Back in high school, Skip was a long list of nots. Not an athlete, not an honor student, not in drama club, not a banger, a doper, a techno-geek, a hipster, a surfer, and he was definitely not cool. What he was, was anonymous. A fringe kid that walked the hallways pretending he had somewhere to go and laughing while he talked on his cell phone to an imaginary homie. He told the other kids he surfed at First Point in Malibu and that his girlfriend was a cheerleader at another school and that his dad, whom he’d never met, got a Purple Heart in Iraq. None of it helped and neither did his name. Magnus Vestergard. What else could his nickname be besides the Maggot? He often thought his life would be completely different if he had a regular name like Jeff, Brian, Bill, or Skip. He liked Skip. It sounded friendly and cheerful. And a different last name. Less foreign and more American. Miller, Parker, Goodman, Hanson.
Everything changed when he saw a video on YouTube. A dork just like him stuck a Roman candle between his butt cheeks and galloped around his driveway with sparks shooting out of him, his friends laughing themselves stupid. It got a quarter of a million hits. A quarter of a million.
Magnus began his own YouTube career the very next day when he was cutting through the alley behind Shop ’n Save and found a dead homeless guy sitting in a wrecked Barcalounger. The guy was wearing wino pants with a huge pee stain around the crotch and tuxedo shoes with no laces. He’d spent his last moments inhaling gas duster, his sooty hand still wrapped around the can. Magnus thought the guy looked a lot like Gilligan from that old TV show. Skinny face, stupid haircut, a big honker, and thick lips. Magnus hunched down next to him with his phone and videoed himself doing an interview, putting a pretend mike up to the guy’s cocked-over head. “What’s up, Gilligan?” he said. “How’s everybody on the island? What’s that? You guys grew some weed? Gee, that’s great. What’s that? Mr. Howell got the munchies, ate a whole coconut, and died? Bummer. So what happened to Mary Ann and Ginger? They hooked up and always walk around naked? Shit, man, I’d buy tickets to see that. You know, there’s something I always wanted to ask you, Gilligan. What’d you do for sex? Wait, say that again? You were hittin’ it with Mrs. Howell? Jesus, what was that like? Fifteen minutes to get her panties off, huh? Wow.”
The kids at school were all over him. Dude, dude, that was crazy! Eeeww, how could you like, do that? You’re a fucking psycho, dude. He was like, really dead? Magnus did more videos. He took a dump on the hood of a cop car and shot a pigeon out of a potato gun. He paid a bag lady to tongue-kiss him and he set fire to an entire lot of Christmas trees. Magnus went from being anonymous to that crazy dude that makes the videos. He got suspended, arrested, was a neighborhood celebrity, but he still didn’t make any friends, even at juvie boot camp.
After Magnus didn’t graduate, he looked for work but nobody would hire him because of the videos. Then his mother convinced her brother-in-law Hugo to take him on. Hugo Vestergard’s Guns America store in San Bernardino was the third-largest gun dealer in California. Magnus was thrilled, like a kid on his birthday and the NRA was throwing him a party. Guns were something he could get into and Guns America was a supermarket of firearms. The store offered the usual selection of Glocks, Smith & Wessons, Berettas, Walthers, Brownings, and Remingtons but Uncle Hugo also carried the S&W .500-caliber handgun, the PS1 pocket shotgun, the Kel-Tec P3AT micropistol, the M110 semiautomatic sniper rifle, and the Chiappa triple-barrel shotgun. Privately, Uncle Hugo liked to say: “If you want to kill somebody with something unusual, come on down.”
Uncle Hugo also kept a large inventory of preowned guns. When the recession hit and people were struggling to make their next mortgage payment they brought in their guns to sell. Uncle Hugo scooped them up for pennies on the dollar.
“Why do you buy so many?” Magnus said.