The media took a shot at reporting the gunplay on July 14. But the truth is not even a dirty realist could nail down what happened, in twentyfour hours, within the Big Apple, what in fact was brought down by all those guns: that all of a sudden they rerouted seven and a half lives aged three to eighty-three in their cribs and on crowded stoops and cars, first a plump divorcée with butterfingers, nervous about her huskier exhusband, then a part-time robber sweating in a rubber Michael Dukakis mask, then a shy thirteen-year-old sleepily watching a video of "The Beauty and the Beast" in his darkened music appreciation class, then young George Logston's smelly pet rottweiler during a police raid of the wrong house, then the eighty-three-year-old suffering from liver trouble in a loft, then Mrs Astarita, a waitress at the Burger King on Utopia Parkway and stepmother of twins, then the infant Amber Rayne who had regularly peed her diaper, her little sister Julia nearby dry in Pampers, or was it Silvia, both used to the sound of gunfire, then the hatchetfaced clocker on the corner of Saint James Place, whose death unleashed a blockparty to beat the band. Then, consequently, among persistent screams, epileptic-like fits of anguish, tears, children, shouts and thundering shoes in hallways, when rubberneckers were already craning and shoving over snatched suitcases of relatives and neighbors too terrorstricken to fret out the night at the scene, leaving the awful mess for an inconceivable return home to clean up smashed glass, pulverized bricks, ripped curtains, plasterboard and staining gouts and outpourings of blood, when already were heard arriving lunatic sirens and roaring cars had emptied themselves of pairs of plainclothesmen, and ambulances belonging to the fire and police departments were flooring it on their way, then, finally, the bodies snapped back to the dead center of attention, oh! the faces!, emaciated with the atrocious suction of death, or bloated with the multicolored force of what had escaped from inside, like a silent film comic blasted with crimson pies, the eyes curdled shut or bugged out in a frozen instant of disbelief, or not where they should be, just holes denuding bones, gristly and stained bones like some hellish soupstock surrounded by strange tubes resembling red macaroni bubbling up in gobs like a dark lava folding on itself: and expectorate strips, garden slugs, or so they seemed, maybe muscle or more probably adipose and general flesh splattered on all the furniture or street already dirtied, splashed on the new terror of women missing a shoe and grasping themselves without minding the smears and the spills amongst the sobs and cries of their hundred surviving young. They could already feel the chest, and the fine mechanisms of the nose and jaw, ache in anticipation of their own crazy projectile.  
      The cryptosymbolic conspiracy of sirens perfected these cries. Policecars roared speeding from lit precincts while others were instantly spun around by radio, the crony riding shotgun stumbling from a bodega teetering, in his left hand, a carton with two white coffees and a halfdozen donuts, the right opening the door of the Fury already rolling from the curb.  
      The somnolent agressiveness of cabdrivers who scythe through the thighs of tourists and officeworkers on break and, tubs of guts inside the car (but angry rhinoceri without), tame the crowds only partially safe on the sidewalk until the lights change, here they are screeching to a stop by transistorized admonishing sounds blocking everything followed by an earsplitting charge of metal and spinning lamps. Even the lovers in the horsecarriages wheeling through the Park wonder where in the city they're going. The mare, blindered, clomps to a halt, swinging her head up, her rump bringing up the coach and her invisible eyes white with some unknown new terror.  
      And the effects of the gunplay in the five boroughs were terrifying. The three-year-old Amber Rayne, left in the apartment on 168th Street with her smaller sister while their mother was out interviewing for a job as a nurse's aide, drawn by sharp sounds outside about six p.m. jumped up on the couch to peer out the third-storey window, her favorite vantage point for viewing the world outside: more interesting at that moment than the staccato laughter from the TV that had driven her great uncle, Lyle Buffington, to the widow across the hall, whose own grateful chuckle was low and tricks more complex than television's, for certain. From her tricycle molded in plastic, but sturdy and fat wheeled enough to bear the girl's rocking as she absorbed a cartoon bulldog suffering a woodpecker's shotgun blast that merely powderburned his jowly underbite into momentary saucereyed and blackfaced setback he loudly shook off like an actual dog water, the poor infant dismounted at the first eruption from the parkinglot below and bound up the sofa to be hit by what one newspaper called a stray bullet.  
