Monthly Archives: January 2013

An icon falls…Tulip calls

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My phone rang early this morning. It was Tulip calling from Vegas. I hadn’t heard from her since before the holidays, so I knew that something big was up.

“Hey Trop,” she said, “have you heard the news?” She started out like that, like we talked every day. Her voice was raspy and her speech a little slurred. I figured she’d been up all night.

“Well hello to you too, Tulip,” I said, “I thought you’d dropped off the map. Where are you anyway?”

“I’m staying at Bally’s,” she said, “but that could be temporary, depending…I drove over for the Super Bowl.”

“You drove,” I said, somewhat shocked, knowing Tulip’s aversion to distance driving, as well as the condition of her classically restored 1978 Ford LTD. “All the way from L.A.?”

“Times are a little tough right now,” she said, “I’m trying to save on airfare.” A few seconds of silence followed, and then I heard the flick of a lighter, and I knew she’d lit a fresh American Spirit. “But if you want some fodder for that blog of yours,” she continued, “just turn on the TV.”

I did as Tulip suggested and turned on Channel 6 News out of Miami. The news of the day was just shocking. Dan Marino, or ‘Dan-the-Man’ as he is so often affectionately referred to here in South Florida had fallen, and fallen hard — within the space of only a few hours. He’d plummeted from iconic sports hero to dirt bag extraordinaire. I am sure that all of my loyal readers know by now, that Dan by his own admission had an extramarital affair — one that resulted in the birth of a child. Dan doesn’t deny the allegations and has in fact admitted that he has supported both mother and child, and apparently very well.

If you don’t live in South Florida, then you might not realize how Dan Marino is idolized here. Oh, the guy has his detractors for sure. A contractor friend of mine who worked on Dan’s house told me that he was cold and distant (translated to arrogant asshole who wouldn’t sign an autograph), but for the most part Dan-the-Man has achieved hero status here. He is after all, the immortal number ‘13’ – the star quarterback for the Miami Dolphins who, back during their heyday led the team to greatness, including the yet to be challenged ‘undefeated season’, of 1972.

As many of we Dolphins fans watch grainy footage of Dan’s gridiron exploits on the stadium jumbo-tron during pre-game hoopla, we find ourselves hoping that someday our team might find another Marino, and in fact every quarterback fielded by the Dolphins is compared against the Marino yardstick…sigh…

So Dan Marino has fallen, or maybe not. So far, lovers by the score are not stepping forward (see Woods, Tiger), and for the moment it seems to be a private matter between Dan-the-Man and his family…so far…

So I think Tulip was wrong. There’s nothing to see here beyond another fallen athlete. I don’t think this story will grow legs. I told Tulip that when I called her later in the day.

“You’re wrong Trop,” she said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Wanna bet,” I said. There was silence on the phone and  I thought better of it. “Forget I said that, what’s your pick for the Super Bowl?”

“Ravens by 3.”

“By 3?”

“Yeah, in overtime,” she said.

That’s Tulip.

Sunsets and the human spirit

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Note:  I wrote this for my wife on a special anniversary. She liked this piece and asked me to please put it on my blog:

* * *

We are standing on the dock at Mallory Square in Key West, Florida. It’s late afternoon, and we’ve come to watch Key West’s premier free attraction – the sunset. Over the years, we’ve visited Key West many times, but this time we are in town to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. It’s late January, and a rare cold front has descended upon the Florida Keys. With temperatures dipping into the high 30s (almost an emergency situation in that locale), we are forced to leave the shorts and flip flops in our suitcase and don long pants, sweatshirts, and even gloves for our trek up to Mallory Square.

“This isn’t the Key West trip I was planning on,” I growl as we trudge past the phalanx of gift shops, bars and restaurants that flank Duval Street. “We should have stayed home and come down another time.”

My wife ignores me, more concerned with the business at hand. “I don’t think it’s going to be a good sunset,” she says, “I’m really disappointed.” I look west, up the street, and see that the sky is overcast.

“Maybe we should just bag it then,” I say.  I notice a café across the street where the patrons are sitting at outdoor tables under heat lamps. They’re eating, drinking, and having fun, and they are obviously much warmer than we are.

