupied look of one who has recently been out of it. He's getting his bearings and his anger back with them. The girl who did all the screaming and the work of pulling at the pile of guys to retrieve him, presumably, is still hot and, now, is in it with the officers. She's being waltzed around and away from the scene by them all the time insisting they aren't doing right by her friends, the victims here! Why aren't they doing something!

The cops aren't yet sure what this is all about and the girl is too angry to help them with that.

"Calm down - or you can go! Y'er that close!" she is warned at last, and they force her into the rear of a second patrol car.

They close the door on her so they won't have to listen as she continues to abuse them and make demands on them. At the moment at least one partrol man is almost as hot at her as she is with them now that there is no one else to fight with and claw at. Later in a corner booth at Gitsis' Diner, perhaps, he'll laugh with others on the shift over the memory of that crazy-angry girl they had to deal with up the Avenue. For the moment he glares a warning down at the caged girl and and turns away with thumbs hooked behind the clasp on his gun belt, elbows out.

Accounts and explanations come in snippets from this one and that and all sides.

The story makes a kind of sense, in the end - though knowing what they know and not knowing what they don't, none on the Avenue telling it or hearing it can make true sense of what has happened.

Call it, "SHOTGUN" and have it come out of the mouths of baffled folk at the two a.m. end of a night of drinking and bar plunging.

"I don'know! We were just hangin' out!..."

"Sittin' in our van there!..."

"Guys comin' by'n'Ihear 'SHOTGUN!'"

"Shotgun?"

"Somebody shouts 'SHOTGUN!' - I don't know?"

"And that's when they're pulling him out of the van, draggin him oudda the seat!"

"For nuthin'; for no reason!"

"'nd they're all over...."

"This one gotta sleeper hold on him! He's like passin' out!"

"And you guys weren't into it earlier?"

"NOOOO!"

"OUDDA the Blue!"

Of course - in the final analysis, it is just another story that ends with the moral that comedy is hard, easily misunderstood and more difficult to do - and do properly - than death.

May 13, 2008.