Excerpt: Mary Martin Just Bought a Revolver
I remember the first time I’d ever seen a gun...
I wrote the first iteration of this story, gosh, seven or eight years ago. I was living in Arizona at the time, an open carry state, where guns are more or less common depending on which part of the state you’re in. Similar to our main character Carl, or Carlos, I did see a man strapped with a revolver inside of a bagel place. I remember looking around the room, trying to garner some sort of unspoken acknowledgment from someone, a nod, a glance, a widening of the eyes, something. Like, are you seeing this shit, too? But that wasn’t my first time seeing a gun in person. That story goes like this: me and a friend were hanging out at another mutual friend’s house when her husband decided to bring out his gun, unloaded. We were doing all the things people in their young(ish) 20s do then—drinking, smoking, thinking we would never die. We admired the gun, pretended to point it at each other, and I distinctly remember my friend saying then, “See, this is why women live longer than men.”
Guns have always fascinated me. As a story device. As a literal and metaphorical political weapon. As children, a stick can be a gun. A banana can be a gun. A finger and a raised thumb can be a gun.
When I wrote the original version of this story, it was right around the time of the Pulse night club shooting. As so often happens after a tragedy involving guns in this country, the media response is to debate. In the end, it seems nothing gets done, but there sure are a lot of arguments being made, and so the original story had this sense of futility to it, futility both of having these arguments and of life itself.
After submitting it to several places and being rejected, I decided to reel it back in. Something obviously wasn’t working, and I kept it on the back burner for several years. But I’ve always liked the absurdity of the idea: a timid woman in her 50s brings a gun to a dinner party and she suddenly is compelled to aim it at one of the guests. What’s more, she finds she is unable to put the gun down.
What I found when reworking it now was that I wanted the story to be not about the futility of these arguments, but the passivity of which we are all capable, sometimes especially myself. The ways in which we don’t express ourselves so as to not cause trouble. It became about how violence and the threat of violence shape our willingness to be seen. It became about the politics of passivity, decidedly what the original version was not about.
In the end I feel much more confident about this version of “Mary Martin Just Bought a Revolver,” and here’s to hopefully getting it published soon!
Thanks for reading!
Mary Martin Just Bought a Revolver
I remember the first time I’d ever seen a gun. In person, I mean. I’d grown up watching John Wayne sling his six-shooters at bad hombres with even badder attitudes, my Dad cackling in the corner with his five o’clock shadow and his six p.m. beer. I remember watching Jack Ruby fire that single shot into Lee Harvey Oswalt’s chest. On live television, no less, through the static of my parents’ old Zenith.
They’d kept an issue of the Dallas Times Herald in a magazine rack in our bathroom, which had a photo of that very moment on the cover. Every time I went to take a piss I’d see Jack Ruby with his gun and Lee Harvey contorting his face from the impact of the bullet piercing his abdomen. I used to stand there with my dick in hand, a little gun of my own, and stare at the paper, wondering what the hell all those hapless cops were doing while Jack Ruby dashed across the basement of that parking lot with a revolver—toward a man who had just assassinated the president, no less. Truth be told, I hated looking at that thing and I once asked my parents if we could take it out, but Dad just yelled at me that it’d be a relic someday before making me mow the lawn. Never spoke of it again. Figured it was easier to deal with it than incur Dad’s wrath for questioning his and ma’s sense of home decor. When the time came to clean out their house after they’d passed—Dad first and Mom a few months after that—I cleared everything out but the magazine rack and that damn newspaper. I think I was afraid I’d hear my Dad’s sandals slapping my way against the hardwood floor and the verbal accosting that would ensue.
But the first time I’d ever seen a gun in person was at a bagel shop of all places—Crusties. Gosh, I must have been fourteen, fifteen. Beck Rombauer and I had snuck out of PE, as we sometimes did back then, for a quick snack. Old Mr. Blump always looked at us all suspicious-like when we’d sneak back, but I don’t think he knew for certain, despite the fact that we’d always return smelling like onions and chives. But there we were, in our maroon-and-gray gym garb, standing in line waiting to order, when I gradually felt this presence tugging at me, like some gravitational pull. Eventually it led my eyes toward a portly gentleman in sky blue jeans, which were tattered around his leather boots, standing beside us. The sleeves of his plaid button-up were rolled past his elbows, and he had a faded tattoo of some emblem underneath his hairy arms. Beside him was a little girl, presumably his daughter, whose face reminded me of a peony, and I remember her mouth was slightly wet and blue, as if she’d just been sucking on a lollipop. Beside her blonde hair, so light it was almost white, half-heartedly done-up in a ponytail, was a holstered revolver the size of a butternut squash and the color of obsidian, casually hanging off the side of the man’s hip. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the weapon because it suddenly felt as though the energy of the room had shifted. Like in a Western. Like when a stranger walks into a saloon and everything stops.
The lady at the counter addressed the guy like an elementary school teacher might address one of her unruly students. She said, “Now, Frank, why in the goddamn hell did you think it necessary to bring a goddamn gun into a goddamn bagel shop?”
Frank brought his arm around the girl beside him and held her close to his body, so close her head was almost jutting up against the butt of the revolver, said he and “this one” were off to the range for some much-needed firearm safety training. I remember him saying to the cashier, “Besides, Penny—how you think them bagels get them holes in ‘em?”
Beck had always wanted to be a writer. Her name even sounded writerly, one of those names you had to say in its entirety. Beck Rombauer. She’d thought it was hilarious what Frank said that one day and vowed to use it in a story, even had a notebook of such observations: things people said, wore, or ate, the way they styled their hair or tucked in their shirts, little details in bus stops and buildings. About a year after the incident at Crusties she hopped a bus to Los Angeles to live with her aunt and that was that. I’d always hoped that our paths in life would cross again, but I suppose it just wasn’t in the cards. Before I’d retired, my coworkers at the library always suggested I looked her up on the internet, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how simple it would be to find someone. Truth was, I felt as though I’d’ve been a bother to her. That was, of course, if she even remembered me at all.
The next time I saw a gun, in person, was about five decades later, when Mary Martin decided to pull one out at our weekly dinner party. Mary Martin. No relation to the actress. Used to be Mary Elizabeth, but after she married Jack, the name kind of stuck. Another one of those names you had to say in full. Our weekly dinners had become a ritual of sorts after Jack went and croaked. How he and Mary ever wound up together is as mysterious to me as the Mary Celeste.