How a gun altercation at Mardi Gras forced me to finally face a lifetime of violence

I don’t know how to tell this story.

This has been the closest thing to writer's block I have ever experienced in my career as an author. Every time I sit down to begin expelling the words in my head, they are jumbled, hidden somewhere behind his gun and the smug face of the woman as she condescendingly questions me while I’m running behind the man with the gun. These scenes of the violence and the red I saw as his Miami Vice shirt disappeared into the restaurant parking lot, they flash around in visceral images forever imprinted in my mind. As I attempt to shove them aside to find the words that are eluding me, I see the blade of my cousin's knife as he chases me down the street because I told the truth. Then, there I am again, a gun in my face as I lay on the cement at seventeen years old, outside the motel we were calling home that week.

Have I simply stacked up too many instances of violence in the course of my life that I could no longer properly process them? Have I processed them at all?

I haven’t processed.

There is just no way to tell what happened that Mardi Gras weekend with any level of a linear timeline. It was like, as I stood there at that physical intersection, with the man with the gun, and he was forcing my hand, now placing me unwillingly at a crossroads within my own life, forcing me to confront all of my past, worried about my present, and uncertain if there will be a future after this moment.

Yet, I can’t say of this story, “It began on the weekend of Mardi Gras” and tell it from this overly neat narrative of an isolated event. If I were to do that, it would make this act of violence seem as if it is somehow rare.

A flash moment.

A wake-up call.

A redemption.

The feeling inside me was almost a sense of familiarity with this grotesque stand-off of the wills. The man with the gun vs the world. This was a clash of masculinity, but more importantly, which version of that would we yield to? I found myself scrambling for answers to why I have become so comfortable within this constant paradigm of knowing the rest of the world doesn’t live like this, while also the other rest of the world is suffering so much worse than this sporadic burst of gravitas that ends in bloodshed. It was here, in this complexity of not knowing where to start, that I became trapped, pushing his gun away in my mind, attempting to find the words behind the actions that have happened around me since my youth.

I can’t start this story by saying, “It began on the weekend of Mardi Gras,” because to truly understand this narrative, you have to know where I was the day that Columbine happened, as the seeds of violence finally yielded the crop of an entire generation of children. To even say it this way runs the risk of whitewashing the reality of the pervasive violence that has been at the very core and nature of our society. The police presence, the militarization of our schools, along with the violence, these things had been happening in communities all over our country for far too long. To pretend that Columbine was ground zero would, in reality, be a disservice to the truth. The more accurate statement would be that Columbine was ground zero for that violence finally infected the parts of our country that most looked like me.

I was sitting in the parking lot of the movie theatre when the news came on. My dad and I were playing hooky because I had a dentist appointment. We arrived at the theater early, so we waited in the car. The news broke on the radio, letting us know that a tragedy had struck middle-class suburbia. We topped this off by walking into the movie theater to commemorate the tragic event by watching The Matrix and eating popcorn. This was my first real lesson in suppressing the reality of what has been happening and accepting that this violence is the new normal.

The day of Columbine was the same day that I first saw the red pill extended in the hand of Morpheus, but it would certainly not become the last time this image would circulate through the zeitgeist—twisting and contorting itself with the same bizarre revisionism that converted Tyler Durden into a hero instead of the punchline. Just two and a half decades from that fateful day, and now macho-ism has so dominated us that the broligarchy has convinced large groups of men that if they shove that pill down their throat, they can practice their violence in broad view on the streets.

The first rule is, we don’t talk about it, after all.

And the second is like it.

Over the next few years, I would become quite acquainted with violence at the hands of my cousin and then ultimately by the circumstances of poverty that thrust us into moments of genuine terror. There was a casual social acceptance of all of this. The police did nothing about the man who robbed me with a gun outside of that motel, and little was done to protect me from my relative. Then the violence became this accepted part of my reality. I came to face, at a very young age, that this was all going to end poorly for me, likely with an unhinged brutality.

Now accepting the fate that lay before me, that there was no way out of this life that would be clean, I leaned into that inevitability. In my adulthood, I tried to reconcile my past hurt from homelessness and poverty by attempting to create solutions that would help alleviate these societal shortcomings. I firmly believed there could be a better way and maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could create systems to replace the broken ones around us. I moved in that faith and hope as I cared for those who had fallen into this pit of normalized violence of poverty and hunger. As I walked into encampments with their certain danger, I didn’t flinch the first time a shotgun was pointed at me. It was like a scent that reminded me of home. When I faced down cops on picket lines with the specter of their weapons hovering over us like a promise, I feared no evil, for my piss and vinegar were with me.

I had suffered in silence as I was bullied for my dyslexia, bifocal glasses, and occasional eye patch. Eventually, I turned that into armor to protect myself, and eventually thought, “Well, as long as I have this on, I might as well fight.” From my youngest years, I had known that this would all end badly for me, so I finally just yielded to it. I hugged it like a cross I was meant to bear. I was nothing more than a worm, so if I died, it might at least be for some greater good or perhaps speaking up for some truth I believed in that moment.

