22 | The Poetry Foundation

The guy my girlfriend ran off with

in 1983 drove a rusted-out Beetle

and carried a .22 pistol for runs to the bank

to drop off nightly deposits from the General

Cinema, where he was Assistant Manager

and where I worked and saw Rocky Horror

about 20 times more than I wanted to

in egg-and-tp-drenched midnight shows.

He lived in a rat-trap, roach-infested, leaning-over

shack on the edge of The Heights,

a few streets over from the house where,

in 2004, a local TV reporter was murdered

in her bed, her face beaten beyond recognition.

In 1988, on my first night as Assistant Manager

at a restaurant in Dallas, a fight broke out

between a pimp and a private investigator,

who also may have been a pimp. A group

of frat boys decided to jump in and knocked

the whole scrum over onto the floor

just on the other side of the bar from me.

The pimp came up pointing a .22 semiautomatic

directly at the closest object, which happened

to be my forehead. He didn't shoot—

just waved his gun around until everyone

cowered under their tables—then

calmly walked out the front door and down the street.

My best friend in sixth or seventh grade

moved to Arkansas from New Mexico.

Ron's skin was lizard-rough.

He raised hamsters and hermit crabs.

I struck him out for the last out of the Little League

Championship. We went out to his father's farm

and shot cans and bottles with his .22 rifle.

Back in New Mexico, he'd had some health problems

and his mother had shot herself in the head.

A few years ago, a dead body was found

buried on his father's property. Ron's son

ended up shooting himself in the head as well.

He was 22.

On December 14, 2012, an armed gunman

entered the Sandy Hook School with two pistols,

a Bushmaster .223, hundreds of rounds of ammunition,

and a shotgun in the car. Rather than turn right,

toward my wife's classroom where she pulled

two kids into her room from the hallway,

he turned to the left, murdered twenty children

and six adults, including the principal

and the school psychologist, both of whom

went into the hallway to stop the gunman,

and shot two other teachers, who survived.

After that, a lot of other things happened,

but it doesn't really matter what.