Gun Club Santa

Ah, 1973. Those were the days.

Mom and Dad belonged to a social group--the Gun Club--and though their outings were all about the menfolk taking off on Friday nights for places north and returning Sunday nights with venison wrapped in plastic, there were the occasional family events, including the annual Christmas party.

Once a month my parents got snazzed up and went to a Gun Club party, either at somebody's house or at the rental hall down at the local church. Occasionally it was at our house, and we'd lie in bed and listen to the laughter and smell the smoke, which Dad would bitch about for weeks after; never could stand that smell. My father was an Old Spice guy--I still love that scent, if it's not overdone. My mother curled her hair, and tucked herself into these snug little dresses, and spritzed Jean Nate all over. Some of the babysitters came from other Gun Club families, including John Barden--5 or 6 years older than us, I guess--who'd stretch out on the couch and ask my sister and me to strip down to our underwear. Which we did, I recall; he was so cool. One of us happened to mention it to Mom or Dad and John stopped coming over. (My kids have never stayed with babysitters beyond my folks or my sisters.)

We went camping in the summer with the Gun Club--dragging one of those fold-down campers behind the station wagon to places in New York state. The men would disappear into the woods during the day, rifles over the shoulders. We'd roll down hills until we got sick, or swim in shallow ponds, or eat. My mother would make small talk with the other wives, but you could tell she wasn't into it.

She hated the whole scene. It wasn't the guns, but the kinds of people who tended to want to be gun owners and wildlife hunters: tinkers, in her parlance: knackers. Not that they couldn't also be perfectly lovely people, but they didn't aspire to a life beyond what they knew, and she did. (She was also the only immigrant there, so the only one who knew something about recasting ones life.) The other women showed up in polyblend pant suits and dressed their men in sweaters and green factory pants. Mom bought Dad suits from a tailor in Dublin, and herself favored more ethnic fare. Here they are, at a Gun Club party:

She had five kids then, but was taking courses at the local college in anthropology and psychology to stay sane; I remember the course books on the bathroom shelf--her study.

One day I came home from school and there was a 15-point buck hanging from the maple tree in the front yard. I was mortified--not just to witness the sport up close, but to have it hanging there for all to see: worse than a peed sheet out the window, worse than being caught in a lie. My father killed that enormous, graceful creature and he was proud of it. Pure and visceral.

That was the beginning of the end of the whole Gun Club scene. Mom and Dad moved one town over and a world away. The Gun Club couples divorced. Their kids married and then also divorced. They all started getting the litany of smoker's diseases. Some of their kids began to get into trouble. One kid died--was shot; we heard about it just this year.

It could never pass as an out-of-the-ghetto tale; this was Weston, Connecticut, and even then it was a pretty privileged place, though we did live in the low-rent district of town. But Mom used to tell us that she was so glad we moved--that she did it because she didn't want us to grow up in the poor part of town, feeling inferior. I never felt poor, though; never felt ashamed of where we lived. But she was speaking in euphemisms, and casting back to the social scene in Ireland, and casting ahead to renderings of the family she intended to raise up, and that's not a child's language.