"Jammed" Part 3 of 3

I jumped at the sound the bullet made as it screamed through the air.  My heart beat tremendously and I suddenly felt as if the ground was swaying back and forth beneath my feet.

He turned around and with a smile that belonged to the face of his younger self.  A smile that remembered his first lesson in what it meant to be a man and what it felt like to have a whole life ahead of you with countless possibilities.  And then he told me to take the gun.

I was still fighting with the ground, telling it to stay still.  I didn’t want to shoot the gun.  What he saw as power and possibility, I saw as danger; and I couldn’t hide the fear from shining in my eyes.  The match of realization sparked and flickered against the looks on our faces.  His smile turned in on itself as his lips pursed and his brow turned stern.  We realized I would not be able to understand how to be a man the way my father did.

“Don’t be a disappointment,” was all he said.

I saw a look in his eye that told me things would not go well if I did otherwise.

Taking it from him, I faced the mountains and held the gun out in front of me.  He maneuvered my feet and shoulders around to give me a more stable footing.  I stretched my finger out and felt the trigger of a loaded gun for the first time.  He told me to take a breath and squeeze gently on the trigger.  As I exhaled, I held my body tight and prayed for mercy.

Nothing happened.

The bullet was jammed in the chamber and could not be shot.  But I didn’t know that.  I looked at my father, absolutely terrified.  What had I done wrong?  What was going on?  He told me to shoot the gun and I told him I couldn’t.

“We’ve been over this a thousand times, Sarah.  How could you fuck it up?”

I stuttered as he came towards me.  I forgot about the gun in my hand as an avalanche of protests erupted from my mouth: it won’t shoot, I’m sorry, I can’t shoot it, I’m sorry, I tried, it’s not working, I don’t know what to do.  I saw him pull back his hand to hit my face and I flinched and lost my footing.  I hit the ground with the gun still in my hand and a shot rang out towards the sky.

On its way up into the heavens, the bullet tore through my father’s body and he bled out within minutes.

-

Before he died in Vietnam, my father’s brother married a quiet, Christian woman named Rebecca, who worked at the jewelry counter at Macy’s.  She remarried a mechanic from Riverside named Frank, a man known in town for being kind to customers who were facing harder times.  Because my mother was nowhere to be found, Social Services asked them to take care of me.  For some reason, they couldn’t have children of their own.  Even though I was quiet and tortured, I was able to help fill that void for them.  They were gentle and considerate of my history, never raising their voices when I set the bar for my life at shoplifting from the minimarket and drinking until four in the morning with friends who only kept me around because I made good tips as a waitress at the local diner.  All they did was tell me I could do better, and when it was time to apply to college they promised to support me if I promised to leave the dead-end future that awaited me in Riverside.

I went to school in Los Angeles to be close enough to visit them, and never left.  Once I was on my own, I could finally lose myself in a life where no one knew my past.  That’s part of the reason I wasted my time trying to be an actress when I first graduated.  I wasn’t quite sure what to do with a sociology degree, and I liked being someone else.  But after twenty-three failed auditions and two television pilots that fell through, I took a job as a secretary to Eric Phillips, a driven start-up at Lawrenson and Thorne.  Frank passed away two years ago and Rebecca soon afterwards.  I still drive out to visit their graves on the anniversary of the day I went to live with them.

The social services counselors told me that my father’s death was not my fault.  Eric tells me it wasn’t my fault either.  But ask them to live with what I’ve done.

Back in the car on the way to Palm Springs, Eric’s hand is still fidgeting in his pocket and I’m sure he’s holding a ring.  He mentioned marriage once, over our second bottle of wine on the roof of his building a month and a half ago.  Eric told me that he loved me and I told him the words didn’t mean anything when they were laden with alcohol.  He was gone when I woke up the next morning, which gave me some pause, but he asked me to come into his office the moment I made it into work.  He closed the door behind me and held me tightly in front of him.  Eye to eye, he told me he loved me and smiled, asking me to smell his breath.  We laughed and kissed and I found out I was pregnant two weeks later.

