You’ll shoot your eye out kid!
For most kids my age, that line is immediately followed by a flash or two from a distinct series of images. Perhaps a fishnet stocking covered leg lamp fashioned from plastic, a tongue frozen to a light post, or the main character sitting on a stool, bar of soap in his mouth after having said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the “F-dash-dash-dash” word!
I’m not sure how successful “A Christmas Story” was when it first hit theaters, but it was an instant classic among everyone I knew at the time, as well as everyone I’ve ever asked since. Out of many famous lines in that film it was that one, more than any other, which echoed around my house.
You’ll shoot your eye out kid!
That was what my mom said when I first asked her for a BB gun. When I first saw “A Christmas Story,” I could have cared less. But for some reason when I was fourteen I wanted one, with a sudden, fierce hunger. My mother was adamant – You’ll shoot your eye out kid! she said, referencing the film, but meaning every word all the same.
I didn’t want a Red Ryder rifle like Ralphie dreamed of getting in the movie. I wanted a handgun. I’d seen them at the sporting goods store. They were black and looked just like the real thing. The glass case had a couple of imitation .9 mm Berettas, the same gun John McClane used in Die Hard. I wasn’t an especially violent kid, and didn’t desire a BB gun for any nefarious deeds. I just wanted to feel half as cool holding it as I was sure Bruce Willis felt mowing down a skyscraper full of terrorists.
I begged and begged. My mother said NO and my father stayed quiet. I knew without doubt that my father was my best shot. He had after all been a boy at one time himself, and I knew that he knew my days of childhood were waning. That Christmas, much to my mom’s horror, there was a long box waiting for me behind the tree. It was the last present opened that morning and the only one I remember from that year.
I didn’t get an imitation Berreta, a .45, or any other type of handgun. Not that I expected to. I would have been less surprised to open a giant box of Playboys. The long box I unwrapped was the same as Ralphie’s; a Red Ryder,You’ll shoot your eye out kid! model rifle.
After my mom muttered under her breath, we picked up the torn paper and put it in the trash. Then I went to the back yard to shoot cans off the top ledge of the brick barbecue. This activity held my interest for 10-20 minutes on maybe two occasions. I didn’t want the BB gun for target practice. I wanted to feel cool.
This was a good year in our family history. My parent’s business was doing well and we’d moved out from the tiny house we’d lived in for the first fourteen years of my life to a much larger one in one of the city’s nicest neighborhoods. The house came with an alarm system, which it was my job to disable as soon as we opened the front door.
One early evening about two weeks after Christmas, we came home and unlocked the door to the usual bray of the alarm. I opened the closet door, punched in the three sets of two digits, and headed directly for the phone. At 14, the phone could have been fused to my palm and it would have gotten only slightly more use than it already did.
Ten minutes later I was pacing the den while my sister played Nintendo on the floor. I held the phone in my left hand and the rifle in my right, aiming the barrel right at the back of my sister’s head.
“Stop it, Sean!” she said.
I didn’t do anything obnoxious like shoot her with BB’s or pretend to kill her, but I continued to stand behind her, talking on the phone and keeping the rifle pointed at her. I’d been in the room for about ten minutes when I heard the beep of call waiting.
“Hold on,” I said. Then, “hello?“
“Hello, Sir. This is the Long Beach Police Department. We need you to come out with your hands up.”
“Nice try.” I clicked back over to my best friend Jimmy and explained that someone was trying to crank call the crank call king. Another beep. “Yeah?“
“This is the Long Beach Police Department, Sir. We need you to put your weapon down and step out of the house.”
I paused, no idea what to think. I looked at the rifle in my hand, still pointed at my sister, and swallowed. Rich confusion and mild fear mingled in my mind. “Is this for real?”
“Yes, Sir,” she said. “Is there someone else in the house we can speak to, or are you the one in charge?”
“Hold on.”
I crept into the kitchen. “The police are on the phone.” I said, slipping the receiver into my mom’s hands, which were still dripping with uncooked dinner. “They say they need to speak with you.”
“I don’t have time for this, Sean.”
“I think it’s serious.”
Just as she put her ear to the receiver, I saw a half dozen officers, guns drawn, sidling across the lawn and toward the wall of glass that divided outside from inside. It was pitch black outside, but the officers were illuminated by the steady beams of their flashlights. Suddenly, a bullhorn blared from outside, drowning the pulse of my own pounding heart.
“COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
Seconds later, my mother, sister and I were opening the door to our house and descending the long set of stairs that would take us to street level. There were 13 cop cars in total. Nine from the LBPD, another four from the security company. A chopper thwapped in the sky overhead.
Though the situation was terrifying, something in the moment struck me as ridiculously funny. I started to laugh.
“BETTER WIPE THAT #$%&@!* SMILE OFF YOUR FACE,” the bullhorn said.
At the bottom stair, I was grabbed by an officer, shoved against the brick wall, and frisked from head to toe. My mother kept yelling, “What are you doing? We live here, we live here, we live here. I can prove it!”
After he calmed my mother and wiped the smile from my face, the officer in charge started to articulate just how dangerous the situation had actually been. While I was wandering a well-lit den with a BB gun pointed at my sister’s head for all the world to see, the Long Beach Police department was witnessing what they considered an escalating hostage situation.
The alarm, it turned out, had been the problem. Our code was something like, 33-34-43. That code meant, “All systems go. Everything’s A-OKAY here, good buddy. Thanks for asking!” However, I had accidentally entered something like, 34-33-43, which meant, “Please help me. Get here as soon as you can. We are being held prisoner by an intruder who is wielding a weapon and is right now at this moment making me disable the alarm. If you do not get here in the next ten minutes, we will all be dead.”
As the officer spoke, my mother’s eyes met mine with the raging inferno of every I told you so! from the last year rolled into one.
“Wait till your father gets home,” was an often used, yet rarely effective threat. But I spent that next hour, huddled in terror and waiting for the inevitable to murder me. When my father finally arrived, dinner was unmade and my mother was in a huff. He listened to the story, weighed the evidence, and finally declared that it was just one of those things.
At least I hadn’t shot my eye out.
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