Zen and the Art of Pistolcraft
The first time I came to Oregon I was co-piloting a Cruise America RV with my detective partner. In the back of the RV, which had a bucolic dockside scene on one side, and a cowboy riding a saddlebronc on the other, was a 300 pound veteran street-gang thug whose moniker was Mr.Chubz Loco.
Chubz, as we knew and loved him, was a third-generation gangster but had somehow managed to preserve a neuron of humanity after a gang war in our city started racking up a body count.
He felt bad about it, which is at least some measure of progress.
Frankly, the city really didn’t care about the shootings and stabbings until they started killing each other in front of tourists. Upsetting higher-end commerce triggered all kinds of eyebrow-shaving and political pressure to solve a problem many decades in the making, and if you work narcotics in America you also work gangs, so there we were, left to sort out the mayor’s sudden sense of urgency.
Anyway, wearing a “spy” watch we bought off Amazon—police budgets being what they are--even before the genius idea to “defund” departments went viral-- Chubz secretly recorded a full admission, by his own cousin, to the gang-turf murder of a fourteen-year-old boy with a car-jack handle.
Chubz was an informant, a snitch, and revealed as one in court, which means he was marked to die, which means we had to get him out, somewhere safe, where he could go on about the serious business of eating Bon Bons and Cheese Enchiladas, of playing video games 18 hours a day, without fear of being whacked by a hit squad of young scholars from Tamaulipas.
So, we took him to Oregon, to hand him off to the US Marshalls where he would disappear into a new life, with a new name, in the Federal Witness Protection Program.
This was before Trump 1.0, of course, before a president with dementia wandering off stage to shake hands with the air, before Trump 2.0, before men could get pregnant, before George Floyd and the Wuhan lab-leak unlocked years of pent-up political and religious fervor, before Epstein’s little island in the Caribe, and long before couples retreats for people in love with their AI chatbots.
Things weren’t simpler then, or safer. They were just different. Americans still convulsed wildly at headlines pumped out by the news-arms of their favorite political parties, still went brachiating at the Frontier Airlines ticket counter, still lost their minds during simple traffic stops, and still thought history began when they were born.
Some of those things never really change, they seem to be baked into humanity, as evidenced by the graffiti in Pompeii, which includes lewd, and somehow familiar, commentary about landlords and local committee puffs and pedants.
It was after a wrong turn in Sacramento that I realized Chubz, and the rest of us, might have more in common than we think. My partner had gotten us lost in a maze of confusing construction zones and so we were suddenly driving through a “Gun and Drug Free” zone of West Sacramento in a Cruise America RV, a large-style invitation to carjacking and robbery—if only because “Gun and Drug Free” zones are never either of those things. That’s when Chubz came forward and asked, earnestly, if we could loan him a gun.
When we landed in Oregon, at a popular tourist destination on the coast, and with some time to kill, I was inspired by a visit to a local hardware store where a Barrett .50 rifle was on display, and for sale, above a shelf full of paint. I thought: What a lovely state this is, you can walk out the door with four gallons of indoor/outdoor and a Barrett and go about your painting and shooting like a responsible citizen. Little did I know that such things, such glorious freedoms, were already critically endangered by Oregon’s small, but vocal, cadres of hall monitors and lunch-ladies.
It's likely, at least to some degree, that moment even informed our eventual decision to move here, a place where somebody once suggested that the cowboys all smoke weed and the hippies all carry guns. And maybe they still do, but maybe now they just have to pretend that they don’t--for fear of being uninvited to the big HOA potluck.
At any rate, here we are, with fully half the population screaming daily, and at the top of their lungs, about threats of fascism while simultaneously demanding free citizens disarm themselves. Even Chubz, a dedicated veterano, knew that sort of thinking was stupid. And anyway, Basho, that great wizard of the north, once wrote that before enlightenment there was only chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, he said, there is still only chopping wood and carrying water.
He could have said the same thing about guns.
Oh, no no no. This is only half the story. Did Mr.Chubz Loco make it to witness protection? Were guns ever used? (Check with Chekhov). The motor home! Did it cross rivers, deserts, mountain passes, without incident? Better yet, with incidents, gunfire to acquire more bon bons, We need to know these things!