When I was young I developed quite a relationship with guns, albeit all from the receiving end.
I first was held up with a gun outside of Seward Park High School. I was 14 years old. It was 1974. Three big guys grabbed me, pointed a gun at me and dragged me up to Delancey Street. I managed to get loose and run into a bank. They didn’t shoot me but they hit me very hard on the top of the head. I was bleeding. I was alone.
Later, as i got older, much of my experience with guns was working as a restaurant manager. I was held hostage, ironically by a student from the college I work at now. First time I even heard of BMCC. Really! It was the early Eighties, so when the cops finally came they acted like it wasn’t a big deal. I got everyone out alive but the police didn’t care. I think I handled it quite well. When I was tied up with my head in the toilet bowl it did occur to me that the boss really wouldn’t miss the money in the safe all that much. I was the manager. I had a cook, a busboy and a cashier. The cook had a gun to his head. My head was in the toilet bowl. I didn’t have much leverage but I think I negotiated a pretty good deal for everyone. It was win win.
Without being held hostage I was held up at least a dozen times with guns. .22, .38 and .357 Magnum pistols among others. Once by what I was sure was a toy gun, but why take chances? Another time someone tried to rob me saying he had a gun. Then a knife. Then he knew Kung Fu. Needless to say in that situation I demanded proof. In any case I saw lots of guns. Shiny ones chromed like a car bumper. Blue ones. Black ones. Tiny ones. Big ones. Revolvers. Automatics.
One time I had to fight two big transsexual purse snatchers who stole a customer’s purse. I locked the restaurant door and they attacked me with plastic takeout knives. They were over six feet tall and looked like RuPaul before there was a RuPaul. I got the purse back but the police officer said “lucky they didn’t have a gun.” I didn’t think about that. I should have thought about that.
Once I was on the D train when three guys with guns robbed the entire car. When we got to 125th Street my friend and I got off and reported it to two nice policeman in the station mezzanine. Then one guy with a gun went running by followed by two other guys with guns chasing him. The two nice police officers excused themselves and ran after them. Two hours later we were still there waiting for them to come back. They never did. We jumped the turnstile and went uptown. I ended up at the lake in VanCortlandt Park watching the sun rise as a flock of swans swam by. It was beautiful. I had only one subway token in my pocket. I was hungry. I was alive. I wanted to throw up.
Then I was shot at. On 139 Street between Broadway and Hamilton. He missed. He was far away. But I felt the bullet go by my left ear. I remember clearly it was my left ear.
I also had to break up a fight with two roommates, one of whom had a crappy little revolver. The other had a machete. When you are between a gun and a machete I have to admit the machete is much more impressive.
Then a mentally unstable relative threatened to kill me. Multiple times. So I threw his rifle out the window and destroyed it. My mother made me pay for it. It was expensive. Monthly installments.
While doing my thesis film on the Emergency Medical Service in Harlem (on 16mm film no less) we picked up a guy on New Year’s Eve shot in the arm above the elbow with a large caliber handgun. You could tell because the wound was huge. We weren’t filming so, as the crew were short handed I got the job to cut the sleeve off the leather jacket at the level just below the arm pit. It was tough work. A large amount of blood was held in the sleeve by the cuff of the jacket and splattered all over the floor. It was bright red. Arterial blood. The man was scared. He was in intense pain. His arm looked like hamburger. He was going to start the New Year in the hospital, in intense pain and he just lost a beautiful leather jacket. It was his right arm. At the hospital I mopped the floor of the ambulance. Blood is sticky, like cherry jello before it gets hard, and it is warm. It is hard to clean.
These are all true stories. I think the time between 1978 and 1990 must have been some kind of golden age for gun related crime. At least from my perspective.
Last year I went to shoot a gun. I did very good. Most of my shots ended up in the center of the target or close by. With practice I could really be great at this I thought.
It was something of a let down. Having someone shoot at you is much more exciting than shooting at someone yourself, or at least shooting at a paper target in a basement. I think I’ll stick to being shot at instead.
I found I don’t like guns much. At least real guns. While shooting the gun it reminded me of bad sex. Not that most sex is bad, but when it is bad it is like shooting a gun, but not as loud and you have your clothes off. I think for some people it must be like good sex but I really don’t want to have a conversation with them about it. I don’t talk about sex with strangers. Abortion, birth control, prostitution, but never sex. Sex related things only. But it gave me an idea.
If the First Amendment can guarantee you freedom of speech but still make it illegal to do things like child pornography can’t the Second Amendment make it just a little harder to kill a kindergarten class? I know I am asking for a lot here, but why do we even need to talk about it all that much? Do we really need to make a big national debate about this?
I guess so. Oh well. Here we go. Let’s make it really hard for someone to kill children in a kindergarten class with a gun. I think we can agree on that. If we can’t, then we should really be ashamed of ourselves. Each and every one of us. Really ashamed, because it means we suck. Right now, we suck.
