They called it 'Collateral Damage.'

"He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many particular features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea.

To this dilatory notation must be imputed the false relations of travellers, where there is no imaginable motive to deceive. They trusted to memory, what cannot be trusted safely to the eye, and told by guess what a few hours before they had known with certainty."

~Samuel Johnson: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

In 1985 I was living in an apartment just off West Michigan Avenue in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The place was low-rent, 1/2 HUD housing, and was a hodge-podge of race, color, creed, gender, disability, age, and ethics. Most of my neighbors bought dope from the rest, and sold it to each other when times got hard.

IN January 1986, times got real hard. Somebody had sold some, let's just say, abominably-less-than-pristine cocaine to someone who didn't live in the complex. The customers were most definitely not happy.

They weren't thinking very well, either. since 20 years have gone by, please forgive my lack of memory concerning the numbers; I will say that the purveyors of said blow-a-la-roach-powder, baking soda, and FSM-knows-what-all lived in apartment #1200, which was on the other side of the complex from where I stored my stuff all day, and my bones (and the stuff that holds them together) at night, behind a nice Schlag lock. I also kept those bones (and accessories) stoned as often and as intensely as was possible on my student budget; being an active part of the neighborhood brain-candy store helped, too.

I digress...

Apartment #2200 was about 75 feet from my bedroom window. At about 2 AM, the gunfire started; the double-pane plate glass balcony doors then the single-pane plate-glass windows of the two bedrooms blew into large shards with not-so-small holes at their edges, shattering and spiderwebbing and making wierd scraping sounds as they tried to outdo each other in their frantic efforts to obey the law of gravity, I barely noticed. I was busy trying to be awake and see something through the muzzle flashes - it's amazing how long a bunch of hot light can hang in the air...

the perps fired more than 50 rounds into the wrong apartment that night, the home of a single mom and her small daughter (I think that's right), and then the tiresqueealing began, and the big block whater-the-fuck-it-was left the premises and, for about 30 seconds (30 eons, more like) it was silent, save for the doppling down of the getaway car fading into ignominy.

The people in #2200 were not hurt. A fish tank in the apartment behind #2200 was shattered. If I'm remembering correctly, 20-gauge, 9mm, and .410 shot were picked out of the walls, both inside and outside the apartment.

The perps were (to my knowledge) never caught.