I’m a lover, not a fighter.
The closest I ever get to a gun is when I play Contra on
Nintendo, and even then I usually need to use the 30 lives code to
beat the game. When picking a college, the whole
“there-isn’t-a-50/50-chance-that-someone-will-pull-a-piece-on-you”
thing put UCLA far above USC for me.
But I’m always up for some competition and (more
importantly) a story idea, so when my buddy Jeff asked if I wanted
to try paintballing Saturday night, I was all for it.
How hard could it be? They give me my gat, I make like Hannibal
from “The A-Team” and shoot some bad guys, some bad
guys shoot me, we all go home happy.
After all, it’s only paint, right?
So off we went. I told tales of my laser tag domination in high
school, back when every 8-year-old had nightmares about Big Bad
Agase.
When we pulled up to the parking lot, I could hardly contain
myself. The place was called “Friendly Fire,” which has
to have just officially displaced a drive-through liquor store
called “Drink and Drive” for No. 1 on the list of
insensitively named places of business.
Walking up to Friendly Fire, the six of us had the same kind of
naive anxiousness that you get before the UCLA-USC football game.
What would it be like? Would we be any good?
What exactly were the odds that we’d be completely
humiliated?
That last one should have been obvious enough when my buddy Dan
said, “I’m gonna suck at this, I just know it.”
It wouldn’t have been so frightening to hear Dan say that,
except for the fact that he’s in the Marine Reserve. Uh
oh.
But we were here, and we weren’t turning around, no matter
how intimidated we felt the very second we walked through the door.
At least they had a waiver form, I figured, and some semblance of
rules.
Or so I thought, until I read them. “Players must not
shoot another player more than three times without giving them a
chance to yell DEAD MAN.” What, my wobbly knees and
deer-in-headlights look didn’t make it look like I had
“DEAD MAN” tattooed on my forehead anyway?
“NO blind firing! You must look at what you’re
shooting.” Well that’s encouraging. When I get pelted
between the eyes, at least I’ll know that whoever did it had
the satisfaction of seeing my head snap like Glass Joe from Mike
Tyson’s Punch Out.
There’s the setup. One man, one rental gun, one hundred
paintballs.
One world of pain.
The first game was “Elimination,” ““ one hit
and you’re out. For us, it was more like one minute and
you’re out. Three of us were picked off pretty much
simultaneously; the other three followed suit 60 seconds later.
The problem was in the setup of the game. Instead of splitting
20-or-so people into two teams, the ref put all 20 of us on the
same side and had us flail around against four ruthless mercenaries
who had their own shiny guns, complete with little blinking
lights.
Little blinking lights!
In the end, all 20 of us were eliminated without hitting a
single one of the Rambo wannabes. It was a blowout that made Reagan
v. Mondale 1984 seem thrilling. Undaunted, we tried again ““
this time with a strategy. Jeff (playing the role of William
Wallace) suggested that all 20 of us charge at them. We had
numbers, he said.
Yeah, and they had shiny guns with little blinking lights. We
nixed the idea and headed for some bunkers on the left. Four of us
made it and dug in, when suddenly”¦
Smack! I was hit. I was hit in the mouth. Disgusting!
It was my last hit. In the next two games, an enemy player came
around the corner and, according to the rules, pointed his gun at
me and asked for my surrender.
These guys were so good, they could have stepped on my foot,
poked me in the eye like the Three Stooges, insulted my mom and
told a joke before I even turned my safety off.
Needless to say, I was quick to choose surrender over being shot
from point blank.
And next time I feel like busting a cap, I’ll choose
Contra instead.
After being shot in the face, Agase feels a bond with 50 Cent.
E-mail him at jagase@media.ucla.edu.