Continued from Part I.

I graduated from school soon after and started working full time. I continued to live with my college roommates in the same house having decided to stay there for another year and keep up my old interests and friendships. It didn’t work out as I had hoped. I did live in the house and maintained my friendships with my roommates, but my circumstances had changed and everything else was different. Regular long hours all week plus at least two hours commuting on the bus took its toll. I was tired in the evenings and late nights out were not as appealing as they had been. I no longer frequented those house parties or those bars.

Several months went by before I had any further contact with her. It was just happenstance that I ran into her again at all.

It turned out that both of us worked in the City.  I ran into her one evening waiting in line for the bus. We sat together that evening and talked the entire ride home.  She had graduated as well and also only infrequently visited any of the old haunts.

The folloring week we got together for lunch in the City.  Soon we were riding the bus together quite often, at least a few times each week.

Those days kind of run together in my mind. My memories of them are quite sketchy; just a few snapshots here and there without much background to give them context. Among those snapshots is an after work dinner hosted by her company one Friday night. She invited me to attend as her date. I guess you could call it our first date, at least I don't remember any earlier one, if you don't call lunch or riding the bus together.

At that dinner, she felt quite free to eat a pasta side entre from my plate. The moment that makes the evening stand out in my memory, that elevates its beyond the background noise, is what one of her coworkers said. He said, “You too share food like you were meant to spend your lives together.”

Frankly, I didn’t find anything telling in her removal of my food from my plate. I found it slightly irritating. I didn’t like anyone eating my food, not even on a date, not even when we hadn't even slept together yet. It would have been different if I had offered, but she hadn’t given me the chance. She had just assumed ownership rights as to my plate and my food. I found myself thinking that she could have ordered the pasta dish herself if she had wanted it. I didn’t say anything to her, not even in jest, and tried to be good natured about the whole thing. I feared I might look like a jerk to her co-workers if I did, and, worse, that I might reduce my chances with her later that evening.

A prophesy of sorts had been made by that co-worker, at least that is the way she saw it. She delighted in telling and retelling the story many times over the years as our relationship continued.

Afterwards, there were more dates, a trip to the shore, an Easter basket sandwiched within a little stuffed animal in the shape of a dog complete with large floppy ears. It all happened in a blur and before I knew it she was my girlfriend, my official girlfriend. It was fairly momentous to me to have someone with that title. She was only the second to bear it.

I met my wife while we were both in college.

Actually, come to think of it, met is probably not the right word. The word met implies an event, a discrete moment prior to which one does not know the person in question and after which one does. There was no such moment, none that remains in my memory anyway. A better way to describe my coming to know her would be to say that she gradually became visible.

She and I had circulated in the same loose group of friends; neither of us central, hangers on both. But we were often in the same places at the same time, usually parties in dark unfinished basements in old dilapidated houses or squalid dive bars with sticky floors. I knew her by sight and recognized her as familiar. I never spoke to her though, nor she to me, and I didn’t know her name.

The earliest specific memory I have of her was from one of those house parties. I already recognized her, I know that from the memory, but all details of how I had come to do so are lost. In the memory I am standing next to one of my friends at the bottom of a flight of stairs, both of us drinking beer out of red plastic cups.  She is walking up a flight of stairs in a pair of black jeans, tight. For no particular reason, perhaps it was just that it was the first time I was at the bottom of a flight of stairs when she walked up them, I think to myself that she has an interesting shape and decide I want to get to know her.  I ask my friend her name.  He tells me.

That was the entire extent of my effort that night. I didn’t do anything else, didn’t approach her, nothing. It wasn’t my way. I was timid, always waiting to be approached rather than doing it myself. It was not a lucrative strategy, I was well aware of that. But it was easy and less daunting.

I know, you don’t need to say it, I was -- am -- a coward.

My timidity didn’t do me any favors that night, unless perhaps you were to take the long view. A roommate of mine, a close friend, who did not suffer from my infirmity, started talking to her later that night. I didn’t know it then, only finding out later, too late.

What could I have said to him anyway? That I had claimed her first by deciding before he started talking to her that I wanted to get to know her? No, I had missed my chance, assuming I’d had any chance with her to begin with.

