Let It Bang Read online

  For the first twelve years of my life, my family lived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Panama City, Florida, cities in the South where firearms are plentiful. Yet we didn’t have anything to do with guns.

  Although my father did look forward to watching new episodes and, in some cases, reruns of the reality TV show COPS. He’d even sit through the commercials rather than risk missing anything. COPS is police-procedural porn that frequently focuses on poor people in poor neighborhoods. That’s exactly the focus that the audience wants. In 2011, COPS became the longest-running show in the history of the Fox Broadcasting Company. At the time, its only real competition for that honor was America’s Most Wanted, another show focusing on the worst of us—fugitives from the law who have committed serious and heinous crimes. But my father’s impulse to watch COPS wasn’t based on the desire to watch as the dregs of society get their comeuppance. It was something else. “We need to know what they’re doing now,” he’d say.

  By “they” my father meant beat cops in blue driving around in a squad car, locked, loaded, and looking for action. As municipal police in different parts of the country discussed what they were expecting might occur, a cameraman—who I hope received some sort of hazard pay—rode along and shot the action as the cops chased a suspect, apprehended that suspect, and placed him under arrest. My father took lessons from this show, and he’d share them with me. “There’s very little difference between a cop and psycho when they’ve got a gun. Both of them want to pull their gun on you. So don’t let them search your car. They’ll plant things there and say it was there the whole time. The law is on their side all the time. You’re at the mercy of a psycho who is permanently on the side of the law. That’s scary, son. You’re right to be scared. And COPS teaches you that.”

  My father said this frequently. He meant that, as a black man, it was incumbent upon me to know and understand the tactics police use to corner, intimidate, and incriminate black men. When I was fourteen, one in six black men in my country had ended up in prison. A year later, while standing on the sidewalk outside the Springdale Shopping Center in North Tulsa, a white cop bombarded me with questions about why I was there. I could see he wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth about shopping at a clothing store called Tops & Bottoms, but then he noticed the academy-style Eagle Scout ring on my finger. He smiled. “That ring just saved you a trip to the pokey, son.” This was not the first time I’d been interrogated on the street about who I was and what I was doing at a certain place. That this cop could see a pudgy five-foot-five black kid with a peach-fuzz mustache as a threat—as an adult—frightened me then, and it frightens me now. That we live in a nation where blacks, who make up just 13 percent of the US population, make up nearly 40 goddamn percent of the prison population is fairly common knowledge. But to me, every day was and is a struggle not to become one of these statistics. Every day I am afraid of it.

  These are facts my parents knew. They sought to prepare me, in the best way they could, to live in a country full of people who think less of me, or think I might do them harm, because my skin is brown and my hair is dark and curly. I believed that my wielding of a gun would only serve to give these people more reason to act on what they already believed. So I made a point to avoid guns whenever I could, wherever I could.

  IT TOOK SOME time for me to get used to seeing a shotgun leaning against the side door every time I walked into Charles’s house. Cold and black, the gun stood watch in case of intruders. I took note of the alarm-system keypad just across the room and contemplated the security overkill. But the side-door shotgun was not the only gun Charles kept in plain view. It was not uncommon to find a pistol or revolver lying on the kitchen table, along with a half-empty box of shells. Lizzie told me this was normal in Charles’s house and not meant to intimidate or scare me. But it did scare me. Charles owned small handguns, large handguns, handguns with cylinders like those that nineteenth-century US marshals used, handguns like the ones modern police use. Charles didn’t come to own assault rifles until he was in his sixties. But handguns? Charles has owned handguns for most of his life.

  On one occasion, I asked about his self-defense sidearm: a gun I’d seen him stick in a bag like an oversized wallet that he carried.

  “Why do you carry that gun?” I asked. “And why do you have so many?”

  Charles, sitting in his favored recliner, took a deep breath and said something about needing to go down to the wrecker shop. He made for the door, only briefly slowing down to pick up his jacket and hat, and left me alone in the living room. A few minutes later Lizzie emerged from her bedroom.

  “Where’d he go?” she asked.

  “He said he was going to the wrecker shop, but I think I made him mad.”

  “What? How?”

  “I just asked him why so many guns.”

  “Oh, baby.” She took on a defeated look and then sat down across from me. That was when I learned from Lizzie that you don’t comment on how many guns a person has. You don’t ask how many guns they’ve bought. You don’t ask how many guns they’ve sold. “It’s like asking how much money you make, or how many times a week you have sex with your wife,” Lizzie said. “You just don’t do it.”

  Charles interpreted my questions the way a corner boy might, though he stopped short of giving me side eye and asking, Nigga, is you wearing a wire?

  My parents taught me there is no such thing as a stupid question, but clearly they were wrong. I felt embarrassed about the whole thing. I wasn’t keen on learning about guns in the first place, and now I’d been made to feel like a fool for what I didn’t know. Fuck it. This old man was not proving to be worth the effort, and I was tired of pushing. So I stopped. Until he gave me reason not to.

