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(Note: The Gershwins wrote a musical called 'Girl Crazy'. The following account should serve as a cautionary tale about what sorts of things can happen to boys in the absence of girls.)
'I have long been convinced that I viewed my guns as a means of communication (yes, I know, an extreme one) from myself to a potential target: a missile rather than a missive; a bullet dour rather than a billet-doux.'
- an anonymous gun nut
I had an obsession with guns off and on for the first two decades of my life.
I built my first two guns myself. One was useless, while the other was harmless.
I fashioned the first gun in the style of an 18th century pistol. As such, it was intended to be a firearm. It was beautifully carved and varnished. I designed my own mechanism whereby pulling the trigger would draw back the hammer and then spring-release it onto a hole atop the barrel.
But this ornate 'gun' could never be fired. For, as the barrel was part of a lead water pipe, the device would have exploded in my face had I loaded it with powder and ignited it.
The second was a rubber band gun. I built it specifically to torment my brother. The handle was carved into a graceful shape. The barrel was a long dowel with three notches at the end. The gun held three rubber bands which could be released in succession as one pulled the trigger.
This gun would not excite me for long. How interesting is it to see rubber bands bouncing harmlessly off one's adversary at fifteen feet? I realized that I needed something with more range, more power, more - zing. In short, something more like a weapon...
A thrown rock was a weapon, of course, but a notoriously unpredictable hit-or-miss one. Too often I would strike someone's head when I was only intending to slightly wound them - or vice versa. Or, worse yet, I would miss them entirely. I realized early on that I needed something more accurate, more reliable - that is, a real weapon.
My first real weapon was a sling shot.
My brother (in the neighborhood he was my ally) and I fashioned our own sling shots. First we'd sever the crotch of a sapling. For the sling we'd cut long narrow strips from an old inner tube in the garage. The web of a leather belt would provide the pouch.
One could propel anything of reasonable size with a sling shot. By trial and error I found the best propellents to be the largest acorns: I would remove their caps and then place one in the pouch so that its pointed tip was facing out. This would then be released to sting the behind of any playmate who for whatever reason had incurred my displeasure. (And: I was easily offended. Though, truth to tell, sometimes I wasn't offended at all - I would just shoot a friend for the sheer exuberance of it all!) Yes, I would 'communicate', via acorn, my feelings to another boy, who in turn would communicate back his yelps.
The sling shot was the first and last weapon I had which could be unleashed on my fellow boy with impunity (I do not recall the mother of any victim ever calling my mother to protest.) As such, then, the times I used it stand as a sort of Garden of Eden of weaponry innocence. (Of course this only applies to boys: the act of a grown man shooting his fellow neighbors in the butt with a sling shot would be considered - unseemly.)
(Still, there existed a hunting sling shot called the WHAM-O! which was widely advertised in our comic books. It came with its own supply of steel balls. Fortunately, I decided that our neighborhood was not yet ready for this monster!)
I owned a bow and arrows during the Robin Hood craze of the mid-50's. And I had many of the accoutrements of that personage: a racy green felt hat with a feather; a suede leather quiver; etc. I would strut about in that outfit, but in truth I cannot recall shooting anything except for an occasional tree. Unfortunately, these things were lethal weapons, and so we could not shoot one another. For some reason no one - not even my parents - had thought of acquiring a target for us to shoot at. What seems most remarkable now is that none of us was killed, given our propensity to shoot arrows straight up in the air (a stupid act), playing 'How close can you come to my head?' (perhaps the stupidest act of all), etc.
I had long wanted an air rifle. But, wisely, my mother withheld her permission until we had acquired our place up in the country, which had plenty of woods to shoot in (and no kids other than my brother who might be potential shooting victims.) I bought a Daisy Red Ryder Carbine, mainly because it had a suede 'boot' at the end of the (plastic, unfortunately) stock.
