gun

i own a gun. it's an old one and very pretty. it is not a gun i will ever use as a weapon, unless some fool breaks into my house when i'm at my desk and i use the butt of it to smack the person across the head. it is a solid gun, so it would probably slow a person down a bit and let me get away. since this sort of foolishness is unlikely, we'll go back to the fact that i will never use it as a weapon. it is a long gun with a lovely wood stock, made for the new york state militia, manufactured upstate. it is old enough to be considered an antique, something i don't have to register, even in nyc, as long as i don't by bullets for it. i don't intend to. but it took a lot to get me to be willing to have it here in my house. because the only thing it can be used for is to kill. in this case, it was designed to kill people. this makes me uncomfortable, even as a piece of history. i do not like the idea of killing people and probably would not be very good at it anyway.

here's the thing. when you decide to be a teacher and you go to teacher school, there's plenty you learn. i really did learn a lot. but i didn't learn to deal with things that make my heart and stomach relocate to the same place. like when a child dies. there are lots of ways a child can die and as many ways to manage yourself. in the four years i've been at my current school, we've had what seems like a surprising amount of deaths, both current and former students. illness and suicide are strong contenders for claiming the most children, but there's also self-destructive behavior (drunken car crashes, overdoses, falling from something you were never meant to be on) and one i have only dealt with once before this week. shooting.

shooting is tough, especially when you know the child who was shot dealt with guns or at least talked a big (and very realistic) game. because what you want to say is "violence begets violence" or "live by the sword, die by the sword" but then you don't expect them to really do it. so i want to tell you a little about this boy i know who was shot to death last week because he was pretty complex. and i told him more than once i was worried he'd get shot. he'd laugh and say, "not me." sometimes there's no joy in being right.

he came to our school midyear on a safety transfer. he was tall and looked too old for ninth grade, really, too old for high school. he wore an impressive scowl and the colors of a well known gang. he tagged up on the chalkboard (again with the gang stuff) and i called him on it. he walked up, towered over me and insisted i didn't know what i was talking about. i said i did. we argued back and forth for a while and then he did something i didn't expect. he didn't back down and he didn't threaten me. those are the two normal responses. he laughed. and when that scowl disappeared it was easy to see the child in there. he said i was alright and he laughed again. i erased the board. everybody won.

in the months that followed, he walked out of the room randomly, sometimes didn't show up, once ordered some delicious-smelling hot wings which he ate in class, threatened a girl and nearly beat her in a hallway because she grabbed his "flag" (a bandanna of a certain color worn in a pocket to signify gang membership or gay preferences, depending on the community, although i think the latter use has nearly died out). in class, though, he was brilliant. he knew strange and obscure answers and asked questions that led the class in fascinating directions. and the kids worshiped him. he was a born storyteller. the sort of boy who would do well in a college english program if we could get him there.

here, then, is the problem. the kids didn't worship him because he was smart. they worshiped him because he flashed large wads of cash and other kids were terrified of him. they worshiped him because of what he said about his exploits with weapons and drugs and in jail. because to a teenager, that's all very romantic stuff. of course, to teenagers, being shot is also romantic.

but then there's this other thing. teachers really liked him. we all knew who he was. he was very honest about it, but he was smart and just incredibly nice. drug dealer nice, i'd said at the beginning. see, if you're a drug dealer you have an excellent client base in a high school so you don't want to get in trouble. and he was drug dealer nice. but i think he was genuinely nice as well. a kid with these two parts- gang life and academic life. he was very good at both and was even managing to be very good at both at the same time. for a while.

but that doesn't last, and in the early hours of 14 july he was at a party with friends when two people with guns showed up. there was an argument that included this boy. one of the people with guns shot this child in the chest. he died out back of an apartment building in brownsville at 2am. now, two other boys were shot but survived and there were plenty of people around and i know some of them know what happened. but they won't say a word. they'd rather let the man who murdered their brother go free than be seen talking to cops. if people watch you being murdered and they don't help find the killer, are they really your friends? this is a real question i will ask my students. which brings me right back to the first murdered student i had eleven years ago. a drive by in a park on a sunday afternoon. plenty of witnesses. nobody saw a thing. the man who murdered him is still free, although i guess if he's been doing drive bys there's a good chance he's underground just like the two children he shot.

see, to anyone who reads an article in the paper on this child he's just a street thug who is part of a community of violence. that's what i think when i see other people shot in situations like this. to the kids who knew him he's a hero for standing up to a man with a gun, even though he's dead now and that doesn't really matter. but to me he was a smart child who would really like college if we could trick him into getting there. he had an easy sense of humor and an odd, unexpected kindness to him. he was important. he is important. and i don't see how it's ever going to be okay for the person who took him away to be walking the streets of brownsville with a gun.