Because of the subject matter, I begin with a rare disclaimer. THIS IS FICTION. A feeble attempt to understand the backstory of someone who picks up a gun and fires into a crowd. For all our sound byte fury over gun violence, we will never defeat something we refuse to understand. Understanding is not acceptance or approval. It requires more than a skim. As I’m discovering from quiet weeks of sitting alone with my grief, I contribute volumes to the things I rail against. I am the cause of my own hurt. And I’m just like most people today. For more of my personal blathering, visit my Instagram post HERE. But read the post below first.
He never imagined living for the love of a gun. Growing up, guns were only long, fiery sticks he used for target practice. Nothing else to do in the ass end of nowhere but run around wooded hills, swim in a creek strung with outhouses overhead, and stay away from the house.
He needs his gun because of what happens in that house.
But he tries not to think about all that. Escapes are escapes for a reason. Each time he shuts the door and runs into the trees, he is free. Being a crack shot is another way to protect himself from the darkness. He aims at the target and fires, aims and fires, until his soul is clean.
When the voices get too loud in the middle of the night, he covers his head with a threadbare pillow and forgets to breathe. Would finding him cold and dead in the morning keep his father from taking another drink? Keep his sadistic mother from thrashing him for eating too fast at dinner or speaking out of turn or looking at her the wrong way? Death would certainly protect him the next time his uncle’s dirty fingers clamp onto his most secret spots and tease out a sickening release.
He longs to turn the gun on himself. Won’t they all be sorry?
Survival is another form of punishment, though. More delicious, really. Showing them he can live a better life, escape this hellhole, well, that gives him a reason to be.
He takes his gun with him when he leaves that nightmare mountainside. Not because he sees himself firing a rifle in the big city. No, nobody there can ever see where he’s been, know who he was.
Remaking himself is the whole point of leaving. A gun in the back of his closet is insurance. Protection in case a past undesirable comes calling, because he is done with that version of his life.
For a while, escape is enough. He stops looking over his shoulder. Settles in. Smoothes rough edges from every inflection. Adorns himself with the custom-tailored body armor of who he longs to be. After all, people aren’t too deep. They’re more interested in accepting this version of him than in finding out where he’s been, especially if it means they can get back to talking about themselves again.
He forgets about the gun. A dusty relic, it represents everything he no longer wants to be.
Children change him again. Make him think about his father. He will not be his father. Or his mother. He will not. Every choice he makes is the opposite of what his parents would do. But even that isn’t enough protection from the toxic stew of his DNA. It rots beneath his pristine suit, his spicy cologne. Because isn’t a monster always a monster?
So he tries to spit-shine his soul. Joins a church where hellfire and brimstone rain through the preacher’s spittle as he condemns every worldly thing. Worldly things stem from the sin that made his father drink, caused his mother to hit him, led his uncle’s filthy urges that spewed despicable things.
And while a saved soul protects him spiritually, nothing will keep his family physically safe like his gun.
He loads every chamber and keeps it on a high shelf in back of his closet. During every sermon, he imagines aiming his gun at sin, blowing it off the face of the earth, keeping his children pristine. Fear is the yeast that leavens the bread. The preacher flings yeast pellets every week, microscopic, insignificant bits of righteous anger, but they activate and expand in the warm, pliable dough of his soul.
Thousands of sermons. Decades of years. A lifetime of yeast to leaven his fear.
Years later, he sees his father’s slack-jawed face when he aims into a crowd and pulls the trigger. Is convinced there’s some hideous mother in the throng who has it coming. Every man that drops is a pervert like his uncle. Sin is sin. Sinners can’t hurt him if they’re dead. All sinners deserve to die.
This post is a continuation of The Aftermath of Death, She Was Venus in Fur, and Grief Out of Balance. All are fiction.
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Righteous anger may be the most addictive thing on the planet.
And it is being deployed to stoke every extreme.
Warning: Word vomit ahead.
I have been grappling with so much for so long. And I’m doing the work away from the computer, in my own quiet space. I haven’t reached out to one person other than MTM to ask for help, because I’m the only person who can help me.
