I haven’t been feeling my best the past few days and so when Nick asked me what I wanted to do tonight, the first night of a long weekend, I thought a movie sounded just fine. Most of the summer blockbusters will open next weekend and so we had slim pickings. We chose Made of Honor to soothe my Patrick Dempsey fix.
Nick was not crazy about going to this chick flick, I think he was just trying to make things as simple as possible for me.
The movie theater is less than a two minutes walk away. It’s a block away and across the street. As we were discussing how much we’re going to miss our 2 minute walk to the AMC downtown theater and enjoying the lovely spring evening, something came into the periphery of my vision.
A man on a bike, from behind us, looked like he was trying to go around Nick’s right side (I was on his left). He was going at a pretty fast rate so I grabbed Nick’s arm and pulled him away from the bike man. Surprisingly, the bike guy kept going around to the right side and it looked like was going to ride straight into a building. He bumped the building and whirled the bike around to come on my side now as if he was trying to run ME over this time. I was getting freaked out and wondered what in the world this guy wanted, and before I was able to sputter any words, he leaned into my face and loudly growled like a wild animal, hungry for a meal.
I looked at him like a strange alien and stopped walking. He biked onward.
We watched in disbelief as he knocked over two more people on the sidewalk.
We hurried to the movie and quickly became absorbed in the cheesy plot. Before we knew it, the credits were rolling and dim lights began to fill the room. The first thing Nick says after every movie, “I gotta piss.” I always reply, “I know, I’ll wait in the lobby.”
We parted ways, Nick to the restroom and me walking in a daze toward the lobby. I was just thinking about how I would have preferred the ending to be when I looked up and saw a young woman screaming at a young man. I thought they were just fooling around because her hands were holding onto his shirt and it looked like he was trying to get away from her.
I kept thinking, “I think Patrick Dempsey looks ridiculously good for a man in his forties….”
The young woman screamed, “Give me my f—ing phone! Give me my f—ing phone!”
At this point I looked up, cleared my thoughts and just saw this man shove her to the ground, but not before she nearly twisted his shirt into rags. I was about to help because I was the closest person to her and I saw it might be getting serious, but something clicked in my head to keep moving, I don’t know why. Keep moving.
A clatter. I look down to see what the noise was and it seemed like something had come out of the young man’s jeans and I figured it was the stolen phone she was screaming about. I look down and I see a black handgun on the floor. I was less than five feet from them and the closest person to the gun.
I turned my head and saw Nick coming, just wanting to get out of there.
There was a flurry of movie goers and AMC employees gathering around the gun. Murmurs guessing that it was a fake or possibly a BB gun began to make their way.
Any thoughts of Patrick Dempsey vanished as NIck and I quickly left. On the escalator toward the lobby, we saw the police rushing upstairs. I slowly shook my head and looked at Nick a long time, speechless over the incident.
As we pushed the doors open into the spring city night, the fresh air swept over my face, calming me down. Nick took my hand and said, “There’s a slight possibility that we’ll see a gun again sometime in our lives, but I don’t think we’ll ever have any fool on a bike growl at us ever again. Now that’s the most exciting thing that happened tonight, huh?”
I just looked at him and shrugged.
