Night Flight
Four or five teen males of the species, wild in the bush, formidable animals drawn to risk and danger. My tribe, my pack, my troop. We are full of spit, fire, and trouble, eager for an opportunity to spend our excess energy, to show the world, and ourselves, that we are specimens to be reckoned with, dangerous, for real, ain’t takin’ shit from you, him, or no man.
A taste of alcohol and the transgressive intoxication it delivers are what we want, but we are working class boys and we have no money. For boys of our breed, though, this is no matter. It’s the thrill of stepping over lines, of breaking rules that we are after, and that, like the beer, can be had for free, with a little luck. And without the luck, the price will be steeper.
Our technique is as unsophisticated as our reasoning about the possible consequences of our planned actions. Walk into the carry-out, the beer display is right there near the door. Cartons of 24 cans stacked in a mountain several feet high and twice as wide. Nervous whispered conversation of five or ten seconds, the mere figment of a plan, but we all know it is pure improvisation from here, bravado and speed. There are five more friends waiting for us at the house nearby. We have only to make it to the car.
One carton each. Single file, pick up, walk calmly toward the cashier. Expressions that give nothing away, as stealth is our only weapon, non-violent delinquents that we are, and we would likely just drop the goods and run if offered any resistance. Avoid looking directly at the register clerk as we approach, the feigned inattention of the lawful, then just keep going. Break for the door and keep going right through it and out into the parking lot, and then accelerate as the clerk realizes what’s happening and yells “Hey, what the hell are you doing?!” Too late.
We hit the pavement at full sprint. We are young and we run fast and well.
But as we reach the sidewalk, a curveball from the fates. A cruiser pulls into the lot, a random accident for the purpose of our work, but one with potentially catastrophic consequences. Cosmic justice perhaps asserting its disdain for having been so rudely ignored.
It will take the cop a few seconds to get inside the store and be informed by the clerk, and by then we are away, for the moment at least, scattered into the night. A block’s distance from the carry-out, the waiting car collects us. We let them know the story, laughing nervously. “F#cking cops pulled up right as we got out the damn door!” We hide the beer in the trunk and get back out, knowing the car is likely to be stopped before it makes it home. With nervous confidence, we tell them we’ll see them soon.
What had gone before, it turns out, was not the game. Now, the true game is on.
Off the road, we head to the railroad track running along the river. The squad cars cannot reach us there. We are already cackling in triumph, though not quite yet at all sure how this will end, when we hear the police helicopter overhead.
They called out a helicopter for a $50 beer run?
We duck like the seasoned criminals we are pretending to be into the trees, wait for it to pass overhead, then back to the tracks to run along them crazily until we hear the ‘copter again, then we return to the trees, large clothed rabbits bolting from hedge to hedge to avoid the metallic hawk. We were talking before, joking, laughing. All that piss and vinegar has run out of us now. We are scared shitless, silent and assiduous about the effort to avoid capture and the rest of what that would entail.
As I run, and the helicopter’s sound and light hover now at the rim of my perception and now pass above in a rush, movie and TV police chases I have seen flit through my brain. We have leapt off the screen, we five, and we exist now in flesh and sweat and hearts pounding with exertion and fear.
I imagine we must be giving off a glow. The aura that things of myth always exude. I am at once burning up and chilled with fiery exultation of my will’s command of the world and ice-cold fear that I have ruined my life for something trivial.
It’s nearly an hour before we arrive, our journey made incalculably circuitous first by the sight and sound of cruisers and helicopter, then by our paranoia that the emergent silence means we should detour into this alley and then that in order to avoid the pursuers we cannot see but sense must be just up ahead. We are caked with mud, dead tired, still more than a little worried that the police will pop up just before we get in the door, but exhilarated.
We learn our intuition was accurate. The car was stopped, but the clerk could not identify those in it as the ones in the store, so they were left to bring our well-hidden booty back to wait on us.
Celebration of youthful transgression and the fact that it is still possible to escape from the grip of power and do what you will, or at least to imagine you have done so. It might well have been mead from the halls of the gods that we deliriously poured down our throats, chortling, choking with joyful triumph, giddy, thrilled to be here, a band of brothers, together and not in the back of a squad car or in jail but free, and to have won, to have won, just this once, and even with so paltry a reward.
Two of my brethren from that night were gone from this veil within but a few years, other risks, still greater, run and lost.
The gambler’s life. Only the one who gives it up in time gets the chance to think fondly back on it later.