The next time I saw her she was in his room, lying on his bed. He introduced her as his girlfriend.

Their relationship didn’t last long, but it did last just long enough for her to recede once again from visibility.

The law in Georgia permits a person like me – one not in possession of a license to carry a concealed weapon – to transport a handgun in the glove box of a car. That same law allows an unlicensed person to keep such a gun in the passenger compartment as well, but only if stored in plain sight. I was going to be driving through Alabama and Florida later that night and, while I didn’t know the law in those states regarding handgun transportation, I thought I would be better off keeping it hidden in the glove box rather than out on the seat.

J.P. had given the gun to me in a black nylon zippered carry case and that case is where the gun had stayed while it was in my house. Perhaps my keeping the gun in that carry case would have made it more difficult to get to that gun had need arisen, but I had kept it in that case all the same. I guess I just wasn’t quite comfortable having a loaded gun under my bed unclad, for whatever difference a nylon case would make.

My discomfort with guns also manifested itself in the absurd amount of time I spent thinking about which direction the barrel of the gun should point while it sat under the bed. I didn’t want it to point out toward any areas within the house lest it go off spontaneously – I’m well aware, on an intellectual level, that guns don’t typically go off on their own, but, as I have said, my level of comfort and familiarity with them was quite limited – and wound the ankles of someone with the misfortune, and bad timing, to be walking by at that very moment. I also didn’t want to point it directly towards the exterior wall though just in case such a spontaneously discharged bullet could penetrate that wall and still retain sufficient energy to injure someone outside. I eventually settled on pointing it slightly diagonally out but mostly along the exterior wall, figuring that such a bullet would have to pass through several studs before emerging, if at all, outside of the house.

In any event, because I had chosen to store the gun in its carry case, that’s what it was in when I brought it downstairs that night. When I took it out to the car though and tried to put it into the glove box, I discovered that the gun wouldn’t fit while inside the carrying case. If all of my problems were so easy to solve, I thought to myself, as I removed the gun from the case. But when I started to put the now naked gun in the glove box I found myself going over the same calculations regarding the direction to point the barrel as I had when I had stored it under my bed. I didn’t want the barrel pointed towards me of course, but again I also didn’t want it pointed straight out towards the outside of the car in case it went off in that direction and struck an innocent standing by the side of the road cheering me on as I made my way south to Panama City to rescue true love. I eventually decided to direct the business end of the gun at an angle in such a way that an unexpected discharge would go towards the driver’s side of the car, but into the engine. I had no idea whether that was the right decision, but I had to get on the road at some point – and not merely for the future benefit of readers of this site – so I went with it.

Then, for some reason I can’t remember, I went back into the house one last time before setting off. By force of habit – I tend toward obsessive compulsive on things like checking the locks one more time or making sure that the burners on the stovetop are off, although I did once leave one such burner on high at my parents’ house while staying there one summer when they were in Greece only to return home that evening to find it glowing red hot as it must have been doing for the more than ten hours I had been gone that day – I may have just been making one last check to see if there was anything I was forgetting, a ridiculous exercise really, given how little I was taking with me.

Anyway, very shortly after storing the gun and, believe it or not, before the clock reached 12:45 a.m., I was on the road and on my way down to Florida. It wasn't until about 45 minutes later that I realized that the only result of my final return into the house was that I had left the now-empty gun case sitting on the kitchen table.

I originally thought about attempting to paint a picture of suspense as I traversed the stairs up to the master bedroom once again; the stairs creaking beneath my every footstep, the gap around the guest room door suddenly filling with light as I walked across the landing on the second floor, and then my wife stirring and rolling over in bed while uttering something, seemingly awaking just at the very moment that I reached under the bed to retrieve the gun.

None of those things actually happened though – I did think that my steps on the stairs were entirely too loud, but there was no creaking, filling, stirring, rolling, uttering or awaking – and I have made promises to you, that I would not gin up false tension any more, and to myself, that I would stick to fact in the telling of this story.

On occasion I have suffered difficulty in writing this because I simply do not any longer remember full details of certain of these events or recall some of the essential portions of important conversations. Despite those difficulties though, I have been true to my vow, at least the one that I made to myself that is.