One of many things this intense concentration has given me is a hyper-sensitivity to noise. I can’t tolerate much news. I spend next-to-no time on social media. Yet I still feel profoundly overwhelmed so so so so much of the time. I need to write more things like I’ve been writing since my residency. Removing filters, not caring who I offend or what people read into these pieces, is the only way I’ll ever be able to finish the story I’m building away from here. While I know what each piece means, I’m trying very hard to let readers see them as they will.
This piece is harder. In particular, the Dayton shooting rattled me, because in April I stayed a few blocks from where it happened. I slept there for four nights, rode past it multiple times, ate lunch mere footsteps away. I KNOW I met at least one person who was there. Someone who was there got at least one of my books. I made such a dear friend there that I immediately texted him to make sure he and his family were okay. Because of how much I travel to speak, I’m bracing myself for more of these things to happen in places where I’ve just been. Or even while I’m there.
And then I’m headed to Dallas this week. Texas, where nobody needs a concealed carry permit to take a gun anywhere. I don’t even want to think about how many guns I am going to be around in the 48 hours I’m on the ground. And I’m not saying this to paint a place as a stereotype. I am returning to Dallas because I got a paid gig, but in the aggregate, I enjoy being there. I hoover up the art and culture and food on offer like a line a cocaine through a rolled up dollar. Charleston is a dead zone for those things. Every second I’m home, I feel culturally dead and have for a very long time.
Oh, but guns are everywhere in Charleston, too. Concealed carry permits are the norm. MTM and I were at an oyster roast last winter, and an actual conversation was: Looks around. “I wonder how many guns are here? Right now?” Looks around again. “Strapped under a pant leg or hidden underneath a sport coat or on a thigh under a skirt?” Someone else. “And don’t forget all the cars. Most of the cars probably contain at least one gun.” We actually placed bets on how many, though nobody could win, and when we really, truly considered it, the number we came up with was staggering. (There were about 35 people there. We figured there were at least 50 guns in the vicinity.)
Yes, we need gun control. We absolutely do. But what will it do to combat the underpinnings of all this fear? What are people so afraid of that they feel they need to take guns everywhere? Why do people stockpile guns? Sleep with them under their pillows? Keep them under the seats or in the glove boxes of their cars? Strap them to their persons on every venture out in public?
And this fear is completely irrational. I gave one example of how it happens in this piece, because I lived parts of this piece. I grew up hearing I needed to fear every single worldly thing, every day, all the time. Ironically, Russia was held up as the ultimate thing to fear. Persecuted Christians. Tortured Christians. Murdered Christians whose only crime was loving Jesus. (These same people scream and rail at anyone today who thinks Russia meddled in our election.) They hired propagandists to come in when I was twelve and act out very graphic demonstrations of the violence that I should fear from the Russian threat. I heard that I might one day have to die for my faith LITERALLY ALL THE TIME.
That was almost forty years ago. Think about all the people who stayed in that environment, who sit underneath this fear-mongering rhetoric all the freaking time for decades, for the balance of their lives. And then they’re given a monetized social media algorithm whose only goal is to make money by allowing the most insane things to proliferate. What has it done to them?
I grew up in a southern American home. We had guns in the house. My grandfather loved hunting, a sport many southerners love and that there’s nothing wrong with. While I know guys who think deer hunting with a crossbow is the shit, the vast majority use rifles. I never, ever feared my grandfather’s hunting rifles hung up on our wall in the den. I saw them as a connection to a grandfather who died a few months after I was born. One of my high school boyfriend’s fathers collected antique guns. I used to go over to his house to study history through his weaponry. No reason to fear those, because firing one would decimate its value. I guess what I’m saying is I really can appreciate why some people own a gun or even more than one gun.
But my parents also kept a loaded pistol in the house. I was oblivious to this pistol. I never knew it existed until my brother’s first suicide attempt. When he was 13 or 14, he got it out and pointed it at himself someplace and couldn’t pull the trigger. So we both grew up in the same house, with the same parents, and one of us was utterly oblivious to this weapon and one was obsessed. How does that happen?
And this incident did not quell my parents’ gun collection. I’ve written joking posts over the years about the guns they acquire to try to deal with my own unease about why they feel like they need them. To me, it is completely, utterly irrational until I circle back to the messages they’ve chosen to hear since I left home. Because the seeds of what we’re experiencing now, the yeast in the bread so to speak, were sown when I was a kid.