      From the mouth of her sibling strapped into a carcarrier on the sofa where they had hoisted and imprisoned her, a pacifier tumbled to the carpet, and her eyes crossed as though both were trying and refusing to see, a defect sharpened by two earrings splayed on ears now flushed deep red as she cried "Ma, Ma!", the only word she knew, unable to get down, and fat tears rolled down over the belts and onto a stained T-shirt with the lettering Pretty Baby and down to her constrained kicking thighs, splashed with her sister and terrorized; while on the other side of the room the cat, malevolently called Gumhead by their mother for its vice of poking into the refuse hutch on the ground floor kept malodorous by the super, Reynaldo Colca, at his whiskers' premonition of mayhem shot from a furry ottoman with the tag on its fleacollar jingling and galloped to its bunker under the bed behind shoeboxes, where it was menaced, frequently, with "Gumhead! Gum-heeaad! stupid kitty, you go marking my Airs again an' I'll castrate your ass!" - this time, dear Lord! nobody thought of emasculating him!, as at that moment, in his shelter, his angora heart leapt and the ringed muscles of his sphincter lost their catty retentiveness, so finicky usually, when he heard the hot punching of exploding gasses in the muzzles of guns, the thud of limbs on carpeting, like drawers violently closed, the ululating of a strabismic little girl, a Mister Softee truck trolling the gathering crowd, its gentle themesong ringing, appeals to a deity, not his, the opening of a steel forensic case, and the eruption into the house, his house, of flowershaped shrapnel, not, however, in that order. Order! In that terrible instant, or soon after with the deformations of memory and dreams, the poor assasinated girl's sister's mind was disordered forever. The body lay in an infamous position, the flowered toddler's dress thrown up, uncovering the yellow-whiteness of her diaper, the chlorotic pallor of her chubby thighs parted and slightly crooked with the awful suggestion of having been so coerced by a worshipper of kidporn kneeling, for the shoot, behind a tripod. Only three years old! That horrible thing, a lead popcorn, had entered the right side of what was no longer the head. The pinkish floret of brains... Details! Skip it!  
      "In an area plagued by lawless young men who hang out intimidating older people and gunning for each other in feuds over turf and drugs, you're going to get your occasional murder of an innocent." Very true: between murders of motorists mesmerized by call-in radio hosts, newlyweds surprised in cul-de-sacs, between mothers with clacking strollers, gifts from the in-laws, pausing to read the notice of a reward offered for the return of a dog on a lamppost, police detectives in suspenders, but also shoulder holsters, talking on the phone by their somber and cup-littered desks, urchins at the playground glumly pondering the theft of their basketball hoop, hanging balls at their hips or lolling on the pavement with the head posed nonchalantly in the palm of the hand like figures on an Etruscan tomb, driving instructors helping a gal out with her dead battery, hyperactive brats in their fathers' reeking and verboten dens, hunters and their hounds, snappy worshippers adjourning from fellowship, cashiers of all shades and sizes - all, all propelled into the subterranean or stratospheric world: in costly theatrical vessels or potters' graves, deluxe caskets surprisingly light to the embarrassed pallbearer at right rear, with or without obsequies, jewelry, hairtrims or even clothes, embalmed like mummies or rushed to rest last seen alive, with the patrac! of dirt spaded on the coffinlid, the children at the gravehead looking up for the signal to cry, too late!, and the slow cortège of autos with headlights burning in daylight, itchy relatives convened in their darkest clothes but nothing to be done about the color of the car, scratching wondering why in hell the bitch ordered Turin yellow, and the hanging university parking permits or pathetic laminated Hayez jesuses, remembering it rained at the victim's wedding, or their own.   
