I’m not usually so literal, but the idiom “Under the Gun” calls forth a story from my personal arsenal. This event was over 30 years ago, but I think about it. I mean, I’m a writer. It’s packed with ingredients for delicious drama — a gun, a bad guy, some good guys, a fantastic soundtrack, and an essential question.
Were the men in the white van sent by God, preordained angels, or was their appearance that night, when my hair was at the height of its absurdity, random?
Backstory: I have always believed in God. Not the gray haired guy in the sky God. More an energy to the universe. I do not believe that we play dot to dot with some predetermined final ending, nor the steps in between.
Because if everything happens for a reason, then one of my son’s best friends was “supposed” to have cancer. The little boy we sponsor in Africa was “supposed” to have his hands burned to the third degree by his own father.
Those born into circumstances that make them ignorant to our God projection — the divine white male in the blue American sky — will be whisked away at the end of their hard knock life to be deposited into a fiery hell of which they’ve never conceived? This seems absurd.
God booms to contestant number One: “You did this wrong! I banish you to hell for all eternity!” To contestant number Two: “You messed crap up, but as the guard served you filet mignon after you wasted millions of tax dollars, you admitted yourself sinner and I Almighty. Pearly gates!”
I didn’t grow up with religion or anti-religion; just a vague absence of both. We did not go as a family to church, not even on holidays. As with too many things, I was left to my own devices. Ridiculousness ensued: purple hair; 8th grade lunches consisting of Snickers, Doritos, and Coke; the boyfriend who boasted stick up hair via solution of Elmer’s Glue and water.
Fear was my faith. My mother’s depression, how to tiptoe around it, my religion. That’s what I believed in. That was what I could see.
I recall attending a tremulous Bible study on our block for a month when I was 4 that involved a coveted “mystery seat”: a certain number was called, a Hershey bar awarded. Hot damp summer, some neighborhood mother played God to fill the seats in her 70’s chapel/living room. She understood well the prospect of free chocolate and bored unsupervised children. We were so present tense, we collectively forgot until we squeaked into the plastic chairs that we would have to slog through the lesson and pretend to listen before the winner was announced.
The genesis of faith stewed in that oppressive house as I stuck to the linoleum. Did He, who saw everything, not witness my passionate display each time my number wasn’t called — the snot infused pageantry, my sister’s face pinched with embarrassment? — did he not hear my desperate prayers for a mother who did not scream out of nowhere names too ugly still to say?
He must be a vengeful, or at least indifferent, God, I decided, mouth watering, imagining the chocolate melting sweet. God knew if you were good or bad, and I was bad, my selfish chocolate wanting. I wasn’t going to continue to put myself out there for the mystery seat when God had already made it plain my number would not be called. As I grew, as my family disintegrated around me, my belief in being unlucky and protecting myself in accordance solidified.
You assemble the pieces of your puzzle that fit your story: the one you adopted early on without the benefit of reason. Until you become present tense again. Until everything is called into question.
Turning point: We are driving home from a party, best friend Julie and I, and it is probably 2 in the morning. I am a high school junior, theater department diva, enjoying enviable casting. I am a wreck. We listen to the Replacements way too loud, my window rolled down, Julie and I Broadway belting regardless the song.
I am wearing a way too heavy mustard-colored long sleeve shirt and skirt ensemble that belongs to my sister. It is hideous. That it is 1987 cannot completely excuse this — it is August, for God’s sakes, in Houston. But I have endured heavier more ridiculous psychological costumes over the years pretending to be my sister. I am used to wardrobe malfunctions while trying on personas. Occupational hazard.
So we’re driving fast but not entirely teenage reckless. Windows down, humidity adding insult to puff hair injury. “We’re coming out! We’re coming out!” we belt Paul Westerberg’s scratchy anthem. We’re young, we’re ridiculous.
We take a left into Julie’s subdivision off of El Dorado Boulevard — hers the second street off of the one we’re headed down. I come maybe a hundred feet before I’ll take a left to get to her house at the end of her cul-de-sac; Julie is likely pondering between lyrics the most effective strategy for sneaking into her house.
An enormous black truck is out of nowhere right behind us. Which is unusual because as noted, it is 2 in the morning in the thick of the summer in the middle of Clear Lake, our insulated suburban Houston bubble, and it is otherwise deserted. Another world out here and we thought it was ours and it was until an enormous black pickup appears in the rearview mirror.
This annoys more than scares me. You know that teenager thing where everyone, the very concept of anyone other than you or possibly your friends, bugs the crap out of you? And you feel entirely justified? This is my reaction — akin to how I feel in Spanish when the teacher forces us to call her “Maestra.”
The black truck revs and shoots around past us. I assume that’s the end of it — a little testosterone fueled aggression, maybe a “drive, bitch!” until he tears ass down the street again. Only he jerks his car halfway in front of us, to the side at an angle, and I have to slam on the breaks to avoid plowing into him. He has blocked our way forward. Out of the truck comes a clean-cut young guy sprung from the driver’s seat, around the side of the truck, striding with purpose.
At first it’s like he’s at the beach, headed for Galveston but got lost somewhere off the 45 and that’ s why he’s here in the middle of the night no shirt. He resembles some stock character we would know from school, someone’s older brother who played baseball or football and graduated a couple of years ago.
