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Zip
by Frank Murphy

In the Bronx during the forties and fifties, my friends and I were obsessed with guns. We dreamed of wearing real pistols on our hips, of holding real rifles in our hands. We wanted to render someone helpless by squeezing a finger. “Bang Bang. You’re dead." We wanted Magic!

There wasn’t a time in my early childhood when I wasn’t playing with guns. At five I joined neighborhood kids playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, soldiers, often using oilcloth guns instead of toy pistols. Our oilcloth guns were remarkably similar to the zip guns that became a deadly fad several years later. They were wood and shaped vaguely like a pistol, with a nail, rubber band, and a clothespin. For ammunition we used patches of oilcloth. They were thin and sharp, and could hurt. When I came home wounded by one of those patches, I lied to my mother about how it happened.

While I played soldier, the Second World War was in its final year. Whenever we had a box and some matches, we set fire to Hitler’s house. As we fought with rocks, climbed clothesline posts and fire escapes, and fearlessly explored vacant lots and abandoned buildings, neighbors placed banners with gold stars in their windows to denote the loss of a father, brother, or son.

When we later moved ten blocks north to 147th Street I never again saw or heard of an oilcloth gun.

At six, recuperating from an auto accident, I played at home with my soldier set, shooting enemy soldiers, firing my plastic howitzer into enemy tanks, bombing tranches and ships with my toy planes, and when I was allowed to, I went outside and played with the toy gun someone gave me. In my imagination I was invincible. I was GI Joe, just come back from Tokyo.

The radio and the movies fueled my imagination. I watched cowboys shooting Indians, cops shooting robbers, and Buck Rogers shooting ray guns. The radio prided itself for realistic sounds of gunfire and bullets ricocheting off canyon walls as the Long Ranger road again. I was back in the saddle with Gene Autry, "Totin' my old .44." Gang Busters introduced me to the sound of machine gun fire. Even some of the songs sang of guns: “pistol packin mama,” “I didn’t know the gun was loaded,” “you can’t get a man with a gun.” I even ate Quaker Puff Wheat - a cereal shot from canons. The cereal box showed a smiling Quaker man beaming brotherly love out at me. Talk about mixed messages.

My mother didn’t want my brother and me playing with guns, although she was proud that her brother was given a battlefield commission during the First World War, she mentioned that he and his friends were never the same after that, although she didn’t explain why.

She often spoke of her father, a cop who, and I don’t know why, only carried a glass gun when he was on the force. According to her, the only problem he encountered was a mad dog on his beat that he had to ask his partner to shoot.

Understandably, I ignored my mother’s resistance to our playing with toy guns, and her not so gentle warnings to “never point a gun at anyone, even a toy one” I continued to point and shoot until that became “kid stuff.” But guns remained attractive into my early teens. In my first gang, on the streets and in the schoolyards we talked mostly of guns and girls.

One day a rumor bounced around my school that a kid in the neighborhood had been killed with a zip gun. After school, sitting with my gang on our usual stoop on Alexander Avenue, Larry Otten came up to us and told us it was Johnny. Johnny hung around with us, particularly in the summer when we jumped off the bridges into the Harlem River. In fact, he was with us when we started calling ourselves a gang, the MicWops.

“He died by accident.” Larry said, “He was showing the gun off when it fired. The bullet went into his face.” Bob MacDiarmid said, “Jeeesus,” and half a century later I can hear him.

We called Johnny Johnny-the-lamppost because he got stuck up on one once and couldn’t get down. He was a generous kid, always passing out cigarettes, which he seemed to have an endless supply of, always sharing his candy bars or bottled soda. And, although he was a year ahead of me in Junior High School, we often walked home together. Now he was dead, killed by the zip gun he held in his hand. So much for magic.

Everyone in the South Bronx knew how to make a zip gun. A piece of wood shaped like a gun, a car antenna, a door latch, and a rubber band—Bang. You had it. Get some twenty-two rounds and you could be as tough as one of the Harlem Redwings, a gang feared throughout the area. And Johnny-the-lamppost wanted to be that tough. He left the MicWops because, in spite of our gang name, we were just a group of guys who liked hanging out with each other. Johnny, in spite of his generosity, was always burning with anger, always cursing. One time an older kid punched him in the mouth for cursing in front of the kid’s girlfriend, but it didn’t stop Johnny. Instead, he told everybody that he was going to get a gun and, “shoot the balls off that stupid fuck.”

