Three Kinds of Sun

Laura Lee: Kansas was all golden and smelled like sunshine.

Josey Wales: Yeah, well, I always heard there were three kinds of sun in Kansas: sunshine, sunflowers, and sons-of-bitches.

Lee: Well, at least we’re known for something.

 —The Outlaw Josey Wales

Tell me this. If Marshall Matt Dillon was not my father, why did I walk like him, talk a little like him, and hold my pistol just like he did, canted out? He and the other man who raised me both carried guns, and they both smelled of whiskey and gunsmoke.

My attraction to Marshall Dillon’s world was primarily religious and legal in nature, a mixture of Old and New Testament truths. I strove to emulate the moral code that Matt, Kitty, Doc, Chester/Festus, and later the Blacksmith lived by. Unlike most of the people around me, they really believed in something. Each episode of Gunsmoke was a lesson in the cleansing, bracing power of the Law, incorruptible and judiciously applied. Matt was Jesus, Kitty was Mary Magdalene, Doc was Paul, and Chester and Festus were errant disciples.

I already loved Jesus. But Matt and the others were more tangible, appearing on the screen in our living room, every Sunday night, after church and rest and meat and potatoes. God, guns, and gonads ruled the days and nights, which were leavened with lots of alcohol. And we let the chips fall where they might. Ours was not to reason why. As the state flag said, Ad astra per aspera—to the stars through suffering.

My father was a superb marksman. To him, marksmanship was a matter of honor and, for me, a mark of compassion. He often killed small game—rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, even birds—with a single head shot, which brought death instantly, as from above. If a hunter needed more than one shot for a kill, my father took it as a sign of moral weakness. He looked down on bad shots. Were he alive today, he would argue against assault weapons because they encourage poor marksmanship.

He was also an unwavering stickler for gun safety. A rough cousin of mine from western Kansas once failed to unload his twelve-gauge shotgun before crossing a barbed-wire fence. My father castigated, then humiliated him. I swelled with pride at his righteous indignation and sighed in relief that, for once, someone else was the target of his disapproval. 

I never saw my father as comfortable and relaxed as when he was holding a gun. And he had many, almost a dozen. For him, guns were a natural extension, a necessary prosthetic. They seemed to restore abilities that had been cruelly taken from him. After the doctors amputated his left leg—poor circulation from drinking—he would prop his prosthetic one up in the corner, next to the .410 shotgun that he called “a good indoor gun.” It made him feel whole again.

Some of my father’s mechanic’s tools hung on hooks in the garage; the rest were arranged in a large wooden drawer sheathed in metal and secured with an inch-thick bolt through a hole in the side. These tools represented the best of my father: his skill, strength, and ability to change the world as it was given to him. To fix things. Guns were just a more lethal type of tool to him. 

Later on, my father hid bottles of rotgut whiskey in that drawer, which he mixed with Coca-Cola. You would think combining guns and alcohol would have been a bad thing, but I never saw my father do anything stupid with a gun, drunk or sober.

To please him, I joined the National Rifle Association’s youth division as soon as they let me, at ten or twelve, and began collecting marksmanship medals right away. Looking back now, I’m glad they said no when I tried to join the Green Berets at age sixteen; they almost certainly would have made me a sniper. The long-suffering recruitment officer told me to come back in a few years. “Don’t worry,” he said as he gently pushed me out the door. “We’ll still have plenty of fighting left for you to do then.”

There were loaded guns all over the house. My father was ever-ready to repel invaders, which seemed noble until I realized there hadn’t been a single burglary or home invasion in our town for the entire time I lived there. When I pointed this out to him later, he claimed a prophylactic effect. We were prepared, so we weren’t attacked.

In my father’s defense there were a number of hold-ups and attempted hold-ups at his Texaco service station and repair shop (“Trust your car to the man who wears the star”) just across the tracks, on Old Highway 40, also known as America’s Main Street. Before his beloved Ike Eisenhower built Interstate Highway 70 in 1959, Old Highway 40 was the main east-west route across Kansas. The highway brought small-town crooks through town, but also the occasional big-time gangster: Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd. My father always kept cash in the till and a revolver in the drawer, which he brandished a few times, but I don’t think he ever shot anyone.  

I recalled this history decades later, in the 1980s, when I was driving a yellow cab on the night shift in San Francisco. I drove it for nine years during the height of the crack epidemic, when people regularly shot drivers for as little as $50. We were rolling yellow cash registers, and everyone on the street knew it. Some drivers carried guns; more often than not, they ended up getting shot. There were plenty of heated situations, and having a gun within reach changed things. You were prepared, so things escalated.

I never lost a night’s receipts, but I did have a number of close calls: one with a knife, one with a passenger who tried to strangle me from behind with my own scarf, and others who tried it with their bare hands. I didn’t carry a gun, but I did carry my father’s massive, solid steel flashlight from his gas station days. I could break a man’s arm with it. 