“No,” she says, “it may clear off. We still have half an hour until sunset.”

The wind kicks up as we pass the old Customs House, and by the time we make our way through the throng of tourists and street performers to the seawall, my face is frozen and I feel more like we’re on a hike in the Maine woods than on a short vacation in the United States’ southernmost city.

In spite of the cold, the dock is crowded, and people of all ages are milling about trying to stay warm, some with drinks in one hand and digital cameras in the other.  Two teenagers sit on the dock making out, oblivious to the crowd gathering behind them. A middle aged couple to our right speaks in French, and although I have little understanding of the language, their conversation appears to have something to do with the sunset, or lack thereof. We talk to another couple who are down for the week from New Jersey, and the conversation alternates between dismay over the cold snap, and whether or not the sun will break through the cloud bank long enough to allow us all a picture.

“We saw the green flash once,” a lady says to me. She refers to the almost mythical flash of green light that supposedly occurs at the point in time just before the sun dips below the horizon. “But that was up in Naples,” she says, “I’ve never seen it down here.”

My wife seems concerned as sunset approaches, but determined to get a picture if the clouds cooperate. “I think it may be breaking away,” she finally says. I focus on the western sky and notice that a hole appears to be forming in the clouds.

“Yes, you’re right,” says the lady who saw the green flash in Naples. “I think it’s going to break through after all.”

Me, I’m still not certain. The two teenagers stop what they’ve been doing and point digital cameras at arm’s length toward the western sky. The French couple speaks in a low but excited tone in the language I don’t understand. Everyone watches the sky for the big break. Then it comes.

The clouds part swiftly and the first unfiltered rays of the late day sun streak across the water. Muted gasps of delight erupt among the mixed crowd of sunset revelers on the Mallory Square dock. A few seconds after that, the sun breaks through and it hangs suspended for a moment, like a rich orange globe sizzling in the South Florida winter sky. Cameras click as everyone takes advantage of the moment. A young couple asks my wife to take a picture of them with the sunset in the background. When she’s through they ask if we want our picture taken too, and they take a picture of us there. After they take the shot and we’ve thanked them, and they have gone away, my wife reviews their work in the tiny camera view finder.

“Perfect,” she says to me. I squint at the tiny image and see the two of us, huddled together in our sweatshirts, trying to stay warm, with the setting sun hanging just above my left shoulder. I think of how the both of us are now preserved in perfect jpeg format for time eternal. For a moment I forget the cold and I think of the past 30 years that we’d spent together. I think of how many sunset pictures we have at home in our photo albums. I recall pictures she’d waited patiently to take on the Pacific Coast Highway, and in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I remember of the incredible shot she’d taken on Florida’s Anna Maria Island when an old biplane passed in front of the setting sun and she’d captured it perfectly.

“Don’t you think we have enough sunset pictures,” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Not enough.”

“Then you’ll never get tired of taking them?”

She laughs at me, “of course not, they’re all different.”

Then she says, “come on, let’s go somewhere and warm up.”

We walk back toward the old Customs House and stop for a moment on the corner to listen to a street singer. He strums a guitar with frozen fingers and sings a Jimmy Buffett song off key.  He looks colder than I am, so I put two dollars in his tip jar and we head out for Captain Tony’s.

Later that night, on our way back downtown, I spot the French couple. They are drinking white wine at the café with the heat lamps. They don’t recognize me, but I know who they are. I think about Mallory Square and how we’d gathered to watch an event that has occurred every night for the past few billion years. I see us all there, the French couple, the New Jersey couple, the make out kids and the green flash lady. All of us pulled in for that moment. Together we’d experienced the end of a day that will never occur again. It’s unique.

She sits on the edge of the bed and asks me what I want to do tomorrow — our last day in Key West. I tell her I don’t care as long as we go to Mallory Square for sunset.

Living in the age of deception

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*hood-winked

To take in by deceptive means; deceive. See synonyms at deceive.

hood’wink’er n.

*  *  *

Many years ago, at New York’s famed Feast of San Gennaro, I was relieved of $20 by a fast talking street vendor in a shell game. I left the Feast a bit wiser, and years later when I confessed my ignorance of New York street games to a friend, he laughed and remarked that I had clearly been ‘hoodwinked’.

