I said sure because I like John because he's so boring and I hopped on my little scooter that I stole from a frat boy at a party about a million years ago and in no time I was there. He must have called from the bar because he was there already, Dull John, my friend, his arms wrapped around a schooner and staring into it exactly the way I would never have expected him to.

So I sat down and tried to cheer him up but to tell you the truth I would have said "How's your balls, Johnny?" just the same if he was being his old boring dull self.

And John didn't look at me or give me that half laugh which is his courtesy laugh which he gives to anything attempting to be funny because John is too stupid and boring to ever get jokes so he just laughs to fit in. But like I said he didn't laugh and I have to admit even though I knew he was never really sincere about them anyway I was kind of insulted so I said, "John, what's up?"

"I'm being stalked, Bill."

Which you've got to understand is the single most incredible fucking thing to ever come out of the mouth of boring Mr. John Smith, account executive. His girlfriend and he rented a video camera once and taped themselves doing it and of course I stole the tape from him when he wasn't looking and even that was dull, them doing it, so you've gotta understand it was really weird and exciting to hear him say that.

So I asked him what he meant. He said he's being stalked by a woman. He said he sees her everywhere. He said she follows him to his car when he leaves work late at night, that sometimes she's in front of his house on the sidewalk when he leaves for work in the morning, he said sometimes after I get done kicking his scrawny ass at racquetball that she's there, walking out of the club, and she follows him at a distance and always in the shadows between street lamps before he drives away. He said it's been going on for about two weeks.

He was still looking into his beer and hugging it and not taking any sips. He was really the most boring fucking guy in the whole world but he was my friend and I felt a little bit sad for him but also a little bit happy that he had something besides tax revenues and mortgage adjustments and sex with his boring girlfriend Alice to think about. And of course, I wanted to keep him that way, so I asked him, "What're you going to do about it?"

He said he wasn't sure. He said he thought maybe he'd confront her. Him, John, the guy who got drunk at a frat party and then got raped by horny fat Alice and who had been with her ever since, John, the guy who got his job because I filled out a form at the university job placement center and signed his name to it, him, John, John Smith, the single most boring and dull motherfucker on God's green earth was going to confront a six foot stockily built blond stalker.

Now anyone else would have asked why such a thing was happening to him or wondered what the fates were up to or at least admitted to a sick perverted pleasure in being chased around the city by some blond snatch. But not John the dull. John was good at accepting things. Like the time when we were kids and I was in a bad mood because my brother had broken open my piggy bank and stole all my quarters for the pop machine at school and I took it out on John's dog and beat the shit out of it and I didn't mean to but I killed it. So I threw it in the street and told John it got hit by a car and he got a little bit sad and thank God he was such an idiot because he believed it and we buried it and then some other dog dug it up and dragged it off and John didn't seem to care, hell, neither did I, we had Atari.

But I guess John couldn't accept a stalker, and who can blame him; me that's who, he was so damn dull but now he was staring into his beer like he probably saw someone in a movie do it, and he was just sitting there waiting for me to say, "No you're not," and he would shrug. But I didn't say it because I knew it was true and I was wondering what would come out of the unprovoked mind of John Smith.

Then he pulled out a gun and put it on the table.

Now this, you have got to understand, even if you didn't get the thing about the being stalked statement, was probably the single most unexpected event in the history of man or God, bar none. I was shocked, almost literally, I almost couldn't say anything. Honest. Once when we were really young like five or something and stupid like little kids are and curious we decided to show each other our dicks and it was the first dick I had ever seen that wasn't mine and while I was very proud when I pulled mine out, pinching it and squeezing at and pulling it out as far as it would stretch, John's was all shriveled up and it looked like a wound on his body, some sort of weird wrinkled cyst or tumor, and not like a dick at all, as far as I was concerned anyway with my limited experience, and that was a shock, too, that teeny-tiny shriveled little penis, he wouldn't even touch it. But this! A gun! I didn't think John even knew that guns were real, that they were something people not in the movies or on t.v. could actually obtain in real life. But there it was, it had that gun smell and seemed to weigh a ton even though I didn't touch it, just looked at it: you could see how heavy it was just by looking at it.

"Yea, I think I'm going to confront her," he said and oh boy was I loving this. John Smith, even his god damn name was boring, and he had a boring car and he liked to watch boring movies and he fucked dull and he drank dull and here he was in the middle of the daytime in the middle of the motherfucking Bogus Jones talking about shooting a woman that was stalking him!