This was my first gun, and intuitively I grasped its significance: a self-contained entity of destruction. There was a magazine which held a plethora of BB's, and a spring mechanism which, once cocked, could propel one of those projectiles out at the mere pull of the trigger. No more reaching for acorn or arrow and placing it in pouch or string! A gun is ready to pounce at the moment its owner entertains the thought. It is convenient, and it is accurate.
And so I went a-hunting with my Daisy. Doing that, I implicitly declared war against every living mammal and bird. (It would have been more in harmony with my later temperament to study those creatures, rather than to seek their eradication. But at the time I was not living with my later temperament.) This declaration took the form of me sending out little copper balls at fairly high speeds in the direction of mainly squirrels and magpies. Fortunately for them, the speed of those balls was not sufficient to penetrate their fur or plumage. (Although, I surmised, it was more than sufficient to raise a nice red welt on the skin of one of my playmates back home. With genuine nostalgia I noted how much I missed them!) But I enjoyed roaming our woods (and others' too) with gun in hand while pretending to be The Hunter.
One languid summer afternoon, however, I found I was too bored and listless to venture into the woods. So I mainly stayed near the cottage and 'plinked' at tin cans atop the woodpile, all the time keeping my eye out for more - inviting - targets. And what, pray, would such a target consist of, given that animals were a waste of good BB's and my brother was off-limits? The prospects seemed dim indeed. Nevertheless, it was wise to be vigilant just in case something presented itself, something enticing...
My mother had just finished drinking her afternoon glass of wine, and had left the glass on the picnic table across the yard. My mother was elsewhere - perhaps planting some flowers out front. So the glass sat there alone, empty, forlorn...
The wine glass sat there, entrancing in its crystalline purity, its glacial elegance. It stood there haughtily, daringly on its stem and base.
This seemed to be presenting the invitation I had been looking for.
At that precise moment of spotting the glass, I knew what I wanted to do. In point of fact I wanted to do it very badly. The only question was a basic one: did the enjoyment in carrying out the deed outweigh the negative consequences?
Negative Consequences One: I would almost certainly be punished. No doubt I would be denied use of the air rifle for a period of time. Would this make it worth doing?
Negative Consequences Two: I would be destroying something delicate and beautiful and useful and innocent. Would I feel too much remorse afterwards to make the deed worthwhile?
The potential gunman must weigh consequences like these all the time. Sometimes he weighs them for an extended period of time - even years. At other times all the weighing and considering takes place with lightening speed.
I weighed for a moment. Then I raised the air rifle, found the wine glass in its sights, and squeezed the trigger.
Across the yard my mother's goblet collapsed to the table in a merry paroxysm of tinkling glass. (In such a way did I 'communicate' with the wine glass, and such was its 'response'.)
Did I feel remorse for destroying this delicate thing? Only a bit; any such feelings were far outweighed by the regret that there were no more wine glasses to shoot.
And was I punished? Remarkably, unbelievably I wasn't. My mother must have been in a very good mood that day!
With that act, I realized intuitively that I had exhausted the uses I could make of the air rifle - that no other cathartic event could come close to the one I had just perpetrated. I felt I was ready for a firearm. But was I? Did I realize that I was leaving behind another form of innocence - that of being able to shoot a gun however and wherever I pleased, as long as it was not directed at another person? Indeed, it is not - discrete - to discharge a firearm wherever and whenever one pleases: for some reason people tend to be bothered at hearing the explosive report of a lethal device in their immediate vicinity (as opposed to the gentle 'pumpf' of the air rifle.)
I acquired my first firearm when I didn't know why I wanted it and I had no clear purpose in mind as to what I would use it for. And then I acquired two others. One of these was an older pump action Winchester .22 rifle, a gracious little gun with silver embroidery engraved on its stock. Another was a 9 mm Beretta automatic pistol: this was the model gun James Bond used. I shot it once, lost interest in the mystique, and sold it to my brother, who may still sleep with it under his pillow.
The third of these firearms was a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun. This is the sort of gun with which one might shoot game birds in flight. The problem was, I never could hit a moving target, though I had practiced a little with a skeet thrower.
