Life Abroad Starts With Taking the Shot

I was once held up at gunpoint while working at a bank. I was also once shot at.

Well, technically not at. More near. But close enough that police removed a bullet from the backseat of our car, which feels like we are splitting hairs here.

We’ll get to that.

When I was 25 and had just come out, I moved to Minneapolis. Can you believe I was 25 when I came out? Late bloomer. Absolutely nobody was surprised. I basically burst out of the closet expecting a ticker-tape parade only to discover everyone standing around like, “Yes, Rich. We know. Would you like us to pretend to gasp?”

Like many of my moves, I had no real plan, just an alarming amount of confidence for someone with absolutely no evidence things were going to work out.

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Young and dumb, I decided I would take out enough student loans to move into a student apartment while I attended the Art Institute. The loans would cover the bills while I found a job.

Financial planning by a 25-year-old gay man newly released into the wild. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a bit, it turns out.

I went to TCF Bank in the Minneapolis City Center to open a bank account. This was July 2001. The manager asked where I was going to school and where I worked. I told her I had just started at the Art Institute and was looking for a job.

Coincidentally, she was hiring. My attempt to open a checking account somehow became a job interview, which somehow became employment at the bank for $12 an hour. I walked in looking for somewhere to deposit money and walked out getting the bank to pay me. Honestly, winning.

A month later, I met a guy. We moved in together.

Yes. Immediately. Please remember I had only recently been released from the closet and apparently had confused “coming out” with “making every bad decision available in the Gay Starter Pack.”

I was absolutely certain he was “The One.” He was, in fact, the one true pain in my ass for the following year. But that is not today’s story.

We moved a good 45 minutes outside downtown Minneapolis, where my banking job was, so every morning around 6 a.m. I would take the car and drive to the Mall of America. I would park there for free and take the bus downtown.

This was my financial strategy. Student loans. Free mall parking. Public transportation. Boyfriend I barely knew. Suze Orman would have driven directly into Lake Minnetonka.

I was also exhausted all the time, so I regularly fell asleep on the bus, missed my stop, woke up somewhere beyond downtown and had to backtrack to work. Eventually I’d arrive early, tuck myself into a corner of the skyway outside the bank and go back to sleep.

My manager would walk up like a mother discovering her toddler asleep behind the sofa. “Rich. It is time to go to work.” I would wake up and begin my day. Again.

Over time, that branch closed, another opened, and I finally moved out of the apartment with my loser ex. I traded him for the two Baptist women and their child who lived next door.

I realize every new paragraph of this story sounds like I am making increasingly questionable choices.

The Baptist gals hated my ex too and were thrilled to help me escape. Against all odds, we made a wonderful little household. They became great friends to me while I saved enough money to finally get my own place. Life was slowly coming together.

I was working constantly, putting myself through school one class at a time and eventually got a great apartment in Uptown that I could barely afford.

Which, in your twenties, is how you know you’ve made it. If you can pay rent but opening the refrigerator causes mild financial anxiety, congratulations. You are thriving.

As I did most Sundays, I was at the bank working. Sundays were quiet. It was just me, another teller and the assistant manager, who spent most of her day in the back.

We had our normal trickle of customers. My teller friend was helping a woman, and when she finished, she went into the back to speak with the manager.

That left me alone up front. The next customer walked toward me. A man wearing glasses and gloves.

Gloves. Inside a bank. Yep. We both know where this is going.

He walked up to my station and slipped me a note that said something along the lines of: “You’re being robbed. Give me all your money. I have a gun.”

I looked up. He pointed at me. “Do you understand? You have ten seconds.”

Then he started counting. “Ten... nine... eight... seven...”

This is where time does that strange thing where everything moves both incredibly slowly and impossibly fast.

I was working in more of a sales capacity that day, so I didn’t have my own cash drawer. I had no pile of money sitting there to hand him. I only had the machine that automatically dispensed cash for transactions.

I tried explaining this to the armed gentleman who, understandably, was not particularly interested in learning about the bank’s internal teller infrastructure.

“My coworker is just in the back. She’ll be right back. We’ll give you what you want.”

He continued counting.

“Six... five...”

So I did what any rational person staring down a potentially armed bank robber would do. Something incredibly stupid.

I deliberately jammed the machine.

I requested too much money at once, which triggered the machine’s security system and locked the whole thing down.

I looked at him. “I have nothing.” And, I really didn’t. I didn’t even have a dye pack to slip him. Eventually I found $80 sitting there from a recent deposit, handed it to him and showed him the locked machine. “This is all I have.”

He grabbed the $80 and ran.

Eighty dollars.

He threatened to shoot me for roughly the cost of dinner and two cocktails in Paris.

The second he disappeared, I ran too, straight into the back room, where I promptly lost my mind.

Later that day, the FBI arrived. I was interviewed what felt like 100 times. They asked the same questions in slightly different ways, checking whether my story changed.

What did he look like?

What did he say?

What did I remember?

What didn’t I remember?

Did I see the gun?

What was he wearing?

Meanwhile my brain was like, “Sir, I barely remember what I was wearing. I was busy trying not to die over $80.”

