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And I haven't even mentioned the fallout from 9-11.
There must be something else going on in the world beside this senseless, ceaseless violence. Somewhere. I don't even mind if it is Hallmark Greeting Card kinds of things where moons hang on strings and float like gold baubles over the well-tended lawns of perfect families, where the mothers stay home, the children are able to walk to school, and the fathers don't have to work killing 60-hour weeks to make less money than their fathers did all for the five minutes a day they get to see those two pretty children just when they're off to bed.
I have decided that Amiri Baraka is right: "luxury, then, is a way of / being ignorant," and ignorant I choose to be. I've stopped watching the news on television, stopped reading the papers, turn my head when I walk past a newsstand. I will cross the street no matter how busy it is, confronting angry drivers and their horns and the possibility of an early death by collision in order to avoid facing those black, 34-point headlines. This is more than cocooning and a transformation from a vital, athletic man in his late 30's into a soft and doughy "couch potato." A couch potato watches -- something. Not I. "Let me sit and go blind in my dreaming." In this new world that Baraka describes, everything goes "calmly out of style," including me, and I can fade away into the relative safety of my apartment pretending to hold back the encroaching outside.
I need help doing it, however, and I have found that help in a new friend who calls himself Bick. He's an ex-army sergeant. He enjoyed jumping out planes in the service, even now, though he also is in his late thirties thickening around his middle, he'll still poke his finger into the chest of a much larger man and say, I think you should screw yourself, although I mean that in the nicest possible way.
I met him in a gun store. I've been getting more and more concerned, staying in my apartment. It's on the ground floor with louvered windows that are an invitation to come right in and rip the place off. I think it's only a question of when not if a robbery or some other act of violence is going to occur. I'm convinced I hear things in the night and I've taken to dashing out into the living room in my white boxers holding a baseball bat. That of course was before -- before I met Bick. Because "I have had to learn the simplest things / last," and one of those things was that life under constant fear is no way to live, I decided to at least investigate the idea of buying a gun. Now I'm from a more cerebral family. We are not hunter-gathers. We were reluctant campers at best. My father did not take me out on my 13th birthday up into the White Mountains of New Hampshire in an attempt to bag my first 14-point buck. On that day, he gave me a new pen, and told me I did a good job reading the Haftorah during my Bar Mitzvah. The beema of Temple Reyim is a long way from a hunter's blind a few miles outside of Laconia.
No, I never did hunt nor fish nor trap nor camp nor any of those other kind of "manly" things that country boys routinely do with their Fathers and their Grandfathers and their Uncles. My childhood was no Faulkner novel where we laughed "on the Great Earth" and needed "help from no man"; I spent a lot of time at the Children's Museum working out how things worked, and I took piano lessons and cello lessons, and I did a lot of reading. I may have missed out.
I went to the gun store because I was disquieted. That May, when the city burned, or so it seemed behind the glass of a twenty-seven inch Zenith. Nine channels of mayhem, no commercials. It would be impossible to sell beer against the panicked overhead shots from Chopper 2, the pilot's voice broken by the engine noise, shouting that the building is burning, the crowd is looting, the police are not around -- as if we could not see for ourselves this elegant madness through the smoke, children carrying toasters leaping through a gap in the security fence, adult faces grim with the weight of their boxes, dragging new televisions home. The looters were all black or brown, and when they made it to the street, they laughed. A couple of men danced. One shook his fist at the helicopter.
I had food at home, and didn't need to go out. But in the watching, a new recognition of home emerged. The walls were thin and there was little insulation. Outside and inside merged easily in the light from a match, in the openings created by broken glass, in the fervor of hooded figures dancing. Fire becomes fire becomes fire, who saw the edges anymore? It is the nature of people to watch those things that burn. Out of the flame comes the lewd certainty that this wood, cloth, body is transformed. I am no different than anyone, than the woman next door. We sat in our furnished rooms without a singular view bathing our faces in unnatural green watching worlds burn. I imagined her at home as I imagine myself. We could not escape the beating. They played the tape that caused it all across the channels, through time zones shaping the minutes around gray. I was not alone. I became the man licking the ground and moaning in a howl for any space without the shank of boots, the crushing heel, burning for minute asylum from the cadence of sticks down and down and down and down such a genteel choreography.