I haven’t been able to sleep well for weeks.  My doctor can’t prescribe me sleeping pills because it’s dangerous in my condition.  Late at night, my restlessness rustles Eric out of his deeper slumber.  Even if I’m turned away from him, he’ll reach out to me and pull me into his arms, close.  He never wakes up completely, but it’s like his subconscious knows.  That I’m terrified.  That I have no idea how to do this.  That after what I’ve done, I feel like I have no right to have someone else’s life depend on me again. Sometimes he leaves his hand on my belly, and once or twice he spread his fingers out to give me a soft, little squeeze.  To let us both know we’re not alone.  All he can do is hold me and promise that I’m safe.  But he can’t always hold me. My doctor said I’m only a few weeks from my second trimester.  I still have time to change my mind, but I know Eric would never be able to look at me again.  In that way, he reminds me of my father.  Staring out into the desert, I try not to think about it.  I’m not ready for that option.  I’m not ready for any option.

"Jammed" Part 2 of 3

When he came home the army doctors wouldn’t clear him psychiatrically to be a commercial pilot or enter police academy.  He turned to ranching cattle in the panhandle of Texas, which took him far away from anyone or anything.  My mother was a woman he met at a bar.  He never expected to see her again, but there I was.  She couldn’t take care of me, she didn’t want to have me, but he swore to take care of me if she would let him.  But when he did, all he was qualified to do was work dead-end jobs as a security officer at the cheap hotels where we lived.  Having a child tied him down and suffocated him with lost opportunities—even ranching was out of the question anymore.  He would spend the next decade either locked in a office watching security camera footage or screaming at crack heads or finding more than one baby abandoned in a dumpster.  He gained weight, lost his strength, became a diabetic.  When he looked too long at himself in the mirror, the hundreds of pounds of fat on his bones smothered the memory of his ignorant, inexperienced teenage self, who seemed more man to him than what stood before him.

I don’t remember when he stopped talking to his friends from high school.  I knew countless stories of high school brethren Michael, who worked long after his shifts at the local stable ended to avoid dealing with his drunk, deadbeat father; and Tony, a star tennis player who, instead of going pro, tore his knee apart on a college team to avoid the draft and ended up unsuitable for both sport and service.  The three of them used to get together ever so often and recount their glory days, which included many nights at the drive-ins with pretty girls and trips in Tony’s van across to the Gulf Coast the first week of every summer.  I heard those stories so many times I grew up remembering them as if they were my own.  And being the only child—the only woman they were able to keep around between the three of them—Michael and Tony treated me as if I were their own baby girl to love and to woo, courting me with stuffed animals for Christmas and boxes of chocolates for my birthday.  But by the time I turned eight or nine, we started to see them less and less.  When Tony got married, my father told him to make Michael his best man because he couldn’t afford to take off work for the ceremony.  And when Michael slid off his motorcycle in a sudden storm and fell into a coma, my father, who had waited at his bedside for seventeen straight hours for him to come to consciousness, left the moment Michael fell back asleep after he came to.

One time I asked why we didn’t see Uncle Mike and Tony anymore.  He told me, “Better we remember each other like we used to be.”

Ever so often I would sit at the base of the closed bathroom door, listening to my father on the other side, screaming at himself for never having done anything with his life, for being a fat, disgusting sack of shit.

“You’re a disappointment.  You’re an absolute fucking disappointment.”

I learned it wasn’t a good idea to approach him when he was in that state.  I told myself it was some kind of demon or monster that would hit me, not my father.  So I learned to stay away, until he started crying.  Big, heaving cries out to God and his dead mother to take care of him.  To take care of me.  That’s when I would knock on the door and convince him to lay down on the bed so I could lay down beside him and hold him as tightly as my little body could muster.