One of the most memorable attempted robberies happened on a slow night in the summer of 1985. I picked up a fare in the Tenderloin and the hair on the back of my neck stood up right away. He asked me to drive him up to the back side of Potrero Hill without giving a specific address, a bad sign to begin with. When we got there he pulled out a Saturday night special .38 and demanded all my money. Because I thought I heard a measure of doubt in his voice, I began talking to him, slowly at first and then more rapidly. I told him why I didn’t want to give him the money and why he didn’t want to kill me over it. I had the advantage of surprise. When I turned around to face him, he looked at me like I was the one being reckless. 

But he listened, and I talked. I told him about my family and my work, about my theories about grace and salvation. After I ran out of things to say about myself, I talked about St. Augustine, about his wild youth, whether or not he believed in double predestination, and especially how he, in contrast to Plato, thought testimony was central to human knowledge. I don’t know how long I testified, or how long we sat there in the dark, me in front and him behind, with no barrier between us.

His body gradually softened. Then he put the gun back in his pocket and got out of the cab and walked away, not looking back. I got out of there, drove home as fast as I could, woke up my partner Gret, and held her close for the rest of the night. 

I was born in 1953 in Junction City, said to be “the wickedest town in Kansas.” It is situated where the Smoky Hill and Republican rivers come together to form the Kansas River—thus the name. Junction City is right next to Fort Riley, the home of the Big Red One infantry division. When the GIs at Fort Riley got paid, they would head over for drink, drugs, debauchery, and whatever else could make them forget the Army. At that point, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Ninth Street in Junction City was one of the hottest red-light districts anywhere.

I grew up in Chapman, on the banks of the Smoky Hill, fifteen miles upriver on Old Highway 40, right between Junction City and Abilene, Eisenhower’s hometown. We played Junction City in high school football and basketball; they usually beat the hell out of us. Sometimes we would go over to Ninth Street, looking for trouble, and we usually found it. 

There were four churches in Chapman: the grand Irish-Roman Catholic St. Michael’s cathedral, my own rock-ribbed German Lutheran church, the middle-of-the-road Methodist meeting hall, and the Baptist church, which was barely a player this far north. It occupied a nondescript storefront between Doc Meyer’s veterinary shop and my Aunt Gertie’s beauty salon. Dog urine and disinfectant, singed hair and nail polish. The Baptist church was the only house of worship on the wrong side of the tracks, where we lived. But as nominal German Lutherans, we drove over them every Sunday in an aspirational crossing.

When I was about fourteen our pastor died and Reverend Glazier moved into the parsonage. A long-serving military chaplain, he had developed some eccentricities along the way. In the first place, with his Ernie Kovacs mustache and smirk, he just didn’t look like the pastor of a congregation in rural Kansas. He had a mischievous demeanor, sometimes told off-color jokes, and drove a silver 1963 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, with those impertinent fins. His extensive collection of swords and knives festooned the walls of the parsonage. And he kept a small menagerie: a Macaw, a boa constrictor, exotic fish, and a massive Alaskan Malamute dog named St. John.

Reverend Glazier immediately began to make radical changes in the look of the church. He invested in the brightest, most colorful vestments anyone had seen and redecorated the sanctuary with (to us) arcane symbols like Celtic sigils and alchemical diagrams. He also spiced up the liturgy and made unusual selections from the hymnal, even adding some tunes of his own. He had a flair for preaching, to which the congregation of Scherer Memorial Lutheran Church, composed mostly of farmers and their families, had not previously been exposed—and they liked it. Reverend Glazier was a lot more entertaining than the old pastor.

Intrigued, I soon became Reverend Glazier’s principal student and righthand man. By then I was an Eagle Scout with merit badges for everything from rifle and shotgun shooting to reading, and he encouraged me to go after the Pro Deo et Patria award, the highest honor the Lutherans conferred on Boy Scouts. To that end I launched into an exhaustive study of the life and works of Martin Luther, and, at Reverend Glazier’s urging, looked into the more unconventional interpretations of his life, such as John Osborne’s play Luther (1961) and Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958). The pastor wanted me to grasp the relation between the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants’ Revolt, and see how Luther sold out the revolution.

When Reverend Glazier was away I took care of the parsonage, at some point discovering, hidden away in a chest under the stairs, his extensive collection of Playboy, which presented some dilemmas in the fraught relation between desire and belief. 

One summer he and his family left for an extended period, leaving me in charge of his house and menagerie. It was especially hot: St. John, with his thick coat, suffered terribly. One day the dog stopped breathing. I found, in horror, that maggots had burrowed into his back, under that mat of hair, and were eating him alive. I immediately took him to Doc Meyers, the vet, but it was too late. When I called the reverend and told him of this catastrophe, he was remarkably understanding and didn’t blame me. But the experience shook my faith. Was not St. John worthy of God’s love and succor, as one of the least of his creatures?

After a while, Reverend Glazier let me perform the liturgy in his absence, and then deliver sermons. I spent days writing them and rehearsing my delivery. If I was to be a boy pastor, I was determined to be a good one. My favorite passages for exegesis initially were all from The Song of Songs and The Revelation.