---

The weekend of Mardi Gras began as a dual celebration. Outside of the general festivities of the Carnival season, it was also our complicatedly calculated 17th wedding anniversary. My partner Tashina and I had found each other through our mutually brutal pasts. She, too, had experienced violence in her life, and she understood without words the dark cloud that hovered over me. We put our clouds together and found love in the mist. Our relationship had not been without its complications, which ultimately resulted in us separating for years, before reconciling and remarrying. We chose to count our anniversary from the original date, considering our season apart as time served in the prison of possibility and finding freedom on the other side of it all. That freedom led us back to each other, so we celebrated this occasion with a beautiful dinner and a rare weekend getaway without the kids.

We rented a hotel on Pensacola Beach so we would have easy access to the Mardi Gras parades. The last time we spent a weekend Mardi Gras getaway together, we were newlyweds sleeping in the back of our Jeep Cherokee, imagining what the lives of the grown-ups who can stay in the hotels must be like.

Our relationship had not been shielded from this violence. Even our marriage was built on this foundation that one day I would be doomed to a tragic end.

A few months before our engagement, I received a death threat from someone outraged about my work with those living on the streets. It was a particularly descriptive type of threat letting me know a time and place I was not supposed to be, which was at our food distribution, and if I did show up, I would be killed. I had already learned in my youth that the police don’t care, so I resolved this without them. The night before this supposed martyrdom that I would face, I sat with Tashina on a pier overlooking the bayou. I can’t tell you what the sky looked like that night, if there was a moon or stars or clouds. Whether the water was still or not, I could not say. What I can tell you with absolute certainty is that I knew that I loved this woman, and so I told her, “I have to go tomorrow, and I don’t know what is going to happen to me. Just know, if I do die, that I had every intention of marrying you someday.”

Somehow, despite it all, we had survived to this moment with me now in my forties and her just south of that. At some point during our discussions at the beginning of that weekend, I admitted to her that my greatest fear was that I would die without being able to tell her one more thing, just one final thought before I go; the last “I love you.”

The festivities of Mardi Gras were in full swing along the Gulf of Mexico. We gathered with some friends to celebrate and let the good times roll. In a moment of chaos, Tashina had lost her phone. I talked with a friend while his partner walked off with Tashina to find the missing technology. Almost as soon as they left, I said, “I am going to have to follow them.”

Our friend looked confused, so I explained, “She doesn’t even know how to connect Bluetooth; she is never going to find her phone.”

I walked into the bar parking lot where we had all started, but had now scattered. There was a man standing there whom I had briefly encountered inside. I was wearing my eyepatch. The old eye problems of my youth were catching back up with me and I needed to wear it on occasion to strengthen my less dominant eye. We had been keeping late hours while drinking, so my eye was wandering. The man in the parking lot, back when he wasn’t in the parking lot but inside, had inquired about my patch. We spoke briefly, and it was a generally unpleasant conversation. When I saw him standing there in the parking lot, I hurried on, not hoping for a reprise. Before I could make it far, I heard yelling behind me and turned around. The man in the parking lot was screaming at someone he eventually identified as his wife. I stood by the bushes along the sidewalk of the main intersection of the beach. I waited to see what would happen. The yelling turned to grabbing, and then he began screaming sexist slurs at her. I went to open my mouth, but before any words could come out, I heard a booming voice behind me say, “We don’t talk to women that way.”

Someone stole my line.

I turned to see a man in his mid-60s with a white beard and hair. I knew this man; he was me a few decades from now, still not knowing when to shut up, and always ready to jump into the fight. He was wearing casual beach attire and holding onto a cooler. The man with the cooler and the man from the parking lot began to exchange words.

Then I saw it.

It happened so quickly.

But there it was.

A gun.

The man from the parking lot was now the man with the gun.

I stood there between the wife of the man with the gun and the man with the gun himself as he squared off with the man with the cooler. I watched the man with the cooler run his hand through his beard with a resolved smile. We looked alike, Celtic mutts with just enough of the fire of the Emerald Isle still in us to think we could win with our bare hands against the power of iron.

I kept my eye on the man with the cooler, wondering what would happen next, as the man with the gun declared he would shoot him. The man with the cooler invited him to go ahead, his arms raised in the air, ready to take the bullet to his exposed chest. Was this it? Had everything led to this moment, and it was finally here, the violence that had been chasing me since childhood. Not just chasing me, but all of us, turning us from school children to suspects? Even if I somehow survived the stand-off, there would be blood, and I would see things that could not be unseen. Trauma would be the end conclusion, unless death became the mercy to finally silence this reel of images from constantly cycling through my mind. Making it out of this would only become another act of violence that I somehow narrowly survived that would go upon the cluttered shelf where I kept such things.

I lifted my phone to my mouth and whispered for Siri to send a message.

“I love you.”

I held my finger over the send button.

If this man were going to pull the trigger, so would I.

Was this the last I love you, here so soon after I finally admitted this fear? Somebody get Alanis fucking Morissette on the phone because this shit is ironic. I should have known better; I grew up on Scream. I might as well have said, “I’ll be right back.”

What if she never found her phone?

What if she couldn’t find it because I never made it there to show her how?

What if she never saw that I said it?

