1
In the summer of 1979, a few days after my fourteenth birthday, I was in the back of a van with an airbrushed panther on the side, trying to buy an untraceable pistol.
I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska. The kind of safe neighborhood where kids would be turned loose in the morning and left to their own devices until the piercing shout of their mother informed them that it was time to come home for dinner. The neighborhood dogs just walked wherever they wanted, unleashed, and we knew each of them by name.
Oh, sure, we had bullies, but not the kind that left lasting trauma. Throughout the second grade, my friends and I lived in fear of a kid we’d nicknamed Checkers because he always wore a red-and-black checkered jacket. He was a huge, scary-looking kid—a third-grader for sure. If we saw him on the playground during recess, and he saw that we saw him, he’d immediately give chase and we’d flee in terror. Sometimes we’d lose him quickly, and sometimes we’d spend the entirety of recess trying to escape a savage beating that would presumably involve broken bones and spurting blood. The only thing saving us was that his frightening bulk was perfect for intimidation but not so great for endurance in a pursuit.
The playground had some gigantic tires stacked on top of each other. You could climb on the outside of them or also crawl around inside the tires themselves. (I honestly don’t know if they were somehow attached or, by 1970’s playground safety standards, just stacked with the assumption that they probably wouldn’t come crashing down and kill several children.) One day, I was inside the highest tire and when I glanced down, there was Checkers, looking up at me. I was trapped. There was no escape. I was filled with the white-hot terror of a second grader who knows that a bloody nose is in his future.
“I’ve got you now!” said Checkers. Then he let out a maniacal, villainous laugh.
And I suddenly realized that he meant me no harm. While my friends and I were completely convinced of the peril we faced from Checkers, he was just having fun chasing some younger kids around the playground. He never caught us because he didn’t want to. If he had caught us, he would’ve simply released us, like fish.
As I got older, there were other bullies, the kind who might try to trip you in the cafeteria or hurl epithets that were much more acceptable a few decades ago than they are today. But there really wasn’t much in the way of danger. There were rumors that a kid froze to death when he forgot his house key and his parents were late getting home from work, but I didn’t know him and the story didn’t really hold up to close scrutiny. Overall, it was a very safe childhood.
Until some kids disappeared.
And I knew exactly who did it.
I knocked on the side door of the van, which was parked at our designated meeting spot in front of The Old House. The house probably wasn’t older than any other house in the neighborhood, but it had been abandoned for as long as I could remember, and it was falling apart to the extent that even kids who thought they were protected by the invincibility of youth didn’t venture inside. But with the overgrown yard, you could park a van in front of it and not attract any real attention.
The door slid open. A man with greasy long hair and a thick mustache looked surprised to see me.
“Fuck off, kid,” he said. “I’m meeting somebody.”
“You’re meeting me.”
“The hell I am.”
“I’m Curtis.”
The man groaned. “Are you kidding me? What are you, nine?”
“I’m fourteen.”
“Sorry, kid. I don’t sell guns to chubby fourteen-year-olds. Go away.”
“My money’s as good as anybody else’s.”
The man massaged his forehead as if this decision was causing him intense pain. “Fine, fine, whatever. Get in.”
I climbed into the van, which smelled like what I was innocent enough to believe was a dead skunk. I started to pull the door closed.
“Don’t close it all the way,” he told me. “I don’t want you to be able to say I tried to kidnap you.”
I closed the door most of the way. The inside of the van had a mattress on the floor and red blankets. I was not so innocent as to think, “Oh, this must be in case he wants to sleep in his van during road trips!”
He lit a normal cigarette and glared at me. “This isn’t cool at all.”
“Sorry.”
“What do you want a gun for, anyway? You’re not going to shoot your teachers, are you?”
“No.”
“Don’t your parents own a gun?”
“Sure they do. A bunch of them.” This was Alaska. Every household had a gun collection.
“So why don’t you use one of those?”
“Because I don’t want it to be traceable. That’s the whole reason I called you. If I wanted something for target practice, I’d ask my dad to let me borrow a rifle.”
“Why don’t you want it to be traceable?”
“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“Because I don’t sell guns to kids. I don’t know what you’re going to do with it. What if you’re dumb? What if you accidentally blow your face off? I don’t want that coming back on me.”
“The whole point is that the gun can’t be traced. If it comes back on you, then you’re bad at your job.”
“It’s not my job. It’s just a side gig.”
“Are you going to sell me a gun or not?”
The man took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke in my face. “Are you planning to kill somebody with it?”
“None of your business,” I told him, trying not to cough. If I coughed, he’d have the upper hand in our little power struggle.
“You sure as hell aren’t planning to use it to shoot squirrels, so you’re either going to commit a murder, or you’re going to plant it on somebody to get them in trouble. Which is it?”
“How do you know it’s not just for self-defense?”
“Then why would it need to be untraceable?”
I honestly didn’t know who was winning the argument. “I can’t force you to sell me one. I’ll just take my business someplace else.”
“Good. Get out of my van.”
I reached for the door handle, hoping he would suddenly change his mind. He said nothing.
I really didn’t have another option. Finding this guy had been extremely difficult. The Internet didn’t exist back then, and in fact if somebody had described the wonders of the World Wide Web as something that would be available in my lifetime, I would’ve gaped at them in slack-jawed astonishment, and then laughed in their face for believing something so ridiculous.
I figured that a drug dealer would know how to get a gun. I didn’t know any drug dealers. I did, however, know a couple of older kids who I was relatively certain liked to smoke weed. (I didn’t know what marijuana smelled like, but I knew what it was. Those educational films we watched in class weren’t a complete waste.)
I paid them five bucks to give me the phone number of their dealer. I called him and asked if he knew how I could get an untraceable gun. He hung up on me. I called back later and a different person answered. I asked the same question, and while he didn’t know, he gave me the phone number of another pot dealer who might. I called that dealer, and he said that he had no idea and wouldn’t tell me even if he did.