Reed Coleman - Gun Church

While Brixton was not a college town, per se, the area in the immediate proximity of the campus was a bit softer at the edges than the rest of the place. Although I thought BCCC a beshitten little pimple, kids came to school here from all around the state. I still wasn’t quite sure why, but I knew it wasn’t for the English department. After the Nadirs left and since our current chairman was a Cajun, I was the only member of the English department faculty on cordial terms with the mother tongue. Stan’s Diner was kind of the crossroads-the one place where the two area populations met.

When I walked in, Jim Trimble was seated in a booth at the back of the diner reading a yellowed, dog-eared copy of Beatnik Souffle .

“That stuff’ll rot your brain,” I said, sliding in across from him. “A lot more dangerous than guns.”

“Hey, Professor Weiler.” He put the book down and shook my hand. “I’ve read it so many times I can recite whole passages. Listen … ”

With that, Jim handed me the book, pointed to his place so I could follow, and recited, verbatim, an entire page. I don’t mean just any page. It was a page where the protagonist, Moses Gold, recites a long, complex poem. Man, I’d forgotten most of it and here was this kid reciting it from memory. Very scary stuff. It reminded me of the crazy kid in the movie Diner who only spoke in dialogue from the movie Sweet Smell of Success . I couldn’t help but wonder how deep his obsession with the Kipster went.

I bowed with false humility. Was there any other kind? At least now I understood the faint echoes of my old style in Jim’s assignments. Imitating voice is what nascent writers do. Imitating mine was a death wish.

“I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ve read everything I’ve published, not written. If you’d read everything I’d ever written, you’d still be throwing up.”

He smiled that disconcerting smile of his. “I don’t care what you say. You’re a great writer.” There was a level of admiration in Jim’s voice that bordered on fanboy gushing. I’d once been quite used to the sound of it, once liked it, once expected it. Now it made me feel like a fraud.

“I was pretty good thirty years ago.”

“And just so you understand, Professor, it’s not the guns that are dangerous, it’s not the bullets. It’s the man holding the gun.” There was a subtle, but immodest bend at the corners of his mouth.

Just then, Stan Petrovic hobbled over to take our order. Stan, the son of a Brixton miner, was an ex-Cleveland Browns linebacker and special-teamer who’d spent time enough in the NFL during the late ’70s and ’80s to permanently fuck up his knees, and to save the money to buy the diner. Petrovic was fond of self-medication and his small-town celebrity. Over the years, as the generations churned and his celebrity lost most of its luster, his need for self-medication increased. Neither the loss of status nor the alcohol had done much to improve Stan’s famously surly personality.

“If it ain’t the local hero and the local zero,” he said, tossing menus at us.

Petrovic had always been a bit of a dick to me, but since the shooting incident at school, his distaste for me had ratcheted up another notch. He seemed to take my recent notoriety as a personal affront. Like I said, you only realize how intoxicating celebrity is after you begin losing it; so while I didn’t much like him, I could empathize with Stan. Jim was not as forgiving.

“Better than being the local hero that became the local zero. Who knows, Stan, a few more years and maybe they’ll vote you into the Football Hall of Lame.”

“Watch your mouth, kid.”

Jim persisted. “Did they have face masks when you played or were you born like that?”

Petrovic’s cheek twitched, his pock-marked, leathery skin flushing red, but he just limped away without a word and sent over a waitress.

When we were done ordering, I asked, “What’s with you and Stan?”

“We don’t like each other much.”

“No shit? I never would have guessed. Took balls to talk to him like that.”

“Grabbing a loaded Colt from Frank Vuchovich’s hand, that took balls. What I just did was nothing. Stan’s a bully. Bullies are naked once you stand up to them.”

“Just the same, you should be careful.”

“Don’t worry about me, Professor. Stan won’t touch me. He dated my mom a few times and he’s still hung up on her. But he really doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

“It’s been that way from the day I showed up here and it’s degenerated since what happened with Frank.”

There was fire in the kid’s eyes. “Listen, Professor Weiler, you’ve stared down the barrel of a gun. Me too, more than a few times. Once you’ve done that, bullies like Stan don’t scare you. That’s the thing with guns: they are what they seem. You’ll see.”

“Is that what the other night was all about, staring down the barrel of a gun?”

He swiveled his head about to make sure no one was in earshot. “That’s a part of it. Look at it this way, Professor-”

“For chrissakes, Jim, outside of class call me Kip or Ken.”

Now the kid was smiling like the circus was in town. I half expected him to say golly gee and ask to blow me. “Really, I can call you Kip?”

“If you’d like.”

He leaned across the table, his whispers conspiratorial. “Well, it’s like I said the other night: it didn’t start out as anything. Me and some friends would go out into the woods above the Crooked River rapids and shoot at shit. ’Round here, that’s no big thing. Every group of friends in these parts shoots out in the woods somewhere. If you haven’t noticed, there isn’t much to do in Brixton.”

“Tell me about it.”

“But you have your head to live in,” he said. “The rest of us aren’t that lucky.”

“Jim, you’ve got a peculiar definition of luck.”

He looked wounded.

“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

“Most guys take rifles. We did, too. Rifles are what you grow up with, but I have all these guns from the Colonel’s collection.”

“The Colonel?”

“My daddy. That’s what he used to make me and my mom call him, the Colonel. He had his guns and I had your books. Anyways, my mom said he cared more for his guns than he ever cared for us, so she made sure she got them in the divorce settlement. She said that if she couldn’t have his balls, his guns were the next best thing.”

“Remind me not to piss off your mom.”

He liked that. “Anyways, we stopped taking rifles and only took handguns with us into the woods.”

“So you stopped taking rifles … ”

“Yeah, between all of us, we had access to all sorts of sidearms and we got real good with them, but we were ignorant of the guns themselves. I mean, we knew how they worked and everything, but we were ignorant of their nature. It was only when we got so good with them that it became boring that I began to understand.”

“Understand?”

“Understand their nature.”

“I’m sorry, Jim, but you lost me.”

He thought about that. “Okay, let’s say you have this beautiful, custom-fitted set of golf clubs, but all you ever did with them was go out and hit balls into a net in your backyard. And let’s say the government said that the most you could ever do with those clubs was to go to some driving range somewhere. Sure, the driving range is better than hitting balls into a net in your backyard, but how much better? Golf clubs aren’t made for driving ranges. Nets and ranges and such are untrue to the nature of the clubs and to the man who owns them. The nature of the clubs is to be used to play the game. To be satisfied to hit balls into a net or to go to a range is like a sin in the scheme of things.”