GUNS GUNS GUNSGUNS GUNS GUNS
During the 1950s American kids liked guns. Our movie heroes slaughtered America’s enemies on the silver screen and TV cops danced provocative gun ballets on prime time. Armed with air rifles my friends and I re-enacted World War II behind my house. Imaginary bullets tore holes through the make-believe Nazis. Hitler was the last to die. None of us suffered a scratch during these battles and I wondered what it would be like to fire a real gun. There was only one way to find out.
At the end of the summer of 1959 my father drove our family south for a week’s vacation on Cape Cod. We stopped at my grandmother’s house in Westbrook for lunch. My brothers and sisters ate their Italian sandwiches and my parents conversed with Edith. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and climbed the stairs to the bedroom over the garage. I pushed through a wall of military uniforms in the closet. A Winchester repeating rifle lay horizontal on a rack.
The gun was heavy in my hand. I pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. I went to the window and aimed the rifle at the cars on Main Street. Cadillacs offered a big target and I imagined that Adolf Hitler behind the wheel. Before I could pull the trigger again, my father ripped the weapon from my hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” He was livid and I backed away to the wall.
“It isn’t loaded.” I guiltily put my hands behind my back.
“You never know.” My father levered open the chamber.
“I checked before.”
“By pulling the trigger?” His anger simmered below the boiling point, as if he understood my fascination. “Stay away from guns.”
“Yes, sir.”
Neither my older brother nor I received another toy gun from my parents. We borrowed broken plastic guns from my next-door neighbor for the games of WAR. Fighting Nazis in the woods wasn’t the same without your own weapon.
The next summer our family moved from Maine to Boston. My parents sent my brother and me to Boy Scout camp. We had two week’s to earn the five merit badges necessary to attain the rank of Star Scout. Swimming, canoeing, basketry, and forestry each took several days. We acieved them without a challenge. On the second-to-last day the camp counselor led our troop to a shooting range. We were armed with .22s and positioned on the firing line. Hitting the target five out of ten times earned the rifle merit badge. I accomplished this task by the seventh shot. I had 3 bullets left and loaded one into the chamber. I aimed the rifle at a treetop beyond the sand bunker and pulled the trigger. The bullet nicked my target and I sighted the gun onto a passing bird.
“What you think you’re doing?” My counselor disarmed me.
“Nothing.”
“You shot that in the air.” His face was swollen with outrage.
“No, I didn’t, it slipped from my hand.” The rest of the scouts had stopped shooting. Another counselor was acting at back-up, as if this was a mutiny.
“You have any idea how far a bullet travels. Maybe a mile.” The counselor waved his finger in my face. “You could have killed someone and maybe you did.”
“Sorry.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, even though I wasn’t sorry.
“Guns aren’t toys,” he pronounced with the authority of Boy Scouts of the America and exiled me from the shooting range. I waited in my tent for the police to arrest me. Finally my brother returned from dinner with a plate of food.
“No one died.” He placed the mashed potatoes and hamburger on my bunk.
“Good.” This news cured my lack of appetite. “You going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“No.”
“Thanks.”
Neither my brother nor I mentioned my errant shot to my parents and I avoided guns throughout my teenage years. Somehow I understood that I wanted to kill something. I couldn’t confess this urge to my priest, parents, brother, or friends. On long rides I dreamed about a gun in my hands. The supply of ammo was endless. My hometown was filled with victims and I had to get out before something bad happened to them. In 1968 I came home with enlistment papers for the Marines. I had lied about my age.
“What’s this?” My mother crushed papers in her right hand.
“I want to join the Marines?” I envisioned fighting the commie hordes with an M-16. After victory my girlfriend greet me with kisses. The killer transformed into a hero.
“Whatever for?” College was the only viable option for her children after high school, but she was very religious and I said, “I want to fight the godless communists in Vietnam.”
“You’re 16 years old. You’re not going to war.” She called the recruiter and blasted his attempt to shanghai her son. I was angry at her refusal. Her patriotism excluded my going to war. My father was of a different mind. He had served in WWII.