      The pitiful case of poor Laura Clark, aged 37, was ambiguous. A court stenographer duly smitten with "my judges", as she called them, who deflated dacronsuited lawyers on their feet with few words, the leeches!, and paused cordially proceedings for her as she maniacally keyed, in her enclosure, the hieroglyphics she had acquired in highschool, corresponding to the incoherent opening statements of widows who had had all their savings swindled in commodities by cheats, fraudsters, during a year which should have been golden, they just felt in their bones, she lived in terror of her estranged exhusband, one Dapper, the nickname an instance of antiphrasis, unemployed electrician boiling over at their separation hard on her shortlived romance with an oily attorney named Nonny - a fucking ambulance chaser! - who'd aftershaved and cappucinoed a way into his sweetheart. In the suffocating panic of her flashbacks of an ultraviolent ex-spouse, and perhaps also in a sort of hallucinated anguish of the body at news evacuating into a clean, calm radio voice daily killings over 3,618,000 square miles, plus lurid pictures of stretchers and crowds, she fretted out a Saturday morning at Gun City, clutching a numeral from a dispenser. At her turn, 17, and after one nail bitten bloody - she was so scared! - the clerk told her she, the little lady, could use an equalizer. For somewhere in the Pythagorean universe of numbers little Laura plus gun equals large Dapper. It also equals zero but such are the thighslappers arithmetic, or the cosmos, or the just Father who looks over us all, play. He had "exactly" the gun she needed, a model Raven, single-action, semi-auto .25 caliber, $79.95 plus tax in blue, satin nickel, or bright chrome finish, "perfectly safe" provided she observed a condition three carry, which is of course leaving the chamber empty of bullets, the safety on, uncocked, come on...! everybody knows condition three carry!, that he demonstrated, in spite of waiting customers, the little piece safely unloaded. He pointed out a free brochure with proud title Refuse To Be A Victim and an 800 number for the National Rifle Association, urged her to read the manual, and emitted an avuncular order to get her pretty little self, if she bought the gun, to a range for a course on shooting and safety. He seemed such a gentleman. Satan and his cadets may also. Because no sooner had she paid for a Hidden Holster, a clever gadget that glides between mattress and boxspring, suspending the pistol at your bedside, permitting shuteye with one hand on the trigger for exhusbands who had already astonished by breaking down the door just prior to divorce, its repair appended to the settlement, and no sooner had she returned for the little Raven after the untimely waiting period, picking up two dreadful and soldierly boxes of bullets, and just after she had driven home, eyes in the rearview mirror for she didn't know what hypoglycemic male uniformed or workclothed or screaming naked, than she committed her third-to-last blunder. Small arms lessons are not imposed by law, and Laura's pluriphobia had extended for a long time to schools. She dared not go out without the handgun, less afraid of the arm of the law than those hairy hands of the hulk that would crush her windpipe, so he'd bellowed, blotting out then and there the carry condition, the safety lessons, the keeping the Raven out of reach while in the car, unloaded and removed from ammunition, and only moving to or from sportshop or rifle range. The courthouse guard, a little in love with little Ms. Clark, holstered and obsequious, and moreover with his cop's eye trained especially on homeboys meriting zero tolerance, waived the metal detector. She carried the Raven in her purse, where else? Its 15 ounces mingled as in a witches' brew with a Perfect Midnight lipstick, a green wallet, gift souvenir of Rome, keys, a pack of Kleenex, a condom, a vial of correction fluid, a pincushion shaped like a Chinese coolie tugging a tomato on a rope over his shoulder and all the adjuncts included with the ballbreaking riddle of muliebrity. In the hopeless paranoia or distraction looming first from her idea of immediate physical harm, and then of loss of a two-fingered hold on life's bottom line, or what she and others considered such, of court orders tearing away her home or transport upon loss of "her" judges' favors, attachments to her slim bank account, hounding bills, or even the disappearance of her two arms to type, crushed and mangled fingers and all the consequent missed workdays with bungled compensation or none at all, ignoring which bleak office to go to, which labyrinthine forms to fill out with no hands!, as in an awful nightmare where you suddenly stare down at your pubes on a scaffold before a guffawing mob, supernatural change of sex or coming back home to find in its place a horrific site-specific sculpture, or squeezing a trigger at a charging assailant only to see from the barrel pop a tiny comic flag with the word bang, well, you can imagine!, Laura had never been so trembly in her life. What resort, after all, does a threatened woman have? She would sneak out with her blouse buttons awry after spilling her morning coffee, with short breath that seemed to rush over balls of mucus, scratchety scratch the car door with her key that missed its mark again and again, and speed to work in a fever, feeling somewhat safe only in her enclosure before the judge, near the sargeant-at-arms.   
