Knucklehead, page 12
“Of course. This way.” He led me to the reading area, which was nicer than our house. Solid little couches and big fluffy chairs formed an oval, with delicate glass tables scattered here and there. It felt more like a place to fuck and do coke than to do legal research. I plopped down in one of the chairs. I had the whole place to myself.
The recent issues of the Herald were hanging on a little bamboo rack. Paul took down yesterday’s issue and presented it to me like a bottle of wine. I accepted it with thanks.
I started, of course, with the back of the paper. I made it all the way to page 1 and found nothing. But I had only been skimming the headlines. So I went through it again, from the front this time, and I read a little bit of each article to make absolutely sure that Nathaniel Perry was not in there. He wasn’t.
At some point, Larry Springgate entered the coke lounge. He was just another partner. Larry plucked the Journal off its perch, eased into a chair, crossed his legs like a woman, and read. We didn’t speak. I reread the entire paper, including sports, just in case shooting black people was officially a sport now. Nothing. I went back to the bamboo racks and found Monday’s Herald. Maybe the story had appeared on the same day as the shooting, somehow. But it hadn’t.
Alone again in the lounge, I sat and thought. Today was Wednesday, and the article in the Herald said that the shooting happened on Monday. No time was specified, but one could reasonably infer that it took place after 12:00 a.m. Monday morning. And the laws of physics required the article to be published after the shooting. So going through the Sunday Herald was pointless, unless I was looking for “Nathaniel Perry to Be Shot Dead Tomorrow.” I had thoroughly reviewed the Monday and Tuesday Heralds, and the story had not appeared prior to today.
So the editors at the Herald had not considered the story newsworthy until now. OK. Who knows how many such stories no one bothers to report? All the news that’s fit to print, right? So the Herald hadn’t been interested. But, surely . . .
I put the Heralds back on the rack and returned to the front of the library. I half-noticed Larry Springgate lurking by the entrance.
“Hi, Paul.” He looked up from his reading and smiled. Paul was one of the few people in the building who didn’t panic for a second when he saw me. He was clearly gay; I suspected there was a brother waiting for him at home.
“I wonder if you could get me this week’s Inquisitors? Do we carry that too?” Paul’s brow wrinkled a bit, but I understood. Even I was whispering, like I was asking for back issues of Hustler. As I said, the Inquisitor wasn’t yet the stinking piece of shit tabloid rag it is today, but it was definitely not the Herald. To put it in New York terms, the Herald wasn’t exactly the Times, but if the Herald were the Times, the Inquisitor would have been the Daily News. Maybe Newsday. It’s the Post now.
Paul got up and marched into the stacks. I followed. Larry Springgate stared.
The Inquisitor didn’t have enough cachet to merit a bamboo display rack in the coke lounge. The issues were folded and stacked in cubbies with the ABA Journals and the Congressional Quarterlys. I felt a little sorry for them.
“Here they are,” Paul said, gesturing. He didn’t touch them. He didn’t seem so much mad at me as saddened by the journalistic standards of the Inquisitor. I felt hopeful for the same reason. If it bleeds, it leads, right? I was guessing that a person shot once in the back and once in the head bleeds a bit. The Inquisitor couldn’t resist.
“Thank you, Paul,” I said. He accepted my apology and left.
I took today’s, yesterday’s, and Monday’s issues of the Inquisitor back to the coke lounge. I went through the same routine, meaning I read each one backward and forward. I found the same thing: coverage of the Perry story began after the man had been dead for 48 hours.
I returned to the C-list periodicals section on my own and found the Oakland Tribune. The shooting happened in San Francisco, but Oakland has black people in it, and I had the distinct impression that Nathaniel Perry was black. When a police spokesman is willing to say to the press, “We don’t know anything yet, but we suspect the decedent,” you can bet your last money the suspicious decedent is black or Latino. And I had never heard of a white or Asian person “running in a threatening manner.” So maybe some editor at the Trib viewed the story as local in spirit.
