The Vocabulary of Guns

71.

I’m too cool for school. Or rather, I’m too cool to ask Terry for ten bucks. Assassins don’t do that, do they? Hell no. They roll large with fat wads of cash and diamond rings big as the Ritz. My pride is of similar dimensions, so instead of being humble and smart, I simply follow Terry’s directions and drive him back home. We say very little. Both of us seem to be more or less satisfied with the events of the morning. We do more before 8 a.m. than most people do all day, indeed. Terry asks me if I’m going to tell JW what we’ve done and I say, Yeah, I guess so. It might make her sleep easier. Cool, he says, and that’s it, we’re at his front door, he shakes my hand like a black man to another black man, then takes his gas can and walks inside his house. Okay, cool. Now I and this Honda and less than a half tank of gas have to get to Washington, Louisiana. My uncle will fill up my car and give me twenty bucks to boot. My aunt will have iced tea in a discolored plastic pitcher, or cold Fanta red in scratchy glass bottles. Maybe some leftover chicken dinner because after all it is Sunday, a day of rest, of leisure, a day to measure your worth and deeds against the words of Him. What would Jesus have done? Easy. He would have simply forgiven them, forgiven Himself and forgiven her. For them, He would have a place in His heart for the contamination of their immortal soul. He would know that those two boys were most probably plundered themselves. Behind almost every rapist is a rape victim. And for Himself, He would have had forgiveness, knowing that there was no way He could have done anything to prevent anything. For her, for JW, He would have had forgiveness for her need to tell it, to speak her secret which in her words, ‘she had to tell someone.’ He would know how powerful that urge is to tell your story. He would understand because He knew how They had altered the story of Himself. How They had used it for Their own desires, for pleasure within this mortal coil.

But I am not Him. I cannot do yet what He has done. I am weak and human and deadly with desires. And my desires have been met. I have succeeded in destroying that image that she put in my mind. I don’t imagine them tearing into her anymore, her mask of pain and shame. No sirree, Bob. Now I see Eric, broken armed and smashed of mug, staggering against a bloody, rusty fence. And when I tire of that image, I see Jamaal, blubbering in front of his mother, shit running in streams down his legs. I see that instead of seeing her, and I am happy with that and I know that He will forgive me for the evil grin dancing across my face as Houston recedes behind me. And now is the day reversed, the flat wet ricey landscape and the double Stuckey’s and the great city of Beaumont with its single tall building, a lonely and abandoned missile silo of a hotel and Orange, Texas with its row of factories that have Japanned the landscape, indeed altered it into moonscape, the black and cinder-colored trees, the lifeless lawns of glassy grass, and then the Sabine is on the horizon, you and the boaters hauling boats and the hunters in their camouflaged trucks and their three-wheelers lashed to the back and the big rigs hauling ass, cutting time, high on Bennies and homemade porn and the kids wave and the teenaged girls show their braces and mama nods and father waves and you are all right and the world is all right and if only the goddamn Saints would win a ballgame today this Sunday would be one for the all timers to all-time about. And you are back in Louisiana now and racing the descending gas gauge and sweating toothpicks and no food in the belly, nothing but coffee and OJ and stomach acid and adrenaline and now, oh now, did the gas gauge just dip again? Shit a mile. So get off the Interstate and take the back roads, there’s a back way to Washington if you can just remember it. But you can’t and you don’t and then you’re turned around, you’ve gone too far north and too far west and at last you see a sign for a place you recognize, Krotz Springs, you know it well, your aunt whom you never met died on the bridge at Krotz Springs, the old one that crosses the Atchafalaya River. And once when you were a boy you stopped in Krotz Springs and you and your brother and your father and stepmother searched the grass at the foot of the bridge for one of the markers that the state hammers in the ground when somebody dies in an automobile crash on state property. But no one could find any at all and your father said, That must be a mistake. Surely dozens of people have been killed on this bridge. But still, it was what it was and you left, you were heading to Washington that time like every time, like this time too, going home to your father’s hometown where the stories all began, where the earth was turned and the first seeds were planted by Mrs. Courvillion and the Junkman and Foot and a hundred thousand lonely walks down the stony hard streets, waiting for youth to dissipate and manhood to arrive. I’m there, baby boy. I’m there mofo. I’m there with a bullet and I am a number one stunner. Look out for me because I’m riding high and fast and in a few minutes, well another hour I’ll be darkening the doorways of my Washington home, walking down Doucette Street and sipping sweet tea.

The car runs out of gas about ten minutes later. As I get out and start to walk, it begins to rain. And now the hallucinations must begin. What was dream will become nightmare. Just as the hero thinks all is well, the day is saved, he has safely reached an Ithaca of the mind, he finds himself once more compelled to get out in the weather and hunker down with his jacket over his head, disguised perhaps, and trudge through the rain in the general direction of his fellow man. He’ll put a thumb out, ridiculous of course, no one in their right mind picks up hitchhikers these days, and no one in their right mind expects to get a ride. Therefore when the beat to shit Nova slows and then pulls over on the shoulder going the other way and the driver rolls down the window of the dingy white car and says, “Where you going?” you think it’s some kind of red neck joke. But you answer, say “Krotz Springs. I’m outta gas,” and he says something to the guy in the passenger seat and then the driver says, “Hop in, we’ll give you a ride,” and you can’t believe it, saved, saved again, another messiah, or in this case two, to help an unlucky voyager on his last voyage home. So you run across the highway and climb in the backseat behind the passenger and you sink into the sweaty dank filthiness of their car and you say to yourself, Thank God. I thought I’d have to walk forever.

And so I sit back and watch the driver, a Fatboy in overalls, no undershirt, and the Skinny Dude, tattooed, scarred, half a front tooth missing, I watch them argue about the radio as we turn around and head towards Krotz Springs.

“Put on some rock,” says the Fatboy as the Skinny Dude punches buttons on the radio. “Find some Zeppelin.”

“Man, Zeppelin sucks,” says the Skinny Dude. “I’m tired of that old ass shit.”

Fatboy takes one hand off the steering wheel and punches the Skinny Dude hard in the arm. “Never say that in my car,” says Fatboy. “No, fuck that. Never say that around me ever. I should kill you for even thinking that shit.”

The Skinny Dude rubs his shoulder. “Thanks for fucking my arm up. Now it's dead.”

“Good,” says the Fatboy. “You should be dead.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, “You like Zeppelin, right?”

“Love them. Best band ever.”

He nods and purses his lips. “It sucks you ran out of gas.”

“Yeah. I’m really screwed. I lost my wallet at a Stuckey’s in Texas.”

“Whoa,” says the Skinny Dude. “You are screwed.”

“Yeah. I’m gonna have to call my uncle collect to come save my stupid ass.”

“Well,” says Fatboy. “We got a gas can.”

“Sure,” says the Skinny Dude. “And we can give you a few dollars for gas.”

“Really? That would be great man. I just need enough to get me to Washington. I can mail you the money later if you want.”

“Sure man,” says Fatboy. “We’ll work something out.” He finds some AC/DC playing. Hells Bells. “Perfect,” says the Fatboy as the opening bells chimes and the grind of Angus Young’s guitar begin to short circuit the mind. And it’s all perfect, indeed. I’m rolling thunder, falling rain. I’m coming on like a hurricane. And for a few perfect moments you three are one, you’re of one mind and one dimension and the music is loud and the speakers are just crappy enough to lend that soupcon of gravel and the window won’t roll up and rain flies in through the gap and lands on the seat and it’s good, it’s like flying in a biplane over the sea, you and them, all of you tapping something and humming a little and Hells Bells indeed, Hells Bells indeed. And then Krotz Springs appears, the bridge that killed your aunty paralleled by a brand new bridge or at least a much newer bridge. And the contrast in styles could hardly be more apparent. The old one only travels east now, and was built by Huey Long. It is all cast iron and rust and will last a thousand years. The newer bridge goes east and west and seems to be a parabola held by the hand of God. Below is a hundred and fifty foot drop to the muddy and placid waters of the Atchafalaya. And each of these bridges is a larger thing than itself. The old is the past, the way things used to be. Our old family and our old family sins. And the new bridge is the future, what I am and what I can achieve. I will take it again someday, to the west and the great beyond. To California if I am lucky and to the love that will save my soul.