I’m not picking on my mother. I’m honestly not picking on anyone or trying to embarrass anyone. While my family dynamic is very, very difficult, I’m proud of my brother for still being alive. I tell this story only to highlight how truly insidious this fear is. The last time my brother tried to kill himself, he spiraled into depression for weeks. It always has a very specific pattern, and he was living that pattern. One of my relatives called me while I was on a trip to plead with me to stage an intervention. I called my mom from a dock in the Missouri River in Kansas and begged her to call the police. Part of that completely whacked conversation? “He’s locked in there with the gun safe. All our guns are in his room.” And I said, “Go in there right now and take them out. Get them out of the house.” And she said, “I can’t. He’s got the only key to the gun safe. ” And I said, “Even more reason to call the police. Somebody needs to get those guns out of the house before he does something we’re going to all profoundly regret.” And she said, “Oh, he won’t do anything like that.”
She was more afraid of whatever causes her to arm herself with enough guns to need a gun safe than she was about the fact that her son might use one to end his life. And she is not unique. WHY IS THAT? WHAT CAUSES THAT?
And this story gets even more surreal, because you know the only thing she was upset about in the wake of this nightmare? The state of SC took my brother’s concealed carry permit and made him surrender his guns because of his recorded suicide attempt, AND SHE WAS UPSET ABOUT THAT. (She is going to read this and think I’m picking on her and trying to embarrass her and my brother, and I am genuinely, truly not. It’s the only story I have to demonstrate the avalanche of this type of thinking – this congenital, cancerous fear of some unutterable something – that is EVERYWHERE in America.)
Until we tear that fear out at the root and destroy all the feeders and seeds and remnants, we will never solve this gun problem. California just had its own mass shooting, and they have some of the strictest gun laws in America. Yes, again, we need to make gun ownership more difficult in the hopes that it will weed out those who do ill, but in the end, we’re only treating a symptom. We’re not addressing the actual problem of all this fear, of why we allow it to proliferate and rule every online conversation and destroy friendships and on and on and on. That’s what tore me apart during this last bloody weekend. It’s what will tear me apart for a long time.
And I don’t know what to do.
Yes, I can vote, but I’m already sick of the emails I’m getting from presidential candidates who want to turn horrific, violent, unspeakable death into a reason for their whole campaign. I’m grossed out by those who try to make THE meme that will go viral about these attacks so they can amass a little more notoriety and by those who fling angry screeds into cyberspace and primally scream at everything. And don’t even get me started on the party that’s using all this to try to game the system enough to exercise complete, oligarchic, authoritarian power over all of us. Maybe that despair, that hopeless feeling of not knowing what to do, is what leads many to embrace this fear.
So I’ve been asking myself what I’m doing to contribute to this fear. What can I change about myself that might help? Because I’m doing a lot of hard work on myself right now, so I may as well add that to the mix. But I know it won’t be enough.
YES. All of this.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Wow! That “word vomit” was powerful – and terrifyingly sad – and weirdly informative. I feel like I’ve had an epiphany.
Although I’ve lived in South Carolina for nearly half a century, I’m a Midwesterner by origin. And I didn’t grow up with that “gun thing.” As I remember, guns were rarely visible in houses or cars of people I knew and were only used for hunting – mostly deer hunting in the fall. My dad didn’t hunt, but my sister and her husband do now, so they have some guns in their house. My mom would not have a gun around our house. She was afraid one of the kids might find it and do some serious damage. So I’ve lived a gun-free life. And I’ve traveled the world without a gun. I truly had no idea how many guns might now surround me here in Charleston.
It’s almost as terrifying to realize how many people live in gun-soaked fear – verging on terror – as it is to face a truly terrifying danger.
I never thought about it growing up. I even went target shooting with a guy I dated. A heavy-duty rifle I was terrified of but fired a few times with much supervision.
I hope I didn’t stoke your fear, Joanne. I honestly go all over the place without fear. But the frequency of these things combined with the utter unwillingness of our legislators to address it gives me pause these days.
I mean, you have traveled a lot. It gobsmacks me to know other countries are issuing third-world travel advisories for the US because of shootings. Totally justified. But so very sad and awful.
We live in sorry times. Let’s hope the next election brings in some light and peace.
Yes.
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