For the next few weeks, I slept with the lights on. I wouldn’t go out alone at night. I was constantly looking over my shoulder.

Had he followed me?

Did he know where I lived?

Would he come back?

The bank very kindly asked if I wanted free therapy.

No. What I wanted was a raise and witness protection. Preferably both.

A few weeks later, they caught him robbing the bank next door. Apparently my $80 had not provided the financial freedom he was hoping for.

I quit the bank a few months later. That was enough banking for me.

Fast forward to 2015. Yuri and I were living in San Francisco and didn’t own a car. Like many people in the city, we used Zipcar whenever we wanted to escape San Francisco for an adventure.

By “adventure,” on this particular evening I mean IKEA in Oakland.

Nothing says romance like Swedish meatballs followed by a disagreement about whether you actually need another KALLAX shelf.

The Zipcar garage was just down the street from our apartment in the Tenderloin. If you know San Francisco, we lived at Ellis and Leavenworth. The true heart of the TL.

You would assume that if I were ever going to get shot, have a needle launched at me or be peed on, possibly in some sort of Tenderloin triathlon, it would happen there.

But we were known residents. The street folks mostly left us alone, and honestly, most of them wanted to be left alone too. We stepped around people, carried our groceries home and went about our lives. That was the neighborhood.

This particular night, though, we had finished our IKEA shopping and were leaving the parking lot. Yuri was driving.

We were queued up with the other cars waiting to exit onto the main road when we noticed two groups of kids fighting. They were yelling at each other across the line of cars. You know, kids being kids. Except apparently these particular kids had chosen the deluxe American childhood package.

We pulled forward to become the next car waiting to exit.

And suddenly our car exploded. Not metaphorically.

BOOM.

A sonic blast hit the car so violently that Yuri and I both thought lightning had struck us. Which would have been remarkable considering it wasn’t raining.

Naturally, I jumped out of the car. Apparently after surviving a bank robbery, my emergency instincts had evolved into “go investigate the explosion.”

A man from the car behind us ran toward me.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so. Something hit the car.”

He looked at me.

“Your car was shot. They have a gun.”

Oh. Wonderful.

That was when I noticed everyone around us scattering.

I jumped back into the car.

“GO!”

Yuri drove us to another shopping center, where we called the police. They arrived, inspected the car and found the bullet in the backseat. The bullet hole was only inches from where I had been sitting.

The police took our report, gave us paperwork for Zipcar and sent us on our way. You know, just another relaxing trip to IKEA in America.

Lamp.

Meatballs.

Shelving unit.

Gunfire.

We called Zipcar and explained what had happened. Their response was essentially, “That’s terrible. Glad you’re alive. Unfortunately, you didn’t purchase the additional insurance, so you’ll be responsible for the damage.”

Excuse me? I did not damage your car. I did not shoot your car. At no point during our IKEA excursion had I pulled out a firearm and thought, “You know what this Toyota needs? Ventilation.”

If I had caused the damage, fine. But I refused to pay for this. In fact, the more I thought about it, the angrier I became. What if I had simply returned the car and said nothing? How many people would have rented it afterward and never noticed the bullet hole?

I was being financially punished for almost being shot and being honest about it. Absolutely not.

For more than a month, I went round after round with Zipcar. They threatened collections. I told them to go for it. We reached the point in customer service negotiations where everyone involved had clearly placed everyone else on a list.

Then one day I had an idea. Find the CEO of Zipcar. Her information had to be somewhere online. It was. So I called her. Apparently my lifelong response to encountering a locked door is to wander around the building until I find an unlocked window.

She actually called me back one evening from a taxi on her way home from the office. She couldn’t believe the story.

I explained the shooting, the police report, the bullet in the backseat and the fact that I was now somehow being billed because someone else had decided to use our rental car as a backstop. She agreed it was ridiculous.

She told me I would hear from customer service within a few days, all the charges would be removed, and she was glad Yuri and I were safe.

And they were. Gone. One phone call.

I remember hanging up feeling incredibly grateful that she had listened, but also thinking about how many people would have simply paid the bill because some company told them they had to. Sometimes the answer is no because you asked the wrong person. (Much like France I might add.)

Sometimes you have to keep pushing. Sometimes you have to call the CEO from your living room. You have to shoot your shot. Metaphorically. Obviously this essay has already contained enough literal shooting.

Which brings me to this morning. My neighbor messaged me, “Did you just hear that gunshot?”

Two years into living in France, I replied, “It was probably a transformer that blew.”

Then I realized what I had just said. I now live somewhere that when I hear a loud BANG, my brain doesn’t immediately go to gun.

Electrical equipment.

Construction.

A car backfiring.

Someone dropping something.

French bureaucracy finally collapsing under the weight of its own paperwork.

Gunshot is somewhere much farther down the list. Honestly, is a relief. I asked Yuri if he had heard anything walking Zelda. He hadn’t.

Then he looked at me and said, “Have you ever written about the time we were shot at at IKEA?”

And that is why today’s story is brought to you by Yuri Kagan.

But I always like to think there is some purpose hiding inside our misadventures, even the ones that happened long before France.