But not today. Today I’m filling up a can with a dollar’s worth of gas, nearly the whole plastic gallon can, identical to Terry’s, is full of sloshing, sweet smelling petro. And there’s a nice view of a blonde filling up her yellow Mustang ragtop. She’s got pretty legs and a pretty smile which she shares with me and Hells Bells the world is looking right as rain. And the rain has stopped. And the Fatboy and the Skinny Dude are not holding up the cashier like I imagined they would, no, they exit the store with beer, stopping to hold the door for the blonde who is exiting too. And they get in the car and offer me a beer. Why not? And the Fatboy starts the Nova and turns on the radio and he is rewarded with Zeppelin, the opening franticness of Immigrant Song. And he backs the car up and drums on the steering wheel and instead of heading back the way we’ve come, back to my car, we’re following the yellow Mustang as it pulls out of the gas station and onto the highway and onto the old bridge, passing over the very spot where my aunt passed from this place. And I say, “What are we doing?”

And Fatboy says, “We’re following that chick.”

“I can see that. Why?”

“That’s a good question,” says Fatboy. “Why? Why are we following that hot chick?” He looks at the Skinny Dude. “Tell the man.”

The Skinny Dude, who’s been adjusting something in his crotch, looks over his shoulder at me and says, “We’re following that chick ‘cause we’re gonna fuck her up.”

“What?”

“We’re gonna fuck her up man. Me and my boy. You can fuck her too.”

“Wait, do you guys know her?”

“Ha, ha. Hell no, brother, we don’t know her. But look at her man. She’s hot. You know she wants it.”

Fatboy speeds up, closing to within two car lengths of the ragtop. The blonde exits the bridge onto river road, a long thread of asphalt fringed on one side by swamp and the other side by the emerald green levee.

“Perfect,” says Fatboy. “Fuckin’ perfect. There’s’ nothing out here. This is gonna be awesome.”

He speeds up, getting closer to the Mustang.

“Are you gonna do like last time?” says the Skinny Dude.

“Maybe,” says Fatboy. “Whatever it takes to get her to stop. And when she stops, that’s her ass.”

“Hey,” says the Skinny Dude. “Do you want me to say what I said to that last bitch?”

“Sure,” says Fatboy. “That’d be cool.” He cranks the music louder. Over the crash of guitars the Skinny Dude looks at me and says, “Last time we wrecked this bitch, I told her ‘If my buddy her thinks your ass is tight enough, he’ll let you live. And if I like how you suck my-”

“Dude, pull over.”

“What?”

“Dude, pull the fuck over. I am not doing this. Pull over right now and let me the fuck out of this car.”

Fatboy turns down the music and says, “What?”

“He doesn’t want to do it,” says the Skinny Dude.

Fatboy looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Aw come one man. Do it with us. We bought your gas and we’ll give you a ride back to your car. This will repay us. Besides man, three dudes always makes it easier. Sometimes with two the bitches get all messed up.”

“Yeah they do,” says the Skinny Dude. “They sure do.”

“Dude, I am not joking pull over and let me out of this car. You guys are fucking sick. I am not doing this.”

“Yeah you are,” says the Skinny Dude, turning in his seat to point a little automatic at me. It’s a Titan .25, the first gun my father bought for my stepmother. She didn’t like it. Too many moving parts. For a while it was kind of mine and from time to time I was allowed to empty a clip or two into the old muscle car on Bullard Road. My father traded it in for a bigger, more lethal weapon. This one however is lethal enough at point-blank range into the face. And I see that the orange sights are chipped and the Skinny’s Dude’s teeth are chipped the same way and above the weapon are his red-veined eyeballs, the irises the color of summer skies, dancing in their orbits, having the time of their lives. And the Skinny Dude says, “You’re doing this with us or I’ll waste your ass right now.”

“Yeah you will,” says Fatboy.

“Yeah I will,” says the Skinny Dude. “I sure will.”

And now like all good ninjas, you must take four deep breaths. One. Clear your mind of imperfect thoughts. Two. Imagine yourself as fluid and all powerful as the very waters. Three. Erase doubt. Four. Take action. And when the fourth breath leaves my lungs, I sweep my hand across my face taking the gun with it. And it goes off, shattering the driver’s glass. And the car swerves off the road, into a ditch, we are launched into the air with the motor gunning like a horse in labor and thus propelled we meet a thick-trunked cypress tree, it’s Man versus Nature, and Nature triumphs. All fly forward. Fatboy goes face-first into the steering wheel. The Skinny Dude goes back-first into the unforgiving dashboard, then collapses to the floorboards. I smash into the back of the bench seat, my nose bloodies, the gun improbably in my hand. Meanwhile, Immigrant Song continues to play. After a moment, I push Fatboy’s body forward in the seat and emerge from the vehicle. Car crash. There’s no feeling like it. I’m alive. I’m bloody and limping and my head feels thick as a brick but I am alive. I look back at the smoking, ticking Nova. Hammer of the Gods. No telling whether those two misguided souls are still kicking and I’m not sticking around to find out. I toss the pistol in a culvert with a flash and a bang and then head back for the bridge. Soon I am walking up the off ramp. Everything I’m doing is foolhardy and illegal but I don’t care anymore. I am bloody but I am unbowed. I’ll walk across this bridge to my sanctuary. I have done it. I am a man now. A man at last. I let out one long and loud howl, matched perfectly in amplitude by a passing 18 wheeler. Yow!

The Vocabulary of Guns

70.

One down, one to go. Terry says Jamaal lives with his mother so we’ll need a more subtle approach. Regarding Eric, Terry says, “I wish the little bitch would have killed himself, but oh well. It’ll be a long time if ever before he holds somebody down and sticks his dick in them.” Indeed it will. I feel dreamy, and the morning air contributes to my groove. The mist is burning off, but patches of fog remain in the fields, in the scattered copses of trees that are hanging on despite the encroachment of man and his need to destroy. Again Terry guides me through the streets, turning me here, turning me there until we reach a neighborhood of pleasant middle class homes. We park across the street from a red brick one story, get out and this time Terry takes the shotgun. He walks up to the front door and stashes the gun in a bush and then heads around the side of the house. I follow. Halfway down he pauses at a window and taps on the glass.

“Jamaal,” he says. “Wake up.”

The blinds suddenly jerk up and a Jheri curled head appears. The window opens.

“Yo niggah,” says Jamaal. “What the hell time it is?”

“It’s almost eight,” says Terry. “Yo pardner, lemme use your phone. Our car broke down.”

“What the hell you come to my house for?”

“We were in your hood. Yo man, just lemme use the phone.”

Jamaal closes the window and we head to the front door. It opens and a skinny black dude appears. Terry goes to introduce me but Jamaal could care less. Rubbing his eyes he walks us to the kitchen where a large black woman is frying ham.

“Mama,” says Jamaal. “You remember Terry?”

“Of course I do,” she says. “How you been child?”

“Good,” says Terry.

“He needs to use the phone,” says Jamaal.

“Of course he can use the phone,” says Mama. “It’s right over there on the wall.”

Jamaal heads back to bed as Terry fetches the portable telephone and then leaves the room. I step over and introduce myself to Mama.

“Ya’ll had some car trouble?” she says.

“Yes maam. We were on our way to church and we ran out of gas.”

“Aw, that’s a shame. You go to school with my Jamaal?”

“No maam, I’m from New Orleans. I’m just visiting.”

“New Orleans? That crazy place? Lord have mercy I haven’t been there but one time and that was enough for me. They stole my purse.”

“No.”

“Yes. At a Mardi Gras parade in broad daylight. When that happened I knew it was time to go home.”

“I hear that.”

“You hungry?”

I am but I don’t get the chance to answer because Terry is back and this time he’s leading Jamaal at the point of the shotgun. Mama drops the fork she’s been using to turn the ham. “Lord have mercy,” she says. “What in the world is going on here? Terry have you lost your mind?”

“No maam,” says Terry. “I’m sorry to have to do this but Jamaal has something he wanted to tell you. Ain’t that right Jamaal?”

Jamaal stands there in boxer shorts and a t-shirt with his hands in the air, utterly terrified. His lower lip trembles. His knees knock. Same as Eric, he knew this day was coming. He knew it was coming from a long way off and very far away but it would move towards him at great speed and quite suddenly and then would be upon him, and he’d know it, but too late, like seeing the fist right before it hits your face. He’d know it was coming because it wasn’t just JW Jones on a Saturday night in late July, 1984, now was it, friend? You know as well as I do that there were many other times when you spread your sickness. Ask around. People will tell you. You’ve been a busy boy, all you attackers. All you destroyers of lives. Give it up. Leave the girls alone. Hang yourself or forgive yourself but stop thinking that what you’re doing is right, that she wants you to do it, that she’s a cocktease, she wouldn’t dress that way if she didn’t want it, I know, I’ve heard it before. Don’t go there. Don’t go there anymore. Treat them all like your mother and sisters and your rewards will be tenfold and acres wide. You’ll dream in great comfort and sleep in deep beds. You’ll be nourished and content and waited upon hand and foot. You’ll be free of your evil twin who is doing so much damage to your good name.

