Halfacre Gunroom

May 1997



I’m in the Halfacre Gunroom holding a Susan B. Anthony dollar I got from M. less than a week ago. It was a trivial thing to her. She had three dollars. A beer was three and a half so I paid with a twenty and later that night or maybe the next morning I put the Susan B. Anthony dollar in my wallet, a memento signifying only triviality and that is a memento, but at least it came from M. and there may not be many more things, at least tangible things, that I can say that about given her current situation and the vision of the future I’ve tried to ignore but am now forced to accept. So I decided to hold on to it, maybe forever, maybe until my next three months of unemployment stretch hits me and I’m forced to scratch and dig for anything that I have. In the act of spending it, though, I will recall M. no matter what the situation may be. Hopefully the memories that spring up before me then will somehow be pleasant. But pleasant memories don’t stand a chance in the Halfacre Gunroom. Maybe I’ll have moved out of the Gunroom by then.



She’s about to turn twenty-four years old, but she thinks she’s all grown up already. She’s been in and out of the Gunroom a time or two before, sometimes longer than others, but now she’s outside again and is giving no indication that she’s gonna walk up to the door any time soon. She doesn’t have to pay a cover charge. She always gets free beer.

The Gunroom is dingy and soiled and barren of life. The dance parties don’t draw crowds like they use to. The music doesn’t move them the way it used to. And the Gunroom considers giving in and collapsing to the ground. But the Gunroom exists. It’s walls stand. It waits to give the give of itself to her again. She might yet be the belle of the Halfacre Gunroom Ball. So the Gunroom goes on---in spite of itself.



My mind and my soul are the Halfacre Gunroom with infinite room for expansion upward and an evil killing floor on the bottom.

Bookshelves of memories reach up to God. The elevator of worry plummets towards the Devil. Woe Is Me is everywhere and makes it hard to walk without tripping.

Pictures go on forever in the Gunroom. Each brings forth another then on and on and so forth. And they never stop and the light to see them by rarely dims.