CoffeeHouse Diary 11: Guns and More Guns 1

I had dinner with Mac last night in Corte Madera. I managed to get him a little tight and was able to extract some stories out of his sordid past in Bible College.

I find it hard to see him there, but I love the stories, and some involve guns.

Back in the very late 70's this poor sap enrolled in a Fundamentalist Bible College in, of all places, San Francisco.

As you might expect it was in constant lock-down with barbed-wire-fencing to keep all the evils of the City at bay.

To hear him describe it it was like waking up every day in a Surrealist painting (How many Surrealist's does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer later).

They could not wear jeans, had to sign in and out no matter where they went, had to sign "morality papers" etc...

I can't see Mac there as anything but a caged Bengal Tiger (even if he is a wuss).

But he met two other Bengal Tigers, and apparently they kept themselves sane in unusual ways. But I'll leave that to him to describe.

My interest is in guns of all kinds.

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One of Mac's first gun stories was about living in the dorms. A friend had taken a picture of him standing with two shotguns and he is wearing a ridiculous sort of safari suit and sunglasses.

I feel certain the man has never fired a real gun and if he did something bad would happen.

No he can only be trusted with toy guns, which is what he had at this Bible College.

To hear him describe it, it was a slightly modified Star Trek Tracer gun, the type that shoots those little plastic disks out and a moderate velocity.

Not good enough for Mac. No, he had to modify it.

The result of repositioning the spring-loading device was that it only fired maybe one out of three shots that he pulled the trigger on. The bonus was the little disks came out like lightening when they did. Blammo!

So it was no surpise that a group of young Bible students...all men (for the dorms were strictly verboten to those of the opposite sex, and I believe Mac was the only man ever to smuggle a woman into his room, but that is another story), seeing the picture of Mac with the shotguns and the caption "Do You Feel Lucky?" decided that given their sheer numbers, and the fact that the other two Bengal Tigers were off elsewhere (they checked) he would be an easy target.

Now I should note that a Bible College can be a place of great repression and suppression. Everyone is supposed to love their neighbor, but in fact, they often hate them.

Certainly Mac had built up sufficient ill-will amongst the brethren. He had, and he admits to this now, made many an announcement about the balding R.A. of his hall, "Jared Bond" saying "Jared Bond, the world's shortest, shiniest secret agent, was killed today when King King mistook him for a Ban roll-on".

This was how the attackers got the keys to his room no doubt.

Then there was Kevin across the hall who felt a bit jealous about the attention that Mac got from the Dean of Women (another story Mac will have to tell). Then there was the usual Fundie Riff-Raff that Mac constantly cut down like fresh grass, often using their own textual passages against them.

Their names were Slider and Scorfull. And they both hated him

[And I have to say, as he now describes this he exudes a certain level of shame over his actions, for he had become far too compassionate man in my view. I would gladly thrash these folks.]
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Next, a knock on the door and a terse battle...