Last July, a friend of mine called to tip me off about an upcoming water gun assassination tournament. I was swamped at work when he called, crimping duvets for a big Neiman Marcus order—but seconds later I was on the tournament’s website, reading the requirements for entry. by midnight I was in the back of a GMC Envoy, paying my entrance fee to a man in mirrored sunglasses. this was the founder of Street Wars, a large, menacing guy who apparently wanted his players to understand, from the start, that this tournament was not a children’s backyard affair.
He snatched the money out of my hand. then he asked me for my phone number, my home and work addresses, my e-mail address, and two current photos—all of which another player would use to hunt me down like a predator. I’d come prepared with this information, but the notion of giving it to a man double parked in the Meatpacking District didn’t feel right. I gazed out the truck’s tinted window, evaluating my situation while a pack of whooping frat boys disappeared into Hogs and Heifers. Relishing the slim possibility that one of them might be in the tournament, I gave him everything I had.
As it turned out, my target was a sun-kissed, twenty-four-year old Hawaiian paralegal. K lived in a five-story walk-up in the east 30’s, and worked an evening shift in the Conde Nast building in Times Square. as far as I could tell from the Polaroids, her skin was as smooth as a sea stone. in one picture she wore a sun dress with frayed spaghetti straps; in the other a faded lacrosse uniform that hung over her like a sheet. in both her eyes seemed to well with hope.
The man told me I’d have to soak her by the end of the first week in order to advance. then he said that if my assassin (whom I would not be given a photo of) nailed me, I’d have to surrender K’s information and forfeit the contest. we shook hands like old associates before I hopped out of the truck, onto a street that teemed with drunk people strutting like roosters from restaurants and bars.
For the first time since I’d moved to new York, I studied each of them.
I hadn’t done anything like this since my first attempt at college. About ten years ago, I fell for a girl in an early morning general requirement class called “The Experience of Music.” The little I knew about Barbara was that she looked like a cheetah, drank a case of Cherry Coke every week, and majored in Human Nutrition. “A fine major,” I muttered as I bent down below the kitchen sink, lugging out the White Pages to find out where she lived. Minutes later I was on the road.
I constantly assured myself that I wasn’t stalking her, even as I raced through a red light and slammed into a cab, which was stunningly more battered than my ‘90 Tempo. The cabbie poked his head of out the window as if he were an ancient mud turtle looking for food. we exchanged personal information and clattered off on our respective journeys. I eventually made it to Barbara’s house, a tiny Chicago bungalow strangled with Christmas lights, but I never left my car. A week later our music teacher said we’d be taking a closer look at the songwriting in “Muppets take Manhattan”, at which point Barbara grabbed her book bag and her soda can and walked out the door.
The e-mail I sent K mostly conveyed a hope that one day I’d get to see her, preferably while discharging a hard, pencil-thin stream of sink water onto her chest. she responded almost instantly, confessing that I’d made her laugh in her cubicle. she sounded almost desperate in her response, concluding her email with a plea for my spray. this was not the response I was shooting for. I’d tried to rattle her cage by invoking the voice of a stalker; instead she responded like someone who’d paid ten dollars to get stalked.
I, on the other hand, was trying to avoid my assassin at all costs. to get into work I’d sneak in through my building’s rarely used freight entrance. The freight elevator had been out of service for years, owing its disrepair to a pair of brawling bootleggers who inadvertently knocked the shoddy door back and plunged four stories through the shaft. Both men died on impact with the lift car. Firefighters used saber saws to deliver the bodies from the steel.
Nights I spent at my girlfriend’s apartment. I did this because no one affiliated with the tournament had her address. But after three days without so much as a phone call or an email, I wondered whether the extreme efforts I was taking to avert my assassin were even necessary.
“Why isn’t anyone trying to stalk me?” I asked my girlfriend.
“Sweetheart,” she said, slapping a nicotine patch on her thigh, “not everyone is going to be as into this thing as your desperate Hawaiian girl.”
It isn’t easy to keep a low profile in new York while trotting with a plastic bazooka the color of rainbow sherbet. Oftentimes I had no choice. even though I tried to keep my gun wrapped in plastic in my book bag, it still leaked through the bag and soaked my books. this pretty much summarized the effect that Street Wars took on my life. I was getting up early, jogging backwards to the subway with my hand on the pump. I was dozing off at work and school after lengthy evening stakeouts. I took cabs during my lunch break to K’s Murray Hill apartment, hoping to catch her on her way to work. I even had friends from across the country call her around the clock, to warn her of impending rains. she flirted with one of them to the extent that he actually considered leaving both his wife and his Irish wolfhound to move to new York.»
The Cry of the Water Wolf–a water gun assassination tournament
