The Vocabulary of Guns

56.

The digital clock in Ms. Mac’s living room reads 10:10, a pair of evil red eyeballs impelling me out of the empty house. My buzz is gone, the night is young, I’m a man on a mission climbing behind the wheel of his Japanese machine. My father’s sweet little Honda. My love machine with its reclining bucket seats and its FM radio sound. I turn it to WYLD, 98.5 and let Papa Smurf’s voice ease me down St. Charles Avenue and her Saturday night lights, past Delmonico’s and a ubiquitous Popeye’s and then onto the Pontchartrain Expressway, connector to the Interstate and its vast grid that covers America like a gauze. I shift to fourth gear and then begin my limitless drive. Like my father would say, I could fool ‘em all, just hop on the 10 and not get off except for gas and pissing until you reached Santa Monica, California, the peaceful ocean, arm in arm with the sun, earthquake and college football country. I could do that. The Superdome passes my right, the massive mushroom agleam with hundreds of orange lights. I’ve come to learn the secrets of that manmade toadstool, the secret catwalks and hidden doors. There’s more to know, of course, more than anyone could ever know. That’s the hidden secret of total buffoon-like ignorance. Some people know there is more than they’ll ever know and they just give up. They have their first terrifying dream of infinity when they are a child and that’s it, they’re done. They drop out and work on bumpers for the rest of their snake-bit lives. Others, like you and me, we have those dreams, dreams of numbers piled into the stratosphere, the true meaning of infinity and endless number lines and we feel the vertigo, the rush of the unknowable, and it makes us dizzy, makes us high makes us want more, more knowledge, more thoughts, more adventures of the mind. Sometimes. And sometimes you feel like a lyric to a song. Tell me no secrets, I’ll tell you no lies. Maginnis and TC and I got in trouble for walking the secret catwalks of the Superdome. Far down below us was the man who wrote ‘Mandy.’ Warming up on his piano he heard us and complained that we were blocking his chi. ‘What’s chi?’ said Maginnis. No one knew. TC thought it was sexual. Maginnis thought it was extraterrestrial. None of us knew how to center ourselves, or measure our life force. Not yet. That would come a long time from now after we had gone off on planetary explorations, found new friends, gotten wives, had babies, wrote each other off. Far from now. Far from tonight. When the raised crypts of the cemeteries are on the left and right, a sea of bone yards. You pass under the railroad bridge and its ever-changing graffiti messages. ‘Do the Dance!’ has been replaced with ‘Do the Dishes!’ Perfect. Perfect. Cross out of Orleans Parish as you merge with the Interstate. Traffic is fast and sassy, it’s Saturday night across America. Some people put on make up, cologne, their best shirts, their tightest jeans and their hippest shoes, took a puff, took a swig, did a line and then got behind the wheel and are now looking for some hook-up. They crank the music in their cars, pass me with a roar in their Firebird, in the Camaro, in the Trans Am. Across America we are all riding together, though I have more in league with the 18-wheelers, the truckers high-balling through town after town after town delivering oil and chemicals and hemp. I’m a man on the same mission as they are. Get somewhere, do a job, get back home. In my case the mission is to unload a shotgun into two men. Two men. A shotgun. Two men. I can see it. Holding the gun on them. No false moves. No stupid monologues that begin with one of my father’s stories and ends with one of them shattering the light bulb with his shoe, plunging us into darkness and uncertainty. No, none of that. Just blast their ass, Dirty Harry style. No, not Dirty Harry style. He has that whole speech. I’ve got no time for speeches. I gotta get it done. So buckle down and let’s get through Metairie and Kenner, flat as an iron, dominated by a few conical hotels and then the airport is a memory, the Kenner police car, vacant for years, parked on the median to warn the uncaring and now we are on the first bridge that gets you out of the city that care forgot, a long causeway over moon dappled waters with a ribbon of power towers carrying electricity to white folks on the north shore. Two lanes in either direction, each a separate bridge. Haul ass if you dare. Fuck up and it’s over the side or mangled by the traffic around you. Keep it at 70, I say. Maginnis would say 68 but that’s pussy. I’ll do 72 and like it. Like the ride and Mellow Moods, still catching the station as New Orleans recedes and black night arrives, it’s Cameo, a love song, and there’s Larry Blackmon’s voice easing you, now static, now clear, easing you out of your ancestral home and out into life, to go forward and do at last what needs to be done. Girl I’m trying to make you see, he says, I’d rather have you here with me falling in love again. But baby until then I’ll be hanging downtown. And you want that too, the chance to make it right, the way it was when you didn’t know anything at all. Back to the past, and if that’s impossible then create a new and better past. So drive on, sweet daddy, drive on. You’re 17 years old. You’re an unkillable, infinite being.