Gun Church Read online

  Gun Church

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Gun Church

  “Rather than love, than fame, give me truth.”

  — Thoreau

  “Stardom isn’t a profession; it’s an accident.”

  — Lauren Bacall

  With his roaring debut, BeatnikSouffle, Kip Weiler displays prodigious talent. He somehow manages to meld the drug-infused bohemian mania of the Beats with the polyester hedonism of today’s disco generation. In one deliciously cruel attack on the Beats, Weiler describes the aging Ginsberg-like poet, Moses Gold, dressed in double knits and platform shoes, mimicking the dance steps from Saturday Night Fever. Disgusted with himself not for his raging pedophilia but for his dance and polyester fetish, Gold lashes himself with a mace while reciting Blake’s “The Garden of Love.” While a bit overambitious and undisciplined, this is a fine and entertaining first novel. Kip Weiler is a writer to watch.

  — JACKSON DRUM, THE MERTON REVIEW

  One

  Black Lung

  My fifteen minutes had come and gone. Unfortunately, I probably had a few decades more to live out. Prufrock had coffee spoons. I measured my remaining days from shrinking royalty check to shrinking royalty check, from term to term. I achieved what all artists dread: I had outlived most of my money and all of my talent. As I once told an interviewer from PublishersWeekly, “My career’s like a road flare. It burns hot and oh so brightly.” Total cocaine-speak. The cocaine did a lot of talking for me back then, some of the writing too. Maybe most of it.

  I smiled, dropping the change on the newsstand counter at the student union, recalling how I’d bedded that chick from PW, how her fangirl innocence stuck out from beneath her journalistic veneer like … like … I stopped smiling. I’d lost or squandered what I once had. The talent, the muse, the knack, the gift, the craft, the skill, the magic, the art, the whatever-the-hell-it-was was gone. Gone. Goodbye. Farewell. Adieu. That ship done sailed, Mr. Hemingway. I didn’t regret the coke so much as the road flare analogy. Well, no, not the analogy itself. The truth of the analogy, the spot on-ness of it. That I surely regretted.

  Thirty odd years ago, I was gold, a literary wunderkind, one of the ’80s big three bad boys: Bart Stanton Meyers, Jake McNulty, and Kip Weiler. The Jewtheran, Nutly, and me, the Kipster: that’s how we referred to ourselves back in those heady days when Dom was our fallback champagne, and Vassar and Brandeis girls knelt at our altar. Us three lads had homesteaded the Upper West Side of Manhattan, holding court at the Hunt Club or, as Nutly was wont to call it, the Cunt Club. Nutly: always so refined, always the articulate one. Now those days seem as far away to me as Atlantis, and much more like memories from one of my protagonists’ lives than my own. Bart and Jake had had their ups and downs too, but had managed to adapt to things like the end of the Cold War, safe sex, and the Christian Right.

  Now it was just a dull ache to bear when I clicked through the cable channels and would come upon VH1 airing one of those I Love the ’80s nightmares. The Kipster-it’s difficult not to think of that me in the third person-is usually featured wearing a “Hey, look at me: I’m so high right now!” smile frozen on his face and an anorexic blond on his arm. Was the Kipster ever that young? Was I? It isn’t only a nightmare in retrospect. Back when I was actually sleeping with those blonds, the sex was only middling and none of the relationships lasted more than three dates and a bj. I often thought the blonds so brittle they might snap if I humped them hard enough.

  These days I didn’t worry about snapping anybody in two. My sex life consisted of the very occasional coed or adjunct lecturer whose boredom was surpassed only by my own. Desire had so little to do with it anymore that it seemed I should reclassify the physical act of sex as something else, something between an oil change and a stress test. I felt closer to the skin of my left palm than to any woman I’d been with in many years. That last year Amy and I were together we hardly fucked, and when we did it was about rage and disappointment.