“See how you feel when you graduate from high school.”
“The war will be over by then.”
“Maybe not.” He and I had watched the Tet offensive on TV. The War wasn’t going anywhere, but by senior year in high school long hair ran over my collar and I attended peace rallies in Boston Common. My urge for murder withered with a bong in my hands.
Two years after college I moved to New York/ My first job was at a gay restaurant on East 60th Street. After work I hung around CBGBs. My friends from the restaurant introduced me to an actress from West Virginia. Her eyes were two different colors and her skin was whiter than powdered sugar. Alice’s favorite film was Goddard’s BREATHLESS. Mine was OUTLAW JOSEY WALES.
We both loved the New York Dolls and signed a lease on a three-room apartment on East 10th Street. The monthly rent was $180. The dealers on the corner of 1st Avenue seemed harmless. At night gunshots echoed down the alley. I told Alice that they were firecrackers. She got used to the noise after a while, but my hand itched for a gun. I wanted to be Charles Bronson.
Later that month I quit my busboy job to work the door at Hurrah’s on West 62nd Street. It was a rock disco. The security staff consisted of an off-duty cop and two bouncers from Harlem; Jack Flood and his nephew, Marvin. They didn’t look family, but I wasn’t questioning the parentage of someone Jack’s size. Conked hair framed a face plastered over his bones like beaten putty and his midnight-blue suit shined from too many cleanings. When we shook hands. his thick middle finger tickled my palm.
“I’m not that way.” Half the staff of Hurrah was gay and he wanted to know if I went with men. I guessed I was his type.
“Someone said you were a punk.” .Jack’s hand was bigger than a catcher’s mitt. Big hands meant big shoes. The slab of his tongue flicked over swollen lips.
“Punk doesn’t mean that now.” Punks in prison were stick pussy. A grainy porno movie flashed in my head and I informed him, “Punk is the music they play here.”
“So that’s what they called it.” He turned to his nephew. “Hey, they call this music ‘punk’.”
Marvin nodded like he had also misunderstood its meaning.
“I thought it was rock and roll.” He released my hand and whispered, “You keep that between you and me. You know that thing with my finger.”
It was a request and not an order.
“I know you.” Seymour the cop had been studying Jack for several minutes. “You a fighter?”
“I fought Joe Louis in Seattle.”
“1951?” Seymour narrowed his eyes like his memory wasn't working right.
“Uncle Jack went down three times like a Times Square hooker.” Marvin joked from the door.
"But Louis never knocekd me out?” Jack squared up to his nephew. Jack had him by 2 inches and 50 pounds. Marvin dropped his eyes. "To tell the truth Louis was past his prime and weighed 30 pounds more than me. I gave the folks a show.I made enough to buy my first Lincoln and I got a shot at Harry Matthews. Now that white boy stood toe-to-toe for 10 rounds in Seattle, givin’ away 10 pounds. I lost on points.”
He winked to indicate he wasn’t telling all the truth. I later learned that Jack had retired with a record of 20-14-2 before entering prison for several long stretches. He never said for what.
“Harry Matthews was a good fighter.” Seymour nodded wordlessly to indicate the two men had an understanding.
Working with Jack was easy. One look from the old fighter stopped most trouble from becoming a problem. Our slack time at the door was consumed by stories. Seymour spun arcane tales of gambling at the track. His wins outnumbered his losses, although the heels of his shoes were round as a baseball. Marvin extolled his girlfriends’ virtues. Each one was beautiful than the last. I was too young to be anything more than a listener.
“You don’t know nuttin’ ’bout women.” Jack offered from the chair behind the desk. He occupied a lot of space no matter where he sat or stood. “You ever been married.”
“What’s the difference?” Marvin played straight man for Jack’s comments.
“Married women kill you if you leave ‘em and single women if you don’t go.”
Marvin, Seymour, and I looked at each other in confusion.
“If I have to explain, then you don’t need explainin’.” Jack pointed out the door at his battered 1968 Lincoln Continental. “I always keep the tank full. Never know when a woman might be after you.”
