Me and a Gun by Mark Skeele Wilson

An assured and soft-spoken teacher instructs her kindergarten class as I kneel between desks offering help to her tiny pupils. I love it here on the rough rug, training my keen eyes over ten sets of wide ones. They are still learning school appropriate behavior, things most of us don’t realize we know and were once explicitly taught. Chairs are for sitting, ears for listening. This is how we move from our desks to the carpet. We no longer sit Indian style, but criss-cross applesauce. On the board are drawn four groups with identical items in each. Four popsicles stand alongside one another. Beside them are four forks and then four pencils. The final group causes me to question my ideology as I consider why we are looking at four Christmas trees during a mid-August lesson and realize that, here in Arctic Alaska, they are simply trees.

I sit bemused as the teacher distributes worksheets and the children flail in an attempt to pass papers down a column of desks. The worksheets show the same four groups of four popsicles, forks, pencils and Simply trees. One item in each group of four is set slightly askew from its doppelgängers. They appear thus:

X X X X

The teacher begins the exercise. “Today we will learn about Same and Different. Three of these items look the Same. Can we cross out the one that is Different?” Some of the more eager children begin to crawl across their desks, arms outstretched, calling out That one-That one! A few quietly eye their own papers. One leaps up and is told to return to his seat. She calls another to come to the board. He takes the marker, unsure, perhaps never having written on a whiteboard before. The teacher demonstrates, tracing an X with her finger, creating a slightly whiter line through remnant erasures, and through the popsicle that is Different, the third popsicle that obstinately stands askew. I feel suddenly hurt. I think No. The boy raises his arm and creates something like an X through a popsicle that has never done anything to anyone, nothing except assert its Difference before a classroom of children learning to smite Difference from groups of Same. I feel this second X more dearly than the teacher’s first, subtle incision, like the deepening of a wound at my chest.

Over the next few minutes I help the children to either side of myself repeat this exercise three times. I find myself a reluctant cutter. Each X is a wound I can feel where previously I was numb. I want to stop helping them. I want to grab a pair of safety scissors hastening them through each row of four to save those slued line drawings. I want to rush out of the room, mushing their confetti before me, herding my flock to green pastures where they can grow woolly outside the reach of these child-wolves in their mother’s den.

§

I have bought a gun. It is a Ruger .44, a 50th Anniversary collectors’ item. (I don’t find that I care about this last detail.) Around here it is a bear gun, not for hunting, but easily carried and drawn in an encounter. In a couple of weeks I’ll be back in Kotzebue, a town of some few thousand people off the road system in rural Alaska, and can revisit the gun shop that stands directly behind and seemingly within one thousand feet of the school. It seems everyone needs at least two guns. (And the clerk does not notice that I bite my tongue so as not to blurt, “One for day, one for evening.”) This second gun, if acquired, would be for hunting. One gun in case I am found, one for finding. And it scares me to have this gun as it scares me to be found, my Difference discovered. And will they come for me?

I decided I need a gun upon sighting some rather daunting bear tracks just outside my home in Kiana, a smaller Arctic town off the road system in Arctic Alaska, but I am uncertain I can go through with the purchase. My first afternoon in Kotz I walk past the gun shop just as I walked past gay bars any number of times during my early New York City days (daze?), trying to curl my mind into a determined fist with courage to enter. I made a pleading attempt to glean information from an untelling exterior and ungenerous windows. In New York at least I could pretend to speak on my cell phone during such surveillance, but my cell won’t work north of Anchorage, hundreds of miles away. In Kotz I walk at a crawl wondering how I will enter this fortress of Same; men who are the Same and relate through their Sameness and have guns so easily drawn to cross an X through Difference. I feel I understand a common expression in a way that I never before considered: Eyes are the windows to the soul, but each sees outward only. To see in I must go in.

§

Since deciding to buy a gun I cannot chase Tori Amos’s “Me and a Gun” from my mind and lips. Men who are the Same likely don’t know the song, it is the account and reflection of a rape. It is a monologue of victimization, pondering, and salvation within the mind. The last time I remember the song occurring to me I was on a mechanical table in the basement of Beth Israel, being radiated, my cancer eradicated. My mind would wander to the ludicrous; reality was an exercise in the absurd. And I felt things happening to me beyond my control.