      Talk about bad luck! Imagine then what she must have felt, God! It raises goosepimples just to think about, not to mention recount when, slinking that day from the courtroom, with inexpressible fright and confusion, she perceived out of the corner of her eye the shadow of what she was convinced was her husband, as by a stir of the air, rise huge and hideous for the leap to flatten her! And when she dropped the purse, and it wasn't the first time, and the Raven functioned perfectly or imperfectly, either because the lipstick had lodged in the trigger or the hammer coming down hard on the ground had transferred energy to the firing pin posed on the primer of the cartridge, there was a fiery thunder that sped a bullet into her heart, so little defended by a silk blouse and jacket, a one in a zillion chance, poor woman, with tamponade of blood from the pericardial sac: so that, with the blow also, she fell in a horrible dancestep against the table in the hall, looking as if someone had winged a fistful of food peppering her breast, and slapped against the floor with the whole compact mass of her where the doctor, when one was found in that pullulating rats' nest of lawyers, pronounced her dead.   
      And also another victim's day was cut short when police found Greg Morris, a probationer, face up with his ankles crossed as if death were just another way of taking it easy. They stuck out from a sheet, lent by a well-intentioned but rookie patrolman, near the greasy door of McDonald's in Bedford-Stuyvesant, streaked with an already browning comettail of matter. The killer, evidently, in the wind. An ambulance swung out red radii in a lazy whirl and threw into chiaroscuro a municipal block party shaping up of, among others, young bloods, their elephantoid trousers in low positions of extreme slippage, the elastic hems of the briefs two or three fingers above, some in the glaring cones of streetlamps proffering digital-affirmative thrusts forehandedly, as if ticking off numerals from a distance, others illuminated partially by six cell flashlights, cowled and deadpan around a paramedic snapping out a bodybag like a picnic blanket, near police cruisers slant parked on the blacktop theatricalized with trapezia of crime scene tape scorned by cops duckwalking under and stretching the DO NOT CROSS aloft for colleagues, plainclothes fishing the crowd to slip calling cards down at waist level amid snatches of such street speculation as "That ol' boy got shot up!" and "You could almost say what part the city a man from just by seeing how they did him," every mother's son gawking at a detective uncover the mystery and blow air and wave a hand in front of his apoplectic scowl as some of the gas settling in the body silently escaped, the slack eyes of the corpse coming alive in the reflected beams of the torch.  
      At another sad hour of the day a tactical raid made on wrong house cost the short life of 15-year-old George Logston's pooch, asleep on the couch next to his master, their two mammalian smells amalgamated in a peptic stew that took some getting used to, though rosewater compared to the stink let fly by the SWAT team, whose charge of padded energumens bristling with special weapons in the steroidal dogma that his father's house was the address of a Cullen Michael, 22, wanted in the October slaying of a department store security guard, annihilated his snooze. "They went to said location in the Bronx and they believed the suspect was in the domicile," justified police Captain John Michel. "They knocked on the door and they were not admitted." Surprise! They knocked out poor George's canine tooth, the one that he nearly swallowed, with the butt of a shotgun. "Like the Gestapo", later likened George's father, a State Correctional Officer on medical leave but apparently sound enough to have repaired, luckily for him, to the Stumblin' Inn on Waldo Avenue, the Bronx, to trade war stories, urban and embroidered here and there. "I was just getting ready to get up and the door bust open!" young George told the Daily News. "They had their guns up. They said 'Get the dog!'