James River Park

Vengeance, Imaginary and Real

"Hey faggot!"

            There were four of them sitting on the wall drinking beer.  It was a warm Autumn evening several years ago and I had come down to the James River to take a walk.

            "Hey, you fat-assed queer!"

            "He does have a fat ass on him."

            Just their tone had been enough to start a fight.  Adrenaline pulsed and I got ready--then did the obvious arithmetic.  One only equals four in the movies.  They laughed at my back.

            When the James is low you can walk almost all the way across on the rocks, which is what I'd planned, but when I got out of their sight I hunkered down behind a car-sized boulder that said "Motley Crue."  It was half in my mind to sneak back for some sort of surprise attack but I hesitated until sanity prevailed.

            Or maybe I'm just remembering it that way.  Maybe I was scared.  In any case, when I decided against a single-handed ambush the curtain went up on my fantasies.  My internal screenwriter rifled the John Wayne archive and came up with a dozen lens-splattering improvs starring me.  Sometimes I killed them outright.  Other times I drew it out, savoring the moment, while they groveled and whined and licked my Nikes before I blew them all off to kingdom come.

            I avoided their territory on the way back to my car.  Then, unable to let it go, I drove back and forth thinking I'd meet one alone.

            Suddenly there were all these police cars.  I parked and walked over.

            "He was mouthin' off to me,"  said the girl, "and I told him to go to hell."

            Her boyfriend, nodding vigorously, took over.  "Then I saw him come up with it."  He pulled an imaginary gun out of concealment.  "He drew down on me.  Then the other one out with his."

            "Four white males,"  the policeman told his radio a moment later.  He described the four who had yelled at me from the wall.  "One's carrying a sawed-off shotgun.  At least one of the others has a pistol."

            I felt like I'd been slapped.  If  I'd actually nerved myself up for a confrontation I might have been killed.  I gave my story to the policeman and went home.

            And that should have been the end of it.  I had done the right thing.  Case closed.  Lesson learned.  But over the next couple of weeks I played the scene back over and over,

each time with a different ending bloodier than the last.

            "Eat lead," I said in one of my fantasies, spraying bullets from a Thompson sub-machine gun, sneering curses from the corner of my mouth like a '30s gangster.  In another I pulled the pin from a grenade with my teeth--a classic Sgt. Rock maneuver I'd seen dozens of times in the comics.  Body parts rained down after the blast.

            It wasn't just that I was surprised by my thirst for violent revenge--what could be more human?--it was the clothes it wore when it came out on stage.  I was a B-movie puppet with Sly Stallone manning the strings.  I had been accustomed to thinking that my imagination was refined.

            During this time I was teaching English at the Virginia State Penitentiary.  When I told the story to my class the group came alive.  They made me repeat it twice, then started a lively discussion on Going Armed.

            One man told a story about a kid who had insulted him and how he had chased him up and down the aisles of a convenience store with an AK-47.  Just trying to scare him, he assured me.  He had pulled out of the parking lot as the police were pulling in.

            "And it was lucky I left when I did because I had six other guns in the car."

            Another man talked about drug dealing paranoia and how he used to sleep with a pistol.

            "Under the bed?"  I asked.

            "In my hand,"  he said.

            "Oh yeah!"  said another man.  "I've done that.  I fell asleep one night with a .45 across my chest.  And my mama found me that way next morning when she came in to wake me up."

            I wonder what she thought, seeing her baby like that.  But I understood where he was coming from--I'd seen the movie.  You can't let your enemies get the drop on you when the world really is a western.