“Tell her,” says Terry. “Tell your mother what you done to my cousin. Tell her, or I’ll spray the walls with your balls, baby boy.”

“Oh my God,” says Mama. “My blood pressure, my blood pressure. Lord have mercy, I need to sit down.” I grab a kitchen chair and she sits. “What is going on Jamaal?” she says. “What is he talking about? What did you do?”

“Tell her!” says Terry. “Eric already admitted it and his ass is lucky to be alive. Tell her or I’ll smoke you like a blunt, fool.”

Shaking, his voice low, barely a whisper, Jamaal says, “Mama.”

“What is it child?” she says. “Tell Mama what you done.”

“Mama, I did something bad. Something real, real bad.”

“What you done, son?”

“I, I mean we, me and Eric, we…we…”

“What, honey? You did what?”

“We raped a girl.”

His mother sits perfectly upright, her eyes bulging, her hand at her breast. “What? What did you say?”

“We, me and Eric, we…we raped a girl. Last summer. She was Terry’s cousin.”

“Oh my God,” says Mama. “Oh my God, oh my God. Why? Why, Jamaal? Why on God’s green Earth would you ever do a thing like that? Why Jamaal? Answer me.”

Weeping, Jamaal just stands there. He shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t know why. Maybe it just sounded like it would be fun.

“Who was she?” says Mama.

“Terry’s cousin,” says Jamaal.

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know. You done ruined that girl’s life forever and you don’t even know her name.” Mama shakes her head. Tears form at the corners of her eyes, run in silver streams down her rich brown skin. She opens her eyes and looks at Jamaal. “Who are you?” she says. “Who are you? You’re not my son. You’re not my Jamaal. You’re not the one who, who sat by his grandmother’s side every night for a week until she passed. You’re not him. Are you? Are you? You took him away. You took away my Jamaal and replaced him with somebody I wouldn’t recognize if the Lord Himself was standing here.” She gets up, walks over and lays her hand on Jamaal’s cheek. “Jamaal, I wish you had never been born.” Standing there, shaking in utter sorrow and humiliation, Jamaal shits himself. Mama steps back. “Lord have mercy,” she says. Child, you done messed up my floors.”

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The Vocabulary of Guns

68.

Bad news. Nobody likes to tell it or hear it. I’ll hear plenty of it in my time. Mostly from bosses. Fired. Fired again. And again. And again. I’ll live a life that Bukowski would be proud to call his own, shit-canned from damn near every place I worked, or the job went away, the business closed, the sugar daddy went sour, the Board mismanaged the funds, the economy, the economy, people will talk about the economy like they’ve got a bad tooth and companies that do things you cannot explain will expire for reasons that verge on historical, like being the last man to die on the retreat from Russia in 1812. Boom and the world slips out from under you, time on your hands to think about what was and what might have been and perhaps what might still be. And I’ll have my own bad news to share with a select few. Someday I’ll take a ride in a borrowed car with JW Jones to a Wendy’s Hamburger Stand and we’ll order food and then start to talk and we’re being watched, as always, white boy and black girl get the most open stares and she’ll say, ‘Not here. I don’t want to talk about this here,’ and you’ll leave and drive to the park, you and this beautiful girl in flowered shorts and a sky blue top with spaghetti straps will ride to City Park, five minutes from her door and five minutes from the first place you ever parked and made out, where she told you the first little hint of what was to come. You put your hands down there rather clumsily and she said, Be gentle. Not like Donald. And you said, What? And that was the end of that because she threw up seconds later on her white dress. And since that night it has been nearly two years and what a two years it will be. Information will flow and flow until you cannot take it anymore, until you hate her, you hate to hear her stories no matter how benign because even the benign ones have an undertow of dread. And so that is why you park at the park across from the museum and you sit by the lagoon and you say it, you give her the bad news. ‘I want to take a break,’ you say and she bursts into tears, just like a novel. She clutches your shirt and leans her head against your chest and weeps. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’ And you look over her head at the afternoon sunset, you are free now, if you want to be. You can also undo it, if you want. You can say, Okay, you’re right; we should try to work this out. But you can’t and you won’t. You’ll just go ahead and let her digest this newest news, bad all the way to the finish line. You’ll put her in the car and drive her home and walk her to that fucking front door for the last time and not care who sees you or who wants to blow you up and you’ll say, ‘I love you.’ And she’ll say, ‘If you loved me you wouldn’t be leaving me right now.’

That whole thing is the unknowable future, however. Right now I gotta take a leak. So this is as good a time as any to wake the house. Cousin Terry and Aunt Julia. Seven o’clock Sunday morning, I’m sure these people are just thirsting for bad news. Several rings of the doorbell and I’m ready to piss into the gardenias when the door finally opens. Terry stands before me, a big ass teddy bear looking sleepy and annoyed.

“Hey brother. I’m sorry to wake you at this hour. I’m Gabriel, JW’s boyfriend from New Orleans.”

Immediately his countenance changes. “I thought you looked familiar,” he says. “I remember your picture. What’s going on? Where’s JW?”

“She’s in New Orleans.”

This gives him pause. “She’s in New Orleans and you’re here? Something happened?”

“Yes and no. I mean there’s no emergency. I can explain in a minute. But can I use your bathroom first?”

“Sure man, right down the hall.”

As he escorts me into his home a voice calls down from upstairs. Aunt Julia wants to know who in the hell is knocking on the door at this hour. Terry heads upstairs to explain as I hit the head. Again, a moment of doubt before the storm. Nobody needs to know. I can carry this feeling with me for the rest of my life. Gabriel. Like a car alarm at 4 a.m. Gabriel. Like a cat screech. Gabriel. Like the dreadful thump of car meeting bicycle. Gabriel. Broken bones. Gabriel. A toenail is torn from its root. Gabriel. A head-on collision with a pickup truck. Gabriel. A view from the crest of the Mississippi River Bridge with a view of Willie Starks’ empire and Jack Burden’s soul. Gabriel. Use the same faucet that those motherfuckers used. Gabriel. Flush the same toilet perhaps. Gabriel. This is the house where it all went down. Gabriel. And the owners of the house have got to know. Gabriel. For me, of course. Gabriel. For my sorry and imperfect soul.

I find Terry in the kitchen making coffee. He offers me OJ and I drain a glass. Then he asks me what’s up.

“Ya’ll have a rec room?”

“A rec room? We got a pool table in the basement.”

“Can I see it?”

“The basement?”

“Yeah, can I see it?”

“You wanna see my basement? You drove from New Orleans Louisiana to look at my basement?”

I pause, then say, “I have something to tell you and I need to tell you in the basement because what happened, happened in the basement.”

Terry looks at me like I am the craziest shit he’ll ever see, then turns and hustles the coffee and a bottle of Tylenol upstairs to his mother. When he returns he walks through the kitchen and opens a door next to the pantry. He flicks on the light and descends the stairs. I follow, noting that the door can be locked from the inside. Downstairs, a single bulb burns, lighting up the low-ceilinged room. A ratty sofa. A washer/dryer. A pool table. A pool table. A goddamn pool table where her hands were pressed against the legs while they….a stereo, turntable, headphones. She was playing a record. Earth, Wind and Fire. The reasons that we’re here. The reasons that we fear our feelings won’t disappear.

“So,” says Terry. “The basement. Now what the hell is going on?”

I don’t tell him to sit down. Why do people say that? Just spit it out. Say it and get it over with because there’s never an easy way to deliver bad news. So I say it. I say, Last summer there was a party and JW was down here in the basement with the lights out listening to music and three guys came down here and jumped her except one didn’t have the heart to be that evil that night so he left but the other two, well, they stayed. And Terry looks at me like I’ve grown a second head. And he says, Who? And I tell him their names which must not be spoken here. And he repeats it. He repeats it in disbelief. He says, What! Then he says it again. And he can’t believe it. He loved them like brothers, he says. Brothers from other mothers and this is what they did. They ran a train on his cousin. They gangbanged his cousin in his house under his very nose while the joint was jumping and the juice was flowing and the record was spinning, playing two thousand zero, zero party over oops, out of time. So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999. And then he looks at me with angry tears in his eyes and he says,

“So what the fuck man? You drove all the way to my house just to tell me this shit?”