Does limestone have a soul? Do fichus understand pain? Do bats dream a world in reversal? I suppose I should try to grant the people in front and behind the cameras some latitude. They are, after all, only as human as you or I or the man trying to break into the car across the street. But they make Olympian pronouncements as if only they know because they are THE NEWS. They "have factual power over my life, which doesn't / make sense to me" until they make sense of it for me. The television never wavers. I cannot stand away from its vision. I wait for it to tell what is and what is not. During the Los Angeles riots the reporters fared badly: "equation: colorlessness + glibness = success." Is it that much different now with Bruce Beautiful beaming from Islamabad on the videophone, telling us what is or what isn't -- though he really doesn't know? During the LA riots the reporters couldn't connect. They, too, didn't know what was or what wasn't any better than the rest of us. No one did, and they circulated false information. To watch the coverage was to image a civil war except if you sat back and shut off the set, took a map of Los Angeles and plotted the locus of violence, you would realize quickly that the whole city was not in flames. "Equation: circle + spear = spiral." You'd realize quickly that Los Angeles was huge and there were whole sections unaffected by the rage. All of this is easy to reconstruct after the fact. But then, I didn't have a map. I didn't shut off the set. I watched and I watched and I didn't sleep and I didn't go to work and I didn't go out -- and I was disconcerted.
That is why I don't watch TV now, nor read the papers; you can't trust them to tell you the truth.
After it was over, after some semblance of calm returned, I went to the gun store. I walked around the aisles. I looked into the glass cases with the weapons attractively laid out. I watched men in workshirts and others in ties buy as much ammunition as they could carry out. One salesman in particular was kept busy running back and forth from the storeroom simply restocking the shelves with boxes of shells.
They're making a mistake, Bick told me. He was there for ammunition too, and with about 60 people in the store, we were going to have more than a little wait. I didn't know what he meant. He explained that everyone was buying the hottest, most powerful ammunition available with names like Corbon-Plus P or Black Talon. He said, It's great if you hit someone. One shot and they go down and stay down. The wound channel is huge and the shock to the system overwhelming; the body collapses in response. But if you missed, that's another story. The rounds don't stop in the thin walls of most California houses. They don't stop in the first wall or the second or even the third. He had heard of an incident where a man twenty-seven apartments away was killed by a round from a .45 that went through all those walls.
A lot of people are going to die, Bick said to me, as a result of all this fear. He recommended Glazer rounds. They've got a plastic tip that drives the bullet in, a very thin metal jacket and buckshot inside. The bullets explode in the body, dispersing their energy very quickly and very efficiently. They're devastating, he said. But if you miss and they hit a wall, they stop. Safety was a big thing with Bick.
Corbon-Plus P? Black Talons? Wound channels? "We want poems we can understand / We want a god to lead us, / renaming the flowers and trees / color-coding the scene, // doing bird calls for guests." I had no idea what he was talking about, but I had found in Bick someone to lead me to some kind of new understanding.
Bick has a lot of guns: a Sig .45, a Baretta .380 and a 9mm with the extra-long clip that holds 17 plus one. He's got a Ruger .357 Magnum and an S&W442 that he uses as his carry-gun. With no visible hammer, he can shoot from his pants pocket. I'd be concerned with shooting something anatomically important, but not him. He says as long as you point it straight -- the gun that is -- there's no possibility of penis injury. Besides, he said and laughed, his isn't that big and who needs big when he has this kind of arsenal.
I tell you all this so you'll know that Bick is the kind of man who also isn't afraid to pull out his gun. Last week he was driving home around midnight on Ventura Boulevard. A small car came up on his bumper and tapped him. Unlike me, he does read the newspaper and listen to the television, and he talks to his police buddies at the firing range where he goes twice a week to cap off 300 rounds. It's an expensive habit but I wouldn't want to come through his window unannounced; he would put a nice 15-round pattern in your forehead using the trillium night sights on his Sig. Don't stop, the newspapers say. If someone taps your bumper keep going until you get to a well-lit public area where there are people and phones. Don't you friggin' stop, his police buddies say, Drive like hell. C'mon over. We'll take care of the bastards.
Bick drove like hell but, unfortunately for him, he spends more money on his guns then he does on his car. He didn't have the power or the control to get away. They were racing down Ventura Boulevard. The other car was going to catch him. It nearly did several times. He weaved back and forth across the broad street. There was no traffic in the other direction, Thank God. He said the lights were going by in slow motion painting the glass yellow and red and green, and while he's telling me this I shouted, Don't get poetical on me, what happened?
So he's racing down Ventura Boulevard and this car filled with young men of what he referred to as the "Latin persuasion" were behind him. Sometimes they got up next to him. He thinks they were Mexicans but who could really tell through the tint of his windows and theirs.