I liked that word. Much more playful sounding than its cousin ‘deceived’, and much less threatening than its drunken uncle counterpart, ‘ripped off’, hoodwinked seemed to fit nicely into the picture of what happened to me that day. Lately, I am starting to feel like we are living in an age of deception, where hoodwinkers of all types are ‘taking us all in’ just a little bit.

First came Lance Armstrong, the Tours de France super star. Since bicycle racing does not attract the huge following here in the U.S. as it does in Europe, it takes some doing for a cycler to gain national name recognition. Ask anyone here in the States to name a famous cycler, and nearly everyone will name Lance Armstrong. Ask them to name a second and your question will likely be met with a blank stare. Lance seemed to have it all. A stellar athlete, Lance was from the get-go, clearly on a path to celebrity, and if his athletic prowess were not enough to seal the deal, his inspirational triumph over cancer would be. Since most of us feel that we are probably just one diagnosis away from this dread disease, Lance’s high profile cancer beat-down left us all knowing that not only was there life after cancer, but athletic top-of-your-game, celebrity status life.

Of course doping charges followed Lance’s success and those who dared to cast a shadow of doubt upon his squeaky clean image were, by many accounts, castigated and intimidated into silence. So, for many years we turned a blind eye to the super-star cyclist, preferring to see him as he wanted us to see him. Not until his recent, and now famed coming out appearance on Oprah, were we forced to confront the fact, that Lance the man, was simply another athlete with sins long hidden from view. First he said he didn’t – now he says he did…I am majorly hoodwinked.

Next came Beyonce. Her now controversial appearance at last week’s Presidential inauguration is under fire, her performance marred by allegations of lip-syncing The Star Spangled Banner (in fairness to Beyonce, if there was ever a song to lip-sync it’s that one). For some reason this inaugural “mini-scandal” seems to linger, perhaps even eclipsing Michelle Obama’s eye-rolling at the luncheon incident.

To those who say Beyonce has hoodwinked us, I cry foul. Well, maybe a mini-teeny-weeny hoodwinking went on, but who could blame her. If she had been lip-syncing to say – Barbara Streisand, well then…MAJOR hoodwinking …but she didn’t do that.  Beyonce chose, apparently (or perhaps she was advised by her handlers), to sing what is arguably one of the most difficult (and often massacred) songs ever written, by lip syncing to her own voice. So what is really wrong with that? Let’s face it. That is a damn difficult venue that Inauguration. You’re on like never before with the world watching – the Prez himself is sitting right there, and baby it’s cold outside. Who would want to take a chance on failure…

…Apparently James Taylor, that’s who. Like J.T. or hate him, you have to give the guy credit, he’s got guts. Taylor went on bald, cold, and nervous, but he played the game straight up. After his performance he gave an interview in which he admitted that Inaugurals aren’t the best gigs in the world for singing guitar players:

“It’s always hard for a guitar player to play when it’s cold because your hands sort of stiffen up and you know nerves tend to do that to you anyway. So I was, you know, very relieved to have gotten to it without any major train wrecks.”

And so he did. J.T. made it through without any ‘trainwrecks’. But it leaves me wondering if an occasional trainwreck, or maybe just a slight derailing, would not have been better for the career of Lance Armstrong. Maybe the loss of a race or two would have simply humanized him…or maybe not, but it would have kept him off of Oprah’s show confessing to the masses that he was a liar and a cheat.

And as for Beyonce, while I don’t feel that she is in the same league of hoodwinkers as Lance, I am thinking that maybe an imperfection in her performance would not have sent her career down in flames either. After all – politicians certainly don’t concern themselves with embarrassment on the national stage, so why should we expect a performer to  be perfect?

That’s it for now…back to writing about ‘writing’  topics really soon…I mean it…

–Trop

*Definition courtesy of The Free Dictionary, by Farlex.

I sell the gun…and have some misgivings…

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Note to my readers: This is part 4, the last part of a ‘serial-blog’.  A serial-blog is something I wanted to try, but might not attempt again. But you never know. Without reading the first three parts, it probably won’t make too much sense, so if you are new here (or just showing up late), please scroll down to Part 1 and read the blog posts in order. In a nutshell, this is a short story that is intended as a personal commentary on gun control. The experience is true, or as best I remember it. All names and some inconsequential details have been changed, so if a character sounds like you my friend, there is a good chance it is.