What if I really didn’t get one last word?

“I don’t want to die,” I screamed inside my mind.

Just as suddenly as the conflict began, the man with the cooler rushed across the street to the safety of the boardwalk while the man with the gun walked in the opposite direction towards the hotels. I followed him a few paces behind while I did the unthinkable and called the police. As I secretly followed the man, describing him to the dispatcher and giving them detailed instructions on his whereabouts, someone said something to me.

Ignoring the fact that I was clearly on the phone, a woman stood directly next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t make it out. Finally, the words penetrated through the adrenaline and confusing questions from the dispatcher.

“Do you actually need that eye-patch, or are you just mocking disabled people?”

“What? No,” I was stumbling and stuttering like I did when the bullies picked on me when I was a child, “I need it. It’s real.”

Dispatch was still in my ear.

“Hello?”

I tried to respond to the dispatcher, but my answer didn’t seem satisfactory to this woman. I was now trying to help the police locate the man with the gun, but also somehow stuck defending my need for a disability aid that was helping me from going blind. Eventually, I lost dispatch, and the woman never seemed convinced by my frantically quick responses as I tried to get the call completed so I could continue stalking the man with the gun before it became too late for someone else.

---

The cops never did come to deal with the man with the gun. Multiple people called, including the security team at the bar where everything began, but they never arrived. When Tashina finally returned from the boardwalk, she still could not find her phone. She told me about how she saw the cops arresting someone, and that she met a man who reminded her a lot of me, who had told her about how he almost got shot standing up to the man with the gun.

She was glad I wasn’t involved.

I told her I was.

She wasn’t surprised.

As she described the man who was arrested, I realized they didn’t have the right guy. She lamented that she didn’t get the man with the cooler’s information so we could help clear everything up, as well as that the wrong guy didn’t get in trouble. I told Tashina I needed to go find the man with the cooler.

“The beach is crowded, you’ll never find him.”

“I know where he is,” I said.

“How?” Tashina asked.

“Because he is exactly where I would be after something like that.”

I walked a mile down the sidewalk until I reached the Irish Pub. I walked inside and there I was, twenty years from now, sitting at the bar telling the story of how I had survived. I watched it all from my barstool as I too regaled the bartender on this end of the bar, where I was still young-ish, and I just watched as I told the story. Does this mean I would survive into my mid-60s? Or perhaps it means I never learn my lesson. What is the balance between loving my neighbor, standing up against injustice, and also having a reasonable amount of self-preservation? Eventually, our respective bartenders introduced us to one another, and we talked for hours. We shared war stories like that scene from Jaws, lifting our sleeves to show our scars, and he would occasionally exclaim, “You remind me of when I was younger.”

I lost something that day; I no longer felt familial with violence. It was no longer a home I was willing to share. In that moment, I knew with absolute resolve that I wanted to live. I didn’t want to relish in my stories of survival anymore. I wanted to have peace. I want a long life. I want to be there when my kids walk down the aisle. I want to hold my grandbabies. I want to see Tashina’s hair turn gray.

This sudden desire to live, something I have struggled to find for the majority of my life, left me with a hollow feeling, as if someone had removed a cancer from my chest, but there was now a gaping, hollow wound.

Was this what Ebenezer Scrooge felt like on that Christmas morning? Were these my three spirits to visit me on the eve of Ash Wednesday to remind me that I am dust and to dust I shall return, but maybe not the doomsday-ist timeline I have grown to accept?

The ghost of violence and patriarchy had visited me. I stood between the man with the gun and his wife in the way I wish someone had stood in the line of danger for me as a child.

Then again, I had also been that know-it-all, the one who thought it was okay to challenge a stranger on the street, only to realize I didn’t know the whole story, and it wasn’t my place to question their intentions, like the lady had done with my eyepatch.

At the pub, I saw the ghost of my future saying, “Come in and get to know me better, man,” while he sat on my grave.

I know I’m being all over the place with this metaphor, but the Ghosts of Mardi Gras past, present, and future had visited me. There I was, standing at my tombstone like Scrooge, screaming for a different fate. Give me just a little longer? I promise that I will honor Mardi Gras in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

When I finally returned home from that weekend, I was the type of exhausted that has no remedy. I couldn’t get out of bed, crippled by what could only be described as a deep depression that fell over me. I slept for days and woke up in hot sweats every single night. I would wake myself up screaming, but couldn’t remember my dreams. I refused to face this thing, and I couldn’t write it down because every time I tried to find the words, I couldn’t see them past his gun, and the knife, and the other gun, and the gasoline, and the rope, and the list just continued.

I kept fighting.

Each day I woke up, and I tried a little bit more.

I wanted to live.

I actually, genuinely, and truly wanted to survive this thing.

Knowing full well that none of us will.

But maybe just a little bit longer, without so many unfinished things or deep loves unstated.

This feeling, the thing I couldn’t quite describe, that I couldn’t find a way to put on paper, that pain and sweating and cycling back through it all, was healing. I finally wanted to live. Because, as Peter taught us, to live is an awfully big adventure.

Healing.

It began on the weekend of Mardi Gras.

Laissez les bons temps rouler.