There are three things in this life you should never look directly at: a solar eclipse, a Gorgon, and the barrel of a loaded gun.
One Friday night in 1992 in Chicago, my friend Brett and I had been out drinking and were about to call it a night. Even though I was an art student, I was wearing a suit — some of my work was in a show that had opened earlier that evening, so I was dressed up. I was carrying a heavy backpack on my back (anyone remember Gardner's Art Through the Ages?) and a gallon of milk and a couple bags of groceries from Dominick's, where I'd ducked in after the bar so I wouldn't have to leave my apartment for breakfast in the morning. We turned off of Broadway onto my street — West Briar St. — and talked loudly as we stumbled along. It was close to 2:00 AM.
Halfway down the block, I happened to glance back. I noticed another walker had just turned off of Broadway onto Briar, and was walking on our side of the street. Nothing about it struck me as odd. I just noticed. After another quarter of a block, I looked back again. The guy was closer that time, and I quietly told Brett that I thought someone might be following us. We were just about to the end of the first block.
I turned to look over my shoulder, to see if the guy really was closing the gap between us like I had thought, or if I was imagining it, and then so much happened at once. Mainly, there was the gun barrel. As I was turning around, he was raising the gun to meet my head. And he spoke:
It's this motherfucking simple.
Yes, it was. It was brutally, punctually simple. Some part of my brain — a part that is apparently capable of understanding without deliberating, a part I had never known before and have rarely met since — took over and, before I knew it and without thought, I was running. I was running, and I was yelling at that bastard with the gun.
"Don't shoot! Oh god, please don't shoot! You fucker! Fuck you, you fucking asshole! Goddamnit! Please don't shoot me, you fucker! Please!"
I felt the weight of my backpack and considered shaking it off so I could run faster. Then I remembered Gardner in there. It was probably thick enough to stop a bullet. Keep the backpack. Then the groceries. Eggs, fruit, bread, milk. The gallon of milk. I threw it at the ground right behind me as I ran, as hard as I could, hoping to slow the fucker down. I rounded the corner at Halsted and went left. Finally, back on a busy street. I realized he hadn't shot me yet. There was an Osco on the next block. Automatic doors. Slow ones. A shopper leaving, which meant the exit door was already open, and the shopper was short, and I plowed over this short guy and into the Osco and ran deep into the store, still pleading for my life, cursing and damning and calling for help. I ran up and down the aisles. Like a dog, I remember thinking, a stupid dog in a lightning storm, in a wide open field, trying to hide itself behind the taller blades of grass.
The short man I had overrun came to me in the aisle. "What happened?" he asked.
The guy, the guy chasing me, he had a gun. Help me. Gun. I was out of breath and I couldn't talk and I was terrified and I couldn't talk and I was trying to escape from the guy with the gun and I couldn't talk.
"He didn't come in after you," said the short man. "He kept running."
Gun. He has a gun. Help me.
"I know, I saw it," he said. "I'm a cop. Why was he chasing you?"
I don't know. I don't know. He has a gun. Please help me.
"You have no idea why he was chasing you?"
No. He has a gun. Please help me.
"You smell like alcohol."
You remember the sound your Fisher Price record player would make if you slowed the turntable to a stop while it was playing? Like a much larger machinery was halting? That's what the world did right then. That's how it called me back into it. I didn't even know I'd been gone.
"I've been drinking," I replied. "But what difference does it make? That guy was chasing me with a gun, and you just said you're a cop. What the hell is this?"
The cop declared that the perp had gotten away. Said he'd take my report and file it. Asked where I lived and if I needed help getting home. I lived right around the corner, I told him, and I asked if he would walk with me to the building, and he did.
It was nearly a decade before I saw Brett again after that night. In that instant wherein I had run, he had pulled his wallet from his pocket and thrust both hands into the air and frozen before realizing that the attacker had gone after me and left him there.
It was weeks before I could be outside of my apartment after dark. It didn't matter how large of a group or how safe the neighborhood. I had visceral terror if I wasn't home by the time the sun started to set.
For years, I crossed the street, far too often, to avoid black men. I couldn't help it. I tried to talk myself out of the profiling. I talked about it with black friends at school. I talked about it to anyone who would listen.
Have you ever broken down a handgun? It's a simple device. Elegant in its way. Easy to take apart. Easy to put back together. Easy not to fear.
21 years later, what haunts me isn't having been held up, isn't the gun, and it isn't having been chased. No, the enduring damage came from the guy's declaration about how motherfucking simple it was. Bullshit. There was nothing simple about that. And this, I think, is the problem with guns: the lie of their simplicity. Loaded or empty. Cocked or not. Living or dead. It is quite literally at our peril to misunderstand guns as in any way simple.
That night robbed me of simple. Most of me wishes I could get it back. But a tiny part of me — the part I met that night, the part that's capable of understanding without deliberating — knows better. Knows simplicity is gone. Knows, maybe, that it never existed apart from fantasy in the first place.