  I didn’t have rage in me anymore. That skipped town shortly after my talent. At the very least you needed the vestiges of passion to have rage. I could likely still provoke it, though. I snickered to myself sometimes, imagining Amy watching I Love the ’80s. She probably seizured at the sight of me and the brittle blonds on screen. Amy: the Jew goddess from Bloomfield Hills. Amy could do rage, all right. She could bend, fold, and shape it like an origami butterfly and make it flap its wings. The stir I felt just thinking about Amy surprised me. I guess maybe I wasn’t so close to numb as I hoped. I wasn’t sure I liked that. I had assumed seven years of teaching English to the rural yahoos at Brixton County Community College had pretty much removed the notion of surprise from my life.

  Brixton County’s two most abundant natural resources were bituminous coal and pine trees. So when the early fall breezes blew just right, the air smelled like Christmas trees being hot-dipped in roofing tar. I hadn’t ever quite gotten used to the Pine-Sol and petroleum bouquet of Brixton County’s lush green hills. As far as I could tell, the county’s third biggest export behind coal and lumber was black lung.

  What Brixton didn’t have in abundance was creative writing talent. On its face, this didn’t make BCCC unique. On the contrary, since my first visiting teaching position at Columbia-a job Amy urged me to take, noticing my discipline heading up my nose and my sales heading out my ass-I had been searching for one student with the magic. That I taught creative writing at all was a complete sham. In what now passed for my soul, I knew that writing was a born gift, that you could teach illusion, but not magic. The farther away from Columbia I roamed, even illusion got harder and harder to teach. These days I gave passing grades to any remotely original assignment written in something resembling comprehensible English. I had long ago abandoned all hope of discovering a diamond in the rough. In Brixton County, the rough was deep and the coal too soft to produce diamonds.

  Christ, I dreaded days like today, days when I would hand back the class’s first take-home assignments. Although, I had to confess that out of the sixteen I received, four didn’t make me want to stick needles in my eyes. Two weren’t half bad. This was the best ratio in my sad tenure at BCCC. One of the papers was from Renee Svoboda, a fairly spectacular blond who-in spite of her obvious Slavic roots-I had come to think of as the St. Pauli Girl. I’d jerked off thinking about her after the first class. I gave her paper a B-/A; the B- was for the paper itself, the A for the orgasms she induced.

  The other respectable effort came from Jim Trimble, a square-jawed kid with coppery eyes and skin like a cave wall. Unlike most of the zombies that took up class space, Jim actually answered questions in class. Still, he’d been a pain in the ass, a brown-noser trying to prove how well he knew my work. Boy, someone needed to tell him that was not the way to my heart or to an A. At least his writing wasn’t terrible and it contained distant echoes of my older, better work. The other two passable papers were notable only in that they included commas and periods, occasionally in the right places.

  “Okay, folks, it’s the day we’ve all been so looking forward to.” I tried not to sound completely suicidal. “Time to return your papers and discuss them. When I call your name, please come up and retrieve your masterpieces. Mr. Kranski … Miss Hall … Miss Svoboda … Good work, Renee.”

  “Thank you, Professor Weiler.” The St. Pauli Girl’s smile was broad and white, and hinted at more than simple appreciation. Her impossible cheekbones and blue suede eyes put exclamation points to the hints. I smiled back with half my mouth. That half smile had gotten me a fair share of women back in the day. “Nice jacket,” she said, brushing her hand over the brown corduroy sleeve. “My grandpa has one just like it.”

  So much for my fantas
ies of the St. Pauli Girl. It was bad enough to be compared to their fathers, but grandfathers! I’d hit a new penis-shriveling low.

  “Thanks, Renee. This jacket’s probably older than your grandpa.”

  I was exaggerating, but not wildly. My mom had gotten me the brown corduroy blazer on the day in late ’79 when my first novel, BeatnikSouffle, had been bought by the legendary Moira Blanco at Ferris, Ledoux. Moira was legendary for more than her editorial skills. She had a writing stable full of the decade’s angriest young men shuttling in and out of her offices and bedroom. As she got older, the men got younger, less angry, and less talented. I was amazed that the jacket, which smelled of ancient chalk dust and was worn shiny at the elbows, still fit like it did the day I got it.

  “Mr. Crable … Mr. Trimble … Good job, Jim.”

  “Thanks, Professor Weiler.” Jim didn’t brush my sleeve or offer a flirtatious smile. Good thing, as I didn’t think I had much more shrivel room left.

