I recently heard a story about two salesmen who spent so much time talking about sales that neither was ever successful. The things they said made perfect sense, on some level, but what remained were a handful of wasted moments and a tab to pay. There was a waiter, once, who never served a meal. He was an actor, I hear, and that tended to suffice. It didn’t change the absence of my dinner and drink.

I tell you this to explain and also to avoid explanation. Here we are. Here are the words that precede the words to come—these words. I’ll ultimately get to telling you about some graceless moment in my youth (this is me doing it) that leads naturally to this present moment: me with the gun, you reading the words describing it.

It’s nickel plated. I hear that’s good. The guy I stole it from was pretty proud of it. He’s dead, now, but I can assure you that I had nothing to do with that. I stole this gun years ago. I heard he died days ago. Heard, mind you. I’m not offering firsthand knowledge. He could still be alive, though I suppose that’s unlikely. I heard it from a good source.

Interestingly, I heard it from the guy I’m pointing the gun at, but I’d heard it before now. Hearing it had reminded me of the gun, though. There’s that. It’s like when I was in the bar the other night—the place that used to be Jake’s, just so you don’t think I’m being generic.

I got to talking to some guy about San Francisco. He said he always wondered if this place, The Palace Hotel with its garden courtyard of antique stained glass, had been affected by the earthquake. I said I’d call my aunt, which I did moments later. Coincidence had it that she’d be going to samesaid place, for the first time in her life, on the following day for tea. She wasn’t certain of an answer, but she promised to find out when she went. The answer came before her arrival for tea, however, in the form of her mother-in-law.

“It’s a good story,” said the mother-in-law, “I wish he was on the phone, now.”

Turns out this antique stained glass has to be cleaned by professionals. Following its standard schedule, it’d been removed from The Palace, piece by piece, marked, and transported to a restoration house in Oakland. The process was time consuming, but it had been begun precisely two months prior to the earthquake. Had this not been the case, the stained glass would have been destroyed. Happenstance and the subjective taste of some divinity, however, were so kind as to spare it. The pieces were returned, on schedule, a short time after the earth had settled back into its routine. All were happy.

I was looking forward to telling the guy at the bar this story on some later date, but such forward looking hadn’t accounted for this moment in which I now find myself. The liklihoods of failure, of prison, and of themes unconsidered seem to have grown since that night, but that’s how these things happen. Somebody says, “Joe Hinton’s dead,” and then you get to thinking about that time you stole that gun from Joe Hinton for shits, and then you inevitably notice that the guy who reminded you of the gun is counting the safe drop for the night. You make notes of time and position. You always knew them, but now your not the you that you were before you noticed.

Times are tight becomes the writing in the legend of the map. That’s the map I read on the wall of my bedroom when I grabbed the gun. These are the other words, arranged thoughtfully, but not so thoughtfully that it seems I’ve tried. It needs to look good, is all, just not so good that it looks like I’ve tried. Trying is the hallmark of a—

“No,” I say. “I’m not joking. Give me the money.”

The problem here is simple: this guy, Allen, he knows me. I’d been thinking I could offer him a cut and we’d both be cool, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that I’ll have to kill him.

How do you feel about changes in tense, pronounced changes with visible comings? I only ask becausee there might suddenly be one. I might be saying something like, “I watch his eyes trace the line from my eyes to his face and then the line from the gun to his face and there’s no doubt left in his mind how serious I am,” but then I might follow it with something like, “He looked up at the cieling, like a liar might, and calculated his options.” The lame “like a liar” part might be something I would actually say, but it’s not present enough. It’s not real. It’ll stick, I think, but regardless, the shift in tense seems unforgivable.

I could go one worse, keep the changed tense, and change the person, too. I might suddenly cease to be me alltogether. I might find myself drawn up in the action as some distant me writes it. From, “I wonder if he’s got any notions,” to “There were once two men.” Action comes naturally to two men. The story of two men could be as simple as what follows.

There were once two men. One had a gun. The other did not. The man with the gun threatened violence. The man without a gun capitulated, albeit with resentment. It seems the two had once been friends. Satisfied with his get, the man with the gun was prepared to leave, but he wavered. This friend was sure to identify him. An offer of being cut-in was unlikely to satisfy the resentful and gunless man. So it was, with some saddness, that the man with the gun came to shoot the man without one.

Timestamp: 11.13.06 at 12:54 AM. Filed under: Fiction.