I had a hard time learning how to read and write, so I spent a lot of time keeping quiet in school, afraid to be called on when I didn’t have the right answer.  Or any answer at all.  My teachers gave me special attention, which only made the heckling from other students worse.  I spent a lot of time with the maids at the hotels where we lived, eventually making extra money scrubbing bathroom floors and washing bed sheets soaked in sweat and other fluids.  The hotels weren’t the kind of hotels tourists would stay in, but to say the only residents were junkies and prostitutes would discount myself and a few other families there who had too many children to raise them any other way.

I thought it was my fault that my father was stuck in hotel security offices surrounded by cheap women and drug addicts.  That if he didn’t have to take care of me, he would have had the time to get into the police academy or fly airplanes.  I didn’t understand what it meant when his doctors said he was bipolar.  That there was nothing I could have done. I had spent years watching him sit on his bed, carefully cleaning the barrel, the gauge, and watching those shiny, brass beads slide in and out of the magazine clip.  In order to feel comfortable in such close proximity to a deadly weapon, I imagined the gun was nothing more than a Lego house he would assemble and disassemble, something innocuous compared to the weapons he wielded in the jungle.  But as we drove out onto the highway that morning, my father became intensely energetic.  He drilled me countless times on the rules of handling the gun, and I repeated with answers I had echoed hundreds of times before: never turn the safety off until you are ready to shoot the gun, never place your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot the gun, never aim the gun at something until you are ready to shoot the gun.  Never point the gun at something you do not want to shoot.

They were all questions he had asked before, but this time it was different.  His intensity made me feel uneasy.  But it was what he wanted.  At the end of the week we would have to pack up what few belongings we had between the two of us and find another seed motel to call home.  Going shooting would let him escape that reality, if only in a few moments.

We drove off the highway and onto an empty stretch of land that was walled off by a low mountainside in the distance, cutting a dark, jagged line across the sky.  We went on for so long I thought we were lost, but suddenly he stopped and we stepped out of the car.  The dirt ground was covered by thousands of bullet casings cemented together by time and dust.

“When I was younger, this used to be a shooting range,” I stood back as he pulled the black case out of the trunk and prepared the gun.   His hands worked a full magazine clip into the base of the gun.  I kept looking over my shoulder to the empty highway, afraid that someone might catch us.

“I’m so excited…I’ve waited so long to show you this,” he said again and again.

He grabbed the gun and squared off with the mountain before us.  At the tips of the mountain range there was a lush, cold forest where it would snow every winter.  He took a breath and I took a breath.  And then he shot the mountain.

"Jammed" Part 1 of 3

In one of my many incarnations, I am a writer.  The following is a work of fiction I wrote that a friend asked me to post on the blog:

Eric wanted to spend the weekend away in Palm Springs.  His parents have a vacation home in one of the planned communities, and he thought with the news that I was expecting, it would be good to get away.  I would have rather spent the weekend alone, but I knew it was unfair to keep him out of the decision-making process.  We weren’t married and we never planned to be.  He was a lawyer in downtown Los Angeles and I was his paralegal; it was the cliché office affair, meant to expire after a few weeks of racy mailroom encounters and fancy dinners, until he found someone prettier and younger.  Among the paralegals, it is a well-known fact that for every woman a young, corporate lawyer dates in the city, there is someone prettier and younger than her next in the queue.  Except my successor must have been running late, because after eleven months Eric still showed up to my apartment every Thursday night with Chinese take-out and a movie.  We spent most weekends at his place, he reading legal documents and me reading fashion magazines.  Sometimes we drove up the coast to have lunch in Malibu.  When a black Subaru crushed the back-end of my car, I spent a week at his apartment so he could drive me to and from work.  We cooked breakfast together in our underwear and after work we walked down to a local park to our favorite bench where he held me close to watch the sunset.  I couldn’t remember being so happy.

But at the firm, we never behaved as if we were more than friendly coworkers.  At first I was upset that he never met my gaze around the other lawyers.  It gave me the sense that I wouldn’t be the last secretarial notch on his bedpost, so I did my best from becoming too invested.  I never asked to make plans more than a week in advance and I was hesitant to call him more than The Guy I’m Seeing.  And then, at the office Christmas party two months ago, he surprised me by taking my hand as we walked around the room together.  Some of the other paralegals forgot their jaws on the floor and I realized I was in love with him.

