How to Be Safe

by Tom McAllister

If guns didn’t exist, then what would people put in their holsters? If people didn’t have guns to put in their holsters, then what would they use to shoot at birds? If people couldn’t shoot at birds, not to mention deer and bears and snakes and evil spirits, then wouldn’t the world be overrun with birds? With deer and bears and snakes? With evil spirits? If guns were banned, then how would men kill their wives? How would men kill themselves?

Katie O worked in the science department. She claimed to have a disease that made her bones weaker than other people’s bones, but she provided no documentation. She said the monthly treat of pizza in the teachers’ lounge was discriminatory because she was allergic to garlic. The students loved her because she often napped through class, asking them to quietly read their books. She was unpleasant and unreliable, and at parent-teacher conferences she talked mostly about her weak bones. More than a few of us thought she was hiding an addiction to something. Did this mean she deserved to be shot? It did not mean she deserved to be shot.

Passages like this kind of remind me of the Throwback Special for some reason. Anyway, I love this kind of stuff.

“I’m going to show up at your house one night when you’re not expecting it and I’m going to cut your whore mouth open with my bowie knife and fill it up with dicks. I’m going to cover you in dicks and smother you with them and when you’re dead I’ll hang you over my mantel like a trophy.” I wrote back and asked him where he gets all those extra dicks, and is there a wholesaler nearby because I could use a few spares.

The barista was young and overwhelmed. She was panicking, so I offered to help her. I was more helpful in those days. I told her she needed to do something dramatic to make a statement. She then tried to push the espresso machine off the counter and it barely budged. I leaned over and helped her, and together we knocked it to the floor.

The sentence immediately after this was "It sounded just like an espresso machine hitting the floor."

ROBBIE WAS CONCERNED about my mental state. He said, “Babe, I’m concerned about your mental state.” He put his hand on my face and made me look at him—it was one of the most sincere gestures he’d ever made. I wished he weren’t wearing a backward hat when he did it. I wished he looked more like someone’s father, with gray hair around his temples and gray eyes haunted by the war and a mouth like a tightrope stretched between the towers of his cheekbones.

Friendly, safe men looked suddenly like men who would breed spiders, or sleep in a coffin, or wear a vial of blood around their neck for good luck. Strangers began to look like loaded guns, cocked and ready to fire.

When I was in college, I worked at an ice-cream shop with a manager named Doug who insisted I give him a hug at the end of every shift. “Time for Doug’s Hugs,” he would announce, and we all had to line up and hug him good night, like we were toys he played with and then put away before going to bed.

Another sticker said MY FAMILY and beneath it there were four guns of various sizes, meant to represent the father gun and the mother gun and the two gun children. There was something I could respect about a man willing to so openly broadcast his anger; at least there were no secrets.

I saw this actual sticker on a truck on Pico Blvd a few months ago. It was right next to a sticker that read "No Lives Matter." So...

At this point, the militia was very weak. The children had long ago lost interest in playing army. The man who’d shot himself in the foot was in incredible pain and kept saying they were going to have to amputate his foot. “I’m sorry you think liberty is worth less than your damn foot, Gary,” Benedict said.

Fifty percent of all relationships end at deli counters. Ten percent of all relationships end with a terrible argument in front of strangers at a car wash. Five percent end amicably. Two percent end in murder.