Even though the Trib was a longshot, it was my last hope, and I clung to that hope as long as I could. I actually spread the paper out on the floor, like a kid on Christmas morning, so that I could cover ground faster. At some point, Larry Springgate returned and sat stiffly on a couch. He practically had eyeholes cut into his newspaper, the same Journal he’d already read.
I skimmed all the Tribs, from the one published the day before the shooting to the one that came out hours ago, back to front and back again, twice each. Again, the story started today, with Perry dead two days already.
I sat on the floor and tried to think. What made the story newsworthy now? What was the media trying to get in front of?
“What are you doing?” Larry Springgate whined, finally.
“Research!” I hissed.
Larry left.
Yet Another Thousand Words.
Thursday, November 18, 1993
The video broke the next day. A Skymount Mall surveillance camera captured the whole thing.
I was in the kitchen making dinner for all three Stewarts with the little TV on for company. I’d barely been listening. Ten minutes into the 6:00 news, the anchor announced the release of a shocking video in connection with a recent “officer-involved shooting.” She warned that the video might be disturbing to young children. That’s what got my attention.
It’s pretty grainy, and there is no sound. What I see is a parking lot, and some old white dude locking his car. A couple of people wander by. Then a young-looking black man goes whizzing past. He’s looking straight ahead. Nothing in his hands. But the mall sheep shrink as he passes.
Not the old dude, though. Running dude passes by about four feet in front of him, and old dude seems to just watch him go by. But as soon as the young man passes, old dude draws and fires. You just see a little puff of smoke, like in a silent movie. The sheep all jump. Then old dude walks out of the frame. I guess that’s when he takes his kill shot. The video ends. Fin.
The anchor never stopped jabbering, and by the time Perry was dead she was telling us about a weed conviction in ’87. I turned the volume down.
That was the only time they showed the actual shooting, as far as I know. For the rest of the night, they cut the shooting. They just showed us a black man running, as if that were the crime. After a few days, they didn’t even show us that.
Last Call.
Tuesday, November 30, 1993
I watched Clinton sign the Brady bill. Brady sat next to him.
This is the thing about guns: they are wrong, but they exist. The very first time I fired a gun was out in the woods of upstate New York with my thugbilly cousins, the summer before I turned 13. During the long moment I spent recovering from the recoil, I had the idea of building a time machine and going back and showing Mr. Du Pont or Browning or whoever it was the horrible horrible consequences of his invention. I would put together a slide show, or maybe a PowerPoint, of school shootings and drive-bys and crazy-ass boyfriends killing chicks who hadn’t even really been cheating. The fantasy was that Mr. Smith or Mr. Wesson or whoever would be so overcome with shock and revulsion at what he saw that he would immediately reject the incalculable fortune that he would have amassed. The virtually infinite wealth that no number of generations could ever spend. And he would gladly choose not to enable the continent of his birth to sweep across the planet like a plague, terrorizing every living creature upon its surface and in its skies and in its waters, until there wasn’t enough planet left to sustain any life at all. My PowerPoint of Boers massacring entire villages and three-year-olds killing their little sisters by accident and gay teenagers blowing their brains out and assassination after assassination after assassination would compel him to forego being the single most influential person in the galaxy, affecting the tide and climate of an entire world forever. But that didn’t happen.
I’d been on the fence about gun ownership. But the signing of the Brady bill forced my hand. I wasn’t worried about the new background-check requirements—on paper, my background was golden. But a lot of the good stuff, most notably high-capacity clips, was about to be banned. They wanted the cops and the bubbas who already had 30-round clips to keep having them, and the law-abiding types such as myself who were late to the party to have eight or so puny shots at our disposal before we had to call time out for a reload break. Fuck that.
