Gun and I

Grace Penry

I first met Gun at a Starbucks. I was maybe fifteen. It was quite uneventful; he was glossy and gray-black, a Glock, and poking out of the man-in-front-of-me’s waistband. I stared at Gun’s handle and trigger while the man ordered two flat whites, or lattes, sized Grande. I imagined he had a wife waiting for him at one of the tables that lined the windows, or in the passenger seat of an SUV in the parking lot.  The man stuck his hand in his waistband as I stared. A streak white undies flared before the waistband came back up and swallowed them, and then man’s t-shirt fell again and swallowed Gun.

The second time I met Gun, I didn’t see him, I just heard him. I was seventeen and at a party when out of nowhere, he began going off over the music blaring from the other side of room. Pop. Pop-pop-pop. 

Everyone froze. Gun sounded like loose ping pong balls. 

The sound terrifyingly slowed the music— stopped the music. Pop. 

I remember I pushed the girl next to me. Move, it’s a gun. We gotta go. It’s a gun. I remember I was the first to move, to speak, to open the back door, to run. I remember her mouth hung open and her red solo cup unceremoniously baptized the carpet in red jungle juice. All around us, cups  dropped, spilling across surfaces. I remember because I had run through three backyards before  I stopped and wondered why my arm felt sticky. 

It must’ve been blanks. Those had to have been  blanks, my friend repeated over and over. But Gun had been loaded and had left a bulleted kiss in the ceiling.

This time, I must admit, Gun left quite an impression on me. I had met Gun’s true personality, a wavering line between deadly and mocking.

When I was eighteen and in college, I sat with a boy in my backyard in plastic chairs. He stared up at the sky while I stared straight ahead through the chain-link fence, past the neighbor’s yard and out into the alley. A pale streetlight illuminated the beige gravel constituting all that I considered yard and space; it made me think of the moon. The boy talked and I listened. Some neighbors were playing music. I thought of dancing. Then, in a singular shot, he suggested: You should get a gun. 

I shivered. I didn’t want a gun. A breeze picked up the hairs on  my arms and I thought about going inside. Instead, I asked: Why? He gestured to the alleyway that I had been wondering at. Tucson is dangerous, he said. All my friends that live in this neighborhood have been robbed. My friend got his TV stolen as he was moving in. How are you going to protect yourself? 

I thought of Gun, and I thought of Gun protecting me and I laughed. I would be more likely to hurt myself than someone else. We continued sitting. 

After that night, I found myself thinking about Gun often, reminiscing on the first time we met in Starbucks, years ago now. Gun was everywhere. Did I need Gun after all?

Sometimes, when I saw Gun in a movie, or in a policeman’s holster, I perceived Gun’s weight, the texture of his handle, the temperature of his trigger. Cold until a bullet warmed his body. I thought about the jolt of Gun taking aim. How does it feel to fire? Would I even be able to? I truly didn’t (and don’t) think I could (or can.) My friend told me rifles kickback after shooting and this can hurt your shoulder. I imagined being concerned about shoulder pain while contemplating killing something— or someone. I imagined the power of holding Gun in my hands. Gun loaded. That power of knowing anything with reason should and would fear me. I imagined the look of fear that once filled my eyes then filling theirs. How those eyes would investigate my  own. How they would see them and find them as cold and dark as Gun. Unnerved.

What would someone have to do to me to make me feel entitled enough to shoot them?

My sophomore year of college, I accidentally moved into Gun’s social circle. I first became aware of Gun’s presence after one of my neighbor’s shot another neighbor’s pet for being “annoying.” The information bled out in a slur of angry texts across my screen as disbelief at what had happened. But it didn’t affect me, not directly, so I accepted Gun as a neighbor the same way one accepts a neighbor’s dead tree branches hanging over the sidewalk: with caution. 

A few months later, the house directly across the street threw a party. I went. It was  a party of convenience, in which I could easily slip back home if I got cold and wanted a jacket. It was February, a month that even in Tucson could be bitingly cold. Gun didn’t show, not that night. Instead, it ended abruptly, like most parties, after someone got too drunk. I lingered around with my neighbors in the mess after, joking around. They were all guys, more-or-less my age, but all guys. My one girl-neighbor moved away after her house was broken into. They all began hitting on me, so I decided to leave. Only one of them, who was taking out the trash, asked if I was ok, if I the others had made me feel uncomfortable. I appreciated him asking, but I knew I wouldn’t be coming to this house again. 