And I say, “No. I thought you’d know where they live.”

“I do know where they live. What’re you planning to do?”

“I’m going to kill them.”

“Oh yeah? Kill ‘em, huh? Well all right. You brought a rod?”

“Shotgun.”

“A shotgun? The motherfucker brought a shotgun. Well, that sounds good. That sounds real, real good. Okay, give me five minutes to change.”

The Vocabulary of Guns

67.

Houston, of course, is all sprawl. It begins with a trickle of trailer homes burning in the darkness and then it becomes the darkness itself, so bright that you cannot look into it. Shortly after the trailer parks and strip clubs, all night liquor stores and junior marts are the miles of car dealerships and chain restaurants, the former advertising themselves with giant inflatable creatures, the latter with streaming flags. A twenty foot pink gorilla squats in the night air, a possible hallucination but who cares, it’s Houston baby boy and I am here, moving among her citizens, plowing through the night passing her breweries pumping acres of steam into the air, past her Astrodome, puny and dingy in the gloom of an empty parking lot. I am caught on your tentacles, Houston Texas, your roads that lead to nowhere, your toll roads and service roads and Farm to Market Roads and State Highways and Interstates. All your far-flung arteries gather and coalesce and the driver must know his shit because in Texas you drive fast and hard and aggressive at any hour, it’s the Texas way. And if you’re a stooge like moi you drive and glance at the map, imperiling yourself and others until at last the Junkman, appearing like a dear friend thought to be dead takes the map from my hand and steers me through Houston and into one of her many golden suburbs, a ring of homes on a cul de sac, lit by the ubiquitous orange sodium streetlamps, sycamores rising, the smell of fireplaces in the night air. And so at 4:39 on Sunday morning October 14, 1984 I found myself parked at an address that I won’t reveal, the site of last summer’s misfortune, the shack where it all went south. A white two story with blue shutters. A tidy front lawn with dark bushes. The scent of gardenias in the cool air. An automatic sprinkler system steams to life, then another, then a third. It is a well manicured world of Houston prosperity. It is a quiet nice neighborhood, a good place to raise your kids. The schools are this and it’s close to that and it’s like every other place in America that people aspire to, not too little, not too much. A chunk of suburban cake. And behind those doors and up those stairs and in those rooms under those sheets, what monsters sleep? What do they dream about, these black mustachioed villains? Are they like the rest of us, those of us whose heart is free of terrible deeds? Or are we all in the same stew, the brew of denial? And yet I’d like to think that the guilt I feel for a slighting remark or an ill-timed breakup pales in comparison to murder or sexual assault. I’d like to think that my night sweats don’t compare to yours, Mr. You Know Who You Are. I’d like to believe that there is neither heaven nor hell except what we choose for ourselves on this third stone from the sun. I’d like to think that when I sleep I dream of Arabian chariots and walks on the Sea of Japan. I’d like to think that in my dreams I am able to fly like Daedelus, free at last on wings of my own doing. I’d like to think that in your dreams, Mr. You Know Who You Are, that you are lashed to the mast of your ship of fools. That each night like Prometheus the great Roc comes for you and tears out your liver and consumes it. And that each day while you recover and pray for death, said liver regrows. I’d like to think that yours is the sleep of the ones who choose to live by their own rules and therefore must be emasculated, dethroned, deracinated, and finally, forgiven. Yes, I said it. I said it. I said it. I could forgive you. I could do that. I could finish this long last look at the house where you did what you did. I could stop the train right now. Get off. Turn on the Honda. Drive home. Put away the gun. Explain nothing to Father or Mother. Never mention it to JW. Pretend it didn’t happen, that it was the work of fiction pounded out of the brain of a madman twenty-five years later. That it was the fevered work of a hashish eating fool, not a driven and focused assassin. That none of it went down the way I said it did. That we were all free and clear of bad thoughts and evil confessions. That she never said a word about what happened because NOTHING happened. Nobody pushed over the first domino waaaaaaaaay back when. Miguel Champ wasn’t late for the NOA game. He didn’t stop by JW’s house. Her stepfather didn’t catch them almost in the act. She wasn’t punished, grounded for the summer. She made no bunk beds. He didn’t rape her in said bed. She didn’t flee the next summer to this very house on this very street in this very city. There was a party that night in late July but JW wasn’t here. She was home with me. With me. We got to have that last good summer, the one before your senior year when you could give a rat’s ass about anything except looking good and feeling good and there’s plenty of both on the wind and in the air and if you can keep from getting knocked up or knocking somebody else up or killing yourself or killing somebody else you can have a helluva good time, the best time of your life, replete with indelible ink emblazoned into the heart like a tattoo from the gods. That’s what should have happened and that’s what I should be writing about. But I can’t. You know that, right? I have to write what I’m writing now. To heal. To forgive. To come to some state of grace. And so with the calmness of the ninja who knows that death is only feared by those fated to die in great pain and confusion, I allow my lids to droop, the mind to follow, the seat to fall back, the morning chirp of birds dropping me into the doze of a righteous youth.

The Vocabulary of Guns

66.

Who doesn’t love a Stuckey’s? The damn places have everything. Hot dogs, pecan logs, ceramic plates shaped like each state. Row upon row of glass and porcelain knick-knacks, untouched, undisturbed, unsold for the lifetime of the store. Not that Stuckey's has much competition out here in the middle of the rice fields outside of Houston. The only structure for miles around is another Stuckey's directly across the road. Get us coming and going. They get me coming as I wheel into the parking lot and go inside for coffee. I hold off on gas, figuring my half tank will get me to about this same place heading home. I wander the aisles for a moment like a dazed spaceman returning to a futuristic earth. The hard fluorescents, the elevator music, the calm and well-ordered world keeping perfect time at 3:30 in the morning. A pimple faced girl behind the counter offers to sell me a lottery ticket from her high school. The grand prize is a brand new shotgun. I decline.

“I wish I could enter,” she says as she rings up my coffee and map of Houston. “The first thing I’d do is shoot my daddy.” With that she gives me my change.

Fortified with hot Joe, I join the race to Houston, Texas. There’s no apparition in the front seat to talk me through the times and that’s fine, I don’t need distractions, I need rock and roll music and the pedal halfway to the metal and here it is, salvation on the radio dial, AC/DC to get me through the slalom of big rigs and fools like me whipping through the night. She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman that I ever seen. Love these guys. If I could meet the band I’d tell them that they had gotten me through some dark days. How ‘Back in Black’ saved my soul, kept me in high school, kept me alive. How I rocked the house with my tape purchased through Columbia Records. I had ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ on vinyl and I burned out the needle with that brain shaking riff. I played ‘Highway to Hell’ deep into the night, sang it to myself in my private moments. Night prowler, I sleep in the day. Night prowler, get out of my way. Night prowler, watch out tonight. I’m the night prowler when you turn out the light. A song about rape. A rapist’s fantasy or a fantasy about a woman’s fantasy, it was hard to tell. Their music was full of that noise. Let me put my love into you babe, let me put my love on the line. Let me put my love into you babe, let me cut your cake with my knife. What a lame rhyme. And what was I singing about anyway? Is this the kind of music I’m supposed to hear? No one’s gonna warn you and no one’s gonna yell attack and you don’t feel the chill ‘til it’s hanging down your back. Is this the soundtrack of badness, sensory elements telling me it’s okay, it’s what girls want, a little rough stuff, tie them up, break into their bedrooms, do anything for love. The romantic fool who doesn’t exactly think with his dick so much as his dick thinks for him. Is that what I am, am becoming? Confused in the nonce, I am finding myself perplexed in the extreme. I see my sweet JW in my mind followed instantly by a blur of other images, all the dirty deeds that have been done to her dirt cheap. I see her and the night prowlers, her and her stepfather and he’s saying let me put my love into you. It’s terrible and terrifying, this inability to control your own thinking, your own thoughts. Too much coffee, I suppose, and not enough sleep and the whir and hum of 300 miles of road but I swear to Christ I truly feel sometimes that I am gonna lose my mind. She told me to come but I was already there. Then the walls started shaking, the earth was quaking, my mind was aching and she was saying that you shook me all night long.

