When I was a young teen, I had an after-school job at the University of Pittsburgh’s library. Few of my schoolmates had jobs, and though I was not earning much by today’s standards, $1 per hour was good money for a teen in the early 60s. I established credit at a “buy here, pay here” jeweler and purchased gifts for my girlfriend, and luggage for my travels to my aunt’s house in Philadelphia, Penn. I paid for a phone line to be connected to my room in my mother’s house, and bought every bit of clothing that I wore for the four years I went to high school from our Wylie Avenue address. These sensible behaviors and responsible attitude were not present when I purchased a gun.
In Pittsburgh, Penn., in 1963, there was apparently a liberal allowance for age with regard to the purchase of a very realistic-looking gun that was designed to fire blanks and tear-gas. I’m sure that I was not older than 16 when I purchased my tear-gas pistol, which took a .22 caliber shell. I could load the gun with noise-making blanks, or tear-gas dispensing shells. The gun did not fire a projectile, but it did shoot a 4 to 6 inch flame, and when a mouse in our cupboard poked its curious head into the muzzle, a fire that I used to kill it. I loved that gun, and though I did not carry it with me to school or work, when I was at home, I would lay on the bed and hold it over my head, and marvel at the beauty of it. And in a moment of high comedy, while my brother and his friends were gathered in our living room, I fired tear-gas into the room and held the door closed. I laughed as I listened to the trapped boys gasping and wheezing, and took delight in their red and weeping eyes when I opened the door. My mother, who was not at home at the time, may not have ever known of this incident, but if she did, I don’t remember her saying anything about it, a memory of great amusement for “me and the boys.”
One day, the young lady who had been my girlfriend for the first two years of my high school days — and who was still a friend, of sorts, after we parted ways — was visiting my sister, also her friend. I heard her say that her current boyfriend was harming her. I offered her my tear-gas gun, thinking that she could swing it about and scare her attacker. When I saw her again, some months later, I asked about the gun. Though the gun had no lethal capacity (except against inquisitive mice), she told me that the boyfriend had taken it from her.
I don’t yearn for the days you could drink from a garden hose, ride a bike without a helmet and travel in a 1959 Buick without seat belts. When I think back on them I am startled and relieved to still be alive. I survived a lot of dangers as a child. I set fire to a concoction of liquids that included lighter fluid and baking soda, which blew up; I fled the scene, measled with dots of baking soda. I sailed a piece of shale into the dark night, and it pierced my best friend’s eye; I leapt, on a dare, from the second story window of an apartment building, landed, and staggered away.
And I laughed when I fired a gun into a closed roomful of helpless people.