So I said, "John! Where the fuck did you get that thing?" And he said he got it at a pawn shop, which was actually kind of dull but that was okay, he had momentum. I asked him if it was loaded and he just nodded. And even though my brother had a gun and let me hold it once I didn't know much about them so I asked him what kind it was. I was not expecting, "A .357 Magnum with full aught chamber slides and teflodome handle, three-times folded trigger-pluck for quick action and a four and a half inch barrel rifled to a precision of two-five two." But that's what he said! Holy shit! This was amazing. You've got to understand, you've just got to. John got B's in school and nothing else, for his birthdays he got crayons and clothes and he didn't even care, John took an astronomy class with me and when we got to take a close-up look at Io, one of Jupiter's moons, he called it, "Neat." I've known John all my life, I've stolen money from him, wrecked his car, kissed the girls he had crushes on, ate his Fritos, drank his last beers, I've even tried to set fire to his house and I would never in a million years have ever expected that to come out of his dull, slack, boring little mouth. Never!

So I said wow a few times, and holy shit, John a few times, and I laughed and sipped at my own beer and laughed some more. I looked around the bar and sipped my beer and I finally said, "When?"

"When what?" he said, and that was better, because his brow was furrowed and he seemed lost for a bit and that was the old John, the good old John, the one who had exactly one credit card and who's checkbook was full of exactly the same check stubs written to the same places. The John I knew and loved and respected and cherished, the John whose guts I hated and had always hated for my whole life.

"When are you going to confront her?" I said.

He shrugged his shoulders and picked up his beer and slurped it like he does with his bottom lip stuck out and it was the good old John, the one I could beat at racquetball, the one who loaned me five bucks for margaritas, the one you could trust to do the same motherfucking thing for the rest of his life, no variation. Then he shrugged again as he set his beer down, and he rested his hand on the gun, like it was a coaster or something. Then he picked it up and looked at it like it was a matchbook or an empty bowl of pretzels.

Then he shrugged one last time, and said, "Right now?"

Then he shot me.

Right in the gut! That motherfucker shot me right in the stomach, knocked me out of my chair, into the back wall. Then he shot me again, in the leg, and then two more shots that missed, and then one in my arm, and the last one missed. And he didn't even pull the trigger after that, like they do in the movies, that dry click of desperation, because that son of a bitch knew the gun was empty and he just walked out of the bar, gun in his hand. The bartender was going nuts, a woman was screaming her stupid cunt head off somewhere, and me, I was bleeding and fucked up and hurt and my stomach was on fire and leaking everywhere and my back hurt and my head hurt and I couldn't see straight and my arm was killing me and so was my leg and I was sweating cold and that fucking John Smith just walked out of the God damned Bogus Jones.

Which means he had figured out it was me who was having fun with him with my blond wig and my sister's heels and the make-up pencil and the sunglasses because I hate him, I hate John Smith more than I have hated anyone else who can just walk into the theater and watch my favorite movie of all time with me and then say after I ask him what he thinks that he has to go to the bathroom. I have hated him with a passion that eats at me and makes me get drunk in bars with cheap women and when their cheapness is really starting to show the hatred keeps me from taking advantage of all that beautiful sleazy cheapness. He is always exactly the same and if ever there was a man who deserved to be chased naked through a forest with a bullwhip and a can of hair spray it was John Smith. Tells me I should take it easy. Tells me I'm obsessed just because I had to punch holes in Cynthia Gofferty''s car window because she wouldn't go with me to the prom. What's he know about obsession? The only thing he's ever been obsessed with is getting to the fucking can after a two hour film and a three dollar cup of luke warm coke-no ice! God! Even his drinks are dull!

Or he had figured out that it was me who had gotten Alice so completely drunk and fucked her, doggy style, in his own bedroom. Or he had figured out it was me who had slashed his tires. Or maybe he thought I was weirdo, which I am. But you gotta see, you have got to see, that not even God Himself could have know that John Smith was going to shoot me in the gut with a gun, no way.

I can't wait. I cannot wait to get out if this hospital bed. The cops don't know it was John, and I didn't tell them. At last, at long-fucking last John and I are going to have some real fun.

This is going to be great.