I became more and more committed to the clerical vocation. One Sunday, after Reverend Glazier had concluded the liturgy, I stood up before the congregation and declared that I was giving my life to the church. Several women came up afterward and hugged and kissed me like I was the son and grandson they’d long suffered and prayed for.

As it happened, my religious apprenticeship coincided with a growing interest in politics. In my second year of high school I wrote a manifesto called “The Dawn,” decrying the principal as an autocrat who ignored the will of the students. Reverend Glazier let me print it up on the mimeograph machine in his office at the church. It was only much later that I realized what a risk he was taking, and that he probably would have been fired and run out of town if his involvement had been discovered.

The rest of the basketball team helped me distribute “The Dawn” after our practice one night; we placed it in all the student lockers. The next day the principal, who knew I was the leader and wanted to isolate me, called all my friends into his office, one by one, threatening to expel them if they didn’t reveal who the author of the offending document was. To my delight and enduring pride, every one of them claimed it was collectively written. At the end of the day I went in myself to admit sole authorship. The principal closed the office door, sat down behind his desk, folded his hands, and addressed me in a voice I’d never heard him use before: “I am going to get you,” he said. “I will make sure you don’t get into any college, anywhere, ever. I will spread rumors about you and malign you and your family wherever and whenever and however I can. Now, get out.” 

When the principal threatened me with legal action for using school property to publish “The Dawn,” lawyers from the Kansas University chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society offered to represent me pro bono. (In the event, the principal did not follow through with the threat.) I ended up going to Kansas State, where I spent two years organizing student strikes, protesting against the Cambodian bombings, and marching on the ROTC building in opposition to the Vietnam War, military training, and the draft. At the end of two years, a university vice president who was grooming me for a Rhodes scholarship said I had betrayed him with my activism. He asked me to withdraw from the school, which I did, leaving Kansas for good.

When she was in high school my little sister started dating a conservative farm kid raised in the strict River Brethren sect—an Anabaptist denomination that opposed war, alcohol, tobacco, and all worldly pleasures.¹ Eventually they decided to marry. He was already a gun enthusiast by then, stockpiling weapons and loading his own ammo. (Loading or reloading a cartridge is a challenging skill. Most gun owners buy cartridges that they use once.) When I heard about the decision I came home from college to try to talk her out of it. Having listened to my pleas, she looked me in the eye and said, “How dare you try to tell me who to love and what to do with my life? Who do you think you are?” I saw her point and reluctantly backed off.

They married and had two children, and things seemed okay for a while. But then her husband started having affairs, drinking more, and getting deeper into the new gun culture in Kansas, which was connected to the far right. There and elsewhere, gun shows were being transformed into political gatherings.

When my father died in 1986, my brother-in-law and I divided up his guns. He took all the high-powered, high-value weapons—including a Japanese rifle with a bayonet, a German Luger pistol, and a twelve-gauge shotgun—and left me with the H & R nine-shot revolver, the H & R “Plainsman” .22 bolt-action rifle, and the .410 shotgun (the “good inside gun”), all of which I was glad to have, for sentimental reasons. 

Things went from bad to worse with my sister’s marriage, and she took the kids and left. In the end he holed up in their little house on the prairie, wanted on weapons charges and other offenses. The sheriff’s men, some of whom he had worked with, surrounded the house, then called my sister and said, “He outguns us by quite a lot. If we go in to take him, we’re going to lose some men. What do you want us to do?” And she said, “Let him run.”

They did, and he ran to Idaho, where he hooked up with various far-right militia groups. When my nephew followed to be with his father, he too got wrapped up in the militia movement. In Christmas 1994 he came back to Kansas full of conspiracy theories about the martyrs of Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993, about how the government was trying to take our guns and about the imminent establishment of the New World Order. “Just you wait,” he said. “We will be avenged. Something big is about to happen, and when it does, you’ll know what I’m talking about.” 

My nephew could not have known what was to transpire a few months later, but it still unsettles me that his prophecies about cleansing violence came true in a way. On April 19, 1995—the second anniversary of Waco and the 220th anniversary of “the shot heard round the world” in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first military engagements of the American Revolution—Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680 others. He and his accomplice Terry Nichols assembled the bomb in Herington, Kansas, where my father was born and raised—it’s twenty-five miles from Chapman. A few days before the bombing, McVeigh stayed at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City. He rented the Ryder truck he used in the attack there. 

When he was ten years old, McVeigh’s father gave him a .22 rifle and a semiautomatic BB gun that could fire fifteen rounds with one pull of the trigger. This would-be soldier later stockpiled guns, and eventually joined the Army, serving in the first Gulf War as a top-scoring gunner. He wanted desperately to join the Green Berets but couldn’t pass the physical tests. Still, a fellow sergeant in McVeigh’s infantry unit said he was a good shot and a good soldier. “If he was given a mission and a target, it’s gone,” he said.