Let It Bang Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Charles and Lizzie

  We’re All Mad Here

  Glock

  Obama Ain’t Gonna Know

  Grandmomme

  There is No Try

  Waldo

  White NRA

  Black NRA

  You’re Worth More to Me, Asshole

  Self-Defense in Black and White

  The Razor’s Edge

  Shooting with Mom

  Hands Up

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by RJ Young

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Young, R. J., (Writer), author.

  Title: Let it bang : a young black man’s reluctant odyssey into guns / R. J. Young.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018012248 (print) | LCCN 2018035744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328826329 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328826336 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Young, R. J., (Writer) | African Americans—Social life and customs. | Firearms—Social aspects—United States. | African Americans—Race relations. | African American journalists—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC E185.86 (ebook) | LCC E185.86 .Y665 2018 (print) | DDC 305.896/073—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012248

  Cover design by Alex Merto

  Author photograph © Ronald Taylor II

  v1.0918

  For Grandmomme

  Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  Guns are right up there with race as one of the most sensitive, taboo-ridden public issues we have. And the mystique gets bigger all the time.

  —Henry Allen, “The Mystique of Guns”

  1

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  Charles and Lizzie

  WHEN I FIRST met Charles Stafford, it was simply in passing. I was at his house on a hill, one he could afford to have fenced, because my boss at the time, Mary, had invited me there to her son’s high school graduation party. Mary’s son had been a lifelong friend to Charles’s son. The two were graduating together and throwing a party to celebrate in a place called Coweta.

  Coweta is a town in Wagoner County, Oklahoma. It’s the kind of place where the owner of a used-car lot thought he’d show his wit and charm by calling his business Shade Tree Cars and Trucks. It’s the kind of town where a Shade Tree mechanic will pull over to find out why your car is broken down, fix the problem, and send you on your way, asking nothing more in return than a well-placed handshake. In Coweta, the word shit has four syllables, and you can still get popped in the mouth for saying it. It’s also the kind of town where it’s perfectly normal not to invite a single black person to a party.

  I drove from my apartment in Tulsa out into the sticks, into God’s Country, as I’ve heard it called, because Mary’s secretary had instructed me that it was “a big deal” to be invited to one of Mary’s family-related events. At the time, I was an intern for Mary at the University of Tulsa’s Collins Fitness Center. To decline would not have been a good look, and could’ve led to a piss-poor work environment. So, because I had to, I found the place, pulled up, and stepped out of my piece-of-shit Oldsmobile Alero.

  I stayed just long enough for my first-ever encounter with Charles’s daughter, Lizzie. I could not avert my eyes from her. Lizzie wore a flowing lavender dress. Her hair was pulled back into a long, curly blonde ponytail that forced me to confront the ferocity and beauty of her features. She looked at me with the kind of contempt usually reserved for someone about to smash a puppy’s head in with a brick. It took me a few seconds to realize I was in her fucking seat. I moved. She smiled then, and sat down.

  I tried to mingle among the faces that looked nothing like mine, but I couldn’t handle it. I found the nearest exit and left the place, which felt foreign and uncomfortable.

  My story with Charles and Lizzie would’ve ended here if I had not egregiously failed an elective, a class called Philosophy of Art. That was the first falling domino that led me to Lizzie. As a student at the University of Tulsa, I worked as a mechanic at Pep Boys part-time and as a personal trainer when I could get clients. I ran the sixty meters, two hundred meters, and four hundred meters—all really fucking slowly—for the track team, and was a member of the co-ed cheerleading squad. You might find it funny that the little scholarship money I did receive came from cheerleading. Or, as I was fond of saying, throwing white girls in the air.

  I’d signed up for the philosophy class to fulfill a requirement for my degree in exercise and sports science, but signing up was pretty much all I did. The loud thud of the F, when it landed on my up-till-then pretty damn good GPA, meant I was in danger of being placed on academic probation, while being still three hours short of the 124 hours I needed to finish my degree. And I had no money for summer school.

  Yes, I’d slipped when I failed Philosophy of Art. I was tired and not much interested in what dead white men like Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel had to say about anything, let alone the meaning of life. And it had been only six months since a member of the financial aid department at TU looked me square in the eye while saying, “If you can’t afford to be here, then you shouldn’t be here.” This after carrying loans that surely will be hanging over my head long after global warming has become global scorched earth. So, I was overjoyed when Mary offered me a paying job at the fitness center through the summer.

  TAKING THE JOB with Mary came with one caveat. She’d asked that I consent to work as a trainer with her friend’s daughter.

  “Can I meet her first?” I said.

  “You’ve met her.”

  “I have? Who is she?”