But before I can ask Julie if she’s dating this idiot and forgot to enlighten me, he is already like some magic trick next to me outside the driver’s door and my open window leaning in, pointing a big black gun at my temple that really does seem like one of the guns we have in the costume closet at school. (He is, by the way, bare-ass naked. Later I’ll see: no socks, no nothing. Is this not awkward? But it’s not the point so it’s an afterthought; peculiar how social mores evaporate when a weapon takes centerstage.)
“Turn out your lights,” he says.
Quiet.
The indescribable quality of a complete absence of sound.
At the moment someone holds a gun to your head, you should be screaming. Clawing, kicking, scratching, biting. Trying to survive. Your will to live should be cranked full throttle overdrive — evolution has seen to this.
Julie, sweet gentle Julie, plays the part, howls like Buffy’s stunt double, puncturing the sticky night air like a sonic boom, but me? — loudmouth, Unsatisfactory conduct grade since I realized I could make people laugh in 6th grade — me of the distinct and oft commented upon, not always kindly, cackle. I sit frozen. As useful as a chia pet.
I see only the steering wheel in front of me, the grooves of a perfect circle, buttons, knobs, the pale glow of my thin hands clutching 10 and 2 just like they taught in Driver’s Ed. Illuminated by the headlights I did not turn off.
His strong arms around me, pulling like I’m Raggedy Ann, like I’m already dead. I don’t fight back, which has always, will always, bother me. Then just as quickly, for some reason, he lets go. I watch him walk — he does not run — back to his vehicle. No clothes. Nothing.
Then another man is in my vision next to me, not a mean young naked man with a gun, but a nice middle-aged one who asks, “Are you alright?”
I take this as permission to scream as Julie goes quiet. My useless screams which I find when I no longer need.
These two kind gentlemen help us stumble out of my brown Chevy citation.
Who were they? In front of us, as if it could have driven into us, but stopped, is their white van. Here’s what we figured out: they had pulled up in back of the black truck, the man with the gun noticed; he walked back to his car and drove away. They had come to our aid down the same street in the opposite direction.
Their angelic white van, for no discernable reason, interrupted any number of grisly possibilities. We don’t ask who they are. We don’t get their names before they go. They are like Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” reminding George of what he’s forgotten.
Then we are at Julie’s house, terrified parents, police, older in middle of the night fluorescent light, worried faces, terry cloth robes. Her mother makes a pot of coffee. My dad arrives, white-faced, lost, we give statements and finally my dad takes me home.
That night I sleep in bed with my father, hugging him like when I was a very little girl, in the place that my mom used to sleep.
Epiphany: If this were in a script for a movie, this would be the part where I tell you that living through this— the good guys in white against the bad guy in black, who saved my life that night — caused me to reassess. To believe in fate, destiny; that there are no accidents. The neat bow would be if I were ‘born again’. But life’s not tidy and lots of times it doesn’t make sense.
At the time of this event, I suppose I was in shock. I don’t think my 16-year-old psyche could handle the implications, so I turned it into white noise, turned up the Depeche Mode. How many times have I done that? My humor, what I often consider my life’s grace, has its down side. Even at age 50, I am still far too liable to bury what hurts. Because I don’t want to have to acknowledge what I’ve lost or could lose.
I don’t want to remember that after that brush with tragedy, with an ensuing grace, as my father hugged me close, I slept better, deeper, than I had in the two years since my mother had left. I felt I could finally relax for a second. Lucky to be breathing.
Having someone, hopefully more than one but in a pinch one will do, who loves you, whom you love, is the place from which all meaning ultimately springs.
I knew with clarity that even winning the Oscar wouldn’t bring that same authentic security. I could only let that in for a few seconds that night, tucked in bed safe with my dad, a few precious minutes. I can only sort of understand it now.
For many years afterwards and into my late twenties, as I pursued an MFA in acting and a career in entertainment, messy family of origin backdrop, I scorned the notion of having children. Laughed at the optimism. But eventually I couldn’t.
It is what I remembered yesterday brushing the hair off my daughter’s chocolate sticky face as we made cupcakes with pink icing. She had covered our kitchen with chocolate handprints, remarking delightedly, “It’s like mud from outside!” And for a second, instead of noting the just mopped floor and searching for the Clorox wipes, I watched her. Why is this so hard to hold on to? Because I want it to be forever and it can’t be.
There cannot be a gray bearded man in the sky handing down white cars filled with angels to help us from getting shot in the head, because of course, some people do get shot in the head, or worse. But I would be lying not to admit there is a part of me that still wants my number to be called, the chosen mystery seat, to believe those men were sent by God.
Maybe that isn’t the question. Sometimes I imagine humanity as a grand experiment. God started it in motion — the ultimate parent — but then sat back to see what his children would do with what they had been given: the earth and all its bounty, the ability to think and reason, free will and a sense of justice, but also ambition, self-absorption, competition, a tendency to compare ourselves.
“What will they do to each other?” God wondered. Would love triumph or would we kill each other?
Turn out your lights? You decide.
Regardless, the grown up in me has enacted her own hybrid of thought from hard-won experience, ugly trial and error, to arrive at a way to walk through the world, knowing all of it is less than certain.
Here goes: what you put out in to the world is what you get back, not because God is giving it to you, not because it was ‘meant to be,’ but because the world eventually reflects back to you who you really are when no one is looking.
Maybe that hell or heaven we are trying to get into or avoid is actually what we are walking around in day-to-day, minute-to-minute.
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Previously Published on Medium
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