Gun Guys (23 page)

At Wayne State, Rick studied industrial engineering with the same placid, methodical discipline that had kept him straight through adolescence, and went on for a master’s degree from the University of Michigan. He married his girlfriend, Martha, at Plymouth Congregational. He became president of the campus chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and a member of its national board, never doubting that when he was ready, an executive position—not a factory job—would be waiting for him within the bosom of the Chrysler family. When he showed up for his interview in 1994, he made the mistake of wearing a necktie.

“Please remove it,” the interviewer told him. “A tie is a power symbol here.” In feverish imitation of Toyota, Chrysler had switched to a Modern Operating Agreement, which meant that the company needed not executives but “facilitators”—a buffer layer between workers and management to coax and cajole, not force and threaten, better work on the factory floor. There would be no executive lunchroom for Rick at the Jefferson North Assembly Plant, the way he’d expected all his life. No reserved parking space. No necktie.

On his feet all day, walking the floor among half-built Jeep Cherokees, Rick memorized every face by “name and last four.” The aching egalitarianism of the Modern Operating Agreement deprived him of the stature he’d expected, but he found that he loved the work. He was not only troubleshooting bad paint jobs and misfilled fluids; he was also slapping backs and keeping people cool and happy. When something needed doing, Rick
could simply ask a man to do it; nobody got his back up about union rules. For a while, the Toyota way seemed to work.

Rick was taking home twenty-thousand-dollar profit-sharing checks on top of a fine salary, ample overtime, and gold-plated benefits; at only twenty-seven, he was making more than a hundred grand a year. He and Martha were able to buy a pretty Tudor house with a detached garage on a corner lot, among the black middle managers of North Rosedale Park. They filled it with furniture, appliances, and four children. Life was good.

When Rick got passed over for promotion, he figured that staying on the factory floor would only leave him bitter, so he took a cut in pay to transfer to Chrysler’s growing information technologies department. Instead of surfing the floor’s wild wave of technical challenges and intense personalities, he sat in a cubicle gazing at a screen, untangling an endless matrix of servers and terminals, matching projects to capacity, and combing the system for bugs. It was okay, really. Figuring out servers and Web protocols felt more like the future than debugging steering columns and upholstery. But it wasn’t nearly as much fun. Life felt pared down. The new job carried no overtime, so Rick and Martha had to budget carefully. The whiff of having been passed over—of having yielded his fate to others—lingered.

North Rosedale Park wasn’t what it used to be, either. The houses were as neatly kept and the lawns as finely manicured as ever, but a neighbor’s car was stolen one night, and then someone broke into Rick’s car and wrecked the steering column trying to start it. A house up the street was burglarized. Blue flashing lights started showing up on nearby streets, their cold glare pulsing off houses he and the kids often visited. One evening after dinner, Martha looked up and said, “Was that a gunshot?” Rick drove to Kmart the next day and for two hundred dollars bought a Mossberg twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. “Fella hears this sound,” said the salesman as he worked the gun’s mechanism with a loud
clack-clack
, “he’s going to take off before you even see him.”

Rick had never fired a gun, and he didn’t fire the Mossberg. It was a shotgun, after all. If he ever had to shoot, he’d be just steps away, and a shotgun would spray enough pellets to get the job done. He slid it under the bed and instructed his children in the protocol: That’s Daddy’s. Don’t touch.

They were sensible, as he’d been. He only had to tell them one time.

A grim advantage to living through Detroit’s economic collapse was
that an unbelievable stream of antiques and collectibles became available as families’ fortunes imploded, and Martha seized the opportunity to start a business. She combed the paper for auctions and estate sales, snapped up treasures for pennies on the dollar, and resold them. Often, a family’s collapse was so quick and thorough that their belongings were simply left on the sidewalk. Rick and Martha spent a lot of weekends driving through hard-hit neighborhoods, finding Gustave wardrobes or Arts and Crafts bureaus given up to the rain. Neighborhoods were being abandoned at breathtaking speed to drug addicts and gangbangers; Rick and Martha were careful to be out by nightfall. Often, toughs eyeballed them from the corner as they poked through piles of belongings; Rick sometimes found himself wishing he had the Mossberg with him, or a handgun up under his clothes, but he pushed those thoughts aside. What would he do with a gun out here? Guns were the scourge of the city.

Besides, to get a carry permit, you had to give the state gun board a good reason. Antiques hunting wouldn’t qualify.

In 2000, so many people were dying from gunfire every week that when the legislature began considering whether to make Michigan a shall-issue state, like Florida, the debate pegged the needle on the city’s emotion meter. Democrats and Detroit’s black preachers inveighed against it; how could making guns easier to get possibly help? White suburban leaders made the Florida argument—that bad people had all the guns they wanted, and good people deserved the right to protect themselves.

Rick felt odd new feelings stir. At the giant Pentecostal Apostolic church that he and Martha now attended, he’d just answered an altar call and given his life to Jesus, wading into a vast pool with dozens of others to be immersed in the cleansing water. Rick knew that guns violated Jesus’s teachings to love one’s enemy as oneself, and he still felt that if black preachers and Democrats were against the shall-issue law, that was enough for him. At the same time, though, he’d been reading: All the while that Jesus was preaching love and forgiveness, he kept armed guards. Didn’t Scripture describe Peter slicing an ear off one of the Roman centurions who came to arrest the Lord? What did he use for that? A loaf of bread? A fish?

It was confusing. The nightly news showed hundreds of people lining up to get carry permits. A lot of them were black. A lot were probably Christians. Probably Democrats. People like him. But the process was taking eight months at least. It seemed like a bureaucratic nightmare. Rick let it slip from his mind.