Guns exist because guns work. The reason why I think my name is Marcus and you think your name is whatever you think it is is not because of the ships that sailed to Africa. And it certainly isn’t because of the superiority of the men on those ships. It is because those men had guns. (Guns, and the vicious desperation that comes from being born in a land that can barely support human life.) If those men had not had guns, their ships would have come back empty. The other thing that happened the moment I first fired a gun was that I forgave us for our own genocide. I had not even realized that I blamed us. But I had. The missing piece was guns.
Guns work so well. But they are a tool, not a virtue. Those English/French/etc. thugs weren’t better than my ancestors, any more than the carjacker is better than the driver stopped at a light, or the predator is better than the runaway locked in his cellar. They just have guns is all. But they didn’t want me to have a gun. Again: fuck that.
Fortunately, although the bill was being signed into law as I watched, it would not take effect for three full months. Some ban: You’ve got three months to buy up as much of the good shit as you can get your hands on. I knew that there was going to be a total feeding frenzy. And that it would have to include me.
Article I, section 9 of the United States Constitution begins as follows:
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
What that means is, abducting Africans to torture and rape and work to death for no money is definitely legal for the next 21 years, but after that, no guarantees. The backstory is that in 1787 people saw abolition coming, possibly in the very near future, and this was a way to buy more time. “Our” Founding Fathers affirmatively made slavery legal, right there in the body of the Constitution.
People got the message. They built more ships and hired more thugs and grabbed us up by the millions. And why not? Free people! I mean, Persons. And almost half of us survived the voyage. They really came correct those last 21 years. They stockpiled us. Our Constitution told them to.
This was a lot like that.
My Cold Dead Etc.
Wednesday, December 8, 1993
The day before I was to become a gun owner, some black guy took a Glock onto a commuter train and shot up a bunch of people back east.
Mom was right—I feel a little guilty when some other black person does something bad. I can’t help it. But I also know I didn’t make that feeling up. It’s a thing.
For centuries in this country, if any black man was accused of a crime anywhere, all black men everywhere ran a real risk of getting killed by a mob. Part of that is perceived fungibility, which is what racism is based on—we all look alike, act alike, know each other, and so on. And, until some point during my lifetime, the prevailing, out-in-the-open thinking was that if one of us did something they didn’t like, any one of us (or, usually, several of us) was available to receive the retribution. We were all each other’s proxy. Again, this view was considered normal and sane.
I have to say that things have changed since then. Clearly, things have changed. But I don’t know by how much. I do know that back in ’91, when Bush the First invaded Iraq, in certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens bat-wielding guidos were jumping any black or brown man they could catch alone. Brothers, Indians, Puerto Ricans—for a while, we were all Iraqis. So I don’t think I have to pretend that mind set has completely gone away.
And then, the day before I’m planning to get me some guns while I still can, a member of my race goes and shoots up a bunch of working people.
He wasn’t dead. The people he was shooting managed to disarm and restrain him before the cops could come and shoot him sixty billion times. And now he was saying that he had been out to kill white people, as well as “conservative blacks.” The cameras ate that shit up. I wondered whether I was a “conservative black.”
The press was acting like we’d captured the very first racist ever. Time magazine’s cover that week featured the asshole’s mug shot, digitally darkened, of course, to make him scarier. The headline under the photo: THE FACE OF HATE. My gut balled into a fist when I saw that cover at the newsstand outside my office. Oh, sure. Hate got invented yesterday. I bought three copies.
It was time for Duck Season to kick into high gear. A gun store seemed both the place to be and not. On the very next morning after the LIRR massacre I took lunch early and walked south on 2nd Street to Downtown Arms, the large, brightly lit showroom just past Market Street, a little after 11:00.
Downtown Arms was the store the respectable suits passed at top speed, averting their eyes porn-shop style. Until the Brady bill passed I’d looked away too. I don’t know exactly what I’d expected, but it wasn’t the professional smiling faces of the clean-cut, if paunchy, men I found there.
