June 29, 2017
Last night there was a steady rain, which was pleasant to hear in the late evening in the final waking minutes of my day. Water droplets were plinking on my window unit air conditioner, and occasionally through the window, flashes of lightning would burst from the darkness. Just as I was putting the final touches on this book (which has been, for me, a long meditation on the pain of gun violence), I heard several loud pops ring out in the alley not a few hundred yards away from my apartment. There were between a dozen and quite possibly seventeen pops. We are on the cusp of the Fourth of July holiday, so naturally I wanted to believe that what I heard was the opening rounds of firecrackers going off into the holiday weekend. But I had my doubts. Who sets off firecrackers in the rain? Who starts the firecracker jubilee on the 28th of June at 11:15 pm? Also, what firecrackers resound with such intentionality? They were loud bangs too, almost like M80s.
By the time I walked down the hallway to my bedroom, I heard the tell-tale sirens from several police vehicles and ambulances arrive on the scene telling me that what I had heard was a shooting, which suggested to me that I had witnessed the death of another victim brought down in the epidemic of gun violence that has shaken our city.
Or maybe it was just firecrackers. So far this morning, I haven’t seen any trace of a neighborhood shooting in the news.
This gun violence, which is at the beating heart of our American identity, is something I wanted to address as a writer.
My own brother loved guns. He lived in a rural Illinois community at the far end of a gravel road that petered out into a dirt trail where stood his ramshackle dwelling—literally, from my vantage point, in the middle of nowhere. He was a hunter and he loved shooting animals not just for sport, but also for the hell of it. (Not unlike Zhmukhin’s sons, so wonderfully described in Chekhov’s story, The Pecheneg.) My brother also had set up several targets on his property and with plenty of artillery and ammunition he loved to have friends down to go plinking.
Later in his life he moved north to Fargo. He told me a story once. He said he asked a cop in Fargo if he could drive around North Dakota with a loaded gun in his truck. The cop told him that not only did he not care if my brother drove around North Dakota with a loaded gun in his truck, it was OK with him if he drove around with a loaded gun in his mouth.
Eventually, my brother, who had been kicked out of the economy (and whose social isolation contributed to his alcoholism, or vice versa) found himself out of money and out of luck in Pierre, South Dakota. He left his favorite watering hole and drove to his favorite fishing hole outside of town where there was nothing but open land in all directions, and he finally did as that cop suggested. He sat in his truck and he put a loaded gun in his mouth and he shot himself. He was a victim of that other epidemic of gun violence raging across America: suicide of white males over fifty years old.
The problem for me about writing about gun violence in the city is that other than hearing it through my window at night, and reading about it in the newspapers, it is mostly gang-related violence which has devolved into a chaotic Hatfield and McCoy grudge match of vengeance and counter vengeance. I have no connection to the gang violence here on the South Side of Chicago other than it happens in my neighborhood and community, and in that sense I am a victim of it. (Therefore, send not to know/For whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee.) Yet as a novelist I can’t write about this type of gang-related gun violence from a position of authority. I can, however, write a book about guys like my brother, and that’s what I attempted to do with this book.
Harold Pinter’s poem Death really shook me up when I first read it, and I used it as a guide to show me how to write about gun violence. I also wrote my own poem on the subject, which a previous shooting on a previous summer night in a previous alley had inspired me to write. I include it here.