Before that I was in the ninth grade, singing along with the song, wondering when (not if) this crime was committed against my mother. She wouldn’t tell me about the rape for another seven years, but I knew. I knew it had happened when I learned what rape was, just as I knew I was gay when I learned what gay was. It was the word I was missing for the experience I was having, whether that was my first crush on a boy, or all those times riding in a car at night with my mother, her anxiety palpable, her eyes flickering to the fuel gauge, her body pressing forward: Make it home. Her trauma was a genetic trait, her fear imprinted on me like the freckles on each of our shoulders, neither of us safe among men.

I want to tread lightly here.I do not want to compare rape too closely to any other experience. But the depth of that song, and its example of the mind bringing us to safe harbor, spoke to me about my mother’s anger and need to heal, of my helpless Difference as a junior high school student, and my resolve to get out of this as the metallic taste of radiation rose through my esophagus one fall dawn in New York City. And so I find myself in an Arctic village.

§

Miss J is an expert teacher. If you’ve never seen an expert teacher at work, it is something to watch. It is as though a prima ballerina has been commanded to dance among the cantankerous floor audience of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater (smells and all, unfortunately). These onlookers will come in and out of the performance in entirely unpredictable ways, each presenting the master with the obstacle of themselves. The ballerina must take the onlooker-obstacle, bring her into the dance, and convince her to sway and leap. The more expert the teacher the more children who fall into the dance, each believing himself or herself the star, each taking their part in the style of a classic cinema musical, everyone synchronizing upon the realization of their part to play. They may lose the beat or explore the melody ungracefully, but our ballerina meets them, rights them, and pirouettes to the next obstacle-opportunity.

Miss J is just this sort of teacher. As she rebelliously glissades and pliés among the yipping jaws and syrupy gripping paws of our little persons, she exudes more personality and expertise than they could ever counter with ignorance, petulance or bewilderance. She is something to watch. She code switches so well I imagine her interpreting for the U.N., relaying one English dialect to another with brassy movements and melodious flair. In private she is hilarious, seeing, and serious. And she prods.

She wants to know that I am gay, for me to say it. She tells me in so many words, “It’s okay, I know.” I wonder how to convey that her knowing gives little ease to my saying. Friends are few in a village of fewer than four hundred people. And Miss J is just the sort of friend I need if I am to last here. (And I want to last. To see this place is to want to thrive here.) When I met her it was as though I knew she’d been missing all these long years. I am afraid to lose her. What will happen when she sees how much growth I need before I am even close to the teacher she is? What will happen when she finds me morally weak and unable to learn from life’s experiences? I am trying to build a relationship upon our two columns before the cracks appear in mine.

We stay up together till five in the morning, laughing, lulling, and admitting (all but That). I glance at the black band tattooed around my wrist. I tell people it is the one tattoo among my fourteen that I regret; that it was an impulse. And it was. I got it a day after conjuring the idea to do so. I tell them it is meaningless. It is not. What I have not told is that I considered writing in small script just below it: hidden in the open. My intention was to always cover it with a wristwatch. But it would remind me of who I am; it is a thread tied round my finger, forever a rubber band round my wrist. But what habit am I breaking? Certainly not the habit of fear. I am someone who puts himself out there, and remains in hiding. I try to be Daniel-san in the Karate Kid. I’ll always attend the party, my crimson shower curtain drawn tightly around.

When I got the tattoo I never considered that a reminder of who I am would so often cut at who I try to present, so constantly burn like dull acid. I say that I regret the tattoo but that is not quite right. I resent it. What is this tattoo to tell me who I am? It calls to me like a child yelling Faggot! Innocent but injuring. There are those who believe you should not complete a tattooed circle on your body; it severs the appendage. I do not want to believe this, but there are times when I feel my left hand ache in a way that is best described as phantom pain, like an amputee who can still feel a lost limb. I look down not expecting to see my hand there. Representative relationships from our common knowledge arise in my unwilling mind: I have cut off my hand, my left hand. The hand is the extension of the body to the world. I have cut myself off from the world. The left hand is the representation of the heart, the right: strength. I have the strength to do my will, but not the heart to experience it fully.

This morning I awaken and wonder at Eve’s good grace, having actually tasted the apple. It is as though I am Eve, and summoning all of my will against that of God and the Fates I take the largest bite I can muster. Canines crash on fibrous flesh. Yet it is not enough. God has defeated me; I may know, but I taste nothing. And I tremble before him. I feel severed, separate from myself and my experience. I want to be an entirety, and entirely a part of things.

Mark Skeele Wilson is a writer, filmmaker, and educator. Originally from New York, he currently lives and teaches in Utqiaġvik, Alaska.