Tony Barnstone

When he read in the obituary section that he was dead, the famous author was at first amused and flattered.They love me so much, he thought,they have imagined me dead because they fear the loss of my genius above all else. So he put on his hat, combed his goatee to a waxed point, and sauntered out of his flat to attend his own funeral.How literary, he thought,like Huck Finn, and Everyone will be weeping. He was perturbed, however, when he found that the funeral home was in a bad section of town, next to a tattoo parlor named The Desultory Slut. He walked in past the unmanned front desk, to a back room of frayed velvet and gilt columns, where his coffin was on display, a faux mahogany monstrosity with painted pewter handles. The only people in attendance were four young professors from the local college, with leather patches on the elbows of their ill-fitting tweed jackets and long cruel faces of foxes and rats. He recognized one of them, a gangly fellow with pimply cheeks who had shaken his hand after his last reading and reverently asked for his signature. Do you have one of my books to sign? the author had asked. Oh no, the young professor had cried, baring his hairless chest,can you please sign here? Now the pimply fellow was sitting in a pew, whispering loudly to his neighbor,Isn’t it great, he said,The old bastard finally kicked. His neighbor nodded silently. Deeply disturbed, but well aware of the dramatic potential of the moment, the author took this as his cue to step boldly into the room, with a loud Ta daaa! For some reason, the professors ignored him, and continued their whispering. For a moment, he was afflicted with a strange vertigo, and stood like a clay golem, without a will of his own. Then a sudden rage took him, and the author snapped out of the spell and strode to the front of the room, waving his arms.Wait, I’m not dead at all. Here I am. It was all a mistake, he cried. But the professors did not see him. In fact one walked right through him, as if he were merely a ghost or spirit, and rushed up to the coffin.Do you realize what this means? the professor cried,This means we’re free, and he grabbed the body in the coffin and dragged it to the floor. The shocked author saw in the body his own likeness, lips and cheeks rouged into a grotesque semblance of life. He’s dead, he’s dead. Our enemy is finally dead, they chanted in a frenzy and the professors began trampling on the corpse, weeping with joy and relief.

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.” —H. Rap Brown, former Black Panther justice minister Thanks for the violence. Thanks for Walt’s rude muscle pushing through the grass, for tiny Gulliver crushed between the giant’s breasts. Thanks for Moby’s triangular hump and Ahab’s castrated leg. Thanks for the harpoons. Thanks for this PBS history of the automatic pistol. The good machine is simple, few moving parts, an efficiency of what’s preserved and what is wasted, so with each shot the recoil cocks the gun to shoot again, then recoil, cock and shoot again, recoil, cock, and so on till the target buys it, or your ammo’s spent. Thanks for the poem, which is really a little pistol: load and cock, point and aim, then the trigger, the hammer, the powder, the discharge, the bullet, the target, the recoil, the crime. No smoking gun, just ballistics, caliber, powder marks, the question why. My life is like a loaded gun, and when I aim it at you I hope to take off the top of your head, no safety on, no playing nice, just the spark, the flash, the damage, just red American cherry pie violence. So, thank you for the harpoon gun we aim at God and death and all the unknown world, and for the spear-stuck beast, rope ripping through torn hands, for what refuses to be caught and what we fathom only by riding the whale down into the deep, refusing to let go.