. Then they shot him four times." The rottweiller, who usually went into ectasy and into raptures as soon as kids apostrophized him on the street or at home with "Sheba, Sheba!" and also elated pride, or else taken in a dozy melancholy and irremediable lethargy notwithstanding incitements "C'mon Sheba! God damn fleabag, c'mon Sheba!", in fact, now seeing himself overpowered, was energetically trying to hide under the diningroom table. O God, yes, a certain, to tell the truth, scent of perspiration and machine oil he had already sensed before the intrusion, without getting overexcited: but as he was essaying a tail wag and was about to lumber down to greet the guests their sinister hoods traversed the window of the latched door and then they charged in like a herd of black bulls to spread through the house in pairs, knocking down, with a crash, a precarious curtainrod of laquer-coated aluminum, and a dustcaked floorlamp with its yellowed shade, whose bulb burst with the first fireworks of the day on a stained rope rug in front of George, throwing the switch in the fuse box in the basement, and then two of them jackbooted after the dog, who went into a crouch beneath the table, his paws drawn turtle under him as he cowered and started to whine, in a high pitch, imploring with eyes larger than human the goggled and invisible faces of his assassins a moment before they let loose their fusillade. And he had been raised to be so loving and trustful! Special agents Vito Shields and "Tex" Polanski had not been trained during their 14 day dynamic entry course that the dog had been instructed to adore even them. And they chose not to listen to young George's vociferous and gaptoothed, and reasonable, objections regarding the murder of his pet, despite their medley of less lethal tactical accessories for use, or abuse: but quickly shot up the staircase to find, happily not to injure or slay, the boy's ten-month-old halfsister and six-year-old brother, both shocked out of slumber themselves and starting to cry. The peace officers, finding no criminal in the house or vicinity, and much less the suspect, "lent their comfort". One Private Whelan, unmarried and without children, went so far as to pick up and chuck the infant under the chin murmuring "Gootchie, gootchie", to the great wall-leaning relief and hilarity of his colleagues.  
      Now try wiping all that up with some miracle towel!, absorbent refused, by their resignations the following workday, by the pair of girls liveried pro gloria Burger King alone on July 14 on Utopia Parkway with Mrs Astarita. She was the nicest lady you ever could have met, and the eatery's most generous donor of throwaway diapers to the three-year-old emulators of the hemotrophic grownups of Queens, women who greeted loudly the day effluvia of their little dervishes or powerranger wannabes on the cheeks of whom, already anemic with pinches, Astarita squirted enough kisses to smother them to death, with all her treasuring and caressing in the idiom and all the envious formulas of motherhood: "What a wittle cutesy-pie! Sweet enough to eat! And to go wee-wee on the floorsy in front of Maria...!" She was like a fish in water in that demotic idiocy. Following the stuttering trotlets and semi-destructive gambols and sudden eruptions of hot tears on now erythemic wittle cheekies there flowed the more or less foreseeable other liquid not offered on the menu: that Maria stooped to with her mop, broom, dustpan and pail of sawdust. Before any hippo could slip and break a bone in that puddle. Lawsuits, the manager reflected as he looked on and stroked his mustache, were an obsession of the area's residents, stout claimants to their 10,000 rights and assigners of responsibilities (alway of others).   
      Always bringing in cakes on colleagues' birthdays, Astarita. Lopsided cylindrical doorstops that for the most part concreted under her imitation crystal pancover, or else suffered digital attacks by children on that "icing", the fat content of which surpassed even the amazing offerings of Burger King, where homemade objects were like visitors from Mars. That giving, and donating, and sharing with others!, operations, to most peoples' way of thinking, often joined to the carnality and subsequently to the psyche of woman, while the male tends, instead, to cash in, to shoot straight for the gift, to accumulate, to reserve for himself. Mrs Astarita babbled with halitosis around the victims of her largesse. In the words of Santiago O'Donnell, a police captain on her case, she had been "back on the work force" after her stepchildren had vacated her duplex and tenanted costly college dormitories. Not a waitress, exactly, at "The Home of the Whopper", which is self-service (the customers, in two lines of unequal physiognomies in front of the counter, miserable) but a "busgirl", highchair carrier and remover, in the alas frequent case of a diner's omission, of the mountains of sacks, foils, tissues, pliable straws, napkins, jumbo beverage cups, bloody ketchup packets, spent cartridges of creamer, extruded containers and fry pouches, not to mention the tray bearing the feast and then its trash, or treasure brought from outside. Maria moved it all, in faith, inured to that madhouse without interlude or remedy until well after dark.  
