The first time I maced myself was an accident
The first time I maced myself was an accident. I’d been chasing a girl with a particularly volatile ex who had a penchant for firearms. A gun shop owner who bought a lot of Klingong makeup kits from my comic shop, which I think were for playing sex games with his wife, hooked me up with some genuine DEA pepper spray. “If he comes around, shoot this shit in his face. He can’t hit what he can’t see.”
Sound logic. So, I kept the little canister in my pocket. Until I sat down on one of the shop’s bar top level stools, heard a SPSHHHT, and felt something wet in my pocket. And, ran screaming to the bathroom to splash gallons of water onto the inferno formerly known as my crotch.
The SECOND time I maced myself occurred on a fine, Arkansas evening at my friend Grant’s house, and begins like many of my stories, with the phrase, “So, me and Grant and Sam got a bottle apiece of Captain Morgan’s.”
Grant had recently procured a Super Soaker, which he utilized by sitting four feet away and prefacing shots in the face with, “Feel the rain.” After several such barrages, I reached in my bag, “Look, you do that one more time, I’ll fucking mace you.” To which my best friend Sam replied from a fetal position on the couch, “Oh, Erik, you’ve had that for two years, it’s not even good anymore.”
Uh oh. A challenge. Never good to combine with Captain Morgan’s and Mace.
So, I did what any red blooded art major would do, and said, “Oh yeah,” then sprayed it up and down my left arm.
After a few seconds of initial non-burning, I wisely followed up the previous event with, “I’ll be damned, it did go bad,” and SNIFFED my arm like Tony Montana doing a rail.
Which disproved Sam’s theory with a hailstorm of tears, snot and sneezing cats.
The moral of the story? Keep me away from firearms.
