Gun Church

Two

I was still alive and, all things considered, I was in better shape than the blackboard. Unfortunately, my left ear hadn’t stopped ringing and the burn on my cheek was hurting like a bastard. The stink of my singed hair was masked by the puff of gun powder residue that came in the immediate wake of the shot. My initial reaction, after the kid had inched the barrel away from my nose and put a hole in the blackboard, was relief: relief I hadn’t shit my pants or pissed down my sock. I had had all the indignity I could handle for one lifetime, thank you very much. The last twenty years hadn’t left much pride in the tank and there was nowhere left to fall after BCCC.

The acrid scent of spent powder, the sickening stink of singed hair, and burnt skin brought it all back to me: the smell of my dad’s suicide. Suddenly, I was twelve years old again at the summer house on the lake. My mom and sister were in town shopping when I heard it. I didn’t know what it was exactly. I knew what it wasn’t. Why would my dad light a firecracker inside the house anyway? He was at his desk, but it wasn’t him I looked at. What I remembered most vividly was first staring at the curtains: those fussy, frilly, white lace curtains that my mother adored and he detested. They were splattered with his blood like a sneering last “Fuck you!” to my mom. His head was thrown back over the ledge of the chair as if he were studying the morning sun through the shattered window behind him. The image of him, of the curtains, of the gun on the planked floor, comes back to me sometimes, but I had shut away the fresh smell of his death the way a kid buries something in his backyard and forgets about it.

About two hours had passed since the first shot. In the meantime, the brooding Mr. Vuchovich hadn’t put another round in anything more threatening than an overhead light fixture. He’d herded the other students and me into a corner at the back of the classroom, away from the windows. The kid had planted himself in the opposite corner, across from the door. Anyone making a run for it or attempting to storm the classroom via the door would’ve been quite dead quite quickly. The state and local police had done as expected. They had cell-phoned, texted, bull-horned, cajoled, coaxed, negotiated in all manner and forms. They had offered him food, friendship, psychiatric help, a bus, a car, a helicopter, a lawyer, his priest, his mom, his dad, his stepdad, and his ex-girlfriend. They’d offered up everything short of hookers and an all-expense-paid trip to Vegas, but the problem wasn’t theirs. Apparently, Frank Vuchovich didn’t seem interested in doing much of anything except brooding.

Given the minor nature of my injuries and my close proximity to Renee, I suppose things could have been worse, much worse. The St. Pauli Girl had had her arm looped through mine, her head pressed against my chest. It probably made her feel safe, like being close to Grandpa. Whatever the reason, I was glad for the touch. The brief affairs I had managed since coming to Brixton were of the roll-over-and-feign-sleep or take-a-shower-and-get-the-fuck-outta-there variety. However hopefully my dalliances would begin, they always ended in disappointment.

With the coeds, the disappointment was categorically mutual. The adjuncts were another matter. The adjuncts had usually read me or at least heard of me. The ones who’d read me expected … I didn’t know what the hell they expected. Maybe the Kipster, maybe somebody more like one of my ultra-hip ’80s cool-boy protagonists: greedy, coked out, and horny, with a taste for ruby port and tawny pussy. They certainly didn’t expect me: a bitter, talentless, middle-aged boor. The ones who had only heard of me expected some hard-drinking romantic hybrid of Hemingway (pre-shotgun) and Mailer (post-stabbing). I’m not sure what I expected-probably very little-but I always hoped for Amy. Disappointment was inevitable.

I tried engaging Vuchovich in conversation, which netted the reply, “Shut the fuck up and get back in the corner.”

Hey, I didn’t need to be told twice. I guess I felt some responsibility for the students, but I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by it. Look, I didn’t know these kids and they sure didn’t know me. They were in community college, for fuck’s sake-the academic equivalent of jerking off. What the hell did these kids think they were going to get out of this? They were sleepwalking in the land of denial. It was a land I was well familiar with. Maybe if we got out alive, I’d draw them a road map.

I may not have had any attachment to my students, but I didn’t want anything to happen to them. They had as much right to fuck up their lives as I’d had, even if they were apt to do it in less spectacular fashion. I had once been good with people. “A real schmoozer,” Bart Meyers used to say. But that was a long time ago, before I’d become disconnected from my wife, my life, and my talent. I was struggling with how to approach Vuchovich when circumstance forced the issue.

Jim Trimble jumped to his feet. “This is bullshit!” he growled.

That impressed the hell out of me. While I hadn’t stooped to begging Frank for my life and the lives of my students, I hadn’t exactly acted very heroically either. I decided right then and there, that if we came through this, to give Jim a second chance.

