I brought a gun to school once.
Yeah, it was when I still combed my hair the way my Dad wanted it combed.
It was only a CO[sup]2[/sup] pistol.
With a fresh cartridge, it could fire a BB at seven hundred fifty feet per second. And since it held sixteen BB’s that fired as fast as one could squeeze the trigger off, I could have made quite a few people jump before anyone knew what was going on.
But I only wanted one guy.
All sixteen BB’s had his name on them, etched with careful precision by the man who wrote the Lord’s prayer on a drawer he carved into the side of a dime.
At least, it would’ve been cool to have them personalized that way.
All for him.
Someone who everyone was afraid of because he was over six feet tall and on the wrestling team and he reminded me of a young Clint Eastwood who brought bourbon mixed in with his Big Gulp to Saturday school.
Someone who challenged five people at once to fight him and everyone backed down.
Someone who really, really disliked a friend of mine because my friend couldn’t keep his mouth shut because he had a HUGE inferiority complex and put everyone else down because of it.
I kept the gun in a backpack with a small hole in the corner for the muzzle.
And when I took it into the men’s restroom to clear the oil out of the barrel after the cartridge had gone in, I didn’t know there was an errant BB left in the chamber.
Sucker bounced off the tiles in the corner, flew back and planted a black welt with a yellow ring around it right square on my thigh.
I laughed aloud as I hopped around on my good leg because it really, really hurt.
And I did not shoot anyone that day, much less the guy who I didn’t want to shoot anyway because I knew it was my friend who was the idiot, but out of a wayward sense of loyalty to the guy who was an underdog like me.
I brought the gun to shock the hell out of my friends, having absolutely no concept of the penalties I could have faced upon discovery. I brought it for power, for prestige, and to gloat silently as the weight of it hung on my shoulder from class to class. No one would suspect a thing.
I was in the know. No one else would dare be so bold as to bring a ‘Finalizer.’
No one else would pretend to be as crazy as I would in order to get attention.
No one else would be so envious of someone with such confidence that not one but FIVE people backed down when challenged.
No one else would hope that someday he could be like that guy with such intensity that he actually tried to one-up the impression of the icon by having the ‘balls’ to bring a loaded weapon to school.
No one else.
Feces and chiggers.
Of course others would.
Heck, the dude himself kept a hand crossbow in his Nova…AND a Co[sup]2[/sup] pistol.
True.
How do I know?
The next day I approached him and said, “I brought a BB gun to shoot you with yesterday, Eric, but I shot myself in the leg. I wanted to apologize because I was stupid.”
And guess what he said.
“Cool, man. Hurts, don’t it?”
He grinned, shreds of Copenhagen just visible above his lower lip line.
I smiled and nodded vigorously.
And from that moment on, we were friends.
Yeah, storybook ending.
Except we were still messed up. His Dad still beat him and he still drank bourbon in school.
I still perpetrated socially unacceptable acts (taking all the toilet paper in the school hostage for a week, for instance) to get attention. And when I became ‘popular’ myself, it wasn’t a volitional occurrence, or even a conscious result of my efforts in Drama.
I had no idea how many people thought I was utterly arrogant and unapproachable—only because I had no idea they even paid attention to me, so I didn’t talk to them.
Girls spread around that I was ‘bad in bed’ who I’d never even been alone in ANY room with, much less a bedroom. When I confronted them, they said they’d ‘heard it from someone.’
And then said, ‘Hey, you finally talked to me.’
I don’t know why I’m posting this. There are all sorts of similar stories. Conjugate:
I’m messed up
You’re messed up.
He/she are messed up.
You all are messed up.
We’re messed up.
They’re messed up.
. We all lived the damn ‘Breakfast Club’ and adhered to our social comfort zones, pain being the common denominator that brought us together, and we’d recognize it only when we picked our heads off the ground long enough to look someone else in the eye.
It still goes on, doesn’t it?
As adults, we’re not immune. Some of us would still love to bring a BB gun to work and plant one in our supervisor’s self-righteous tuckus. And some of us still bury our heads, certain that someone else is better than we are and hating them for it. Or fooling ourselves into thinking everyone else has a problem.
Where does it end?
Does it end?
Well, I think it can. But…where do we start?
Not we.
Me.
It starts with me.
Hey ladies and gentlemen, here I am.
See me?
Cool.
Because I see you.
And I’m keeping my head up, this time.
)