As for the other promise – I try to avoid all the cliffhangers, I really do – the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak.

Anyway, having once again resisted the urge to delve into fiction, I will just tell you that I successfully sneaked back into that bedroom, grabbed that gun, and was back downstairs in no time at all.

The “one more thing” I referred to at the end of the last post was a gun.

I had obtained it in the weeks leading up to the reputed and often debated end of the millennium. Regardless of where you stood on that debate though, and I’m talking about the question as to which year numerologically speaking was the last of the twentieth century, the then looming potential computer problem that threatened our very way of life was of the opinion that 1999 was that last year and that a millennium would end and another start when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. Nobody really knew for certain how that problem would manifest itself once the clock reached midnight that day and the new millennium began and, despite the fact that I didn’t really believe that there would be much, if any, tangible effect, I wanted to at least have a gun in the house just in case something did happen.

One of my closest friends from those days, J.P., who I had met a couple of years earlier at the dog park (he had a large black Great Dane named Phoebe), had lent me the gun. He was ex military and had spent at least one tour of duty looking out over the de militarized zone between North and South Korea. After his discharge, he had run various businesses, one of which was a gun shop. That business was defunct by the time I met him, but he still kept quite a large collection of weapons of various types in his house.

He knew that neither my wife nor I had ever owned a weapon. I was sure that he didn’t approve, but then my wife and I both came from a somewhat different culture than he did, me from England where even the police don’t routinely carry anything more than a short truncheon – although the first time I saw security forces of any type carrying machine guns was in an airport in London and it is only in the recent, post 9/11 years, that I have seen the same within the borders of the United States – and my wife, also born of English parents, from an area in New Jersey where gun ownership and possession was frowned upon and discouraged.

By the way, while I’m in the neighborhood of the subject, when I learned, at nine and a half years old, that my family was leaving England and moving to the United States, it seemed a very frightening prospect, in part because of the sidearms openly and routinely worn by the police. Everything about America seemed scary to that young English boy that was me though; even the winter in America seemed bigger and more deadly. I remember fearing, perhaps because of ominous comments made by my friends, that I would find death in America while trapped in a car in the snow. Of course, that particular fear could also have had something to do with the timing of our move. We moved around Thanksgiving Day in 1977, less than one year removed from a particularly bad blizzard in the United States and a news report, that I still seem to vaguely remember watching on television, of a car buried in a snow bank. And it didn’t matter to that nine and a half year old mind that we were headed to Tampa, Florida instead of Buffalo, New York. Anyway, we made the move without incident and my fear of the United States gradually subsided over time as the country changed from a great unknown to the familiar.

Guns though were a different issue, they have never moved into the familiar for me. Neither my parents nor their respective spouses ever owned any guns while I was growing up, and they still don’t. My only personal experience with and knowledge of guns from those years came first when a close friend of mine from eleventh grade, who wanted to become an Army Ranger, acquired a .22, with which the two of us spent at least one or two afternoons shooting at soda cans that we had arranged on a fence and then later when an acquaintance from school killed himself with one while sitting in the passenger seat of his friend’s car.

Nevertheless, I told J.P. one day at the dog park, while we were sitting on the trunk of a tree that, still living, grew horizontally out over the Chattahoochee River, a victim of the combination of erosion of the river’s bank and gravity, watching our dogs run around in the grass or splash and swim in the river, that I would feel better if I had something in the house when the millennium turned, even something as small as a handgun, just in case the unlikely happened. He agreed to lend me one of the two .357 Magnum revolvers that he owned, but only after he had taken me to the shooting range so that he could give me a lesson on the use of the gun.

After I had gone through my lesson of the proper way to handle and shoot – and the proper respect to give – the gun, I had taken one of them home. I kept it under the bed in the master bedroom. I had put it there so that I would be able to quickly gain access to it should a crisis situation arise.

On that night in the very early morning of December 30, 1999 though, that placement was very inconvenient and meant that I would have to go back up to the master bedroom once again if I was going to take the gun with me.