      Darkness meant a madman with a gun that evening, as it does every night in our town. The particular person with a problem of some sort, this time, was an associate of the estimated 150,000 insane who roam the city, and a lucidly cardcarrying member of the 300,000 New York members of the NRA, who keeps reason-impaired vigil over the right of the fool to stock his armory. Behind a hedge across the road he was proud of his snipership as he blew away part of the lady's upper body. The well-placed shot shattered a hole in the plate glass that branched out like an aerial view of London or an egg hurled stochastically into a skillet, and punched glistening scraps of her, then the remains of Maria against a wall, seen in his telescopic crosshairs in all her utter surprise, pieces of tissue of radically different textures from the bloodless burger patties stacked on treated paper squares: more like an exploded milkshake or an icecream sundae with special toppings in nightmare colors vomited there by the devil, the busgirl on the ground in a pneumothoracic stew, making throttled noises like someone screaming under water, literally suffocating on bits of herself, none daring any firstaid in fear that the sniper hadn't ended his graveyard shift: and the other girls certain it was their number, afraid to run and lock the door, with the blackness out there, the polluted silence. One threw up her hands to defend her face from enemy things in potency outside, wailing with an anguish that flared in her like a three alarm fire, while her colleague's thigh and bladder muscles just gave out, one two, with the terrified, sapping knowledge that the assassin was on his way to blast her as she pleaded from the floor. And poor Maria's body, not prompt with a pail now, seemed to have burst with debris and fluids from the eyes, ears, mouth and nose when her coworker pulled herself, weeping, towards the hanging phone cord, grasping and jiggling it frantically to tease off the hook the receiver, stultified itself, which finally surrendered and fell onto her breast, and after indescribable hesitation she shot up to punch nine one one and hit the deck again. And New York's finest responded after five minutes, commendable speed and truly deserving of a medal with all the gunplay they have to put up with, day in day out. The cars slanted to a halt at the front and sides of the Burger King issuing trochees hysterically from their bullhorns, certain uniforms out on a sprint the moment the vehicle stilled its trajectory, doors thrown open and long and short guns pointed, while a cop shoved his way through the entrance with a pistol in his hand, a big black one held down, and shouted at the survivors to remain on the ground, order obeyed somatically, from the ovaries. But Corporal Dennis Payne limited himself to resting the rotund opulences of his buttocks on his heels as he determined the sorry state of the victim, asking simultaneously and loudly if they had seen the shooter, while he thought of Harvey Chaiken, dining with his wife, Lyla, at the Topside Restaurant down the road, slain just a week before by a similar shot to the chest fired by an unidentified assailant.  
      Another criminal summoned his death by entering a Staten Island bank flaunting a rubber mask of the 1988 Democratic hopeful Michael Dukakis, a face no-one in his panic could place. And this loser was given his deserts by a certain Walter Haas, 51, a trainer in a defense school on his lunch break: sent from heaven! if you consider that, with the perpetrator's revolver pointed at a poor pregnant woman and him barking muffled threats from under there, you've really got to have someone in the trade. This Haas was daydreaming pleasantly of one of his students at the shooting range, one of an influx of females in step with the new vogue for legitimate home self-defense. And he could feel in his revery her hair and the warmth rising from her nape and sense the odor of perfume and his broad hands wrapped around her small, which were incredibly smooth but all wrong on the pistol grip, extended straight from her body: so that, for a glorious moment, you just had to plaster yourself against her bottom and grope around her ribcage and the two great knockers to steady the Ladysmith, pointed shakily in the general direction of a human silhouette. For seven seconds, maybe more: greatly appreciated by all those Saras and Tinas rightly fearing for their lives out there and beading their pretty eyes focused on bringing the opponent down with a bullet to the torso. At that moment Walter murmured into their ears that a charging intruder just 20 feet away would reach them in 2 seconds!, and how would they manage the threat, by talking a rapist out of an assault? And as the gals nervously giggled he would add that those little .38s tore 15 by .5 inch cavities in goats' carcasses or gelatin: but by now their foreheads were furrowed and the smile gone.  