A Lincoln, a full tank of gas, and Jack Flood was a movie without a screenplay. Only one of Jack’s women came to the club. Nadine was Jamaican. Her hips were spread as wide as a small sofa. She wanted to see the Specials do MESSAGE TO YOU RUDY.
“Jack likes them built for comfort.” Marvin whistled in admiration.
“I like all kinds.” Jack smacked his lips upon seeing Alice. She stormed upstairs and didn’t speak with me until we were back at the apartment.
“I don’t like the way he looks at me.” Alice was beautiful enough to be in movies, but her scowl aged her twenty years.
“Who?” I played dumb.
“Your friend Jack.”
“A lot of men look at you.” After a year in the city she should have been used to men staring at her, as if she was naked.
“Not like a killer.” Alice told me to speak with Jack and I said yes.
The next night the Dead Boys filled the club beyond fire capacity. After the headliners took the stage, I pulled Jack into the side hallway.
“What’s up?” Jack cracked his beefy knuckles.
“Do me a favor and don’t look at my girlfriend like she’s fried chicken.”
“That’s all. I thought you were goin’ to have me fired.”
“Why would I do that?” Only the manager could dismiss staff.
“You don’t know.
”
“Know what?”
“Nuttin’, that’s good.” His broad face broke into a guilty smile. “So we’re good.”
“Sure.” He was doing something underhanded at the door. I was to turn a blind eye. “As long as you ignore my girlfriend.”
“Sure thing, but you know the closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat.”
Alice hated my working nights.
“Can’t you get a regular job?”
“I could.” And I promised to look for a 9-5, except the money from Hurrah was good, each night a different punk band from NY, London, or LA played to full houses, and hanging with Jack was better than watching THE TONIGHT SHOW on TV. The only time we really had to do anything was when people tried to sneak inside for free. Jack hated this.
“They’re stealin’ money from our mouths.”
One night the B-52s packed the house. The manager told us not to let anyone else enter the club. We shut the door. 2 Puerto Ricans jimmied open a side entrance. Jack dragged the interlopers to the front door and booted them onto the sidewalk with a size 14 shoe.
“We’ll be back.” The pair warned, walking off toward the projects.
“People always saying that.” Jack repositioned the gun behind his back. “Never know when it’s gonna be true.”
Thirty minutes later the band hit the stage. Marvin went upstairs to watch the show. I got drinks from the bar and returned to the entrance. Jack was leaning against the wall. It was only the two of us.
“Where’s Seymour?”
“Outside calling his bookie.”
I handed Jack his cognac and coke. He didn’t have time to drink it, because ten Puerto Ricans crowded into the hallway. Five of them held stilettos and my stomach shrank behind my spine. Jack coldcocked the first attacker. The second stuck a shiv into his side.
“Motherfuckah, you fucked up my suit.”
He hammered his assailant’s nose a short right. Another he mauled with a left. A knife slashed at my face. Jack caught the blade with his right hand and cracked the Puerto Rican’s skull with his elbow. Jack pulled out the .38 with his unwounded hand and threw it to me. I caught the pistol by the grip
“Shoot the motherfuckahs.” Jack was bleeding from three places.
The Puerto Ricans fled the hallway and I chased them onto the sidewalk. They were already 100 feet away. I had been waiting for this moment since I was a kid. I pulled the trigger and the front windows of a car shattered upon the bullet’s impact. My Boy Scout training hadn’t covered shooting at moving targets. The gang accelerated like a DJ had sped up a 45 to 78 rpm. There was no second shot.
“I’m goin’ to the hospital.” Jack hobbled up to me, blood seeping between his fingers. “You bettah get rid of that before the cops come.”
“I’ll do it right now.” I stuffed the .38 into my leather jacket.
“Good. Now flag me down taxi. Cab drivers don’t pick up bleedin’ brothers.” Jack leaned on a car and I stopped a taxi.