One question in the back of my mind when I was considering whether to take the gun with me was what I would face when I arrived down there in Panama City. I was going into the heart of M.P.’s husband’s territory, the “heart of darkness”, as I have seen Florida described more than once somewhere, and the portion I was going to be visiting was among the darkest of all. His family was all down there and who knows what would happen or who would be there to greet me when I arrived. For all I knew the entire Bolivian army was down there waiting in ambush and I wouldn't even have Sundance with me.

But the truth is I didn’t expect to be using the gun in that fashion or in any fashion at all. The real reason the idea of taking the gun with me on my trip to Panama City was appealing, more than anything else, was that when I returned to my house, whenever that may be, I didn’t want to face an angry and also armed wife. I knew from experience that she could let anger get the better of her and appear in her reactions on occasion not entirely rational in situations that may not actually have warranted such a reaction and the situation involving M.P. would certainly warrant it. Given what was I was going to do that night and what was likely to happen after that, I didn’t want to face my wife at her most irate and with access to a gun.

So, after brief consideration, I decided I would take the gun with me.

With the decision to go and get M.P. made, the only thing left to do was a little preparation before I set out.

M.P. had told me the drive down to Panama City took about five and a half hours and I wanted to get on the road as soon as I could in the hope that I would reach her parents' house early enough to whisk her away before her husband would even be awake, let alone at their house, and thus make certain to avoid, for that morning at least, the nastiness that would certainly accompany my future encounters with him. A trip back to my house was unavoidable though because when I had left it a few minutes earlier the last thought on my mind was that I would be driving to Panama City that night. I had taken nothing with me other than my cell phone and I was wearing only a pair of sweatpants and an undershirt. I’m not even sure any longer if I’d taken the time to put on a pair of shoes.

Anyway, I drove back to my house to grab a couple of things. I was unsure about what to take because I had no idea about what M.P. and I were going to do after I picked her up or when we would be back in Atlanta. For that matter, I was far from certain when I would be returning to my house, if at all.

It simply wasn’t feasible for me to go around in the middle of night putting together a suitcase though. It just wouldn’t do to be discovered packing in the middle of the night. What would I say to my wife if she woke up (or, for that matter, her visiting friend who was sleeping in the guest room)? I knew the confrontation was coming; after all I would hardly be able to keep my affair secret any longer after driving to Panama City in the middle of the night to pick up M.P. Nor did I want to. As an astute comment left a while back suggested, I wanted to be forced into action and forced to move away from my passivity and cowardice. The trip to pick up M.P. would certainly do the trick. However, the middle of the night before that trip was not the ideal time for that confrontation, if, for no other reason, because of the delay it would cause.

By necessity though, I did go back upstairs to my closet, the walk-in type, which was located off of the master bathroom. It was a little nerve-wracking getting to it because I had to go through the master bedroom to get there, but once I made it to the bathroom and closed the door I was much less nervous than I had been just over three months earlier when I had been forced to shave while sporting marks no less unmistakable than a red letter on the forehead. Regardless, I didn’t spend any more time up there than absolutely necessary. Just enough time to take a quick look around at my clothes and give a quick thought to what I might need. In the end, I just grabbed a couple of pairs of underwear, a pair of pants, shorts and a shirt or two and got out of there.

Once back downstairs, I looked around to try and find our road atlas. I had a map of Georgia in the drawer next to the stove, but that wouldn’t do me much good because only the first part of my trip, the interstate part, was inside of Georgia. The rest of it was over smaller unfamiliar roads in Alabama and panhandle Florida. After about five minutes of unsuccessful looking though I gave up, trusting that M.P.’s directions would see me through and figuring that if I really got into a pinch I would be able to pick up a map at a gas station/convenience store on the way.

I was about to make my way back to my car and get on the road when I remembered one more thing that I needed to consider taking with me.

Described by its author, Doug Pascover, as redefining misanthropy for a fresh generation, Waking Ambrose is a daily read for me, although I must admit to being less than conscientious in participating in the definition exchanges in the comments (you’ll see what I mean if you go and have a look around at a few of the posts and their comments). More from the site’s description: “Standard posts begin with a definition from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary followed by a modern adjustment. Guests on Wednesday and storytelling on Saturday.”

I was a Wednesday guest, go check it out.