  “She’ll be here tomorrow. I expect you to be here too.”

  When I showed up at work the next day, I saw Mary standing beside the woman who had told me with nothing more than a furrowed brow and a twitch of the nose that I was in her fucking seat. She was looking back at me.

  The toughest part of working out with someone who doesn’t want to work out is finding something to talk about. But with Lizzie there was no talking. Well, there was, but it was decidedly one-sided and repetitive. I would ask a question, and she would either roll her eyes or raise her eyebrows. Rather than attempt an exercise I asked her to try, she would just stare. This went on for a few days, until I asked her if she would rather just walk the track. In response, she simply turned and began walking up the stairs to the second level of the facility, where the track was. Just being with me for an hour, in a place that looked built to torture her physically and emotionally, was horrible for Lizzie. She’d been overweight for most of her life and was somewhat resigned to that. I would try to empathize with her. But nobody wants to hear how the currently fit trainer was once a fat kid. Mary knew this about my
background, and it was why she chose to bring Lizzie and me together. Even though it wasn’t working, I continued to try to relate to Lizzie.

  This was our routine for about a week. Because after most of my sessions with Lizzie, I also trained Mary, along with Lizzie’s mother, Nancy, they’d ask how things were going with Lizzie, and I was fine with telling them. That is, until the day I lost my temper with Lizzie and, straight to her face, called her “kind of a bitch.” She didn’t speak to me after I said those words to her. She simply gave me the finger and walked away. I knew then that I would be fired.

  Except I wasn’t.

  Mary and Nancy told me that this white girl’s getting pissed off and flipping me the bird was a good thing. That I had elicited emotion from Lizzie, which was precisely what they’d hoped for when putting the black man who talked too much together with the white woman who talked little to not at all. No, they said, you’re doing a good job. I’ve never thought two white women crazier than I did that day. The next day Lizzie showed up, which was cause enough for celebration. But then she said something.

  “It’s that you don’t read,” she said.

  “What?”

  She did that furrowed-brow, nose-twitch thing again. “I don’t expect someone like you to read.”

  “Someone like me?”

  She gestured at my muscle shirt and shorts.

  “Ah, I see,” I said. “So you’d be surprised if I said I like Shakespeare.”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, you don’t.”

  “‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’”

  “Do it again,” she said.

  That was the first time I saw her winged smile. The one that quivers and disappears all at once, like the wings of a hummingbird. This is how the formal courtship began—with talking. We talked throughout all of our sessions after that one. But soon that hour proved to be insufficient. We talked through text messages—about books, about politics, about each other. Lizzie became the person I wanted to speak with each morning and the person I wanted to speak with before bed that night. She was my best friend, and I was grateful to be hers. And then she’d smile at me, and I no longer wanted to be just her friend. I wanted to be her most intimate friend too—her husband. I loved her. I never expected that to change, and it hasn’t.

  I eventually asked Lizzie to marry me. And she said yes. Because I loved Lizzie, I felt compelled to try to know her family. But by the first time Lizzie took me home to meet her parents, three months after we began dating, I knew just one thing about Charles, her father. The only thing he and I had in common was a mutual admiration for Lizzie.

  CHARLES SHOOK MY hand the first time we formally met. Then he promptly left the room. Neither Lizzie nor Nancy found it alarming that he came back in with the biggest goddamn revolver I’d ever seen. They didn’t think it was weird that he would hand it to me either. I felt certain that I had landed in either Wes Craven’s rendition of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or the next film in the Saw franchise. I knew that in a horror movie, the black man usually dies first. I was waiting for one of the three white people in the room to tell me how most people are so ungrateful to be alive, or how they would’ve voted for Obama a third time—right before performing a lobotomy on me in the family den.

  Charles pointed to the gun in my hand. “It’s a Judge.” I didn’t know what that meant, and I don’t think he knew what it meant to hand me, a young black man, a revolver that Dirty Harry would be scared of. Once the feeling of fright dimmed, the absurdity of this event hit me. To show me what a down brotha he was, the man wanted me to hold a pistol he could cross-load with .45 Long Colt and .410 shotgun shells?

  As I got to know him, I would come to see this gesture as one of the Charles-est things ever. It was truly a display of friendship. But that day all I took in was how important firearms were to the man whose daughter I was dating. It was also my first clue as to how hard it was going to be to fit into his family.

  AFTER CHARLES PLACED that cartoonish revolver in my hands, I made several other forays into the wilderness of Lizzie’s family. The first came a year into our relationship, when she brought me, her boyfriend, home for Thanksgiving.