I forgot my wallet at Stuckey’s. The thought hits me like sniper shot to the chest. Hot then cold. Shit a mile! And you know to turn around is futile if you left it on the counter but maybe not so turn around anyway which is not so easy, the exits are miles apart and then race back the way you’ve come, only twenty minutes or so away but it always feels like time moves faster and the distance is farther and you at last pass the east bound Stuckey’s, identical to its sister in every way, the same pecan rolls, the same angry teenager making change and then beyond to another exit and now back to the first Stuckey’s and pull into your same parking spot and hustle on in expecting to find Darlene or Roxanne or Tiffany or Sharon but there’s a dude behind the counter, he says the girl’s shift is over, she’s gone home or wherever and nope, nobody turned in a wallet. It would be stupid to even think much less suggest that you left it on the counter and the daddy-hating cashier walked off with it, your money, driver’s license, library card. Stupid to think but not impossible. So back in the car and the coffee has cooled and you still have some gas but no more cash so be careful, whatever that means, drive the speed limit I suppose, 55 is fast enough my ass, I have a job to do, places to go, people to see and kill. Crank that FM station. You’re beyond the Mississippi now and the call letters all begin with K. K-Rock, save my soul, bubba. Save me from myself and what I’m going to do. Save me from madness and badness and dangerous to knowness. Save me, save me oh gods of rock and roll. Let me be righteous and not rapist. Let me be not changed, metamorphosed into the evil twin that walks the earth in our skins, undoing all our good deeds, committing in our names the most heinous of crimes. And the gods save me. They put on the song that I need at this exact place and time. Radio salvation. Do you hear it? Do you hear that opening jam? Do you recognize that distinctive guitar riff and that pulsing drum beat and the background singers saying whoo-whoo? And when the singer says it, says what we all want to hear, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, what I mean. He says, We got a thing that’s called radar love. We got a line in the sky, radar love.

The Vocabulary of Guns

65.

What’s the difference between a coon ass and a dumb ass? Answer: the Sabine River. I don’t know where I heard that joke. I can’t really remember jokes. Freud has a whole subset for people like me who pathologically forget jokes. Our brains don’t remember the story, or perhaps the imprint of the joke isn’t made unless we turn around and tell it again. Here’s another one. A rare monkey is being transferred from the LSU Biology Lab to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. A special, air conditioned truck is required to transfer the monkey but it breaks down halfway to New Orleans. The driver waves down Mr. Boudreaux who happens to be on his way to the Big Easy to kick up his heels. They put the monkey cage on the front seat and Boudreaux takes off. Meanwhile the driver waits and waits. Hours pass. He looks up and sees Mr. Boudreaux’s truck coming back down the highway with the monkey riding in the front seat. The driver steps out in the road and waves down Mr. Boudreaux. ‘What re you doing?’ says the driver.’ I told you to take this monkey to the Audubon zoo!’ ‘Man, I did,’ says Mr. Boudreaux in his soft Cajun drawl. ‘And we had such a good time, now we’re goin’ to Astroworld.’

Texas on all sides. Dark as a motherfucker. And big. You can tell how vast it is the instant you cross the Sabine. The sky is wider; the range between rows of trees is greater, the service roads that parallel the Interstate are better than the Interstate itself in Louisiana. I am leaving a poor state and entering a rich one. Drive friendly, says a huge billboard. The Texas way! Sure will. My driving will be impeccable. It won’t be what I do behind the wheel that will be of concern. Hopefully. Hopefully. I can’t spend time rehearsing what I’ll do. Be like the ninja. Be present. Take four deep breaths. On the last exhale and do what must be done. You may only have one moment to do the deed. When that moment is at its ripest point, it must be seized. Not before or not too late. All is ripeness. So take it easy, coolio. Fiddle with the radio and pick up some conjunto and some country, lots and lots of country and commercials and so screw it, relax into the wheel and the bucket seat and remember to remember your first joke ever. Or rather it was a dirty song. How did it go? Not last night but the night before, twenty-four nigg-That’s about as far as you got before your stepmother cut you off. She was driving the old Ford Galaxy through Dinky Town in Minneapolis. You were heading home. Your friend and you sat in the backseat, a roguish boy, king of the first grade. It was he who had taught you that song. ‘Gabriel, where did you hear that?’ said your stepmother, looking at you in the rearview mirror. Your friend, king of first grade fidgeted next to you, sensing danger. You ratted him out on the nonce. Your stepmother looked at the king of first grade and said, ‘We don’t use that word in our house.’ No, you did not. That’s about as pissed as your father ever got. That night he said to your first grade ears, ‘I’d rather you said motherfucker than say that word.’ Not that you had many opportunities to say motherfucker. It was the point of the matter. How he loathed and despised that word.

‘That’s right,’ says the Junkman, the old Negro, stomped to death and thrown in the bayou and he must now and forever be known as the Junkman, simply in honor of the old black man my father cheated out of money for the copper drainpipes. It is he, the murdered man, my father’s murdered man and so my murdered man as well and he’s here, riding shotgun, a mystic life-force helping me commit capital murder and then escape across state lines. He’s s specter, nearly silent, but he’s my sage, my Virgil and he’ll be here for me as long as he can, as long as I believe in him and the obligation that he represents. He says it again. He says, ‘That’s right. Your daddy didn’t cotton to none of that racist mess. He didn’t have no use for all that white power stuff. He saw the worst people in charge of the best people holding down the poorest people. He saw all that and he didn’t see no need to run off to Vietnam or join the Peace Corps. He decided to educate his mind. His mind, he knew was a terrible thing to taste. And he didn’t want that for himself. Of course, he owe it all to Mrs. Courvillion. You know that right?’

“Right,” I say as the signs pass me by, mileage to Beaumont and Houston and El Paso, ones and tens and hundreds of miles away.

‘You know she taught your daddy to read,’ says the Junkman, shifting in his seat, titling his head forward a little, touching the brim of his porkpie hat. ‘You mind if I smoke? Cool.’ He lights a cigarette, cracks the window. His entire mien is like my father’s, like a slouchy black version of my old man, captured in his moment of interruption, his life severed at the age of 48. ‘She’s the one that held him back in the 3^rd grade. You remember that right?’

“Sure,” I say, recalling dimly the relief I felt when I passed 3^rd grade, indeed excelled (except for math) in all my subjects. I had heard my father’s voice when he described the humiliation of staying behind, of having his dumminess exposed to the world.

‘Yep, she sat him in that desk and said, Bennie you are going to learn how to read. And he did. You know he started out the year dumb as a box of rocks and by the end of third grade he was reading Tolstoy.’

“That’s not true.”

‘Hell yeah,’ says the Junkman, ashing out the window. ‘Warren Peas. He wrote a whole e'say about that dude.’

I ignore the Junkman, allowing him and his cigarette to fade from my mind. It’s true what he says, what his hallucination says. No need to dwell on the ramifications of his arrival. Clearly I’m losing my motherfucking mind. That’s fine. That’s cool. The road still rises up to meet me. I’m still a coonass on the warpath of a couple dumbasses. I have the huevos and the brain power to get it done. A nod of the head to Mrs. Courvillion, dead perhaps or really old and long retired, the school teacher that taught my papa to read and therefore allowed him to read his way right out from under their noses, all of them, all the rednecks who used terms like ‘nigger lover’ and the like, she allowed my father to Tolstoy and Keats and Yeats and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and Samuel Fuckin’ Beckett his ass outta Washington, Louisiana and out into the world to beget me and raise me on the vocabulary of guns so that I could go, go, go, and do, do, do this thing that must needs be done. Thank you, Mrs. Courvillion for helping create the killer in me, a force of vengeance, the Nemesis.

The Vocabulary of Guns

64.