  “Mr. Vuchovich … ”

  Frank Vuchovich came to collect his paper, but never left. He was a small, wispy kid who cast a bigger shadow across my desk than his stature might have suggested.

  I looked up, really looking at Vuchovich for the first time. He had inky black hair, a twisted beak of a nose, and opaque eyes that peered through slits in a mournful Slavic face. There were many such faces in Brixton and neighboring counties. A large percentage of the local population was descended from the families of the Eastern and Central Europeans who had come to work the area mines over a century ago. Most of the men still worked the mines or in the paper mills.

  “Is there something else, Mr. Vuchovich?”

  The kid didn’t move, didn’t speak, but screwed his face into a red twisted mess that was only vaguely human. Just because I no longer had the rage in me didn’t mean I was blind to it. And once I recognized it, I forced myself to look away from Vuchovich’s face and scan down. The kid was dressed in military fatigues covered by an oversized black trench coat. As I focused more carefully, I noticed an elastic strap and a leather band slung under the kid’s left arm.

  “Shit!” I thought I heard myself say.

  Before the word was fully out of my mouth, Frank had pulled a dark blue hunk of metal out from under his coat and was now pointing it at my nose. It took a second for me to accept what was going on. The world was at a standstill. I was lightheaded. My hearing took on that bizarre windy quality like when I was a kid and I’d hold two empty cardboard towel rolls up to my ears. I could make out distinct noises: the scraping of grit trapped between the chairs and the tile floor, the scuffling of feet, the snapping of gum, the hammer clicking back under Vuchovich’s thumb. As distinct as they all were, they sounded as far away as my old life. That all changed when Vuchovich squeezed the trigger.

  Two

  Royal Blue

  I was still alive and, all things considered, I was in better shape than the blackboard. Unfortunately, my left ear hadn’t stopped ringing and the burn on my cheek was hurting like a bastard. The stink of my singed hair was masked by the puff of gun powder residue that came in the immediate wake of the shot. My initial reaction, after the kid had inched the barrel away from my nose and put a hole in the blackboard, was relief: relief I hadn’t shit my pants or pissed down my sock. I had had all the indignity I could handle for one lifetime, thank you very much. The last twenty years hadn’t left much pride in the tank and there was nowhere left to fall after BCCC.

  The acrid scent of spent powder, the sickening stink of singed hair, and burnt skin brought it all back to me: the smell of my dad’s suicide. Suddenly, I was twelve years old again at the summer house on the lake. My mom and sister were in town shopping when I heard it. I didn’t know what it was exactly. I knew what it wasn’t. Why would my dad light a firecracker inside the house anyway? He was at his desk, but it wasn’t him I looked at. What I remembered most vividly was first staring at the curtains: those fussy, frilly, white lace curtains that my mother adored and he detested. They were splattered with his blood like a sneering last “Fuck you!” to my mom. His head was thrown back over the ledge of the chair as if he were studying the morning sun through the shattered window behind him. The image of him, of the curtains, of the gun on the planked floor, comes back to me sometimes, but I had shut away the fresh smell of his death the way a kid buries something in his backyard and forgets about it.

  About two hours had passed since the first shot. In the meantime, the brooding Mr. Vuchovich hadn’t put another round in anything more threatening than an overhead light fixture. He’d herded the other students and me into a corner at the back of the classroom, away from the windows. The kid had planted himself in the opposite corner, across from the door. Anyone making a run for it or attempting to storm the classroom via the door would’ve been quite dead quite quickly. The state and local police had done as expected. They had cell-phoned, texted, bull-horned, cajoled, coaxed, negotiated in all manner and forms. They had offered him food, friendship, psychiatric help, a bus, a car, a helicopter, a lawyer, his priest, his mom, his dad, his stepdad, and his ex-girlfriend. They’d offered up everything short of hookers and an all-expense-paid trip to Vegas, but the problem wasn’t theirs. Apparently, Frank Vuchovich didn’t seem interested in doing much of anything except brooding.