PART 4

…I continue…

Dean White had it made. Or so I thought back then. If there was ever a guy who was truly his own man it was Dean.

About fifty years old at the time, he looked older. He had a long salt and pepper beard almost to mid-chest, and long grey hair almost to mid-back. His hair was always pulled back in a pony tail, held in place with one of those turquoise Navaho hair clasps. He also wore a turquoise ring on his little finger and always wore a turquoise bedecked belt buckle on a hand tooled belt. Dean hadn’t an ounce of Native American blood in his veins but he apparently liked the jewelry.

Dean made his living with a small printing business that he ran out of the basement of his house. He printed labels for catalogs and fliers and usually worked all night. This left him free all day to hunt and fish. Dean was married to a girl named Suzie, who was at least twenty years his junior. Suzy had platinum blonde hair and had worked as a stripper at a club in Kansas City before she left that world behind to marry Dean (or so I heard).

In addition to his printing business, Dean also was an accomplished gunsmith. He was known to buy and sell guns too, so he wasn’t surprised when I showed up at his house one morning with the .22 High Standard, wrapped in cheese cloth, and stowed in a shoe box. Someone had told me that as long as a pistol was contained in a box, any box, that it wasn’t considered a concealed weapon and you could carry it on the car seat beside you (sounds like hooey to me now that I think about it).

Dean was coming off of an ‘all nighter’, having just finished a big print run for an Omaha department store, and he still had 250 bulletins for the First Presbyterian church to run off before services next day, so he was a little grumpy. Suzy was pleasant though and brought us both steaming mugs of hot coffee.

Dean unwrapped the pistol, and inspected it like he knew what he was doing. While he was looking at it I gave him the condensed version of how Lenny and I had tried the gun out on a firing range, conveniently leaving out the fact that the range was on Earl Hackelman’s farm, and not only had we trespassed, but we’d almost been run down (or gunned down) by Hackelman himself. I told Dean that the gun shot right and high.

Dean laughed at me. “This ain’t no target pistol, son,” he said. “Now if it’s targets you want to shoot…” He got up and went into another room. He came back with a long oak box with a fancy inscription carved into the lid above a carving of an eagle with outstretched wings. He sat the box in front of me.

I opened the box. Inside was a true .22 caliber target pistol. I handled it carefully. It was perfectly balanced and the difference between it and the gun I had purchased from Harry was as pronounced as the difference between my 1969 Plymouth and a racing Ferrari.

“How much?” I asked Dean, momentarily seeing myself entering professional shooting competitions.

“Three seventy five,” said Dean, “but I could allow you fifty for your gun, so make it three twenty five and it’s yours.”

“Kinda out of my price range,” I said, as I laid the target pistol back in its ornate cradle. “What can you give me outside of trade.”

“Thirty bucks,” he said without hesitation.

“Thirty bucks,” I said, “wow, I paid fifty.”

“You got screwed,” said Dean.

“How about forty then?”

Dean smiled and pulled a turquoise money clip from the front pocket of his jeans. He counted out thirty five dollars. “Take it or leave it,” he said.

I took it.

*

A few days after I sold the pistol to Dean, I ran into Lenny’s brother Rick at the County Line Tap. I hadn’t spoken to Lenny since the day he approached me with the offer to buy the gun. Lenny had left town for California without saying goodbye to anyone.

I walked over and asked Rick if there was any word from Lenny.

“Didn’t you hear,” he said.

“Hear what?”

“Lenny got robbed, that’s what.”

“Where…when?” I asked.

“Modesto, California,” he said. Then he told me that Lenny had stopped at a burger joint to get a bite to eat, and when he came out his car was gone.

“They stole everything he had,” said Rick.

“Everything?”

“Yeah, everything. All he had left were the clothes on his back. They found the car the next day stripped and burned.”

Careless Lenny…I thought of the gun that I almost sold to him.  Would I have put a weapon into the hands of a criminal, had I sold the gun to Lenny? Could the gun – my gun – have been used to rob, intimidate, or even kill?!?!. The answer was an unequivocal yes.

