Guns
"Have you ever read anything by Straussberg?"
I wanted to stare at him until he retracted the question, but I knew I couldn't.
"No, not much. Not anything, actually."
"Oh my! He's great, he wrote this amazing piece about an impoverished swedish school boy who. . . "
I looked over at my wife who was happily chatting with her friend. I thought of all the times I'd introduced her to my friends and their wives. Surely they couldn't have been as weird as this guy.
I would honestly rather be sucking on the tailpipe of a car than be sitting in a conversation with this guy right now.
I turned my attention back to this paradigm of social awkwardness, who didn't even know me and honestly couldn't realize that I didn't want to get to know him. He had stopped talking.
Oh crap, did he ask me a quesiton? He kind of looks like he's looking for a response. Dangit! Um. . .
"Yeah? Wow."
He seemed appeased. Good.
"So, do you own any guns?"
So do I own any guns?! What in the world? He was just telling me about some lame poetry about a crippled school boy and now he wants to get all manly on me? Bull!
"Of course I do. Yeah, guns. . . gotta love guns, right?"
I wasn't about to let him prove that he was more of a manly man than I. As he eagerly rushed off to the back room, I realized that he might actually be bringing back a gun. What that meant I wasn't sure, but I did know that if he wanted to talk "guns" that I was in for it. Sure I'd shot a gun before--in fact my grandpa had even given me some sort of sissy rifle a couple of summers ago, but I haven't shot it because frankly, I don't know the first thing about guns.
He rushed back with some sort of assault-rifle-looking gun that looked like it belonged to some Columbian drug-lord.
Great.
"So this one is a Ruger 357 with a triple seal blue-wing finish. I also went with the double corragated Thompson clip."
"Yeah I can. . . I can see that."
He then handed me the gun.
"I own over a dozen assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols."
I have no idea what you mean by that. Is that impressive, scary, or a threat?
I held the gun like how I imagine an awkward young father holds his first child for the first time. I had no clue. And what's worse, he sat there looking at me as if to say, "Well, aren't you going to do something with it?" I knew what I'd like to do with it.
If I screw this up, I could literally kill someone.
So I sat there staring at this gun, trying to show him up in manliness while our wives were in the other room chatting up a storm, not knowing that at any point in their conversation they could feel the sweet sting of hot metal as a bullet ripped through their shoulder. He sat looking expectantly at me waiting for me to prove that I really did know guns.
There's got to be some lever I can pull, or some bolt I can latch. . .
I found a lever and decided to pull it back. It slid back and automatically set off a chain of movement in the main action of the gun. Since nothing came out of the barrell, I considered it a personal victory.
"Yeah! All right. This is . . . quite a weapon."
I carefully handed it back to him, as if I was satisfied with my experience with it. No sooner had I done that then he pulled some sort of pistola out of his back waisteband.
Who is this guy?
Of course he handed it to me with the same expectant look. So I held it up and acted like I was aiming it at his clock on the wall.
"Man, I could really shoot some. . . birds or. . . some sort of deer with this bad boy."
"I wouldn't know, I don't hunt."
You don't hunt?! What's the point then?
"You don't? Were you in the military or police force or something?"
"No. I just like guns."
You own enough guns to arm a marine reserve unit and you don't use them?! You and your wife are struggling college students with two little kids running around and you buy $2000 worth of armery?!
I didn't know what to say. I still don't know what to say. All I know is that from then on, I've encouraged my wife to hang out with her friend on a girls-night-out only basis.