One Brick Short

There’s a thousand stories in the naked city, although there’d be hundreds less if people just wore their clothes, and the recent paintball escapade is just one.

It goes like this, according to local blog cvillain.com: Round about dark Monday night or Tuesday morning, shooters unknown plastered paintballs throughout the Belmont neighborhood, tagging cars, dogs, houses and small children breaking curfew. When upset homeowners discovered decorated windows and walls, the city’s finest were summoned.

It seems, however, that shooting a house or cat or other inanimate object is, in fact, not an act of vandalism. That, at least, is what the cops purportedly professed to the homeowners. While that seemed implausible, the fact that the perpatrators would shoot a neighborhood to pastel and back using pink paint indicated they were nefarious, if not lacking in good taste. No doubt about it, I needed more information and that’s why I’m here in La Taza Coffee Shop in Belmont’s left ventrical, waiting to meet people I’ve only met online, people who could easily be predators, lulling innocent reporters into a some evil, unspeakable badness.

It’s OK. I’m a professional. I carry a pen.

In case these cvillains need protection—anyone vicious enouigh to vandalize with pink paint is most certainly the vindictive type—I’ve assured my inflamed sources that their faces will be digitally remastered and their voices disguised so readers cannot recognize them.

And so I wait. The time to meet goes past by 10 minutes, 15, 20, 25, 30, touchdown! Somewhere in the wait a man enters. He smiles and approaches. “This is from a friend,” he says, or something to that effect, and hands me a brick.

That’s all I get out of my wait, besides a good cup of decaf mocha. I have no interviews. I have no story. I do, however, have a full load.

Ooops ... I did.