Gun Church

me by better men than him. Besides, I stood up to him. I’ll be fine.”

“Is that what Jim says?”

“What’s this got to do with Jim?”

“Just forget it,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

She grew quiet, quickly finished the dishes, and left, but I knew she’d be back. They always came back. All except for Amy.

Ten

Magician’s Hat

I met Jim after school as agreed, my old golf bag and clubs slung over my shoulder. He drove a beat-up Ford F-150 pickup. There wasn’t anything unusual in that. Pickups were de rigueur in Brixton. Took me a year to figure out that the parking lot at Wal-Mart wasn’t the staging area for a monster truck show. I didn’t say much of anything after I got into the cab. I figured to let the kid do the talking. He did some, but he was decidedly less expansive about the essential nature of handguns than he had been previously. He seemed far more interested in discussing what a prick Stan Petrovic had been and how cool it was that I stood up to him.

Even as Jim bragged on me, the St. Pauli Girl’s question rattled around in my head: “If Jim wasn’t there, would you have … you know, done that?” Smart question, that. She knew and I knew the answer was no.

Hero worship is a potent drug. I knew firsthand that it could make both the worshipper and worshippee do some fairly risky things. Just ask the assistant editors and PR girls who’d slept with me, or the society fans who fucked me in bathrooms at parties with their husbands in the next room. Sometimes I wonder what those PR girls, the assistant editors, and the society dames think of me these days. There probably isn’t enough chewing gum or mouthwash in the world for them to rinse away the taste of those memories, if they remember at all. I laughed to myself, imagining them telling their middle-aged friends about having blown the great Kip Weiler. Kip who? Exactly, ladies. Kip who?

“What are you smiling at, Kip?” Jim asked, smiling himself.

“Just reminiscing.”

“Do you think about the old days much?”

“More recently. Since Frank Vuchovich was killed, I’ve been remembering things I haven’t thought about for a long time.”

“Like about your dad.”

It was as if he’d hit me with a steel pipe. “How did you-you know about that?”

“That he killed himself and that you found him? Yeah, uh huh, I know. Sometimes I think I know more about your life than I do about my own, Kip. If life was college, you’d be my major. So why did your dad do it?”

“Because he was a miserable person. I don’t know. He didn’t leave a note. Just like him too, not to leave a note. I think he did that just to torture my mother.”

We didn’t talk again for quite a while.

Every time the truck hit a bump, my old golf clubs smacked into the sidewalls of the pickup box. Not that I really gave a shit about those clubs. Although they weren’t quite as old as my brown corduroy blazer, they were woefully out of date. Jim noticed the racket too.

He said, “I guess I should have tied your clubs down.”

“They’re not my clubs anymore. They’re yours now.”

“Huh?”

“I didn’t know what we were going to do today, but I didn’t think you really wanted to go hit golf balls, Jim. If I took a swing in anger after all these years, I’d dislocate both shoulders. I dug those old clubs out for you … as a gift.”

He pulled the truck over to the side of the road. Uhoh. I was a manipulative asshole, but I was much more adept at it with women. I knew just how to play them in the key of me. I was on less steady ground with men. Luckily, he didn’t get that goofy can-I-blow-you-now look on his face.

“I can have your clubs?”

“If you want them, they’re yours.”

“Thanks, Kip.” He shook the life out of my hand.

“You’re welcome. I’m happy to do it.”

And I was.

I should have gotten rid of those golf clubs a long time ago. I’d shed every other vestige of my old life except my car. Strange, the things a man clings to. I remembered all too well the last time I had used my clubs. Back then, “CC” at the end of a place name meant country club and not community college. I was teaching at Columbia, my writing career aimed squarely at the abyss. Things with Amy were deteriorating, and the end of my time at Ferris, Ledoux was at hand. Meg Donovan, in a misguided attempt to salvage what was left of my career, had arranged for me to meet with Peter Moreland III, an up-and-coming editor at the Travers Group. His rise through the ranks wasn’t hurt by the fact that his family was a majority stockholder in Travers’s parent company.

When he called, Moreland was all good cheer and WASPy old-boy charm. He was polite, self-deprecating, and flattered the hell out of me. He just loved Moira Blanco, but supposed a change of editors might do me some good. Chemistry in publishing, he noted, was a fickle thing. He even seemed willing to turn a blind eye to my recent coke- fueled self-sabotage. He said he always appreciated my edginess and hoped his editing could help re-sharpen it.

“Why don’t you come up to the club on Sunday? Oh, and please bring the missus,” he’d said as if an afterthought.

Afterthought, my balls. Looking back, I can’t point to any one thing he said or did after our round of eighteen that betrayed his interest in Amy. He even had the good taste to keep a Daughter of the American Revolution centerfold by his side. Her name was like Zoe Gates-Tilton or Bates-Swinton or some such thing. Bart Meyers would have referred to her as a shiksa goddess.

Moreland didn’t ignore Amy. He was properly attentive. He knew her work and that led to a discussion of her more well-known contemporaries. It was as polite and civil a discussion of painting as I’d ever heard. In retrospect, the chat between Peter and Amy may not have been all that polite because I really didn’t hear much of it. I was jonesing like mad and my internal voice kept at me to order another scotch or take a run to the bathroom for a toot. To distract myself from my addictional callings, I pondered the full shape and color of the fair Zoe Swinton-Tilton’s assertive nipples. The distraction was fleeting because I was scared shitless at the idea of talking future books with Moreland. This was before I’d met the man I would come to think of as McGuinn. Besides, for all my legendary debauchery, I never actually cheated on Amy while she was present. To show you just how fucked up I was, I used to think I deserved credit for that.

Amy recognized the signs of me falling apart and tried valiantly to steer Peter’s conversation to my work. She had, by one means or another, been trying to rescue me from my self-destructiveness for years. It wasn’t as if Peter Moreland didn’t attempt to follow my wife’s lead. He tried several times to engage me in talk of new projects, which in turn led me to order another scotch and to turn my boorishness up another notch. Only after I began to speculate aloud about whether Zoe shaved or waxed did things disintegrate.

In the car on the way home Amy asked for a divorce. I don’t remember my exact response because I was so thoroughly wasted. I vaguely recall begging her to stick it out with me for a few more years. Junkies get skilled at begging. I remember that she started crying and told me that I couldn’t afford her and that she could no longer afford me. She moved into her Tribeca studio that Tuesday night. I think I was at Indiana University when I heard she’d married Moreland.

Jim must’ve noticed the sick look on my face. “Something wrong?”

“Not now. That’s the problem with reminiscing.”

“What is?”