Lake Charles arrives like a vision of hell. Columns of blue flame burst above the skyline, refineries going all night, cleansing their smokestacks of excess natural gas. Clouds of yellow steam pump into the night sky, beautiful cumulonimbus clouds manufactured by man. A high narrow bridge takes you over an estuary, exposing the city in all its futuristic horror. A purple canal meanders among railroad cars, sausage-shaped tubes full of matter and anti-matter. A helicopter buzzes above the lake. Miles of orange lights dot the Saturday night landscape. Truck drivers on their mission to mama or Montana hog the bridge, drive you into the rail, over the side, you’ll fall forever until you emerge through some wormhole into the future, the imagined world of Blade Runner and the other dystopians, 2010, a space catastrophe. You’ll be old by then. You’ll be in your 40’s. I do the math as I crest the bridge, one last magnificent view of Dante’s 8^th circle, fire and steam and majestic complex buildings composed of pipes and reactors and scaling ladders and fat, squat chemical tanks. When it’s 2010 I’ll be 43. That’s old. That’s crazy old. 2010. Will the world even exist? Will we have made contact? Will we have blown ourselves off the planet, left it for the roaches and the sharks? Flying cars? Certainly. Jetpacks? To be sure. Laser guns? Absolutely. Space stations and a base on the moon? Are you kidding? Yeah. All of that and more. You can see it arriving out of the black landscape of prairie that surrounds Lake Charles, the last shot of Louisiana before Texas and another world with other laws. Cities of the future will be covered with domes to protect them from terrorist attack. Ireland will still be in chaos, as will the Levant, Angola, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador. Castro will still be alive. Flames will rise on the Korean peninsula and Southeast Asia. Pakistan still hates India. The Russians will still be in Afghanistan, Germany, Poland, Rumania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia. Only Yugoslavia will remain outside the Bear’s orbit. Turkey will burn, Iran too. And what about the home turf? What will America look like in 2010? Cities that stretch down both coastlines. Flooding of the ports, immigrant violence, terrorist attacks. There’s already that vision in 1984 of an empire on the ropes, of a last swagger towards some disaster, an accidental nuclear explosion, a horde of jihadists burning Uncle Sam in effigy, all our duplicitous maneuverings on the behalf of fat cats will finally lead to towers falling, clouds of destruction raining down on American peace of mind. And how will we react as we watch our grandfather’s hard work fall in our lifetimes? One day you hear they’ve crossed Hadrian’s Wall and twenty-five years later the barbarians are at the gate. Will the simple things change? The car I’m driving, speeding tinnily through the night on a 1.3 liter engine, front wheel drive, made in Japan. There’s no stopping that wave. If we still have cars in 25 years they’ll all look like this little rattrap. American steel, like doomed dinosaurs pass me left and right. Wave to their disappearing taillights as if they were driving off a cliff. But perhaps cars will be irrelevant. Perhaps we’ll travel some new and exciting way. Like eggs shot out of a cannon, we’ll travel in pods through the stratosphere, 23 miles high and descending into another cannon-like tube. No pilots, we’ll travel based on algebra, calculus and trigonometry. Magnetic energy, untapped, as alien to 1984 as uranium was to Charlemagne, will finally be harnessed and used to end all our energy needs. Walk to the pod station and it’ll shoot you across town. Buy a ticket for Europe and the pod cannon will shoot you into the rare air and then drop you down on the Louvre. A beautiful way to travel, like Pullman cars. People will chat, listen to music, eat their lunch. A trip to Paris in ten minutes. A trip to Constantinople in 13. A trip to Calcutta in twenty minutes. We’ll fly over our burning, terror-gripped world, marveling at the formation of cyclones, hurricanes, the tidal patterns and the wakes of huge convoys of ships. The future, the future, it’ll be a better place. Hell, dream big. As you ride across flat land betrayed only by billboards and road signs, the big trucks pounding you but your hands are sure and the digital clock is your friend not your enemy and you still have gasoline and the gun is sleeping like a baby, hell dream big, big daddy, dream the ultimate dream. Yes you’ll be alive and no the world won’t have ended and yes you’ll be happy and you’ll be a writer and you’ll have a dog and a girl and a sunny place to live and the skies won’t darken with death each night, no, and the suburbs will be for others to uncover and most of all, best of all, you will have lived to see the Saints win a Superbowl. Amen, hallelujah and gimme the love. Fortified by that heart-palpitating thought, I check the next sign. Twelve miles from the state line. Ain’t no stoppin’ me now. I’m more than halfway to my future, to a Blade Runner world ruled by guns and machines and men.

The Vocabulary of Guns

63.

It’s two a.m. Do you know where your mama is? I don’t. I imagine my stepmother is home by now, zonked out on alcohol and valium, but where my other mother is I have not a clue. Poor junkie soul, she might be dead. I guess no one would try to find us and tell us the news. We lived in an era of secrecy unimaginable back then. We had phones in our houses and when we wanted to find someone we consulted the phone book, or an operator.

‘Yes sir, how may I help you?’

You tell her that you’re trying to find your mother.

‘What’s her name?’

You tell her.

‘Where does she live?’

You don’t have the foggiest idea. Try Minneapolis, you say, and while the operator, a sweet-voiced lady with a touch of the Midwest on her tongue, searches the lists for all your mother’s names and aliases, you try to imagine what she, your mother, looks like now. It’s been many years. The last time you saw her you were saying goodbye, telling her that you wanted to go live with your father and his girlfriend. That hurt. It hurt to hear and it hurt to say it but your father told you that the Judge had ordered this to occur. So your father drove you across town to your mother’s apartment and he walked you to the door and left you. I’ll be downstairs, he said. Take as much time as you need. You didn’t need much time. You sat on the floor in your mother’s apartment and played with your new toy. It was a whirly bird, one of those long-beaked tin birds on a spring that appeared to be flying. It was yellow like a school bus. She asked you if you liked it and you said yes. You didn’t look up at her or around the room very much though it looked like all the other places you had lived with her, cleaner perhaps, a little less chaotic. Her boyfriend was back in jail. Your father had told you that. Her new baby was in a crib in the extra room. Your room, if you wanted to move back. You didn’t. You didn’t want to move back in with her because you didn’t miss your mother even a little bit. Nope, not at all. You’d gotten used to regular meals and your own bed free from crashing drugheads and a house that was quiet at night except for old movies on the black and white TV. You didn’t miss the wild, all-night parties that turned into soggy, grey depressed next days, ashtrays full of needles and a pool of vomit on the floor and a kitchen that looked like hell had broken out and taken over. You didn’t miss any of that. Nope. And you looked at your mother and you saw yourself, blonde hair, blue eyes, pale freckled skin. The woman who had nursed you and birthed you and loved you like a son sat there on the edge of her chair leaning forward, trying to get you to say that you preferred to live with her, right? She spoke as if you didn’t know your own mind, as if you hadn’t learned the hard way to think for yourself because in a house of heroin addicts nobody was going to think for you. No, you said, I want to live with papa. Her face snapped shut like a closing refrigerator door, click and the light was out. You had now joined the long and getting longer line of men who were letting her down. She stood, smoothed her groovy colorful skirt and she said, Okay if that’s what you want then fine. Fine. Go live with your father. But you remember that you had the chance to live with me and you messed it up. Remember that Gabriel. Remember that. And then she opened the window and called down to your father and he came upstairs and got you and took you out to his Volkswagen and put you in the front seat and made you buckle up and then the car started, you were moving, it was true, you were leaving now, she wasn’t running after the car or yelling at you or looking at you that way. You glanced up at the window and saw her orange curtains blowing. Then the window was shit, trapping a piece of curtain outside. That little flare of orange, peeking out into the world. It looked so lonely, so isolated. It wanted to be inside with the rest of its cohorts, the colors and warm room that would inevitably fade. And you knew it then, that she was born to lose and even if she had it together today it could and would all fall apart tomorrow, she’d lose the baby in the crib and she’d lose another baby way out west in Mormon country and she’d come as close as is necessary to losing her life before she’d get her shit together, before she’d send your father a letter saying that she was clean and she wanted to see you. You’d watch your father destroy the letter saying, I don’t want her back in my life and I don’t think you do either. She’s bad fucking news.

‘I’m sorry,’ says the operator, so maternally young sounding, so sweet and beholding. She could be your mama. She could pull you to her breast and rock your blues into the next century. She could be the one that would love you the way only a mother can, flesh of my flesh, product of my loins. She would look at you and say, I carried you inside me for the better part of a year. I brought you into the world in a fit of great agony and joy. You are mine and I am yours and we will never lose that bond. Say it. Please, say it. Say it, Miss Operator. Say you love me, say it. Say, I love you son. ‘I don’t show any listing,’ she says. ‘Would you like to try another name?’

No.

‘Thank you sir. Goodbye.’

Goodbye.

The Vocabulary of Guns

62.

