This past weekend I went with eight other guys to a paintball course deep in the woods of Vermont. Our group should have been much larger, but several people canceled as punk-ass bitches tend to do. If you’ve never played paintball, you should know that it hurts, sometimes quite a bit. A direct hit from a paint pellet is similar in pain to being snapped hard with a fat rubber band, like those assholes undoubtedly did to you at least once as a child. The plus side to what seems like an extremely lame thing to subject yourself to is your ability to shoot back. It’s warfare, except no one really gets killed. You get to inflict pain on your friends and let your inner Shih-Tzu run wild. Paintball kicks ass.

After going through the obligatory safety speech and marching out into the courses, we split into two teams of four and proceeded to blast each other to high hell. Since there were so few people that day, the rounds were short and at times anticlimactic, but we tried to make the best of it.

After a few rounds, our referee told us that there was another group of eight people coming onto the courses and asked us if we would like to join up with them. We agreed, but immediately started worrying that we were about to get pasted by a crew of off-duty National Guardsmen or police officers. We waited, resigned to whichever bad-ass might show up.

Much to our surprise, our new opponents were a group of middle schoolers. They crossed onto our course, accompanied by some chaperoning parents with more than a little bit of apprehension in their faces. Here we were, a bunch of early thirties men, sweating, swearing and splattered with paint and these kids were being expected to give up their birthday party paintball games in lieu of getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of surly adults. Awesome.

We’d rented our equipment, so we were all carrying guns that were at the low end of the ass-kicking spectrum. These kids, however, were decked out with weapons ranging from good quality to fully automatic death machine. Some of them were sporting body armor, while others had improvised by stuffing pieces of cardboard underneath their clothing. We had no such accoutrements, only the clothes on our backs and an extra nearly twenty years worth of pent-up rage and disappointment. We were ready to kill.

Our first few rounds had the kids pitted against the adults which resulted in a complete bloodbath since many of them were too chickenshit scared to get shot that they rarely fired straight or at all. It was a thrilling fact that, at the shriveled and defunct age of thirty, I was being given the chance to deliver some serious smackdown on children that when I was at their age, would beat the fuck out of me and toss my ass in a dumpster every day at recess. I made it my calling to terminate their asses with extreme prejudice.

After several one-sided rounds, we split up and created two new teams, evenly mixing it up between kids and adults. This led to better action and some surreal moments of running into some area, knowing a twelve year old has got your back. At times we had to yell at them when, finding themselves blessed with some good cover, they made camp and prepared to hide put until the round was over. I would be getting pinned down, trading fire against two people and the kid next to me would be curled up with his gun lying on the ground.

Still, it was a great time. I walked away with several welts that have now blossomed into some beautiful golf ball sized bruises. Personally I think being able to shoot children with paintball guns may be one of the best things to ever happen to me. The only thing that might possibly top it would be shooting old people or maybe midgets.

Last night, some asshole tried to mug me and ended up beating the shit out of me instead. I was walking down the street that I live on in Prospect Heights around eleven at night. Halfway down the block, I noticed this big black guy was walking towards me. I moved to the side, towards a metal fence to give him room to pass and it was a big mistake because he zeroed in and cornered me against the fence and whispered “Gimme your wallet”. Had I chosen the other side of the sidewalk to give way to, I would have had a chance to run into the street, but I’d boxed myself.

It all happened so suddenly and quietly that what was happening didn’t register. Instead of the little voice in my head telling me, “Dave, you’re getting mugged, give up your wallet before you get killed”, all I understood was that someone was fucking with me and I needed to get out of being stuck up against the fence. I tried to move out of the way, but the guy grabbed me by my shirt and proceeded to pound the shit out of me. I knew I was being punched in the face and around the head, but I didn’t feel any pain at all. I can’t remember if I hit him back. I’m inclined to think I didn’t because my knuckles seem unmarked. I do know that I did a lot of struggling and yelling.

Somehow I ended up on the ground with a couple of feet between me and the guy, enough for me to get my footing and tear off down the street. As I got up, someone in the building next to me turned on a light and yelled out the window and the mugger moved off in the opposite direction from me. It’s not like I stopped to watch him go, I was too busy running for my life, but I think he just walked off, probably into an apartment building nearby. There’s a lot of thug motherfuckers that live on my street, spending their days smoking blunts, playing dominoes and acting like badasses. I’m pretty sure he was from that crowd which basically means I’m fucked. I got away with my wallet and everything else except my glasses, which were likely sent flying with the first punch.

I made it inside and checked myself out. There was a good amount of blood coming out of me, most of it from my mouth and hands. I had two fat lips with the top lip split in two places, a fat bump on my forehead and a shitload of cuts and scrapes all over with the worst on my hands and my right knee. The thumbnail on my right hand had been torn off. My shirt was torn up. I was a fucking mess.

I called 911, but the cops don’t give a shit. So, after many icepacks and hydrogen peroxide baths, I tried, unsuccessfully to sleep. As I lay there, trying not to bleed on the sheets, I couldn’t get my mind off that guy. I ran through all the possible scenarios and as much as I would have wanted otherwise, I realize that I was in way over my head and that I’m lucky to be alive or not in the hospital. It’s not a good feeling. I’ve practiced Aikido for about ten years and before that, Karate. None of that meant shit. All of it went completely out the window because my guard was down. Once it was down, there was no chance of getting it back. Even so, I should have just handed over my wallet. I can’t explain why I didn’t other than it all was too fast. If he’d had a knife or a gun, I have no doubt whatsoever that I would be dead or at the very least, severely injured. It’s not a good feeling.

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for about a year and three months. During that time, I have been the victim of three crimes, one, last night, being violent and almost getting me killed. My head is aching and there’s a big part of me that’s keenly interested in getting my ass on the next train back to Vermont. That’s not likely to happen though. I feel guilty about it, but I hate the people that live there. I just do. I’ve been robbed, beaten, threatened, called a “Cracker” one too many fucking times. Walking down my street, it feels often like I have a fat red and white target painted on my back what with the way people look at me. I don’t like the anger that I have and I realize that a part of it is irrational, but I also realize that a large part of it is grounded in reality. I’m polite. I keep to myself and yet all I get is abuse in one form or another from a bunch of angry racist fuckheads who, en masse, find it perfectly acceptable to take their aggressions, in whatever form it may be, out on the nearest unassuming white male. I don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t feel good, but I never did anything to deserve this bullshit. It’s a very shameful feeling, but it’s still hate. I wish I didn’t feel it, I wish I could compartmentalize and rationalize it better, but I also wish my forehead wasn’t throbbing and I wasn’t required to eat through a straw.