I was haunted by my ‘almost sale’ for some time afterward, and in my mind’s eye, I could  see the look on the face of  the happy car thief, after finding the loaded .22 pistol carelessly left in the glove compartment of Lenny’s unlocked vehicle. I could see the evil glee in the man’s eyes as he slid the piece into the waistband of his jeans. Later I could see the look of terror on the face of the liquor store clerk as the gun brandishing robber demanded the cash drawer. Maybe she would resist, or perhaps a feigned gesture would be misinterpreted as resistance. Maybe the thief would panic, pressing the trigger just a bit too hard…this target would be much closer than the one in Hackleman’s cow pasture. At two or three feet it wouldn’t matter if the gun shot right, or high. I would hear the sharp crack of the .22, and then I’d see blood on the face of the store clerk, and on the thief, and then on myself…after that I would awake covered in sweat.

THE END

We flee the scene…I receive an offer to buy my pistol

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PART 3

Note to my readers: Into the seemingly endless stream of blather regarding gun control in the United States, I have contributed even more blather, in the form of excerpts from a short story that I wrote. Since it runs long, I have broken it down into 4 parts. It is best read in order, starting with Part 1. It is (for the most part) factual, however, names and some inconsequential details have been changed to protect the innocent.

The narrative continues:

We panicked…

I don’t remember which one of us was in the car first – I don’t even remember taking any special precautions with the revolver, but later I found it tossed under the front seat, still loaded with seven live cartridges and two spent ones. There wasn’t time to do anything but run. Earl Hackleman’s big Dodge 4 by 4 was bearing down hard on us. By the time I put the car in gear, and hit the gas, he wasn’t more than a hundred yards distant. I slammed the Plymouth into first gear and we lurched away down the rutted cow pasture path toward the gravel road. I hit second gear and we nose dived into a washout that almost twisted the steering wheel from my grip.

“Ya want me to drive?” yelled Lenny, “Jeez, what’s the matter with you, get a move on.”

“We won’t be going anywhere if I bust an axle out here,” I shouted back.

I drove as fast as I could, over the rough terrain, but I knew that the low slung car was no match for a souped-up off the road vehicle like Hackelman’s. My only hope was that I could beat him to the gravel road. There I knew I could out distance him. I glanced into the rearview mirror, and for a second I couldn’t believe our luck. It looked as if the headlights behind me had stopped closing in.

Hackleman had apparently stopped at his firing range to make sure everything was okay – like we might have messed with his sandbag or maybe he thought we’d dropped off a platoon of commie commandos, I don’t know, but I saw a flashlight beam shoot from the window of the stopped truck and sweep across the firing range. That lasted for only a few seconds, before the truck was on the move again, chasing us down on the rutted path. Stopping had been his mistake, if he had any hope of running us down. It was all the time I needed to make it to the gravel road ahead of him.

We rolled over the cattle crossing with Hackleman’s headlights close behind, but not close enough. Safely on the gravel road, I dropped the Plymouth into fourth gear, dumped the clutch and punched the gas pedal to the floor. We roared forward with tires spinning, leaving a hailstorm of gravel and dust in our wake. Behind us I could see Hackleman’s headlights turning onto the gravel road from the cow path, and for a moment it looked like he might be following us, but a few seconds later he dropped back, and then the lights were gone. I kept the pedal down until we reached the highway, half expecting Hackleman’s truck to appear out of nowhere, right on my bumper with headlights blazing, but it didn’t happen. We were on the blacktop headed back toward town before either Lenny or I spoke. It was Lenny:

“I think Harry ripped you off on that pistol.”

I didn’t answer him.

 *

The next morning I took the revolver from the car and emptied the shells from the chamber and threw away the two spend casings. Then I wrapped the gun carefully in cheese cloth and put it, and the box of Remington cartridges, in the bottom of an old tackle box that I kept under the workbench in my garage. Then, I once again forgot about the gun, until…

…one morning, two or three weeks after the incident out at Heckleman’s farm, Lenny came into the café where I was eating breakfast. He sat down across from me and we made small talk for a bit, even laughing about that night we’d outrun Heckelman.  Then he told me that he was leaving town. It seems Lenny had grown dissatisfied working in the family business with his father and two brothers and had decided to move to California. He had an uncle in Fresno who had offered to put him up for awhile, until he could find a job, and he’d decided to leave the next day.