  Given the minor nature of my injuries and my close proximity to Renee, I suppose things could have been worse, much worse. The St. Pauli Girl had had her arm looped through mine, her head pressed against my chest. It probably made her feel safe, like being close to Grandpa. Whatever the reason, I was glad for the touch. The brief affairs I had managed since coming to Brixton were of the roll-over-and-feign-sleep or take-a-shower-and-get-the-fuck-outta-there variety. However hopefully my dalliances would begin, they always ended in disappointment.

  With the coeds, the disappointment was categorically mutual. The adjuncts were another matter. The adjuncts had usually read me or at least heard of me. The ones who’d read me expected … I didn’t know what the hell they expected. Maybe the Kipster, maybe somebody more like one of my ultra-hip ’80s cool-boy protagonists: greedy, coked out, and horny, with a taste for ruby port and tawny pussy. They certainly didn’t expect me: a bitter, talentless, middle-aged boor. The ones who had only heard of me expected some hard-drinking romantic hybrid of Hemingway (pre-shotgun) and Mailer (post-stabbing). I’m not sure what I expected-probably very little-but I always hoped for Amy. Disappointment was inevitable.

  I tried engaging Vuchovich in conversation, which netted the reply, “Shut the fuck up and get back in the corner.”

  Hey, I didn’t need to be told twice. I guess I felt some responsibility for the students, but I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by it. Look, I didn’t know these kids and they sure didn’t know me. They were in community college, for fuck’s sake-the academic equivalent of jerking off. What the hell did these kids think they were going to get out of this? They were sleepwalking in the land of denial. It was a land I was well familiar with. Maybe if we got out alive, I’d draw them a road map.

  I may not have had any attachment to my students, but I didn’t want anything to happen to them. They had as much right to fuck up their lives as I’d had, even if they were apt to do it in less spectacular fashion. I had once been good with people. “A real schmoozer,” Bart Meyers used to say. But that was a long time ago, before I’d become disconnected from my wife, my life, and my talent. I was struggling with how to approach Vuchovich when circumstance forced the issue.

  Jim Trimble jumped to his feet. “This is bullshit!” he growled.

  That impressed the hell out of me. While I hadn’t stooped to begging Frank for my life and the lives of my students, I hadn’t exactly acted very heroically either. I decided right then and there, that if we came through this, to give Jim a second chance.

  “Sit down, Jim!” I got up, stepping between Vuchovich and Jim. “Sit down!” I repeated, actually shoving Jim away. “Go sit next to Renee.”

  I took
a few tentative steps toward Vuchovich. Frank raised his weapon, but he was sufficiently sharp not to move out of his corner. After spending the last two hours with him, I figured Tom Clancy novels were probably Frank’s favorite masturbation material. No doubt he was acutely aware of the snipers on the adjoining roofs. I was sure he knew what kind of rifles and ammo they used. He was probably hard thinking about it.

  A ray of light from the afternoon sun caught the raised revolver just right. Until then, I hadn’t paid it much mind. It had bullets and it went “bang.” I’d seen close up what guns could do to the human skull. What else did I need to know? But now as its blue finish gleamed in the sunlight and its unusual shadow was cast against the blackboard, I had an idea. One that, if my drug- and alcohol-atrophied brain fucked up, would likely get me killed.

  “Colt Python, right? Royal Blue finish, eight-, no, six-inch barrel.”

  The kid didn’t say anything, but his eyes got big and his right index finger eased off the trigger onto the trigger guard.

  I kept going. “That thing on top of the barrel, that’s a ventilated rib.”

  Frank was impressed. “That’s right.”

  “Colt Python, the Rolls-Royce of American handguns.” I said, repeating verbatim the words Bart Meyers had said to me twenty years earlier. Truth was I knew more about the location of Schrodinger’s cat than handguns. Let’s just say that since the day I found my father, I hadn’t been especially keen on guns. That was until I needed to write about them.

  I had outlined a chapter in my second novel, Flashing Pandora, where my tragically cool futures-trading prince, Kant Huxley, and the eponymous Pandora are confronted outside CBGB by the gun-toting Harper Marx, one of Huxley’s ruined partners. Kant Huxley and Harper Marx, indeed! Christ, I used to think I was so fucking witty. Could I have been any more pretentious? I heard Joe Heller thought I was a schmuck for riffing on what he’d done with names in Catch-22. He was right.