“Sit down, Jim!” I got up, stepping between Vuchovich and Jim. “Sit down!” I repeated, actually shoving Jim away. “Go sit next to Renee.”

I took a few tentative steps toward Vuchovich. Frank raised his weapon, but he was sufficiently sharp not to move out of his corner. After spending the last two hours with him, I figured Tom Clancy novels were probably Frank’s favorite masturbation material. No doubt he was acutely aware of the snipers on the adjoining roofs. I was sure he knew what kind of rifles and ammo they used. He was probably hard thinking about it.

A ray of light from the afternoon sun caught the raised revolver just right. Until then, I hadn’t paid it much mind. It had bullets and it went “bang.” I’d seen close up what guns could do to the human skull. What else did I need to know? But now as its blue finish gleamed in the sunlight and its unusual shadow was cast against the blackboard, I had an idea. One that, if my drug- and alcohol-atrophied brain fucked up, would likely get me killed.

“Colt Python, right? Royal Blue finish, eight-, no, six-inch barrel.”

The kid didn’t say anything, but his eyes got big and his right index finger eased off the trigger onto the trigger guard.

I kept going. “That thing on top of the barrel, that’s a ventilated rib.”

Frank was impressed. “That’s right.”

“Colt Python, the Rolls-Royce of American handguns.” I said, repeating verbatim the words Bart Meyers had said to me twenty years earlier. Truth was I knew more about the location of Schrodinger’s cat than handguns. Let’s just say that since the day I found my father, I hadn’t been especially keen on guns. That was until I needed to write about them.

I had outlined a chapter in my second novel, Flashing Pandora, where my tragically cool futures-trading prince, Kant Huxley, and the eponymous Pandora are confronted outside CBGB by the gun-toting Harper Marx, one of Huxley’s ruined partners. Kant Huxley and Harper Marx, indeed! Christ, I used to think I was so fucking witty. Could I have been any more pretentious? I heard Joe Heller thought I was a schmuck for riffing on what he’d done with names in Catch-22. He was right.

In any case, I had foreshadowed that scene earlier in the book when Kant is forced to improvise a new trading strategy as a crisis in the Middle East-yeah, like that could ever happen-forces oil prices to soar. Pandora, who up until that point had been cool to Huxley’s advances, gets totally hot for him while watching him ad-lib a new strategy with billions of dollars on the line. Later in the book, when Kant feels Pandora slipping away, he pays the desperate Marx to act the role of the vengeful partner. Of course it all goes wrong in the end.

“It has to be a distinctive-looking gun,” I had told Bart.

Bart, who was a complete gun nut, had first selected a Luger. “Behold!” he said, carefully removing the Luger from its original packaging, handling it as delicately as a slippery newborn. He laid it across the palms of his white gloves. “Fine German craftsmanship and machining; an intricate firing mechanism, beautifully balanced, and its shape … Kipster, there are few things on this earth as immediately recognizable simply by its shape than a Luger.”

“No, Bart. I want something brutal and American, the firearms equivalent of a muscle car.”

“I’ve got just the thing: an elegant beast.” With that, he curled the fingers of my left hand around the grip of a hefty, blue metal revolver with a weird-looking barrel. “Meet the Colt Python.357 Magnum: the Rolls-Royce of American handguns. That’s a 1955, one of the first Royal Blues with a six-inch barrel off the production line.”

Now as I stood across the classroom from Vuchovich, I struggled to remember what else Bart had taught me that day nearly three decades back and how I had used it in the book. Problem was he hadn’t told me much.

I played for time. “Is the Python yours?”

A smile. “It’s mine now.”

Good. This was progress. I gave myself an invisible pat on the back.

“A 1955?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Vuchovich, his cold eyes receding into their original broody slits. “You tell me, since you seem to know so much.”

This was not progress. In the span of a few seconds I’d changed the dynamic from common ground into a pissing contest.

“That’s a trick question, Mr. Vuchovich,” I said, inching slowly closer. “I’d have to see the serial number.”

The smile turned malevolent, detached-a smile as disconnected from joy as a legless man’s collection of spare shoes. His finger was back on the trigger. “You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

Clever! I hated the word. Clever is what my father used to call me. I wasn’t smart or bright or talented. I was clever. Drunk as he was most of the time, I suppose I should have been pleased he noticed I was alive.

I found that I was no longer inching toward Vuchovich, but taking full strides. The room got deadly silent.