Two weeks later, these neighbors threw another party, which I didn’t attend, but Gun did. 

A month later, Gun showed up again and that was their last party. 

The pressure of Gun’s constant presence on my street became unbearable. I couldn’t stand the fact that Gun lived in my neighborhood, and that he was willing to prove it, too. He reminded me that he was in control, not me. And if I wanted to feel safe, if I wanted to be in control, he let me know that I needed him to protect me.

By the time I saw Deadpool, my relationship with Gun had reached a very rocky point. He got me into increasingly heated fights. Mostly, he proved an awful listener. 

Anyway, Gun had received a principal role in this movie as supporting comedian. He constantly spit out laughter in the form of bullets, teasing his victims: Daddy needs to express some rage. I know it was only a movie, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Gun’s ability to take everything that was something and reduce it to such a nothing. The bodies of the bad guys  split, their jaws slacking off to the side at extreme angles, their stomachs a red hole. I felt every image. That erasure was supposed to make me laugh. Exaggerated as Gun played his role, I felt sick. I closed my eyes and tried not to think of all the pierced bodies piling up in my mind. Every bullet they had taken was a bullet I had dodged. I could swear that they   were the same bullets I had seen leave Gun’s body before.

Still, it would be a lie to say that I never, not even once, wished  myself to be by Gun’s side. In a true sense too, like Trinity from The Matrix or like Sarah Connor from Terminator. Some part of me wanted to walk down the street with Gun by my side— cool and in control, ready to drop out of air vents and somersault across marble floors with Gun excited in my holster, eager to take on villains. Mostly though, I desired Gun so that I could feel important. Equal to others that had made me feel so silenced. This depressed me. Why wasn’t I enough without Gun? Perhaps that’s why everyone wanted Gun— he could make you untouchable.

Yes, my relationship with Gun became rather one-sided. I avoided him at the same time I obsessed over him. Sometimes, he even dictated my decisions. I partly blame the media for this. They couldn’t get enough of Gun. They would praise his role in every edgy TV series or video game, and then condemn him after every shooting as “America’s epidemic.” Meanwhile, I sat in the car outside a Target in Phoenix afraid to enter, after Gun’s temper tantrum at a Walmart in El Paso. 

Every time Gun neared, a true repulsion and fear took over my body. Once, I took my sister to lunch and watched Gun glare at me from the pocket of a boy’s black skinny jeans as I chewed on my sandwich. On a family vacation, I flipped through signs at souvenir stores of Gun silhouetted underneath the words: 

Private Property
Trespassers Will Be Shot
Survivors  Will Be Shot Again. 

And other signs of women, their breasts larger than shoulder-width and their hips impossibly jutting out to the side, cocking a rifle: 

Warning 

Forget the Dog 

Beware of The Wife. 

People couldn’t get enough of Gun; he is to American mythology what Clark Gable was to Hollywood. Our golden boy. A true star. Controversial. Heroic.

Now, I’ve subscribed to the emails from Everytown, Moms Demand Actions, March for Our Lives, Sandy Hook Promise. I’ve donated, I’ve called, I’ve signed. I even organized the March for Our Lives in Tucson. I’ve done everything that (probably) doesn’t make a difference in the long run, but I did it anyway, trying to feel less afraid of Gun.

Because really, truly, I am.

Ever since the first time I saw Gun go off, I’ve done all I could to avoid that feeling, that reality, again.

I worry for my sisters when they go to school. For my brother while he rides the metro. For my Dad when he travels for work, for my mom when she grocery shops. I think about when Gun rumors circled around my high school, or when Gun took away my eighth-grade classmate, along with his entire family, in a murder-suicide. I remember being eight or nine when my dad whispered to my mom that my grandpa was upset because someone had broken into the house— into the gun closet— and I hadn’t understood why.

Gun had no current, no direction of being, until I saw him in that Starbucks, when these fragments of occurrences came together within his figure, small and lifeless. How then I realized:

Gun’s violence isn’t a distant reality that only a rare few are exposed to; it is the American reality. One that all of us, on some level, must reconcile with.