Meanwhile, he had more serious worries; Martha was contemplating divorce. She and the kids had decamped to her mother’s house, across town. It was strange to wake up alone in the bed and to come home to an empty house after staring at a computer monitor all day. He hardly spoke a word to anyone some days, from sunup to sundown. The fat, fair era of a house flush with cash and alive with children was only a decade gone, but it felt like another lifetime. Rick’s affability was draining away. He found himself shouting at drivers who cut him off on the freeway.

One chilly evening in September 2006, he pulled into his detached garage, exited its side door to the backyard, and started tiredly across the lawn to the house. Behind him, someone spoke.

Rick turned; a young man stood at the end of the driveway, wearing a dark hoodie, holding a gun. “You know what this is,” he said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Rick said. He thought of the shotgun under his bed, an impossible thirty feet and two doors away.

The young man made a motion with his chin, and another man, identically dressed, stepped from the shadows. They ordered Rick to sit on the gravel, hands on his head. One held the gun to Rick’s ear while the other went through his pockets, taking keys, wallet, and watch. Rick glanced up; the eyes of the man holding the gun looked dead. There was no way to read whether he intended to pull the trigger; it seemed it wouldn’t matter to him either way. Rick squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for a bullet to crash through his skull. When he opened them, the men were gone. Shaking, he hurried into the house.

He paced—kitchen, living room, dining room, kitchen—trying to unclench his heart. It wasn’t fear propelling him from room to room. It was rage. Not at the muggers—they were just knuckleheads. No, he was furious at himself, for putting off getting a carry permit and leaving it up to those thugs to decide whether he lived or died. If he’d had a gun, he’d have pulled it the minute he saw that boy at the end of the driveway.

Shot the motherfucker, is what he’d have done.

Rick’s experience at the Northwestern District Police Station the next day only deepened his conviction to get a gun. He sat on a bench for hours. “We’ll get to you when we get to you,” a sergeant grunted whenever Rick tried to speak. The detective who finally took the report—black, exhausted, steel-haired—scribbled notes morosely. He didn’t even pretend they’d follow up.

“This is an armed robbery,” Rick finally pointed out.

“I know what this is.”

“A serious crime, right?”

“One of many,” the old detective said. He looked up. “You know what? You speak really well.”

Rick had gotten the same bullshit at Chrysler:
You speak really well for a black man
was the subtext, as though an educated black man should be a rarity worth remarking on. That the detective was black only made it worse. “Well, thank
you
,” Rick said. “Let me ask you: What do I need to do to buy a handgun?”

The detective put down his pen. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Oh, yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.” The old man fixed Rick with eyes so exhausted, they looked as though they’d been shellacked. “We got enough people running around with guns. You don’t want to be part of the problem.” He looked back down at his paperwork. “Leave it to the professionals.”

“To the professionals.”

“That’s right.”

“The police.”

“That’s right.”

“Where were you when I had that gun up to my head?”

“Sir …”

“Where were you when that nineteen-year-old punk-ass was making up his sweet mind whether to leave my babies fatherless?”

“Sir …”

“Acey-deucey, like, ‘Shoot him or no?’ ” Rick stood up, shaking with fury. “No, man, I’m serious. You can’t protect me.”

Rick spent a couple of days replacing the ATM card, credit cards, keys, and driver’s license the muggers had taken, and as he moved around the house he found himself hyperaware, checking doors, windows, and closets for intruders. Out on the street, his eyes never stopped moving, scanning alleys, doorways, and parked cars. He couldn’t stop thinking about those dead eyes, about how little his life meant to that thug. Martin Luther King’s peaceful pieties seemed just that now, while Malcolm X made more sense to him, elaborating the right and responsibility of every man to defend himself by whatever means necessary.

Rick added to his list of errands that week a stop downtown at 1300 Beaubien—Detroit Police Headquarters—to pick up the paperwork for a concealed pistol license. The lady behind the window told him it would take about three months, and that if he wanted to buy a gun before then to keep in the house, he’d need a “purchase permit.”

“How long does that take?”

“You take a seat on that bench, and I’ll run your record. If it comes up clean, I can issue it right here.”

“Let’s do that.”

An hour later, Rick was at Northwest Gun & Ammo Supply, on Grand River Avenue in suburban Redford, laying the paper on the counter. The clerk, a white guy about his age, sat on a stool reading the
Detroit News
. “I want to buy a gun,” Rick said.

The clerk looked him up and down and made a face, vaguely annoyed. “What
kind?
”

Rick had no idea. His brother-in-law had mentioned owning something called a Smith & Wesson M&P, so Rick asked for one of those.

“You sound pretty sure.”

“I am. Smith & Wesson M&P.”

“I like the Glock.”

“Smith and Wesson M&P.” He wasn’t going to let this supercilious white dude dissuade him. He wanted his brother-in-law’s gun.

“What are you going to use it for?”

What do you think I’m going to use it for?
he thought.
Tennis?
“I just got robbed. I’m getting a carry permit.”

The man’s face softened subtly. Rick seemed to have passed some kind of test. The man reached into a glass case full of guns—black ones and gray ones, big ones and little ones. He came out with one, gripped it in two hands as though to tear it in half.
Clack-click!
It stayed in one piece, but the whole top of it locked back, exposing the insides. He handed it to Rick. Rick had no idea what to think. His questions—How do you load it? What do I have to do besides pull the trigger? Does it kick?—got stuck in his throat, dammed up behind a wall of ignorance. All he said was, “Smith and Wesson M&P?”

“That’s it.”

“How much is it?”

“Five hundred and sixty-nine dollars.”

Rick’s chest thumped. He’d been expecting it to cost half that. He looked down, befuddled. The boxy black gun lay on the counter. It had
all kinds of confusing buttons and levers. He picked it up gingerly. One thing was clear; it felt good in his hand. “Okay then.”