The driver protested about Jack’s messing up his seat. I gave him an extra $10. They drove away to Roosevelt Hospital on 8th Avenue and I went up on the roof of the nightclub. Another five bullets were in the chambers. Pulling the trigger had been easy. Shooting someone was the next step. I had a feeling in the right circumstance that would be easy too, so I dropped the gun down an airshaft. It clanged twice on its ascent and I returned to the door, wondering whether Jack would live. The police were waiting on the sidewalk. Five patrol cars. Ten cops. Two of them were plainclothes detectives. They had a lot of questions. I told them 90% of the facts.
“What about the gun?” The detective smelled gun smoke in the air.
“What gun?”
“Someone reported a shot.” He stared at my hand. The trace of sulphur on my fingers hadn’t come from fireworks.
“I didn’t hear any shot.” Seymour showed his badge. The detective accepted his fellow cop’s explanation and dropped his ear to the radio. “A couple of those boys stole a taxi. They crashed it in the park. We’ll show this ‘Jack Flood’ their pictures.”
No charges were pressed by either side.
“Jack has a record of violence long as your arm and not just in the ring.” The club’s lawyer explained to me in the club’s office and then read out some of Jack’s previous charges. All were felonies. Most involved guns. “Better Jack drop it.”
Jack said the same thing in the hospital.
“How you feeling?” I felt bad that I was untouched.
“Only scratches.” The bandages covered his ebony arm and chest. He was a tough old man. “Good thing I wasn’t gettin’ killed, because you shoot like shit and that’s a good thing, because you don’t want to be woundin’ people who are tryin’ to kill you. You gotta have a killer instinct and you don’t got that.”
“How can you tell?” I had aimed the gun.
“If you wanted to kill ‘em, then they’d be killed."
I had failed the test, but neither was I entirely a man of peace, which was why I got along with Jack. After his discharge from the hospital, I invited him to dinner in my neighborhood. That night Alice got ready to leave before he arrived at our apartment.
“You only like him, because he’s a gangster.”
“No.” I liked Jack, because he was Jack Flood.
“And you want to be a murderer too.”
“No, I don’t.” That desire had been killed by my shooting Jack’s gun.
“When was the last time you wrote a poem? Not since you took that job.” She slammed the door after that sentence.
Jack liked the Italian restaurant on the corner of 1st Avenue and 10th Street. Lanza’s was empty and the food was mediocre. The wine was sour, but the prices were cheap.
“Ain’t nothin’ bad gonna happen to a black man in an Italian restaurant." Jack couldn’t have been happier. "Not like Harlem. I always got to watch my back in restaurants up there.”
After dinner he’d walk across the street to his Lincoln. It was parked next to a hydrant. The dealers on the corner stepped aside for Jack. Their respect had nothing to do with the two guns on him.
“They don’t know me, but they know me.” He tore the parking ticket into shreds. “I’m old school. Not many of me left in this city. You wanna go see James Brown?”
“James Brown?” James Brown had saved Boston the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination by calling for calm from the stage of the Garden. “You know James Brown?”
“He’s an old friend.” Jack slipped behind the wheel. The Lincoln was the perfect fit for a man his size. “He’s playing at the Lone Star.”
“It’s on 5th Avenue.” Alice wasn’t going to be home for another three hours.
“Get in, I’ll introduce you to him.”
Jack drove cross-town on 9th and backed up 5th for several blocks. Cars blew their horns, as he burned a red light in reverse.
“Jack?”
“I know what I’m doin’.” He wrenched the wheel to the right to park right in front of the Lone Star.
“Good parking job.” His driving explained the many dents in the Lincoln.
“Always is when you don’t pay attention to the law.”
The tickets were $10. Once inside Jack asked, “They take your ticket?”
“No.”
“They ain’t’ takin’ no one’s ticket.” Jack eyeballed the door. “Go up to everyone and ask them for their tickets and I’ll sell them outside for $5.”
“They cost $10.”
“We’re not retail.”
Jack and I overpacked the bar with 100 people. Some of the 14-piece band crowded onto a minuscule stage. The horn section was lined up the stairs. Jame sBrown barely had room to dance. Jack and I bought a bottle of champagne. Once the show was over, he took me up to the dressing room. James Brown was signing autographs for his fans. He froze upon seeing Jack.
