Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [103]
Unfortunately for me, I was the only one there, pulling the graveyard shift. Shit, did I just call it that?
“C’mon,” I continued, trying to hide the shakiness in my voice. “It’s gonna be OK. We’re here for you.”
With the word you, his scattershot eye movements came to a halt and locked on me. And then he started to sob, but without tears.
“C’mon, brother, it’s OK. Let it out.”
And with that the sobbing stopped.
“Are you who I talked to on the phone?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “You might have been talking to Craig. His shift just ended and he’s not here. But I’ll talk to you. Let’s say we put down the gun first, OK?”
And with that he put his finger on the trigger.
My lungs slammed shut and my heart felt like it went with them. I had a half second to make up my mind about what to do. Do I run? Do I rush him? Do I beg him to let me live? Do I try to stay calm and appear strong so as to steady him? Do I say my last prayer?
“Wait!” I said forcefully, without shouting. “That is not an option.”
He stopped and looked at me like a dog that didn’t want to obey his master’s order, but for some reason his brain knew only that he must.
“What do you mean it’s not an option?” he screamed back at me.
“Because,” I said firmly with the sternest look I could muster through my own holy-shit terror and fear. “Because. I. Said. So.”
A thought from my training clicked in my head: They call it an audience suicide because the suicide needs an audience. He kills me, there’s no audience. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me. He was going to kill himself. And let me live with the image of that for the rest of my life. I was the stand-in for the abusive parent, the cheating wife, the disloyal friend, the bastard of a boss, the voice in his head. I was to be punished the way “they” had punished him his whole life—or, maybe, just this past week.
With his finger on the trigger, he placed the shotgun barrel under his chin and prepared to pull.
“I am not impressed,” I blurted out. “Do you hear me? And right now, you are pissing me off because you have no idea how much I care about you, and right now I’m all you got, and goddammit, if you took a second to put that gun down and talk to me you’d know you’ve got a friend here—me—right here, and fuck it, I’m worth at least a couple goddamn minutes of your time!”
I had no idea what I just said. What I did know was that it sounded all wrong. Nothing like what was in the “empathy training” the county workers gave us when I came up with the idea to open this place. I was nineteen then, and I didn’t see any adult organization doing much good when it came to truly helping young people. A teenager would run away and get caught, and instead of anyone listening to them to find out why they ran away—like, maybe they had a reason to run away—they were just sent back home, often for another beating or molestation. The experience I had with a friend who needed an abortion but couldn’t get one because it was illegal in Michigan, plus a classmate who had overdosed and another kid from my old Boy Scout troop who had hung himself was enough for me to start this hotline center. My rules: It would be run by young people for young people. You need a place to crash, you got it. You need a pregnancy test, we do it for you. You high on drugs? Drop by and let it wear off while sitting with us. We will never call the cops, and your parents will never know.
The ethos of this was shocking to many of the adults in the area, although some, like the VFW and the Rotarians, wrote us checks because they saw the good work we were doing, even if it was a bit unorthodox. But the results were that the runaways didn’t keep running, young girls weren’t forced to have babies they couldn’t care for at sixteen, we handed out free birth control, and our phone lines were open from 3:00 p.m.