And then it hit me.

Not the bullet, the point.

I was recently asked during an interview what I would tell someone who was thinking about moving abroad.

My answer was simple. Get out of your own way. So often, we are the thing standing between ourselves and the life we say we want. After thinking about the bank, IKEA, Zipcar, Minneapolis, San Francisco and eventually France, I think I would answer the question differently now.

Shoot your shot. Shoot it on behalf of yourself.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been doing well in life, succeeding by every normal measurement, and then announced I was changing something.

People would look at me like I had just walked into Thanksgiving dinner and announced I was joining the circus.

“Why would you do that?”

“You have everything going for you.”

“You worked so hard to get here.”

“You finally have what you wanted.”

And they were right. I did.

The job. The money. The house. The friends. The career. The popularity. The comfortable life I had worked incredibly hard to build.

And then I wanted something else. So I tried something new. Then something new again. Until eventually “something new” became France.

None of those decisions came with guarantees. I just kept taking the shot.

So if you are reading this as someone who already shot yours, congratulations. You are doing the hard stuff. Maybe you moved abroad. Maybe you changed careers. Maybe you left the relationship. Maybe you started the business. Maybe you finally admitted that the life everyone keeps congratulating you for is making you miserable.

Whatever it was, you aimed at something different and fired.

And if you are still dreaming about it, here are a few things I have learned.

Stop waiting to feel ready. Ready is mostly a myth we invented so procrastination could wear business casual. There will always be another reason to wait. More money. Better French. A different job. The kids getting older. The stock market improving. Mercury leaving whatever house it apparently broke into.

At some point, preparation quietly becomes procrastination. You can spend ten years getting ready for the life you could have already been living. Shoot.

Aim at the life you actually want. Not the life that looks responsible on paper. Not the life your parents understand. Not the life that makes your LinkedIn profile look like you were assembled in a laboratory by Human Resources. If I had built my life exclusively around decisions my mother immediately approved of, I would absolutely not be sitting in southern France writing this.

You think my mom heard “We’re moving to France” and responded, “What a sensible and financially prudent next chapter”? Absolutely not. Moving abroad sometimes begins with admitting something incredibly uncomfortable. The life you successfully built may no longer be the life you want.

That doesn’t make building it a mistake. It means you changed. Aim again. Shoot.

Bet on your ability to figure shit out. You do not need to know exactly how you will navigate visas, doctors, schools, taxes, banking, insurance and the French language before you leave. Because I have news for you. You can study all of it for five years and France will still eventually hand you a form you have never seen before and request another form proving that the first form exists.

You need enough information to begin. Then you need enough confidence in yourself to believe that when the next problem appears, you will figure it out. Look backward. You probably already have a lifetime of evidence that you do exactly that.

I survived bad boyfriends, student loans, a bank robber, the FBI, a bullet through a Zipcar and IKEA on a Saturday. Surely I can find the correct window at the préfecture. Shoot.

Accept that the bullet isn’t going to fly perfectly straight. You might choose the wrong city. Your first apartment might be a dump. Your French will absolutely embarrass you at some point. I once accidentally asked a man if he had a “pussy” instead of asking if he had a cat. So yes, things will happen.

You may discover the dream needs editing once you actually live inside it. That is okay. Missing the bullseye isn’t failure. You fired. Now adjust your aim. Preferably before speaking French to another unsuspecting cat owner. Shoot again.

Remember, not shooting is a choice too. We tend to imagine staying put as the safe, neutral option. It isn’t. Doing nothing is still doing something. Every year you don’t make the move is still a year of your life being spent.

There is risk in leaving. There is also risk in staying. Sometimes the bigger gamble isn’t moving to another country. It is waking up ten years later, sitting in the exact same place, wondering what would have happened if you had pulled the trigger.

I know a couple who moved to France a little over a year ago. It didn’t work for them. They’re moving back to the United States. And you know what? That’s allowed. They tried. They got their answer. Going home is an option. Changing your mind is an option. Choosing another country is an option. Admitting “Well, this was terrible” and reversing the U-Haul is an option.

But you don’t get to know whether the dream works unless you actually try living inside it. Shoot.

Moral of the story: You don’t shoot your shot because you’re confident it will hit. You shoot your shot because you’ve finally become confident you’ll survive wherever it lands.

That’s the part I think we misunderstand. Confidence isn’t knowing everything will work out. It is knowing that if it doesn’t, you will. The shot might land in Minneapolis with a terrible boyfriend and two Baptist women next door. It might land behind a bank counter with a man counting backward from ten.

It might land in an IKEA parking lot with a literal bullet in your Zipcar and customer service explaining that apparently surviving gunfire was not included in the basic rental package.

It might land in France, where you suddenly discover that the person you spent years becoming isn’t the final version of you after all. You adjust. You learn. You fill out another form. You murder the French language in front of innocent civilians. You try again.

Eventually you realize the goal was never to become fearless enough to take the shot. The goal was to trust yourself enough to know that wherever the hell it lands, you’ll figure out what to do next.

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If this made you laugh, restack it. Consider it your shot.

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