Nevertheless, I brought the shotgun with me when my father and I went up to the cottage one wintry day. There was a hard crust of snow on the ground, and the tree branches were 'bare ruined choirs.' In fact, there could not have been a starker contrast to that idyllic summer afternoon when I shot the wine glass.
My father and I were standing by a tree a dozen or so yards from that past scene. I happened to look up, and I spied a small bird perched alone on a high branch. Almost instinctively I raised my gun, sighted the bird, and squeezed the trigger.
The bird fell like a rock through the branches into the snow.
My father was shocked at what I had done. Indeed, how could I defend my actions?
'I shot the bird because it was there'
(the Edmund Hillary argument)?
'I shot the bird because I could'?
'I shot the bird because it wasn't moving'?
'I shot the bird because I was bored and in need of
something to happen'?
None of these satisfied my father. Or me either, for that matter. That would be the first and last bird that I would shoot.
My gun fetish waned during my first two years of college. But in my junior year I roomed with a senior chem major named Thomas E. Johnson who was interested in guns.
What sort of person was Johnson? A rich misanthrope who had no friends and didn't seem to care. He looked like the nerd that he was: round glasses magnified already-wide-open eyes, giving him a 'deer-in-the-headlights' look. At the time we met, I considered him to be merely eccentric. But other things emerged which showed evidence of a damaged individual.
For example, another student told me that his jacket had been stolen from a coat hook outside the dining hall. A few weeks later he spotted Johnson on campus wearing the jacket. 'Hey, that's my jacket!' he yelled. Without a word Johnson took off the jacket, handed it to its owner, and walked away.
Johnson told me that he planned to change his name to 'Zay Curtis' some day, and I half believed him.
At some point he suggested that we each bring our guns up to school so that we could shoot on weekends. (It was against school rules to have guns in the dorms.)
But none of his foibles prepared me for his collection, which was bizarre in the extreme. The guns stashed in his dorm bedroom closet - his 'little arsenal' - were as follows:
1. One Crosman pump action .177 pellet pistol. The more you pumped it, the more power you had. Johnson would use this for target practice in the very room in which I studied.
2. One derringer pistol with holster. This is the tiny pistol riverboat gamblers would carry in their waistcoat pocket in the 19th century. Johnson had loaded his with 'dumdum' bullets: these had hollow points which would expand upon hitting an object, thereby causing a more gaping wound. Johnson carried this little menace to class every day, the holster visible on his belt.
3. A replica of a Civil War-era revolver. This sort of gun predated cartridges. As a result, it had to be loaded as follows: First, pour black powder into each of the six cylinders and tamp it down. Second, put a lead bullet into each cylinder. Third, place a firing cap over the nipple above the powder for each cylinder. And fourth, spread petroleum jelly across the fronts of all the cylinders, so that a discharge of one cylinder doesn't set off the others. (Needless to say, this gun was a mess after just one usage.)
4. One Fox over/under shotgun. This was an elegant and expensive gun of the sort the vice president might use. It put to shame my nameless double-barrel shotgun.
5. One sawed-off pistol-grip double-barrel shotgun. These were illegal in the larger society, never mind the dorm. It was intended to be hidden under a trench coat, thence to be used to blast people away as needed. No greater contrast could be found between this blunt thug and the aristocratic Fox.
6. One .45 caliber automatic pistol, with tan tooled leather holster. This was a weapon specifically designed to kill men. (It was claimed that, should a bullet from one of these strike you on the finger, it would knock you over with the force of a Mack truck.)
That was Johnson's 'arsenal.'
There was the time that we were flying a kite and it got stuck up in a tree. Johnson offered to go back to the room and get his (blatantly illegal) sawed-off shotgun to, in his quaint words, 'blast it out of the tree.' Fortunately, some one of us talked him out of this, reasoning that to destroy the kite in order to save it didn't seem very - sane.