“Say,” he said to me finally. “You wouldn’t want to sell that pistol, would you?”

“Why would you want it,” I said, “you told me Harry ripped me off.”

Lenny shrugged. “Maybe he did. But I need a gun for the road, and I don’t have a lot of time to shop around.” Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. Lenny was suddenly flush with cash, having sold his share of the business to his father and brothers. He pushed a fifty dollar bill across the table toward me.

I looked at the fifty – it wasn’t a denomination that I saw every day. At the time it was nearly half a weeks pay. It was also more cash than I was likely to ever get for the pistol, so I gave the transaction serious thought.

I had known Lenny for years, and he was a good and honest friend. But I hesitated to sell him the gun – not that I feared Lenny would use the pistol for any criminal purpose, but he was reckless and careless. If I have ever heard an inner voice (and listened to it) it was that day in the café sitting across from Lenny with that fifty dollar bill on the table.

“Naw,” I said,  “I better keep it around.” I pushed the bill back across the table. “A guy never knows when he’s going to need a gun.”

The next day I sold the pistol.

To be continued.

Night target practice and I commit my first gun crime

. Gun control, Life . , . 2 Comments

PART 2 (best if read after PART 1 – see previous blog)

…back to the story about my first (and probably last) handgun…

I wrapped the revolver in a towel and I stashed it in the trunk of my Plymouth, and it stayed there for several weeks. I forgot about it. Then one day I told my friend Lenny about the gun.

“How’s it shoot?” he asked me.

“Couldn’t say,” I said. “I haven’t shot it yet.”

“Whatddaya mean you haven’t shot it.” Lenny was astounded. We were having a few beers in a local tap, and it was late. He insisted that we go out to my car and get the gun and fire off a few rounds in the parking lot. Fearing the worst (alcohol and firearms), I put Lenny off, but I told him that we could go do a few target rounds the next day before I went to work. Lenny said he knew the perfect place to shoot.

The next day I picked up a box of Remington High Standard Long Rifle cartridges and a packet of cardboard targets from the Coast to Coast store in town before heading out to meet Lenny. I had to be at work at 10 PM and had arranged to meet up with him about 8…yeah, it was dark.

Okay, target shooting is not usually recommended after dark, but we knew what we were doing – sort of.

We drove to a remote spot that Lenny knew about. It was four or five miles off of the highway, down a twisting gravel road. Lenny directed me to a turnoff that I might have easily missed. It led off of the gravel road and up into a cow pasture. Ignoring a ‘No Trespassing’ sign we rumbled over a cattle crossing and then bounced along a dirt path for another half a mile or so.

Finally, Lenny told me to stop and turn off the lights. We got out of the car. There was a half moon, so we had enough light to see. There was a steep embankment rising directly in front of me. It was probably thirty feet high – maybe higher. Fifty yards or so from the embankment and directly in front of the car was a low bench made out of 2 by 4s. There was a burlap bag of sand on the table.

“Where the hell are we?” I asked Lenny.

“Fuckin’ cool, huh,” he said, striding away from me with our cardboard targets in hand.

“What is this place?” I asked as I followed along behind him, “some guy’s private shooting range? Jeez, you want to get us both arrested?”

“You worry too much,” he told me.

Downrange from the 2 by 4 shooting table and near the base of the embankment was a wooden target stand. The stand could be adjusted to accommodate a variety of targets. Ours were fairly small bulls eye targets – not like the elaborate human silhouette targets you see at shooting ranges. Lenny attached a cardboard target to a clip on top of the stand.

I looked around, still worried about the ‘No Trespassing” sign we had so conveniently ignored. We seemed to be alone, the only light came from a mercury vapor yard light from a farmstead a mile or so away. I could see the outline of a darkened farmhouse and barn.

“Hey,” I said to Lenny. “Isn’t that Old Man Hackelman’s place over there?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, he is one crazy s.o.b. that’s what.”

