Gun Church (6 page)

According to the man I met at St. Nicholas’ churchyard in the Deptford section of London that night all those years ago, he had good reason to see accusation in the eyes of passersby. He told me that he had started killing before the age of fourteen and that he had been killing ever since.

“That first one was easy,” he said, in his peculiar monotone, “a man twice me age with a fierce reputation for mayhem of his own. A few of the lads diverted his attention with a brawl and I stepped right close beside him and put two through his liver.”

I said, “You don’t look like much of a killer.”

“Really? What the fook do ya suppose a killer looks like?”

“Not like you.”

“Well, then, Weiler, have a good look in the mirror and behold.” He laughed a cool, distant laugh. “Come now; stroll with me.”

McGuinn did very little talking about himself as we walked. He seemed far more interested in me and, narcissist that I was, I was only too happy to oblige him.

“Ya are a bit of a bastard, Weiler, aren’t ya?” It was a rhetorical question.

“More than a bit, but what’s that got to do with the story you’ve got to tell?”

“Everything.”

He reached his right arm around his back under his jacket and I froze. If he had taken any longer, I would have pissed myself.

“Take this,” he said, handing me a tattered spiral notebook. “Make something more of it than what’s there.”

“And what
is
there?”

“Me life, Weiler. Don’t cock it up.”

In the music business there’s an affectionate little niche for one-hit wonders; but, paradoxically, have two or three hits and you’re forgotten. It’s akin to being the second person to swim the English Channel or fly across the Atlantic. You are trivia. Maybe less. Kip had a gift none of us could touch, but he pissed it away. I cannot sometimes help but think he might have achieved literary immortality had he pulled a Harper Lee.

—BART STANTON MEYERS,
GQ

Logging and mining towns are rough and tumble places. Brixton was no exception. It was the kind of place where even the emo kids had grown up hunting and field dressing deer. None of the locals wasted time mourning Frank Vuchovich. They crossed themselves and moved on. Brixtonians were stoic and not given to hand wringing or calling Child Protective Services. The parish priest was their first responder of choice. So, yeah, I fit right in here, like a foot in a glove.

I didn’t exactly have my choice of jobs when I moved to Brixton. The only reason I got this dream job was because I once charity-fucked Ellen Gershowitz, a new girl in the publicity department at Ferris, Ledoux. The head of PR had arranged for five journalists to have lunch with me at The Quilted Giraffe—an aptly pretentious venue for the decade of wretched pretension. The luncheon was a big deal at the time because I had stopped giving interviews. The moratorium was a total bullshit publicity stunt in order to create some hype for
Flashing Pandora
. Unfortunately, no one had cued in Ellen G, who had arranged for me to give an interview to her alma mater’s newspaper that morning.

Needless to say, Miss Gershowitz received the reaming of her life and was forced to apologize to me in person prior to the luncheon. That she had to throw herself on my mercy was indicative of just how low on the totem pole poor Miss Gershowitz was. Readers have some peculiar notions about the status of writers, the most foolish of which is that writers are treated like royalty by their publishers.
Yeah
,
right!
By the time
Clown Car Bounce
was published, I couldn’t get the PR department to return my calls. When I complained to the head of publicity that they misspelled my last name in the press release for
Curley Takes Five
, the editor in chief at Ferris called me up and told me to concern myself less with other people’s spelling and to concentrate more vigorously on my own vanquished skills. I was royalty, all right: King Shit.

Ellen Gershowitz was pleasant enough on the eyes when she wasn’t crying and apologizing. God, she was so miserable that day I think I would have slept with her even if she’d been a beast. Women aren’t the only suckers for wounded lovers and I was particularly vulnerable to tits and tears. I was never quite sure if she was more grateful for the mercy fuck or for the interview I gave her college newspaper the following day. I was too vain to ask. Regardless, a few more months of abuse at Ferris, Ledoux cured Ellen Gershowitz of publishing and drove her straight back to graduate school and a life in academia.

It’s not like my academic travails were closely guarded secrets. On the contrary, my deconstruction had been quite a public affair. The issue was that the newsworthiness of my plummet from grace had diminished in direct proportion to my sales. No one cared. I wasn’t old news. I was no news. I was forgotten. Better to be dead than forgotten. Just ask my father. That I’d suffered through seven years in Brixton without throwing myself into an industrial meat grinder was testament to my narcissism. People often mistook my egregious lack of pride for poor self-esteem. That wasn’t it at all. At the bitter end of our marriage, Amy used to say I was born with an ego in place of a heart. I didn’t disagree. Generally, writers are the most appalling narcissists.

When Ellen Gershowitz contacted me after hearing about my being run out of yet another job, I was amazed anyone had taken notice. I doubted colleges could get any more obscure than the schools I’d been thrown out of. My mistake was projecting my utter lack of pride onto those schools. When you’re fourth-rung material, even third-rung schools look down their noses at you. Ellen, who had passed through Brixton as an adjunct and was a friend of the chairman of the English department, got me the job. Only very recently have I stopped regretting that long-ago mercy fuck and forgiven her.

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 Soufflé
.

“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.”

Guns, Metaphysics, and the Art of Golf
, by Jim Trimble. Was this kid for real? I felt like a character in a Woody Allen movie and not one of the good ones, either. Come to think of it, fuck Woody Allen! Talk about a guy who lost his muse and got tens of millions of dollars worth of second chances. So, yeah, I wrote a few bad books and broke a few university rules, but I hadn’t been fucking my own stepdaughter. Even the Kipster had his limits.

“Golf, Jim? Do they even have golf courses in Brixton?”