But then, Johnson wasn't very sane. I have already said that he carried a loaded gun to class every day. The chasing incident proved his innate insanity all the more:
Something had set Johnson off against me. As I recall, we had traded some things. I then bragged to people as to how I had bested him in the deal, which included my acquisition of a copy of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' discarded from the University library. Anyway, a furious Johnson began chasing me (as I held 'Ulysses' in my hand) down the jagged hall in our dorm, thence to climax as a wrestling match in our room. There, as I was pinning him, Johnson yelled, 'Cut it out, May - I've got a gun here!'
I jumped off immediately. The derringer was in his hand. That crazy fool had been chasing me with a loaded gun!
I'm wondering whether Johnson's craziness didn't rub off onto me a bit:
One evening in the dorm room I was feeling bored. Never underestimate what a bored young man may do. In point of fact, that evening I did something so mind-bogglingly stupid that, at the very least it might have gotten us both expelled, and at most blown us to smithereens.
While Johnson was studying at his desk, I got the black powder from his room. I sprinkled a trail for several feet across our room, culminating in a pile in the center. Then I lit the tail end of the trail.
A fire traveled slowly along the trail. When it reached the center, the whole pile combusted in slow motion. With a soft 'poomph' a large ball of black smoke rose toward the ceiling. It hit with a splat and spread in all directions. In another moment the room was filled with acrid sulfurous smoke.
This time it was Johnson's turn to call me 'an idiot'. We opened all the windows (which overlooked a parking lot behind the dorm.) When this did not seem to be doing an adequate job, I opened the door into the hall to get a circulation going. But, with a will of its own, the smoke seemed as likely to flow out into the hall as into the parking lot. 'Close the door May - do you want us to get caught?!' Johnson yelled, his tone dripping with Responsibility. I didn't know what I wanted, but I closed the door.
As we waited in trepidation, we began to hear a quiet murmur of voices, a small bustle of activity out in the hall. After several minutes of this did not produce the expected knock on the door, we decided to see what all the fuss was about. We ventured cautiously into the hall, making sure to close the door quickly behind us.
In a small alcove next to our door there were a couple of machines that sold drinks and popsicles. In the smokey alcove a few students were peering into the machines, checking electrical connections, etc. I was paralyzed with fear. But Johnson, one of those geeks who would pour over electronics parts catalogs, stepped up brazenly and began to give them 'troubleshooting' advice. But the cause of the smoke was fortunately never found by those students.
Soon enough we were back in our (much cleared up) room, where I proceeded sheepishly to clean up the floor at and near ground zero.
Someone once famously said, 'No matter how charming the rest of the play, the last act is bloody.'
The last act of this tale takes place in a garbage dump. Gone is the sward of green grass leading up to one single pristine wine glass on a summer's day; or a crust of snow beneath a solitary bird in a bare tree on a winter's day.
The dump stretched as far as the eye could see. It was a rolling chaos filled with a myriad of cast-off objects and refuse. It also was said to have rats, though I never saw any. Johnson and I had come there a few times to shoot anything which caught our fancy.
I was shooting randomly at objects near and far with Johnson's .45 automatic, when I heard a nearby voice yell, 'Hey, watch out, someone's down there!' I looked out in the distance and, sure enough, a man was rooting about in the very area at which I was shooting with a gun designed specifically to kill men.
I am well practiced in what to do in such a case as this: I weigh the consequences for a moment. Then I raise the gun until I find the man in my sights. And then I...
But of course I did none of that. I was not that stupid. If anything, I shuddered, as I do each time I recall this incident. Then I put the gun back in its holster and handed it silently back to Johnson.
I didn't fire another gun after that. At the end of the year Johnson graduated. I lived alone the following year but there were no guns in my room (soon enough I would sell them all to a dealer for a pittance.) Rather, I took up music again and found it to be (as I still do today) a far superior art of 'communication.'
A few years after graduation I read in the alumni magazine of the death of one 'Zay Curtis, a.k.a. Thomas E. Johnson.' It did not tell how he died, but I can just imagine.
As for that copy of 'Ulysses', it remains in my bookcase, still unread, to this day.
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