The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  “Police! Open up!”

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to exit the bathroom until I knew that Matt was in handcuffs or a cop car, so it’s hard to know exactly how things went down once the cops arrived. There was some brief commotion, and I could hear Matt saying a lot of things like “I didn’t do anything! I just wanted to come down and drink with my friends!” I wasn’t entirely sure if the cops came through the window or if they managed to get Matt to let them in the apartment, but they were standing inside by the time I felt safe enough to come out.

  They asked Lauren and me if we were all right. We said yes and relayed the events of the night the best we could. We explained that Matt had gone from zero to 100 in about five minutes, if zero was “hey, let’s drink and watch old game shows together” and 100 was “I am going to stab both of you until you are dead.” No matter how many times the cops tried to ask about why Matt would do that, we had no logical answer. It was the biggest and quickest 180 I’ve ever seen someone do, and it seemed to be entirely random.

  Before the police left, they showed us the knife that Matt had broken in with. It was somewhere between a butter knife and a full-on murder knife, like something you’d cut a hard roll or a steak with. I guess there’s a term for that, right? Steak knife? He had a steak knife, and it was bent almost 90 degrees near the top where he’d used it to get the window open. It wasn’t the big Psycho knife that I envisioned as he was attempting to get inside, but it definitely could have murdered me if Matt had wanted it bad enough.

  More cop cars arrived in the parking lot, and Lauren and I stepped out front to see what was going on. Matt was handcuffed and being led into the back of one of the cars, and his distraught mother had apparently arrived at some point. When she saw us, she started yelling.

  “What have you done to my boy?” she cried several times.

  I’m not sure if I responded out loud, but I remember at least thinking, your boy broke in with a knife and wanted to stab us.

  After Matt got into the car, all of the cops and Matt’s mother took off. Lauren and I were left standing out front by ourselves, and Patrick had woken up amid the commotion. He was standing on his porch directly above us, and Lauren and I went up for a chat.

  Patrick told us that he remembered waking up briefly as Matt was asking for a knife, but that he dismissed it as him just being dumb and drunk. Lauren and I explained to Patrick that while we weren’t mad at him, he should probably take notice if his hard-drinking roommate is stomping around and searching feverishly for a stabbing implement. Patrick apologized profusely, and there were never any hard feelings between the three of us.

  It was around four in the morning by now. I had zero idea of what would come next as far as Matt’s status. Do they keep people in jail for days after something like this? Is there a trial? Do they ask me if I want to press charges? I’d seen all the dramatic parts of situations like this—the knife attacks, the courtroom theatrics—on TV and in documentaries, but no one sat me down with a simple “all right, here’s what happens next” breakdown. The cops were gone, and Matt was gone for an indeterminate amount of time. All I knew is that I hoped I wouldn’t be there when he got back.

  Lauren called her parents and got a ride back home. I locked the doors and windows—hey, there was a lock on those after all!—before attempting to sleep. Adrenaline kept me up for a while as I laid down, but the booze and exhaustion helped me eventually drift off.

  When I woke up at around 10am, I wanted to discuss the night’s events with Patrick in the light of day. I texted him to make sure Matt hadn’t returned while I was asleep and spent hours pacing around the building with a bigger knife. Patrick gave me the all-clear, and I walked into his apartment and sat down in the living room.

  It didn’t take more than ten minutes of “wow, last night was fucked up!” conversation before we heard a car pulling up in the parking lot. Paranoid about Matt’s return, I ran to the window and peered out. Sure enough, there was a cop car below us. The back door opened, and Matt stepped out. We never saw the officer who was behind the wheel, as he drove away down the alley as soon as Matt shut the door. Leaving a presumably still-drunk Matt at my building and taking off felt comparable to squeezing a bull through my front door, poking him in the ass with a hot branding iron, and saying “Have fun with this!”

  Not expecting to encounter Matt this soon, I had to quickly consider my options. Ideally, I’d leave the area for several hours to give him a chance to sober up and settle down a bit before we talked. This was impossible because I was on the second floor, with only one staircase that led up or down. Considering the circumstances, I figured that my best option would be to calmly sit in his apartment—accompanied by Patrick and his sanity—and attempt to have an adult conversation about the incident when Matt came through his now-broken door. I expected him to be drunk-ish and belligerent, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe spending a few hours in a holding cell would have given him some time to reflect on his actions and feel sorry for them. He’d probably enter the apartment with his head hanging low, offering a hungover “I’m sorry, man,” and things would go right back to the status quo.

  BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

  “RYCKERT! OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

  Maybe I had been too optimistic.

  Matt was downstairs, loudly banging on my front door and windows. It was far too early for this déjà vu. The tone in his voice as he continued to yell made it clear that this was the worst-case scenario. He sounded just as enthusiastic about murdering me as he had in the middle of the night, only now he was way more pissed since I had called the cops on him. It was a great situation.

  In that moment, my brain went into self-preservation mode and ditched every option except for one: hide under a bed and call the damn cops again.

  “Keep him occupied for a bit,” I told Patrick as I sprinted into his empty bedroom.

