Fragment From My Memoir (in process)

"The Gun"

*Yes: This really happened. If you appreciate my work, please consider going paid or sharing this with friends and family. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Photo by Tom Def on Unsplash

1988

Age 5

~

And of course there was The Gun Incident.

Vaguely I had known back then that Jared’s dad Carl owned a handgun. Probably Jared or Brien had told me but I can’t recall. One day Jared called by phone and told me to come up and hang. So, as I always did, I walked out my front door and started up the hill. A typical day, I assumed; we’d likely run around the barranca or maybe even play soldiers with Brien where the three of us got weak BB-guns and ran around the backyard shooting at each other (no head or crotch shots allowed) using metal trashcan lids as makeshift shields. (That’s how you know it was the early 1990s; no parent would allow this today, they’d be hauled off by CPS.)

But that day I walked into something much more intense and unanticipated.

Up the hill I walked along their steep rising driveway. I never used the brick stairs at the front, instead I always walked around the back along their parked SUV and boat and along a tall wall separating them from their immediate neighbors, around the edge of the backyard, through the back of the house and into a side door which led into their small kitchen.

This time when I softly turned the gold knob of the side door and pushed it forward, I felt a sort of premonition, some deep intuitive survival mechanism momentarily kicked in. A bell deep inside tolled from a distant city I was only vaguely aware of.

I saw Jared right off; he wore, strangely, a black hoodie with the hood up. Something heavy-looking dipped in the black front pouch of the hoodie. Closing the door gently behind me I said hi and then asked what was in the front pouch.

Jared smiled sadistically and looked at me and said, “Did I ever show you my dad’s gun?”

Looking around I said, “Where’s your dad?”

“My parents are both gone.”

“Well, uhhhhh…”

“Look at this,” Jared said.

He pulled out the item, the thing sagging the front pouch of his hoodie. It was a gun. Black, steel, a somewhat long barrel.

“Nine-millimeter,” Jared said, proudly. “I know where he keeps it. In a safe in their bedroom upstairs. I watched him put the code in one night. 8-8-9-4-2-1.

“Is that real?” I said, and felt my heart clinch a little, my adrenaline shifting.

“Of course it is.” He smiled. “Watch this.”

There was a clicking sound and then the bottom of the gun’s handle slid out sleekly and he showed me the end with bullets in it, copper butts shiny and loud.

“The thing that holds the bullets which I just removed is called the magazine,” Jared said confidently.

“Maybe you should put the gun away, Jared.”

Jared eyed me intensely. Looking down at the gun again he slid the magazine back into the handle until it made a loud, satisfying click.

“Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Jared, I don’t know what you’re doing but—”

Suddenly he lifted the gun and aimed it directly at my head. We stood maybe seven or eight feet from each other. I was barely in the kitchen, my back just a couple feet from the side door I’d only minutes before entered.

“What are you doing, Jared?”

My heart was now thudding wildly against my chest. Adrenaline was full tilt. Fire erupted from my deepest core. All psychological cylinders were ablaze. I felt like a deer intuiting the nearness of a lion.

“Walk backwards until your back is against the door,” Jared said.

“What?”

Out of the blue Jared shouted at me and he sounded emotional. None of it made any sense. It all seemed completely out of place. I had only the vaguest sense that this kid who I thought was my best friend was severely damaged internally. His father, the masks and spanking and all of that. Something massive, sincerely wrong.

Jared stepped forward closing the gap between us by a foot, then two. He flipped the safety off on the gun with a new tiny click, then cocked the hammer back (words I only learned years later) and said, with wild blue hazy eyes filled now bizarrely with horrible rage, “I said. Step. Backwards. Until. Your. Back. Is. Against. The. Door.”

My heart about leaping out of my chest, my hands moist, warm and clammy, my hands both trembling, I backed up slowly, inch by inch. It was as fast as I could muster. Finally my back was against the door.

Jared approached, closing the gap again, five feet away, four feet, three feet, two, one, and then he was right at me. We were the same height. He smelled like cookie dough. Briefly glancing across the kitchen I saw a plate full of chocolate chip cookies. His mother probably made them earlier before she left. Where were his parents now? Where were my parents now? Where was God?

“Open your mouth,” Jared said.

Gulping, swallowing saliva down my tight, constricted throat, I said, “Jared. What are you doing? This is insane, this is…”

“Open. Your. Mouth.”

I sighed and then slowly, reluctantly, opened my mouth. Almost immediately, he slid the barrel of the gun in. It was cold heavy steel and it chinked lightly against my lower teeth making a cool menthol sensation, and also like two coins rubbing together. That iron taste like a penny in your mouth.

He pushed the gun in further. My gag reflex wanted to kick in but I resisted.

Jared gaped at me and said, “I’m going to count down from ten. When I reach zero I’m going to blow your brains out.”

“Jared, why are you doing this?”

Tears, I realized then, were silently rivering down my pale cheeks. I had an out-of-body experience. My conscious mind fled out of myself and above me and I watched myself with Jared. It was beyond surreal; surreal doesn’t even describe it. Terrifying doesn’t do it justice, either. It was God and Satan locked in battle. It was the Nightmare of all Nightmares. It was Death showing its fangs. It was forever going to be imprinted on my mind. That is, if I somehow managed to survive.

“Ten,” Jared said.

Then I was crying loudly. “Stop, Jared, don’t do it, c’mon, we’re best friends, what are you doing…”

“Nine.”

I looked around wildly. Decades later, I’d think of the first (and also final) scene in the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton placing his own gun in his mouth and shooting himself in order to kill his manic second self (Brad Pitt). But now, here, I was only quivering on the line between alive and dead. I felt like the fly tangled in the spider’s web, that spider currently wrapping me even more in its silky, spindly twine, preparing for murder.

“Six.”

Six? He was already on SIX? I’d been momentarily blacked-out, or grayed-out; daydreaming for a few hallowed, crucial seconds.

“Five.”

I thought then of my family, my mother and father, my half-sister in LA, my grandparents and our family friends, Christmas and birthdays, the house down the hill, my house, which now felt like it was thousands of miles away and in a fourth dimension to boot.

“Three.”

I stared at Jared. He was crying too. His blue eyes seemed almost gray. Rage percolated off him like red-orange licking flames of fire.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. I’d heard my mother say this to my father once. I had no context. But it sounded wise and adult and true.

“Two.”

“JARED!!!” I shouted now as loudly as I could, weeping.

“One.”

I waited for it to come. In my mind I heard an incredibly loud BANG sound, an echoing, egregiously loud shot fired, and then I imagined blood and brains and flesh spattered against the back door and the walls.

“Zero!!!”

Jared yelled POW and then ripped the barrel of the gun out of my mouth, chipping a lower tooth hard as he did it. He pulled the gun out completely and held it down at his side. He exploded into laughter, as if he were his dad laughing about farting after you pulled his finger.

Instantly I turned, ripped the door open, and, crying openly, I sprinted out along the backyard, hearing Jared’s muffled cries behind me, along the wall and by the boat and SUV, down their driveway, down the hill and into my house.

I had survived.