Dr. O’C and I have to find a new place to live. Our lease is up and we’ve decided to rent for a little while longer in the hopes that the remarkably stable Australian housing market bottoms out like it has every where else in the world. It’s always a pain in the ass to find a new rental house, but it’s a blessing really because our living situation was driving me slowly insane(r).

Because I’m easily distracted, I’ve been daydreaming at some of the rental houses that I’ve occupied in my time rather than looking for a new one*. There was the roach and (later) gecko infested studio in Tallahassee. There was the sprawling 1920’s behemoth on Melbourne Street in Columbia that Dr. O’C and I rented for next to nothing in my last couple of years of grad school. And the most expensive house I’ve ever lived in, a Victorian tenement house in Oxford that was so narrow I could almost touch both walls with my arms spread.

But the house that sticks in my mind the most was an old tin-roofed servants cottage behind an Edwardian mansion in Athens, Georgia. I lived there for a couple of years while finishing up my bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia. The house dated from the early 1900s. There were two rooms and a small front porch with an afterthought of a kitchen carved in at some point in the 1950’s. There was no air-conditioning and the back yard was shared with the owners of the big house and their two ridiculously aggressive Dobermans. It was broiling in the summer and frigid in the winter, but I loved it. It was quietly tucked away in the trees with only a little dirt drive off a side road, so it afforded me a perception of blessed isolation.

The isolation was only an illusion, really. I was only about 200 meters from one of the biggest sorority houses in town. My landlord busted me for growing a few marijuana plants on the side of the house. And my house got broken into. Twice. The latter was kind of my fault. (Actually, the former was as well). You see, I rarely locked my door. I lived in a world that hadn’t existed for about fifty years if ever. Unfortunately most everyone else lived in a world in which if you didn’t lock your doors all your stuff got stolen. After the first break-in, I probably should have learned my lesson. But at that time, I could almost see up to the poverty level from where I lived, so I didn’t have much to steal and after a week or so of vigilance I reverted to form.

The second robbery was a bit scarier. Someone came into the house while I was sleeping. I woke up and saw a shadowy form rummaging around my living room. I jumped out of bed, buck naked and yelling. The guy bolted and I chased him, still naked, half-way down my drive until I realized that I was coming into the line of view of the sorority house.

The day after the second break-in, I decided that I needed to do something to protect myself. Now, locking the door would have been a good start but common sense has never been my strong suit. I should preface the rest of this story by saying that I used to drink a lot. And by a lot, I mean a lot. I was convinced that life’s hard decisions could be made with more clarity after about half a fifth of Jack Daniels. So I sat out on my rickety front porch and got down to some serious thinking and drinking.

At about 2 in the morning I decided that what I needed was a gun.

The problem was acquisition. The State of Georgia in the mid-1990’s did not have the nation’s most stringent gun control laws, but you did need at least a driver’s license to buy one. I had lost my driver’s license a couple of years ago due to some unpleasantness in Seattle, but what I did have was some dodgy friends. I talked to my bartender friend who I knew was a gun nut. She introduced me to a ‘business associate’ of her boyfriend who lived off the grid on the east side of town. After a bit of drinking he decided that I was OK, and he could help me out.

I worked in a downtown coffee shop at the time and just before close a couple of nights later, the Business Associate came in and asked to talk to me in private. Five minutes in the men’s room, two hundred dollars poorer and I had a shiny, oily and delightfully loaded Cobra .22 calibre pistol in the left pocket of my jeans.

I’ve got to admit that I felt pretty butch walking home from work that night with a pistol in my pocket. The weight of it, the secrecy of it, the power of it was all absolutely thrilling. I couldn’t stop touching it, feeling the slick steel. I got home and put it gently in my bedside table, got a tumbler full of whiskey and a book and lay down for bed.

And I didn’t sleep.

My mind wouldn’t shut down. I kept thinking about the gun. Would I really be able to use it if the robber came back? Would I be able to aim it and squeeze the trigger? Would it fire? Should I test fire it? Maybe at the landlord’s dog? What would happen if I could do everything right and I hit the robber? Would I go to jail? What if I shot myself while I was messing around with it?

About four a.m., overwrought and exhausted, I got out of bed, grabbed the gun and headed out the door.  I headed through campus down past the stadium to the woods on the east side of the campus. I hit the Oconee River  pulled the gun from my pocket – gleaming darkly in the moonlight. I paused – a long heart beat – and tossed it into the muddy river.

After that I just made sure to lock the door.

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*Anyone in the Adelaide that has a house to rent (between the CBD and Flinders) or knows of a good one, please do let us know!

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Uncle Tupelo’s “Still Feel Gone” is available from Amazon.

Image credits:

Tin roof

Cobra

Oconee River

 
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