On the drive to Palm Springs, he’s kept one hand on the wheel and the other fidgeting in his pocket.  I’ve spent the entire drive looking out the window of the car, watching the tall buildings race past us and turn into smaller buildings, then houses, and finally open fields.

“How are you feeling?” he keeps asking me.

“I’m fine,” is all I’m willing to tell him.  Ever since I realized I was late, Eric has hovered over me like a firefly at a flame.  He wants to know everything I’m thinking about him, about us, about the baby.  It’s evident he wants it.  Eric comes from a congregation of brothers and sisters who, well into their twenties and thirties, have all stayed close to their parents’ home in Fullerton and actually enjoy wearing matching sweaters for Christmas.  His older sisters Jodie and Nancy and younger brother Steve already have children of their own, and the pressure is on Eric to be next.  I don’t have any family left, so I can’t relate.

The green fields we drive past bleed out their color until they’re ashy beige.  Crops are replaced by sand and dust and all is still and empty, just as still an empty as Texas was sixteen years ago.  There, the ground was littered with shotgun shells and bullets encased in the desert’s sandy dust.  My father shot a few rounds into the distant mountainside and then looked at me to step forward.  I was thirteen and my hand was finally large enough to grip the pommel of the gun, in the notch between my thumb and forefinger, and still reach the trigger.  Every week he pulled out his handgun to test me on its mechanics—how to take it apart, how to put it back together, how to clean it, how to store it.  How to shoot it.  It was a matte black pistol, like the ones you see on cop shows and action movies.  A Browning dual-action, semi-automatic.  We would sit on the edge of his bed as he pulled it out of its gun case, a large black suitcase lined with grainy foam.  He removed the magazine and checked to see that the chamber was empty.  Handing it to me, he watched me expectantly, hoping.  Even willing me to pull the trigger of an empty clip.  The gun was heavy and it hurt to strain my forefinger out to the trigger, but I could do it.  I had avoided telling him for weeks now, but he had lost his job that day, meaning we’d probably have to spend a few days in the car while he looked for a new one.  I knew it crushed him, and I knew I could keep him from having a bad night if I told him I could finally hold the gun.  So I did.

His face lit up into a smile and he took the gun out of my hands to pull me into a hug.  He told me how much he loved me, how much I made life worth living.  It was as if I had won him the lottery.  Which in his eyes, I think I did.  His father was an alcoholic line cook that didn’t make it home many nights, and when he did, it was to force himself on his wife who killed herself by the time my father was six or seven.  That left my father to be raised by his older brother, who taught him how to shoot a gun when he was thirteen.  The first time he shot a gun, the aftershock of the explosion rippled through his body and it was such a force, such a power he wielded, that he no longer felt helpless in a world where fathers hit you and mothers died on you.  In his eyes, learning to shoot a gun was one of the first steps to becoming a man in the world.  And in a world where he could never give me our own house or a pet dog or take me to Disneyland like the fathers you see on T.V., it meant everything to him to at least give me that.  It didn’t matter that I was a daughter; I understood what he meant.

My father had grown up on the western edge of the Texas desert in the fifties, when there were still cowboys walking the streets.  When he didn’t weigh four hundred pounds or wake up attached to an insulin pump.  When he could walk more than a two hundred feet without having to sit down and catch his breath.

In high school, he had been an all-state football player.  He earned his pilot’s license when he was nineteen.  He was a search and rescue officer on a team of men that routinely climbed the mountains near his home to rescue injured hikers.  Or their bodies.  When he was seventeen he wanted to be a cop and woo damsels in distress or fly commercial airliners and charm stewardesses.  He was a man’s man, thriving on big dreams and testosterone.  But he wasn’t for long.  He and his older brother were sent away to Vietnam.  An astigmatism kept him from being safe in the cockpit of a plane, so they forced him onto the ground where there was no hope for any many but to end up dead or broken.  His brother ended up dead.  My father ended up broken.