Why I Look for Escape Routes, Cover and Defensible Positions at The Happiest Place on Earth.
It’s not what you’re thinking. I was never in the military. I was never trained in defense. I don’t have PTSD. I’m a huge fan of imagineering, and we go to Disneyland a lot. But I’m often on my guard.
I grew up in a very rural part of eastern Indiana. By 21st century standards, I’d say that just under 30% of my 103 classmates were at least kind of toxic. And more than a few of those had significant anger management issues, though I doubt there was a name for that back then. All white. Neary all Christian. Fisticuffs and battery was, in the main, tolerated by teachers, parents and the police as a viable method of conflict resolution.
Outright assault — complete with black eyes, lost teeth, and clumps of pulled hair – happened all the time. Between boys. Between girls. Between drunks. Between parishioners. When drunk.
In the middle of this normalcy, a few friends and I had formed a fairly standard-issue garage rock band, playing 80s rock while it was still on the radio, and we were just starting to pick up a few gigs, especially across the border in Ohio, where you could be under 21 and play the stage at clubs.
One day we were practicing in the vacant house of the guitarist’s recently deceased grandmother. We didn’t even have a PA, just a couple budget amps and an ancient Rogers drum kit.
Across the street was a white mobile home, and in it, Duane, whom everyone called Duke for no reason. He was in my class, but he was a big, hulking guy who already had to shave his whole face, not just his lips. And he seemed to me to be just a wound-up ball of seemingly constant pissed-offedness. And on this day, as you might guess, the seeping out of about 10db of kick drum into the garden-gnome serenity of his front yard infuriated him, and compelled him, as was custom, to take matters into his own hands.
We were probably practicing some Molly Hatchet nugget when the door swung open with a bang, and a raging Duane stormed over and kicked hole in Randy’s amp, yelling accented expletives as veins in his neck throbbed.
Then, he turned and silently walked out, having solved his injustice in the moment, as was custom, without one single thought of consequences. Both because there would be no consequences, and becuase he did not have the basic creativity to imagine any.
So. The only thing that died that day was fairly new Unicord Stage amp. But I think about him, and that day, almost every time there’s a mass shooting, which is to say, every day. Today there were four.
In 1980, in rural Indiana, you would have had to drive a few miles to get to a gun store, and that would be for a .22 or a shotgun, or for deer slugs or shot for duck hunting. Handguns were pretty rare really, except for a rusting M1911 like the one my grandfather kept after the war, but I never actually saw until years later.
Guns were certainly ubiquitous in my town (I was a pretty good shot with both my grandfathers’ .22s) and you might be surprised to learn that statistically, more households per capita had guns in 1980 than do today, even if there are millions more guns being sold each year.
But it was different. Functionally and culturally.
In my town, everything that decorated the rooms where the guns were kept were about hunting. The felt hats with flaps just like Elmer Fudd’s, and the hi-vis orange ones that had just come out. The jon-e warmers and the plaid hunting coats, the 5-buckle rubber boots from Tractor Supply, and the pictures of ducks and bucks hung on the panelling. Flushed pheasants in watercolor were very popular, though I’d never seen one in our woods. The desks in those rooms were just desks — but with drawers for shot, gun oil and two kinds of powder, and boxes of bullets. No locks.
Nothing about what we, or Duane, thought about guns in those days were about conflict resolution, or home defense, or using them like going to a batting cage. And we didn’t own dozens. There were no cheap nylon flags that said “come and take it” or tee shirts or posters of women in bikinis firing a SIG MPX on the walls. That would all happen later.
Today I live about as far away from that town as I can, In one of the bluest wealthy enclaves in California. Where, if you hear gunfire, it’s almost certainly a location shoot for a prestige cable series.
In the interim, the NRA went from a gun safety organization to a fear-farming factory. And guys, millions of them, with exactly Duane’s fuse and sense of conflict resolution, now have the on-demand option to resolve every perceived slight or personal injustice with what is functionally identical to a modern military antipersonnel weapon. My grandfathers fought WWII with less firepower. Available on credit at the hardware store on the edge of town, next to the all-things-deep-fried-diner that’s still decorated with trump flags and a poster of a woman in a bikini firing a SIG MPX.
Even before our high school band broke up, the hate-radio that eventually led to Trump and DeSantis, OAN and Newsmax and Clint Eastwood yelling at an empty chair was already pushing pop music off of AM radio. And by the 21st century, the data proved it to be effective: The goal and path to fame, wealth and power could viably be to create perceived injustices and manufactured threats and get (white) people’s neck veins throbbing.
They farmed outrage and fear-of-anyone-diferent that created targets, big juicy ones — like outdoor concerts, events or gatherings, or dance clubs where the wrong kind of people danced. And I see the veins on Duane’s neck. Or bank lobbies, or the post office, or food courts. Or theme parks. And I see the veins on Duane’s neck.
While I’m at Disneyland or DCA, or any other number of happiest places, I often stop and look for escape routes and secure areas. Maybe you do too. I check how many modes of electronic communication I have on my person. Would the Mark Twain boat be safer than hiding in the Indiana Jones queue? Would a shooter think to pursue people into The Many Adventures of Winne The Pooh? Are there places to hide in Soarin’ or Incredicoaster? Mission Breakout? Webslingers? Oga’s Cantina?
Or — out of nowhere — I fantasize about tackling the shooter from behind and beating his fat-dumb, outraged-farmed, conspiracy-theory-fed-face into the pavement, causing the veins in my neck to, for a moment, look an awful lot like Duane’s.
A few years ago I was asked to go to my high school reunion. I truthfully said I would be in France when that happened but politely asked how the people I could remember were doing. As is always the case when you haven't heard the news from a small town in a while, first thing you get is a list of who all had died since graduation, and when. Lotta cancer. (Verna!? Not Verna!) A couple of suicides, car-wrecks when the corn gets too tall to see around the corner at a county road intersection (happens a lot).
And Duane had died. I don’t know of what, but I did look up his obituary. Just a normal guy. Never moved further away than the next county. He liked car racing. Found someone to marry. Worked in a warehouse. And for a company that made pallets and crates. People still called him Duke, apparently.
He did not die in a gunfight after a police response to shooting up a band practice he was violently annoyed by.
