It's Personal: Assassination

You might read the title and automatically think TMI. (That's 'Too Much Information' for those who don't try to abbreviate every single common English phrase known to man.) And if it was associated with anything even closely related to the act to which it refers, you'd be right. But it's not.

Instead, Assassination was - and may still be - a game in which mostly males at Lyman Hall High School participated. The game's rules were easy. Each person who chose to be an assassin received a piece of paper with another assassin's name on it. (The assassin was therefore both assassin and potential victim.) The assassin would then 'assassinate' his victim and take from him the piece of paper that the victim was trying to assassinate. Last one alive won. Much like Highlander.

There were also bodyguards. Bodyguards could protect assassins going so far as to be 'shot' themselves, which neutralized them for 24 hours. Bodyguards could also neutralize other bodyguards. But bodyguards could not assassinate.

The only limitations? Assassins could not assassinate on school grounds or in a victim's home.

The weapons of choice? Water guns.

During senior year, one of the assassins - a rather popular kid and a fellow football teammate named Jason - asked me to be his bodyguard, mostly because I owned a car and often drove him home from school. Having always been the consummate goody-goody and fearing any repercussions, I hesitated. Until one day, a guy by the name of Beau with whom I had played both football and Little League baseball - a bodyguard for another assassin - chased my car in order to get me to stop so he could forcibly carry Jason off to the assassin who would kill him. Beau broke the antenna on my Silver 1984 Toyota Celica GT Hatchback with power doors, windows, and moon roof.

Not happy. So, I joined.

Not only did I protect Jason, I also acted as an accomplice in his attempts to assassinate. I keenly remember one evening when we were following our target. We followed that target into the Wallingford Country Club parking lot. Little did we know that the assassin that had Jason's name was tailing us as well. The target and the assassin had teamed up to eliminate Jason, a common tactic. We found ourselves trapped. Just when we were convinced that we would have to make a mad dash across the course, a few men ran out to us from the country club. The target and assassin peeled away in opposite directions. The men approached the vehicle.

'Are you okay?' they asked. We answered affirmatively. 'It looks like they wanted you pretty badly,' one of them continued. 'I'm a cop, you want me to call this in?'

'Uh, no' I replied sheepishly.

It seems we had happened upon a policeman's ball or some such thing. Just our luck. We talked our way out of it without giving the game away and were on our way home.

During another instance, Jason and I were looking for his target near the section of Durham and Old Rock Hill Road (close to where the target lived). When we saw said target drive past us, Jason started yelling for me to turn around. I stopped in the middle of the street - idiot that I was - and backed up. I then put the car in drive and hit the gas harder than I intended. I also thought the Silver 1984 Toyota Celica GT Hatchback with power doors, windows, and moon roof had a better turning radius. I was wrong. And thus I slammed the right side of the car into a telephone pole.

Not the brightest thing I've ever done.

It was at that moment the consummate goody goody almost lost his lunch. First thought: the old man's gonna kill me. Second thought: how much is this gonna cost? Third thought: what the hell was I thinking?

Jason sat beside me, unusually silent.

'I guess I should go see what damage there is,' I said solemnly.

I exited the car and rounded to the right side. There in all its blackened beauty was my bumper, virtually untouched. And there was the telephone pole with a big black dent in it. I couldn't believe it. I walked back and sat down in the driver's seat and said, 'no damage.' Jason leapt from the car and surveyed it himself. He came back laughing hysterically. 'You hit a f@#$ing telephone pole,' he exclaimed.

Never lived that one down.

Then it came. That day when Jason told me he had been assassinated. Just walking out of his cousin's house, he was 'attacked' by our friend and teammate Jesse. It seems Jesse had lain in wait for nearly two hours waiting for his prey. And he let loose a blast that soaked Jason.

And thus my assassination experience had ceased. Jason made it to the top five, I think, but at the end of that game, there was only room enough for one.