Everybody in the county knew Earl Hackelman. A card carrying member of the John Birch Society, Hackelman was indeed certifiably nuts. He thought that communists were poised to invade Nebraska and had once done a stint in the state mental institution after sending a threatening letter to a federal judge. In another locally high profile incident, he’d pulled a shotgun on power company workers who dared set foot on his property to repair a downed line. Now we were about to shoot targets on his private shooting range.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “If Hackelman catches us we’re dead – the guy said he was going to kill a friggin’ judge, what do you think he’ll do to us for trespassing.”

“Forget Hackelman,” said Lenny sounding annoyed. “He’ll never know we’re here – he’s half deaf, and he probably goes to bed at sundown.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s just pop off a few rounds and we’ll leave.”

I relented, and we paced off about twenty five yards back toward the car. I unlocked the trunk and brought out the pistol and loaded it with nine cartridges. When the gun was ready, I flipped on the headlights. The range was now beautifully illuminated.

I took the revolver first, and taking a stance perpendicular to the target (as I had seen shooters do in magazines), held the revolver in my right hand at arms length, and sighted down the barrel at the far away target. Then I squeezed off my first shot. The gun cracked and a smattering of dust flew from the embankment two or three feet to the right of the target. I had missed it completely.

“Pull it left,” said Lenny, obviously an accomplished shooter.

And so I did for the next shot. This time the gun shot high. There was a barely audible ‘zing’ sound as the bullet struck something a bit ‘north’ of the target and a trickle of dirt rained down the embankment a few feet above the cardboard target.

“Crap,” I said. “What’s wrong with this thing.”

“Looks like Harry took you for fifty bucks,” said Lenny laughing.

“Thirty nine,” I said. “I still owe him eleven bucks.”

The banter between Lenny and me might have gone on for some time if it were not interrupted by the far off roar of a fast approaching Dodge Ram Charger,  bucking across the cow pasture, its over-cab mounted, halogen headlights piercing the night. If not for that, Lenny and I might have pissed away half a dozen more rounds  at Earl Hackleman’s gun range. But our time had ran out.

“Jesus,” said Lenny. “It’s Hackelman.”

To be continued.

-Trop

My first and last handgun

. Gun control . 1 Comment

PART 1

In 1974, when I was 20 years old, I bought my first and last handgun. Not for any good reason did I buy it, and not for any good reason did I dispose of it, except maybe for the fact that I hadn’t any need for it.

I bought my pistol, technically a revolver, from a friend of mine named Harry. Harry was a long-haul truck driver who ran a route between the upper Midwest and the Gulf Coast. Harry spent time in the less-desirable parts of cities like Kansas City, Topeka, Fort Worth and Baton Rouge (no offense to the honest citizenry of these fine towns, but Harry spent lots of nights in freight yards and truck stops). He often slept in the cab of his Freightliner, and he since he carried lots of cash, he felt better having a gun in case of trouble.

One day he and I were shooting the breeze in a coffee shop in the town where we both lived. He was only in town for the weekend, having dropped off a load of irrigation pipe in Omaha, and he had ‘bobtailed’ back home (truck driver lingo for travelling without a trailer – a financially undesirable condition best avoided). He was back for his girlfriend’s birthday. Problem was, he’d had some sort of financial ‘emergency’ on the road and now he found himself between paydays and short on funds.

“Hey,” he said, “do you still want to buy my revolver?”

I didn’t recall ever wanting to buy it in the first place, but he had shown it to me once, and I remember remarking that it seemed like a fine piece and I didn’t blame him for carrying it in his line of work. But I don’t think I ever mentioned wanting to buy it.

Disclaimer…

Before continuing, I want to say that I have never had any particular fear of guns, nor have I ever had a particular love for them either. Where I grew up, a good many households had a gun stored away in the closet, or hanging over the doorway on the mud-porch, or over the mantle. For these people, a gun was like a tile-spade, or a pick-axe – simply a tool to be used when conditions warranted, such as when weasels threatened the chicken coop, or coyotes descended upon newborn farm animals, or a fat rattler slithered up under the cool leaves of a cucumber vine in the garden on a hot summer day.

Those kinds of conditions required an instrument of special dispatch.

