My Dad let me watch Die Hard for the first time when I was 4 years old. I became obsessed with John McClane. I watched the movie every day it seems. I wasn’t supposed to tell my Mom that he let me watch it. I knew I wanted to become a police officer. I would wear a white tank top and get it all dirty and run around the house. For Halloween, I dressed up as John McClane for like 4 years in a row. We taped a gun to my back, and I walked around with a plastic toy mp5 with an orange tip. Instead of trick or treat, I’d say YIPPEEE KI AYY. He told me to never say the last word of that phrase, and I understood it was a bad word, and that I shouldn’t say it. This was the early 90s, so no one cared that a kid was running around with a gun taped to his back, or carrying a sub machine gun type gun. It was a small town, and everyone knew me. My Mom hadn’t seen the movie, so she didn’t even know what it was all about. I would practice ripping the gun taped to my back off and shooting at imaginary targets and then blowing on the tip of the gun just like in the movie. Every time I saw an elevator in a building, I wanted to get in it, or I’d imagine a guy sitting in a chair with the now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho written on it. When I was 8, the last year I was allowed to dress up as John McClane, was when we got to go do Halloween by ourselves. Or at least our parents didn’t walk with us to each house. My friends had seen the movie by then, because I had it on VHS and we’d watch it all the time. My friend dared me to drop the motherfucker part at this one older lady’s house. Even though I knew it was a bad word, I was no longer 4, I was 8, and thought it would be funny. I didn’t fully understand it. We went up to her door, and I knocked. When she opened the door, I said it. YIPPEE KI YAY MOTHER FUCKER, while holding out my bag of candy. What I saw next was a look of horror that I hadn’t seen come over a face since nineteen eighty eight when John McClane threw Hans Gruber off the Nakatomi Plaza, and plummeted four hundred ninety three feet into a concrete slab.