When I moved in the East Village with my hillbilly girlfriend in 1977, I never walked down East 10th Street between 1st Avenue and Second Avenue. I told my girlfriend to not do the same. She obeyed my edict, because it was the right thing to do and she was from West Virginia. No one from the hollows had seen the evils of New York and even less the horror of the Lower East Side.

Two whorehouses and numerous drug dealers controlled the offending block. These motherfuckers tolerated no protests against their rule. Alice left me in 1979. My life was going in a different direction from an ingenue actr=ress smart enough to recognize that I was trouble.

I met new people. Uncle Carmine lived further East on Avenue C. He believed in carrying a gun and thought that I should too.

“This is for you.” He handed me a heavy paper bag in his plumbing office. I was friends with his wife. Aunt Jane came from Washington County, Maine, which hshe considered the lat place of Earth created by God. I was from Falmouth Foresides. She thought we had easy winters. She was right.

I hefted the bag. The weight belonged to a gun. My hand grabbed the weapon. A 5-shot .38 revolver made in Germany. Uncle Carmine had been in the Merchant Marines.

“I got it in Bremen. Never fired it once. Maybe you’ll be just as lucky.”

“I doubt it.” I stuffed the revolver in my jacket and walked back to my apartment counting the number of people whom I would have shot for trespasses against the community. I would have run out of bullets on the first block. The East Village needed a death squad to combat the criminals. Thankfully they executed themselves in a series of wars aimed at controlling the heroin trade of the Far East. I never had to shoot my gun.

Not once, because the next day I returned the weapon to Uncle Carmine.

As for the gunmen in the East Village, they did all the shooting themselves, but the East Village in 1986 is not America 2011 and certainly not Arizona where a young man decided to shoot up a political gathering at a Tucson food mart.

A congresswoman gravely wounded by a right-wing assassin. A judge dead from a disgruntled GOP supporter. An 8 year-old girl killed by an errant bullet and they weren’t alone. A very sad moment too often repeated in the USA, but even worse was the climate of hatred wound up by the media. Fingers pointed in all directions. Blame spilling over the the TV and they smiled at the cameras.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Neither left nor right.

Only fucked up.

Because that’s what America does best these days.

Fuck up with guns.

Now that I think about it, “Where the fuck is that old .38?”