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.”