Our apartment in
Hollywood was bordered by a dismal black ghetto on one side and a vital Cuban
neighborhood on the other. The year being 1970, there were riots in the Miami
ghettos and a curfew to go along with it. Snipers were picking off anything
that moved, and rioters were burning anything that didn’t. It was
Burn-Baby-Burn, black or white, and it didn’t seem to matter whether it was
before, or after, curfew. I was dazed at the news that a twelve-year-old black
kid on a bicycle was shot dead in broad daylight by a roof-top sniper. The
sniper could just as well have been a cop. At that time there was as much vice
in Miami Vice as there was on the streets. But, just as likely, it could’ve
been target practice for an asshole on either side, aiming to stir things up
more than they already were. Several nights during the curfew we sat around the
kitchen table drinking wine and smoking dope, while sirens, helicopters and
gunfire sporadically popped away as surreal background noise to the blues of
Aynsley Dunbar and the Retaliation on the turntable… “but if you give me any
trouble, I’m gonna run you off the hill.”
The curfew had killed the business for over a
week. We all had a case of nerves, living in a war zone and, cooped-up with each other, we were getting cabin fever. I figured that there would be nothing
like a hot bowl of chili to cheer up the boys on a friggen hot/humid summer evening in south Florida. Spicy, hot peppers always did the trick for me in Southeast Asia. I decided to make a pot and had filled a gallon pickle jar with a couple cups of pinto beans and water to pre-soak them before cooking . I set the jar on the kitchen counter with the lid off to the side. It was like jail... we played cards and slept while we passed the time. Ted was resting in the bedroom (the only room
with air-conditioning) while Danny, Kenny and I were sitting at the kitchen
table with the windows open. It was a couple of hours later, while the Crew was
sitting around chewing the fat and passing time that suddenly a sharp report
like a rifle-shot sent glass flying across the room.
Ted jumped up from the bed and
hit the switch to the lights while snapping the slide on his forty-five. I did
the same to the kitchen lights, barefoot on broken glass and yelled, “Sniper,
hit the fuckin’ deck!”
Everyone was on the floor in
the same second. Kenny and Danny headed for the bathroom crawling into the
shower.
It was quiet, and some time
passed before Ted called out, “Anybody hit?”
Nobody answered. I wasn’t sure
but decided to call out names in a hushed tone, “Kenny?”
“I’m okay.”
“Danny?”
“Okay.”
“Stan?”
“Fine, what the fuck?”
“It was a rifle shot…” I
whispered, “I’m sure. It must have come through the window where we were
sitting. I think I heard the round buzz past my ear.”
“You sure it was a rifle?” Ted
was on the floor in the bedroom with a loaded 45 automatic at ready.
“Yeh, it had to be… what else
could it…”
“Where did it hit?”
“The counter,” Stan said, “The
bean jar on the counter.”
“The bean jar?”
I put two and two together. “Did anyone put the lid on the bean jar?”
“Yeh, I did,” Stan muttered.
I got up off the floor, turned
the lights back on, and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. I surveyed the scene
where the bean jar had been. Seeing that there were no bullet holes behind
where the jar was I took a long pull off the bottle of beer. Danny and Kenny
came out of the bathroom, “What was it?”
“The bean jar,” I snickered,
“We were attacked by a bean jar!”
“What do you mean?” Ted came
out of the bedroom sheepishly disarming the automatic.
I started sweeping and wiping
up the beans and glass from the floor and counter and explained the physics of
it, “Stan screwed the lid on the jar of beans I was soaking. One cup of beans
expands into six when you soak ‘em. The jar flat-out fuckin’ blew up!”
“I thought you said you were
sure it was a rifle shot.” Ted scowled. “What about the round buzzing your ear?”
I went over to the open window
and checked the screen. My inspection revealed what I already knew. There were
no holes in it, so I had to admit, “I might have imagined that.”
No one had any hard feelings
about it. We laughingly referred to the incident as the “The Bean Jar Sniper
Attack” and just the mention of it was usually good for a laugh.
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