Smith & Wesson: East Texas, 1984

This is an excerpt from my (unpublished) memoir. The setting is a trailer park just outside a small college town in East Texas, the time period is the mid-1980s. This is one of the stories in the book that I go back and forth on whether to include, so thought I would share it here. Thanks for reading!

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When I get home around ten o’clock, the trailer park seems deserted. no lights, no signs of life in any of the other trailers.

I never imagined I would be living in a trailer park. The last house we lived in as a family, the one where Mother killed herself with five bottles of prescription pills, was a 5-bedroom, 4-bath house in a leafy suburb of Houston. In the year since she died, Daddy’s remarried, I’ve gotten divorced, and this rented trailer is the only place I could afford to live.

After classes in the morning, and then a double-shift waiting tables at the Red Barn, I’m tired and want to wash off the smell of chicken fried steak and gravy, and the memory of the manager, Ken, with his key chain he uses as a yo-yo and calls the waitresses by bellowing, “All you heifers, come here.”

Standing in front of the bedroom closet, I kick off my shoes, untie my blue denim wrap skirt and step out of it, peel off my shirt, unhook my bra and as just as my tits can breathe free, I turn to see a man's face, a pale and surrounded by a curly mop of hair on top and a beard, framed squarely in the middle of the small window. The light from the bedroom shines on his face and I am struck by both how bright this overhead is and how clearly I can see him. He is close, maybe ten feet away, if that. The only thing between us is the flimsy trailer. 

    “Ahhh!” I scream and dive for the side of the bed where he can't see me. Goddammit, why did I leave those crappy curtains open.

    “I’ve got a gun!”

I’d been keeping it beside my bed rather than in the car since I moved into the trailer. Daddy gave me this Smith & Wesson when I left home at 17, convinced this was all I needed to keep me safe in the world.

Daddy wasn’t one of those men with a pickup truck and a gun rack. He was more the Lincoln Continental and concealed weapon type. When he gave me the gun, he gifted it with this advice: 

“If somebody’s comin’ after you, make sure you aim, shoot and kill ‘em. If you just wound ‘em, you’ll only piss ‘em off and then you’ll really have a mess on your hands. Now, if someone tries to get into your house, make sure they’re all the way inside. Then shoot the bastard.”

Daddy also made sure I was well versed in the Texas statute about the use of deadly force against an intruder.

    “What if he’s not all the way in the house?”

    “If he’s halfway in, then drag him the rest of the way inside. Make sure you put at least 3 rounds into him. If you shoot less than 3 times, shoot him again to make sure he’s dead. Once you’re sure he's dead, get the hell away from him and call the police.”