  Nancy was smart enough to assume that her daughter and I might be sleeping in the same bed—which I would neither confirm nor deny. She told Lizzie it would be perfectly fine with both her and Charles if we chose to sleep in Lizzie’s bed. Two feet from her parents’ bedroom. Pass.

  I think Nancy knew I would say no because she’d already turned down the bed in the guest room for me, and that’s where I slept that night. The next day I woke, and drove to the gym in town for a lift and a run. I came back to the house to find a set of Round House overalls, gray long johns, white socks, brown gloves, and a heavy brown Carhartt jacket, with a pair of work boots on the floor. I turned to look at Lizzie.

  “I hope they fit,” she said.

  I checked the tags and the size of the boots. They did. “But what do I need them for?”

  At this Lizzie merely smiled and handed me a wool cap. “He’s waiting on you.”

  “Waiting on—”

  Charles burst into the room. “Come on, RJ. Get changed. We got work to do.”

  Before I had the chance to ask what I was getting changed for, Lizzie and Charles left the room and closed the door. This left me with no option except to put on the clothes. Then I walked outside, and the biting wind hit me head on, making a cold day colder than Ice Cube’s No Vaseline. Lizzie’s younger brother, Jimmy, who would be my future brother-in-law, and Charles were waiting for me. They told me it was time to get in the truck. I could see my breath, and yet my hands were beginning to sweat inside the gloves. What on earth was I doing with these white men?

  Charles drove up to the gate that separated the five acres his house was built on from the rest of his property. Jimmy stepped out of the truck and unlocked the padlock on the large green metal gate. He swung it wide, and Charles drove through. After Jimmy closed the gate, we drove up and over a hill. On the descent, I could make out what looked like a small orange metal corral connected to a blue metal chute. As we drew closer, another truck pulled up, and out popped two more men. The three of us stepped out of our truck, and I was introduced to Charles’s brother-in-law, Jay, and his son, Mikey, who lived on the hill just across the pasture. Through this introduction and the following conversation, I came to understand just what the hell we were doing out on a biting-cold, gray November day, when even the sun knew better than to come out and play. We were going to vaccinate cows.

  But to vaccinate cows, you need cows. And to get the cows you need to round them up. So Mikey and Charles each jumped back into a truck and began herding cattle toward the corral. Soon those animals were milling about in the pen, sounding terrified. I was just standing there, feeling like an idiot. Jimmy held out two long black sticks, indicating I was supposed to pick one up. I noticed their ends looked different.

  I cagily took one from his hands. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a bull whip.”

  “What do you have?”

  He hit a button at the top of the stick’s grip, and a fierce wave of lightning flashed.

  “An electric cattle prod?”

  Jimmy’s face took on an Ain’t it cool? expression, and I started to do the only thing I could think of: use my phone to record what was happening. Outside my comfort zone, all but paralyzed by the absurdity of watching cows with horns being crammed into the pen. Of thinking how the smell of a newly pinched cow turd punishes your nose for simply performing its natural function, while Charles showed how impressed he was with the size of the heifer’s stool.

  “Boy, they’re shitting good!”

  He said it with ferocious pride, like a newborn’s father cooing through the glass at the hospital nursery. Of course, this is Charles’s livelihood. This is how he feeds his family; to him, cattle are an important commodity. But for me, this was all new. I was trying t
o survive this initiation into Lizzie’s family.

  Mikey ushered each cow individually into the blue chute and into a neck brace. Then Charles and Jay took turns sticking a cow in the neck with a needle filled with a one-stop-shop vaccination. The process looked barbaric to me. But I eventually became sort of enchanted, watching those cows and calves taking offense at being manhandled. I was happy as a voyeur, but that role was not to last. One large cow balked at entering the chute, and I was handed the electric cattle prod.

  “Juice him, RJ!”

  Which was Charles trying to help me do something useful, rather than fiddling with my phone and playing dress-up. Despite my reservations, I poked the cow. I was frightened to see it rear up on its hind legs and get pissed. Then I realized that it wasn’t a cow at all. It was a bull. I still don’t know how my shorts remained unsoiled.

  After about three hours, more than 120 cows had been penned, slammed down the chute, and boosted with vaccinations. Mikey celebrated with a soda and inadvertently spilled a bit on Jay’s truck.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was only vaguely aware that I didn’t owe Mikey an apology for the fact that he’d spilled his own damn soda. I was basically past logical thought processes by then.

  “Forget it,” Mikey said. “It’s a Toyota anyway.”

  2

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  We’re All Mad Here

  BEFORE I’D BEGUN to court Charles’s firstborn, I had little desire to know about guns because I believed I knew enough about them already. Which is to say, I knew that a gun, especially in the hands of a complete stranger with a badge and a mandate to protect and serve, could get me killed.