Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [104]
It was now 1975 and I was twenty-one. This was my first confrontational encounter with a loaded gun. My only goal was to keep both shells in the barrels of that gun. The very next sound I heard was not a shotgun blast.
“Don’t yell at me!” he shouted back.
Whew. He had chosen to engage me instead of the trigger.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell,” I said, my own voice now quivering. “It’s just that I’ve had a rough day and it just can’t fucking end like this with you killing yourself.”
Making it all about me really threw him off.
“Hey, man,” he said, lowering the gun from his head. “You OK?”
OK. So now I had confused a distraught crazy guy. This could go any of a number of ways. I decided to try to pull it together.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Not very professional of me.”
“I just can’t go on,” he said, calming down a bit. “Nothing in my life has worked out. And I don’t want you stopping me. I just want you to let me leave this world and…”
“Hey, you’re the one with the gun.” (I really didn’t need to remind him.) “You have the right and the power to leave this world anytime you want. All I’m asking for is a few minutes of your time. Can you please give me that?”
The muscles in his body relaxed a bit more, and he seemed to forget he still had a ready-to-fire gun in his hands.
“Yeah, I can do that.”
“How ’bout you let me hang on to the gun while we talk. When we’re done, I’ll give it back to you. Still loaded. You can make your decision then.”
There was a long pause and a longer stare at me and he considered my offer.
“C’mon. Gimme the gun,” I said with a faint smile. “The last fucking thing you and I need right now is a gun!”
As I said that, I laughed a nervous laugh, and a faint grin briefly grazed across his face. I had moved closer to him by now and was holding out my hand. He reached out and gave me the gun. I gently switched the safety on with my shaky hand and then cracked open the shotgun and removed the shells.
“Safekeeping,” I assured him. “Let’s go in here and talk.”
And for the next two hours I heard the story of his life. As I was the only one there, I could hear the phones ringing in the other room and automatically going to the answering machine. He told me about flunking out of a trade school and then losing a series of jobs due to his drinking. His wife had left him and returned twice, but now she had started seeing another guy in the same apartment complex. He had no kids but wanted some, and his parents thought of him as pretty much a loser. I could see how far down the rabbit hole he was, and I began to wonder if there was a point of no return beyond which one could not climb their way back up out of their pit of despair. He grew tired after a while and asked me if we had any booze in the place. I told him that wasn’t allowed, unless it was for special occasions like some guy wanting to blow his brains out. He got a good laugh off that and then decided to turn the tables on me.
“So, what’s your problems? Everybody’s got problems. What’s yours?”
I did not want to depress him further. I told him it’s the same as every guy: chicks.
“You got that right, man. They got our number. And then they don’t let up.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but they got their good points.”
“Heh-heh, you got that right, mister!” he said in that special code spoken only between guys.
“We just gotta keep at it and find the right one,” I continued. “She’s out there. Yours is out there. Mine is out there. Too many fucking women on this planet for there not to be the right one out there for us. Just gotta keep on keepin’ on.”
“Yup, keep on truckin’!”
We were just about out of mid-seventies catchphrases when all of a sudden it dawned on him that the phones had been ringing nonstop.
“Man, you the only one here?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, shit, man, I’m keepin’ ya from your job. You better get back to it.” He paused and thought for a moment. “Unless you need me to stick around and give ya some help on the phones.”
“Nah, that’s OK. I’m about ready to close down for the night after