“Hold the gun out into the light again!” I barked at the kid.

He complied, extending his arm and lifting the Colt so that it was once again captured by the sun. I was now no more than a few feet away and on a very, very lonely island.

The scene in Flashing Pandora, as originally conceived, had Harper Marx angrily waving the gun at Kant and Pandora. Kant, as always, would act like he had everything under control, which-having paid Marx off to load the burly gun with blanks-Kant would assume he had. Already rendered impotent, literally and figuratively, by his financial ruination and impending trial, Marx had different plans. There would be no blanks in this gun. He meant to kill Pandora, the only possession in Kant’s life that was more to him than just another proper noun. I needed a way for Kant Huxley to prevent Harper Marx from taking a shot at him after shooting Pandora.

“That’s easy, Kipster,” Bart said. “Have Kant grab the cylinder and hold it tight against the gun frame.”

“Grab the cylinder? That’s fucking crazy!”

“Here, try it. There’s not a person alive who can exert enough trigger pressure to make the cylinder spin if it’s being held properly. Pull the hammer back and then when I grab the cylinder, try to pull the trigger. Ready?”

… Kant’s ears were still ringing from the shot. Harper Marx’s eyes were as loving as a shark’s, black and cold as the sea at night. He turned and saw Pandora slumped against the soot-stained Bowery brick, her blood turning pink in the rain.

“Too bad it’s raining, Huxley, old chum,” Marx snickered. “You’ll never hail a cab in this weather. Let me save you the trouble.”

Kant grabbed the gun.

Bart grabbed the gun.

I grabbed the gun.

It dawned on me, perhaps a little too late, that this was hand to weapon and not words on the page. I peeked over my shoulder to see my students frozen in place, still huddled in the opposite corner.

“Run! Get the fuck out of here!”

Now there was a mad rush, the pressure that had built up in the room over the last several hours exploding out the door in a single panicked burst. It all happened so fast that I half expected the chairs and textbooks to be sucked out the door in the wash. I felt myself smile, thinking about the St. Pauli Girl being proud of Grandpa.

Outside the door someone was screaming, “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

Vuchovich, who like the rest of the class had seemed momentarily stunned by my newly grown balls, had scrambled to his feet and was tugging on the gun. I clamped my other hand on the gun and leaned back for leverage. Vuchovich lost his balance. As he pitched forward, I stumbled backward, reflexively throwing out my arms to cushion the fall. On the way down I had the following thoughts:

Fuck!

I hope I don’t fall on my wallet.

I wonder where Amy is right now?

It’s amazing what you think about sometimes.

The ironic thing about the “Passion Play” chapter in Flashing Pandora was that I never used it. Moira Blanco hated it.

“It’s too facile, too off the shelf, Kipling.” That’s what she used to call me. “You want to take Pandora away from Kant without killing her. Her death would be painful for Kant, but not crippling. You want to cripple Kant, to punish him for his transgressions. If you want to cripple him, she must survive and live just beyond his reach.”

She was right. Moira, in contrast to her angry young men, had lived a little. She felt her job was to introduce subtlety to the young writer’s palette.

“Men get older, Kipling, but they never do grow up.”

She was right about that too. I was living testament to it.

I edited the chapter so that Harper Marx lures both Kant and Pandora up to the roof of his old loft building in SoHo. He holds them at bay with a chef’s knife, explaining in excruciating detail to Pandora how Kant ruined him, how Kant had paid him to play the part of the vengeful partner, how he was supposed to menace them the following night at CBGB. When Marx sees that Pandora believes him in spite of Kant’s feverish denials, Marx leans over the edge of the building and plunges to his death. Like the smell of my father’s suicide, I hadn’t thought about that chapter in decades.

I peered up at Frank Vuchovich standing over me, that blue hunk of metal in his hand. He looked more perplexed than angry, as if he hadn’t ever considered the endgame. He just sort of stared at the gun as if it held the answer about what to do next. He might just as well have clicked the heels of his ruby slippers or strung together all his blown-out birthday candle wishes for the good it would do him.

“Frank, put it-”

A window shattered. I felt the spray of warm liquid on my face before I could make sense of it. Another window broke and the kid sat down on stringless legs; his head making a sickening thud as it smacked against the tile floor. I scrambled over to him, but it was no use. The shots had ripped holes through his heart and liver. Death had come so quickly that Frank Vuchovich hadn’t had time to rearrange his expression. He was puzzled even in death. And in that second I felt every feeling I’d ever felt, including things that hadn’t stirred in me for a very long time.