  My beer gut kept me from comfortably sliding under the bed, and I made a quick mental note to add “hiding under things more easily to avoid getting murdered” to my list of reasons that I should lose some weight. Once I had shuffled myself underneath the bed far enough to keep any appendages from sticking out, I called 911 for the second time in about six hours.

  “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “You just dropped off my friend after he tried to stab me, and I’m pretty sure that he still wants to kill me. Can you pick him back up?”

  With cops on their way, I silently and uncomfortably remained under the bed while Matt entered the apartment screaming about how badly he was going to fuck me up. Patrick did a great job of stalling and saying that he didn’t know where I was, so Matt went back downstairs, assuming I was still in my apartment. From upstairs, I heard him fruitlessly banging on my front door until a car pulled up. The knocking stopped, and I hoped that the same cop who had just dropped Matt off was the one tasked with picking him right back up again.

  Matt was shuffled off to jail again, and I figured that I should probably take advantage of this brief window in which he was temporarily unable to kill me. I thanked Patrick for keeping Matt busy, then hopped in my car and drove to the safe haven of Lauren’s family home. She had explained the events of the night to her mother and father, and they told me that I could stay as long as I wanted.

  Even though I had managed to get some sleep earlier, I was still exhausted from all the stress. A slight hangover didn’t help matters, so I took a couple of ibuprofen and collapsed on Lauren’s living room couch. For the next few hours, two gigantic black labs were constantly licking at my face or jumping on the couch as I attempted to rest. Under normal conditions, this would have been super annoying. In the moment, however, anything that didn’t include the possibility of multiple stab wounds felt like a step up.

  Staying at Lauren’s place forever wasn’t an option, so I went back home later that night. Patrick let me know that Matt was upstairs in his apartment and not happy, but that he seemed to be a few levels removed from “murdero
us rage” by now. I didn’t fear for my immediate death anymore, and figured that I’d wait for Matt to make the first move toward reestablishing contact and discussing the situation.

  That never happened. For about a week or so, I had zero contact with him. I hoped that he’d attempt to mend fences soon, as we were both set to attend a quickly approaching birthday party for a mutual friend. Talking to him about the incident during the party didn’t seem ideal, but things were clearly heading in that direction.

  At the party, Matt avoided making eye contact with me for at least five or six drinks. He seemed to be in a cheery mood after that, so I approached him and we started chatting about our usual assortment of topics. With the conversation staying friendly, it seemed like a good time to clear the air.

  “So are we cool?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, after the whole thing last week.”

  “I don’t know, man. I didn’t do anything wrong, and you sent me to jail for it.”

  This conversation clearly wouldn’t bear any fruit, and things didn’t get any better when his girlfriend approached us and took his side. I tried to calmly talk to her about what had happened, but she had clearly bought into Matt’s confusing “I tried to go downstairs to hang out with them and he called the cops on me” story. No matter how many times I attempted to explain how that version of the story made absolutely no sense, they weren’t budging.

  We obviously disagreed on what happened that night, but we almost immediately got back to our normal drinking routine together. I knew that any conversation about the knife incident wouldn’t go anywhere, and he certainly didn’t seem to have any interest in discussing it further. He still lived directly above me and we’d had a good relationship for years prior, so I wasn’t going to let one fluke night involving a knife almost sliding between my ribs get in the way of a good friendship.

  One of our regular haunts was Louise’s, a no-frills bar that spoke strongly to my college self with an unpretentious crowd and 32-ounce schooners of beer for $1.75. Many of my other friends wanted to go to Brothers or Quinton’s or any of the other bars on the main drag of Massachusetts Street that catered to the frat/sorority crowd. I hated every second of being at those bars, so I always pushed for the place with the $1.75 schooners and classic rock.

  My love of these schooners led to an awkward moment with my landlord, who also happened to own Louise’s. At the time, my apartment was filled with dumb things that I had stolen from various bars. My IHOP rug greeted people when they came in and my bathroom wall was covered with numerous crappy plastic clocks, all set to different world cities like a NORAD control center.

  Something about those schooner glasses was super appealing to me. They seemed far too large for their price, and the curved glass made me feel like I was drinking my Milwaukee's Best Light out of a medieval goblet. I wanted to utilize them outside of the setting of one bar, so I started swiping them from Louise’s whenever I was there with a group that included a girl with a large enough purse. In the hustle of people leaving, I’d have the girl tuck away a schooner so that I could add it to my collection.

  After a few months, my apartment was riddled with these easily identifiable schooners (to my knowledge, no other bar in the city used them). One hungover Saturday morning, I was roused from my sleep by someone banging on the door. I shuffled across the living room in my pajamas to answer it, and was greeted by my landlord. He needed to talk to me about the electricity meter or new plans for the parking lot or some other thing that I wasn’t particularly concerned about in my current state.

  Halfway through explaining whatever it was to me, he glanced over my shoulder and scanned the room a bit. A slight nod later, he cut his talk short and headed to the next unit of the building. A few days later, I found a package with my name on it sitting in front of my door. I opened it up to find a shirt from Louise’s, along with a note that read “I get the feeling that you’re a regular. Enjoy the shirt.” I started wearing the shirt frequently, and stopped swiping my landlord’s schooners at last call.