He kept a cigarette tucked behind his ear when he was out of school, the rest of the pack in his rolled up sleeve. He wore his collar half turned up around his neck and walked with a swagger. He was fifteen.

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Continued... Zip
by Frank Murphy

At the funeral, some adult touched my arm and led me gently towards the coffin. “He looks like he’s sleeping,” A tall woman said. He didn’t. A pillow was laid carefully beside his head, hiding the place where the bullet went in. They did a good job. The face didn’t look shattered, but Johnny-the-lamppost didn’t look at all like a boy sleeping. Johnny-the-lamppost looked dead. His face was now made of stone, his hands, folded together on his stilled chest, were hands of stone. Looking down into the coffin and seeing the first dead body I had ever seen, I thought how little the boy in the coffin resembled the boy I knew, the one we called Johnny-the-lamppost. The boy laid out below my gaze was now magically turned to stone.

Only a short time passed before another teenager in our neighborhood died the same way. I didn’t know him well; I think his name was Ritchie. He was a scrawny kid with an old man’s face and a big Adam’s apple. Some people spoke of suicide, but his death was ruled accidental.

And then, within a season, Warren died due to a zip gun. Once again they called it an accidental shooting, and most likely it was. But Warren hung around with a rough crowd, always on the fringe of one gang or another. I doubt he was ever fully accepted into the gangs; he was small and thin, and I never heard of him actually getting into a fight. But people said his cousin was on the Fordham Baldies or one of the other violent street gangs and that gave him enough street status to hang with groups that otherwise wouldn’t let him come near them.

Warren was the furthest thing from a friend I could think of. In fact, he last hung with a gang who picked on me mercilessly because of my stutter. And yet, after a shameful feeling of elation and relief, I began not only to feel sorry for him, I began to understand him a little. Or at least I thought I did. I thought he was just another guy like me wanting to be tougher, wanting the magic of invincibility. There were so many times I fantasied making a zip gun and blowing some taunting kid’s head off.

After Warren’s death parents in the neighborhood kept an even tighter rein on their children. By five o’clock the stoops were empty, the playgrounds deserted. Weeks went by without my seeing any of the MicWops. His death also brought the police into the neighborhood schools, into the classrooms and the wood and metal shops where the zip guns were made.

Two policemen came into my classroom one afternoon. They spoke of the dangerousness of guns, and in particular the danger of zip guns. When they finished speaking, one of the officers asked anyone in the classroom for any part of a zip gun. “It could be collected,” The cop said, “no questions asked.” One of the wise guys in the class held up a rubber band.

Soon, the zip gun craze was over. It came to our neighborhood like a wave washing under the docks, and then was gone, taking the lives of three young boys with it.

The experience of seeing Johnny-the-lamppost’s parents at his funeral began the slow process of breaking my obsession with guns. When the other deaths followed, I began questioning just how invincible a gun made someone. The fact that all three of the kids I knew died while holding a gun was certainly something to think about. And as I began to hear of more shootings, one under the Willis Avenue Bridge, one on a neighborhood rooftop, others in gang wars, without making a conscious decision, I let the thought of guns drift out of my mind.

At seventeen, I joined the army. It was peacetime so there was only one time I came under direct fire. It happened when I was a recruit in Korea. I and several other recruits wondered by accident onto a South Korean Post and none of us knew that the camp guards were asking us to halt. The following shooting lasted only a few minutes, but in that time I formulated two separate but equal philosophies about war: One, war stinks. Two, if I could shoot the person shooting at me, it would make him stop shooting at me.

However, it would have been difficult to shoot at the soldier shooting at me. Our guns were unloaded because we were recruits. That was only one of the many restrictions placed on our handling firearms. I soon learned that while on guard duty our weapons were loaded with three blank bullets on either side of the clip. Furthermore, we were required to shout three times in Korean and then in English, “Halt or I will fire.” We joked among ourselves that anyone we challenged could be a mile away before we got a shot off. It's strange to think of how cautious the army was, how carefully firearms were controlled only a few miles from the DMZ, the dividing line between North and South Korea.

There were many other rules concerning our weapons. Most of them for our safety. We had been taught how to kill with a rifle, a pistol, or a machine gun, but we were also constantly taught how to avoid an accidental shooting. And still, one night in the barracks I witnessed a couple of my mates fooling around with an unloaded weapon. When it went off it blew a hole in a wooden rooster sitting on top of the next barracks. It also blew away forever the last stubborn remnant of my obsessive love-hate relationship with guns. The spell was broken.

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