Lafayette, Louisiana is a snarl of Interstate wrapped around itself in steep banks and hairpin turns. Driving through is like running the track at LeMans. It’s past midnight now. All my senses are keen. I hear the thoughts of passing truck drivers; catch in a glance all their hopes, dreams and fears. One hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gearshift, seatbeltless; I ride the wave of the insomniac, the night trawlers who people the Earth. The city disappears as quickly as it arrived. My father’s first college town, one of many for that multi-degreed man. You stayed in school for a long time back then, if you could. ‘You’ll go to graduate school if we let you go to graduate school,’ the old bitch on the draft board told my father. How different it might have been if she had followed through on her threat and sent my father packing off to The ‘Nam. Of course he would never have seen Charlie. With his brain and ability to type they would have put him behind a desk or up some colonel’s ass. I grin as I drive to imagine my father with a crew cut, my beatnik, poetry-reading pop saluting, polishing his shoes to a gleam, driving the brass around. Drinking off-base. Going with whores. Seeing the Orient or for that matter the Occident. Cashing out of the Service and heading for…where? San Francisco? Europe? The moon? No, probably he would have come right back to Louisiana, to this redneck world of racial tension and cheap beer, where the friends were close but not too close and his mother was the same. He’d come back here and he’d write about the war and what it had done to him. Like Faulkner and Hemingway it would have changed him, made him stronger without killing him. He would have chosen better than to marry the first piece of ass he got. True. It makes sense. As the night reclaims those of us on the road to the west or at least Lake Charles, with the Honda whining under my feet and the shell of glass and cheap steel around me and the radio picking up nothing but country and Cajun music and so it’s just silence and the roar of commercial vehicles passing me every 18 seconds, I realize why my old man has never given me much advice about poontang. He has practically no experience to speak of. He must have been a cherry when he met his first wife, his shortest marriage, only 10 months. Well, when your wife screws your best friend 6 months into ‘until death to us part’ you’d be a fool to stick around to see exactly whose death will part you.

And JW is my first. She doesn’t know this. She won’t know this until she reads this, years from now, if ever. I’ve told her so many lies about my past that she thinks all manner of things about me. Abortions, male prostitution, older women, the whole shebang. The reality is I never even got a stinkfinger until I started running with her. I wonder, years from now, years from the time I am writing about when I did what I needed to do instead of just dreaming about it and writing about it, I wonder if all those years later she’ll remember our first time. The hotel room looming high above Canal Street. The mist on the river. The lights of Algiers glowing like another country seen from a plane. The perfect clean quality of the room, sterile, scrubbed, a bed free from memory. How we turned off the single lamp and ignored the bucket of champagne and lashed onto one another with blood heat and flesh-digging nails. Her natural ability to feel tremendous pleasure. And I, who had bragged about my conquests in the most oblique of ways found myself done more quickly than I could have imagined possible. How that’s okay because when you’re young and dumb you’re also full of cum. And how, on that first night of the rest of all my sexual days and nights we did it again, easily and this time I already had improved my technique and I was able to last as long as I wanted. Do you remember, JW, wherever you are? Do you remember how you said ‘stop’ because it was too intense? And how I couldn’t and I didn’t? I remember. I’ll remember that feeling forever. Even if I drive to every place on Earth and kill every man that needs killing I will never forget that feeling that I had with you, JW. I should have stopped when you said ‘stop.’ I’ll be sorry about that for the rest of my life. Not for you, though. For me.

The Vocabulary of Guns

61.

The funny thing about the music you like when you’re seventeen is that you’ll still be hearing it wherever you turn twenty, even 30 years later. You don’t know this, of course. You think Kool and the Gang sat down and wrote your life out in a napkin in a club and later set it to music and now it’s spinning on a turntable somewhere in the south Louisiana darkness. Late at night, body’s yearning. Restless night, wanna be with you. And the truly important jams, the ones that you slow danced to or heard with your lover for the first time, those will also be recycled into tomorrow’s elevators, 7-11’s, grocery stores. The music that you can’t stand to listen to will invade every corner of your adult life. Cyndi Lauper will be she-bopping when she’s 90 and you’re 75. Van Halen will be telling you to jump from beyond the grave. The Thompson Twins, a three piece, unrelated, will still be demanding that you hold them now. You won’t realize that you’re a market, a piece of meat, when you’re 17. You’ll think it’s all true, all the lies, all the images, the world that they want you to copy, immerse yourself in, judge yourself by. Not just the music, which is positive and ethereal even as it rips your heart out. Baby, baby, what’s your claim to fame? Got me out of bed, heard you call my name. What’s this crazy place you wanna take me to? Tell me what’s the prize if I go with you? And so on. So on into the future when you’ll immerse yourself in Obsession and Guess, when you’ll wear your polo collar up, then down, with an oxford, without. You’ll change your hair color until your hair falls out. You’ll slick it back with hard Australian jell everyday for a year. You’ll dream you are Soloflex, an underwear model, an Esquire Man. All along the way, your soundtrack will dominate your thoughts. You’re my heart. You’re my soul. And my love has got to go. If it’s a thrill, then I will. Hey misled, be for real. It will all feel real, for a few sweet years it will all feel real. And then you’re twenty-one and nobody thinks you’re funny anymore, you’ve wrecked cars and girls and friendships. You’ve stolen from every person you can and now you’ve moved up to felony theft. You get off work at 7 a.m. wearing the black suit of the hotel desk clerk and you trundle down Magazine to Ms. Mae’s bar, the old one on the corner of Dufossat Street. Inside the dark and jolly bar you’ll pound a hundred thousand bottles of beer, tip generously, be mistaken for a bible salesman, and play the jukebox all morning long. You’re a young alcoholic and your nostalgia runs shallow. The tunes of your self-pity are barely five years old. Billy Idol, put him on! And I’d do anything for my sweet 16. And I’d do anything for my little runaway child. They’ll look at you, the old drunken men and the young drunken men and they’ll wonder for a moment who you are and why you’re wasting everything you’ve got. You’ve got a good face, the women will say. Older ones will say Robert Redford. Younger ones will say fuck me now. The old drunks and the young drunks will watch you sway in the light of the juke box, push dollar bills in carefully, select your music with precision, five dollars worth, about 15 songs. Jam after jam will come on and the bar will shake with life, the pool players in the back room will become sure as Annie Oakley, the laughter will peal like silver bells, the tips will pile up and the bartender will work just enough to keep him busy and not enough to get him pissed. There will be joy at Ms. Mae’s and it will be because of you, secret drunkard, waster of mortal flesh, an alcoholic already deep into his fourth year of a lost decade. Playing the juke box, playing the old songs, the remember when. Why don’t you come back, please hurry why don’t you come back, please hurry why don’t you come back please hurry and stay for good this time. And they’ll know, those who see you or pay attention to you, they’ll know that you’re simply paving your way to hell with the best of intentions. You only want to please people, to love and be loved. You can’t say your heart was poisoned when you were less than a major. You can’t say that your emotional growth was stunted like a bonsai. That’s chicken shit and for the birds, all at once. You can’t be that forever man in all the Ms. Mae’s of the world, can you? You can’t/won’t be the guy, the one who can’t leave high school, who still talks about the TD he scored against blah-blah and the time Miguel was late for the NOA game. Please don’t be that guy, become that guy. Stay away from the old music and the old jams. Misled, indeed. Turn the knob when they take you down memory lane. Do anything for your sweet 16 but leave Billy Idol to make an ass of himself, rocking the house with a cane and an ear trumpet. Leave it be. Make new memories, new loves, new growth. Turn the station or turn it off. Remind yourself that you can only feel the way you feel when you feel it. It’s like cutting. It’s never as painful as the first time, no matter how much it continues to hurt.

The Vocabulary of Guns

60.

