IQ(47)

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 f*cking 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.

“Because this is America,” Uncle Hugo said, “and sooner or later there’s going to be another mass shooting and what happens after every mass shooting? The gun control nuts come crawling out of the woodwork talking about banning this and banning that and the next thing you know everybody and their cousin wants a gun. Well, if they can’t afford a new one I’ll sell them an old one. Something for everybody.”

Many of the preowned guns hadn’t been inventoried yet so it was easy for Magnus to borrow a few. He’d hike into the desert and try them out. What he discovered was that he had an honest-to-God talent for shooting things. He could pick lizards off a rock at fifty feet, hit a rabbit on the run, and shoot crows right out of the sky with a pistol. The Colt Delta Elite was his favorite. It shot a 10mm FBI load that had a flatter trajectory and longer range than a 9mm. Magnus set up his own shooting range and could have passed the Marine Corps’s rifle and pistol tests and been certified by the American Sniper Association.

But what was the point of being good with all those cool guns if nobody knew? He started showing the guns off to the Caltrans workers and truck drivers behind a strip club in Redlands. Sometimes he’d take a bunch of guys out in the desert to shoot watermelons and soda bottles. It was a hoot but afterward nobody wanted to get a beer.

Magnus started selling the guns. His prices were low and he had a lot of customers. He traded a Heckler & Koch submachine for a six-year-old pit bull named Carver’s Lucky Seven. The dog had a long pedigree of game-bred fighting dogs. Magnus and Lucky slept in the same bed and took showers together. Magnus ate fast food but Lucky got grass-fed organic beef, free-range chicken, and low-glycemic vegetables. In the evenings they’d go hunting for coyotes, Magnus shooting them and Lucky finishing them off. Magnus stopped going to the movies because he didn’t want to leave Lucky alone for three hours, and he only had sex with a hooker if Lucky liked her. Uncle Hugo loved the dog, saying it was the perfect mascot for a gun store.

Things were going good until Debbie Bellweather, the busybody bookkeeper, noticed a mismatch between the number of preowned guns purchased and the number waiting to be put in the system. She told Uncle Hugo, who put two and two together and called the police. Magnus was convicted of grand theft and selling guns without a license. He took a plea deal, got a ten-thousand-dollar fine and an eighteen-month sentence at CSP Solano. First day in, he mouthed off to a guard named Studdard and got the shit beat out of him.

While he was inside, Magnus boarded Lucky with Al Gunderson at Sentinel Pit Bulls in Fergus. He called every chance he got but the old man wouldn’t accept the calls because they were collect.

Magnus’s cellmate at Solano was Jimmy Bonifant, a drug dealer based in LA. Magnus told Jimmy everybody called him Skip and he explained about getting busted by Uncle Hugo and Debbie Bellweather and how they’d be sorry once he got out. He told Jimmy about the guns and how good he was and how he could have passed all the Marine Corps tests and could shoot crows out of the sky with a Delta Elite that shot 10mm rounds that had a flatter trajectory and longer range than a 9mm. He gave Jimmy his email address: [email protected]. “Easy to remember, right?” Magnus said. He asked Jimmy for an email address but Jimmy said he didn’t have one.