  SOON AFTER VACCINATION Thanksgiving, despite my best efforts and mechanical know-how, my Alero finally decided to depart this weary world. It died in its sleep. I had parked it outside the apartment that Lizzie and I now pretty much shared, and the car refused even to cough a start the next morning. I checked the battery. I tested the spark plugs, and I tested the alternator, and when those things failed, I went to the obvious. Did the car have gas? Was I using the correct key? Was I even in the right car? After more than a day of tinkering and phone calls to auto-tech friends much smarter than me, I gave up. The car was dead, and I needed to start walking. When I arrived home that night, Lizzie met me at the door and held out a key she’d made. It was for her Impala.

  “We can share,” she said.

  This was no small gift in a state where public transportation is for shit, and it is nearly impossible to get from one place to another without four wheels and a driver’s license. Lizzie and I shared her car for several months, and that’s when it became clear to me that though she held down a job that covered her rent, her parents were paying for her degree in English literature as well as her car. I was unaccustomed to such acts of generosity. I’d never personally met anyone with the means and will to perform them. The weight of this discovery was jarring.

  THE SCHISM IN my own family had begun purely because of finances, but religion and politics had strained things even further and made a relationship with my parents untenable. But I still needed family. Now that I was sharing Lizzie’s car, the last thing I wanted her father to think was that I might be using her. On the next trip to Coweta, I waited until I could get Charles alone. It was two days before I caught him by himself at the kitchen table, reading the paper. I took a seat next to him, and then a deep breath.

  “Charles?”

  He took his time as if finishing a paragraph, laid the paper down, and peered at me over the top of his glasses. “RJ?”

  “I realize you do a lot for Lizzie. But I want you to know that what you do for her is not what you do for me. I’ve made my own way, and I plan to continue doing that as long as Lizzie keeps me around.”

  Charles studied me for just a moment with a quizzical expression. “Does this mean you’re not going to let me buy you a car?”

&nbs
p; See that? Just when I thought the old bastard was going to make it easy for me to continue to see him as a flat character in the rolling sitcom that is my life, he rounded out into the kind of person he’d raised his daughter to be: capable of great kindness and generosity. I didn’t ask why. I just fought back tears and hugged him. Charles bought me my first truck that same weekend.

  I resolved then to begin my quest to get to know Charles through what he liked best. I’d exhaust all avenues at my disposal until I felt comfortable enough to engage him on the topic of guns. This time I planned to do it right. I would avoid putting my foot in my mouth and keep quiet until I knew what questions to ask and in what manner to ask them.

  I came close to derailment at Christmas. We opened our presents in Charles’s house. He pretended to be a fat white man in a red suit, with a deer fetish, living in subzero temperatures most of the year, who had brought trinkets to each of us. But my eyes kept drifting back to the weapon of war on the floor next to Charles. For Christmas he had bought himself a Smith and Wesson AR-15 derivative. I didn’t ask how he could just walk into Atwoods, the local farm-and-ranch-supply chain store, buy the thing off the shelf like a loaf of bread, and own it without fear. I kept that to myself. But just being in the same room with it felt crazy. This was Christmas. It was the day of good cheer, bad music, and ugly sweaters; of whimsy, of family, of fun. But I had none until Charles finally took this rifle, which had been banned by law throughout most of my life, back to his bedroom. I kept that to myself too.

  But that Christmas I wondered how my country had gotten to be so over-the-top demanding about the right to bear arms—the biggest, baddest arms we can get our hands on. Why do so many adults I know, not just in Coweta, but across Oklahoma and the entire country, think they need a gun? Our nation hasn’t fought a war on its own soil since December 7, 1941, and before that, 1861, when the country picked a fight with itself. So, what war were the people—white people—in my life preparing for? All too quickly I began to feel like a little blond girl in a pinafore stuck at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” Alice said.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  I was thinking, Quite, Cat. Quite.

  SINCE I DIDN’T know anyone trustworthy who could teach me about gun culture, this quest began privately. I started my education with what I could easily get my hands on—music. I was amazed at how much gun culture had seeped into me already from this source. Machine-gun fire and loud pistol popping percussed the music I grew up listening to—it was just part of the track. 50 Cent had already conditioned me to the names AK-47 and AR-15 as normal parts of a conversation. I knew about night vision, shell catchers, and infrared beams, and that 50 Cent keeps a gun big enough to intimidate Shaq. (Never mind that a gun as small as a pocket pistol would likely intimidate Shaq because Shaq is not a stupid man.)

  Wu-Tang Clan told me how the gun will go. The music I listened to taught me that Uzis, MAC-10s, and M16A2s were choppas. Mobb Deep told me survival of the fittest means being strapped with a gun and ready to die using it. Lil Wayne told me that to do my thang included shooting a person with a Glock, not to kill, but to render comatose. Ludacris told me that saying we got with a hard edge was meant to be heard as we got guns. N.W.A. told me coming Straight Outta Compton also meant leaving with a sawed-off shotgun in hand. As a teenager, I was intrigued with the heft of lethal force, what it meant to hold that shit in your hands, to focus rage and anger into a single trigger squeeze.