Why is your favorite book your favorite book? Is it the story, the plot, the characters, the ‘what’ that happens within? My father says his favorite novels take him into another world. It takes him to a place, I suppose, outside of himself. During the time that I am writing about, my favorite novel is ‘All the King’s Men.’ Willie Stark’s missile-phallus, lit by a million watts, looms on my right as I cross the Baton Rouge Bridge over the Mississippi River. Stark would have appreciated this bridge, this infrastructure, this long flat road to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Indeed, Jack Burden would have appreciated it more for it was he who took the long drive across America subsisting on nothing but Coca-Cola until he reached Long Beach, California, something of a resort before the war, and there he lay on his bed with a bottle of bourbon and drank until he couldn’t remember anymore. And when that was achieved he checked out and drove home. He saw no beach, no other people for that matter except a barber and a clerk or two. He had done what was needed and therefore he could go back to the past which had swiftly become a brand new present. Along the way he encountered the man with the twitch. And it set off an existential crisis for old Jack Burden. He couldn’t get it clear in his mind if the twitch was itself or if it was connected to something larger, God perhaps, the Great Twitch Himself. Jack came to an understanding. He’d see Willie gunned down and he’d know that he may as well have put the gun in the assassin’s hand. He’d kill his own father like Oedipus of old, not knowing who the man truly was until it was too late. The bad father was dead and the good lived on. Or vice-versa, for each man, Jack came to understand, has equal measure of good and bad and what we do determines what we are and every action has an equal and opposite reaction, a filament of the web is caressed and a tree falls three weeks later. Or something like that. Willie’s capital city is behind me now and before me is the black, headlamp-lit highway. The romantic young man that I am loves the story of Jack’s struggle, the young love for Anne, the inarticulate feeling of being on a beach with love bigger than twenty suns and all day to swim. The feelings of youth, the pangs of the old writing about the young, resonates most deeply with the young themselves. It is we who must decide whether Willie is good or bad. It is we who must struggle to tell the story of ancestral sins. It is we who must be agents of vengeance in these strange and troubled times. It is we who must find and attach ourselves to something so much greater than ourselves. And so ‘All the King’s Men’ is something of a manifesto to some of us in the English class. We debate whether ends justify means and naturally I come out on the side of Willie Stark, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Peace out bro. That’s me, peace through superior firepower. It’s the do-gooders like me and Mussolini who want a well-ordered world, where trains run on time and nobody tries to make a left hand turn. A world of predictability, minus the gas ovens. I still wind up sounding like some kind of Aryan freak, and classmates openly wonder whether I’m not the type to come to school with a loaded rod and smoke some fool for an imagined offense. Not me. That’s not my speed. The pen, I pretend, is mightier than the revolver. And so I dedicate myself to the written and the spoken and not the silent language of the trigger pull, the moment of inhalation before the final exhalation. I want to be Jack Burden, ultimately. I want the girl at the end and a chess-playing father and the house with the jalousies in the town named for our family, with a view of crashing gulf surf and a fire in the fireplace and a warm four-legger and my manuscript finished and the drink is just right, we’re all happy now, safe, together, somehow mother is okay or we’re all okay with her absence, dead or drugged up in a convalescent home, it’s all the same to us, we sweet and happy few. And that’s what will bring me back, again and again to ‘All the King’s Men.’ Not so much the world of Penn Warren’s pen, though that by itself is reason enough. No, it is the world of myself that can be returned to, a way I felt as recently as last March and April when as a class we read all 558 pages and bitched and moaned the whole way. But teacher was right, she knew I’d love it and I do. The azaleas are always turning pink and white and magenta. The clocks haven’t sprung forward yet and so each evening the sun must battle the night for a few more moments of your time. The streetcars are still running past the open windows of teacher’s class room. Love is still an unknown, a still to be discovered element. You exist way down or way up rather with the rare gases, xenon and his ilk. You don’t know shit from apple butter and it feels so free. You are perched on the brink of all possibilities, uncut, unbloodied, unaware. You can discover the truth about the Judge and the crucible of Tom Stark and the fire-breathing fury of Sadie and you can ride the road with Sugar Boy and say, ‘Those bbbbaaassstuuddss,’ and laugh every time like you’d made it up yourself. And so it is. And so it goes. The great gift of literature, like an all seeing twitch, pulls each of its faithful into the web, into the conspiracy, into the maelstrom of ourselves, into a time when we liked ourselves better, knew less, wanted more.

The Vocabulary of Guns

59.

In the time that I am writing about, Baton Rouge was still obscured by trees. It was a magical sensation to pass the Highland Road exit and then you knew you were close to the city, your one hour drive already over if the capital was your destination or the campus of Louisiana State or one of the big ass chemical plants that spawned Dantean scenes into the night air. The rich families were still rich in 1984 and they held the land that was bisected by the Interstate. Hardwoods, clean woodland, palmetto-thick in summer, ghostly and black in the winter. It gave one a pleasant feeling after miles of weedy willows and then the slow rise into higher land until you came upon a forest amidst the south Louisiana sprawl of trailer homes and strip malls and Cajun this and coon-ass that. You could have been a traveler in a medieval time, arriving on horseback from the Palatinate, a crusader returned from the wars, a conquistador home from darkest Peru. And then you’d round a bend in the road, the highways converging together, the 12 meeting the 10 and the medieval keep would be seen rising above the growing town. In this case, the keep is the Hilton Hotel, twenty-five stories of white cement and lights burning over the commercial byways. You enter the city in your father’s car, passing the hotel. You’ll know in your bones that you’ll have a history in that tower. In an instant you’ll see it all, yourself behind the front desk, checking in the Mr. Lou Brock, yourself in an argument with a black Baptist preacher, yourself stealing money from the till, shoes from the shine man, jewelry from the safe. Nine months will pass in the bat of an eye, nine months that spawned huge friendships and mountains of deceit. You’ll see yourself screwing a stewardess on the floor of her hotel room. You’ll see a knot of crazy bellmen, your drug smoking, acid eating, novel writing friends. Through them, you’ll meet Bukowski. You’ll meet people who think nothing like you and you’ll like that feeling. You’ll meet dudes from Houma and Thibodaux and Houston fucking Texas. You’ll meet dudes running away from married women, dudes running away from adulthood, dudes fated to die young. All in a moment as you pass the hotel. The blue sign will be changed to red as the years pass and the nation stops fearing the Russians. You’ll escape with something less than your dignity, able to quit (thank God) before they fire you. You’ll place a phone call from somewhere alien like New York or Los Angeles or Miami, begging in no uncertain terms for your one ally left at that place to give you a good recommendation so you can escape whatever hell you and Bukowski have found yourself in. She will and therefore you will. And someday if you have half a brain left and any kind of nutsack, you’ll come back to the Hilton Hotel, all the Hilton Hotels of your past and you’ll ask to see the manager, Larry or Steve or Peshawar or Dao or Rita or Susann or Nancy or Kate. In this case, it will be Tom, Tom something, like two first names, Tom Frank perhaps. And the clerk who you do not know will ask who you are. You’ll give your name, Gabriel Doucette, you’ll say, a proud name, an ancient name, a name with its own street in a not so faraway town and you’ll think how you’ve sullied that name that was picked out with such care and you’ll look around the lobby of the hotel where you know no one anymore and that’s a blessing, no, Henry is still here, the only black bellman, tall and handsome and a little grey at the temples, he remembers you and shakes your hand, lovingly hugs you and says, ‘What’s up, where you been man?’ so country you could kiss him, and you’ll say where you’ve been all this time, France maybe or Oregon or the Bahamas or Mexico or England or Canada or Hong fucking Kong, anywhere but Baton Rouge and he’ll say, ‘Man that’s what I need to do, get out of here,’ but he won’t because he can’t, the wife, a baby, maybe two. He’s stuck and you’re free to fuck off the rest of your life. And then you’ll hear your name. ‘Gabriel.’ And you’ll turn around and Tom the Hotel Manager will be standing there waving you into the suite of offices behind the front desk. He still has the same haircut, mustache, brown shirt and yellow tie. As you walk into his office you’ll catch the eye of the food and beverage manager who knew you were a thief. She’ll look at you like you kick kittens and then you’ll sit across from Tom. Where you’ve sat before, denying everything, lying through your eyes, your whiskers, your yellowing and strong, hard teeth. With a Batman button on your oxford cloth shirt. Batman oughta put you away. And now Tom says, ‘What can I do for you?’ and he looks at you like you screwed his wife. And you tell it all. You tell it ALL. You tell how you stole and lied and lied and stole. And you say that you have no excuse, you’re not here to make an excuse, only to ask forgiveness and to promise that somehow, someway, you don’t know when, you’ll pay that money back, however much it was, you don’t know and you never will. And there will be a moment of silence in that ugly little office with the pictures on the desk of his wife and two daughters, gawky girls holding fishing poles. And then he’ll say, ‘I knew you were lying and I knew you were stealing. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Doing what you did today, coming in here and admitting what you’ve done, that took guts. That’s what a man does. He admits his mistakes. He doesn’t lie to others because he doesn’t lie to himself.’ And he’ll go on and you’ll sit there listening, not believing it, waiting for the cops to arrive or someone to throw hot coffee on you or spit in your face but they don’t, they won’t, not at all, not a bit, Tom will stand, you’ll stand, he’ll shake your hand and say this, the final nail in the coffin of your past, ‘If you need a job, come see me. We’d love to have you back.’ And you’ll go. You’ll walk out the door feeling a new man. ‘Goodbye,’ you’ll say to Henry and he’ll say, ‘You look out now, baby. I’ll be seeing you.’ And he won’t and you won’t. No need. They’ll be no need ever to ever go back through the doors of the Hilton Hotel again.