“I ain’t dead.” Jack hugged the smaller man.
“No one said you were.” James Brown wiped the sweat off his face.
“Liar.” Jack released James. “This is my friend.”
“I saw you at the Newport Jazz Festival. You blew Zeppelin off the stage.”
“Thanks.”
Jack lifted a finger to signal the two needed time alone. He slipped the Godfather of Soul some money. The next night we racketed the door again and Jack confessed that he was doing the same at Hurrah.
“Those kids don’t wanna buy from a brother, but a white boy?” He let the sentence hang in the wind.
“We could make some money.” SRO shows packed the club with 700 people. Tickets were $10. 50 tickets a night split two ways was $250 each. “I think about it.”
Thinking about it was one thing. Doing it was another. The door had too many eyes. The manager caught onto the scheme after a month. He demanded other names. I offered mine. He fired me without any severance pay. Jack kept his job and contacted the security at Madison Square Garden, the Palladium, and several other concert halls. I sold excess tickets. Jack always got a cut.
Alice and I broke up that winter. I left her for a blonde model. Lisa didn’t like the way Jack looked at her either, but she never had any reason to socialize with him.
Jack, Marvin, and I watched the first Roberto Duran-Sugar Ray Leonard fight at Danceteria on West 19th Street. We had bet heavily on Duran. His unanimous victory paid 9-5. I shouted for drinks. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a familiar face. It was one of the Puerto Ricans from the stabbing. Jack slowly turned his head.
“Is that who I think it is?” Jack wasn’t expecting any lies.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t want a piece of this and you ain’t seen nothin’.” Jack snapped his fingers and his nephew trapped the Puerto Rican against the wall.
“Jack, we won money tonight.” I was pleading for a life.
“I win money all the time.” Jack’s hand slipped behind his jacket. He liked a gun in the small of his back, because he could feel it that way.
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what? Ain’t nothin’ happen yet.” Jack walked across the room. People avoided contact. The young Puerto Rican boy prayed with quivering lips. Jack whispered in his ear, then patted him on the cheek. He returned to the bar with Marvin. The Puerto Rican boy was gone.
“What you say to him?”
“Said it was his lucky day, but I’d see him again.”
“And what will you do then?”
“Depends on my mood and tonight my mood is good.”
I kept expecting the Puerto Rican boy to come back with an avenging gang, but he had learned his lesson from the confrontation at Hurrah. Jack Flood was was more trouble than he was worth.
A week later Jack and I were eating at Lanza’s. We washed down meatball and spaghetti two bottles of horrid wine. As we waited for the check, I asked, “Jack, would you have killed that kid the night of Duran fight?”
“Kill ‘em?” Jack scrunched his lips as if the next words were hard to say. “Nah, no reason for killin’. He ain’t killed me.”
“But you looked like you wanted to kill him.”
Lookin’ like and killin’ ain’t the same. You know why I threw that gun to you?”
“Because you were hurt.”
“Yeah, but the real reason is that I was scared to kill ‘em. If I did, then I was goin’ back inside and I’m too old for prison. “ This was a confession. One Jack really didn’t want to make, but he said, “It bothered me, forcing you to make that decision to shot or not. Everyone sees movies and thinks it’s easy pullin’ a trigger. Ain’t never easy pullin’ a trigger.”
“That’s true.” I had pulled the trigger without thinking.
“Good thing your shooting wasn’t worth shit.”
"Thanks." I was grateful too.
Jack and I parted ways as people do in the lives we led. I heard Marvin was shot dead in a Harlem alley, but nothing about Jack. I decided that he was still driving that big black Lincoln. It was better than thinking him dead, because men like Jack Flood don’t get to the heaven in the after-life, even though they understand the real value of ‘thou shalt not kill’. Jack had taught me that lesson. I’ve never owned a gun in my life. I shoot them only at gun ranges. I never think about killing anyone anymore, but I know what it’s like, because every bit of Jack was a little bit me. At least I’d like to think it was. Not any more. Not any less. Just enough.