  One day, I found myself riding with Charles in his truck, and he began singing along to a country song. I brought up the idea that country music is just as bad as rap music in its characterization of violence. That it was just as bad as hip-hop in its depiction of women as objects, and to act as if that statement wasn’t true was the sort of exercise in arrogance that black people weren’t allowed.

  “You just don’t like George Strait,” Charles said.

  Perhaps, but why is it considered crude and inflammatory for ASAP Ferg to rap about his violent, psychotic uncle carrying his grandmother’s kitchen knives and that same grandmother hiding a gun from the uncle under her pillow in “Let It Bang,” but endearing and downright quaint for Aaron Lewis to write a country song about his grandfather’s shotgun and how it was used to back down burglars and shoot up road signs in “Granddaddy’s Gun”? When white men use six strings and G-chords to write songs about their fascination with guns as a means of protection for and pride in their families, they are raised up as symbols of good family men, willing and able husbands, brothers, and sons. But let a black man write a song about how he uses a gun to stake a claim, to stand his ground, to negotiate business—much as many lauded political and military leaders have done throughout history—and watch that black man be made out to be a criminal, whether or not he has committed an actual crime.

  The idea endures that country music is based on wholesome values, but studies are finding otherwise. Country and rap lyrics, once you peel away the cultural differences, have generally similar violent through-lines. (What’s more, country music actually makes more references to drugs than any other major musical genre, while rap makes the fewest.) And yet the band plays on—another system that rewards white men for brandishing firearms in art and life while crushing black men who do, for any reason.

  Which doesn’t make music any different than cinema. On film, white men oozing with armed-up machismo abound, from westerns to sci-fi to action blockbusters.

  It’s impossible to make an action movie without machine guns, submachine guns, and fully automatic weapons, for fear of seeming lame. Yet how many black action stars can you come up with? In his Oscar-winning role as Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington drops to the floor for a shotgun to shoot at—and just miss—his new partner, Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke). Jake runs away but is cornered in a kitchen and stalked by Alonzo, a black man with a shotgun, a black man toying with his white prey: “You know I’m surgical with this bitch, Jake. How you want it, dawg? Closed-casket?” And there it was: my visceral first experience of seeing a black man holding power over a white man. I was fourteen when Alonzo became an example of just how I didn’t have to take this shit anymore. He was the man allowed to leave this world on his own terms (even if those terms included being gunned down by white members of the mafia) because he set those terms. He was a black man for whom the rules were whatever he said they were. Because he had a gun.

  I had little idea of the differences between revolvers, semiautomatic pistols, and fully automatic weapons, or their history, until I stumbled upon a film called Lord of War. The movie is told from the vantage point of an illegal arms dealer named Yuri Orlov; it took me far into understanding the wider world of guns. Yuri’s voice-over discussed the AK-47:

  “Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalasnikova model of 1947, more commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It’s the world’s most popular assault rifle, a weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple nine-pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood, it doesn’t break, jam, or overheat. It will shoot whether it’s covered in mud or filled with sand. It’s so easy even a child could use it, and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people’s greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, suicidal novelists.”

  I stopped the movie and rewound it to hear this monologue again. Wait, I thought. That part about the AK-47 being Russia’s greatest export can’t be true. But Yuri was closer to the truth than most people think.

  Then there’s my favorite literary reference to the feeling of holding and using a gun, a paragraph-length soliloquy of a sentence in Billy Bathgate, which
E. L. Doctorow couldn’t bring himself to punctuate with anything other than commas.

  I will never forget how it felt to hold a loaded gun for the first time and lift it and fire it, the scare of its animate kick up the bone of your arm, you are empowered there is no question about it, it is an investiture, like knighthood, and even though you didn’t invent it or design it or tool it the credit is yours because it is in your hand, you don’t even have to know how it works, the credit is all yours, with the slightest squeeze of your finger a hole appears in a piece of paper sixty feet away, and how can you not be impressed with yourself, how can you not love this coiled and sprung causation, I was awed, I was thrilled, the thing is guns come alive when you fire them, they move, I hadn’t realized that.

  This beautiful run-on sentence let me in on the psychological underpinnings of the fascination with guns, but it also illuminated a glaring lack in my knowledge of them. To know a gun, I’d have to own one. To know Charles, I’d have to shoot one.

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  Glock

  IN HIS TRUCK, in traffic, Charles could become flustered while speaking on his mobile phone—a flip phone that might have come straight out of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s hand in 2000. Charles doesn’t use it to text, play Words with Friends, scroll through Instagram, or check Facebook. In fact, if you text Charles, it could quite literally be months before you get a response, and only after his son or daughter had helped him clear the cobwebs from this digital relic. However, if you call him, he’s going to answer. Or he’s going to call you right back. The conversation might be short, but it will most certainly be had.