Everybody thinks that gun nuts are all right-wing racist kooks. And they pretty much are. But, like most stereotypes, this is both true and not true. Best I can figure, gun nuts love guns so much that it almost transcends race. Kind of like what having the same kink or owning rental property does for people—one common cause unites them beyond any rational explanation. So, sure, don’t get them started on the Clintons. But the reception I got at Downtown Arms that day was undeniably better than the reception I got from the black security guards in the lobby at work. Yes, I was wearing a suit, but I wore a suit at work too. Frankly, I didn’t care that they hated Clinton. Those folks could see me.
An older gent approached. White, of course, but he was smiling. “Good afternoon, sir! Help you with anything?” The smiling man sported a name badge that said Roy and he was also wearing a large pistol on his belt, the same belt that held up his khakis. I looked around the room. The entire sales staff was carrying. Short-sleeved button-down Dilbert shirts, Dockers, and semi-autos. With extra ammo.
OK. This is the coolest motherfucking establishment I have ever been in in my entire fucking life. And I’ve been to Hooters.
I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t just meeting a salesman; I was meeting my mentor, my sensei, my rabbi. Roy became “my guy” the way the Johns and Dicks I worked with had a hat guy. I would talk guns and buy guns from Roy for years, off and on, until well-intentioned but utterly clueless liberals finally succeeded in shutting the place down. Today, the few remaining gun shops in the Bay Area are all in sketchy neighborhoods. Well done.
“Hi, Roy,” I said. “I am looking for a gun.”
“Well, OK then! Let’s narrow that down a little. A handgun? Rifle? Shotgun?” I sensed not a hint of condescension. None.
“Oh, definitely a handgun.” I felt kind of sleazy saying that. That’s part of the liberal crazy too—a shotgun is somehow more legitimate? Do you people know what a shotgun does?
“Great! Will this be your first handgun?” It was so obviously going to be the first handgun I’d actually bought and owned, but he asked me anyway. Roy had better skills than most waiters.
“Yes.”
“Big? Little?”
“Um . . . medium?”
“We can do that.” Roy ambled over to a row of glass cases at the far end of the store; I followed. There were about a dozen suits milling around, mostly staring at guns inside the cases, and another dozen stereotypical gun nuts, all safari vests and plaid shirts, mostly handling the merchandise. Since the sales staff was carrying, I guess we all knew that if someone got froggy and started waving a piece around, Roy and his buddies would handle it. But nobody was feeling froggy. It was like there was a truce in effect. A time-out. Sure, we could all end up shooting these guns at each other if society broke down but, for now, we all had a bond: we were preparing. The sheep were all outside, hoping for the best. We were at Downtown Arms, hoping for the best and preparing. I was home.
Roy stopped behind a case that held several semi-automatic pistols. They had long barrels but were slim overall. “Twenty-twos?” I guessed.
Roy smiled. “That’s right. A .22 caliber is a great starter gun. A starter pistol,” he said, riffing off of himself and chuckling. “But really, this is a good way to get acquainted with pistols. You could go with a revolver. Revolvers are good too, very good, and simple to learn and use. But you’re a young man. You’ve got lots of time to familiarize yourself with semi-autos. This would be the best way to start.”
I believed him. Even though it was my nature to suspect that Roy was steering me toward the small-caliber weapons to keep me harmless, or at least to ensure that I would come back to buy more, I did not really think that this was the case. For one thing, as I had predicted, we were already deep into a buying frenzy. There were 20 to 30 cats gun shopping in the middle of a workday. Business was obviously good; Roy wasn’t desperate. And for another thing, I just believed him.
“A .22 sounds good . . .” I drifted down the case and took it all in. There were several finishes inside, mainly stainless steel and blued; “blued” is black. “You think maybe stainless . . . ?”
“Guns are black.” I took this at face value. Even though in time I did go on to buy a couple of stainless pieces, if you ask me, guns are black. “And don’t worry about the ban,” Roy said smoothly. “When you are ready for something larger, we’ll still have enough pre-ban inventory to get you whatever you need. All perfectly legal to sell.”