Back to my story…

“I don’t know if I need a revolver,” I told him.

“Suit yourself,” he told me, “but you can have it for fifty bucks if you want it.”

I thought it over for a few seconds before asking to see the weapon.

We adjourned to the truck yard behind the coffee shop, where Harry produced the revolver from under the mattress in the sleeper cab of his Freightliner. I opened the cylinder to make certain it was unloaded – it was. I spun the cylinder like I knew what I was doing, before snapping it shut.

By today’s standards, the gun was a pea-shooter. It was a High Standard .22 caliber, 9 shot revolver, and it felt heavy in my hand – handguns are always heavier than you think they should be. Suddenly, I found myself wanting to buy it.

I checked my wallet, and found that it contained only thirty nine dollars – all I had left from last week’s pay at the packing plant.

“That’s okay,” said Harry, hurrying to close the deal. (You could still go on a pretty decent date for $39 then.) “You can pay me the rest next time I see you.”

So it was a deal. I walked away with a nine shot handgun, Harry walked away with $39 and an IOU for $11, and hopefully, the Birthday Girl was not disappointed.

…to be continued.

Thoughts on December 21, 2012

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I don’t know about you, o’reader, but I take great comfort in the fact that the world did not end on December 21st of last year. In spite of the fact that the rendering of our tiny planet into a puff of cosmic dust would certainly solve, with great finality, the problems of all mankind, most of us rather enjoy our ride around the sun. With a few exceptions, we are a diverse lot of complacent and happy souls here on Planet Earth, and if our lives are not perfect, we still enjoy living them, and if our days become ‘hum-drum’, measured, and even mundane, so be it.

Not that we are a planet of bores here on Earth, but seldom (thankfully) are we confronted with a disaster over which we have no absolutely no control. The kind of event that would really shake the mundane out of your day – such a day as (some) predicted would occur on December 21st. Most of us, however, do not wish to be thrust into jaw dropping disaster.

Not that we are oblivious to the world around us. We fear natural events such as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, floods, fires and mudslides, and perhaps fear more, man made events such as terrorist attacks, random shootings, plane crashes and freeway pileups. We are well aware of the fact that we could be poisoned by Anthrax, attacked by killer bees, eaten by errant microbes, strangled by jealous lovers, gunned down by deranged co-workers or run down by feeble elderly drivers (cut me a break on last one, I live in South Florida and I know what I’m talking about).

But even the most disastrous of the aforementioned disasters involve only a small portion of Earth’s population, while only one disaster, the mega-disaster: The End of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) involves, well, all of us. Maybe that is the allure of TEOTWAWKI. Is our attraction to end time theories a result of there being safety in numbers? It is true that when it comes to TEOTWAWKI we are all in the same cosmic boat – whether you reside in Somolia, or Burbank, TEOTWAWKI is taking us all out.

So ask yourself…

…are things just a bit slow right now since the countdown clock that used to appear on the right hand pane of my blog has been taken down, and the date December 21, 2012 is simply a circled date on last year’s calendar – the one that is now residing in your recycling bin alongside the Christmas cards and crumpled hunks of wrapping paper. Has life become just a tiny bit more…boring…than usual? Maybe you sort of miss the rush of knowing it ALL ‘could’ end on a particular day. Well then, look no further than Ed’s End of the Planet Books…here we go…

Please mark Thursday, September 11, 2020 on your collective calendars, o’ readers. Yes, according to some experts and researchers this is a date of interest. The planetary alignments are an astronomical certainty. On this date, the planets Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus all align with the Sun and the Moon! Yikes. Is this a recipe for disaster or what? Some doomsayers are predicting that the combined gravitational pull of these celestial objects could pull the earth off of its axis causing continent-drowning mega-tsunamis, hundreds if not thousands of feet tall. Earthquakes and volcanoes follow – a real mess. Still other experts predict a more subtle TEOTWAWKI. In their scenario, the earth is simply pulled away from its orbit around the sun causing the planet to become increasingly icy and cold, until we all freeze – so there…so much for global warming. Al Gore didn’t know what he was talking about after all did he!

Anyway, more on this event in another blog – I can’t wait.

Mahalo,

Trop