He got to his house about twenty seconds before they did, jammed the car into park in the middle of the walk, ran inside, managed to get his security code entered in only two tries, got to his apartment, picked up the Sig and went back out holding it combat-style in a two-fisted Weaver Grip. He hid in the shadows, looking to cut down the angles, to gain the clear shot. As he was standing there in the bushes waiting for the car full of kids to stop, for someone to get out -- as he was waiting for the confrontation which you might say he had trained for all his life -- some revelation must have come to him. The car full of alleged-Mexicans came by, slowed, then drove on. He remained in the bushes, hidden. He said, I took evasive maneuvers, and no one was lost in the operation.
I think he's lying to himself as much as he's lying to me. He was, at that moment, faced with the supreme question that surrounded the definition of manhood in our culture. You know the predictable aphorisms: We do not cry. We do not feel. We are aggressive and beastly. We respond in force against force. They knock down our biggest buildings, we bomb them back to the Stone Age -- which was close to where they started. The strong survive and any man who shows his weakness will be driven from the pack. These were all very real considerations to him at that moment. I could put myself in his place. It was mortal combat from which he might not emerge alive, and if he did, perhaps not in the same whole-limbed condition as when he began the evening. I think his mortality caught up with him: he was 39 and not married and if things turned out badly he was going to wind up on the front page of the LA Times the next morning and I wouldn't read about it. He wasn't prepared to die in a firefight over a piece of nothing, although at that moment, "all things are made bitter, words even / are made to taste like paper." There was no relief in inaction, only bile.
He did phone the police. The woman officer who answered the call said, I'd say you were about a minute away from a car-jacking, but you did the right thing. Bick didn't mention the gun.
I admit that I bought a Taurus PT-99 9mm with the extended clip and the special night sights. Bick helped me pick it out. The clerk slid back the door to one of the glass cases, bringing out the weapon. In the measured light this thing was not blue, really, more blackish and cold. The clerk handed it to me open as if it were nothing, a lamp for my inspection. The grips were wood polished a natural brown, they warmed to my testing hand. Surprised by the fit, I extended my arm, felt the balance change.
We went across the street to the range and tried out a demonstration model. My guide set the target -- the heart yields the highest scores. We pushed waxed plugs inside our ears. I heard the sound of blood, my lungs, now the compression of fire a faint tap against my side. Each breath articulated a question: How many shots does it take to still the breech of a 200 pound man in a bedroom when the only thing known is the nothing held in a two-fisted grip the moment it takes the trigger to travel rendering nothing the same.
Bick led me back to the store. Give them your credit card, he said. His sales pitch was so effective it left me wondering if he worked for the place. I keep the gun by my bed loaded with the bullets that explode. My body has constructed its own form learning to sleep on the edge. I have lived here for years enjoying a relative freedom to dance naked through the rooms. Now I have introduced motion sensors on the walls that chime lewdly if someone is inside.
If someone is inside my sleep is no longer easy. I practice the move off the bed onto the floor thumbing the safety aiming at the door. In that instant drained of silence, again I hear my breath.
One night, a few weeks ago, I was dozing. My girlfriend Didi was over. We had just had the most wonderful delivery dinner from a local Thai restaurant that cooks like homemade. I've become friendly with the delivery men and I spend so much money there these days that they usually throw in the drinks for free. Suddenly the alarm went off and I was awake, rolling to my right, grabbing up the gun, the safety off, ready, waiting.
Don't shoot, Didi shouted. Please don't shoot. It's just me. I went to get something to drink. Don't shoot, for God's sake. I forgot about the alarm.
I was sleepy enough that I thought it might be a trick but it was her, coming back to the bedroom. She has taken to not staying over much since then, and I'm afraid that the relationship may be in the process of a reorientation, a new orientation, which is to say that as I have ended my newspaper subscriptions and terminated my cable service, this particular girlfriend is probably going to go the way of news as well. I'll have to look for someone else though it will be hard because I don't get out much. The gun had to be sent to Miami for repair; that's where Taurus is located. There was something wrong with the locking mechanism and the magazine kept popping out after every shot. It was lucky for me that it happened one morning on the range. How awful to have shout at someone, Hold on a sec, I have to unjam the gun.
I hope nothing happens in the interim, they said it will take a few weeks to fix. In the meantime, I continue to sleep with the motion sensors guarding me. Now I've got my baseball bat by the bed. I'm ready. I am waiting.
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