  Things between Matt and me were friendly but slightly uneasy around this point. We were back to our bar routine, although I’d typically stick to talking to Patrick or Lauren while Matt stayed around his girlfriend. The dam seemed to break during one Saturday night at Louise’s in which the subject of Star Wars came up after many schooners. This was 2006, so the prequels had already disappointed everyone and we were still years from any news about the new episodes to come.

  Enthusiastic Star Wars banter went on among our crew throughout the night, with the usual talking points of the prequels sucking, Jar Jar being terrible, debates on whether Episode III was actually any good, etc. When our discussions got to the original trilogy, our drunken enthusiasm hit a fever pitch. None of us had watched Episodes IV, V, and VI in years, and our conversation turned into a ton of “Man, remember how cool it was when Luke was getting trained on Dagobah? Oh, and Lando was cool as hell! Man, Empire was great. So was the end of Jedi.”

  We reminisced about the movies long enough for me to offer a proposal: let’s all go back to my apartment after last call, drink for the rest of the night, and watch the entire original trilogy back-to-back-to-back. Matt seemed on board at first, but his girlfriend went into one of her trademark drunken fits of drama, and he had to tend to that for the rest of the night. Patrick was always smart enough to call it quits and drink some water after last call, so he wasn’t chomping at the bit at the concept of drinking for seven more hours.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it myself, and it’s going to be great.”

  Last call came, and we settled up our bills. I got home and switched into my pajamas the second I walked in the door. Tonight was all about pure comfort, watching good movies, and getting blindingly drunk. I was on a brief Guinness kick and had my fridge stocked with materials for making Black and Tans. Before popping in A New Hope, I prepared one using that weird spoon trick that I never fully understood, and settled in for a long night of nostalgia and lightsaber fights.

  As I expected, watching A New Hope after a long night of drinking was great. I was about three Black and Tans deep by the end of it—on top of the numerous schooners I had ingested at the bar—and I made another as I popped in The Empire Strikes Back and watched the Battle of Hoth. I was drunk as all hell, but the nostalgia and booze made for a tremendously fun night. Every little scene and piece of dialogue was the best thing in the world to me, and I couldn’t wait to toss Return of the Jedi into my PlayStation 3 next.

  I did just that, and kept up with my pacing of three or four Black and Tans per movie. Considering that I had been slamming giant schooners all night before this cavalcade of Black and Tans, I had probably drunk enough beers to fill one of those helicopters that dump water onto forest fires. Despite my loopy mental state, I loved everything from the Sarlacc Pit to the build toward the climactic ending.

  In the midst of my mental haze, I thought about how great it was to have hung out with Matt that night without any worries of a drunken force of nature bounding down the steps and lunging through my window with knife in hand. There was still some uneasiness, but chatting with him at the bars and sharing Star Wars memories made me think that we were on the right track to being good again.

  Hurricane Matt may have been tamed at this point, but I couldn’t have predicted the other, much more literal storm that was about to make itself known. Near the end of Return of the Jedi, I started hearing loud crashes and what sounded like explosions coming from all around me. My surround sound system was far too cheap to be presenting the audio of the assault on the second Death Star with the booming clarity that I was hearing.

  I was so close to the end of this three-film marathon, but I had to pause and figure out what the hell was going on. Sure enough, the booming continued and actually intensified once I stopped the movie. I shuffled to the front door to see if I could tell what was causing the noises. It was far too loud to be trash tru
cks, as it sounded more like full-sized trees crashing down into the road.

  Upon opening the door, the first thing I noticed was an angry-looking sky that was a shade of dark orange. Intense wind hit my face and leaves blew into my apartment. The real warning sign that something was up came when I looked across the alleyway to see dozens of shingles being ripped straight off of the roof of a neighboring house. I’ve had plenty of times in my life in which I’ve felt my brain has just shut off entirely, but never more than in this moment. I was standing in my pajamas after drinking for close to a dozen hours, and the apocalypse seemed to be knocking on my front door. A power line crashed to the ground halfway down the block, which snapped me out of my stupor. I should probably get inside.

  Years of living in Kansas had taught me that when a tornado is coming, you get down into the basement as fast as possible. My ground-floor apartment had nothing of the sort, so my first instinct was to lie in bed and put a couple of pillows over my head and groin. I didn’t know if this thing was gonna make the building collapse on itself, but if it did, I didn’t want to get concussed and I didn’t want debris landing on my balls.

  Everything passed before too long, and I found out the next day that it had been a microburst that had wreaked havoc on the town. Local weathermen explained this as something like a giant bucket of water in the sky that gets dumped out all at once, causing intense winds to rush out in every direction. Power was out almost citywide, trees were down across campus, roofs had been torn off of buildings for blocks, and class was cancelled for a week due to the massive damage done to the area. During all of these nights, many houses around town hosted keg parties that were surrounded by downed trees and lit by campfires.