Safety Was My Priority

Essay for Narratively contest

A remaining t-shirt from the store that closed in 1983.

It was 10 PM and time to close our Indianapolis record store. Gesualdo and I brought our rambunctious toddler, Kyrie, and proceeded through the motions of vacuuming the floors, counting the day’s receipts and wiping down the display cases.

We’d read recent news stories about violence at retail stores when employees carried trash out the back door into their dumpsters. We’d implemented a policy requiring trash to go out the front door and be driven around to the dumpster. People had been killed doing this mundane task, so we were being cautious.

Gesualdo manning the “register.” Sure looks like an adding machine to me.

Buddies Patty and Jerry Campbell and their pal, Steve Creasy with a bag full of vinyl.

I carried the plastic bags to my car and sat behind the wheel of our Chevy Malibu station wagon when I suddenly heard tires screeching across the parking lot. A long white sedan squealed to a halt, parking nose to nose with a Cadillac sedan backed into a parking space in front of the convenience store next door to ours.

The driver and passenger doors sprang open and men jumped out with guns drawn. Just then I noticed a man walking from the head shop down the strip mall and watched the guys from the white car open fire on him.

I scrunched down behind the steering wheel so nobody would see that I’d witnessed the shooting. At that moment, I saw Gesualdo stick his head out the door of our shop with Kyrie toddling behind.

Gesualdo and Kyrie at our tiny home where the FBI interrogated me the next day.

I sprang out of the car and raced to the door screaming, “Get back inside! Someone’s just been shot!”

It turned out the shooting victim was a drug dealer who was arrested and jailed. Those FBI agents changed our life because we added that head shop guy’s smoking paraphernalia to our store’s inventory and went on to enjoy a successful retail store for the next ten years.