Life As We Know It by Jennifer Foote Sweeney

Author:Jennifer Foote Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ’RENTS

LOVE ME, LOVE MY GUNS

Susan Straight

I NEVER SAW a gun until I was twenty-four. I didn’t grow up in Mayberry; I grew up in southern California. In my old neighborhood, drugs and alcohol fueled many parties and fights. One night, my younger brother and his friends had an altercation at the end of the street; from my bedroom windowsill, I watched them run home. A boy named Sammy had a knife; someone hit him in the head with a baseball bat. He was killed.

In junior high, where I met my future husband, Dwayne, we witnessed mass fights and riots. I saw girls with razors in their hair and boys with fists. There were more riots in high school; boys fought viciously, one with a tire iron. Fights could be brutal; our friend B. D. got his jaw broken over a quarter in a parking-lot craps game. But no one was killed in school, and no one had guns.

Dwayne had seen guns in his neighborhood. Many fathers there, originally from the South, still hunted. On New Year’s, they fired guns in celebration.

But Dwayne never had a gun. When we were newly married, hanging out at my longtime girlfriend’s house as drugs really exploded in our city, Dwayne was terrified when my girlfriend’s husband pulled out a semiautomatic pistol from under the couch. A potential customer, or killer, had knocked. I was upstairs with my friend and her new baby.

Later in the car, Dwayne told me we couldn’t visit them again. “He pulled out a piece. We can’t take that chance,” he said. “Could be the cops. We could get caught in a shootout.” He shivered, I remember clearly, and said, “I heard him cock that baby. Click, click.”

Thirteen years later, a shotgun fell on my head as I searched the closet for baby clothes, and my heart leaped in fear, like a small animal tethered to my breastbone. Dwayne hadn’t told me about the shotgun, never mentioned we were armed. I suddenly imagined him holding the gun, cocking that baby. Shuck, shuck.

Since college, Dwayne had been working with juvenile offenders at a correctional facility. Many of their crimes involved guns. When I was five months pregnant with our first child, Dwayne worked graveyard shift. One night, a juvenile pretended to take an overdose of stashed pills, and Dwayne had to escort him to the hospital. A man jumped from the bushes and shot Dwayne in the chest with a Taser stun gun. Dwayne staggered, but his size, his sheepskin jacket, and his bravery blunted the shock. He punched the man, knocking him down, and ran after the hobbling juvenile headed for a van. Then another man emerged from the van, pointing a .38 at Dwayne’s face. Dwayne had no choice; he had to back away.

He didn’t tell me. He didn’t want me to faint, to upset the baby. But I read about the escape in the paper, and then I saw the burn marks on his jacket. When he described

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