A CHRONICLE OF MY DEATH FORETOLD

A SMALL ESSAY

My father had this wild habit. At dinner time he would take whatever handgun he’d been carrying that day and place it unholstered on the table beside his plate. Never had the safety on. You better believe we kids were the quietest eaters you ever met, with all kinds of manners.

Dude often threatened to shoot us whenever he thought we had done something extra wrong. Without question, though, I was his favorite bull’s eye. One promise he made whenever he really lost it with me: I’m going to wait until you’re 18 and when you’re walking alone at night you’re going to run into me and I’m going to shoot you, and no one will ever know I did it.

I swear he must had said this craziness at least once a month and with extreme emphasis. In front of my mother, too, and she never said peep, which had me convinced she’d probably cover for him.

This shit was funny to us kids because we had poor-kid-sense-of-humor — but also not funny because we had seen our father shoot at the Englishtown Rifle Range and he was deadly with it. Plus, when my dad beat us, he often lost it completely and more than once had to be pulled off us, so restraint was not exactly his strong suit. Also in our corner of New Jersey a father lighting up his family was not entirely out of the range of possibility. One of our neighbors had taken his whole family hostage with an M16 and we had to wait for the cops to talk him down before we were allowed back into our apartment.

By the time I was 12 I was convinced that dude was seriously going to shoot me in a dark alley, and I was starting to think I might have to shoot him first. You get punched in the head enough you start coming up with some real illogical stuff. He had taken us to the range enough that I could have easily done it on a mechanical level. I wasn’t him or my brother with the accuracy, but I wouldn’t have missed, either. In those days when I shot, I almost never missed.

But could I have done it? Not likely. Whenever me and my brother fought I always pulled my punches, didn’t want to hurt him. (He never returned the favor, always smashed me full-out.) I probably would have shot myself way before I shot him.

Anyway, never had to find out. After one last brutal ass-kicking of yours truly that had me showing up to school with a black eye, an ass-kicking that had me plotting patricide for real, my father walked out of the apartment and never came back. For whatever reason he left some of his pistols, and for a while I kept one of them under my bed, loaded, safety released, just in case. Sometime later my mother must have found it because she put it back in her bedroom with the others — but by then I had bigger problems than my father.