Because even after you put death aside—keeping in your sights not Oswald’s ruptured gut, but the very idea of the gun beginning to grow, becoming a new kind of try-me, a sure bet he could grip, strap to his thigh, flaunt to protect the earnings of his half-assed strippers and ventriloquist acts and hustled bottles of gut rot champagne and how, once he had a buddy cop score it from Ray’s (bada boom, saving him eighteen bucks), the Colt bloomed from a theory of back-up to an actual sweet heft in his hands; or how, on that particular day, after he parked the Olds and cooed a goodbye to Sheba, his dachshund, his sugar, his baby, he was perhaps thinking less about his wad of cash than words like hero, wrist-slap, crown as he strode down the ramp off Main, then mingled incognito with the press, ready to gawk at the man who shot JFK, but also beginning to feel that tug on his sleeve, beginning to realize he could wring some use from his grief after all, unlike everyone else at home “glued to the tube,” as we’d later say, hoping to glimpse a few handcuffed steps, not knowing they were moments away from watching the first ever broadcast death, which truth be told was not much more than a procession of Stetsons, white shirts and ties that became an arm-cocked lunge and a one-off bang followed by the camera herky-jerky showing Oswald disappearing into a sea of suits; or how it would take the next day’s freeze-framed money shot to let the moment chime beyond that first fleeting shock, beyond the image we’ve seen and seen again, where Oswald’s lips are forever locked on that lopsided O that tells us precisely nothing about death or what it means to have a bullet burrow into the lower lateral chest wall at the precise moment the shutter is clicked by Robert Jackson, the man who began banking on the Pulitzer even as the image first swam into view in its chemical bath, forever turning what had already been printed by the rival Dallas Morning News into a mere snapshot, a near-miss, an also-there, given how the payoff we crave was still in the split-second offing; or how the gun, decades later, let loose from the courts, was auctioned to Anthony Pugliese III, who first fingered his $220,000 prize through a Crown Royal sack passed to him beneath a table in Little Italy; or how the murder weapon became, for Pugliese, a notch in the belt, a trophy, a claim, one more bit of memorabilia he owned, like Indiana Jones’s prop bullwhip, or the hat worn by the dissolving witch during Oz’s what-a-world-what-a-world scene; or how the gun became something of a celebrity, appearing on Larry King Live like some come-back actor hawking a new book; or, even more, how the Colt became a money-making machine, with Pugliese firing it into his swimming pool, then gathering the deep-end bounty and mounting each bullet in a frame along with an 8 x 10 of Oswald being shot, signed by two of the escorting detectives and accompanied by a decree that confirms it is indeed a relic from “The Most Famous Gun in the World;” or how, years later, Jack’s brother Earl agreed to fire off some rounds as well (“Maybe 63?” Pugliese once joked), this time into a barrel brimming with hose water because why not and, besides, Earl’s bankable Ruby DNA could reap even more for each framed-bullet sale; or how the gun in a bank vault was forgotten for years after its owner became entrenched in a plan to convert 27,000 acres of Florida real estate near Yeehaw Junction into “Destiny,” a hooked-on-Green housing development with its “Come to Your Destiny” slogan and intravenous vitamin injections and planned kibosh on anything but organic food, a place “where kids can ride their bikes down the sidewalks and people can sit out on their front porch,” all of which unraveled after Pugliese was accused of defrauding his partner, a co-founder of Subway sandwiches, of just over a million bucks, then funneling the cash for personal use, including an $11,000 moat-chiller, which is, it turns out, exactly what the name implies: a device that chills the moat around one’s home—what do you make of America then?
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Matt Donovan is the author of the collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption, as well as two collections of poetry – Vellum and Rapture & the Big Bam. He is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Creative Capital Grant, an NEA Fellowship, and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. Donovan is currently writing a book about guns in the United States, and collaborating on the chamber opera Inheritance about the life of Sarah Winchester.
1 comment
James A. Farmer says:
Dec 3, 2023
Sunday, November 19th, 2023
Remember: Guns cause crime like matches cause arson! Read my recent letter I posted below. –James A. Farmer Klamath County, Oregon. Long Live The State of Jefferson!
To The Roseburg Beacon: Letter ran in the Wednesday, November 22nd issue of The Roseburg Beacon in Roseburg, Oregon.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. This was on my 7th birthday. This LBJ inspired treachery impacted my age group in the most negative way, and continues to haunt and curse our nation today! Unfortunately, an issue doesn’t disappear simply because it’s been ignored, censored, covered up and concealed for decades. This is especially so due to our government controlled socialist public schools, colleges, universities and academia, who walk in step with a deceitful and morally/intellectually dishonest news media! Fortunately The Roseburg Beacon continues to be one of few bulwarks against truth decay. Case in point: “American Experience, “LBJ: Beautiful Texas/My Fellow Americans. A profile of Lyndon B. Johnson.” This recently aired on KSYS Channel 8.1 Aug. 15 and 16, 2016, respectively.
Consider the following the itemized links below:
Barr McClellan’s 2003 book: “Blood, Money, and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK”. Also posted on YouTube.
J. Evett Haley’s 1964 book: “A Texan Looks At Lyndon: A Study In Illegitimate Power.”
“How Persecution of American Christians Really Began in The US!” via the Constitution Party of Oregon (www.constitution party oregon.net) posted under “Liberty In The News.”
Trump to Pastors: ‘Christians Have Been Silenced Like a Child” via Pat Robertson’s 700 club confronts the 1954 Johnson Amendment which remains blatant censorship.
“Lyndon Johnson Murdered John F. Kennedy” on YouTube.
The oppressive 1968 Gun Control Act LBJ signed into federal legislation and its Nazi/ racist roots long since exposed by JPFO, Inc. at http://www.jpfo.org.
“The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ” 2013 by Roger Stone.
Finally, the Vietnam War (1961-1975). How LBJ and then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara greatly escalated this “no win war” in Southeast Asia. And at a cost of 58,000 American lives. Lyndon B. Johnson likewise paved the way for Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. And while Richard M. Nixon was no saint, he wasn’t even in the ballpark with Lyndon when it came to the above political atrocities, abuses, and crimes against the American people.
No, the public’s distrust of our government didn’t start with Richard Nixon and Watergate in 1974. It started with Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), Thomas Dodd (D) of Connecticut, LBJ’s anti-gun lieutenant in the U.S. Senate and fabricator of the unconstitutional 1968 Federal Gun Control Act, Ted Kennedy, both the Earl Warren and Warren Burger Supreme Courts, not to mention the corrupt Daley Democratic Machine in Chicago, Illinois (Cook County). How soon the public forgets!
James A. Farmer 5 Klamath Falls, Oregon