      When all of sudden, instead of the pistol packing babe and her hooters, the shouts begin and the customers and tellers freeze and the hair-raising mask is smack in front of him aiming a gun at everybody in its power. It was an nasty couple of seconds, he told his cronies that night, probably the nastiest in his life. And Walter, in fact, did not react with what he taught people to do in such a predicament, a bit vainly, as it turned out, which is to go to cover first, and fast, and only then "present your weapon": but just stood still as a scarecrow and drew. "The subconscious mind is infallible!" he later informed his friends in the bar, in rehearsal for his class tomorrow. That is, he snapped open, without thinking, the leather flap holster under his jacket, extracted his Beretta, aimed it with what he afterwards grandiloquently called the "subliminal sighting method", all of which must have hypnotized the creep, being slow as molasses, it seemed to the teller at window three. Shot in the back of the head by the terrified trainer, the shock snapped the rubberband clutching the mask of the hasbeen, that flew off, and the gasses unleashed by the bullet inside the skull thrust his eyeballs inches out of their sockets, the end result an expression of cartoon astonishment, as ludicrous as, and, it appeared, now directed at the ecstatic visage of the Democrat, floored himself and beaming approvingly at the blood seeping towards his lips, while a woman screamed "O, God! O, God!" and fainted, a second victim down, not counting the mask: and the rest of the clients, then, stampeded out like panicked sheep, strongarming each other's backs in a horrified cancan, half fainting themselves, the leader pulling at the glass door that never yet had opened in and did not now, pulling all his wildeyed devotees up short at the gate and nearly tripping on the comatose woman propped there with her tongue lolling out against a desk, uselessly fanned by the teller at window four, then all out on the sidewalk tumbling and puking and crying while Walt stood gazing at his smoking gunbarrel with an expression as flabbergasted as the bug-eyed corpse's, whose stiffening body, in a few hours, got far more attention by police and coroner, in its dissolution, than it ever had in life.  
      It fell next to a further child, little Ricky Fand watching a Disney animation in his hushed music appreciation class when 180 grains of hot lead tore through his left lung from behind, fired by Alan Bondy, a troublemaker always bringing paraphenalia into school where it didn't belong. The poor child had been excused that day to leave at five minutes to three by his teacher Mrs Leonardo for the umpteenth time, in order to grant him a head start on the bullies who vowed to "kill" him in dispatches penned, skulled and crossboned by none other than Bondy, one going the rounds when the threat was shockingly carried out, with a bang, at two fifty. But the crinkled, uncrumpled and annotated note was only brats' hyperbole for a sluggish punchfest and wholehearted vicious taunting when the mob grabbed the physical freak running as fast as his skinny legs would carry him near Van Cortlandt Park, his homework clasped to his chest. They would sidestep in a circle around the hostage, jaws suddenly gone slack, rolling their eyes, and bawl "Duh! Duh!"; then Bondy, with his bowl haircut, cruel mouth and Converse sneakers, would stride in, the yellowbelly, with a shove to little Ricky's sternum that would drive him stumbling assbackwards, eyes veiled with impotent tears, only to be propelled into the ring from behind by another prankster prancing around with a U on his reportcard for exercises self control. From that heart of attention - his nose running, mucus mingled with scalding teardrops - little Ricky would finally break in a desperate bid, but they had really let him, and bolt all the length of Baily Avenue, laughter and abuse fading at his back, wiping the snot and saltwater on a sweater sleeve and dashing greasy hair away from his smudged face, and slow down, his heart pounding in shame and fatigue, only near home on Irwin; and Jewish widows, semi-liberated until tomorrow from some vicious circle themselves, would commiseratingly hold the door of the garden apartments open for him.  
