Other Peoples’ Guns
I’ve never owned one. My record with firearms includes:
1) passing out with a shotgun across my chest and my white hi-tops buried under leaves while duck hunting the morning after first experiencing vodka-oj cannonballs,
2) almost blowing off someone’s foot with a pistol I hadn’t learned to un-cock, and
3) blasting a mesquite bush I’d seen an inedible bird fly into, miraculously hitting said shit-bird, and having my hunter friends impale said shit-bird on the hood ornament of an Oldsmobile so that the rest of the weekend could be spent admiring my signature kill.
But still, I miss watching my buddy level a shotgun at a covey of quail while wearing nothing but a very small towel because he’d just been swimming in a pond, then dropping two of them even as the towel dropped, then, standing stark naked, raising their dead bodies towards the sky in grinning triumph. And I miss hearing about the new semi-auto my friend’s 6’4” ex- SFA-lineman older brother purchased to add to a collection so burgeoning (he’s up to around 50) he can’t even remember where in his house some of them are stashed. And then there’s the tiny, ivory-handled, monogrammed Derringer that same brother bought for his newborn niece. And the uzis another friend’s mustachioed older brother snuck onto a repossessed yacht to steal back from the government after the mid-80s oil crash fired a couple of rounds into his dad’s bank account.
And: in the 8th grade me, “Lloyd” and “Kurt Harris” (his 1st Vikon Village fake ID name) were walking towards Hillcrest on Amherst when this black Jag passed us, slowing up at the stop sign. Lloyd hurled half a Baby Ruth impossibly high into the air, and it landed on the Jag’s trunk with a gunshot-like crack. We took a left on Hillcrest. The Jag did too. It crept up alongside us, and the blond housewife behind the wheel leveled a pistol and screamed “I’m sick and tired of you fucking punks ruining my life!” while her 10-year-old daughter clenched the passenger seat in terror.
Lloyd froze, also in terror. Kurt and I kept on walking, also-also in terror. I felt like we’d abandoned Lloyd, though I swear I just assumed he’d keep walking too. Eventually she broke the standoff and headed south, hopefully to refill her Valium scrip.
Batshit-crazy lady from 1985, I miss your gun most of all. If there’s a god, one day I’ll meet your daughter, and she’ll be hot.
