1980, Kansas City, Missouri

By Christopher Gronlund

I was 10 years old the first time I tasted peppermint schnapps. I’ll never forget that day; it was also the first and only time I’ve shot a fully automatic handgun.

My father was a good mechanic and an even better alcoholic. He worked on forklifts and heavy machinery in Chicago, and later — after my mother divorced him and he remarried — he moved to and worked in Kansas City. He and a friend left the company where they had worked for years and formed their own maintenance company. They made a lot of money fast; it was amazing to me, the American Dream realized.

I lived with my father for a short time in sixth grade. On weekends, I cleaned up his shop. One afternoon after cleaning, I noticed my father and his partner at their workbench, messing with a small piece of metal. I figured it had to be an intricate part of a big machine — something important that needed the same kind of detail reserved for Swiss watch parts. They had all kinds of tools; many of the tools didn’t look like anything I’d seen used for fixing forklifts.

After washing some tools in a solvent a 10-year-old probably shouldn’t have even been around, my father called me over. He had a bottle of peppermint schnapps in his hand.

On the workbench was a handgun. It was chilly out and my father, nice and tipsy from the schnapps, offered me a swig from the bottle. It tasted like cheap candy and cough syrup, but I tried keeping my composure. It felt like somebody was blowing up a balloon inside my head. As I reeled from the alcohol’s effect, my father popped a clip into the handgun and handed it to me. He pointed toward a big pile of railroad ties stacked in a corner. I always wondered what the railroad ties were for. They were full of holes; I assumed there were some kind of little wood-eating worms near his shop, little worms about the size of a .22 caliber bullet, to be exact.

I never really liked guns. I got my hunting license that same year, but I made noise to scare off whatever it was my father wanted me to shoot each time he dragged me into the field with him. He bought an over-and-under shotgun for me: a 12 gauge and a .410 all rolled into one gun. It sat in my closet; the .410 didn’t scare me, but the time I shot the 12 gauge barrel into a riverbed, it scared the bejeezus outta me.

This was the first time my dad ever offered me a handgun, though, and I felt it was an important moment, so I went along. He showed me how to hold it, how to aim it, and how to disengage the safety. He told me to aim at the railroad ties in the corner. He told me to exhale as I gently pulled the trigger.

With the warm glow of a swig of peppermint schnapps helping overcome my fear of guns, I pulled the trigger. The gun rattled and rocked in my hand — flames shot from the muzzle and my hand went numb from vibrations. I was expecting a single shot, not a rolling parade of lead, to fly from the end of the gun. It scared me, but it was also pretty cool at the same time — not that I ever fired live rounds from an automatic gun ever again.

I put the safety back on and placed the gun on the workbench, realizing what dad was doing with the intricate tools and files. The handgun should have fired just once, but with a little modification it became so much more. I realized at least part of the money dad brought home wasn’t from fixing forklifts.

My father, his partner, and I shuffled our feet around on the concrete floor, each of us searching for something to say. I broke the silence by asking dad for another sip of schnapps, but he told me I’d had enough.

In his own way, he was a responsible father.

Christopher Gronlund’s travel writing has appeared in the Dallas Morning News and in Writer’s Digest’s Personal Writing. He’s currently finishing his second novel.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 | Email This Post

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