      This Bondy, instead, had a mean habit of filching and sporadically returning his parents', and sometimes his grandparents', belongings: coin collections in installments, meerschaum pipes for everything but tobacco, an inflatable Kodiac for sundown boating on Jerome Park Reservoir, whole halfpounds of bologna and Gulden's mustard on English muffins he smacked his blubbery lips on, dagwoods that left a quarter inch of brownish sludge on his loose tongue, with complacent belches, Bavarian beer, a bottle at a time, from the garage, and sometimes the Bavarian car also, brown bottle between his thighs, though he was four years from his driver's permit and had already totalled his mother's stationwagon during a joyride along Route 9W North, in Jersey. An alert writer would compose a picaresque novel about him, first person singular and in vernacular, from his point of view. His mom and dad had bought him a desk, or rather an entire executive suite in hopes that, "grounded" for fourteen nights, he might turn his desperate mind to some homework. On the open drawer of the desk - ensconced in a leather swivelchair reclined to utmost, one leg mounting the table - the rascal had set out his paraphenalia and went on inhaling all the livelong drowsy afternoon through a hollowed Bic pen the oily, blackish smoke from a puddle of hashoil on a square of aluminum foil, one hit after another (long sweetish intakes and clamorous stoppings of breath followed by dreamy spouting exhalings), leaning back even further as each rush billowed to his skull to trickle through his cortex like pins and needles from ballooned lungs, rheumy eyes closed in pleasure; and thus like a miniature Turkish sultan all evening as if it were the incense of heaven, syrupy and tar black: and greasier lips, then, as the oil and saliva mingled in that pen meant for writing a report on the Ottoman Empire or The Utilization of Rachmaninov in "The Beauty and the Beast". That seemed, soiled and swollen as they were, the lips of some Mulberry Street urchin in a photo by Jacob Riis. And also his expression, besides, oscillating between a blessèd and faraway raja and perverse cupid in ecstasy in the declining afternoon, with the two upper parts of the eyeballs concealed by slouching lids, in a sort of downslide of the whole forehead, a visage that at moments appeared beatific wisdom gained, but it was just the sacred hashish working overtime. Thus all night in bed and the following day with his elbow propping his head on the graffittoed desk in one mod after another, in dirty jeans and T-shirt, impervious to all and scratching his knee, the other hand toying with the Sig Sauer in his knapsack under the desklid, where years ago, other kids might have hid joybuzzers or frogs. He was staring at the screen and glancing down at the safety forced on, and off, and on, by his chubby finger nowhere near the trigger, in his hash burnout and boredom, until the safety seemingly caught in its range between secure and much less, and then the gun went off with a noise no-one present was likely to forget.
      Extremely disgraceful, and unluckily also fatal, the case of Herbert Ferrill, a veteran of the Brooklyn Dodgers on West Tenth Street, Manhattan: an ex-thirdbaseman with a batting average of .238, and now a doddering average of a daily fifth of vodka from the nearby Village Vintner, whose owner kept a pistol under the counter. This Ferrill's son, a minister of the New Life Christian Fellowship Church, who had started collecting handguns because he feared the Brady Law would "infringe on" his rights, was demonstrating gun safety to his wife, daughter and son-in-law at the kitchen table. With the impatience that characterizes those of his trade he had attended a shooting course that Sunday and was eager to preach his knowledge to others, against every criterion of safety. Now, rendering a firearm harmless or harmful, especially a highly efficient weapon such as his Jennings .22, is not as simple as might appear at first sight to the profane. It requires a whole series of steps, every one of which, if left out, by inadvertance, can end life faster than you can say Jack Ruby. It ended up that the gun, that he had beleived unloaded, was in fact charged and rang out so loudly and clearly that his poor old father, in the next room nursing his liver and staring at the TV, startled at the shot and the screams of his daughter-in-law and granddaughter, suffered a stroke that his family did not even take note of until they calmed down and saw that the bullet had merely put out of its misery an aging teapot. But things unfortunately deteriorated, given his advanced age, eighty-three years!, and his already weak heart, and pulverized liver. So that the ambulance attendants, on their way to Saint Vincent's close by on 12th St. with the patient, you might say they could only ascertain that a coroner's certification, and not the emergency room, was most appropriate, as they all swiftly flew to hell in a handbasket.

Robert de Lucca is a writer and translator who lives in New York and Pisa, Italy.

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