My father bought his first gun when my kid sister ended her relationship with a marine who, it turned out, lacked the emotional stability one would hope to find in a trained killer. I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. When I tried picturing it, I was reminded of a few key scenes from my childhood.
First, there was the evening we found termites in my bedroom. My father ripped up the carpet. Then took a sledgehammer to the built-in cabinets, ground zero for the infestation.
“Where am I supposed to sleep?”
“We’ll set the inflatable mattress up in the living room,” my father said. “There’s no reason to cry about it.”
That night, when my older sister came home from her part time job waiting tables, not wanting to wake the family, she attempted to make her way through the living room, in the dark. She tripped over a large object, which, surely, wasn’t there when she left for work that afternoon, and fell face first onto a pile of flesh and bones. A pile of flesh and bones, which, being woken up by a body dropped, seemingly, from mid-air, was screaming.
It took me a minute to realize the primal sound filling the house with terror was being issued from my lungs. Should I ever be eaten alive by a bear, I know the exact sound I will make.
My father came bounding out of his bedroom brandishing a baseball bat, in nothing more than a pair of white cotton briefs, his hairy belly spilling over the stretched out elastic waistband.
“What if you had a gun?” I said, when I called to voice my concern about his recent purchase. “You might’ve ended up shooting your own kids.”
The other time my father attempted assuming the silverback role was when we moved from New Jersey to Florida. That first year, we rented our house to an Italian man who owned a pizza parlor, popular amongst a certain organized segment of the Italian American community. There was a dispute over a rent check. And, next thing I know, my mom was serving coffee and cake to two plainclothes detectives in our dining room.
After the detectives left, a family meeting was called.
“Until further notice, you kids are to come directly home after school. No stopping at a friend’s house. No walking to the convenience store for snacks,” my father said. “And let me make this clear, if you see a Cadillac or a Town Car parked on the side of the road, you run like hell.”
That night, before bed, I watched Goodfellas and Casino, back to back. I could not sleep, I was so excited about going to school and telling everyone my family was now living in a Scorsese movie.
Back then, instead of buying a gun, my father added a can of mace to his modest arsenal, which was little more than a baseball bat, propped up behind his nightstand.
“You were willing to go toe to toe with Tony Soprano with nothing more than my old little league bat, but you need a gun for your daughter’s ex-boyfriend?”
“I was a much younger man back then. I’m not in that kind of shape anymore.”
He bought the mace at a popup kiosk in the mall. Not satisfied with the salesman’s guarantee it would work when needed most, he insisted the guy spray him.
“If we’re going to do something like that,” the salesman said, looking over his shoulder, “we’d have to go out to the parking lot.”
My sisters, my mother and I could see the entrance from the kiosk. We stood, silent, our eyes on those doors. When they finally swung open, my dad appeared. His head hung low. The salesman leading him by the arm, like a blind man.
When he lifted his head, my kid sister cried. It looked as if the salesmen had, in the short time they were gone, set my father’s head on fire and quickly extinguished it. His face was red.
It wasn’t until we got home that my father discovered the salesman had given him a brand new can of mace. We were in the car, parked in the driveway.
“What’s the difference?” my mother said.
“I know the one he used on me works. Now I need to test this one.” He took the mace out of its packaging.
“I am not macing you.”
“I’ll do it,” my older sister said, from the backseat.
“I’ll do it myself,” my father said. “I’ll mace myself, for the family.”
“Daddy, please don’t,” my kid sister said.
“Maybe you should wait until tomorrow. You’re looking pretty raw.” My mother went to touch his face. He turned away. Then got out of the car and went into the garage. He held the mace at arm’s length and pointed it at the center of his face. Before pulling the trigger, he looked at us, still in the car, as if we were at a drive-in movie. He walked over and shut the garage door, pulling the curtain on his performance.
We waited a solid minute before my mother said, “Dear, God.” We got out of the car. She threw the garage door open. We stepped back, allowing space for the toxic cloud to float out. My father was sitting on the weight bench. Once again, his head hung low.
“Stop crying and get daddy the garden hose,” he said to my kid sister.
He started with a simple handgun. But every time a crime was committed within a certain radius of his home, he’d add a more powerful weapon to his stash. The most reaffirming pair of crimes happened at the shopping center in front of his neighborhood, over the course of two nights.
The first night, a clerk at the gas station, where my father went every morning to buy the paper, was killed by an armed robber. The next night, the man returned to hit the diner, next to the gas station. The owner of the diner was a member of the National Rifle Association, and a much quicker shot than the robber.
“May he rot in hell,” my father said.
After that, he enrolled in a tactical weapons course, similar to the training Keanu Reeves did to prepare for the John Wick movies. He was a diligent student. He’d spend his weekends practicing. Not at the gun range, but in his house, ducking behind walls, rolling over tables, aiming a gun (unloaded, I hope) at make pretend intruders.
In the first John Wick movie, Keanu goes on a mad killing spree because the bad guys broke into his home and murdered his puppy. He’ll routinely take out a few dozen highly trained killers over the course of a three minute scene, without breaking a sweat. One of the reasons Keanu is so convincing in the role is because, unlike my father, his build is more similar to Michelangelo’s David than Playskool’s Mr. Potato Head.
But if Mrs. Potato Head and her kids were in danger, I have no reason to doubt Mr. Potato Head would do anything but a fine job at defending them. Even if he had to do so in his tighty-whities. We are, after all, talking about the man’s family.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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