No Guns!

by Haden Ware

In tribute to the current “Weave the Web” Secretary of State (also known as Webmaster, Slugger Webster, Mom and NanNan), I thought my first story should be one featuring one Nancy Ware.-HWW

Who was Peter Kropotkin?…

He’s an Anarchist from way back in the day but what drew me to him was his writings debunking the capitalist propaganda that we should all look out for our selves, survival of the fittest. I have a real problem these days with social Darwinism and the idea that if someone is down they somehow deserved it. What Kropotkin did was write a historical account of civilization where he pointed out that the societies that survived and flourished were the ones that helped one another. A concept that I think has been lost by the carrot of personal wealth and the stick it dangles from, capitalism. His placement in the story wasn’t ideal as, in little league, I was on a team, and my efforts at the plate or on the mound would be for the greater good of the team, the basics of mutual aid. I just needed to come up with a reason why you gave me gum in a Copenhagen tin….if you even did. I might have put it in the tin myself, but that’s not the way I remember it. HWW

This pencil drawing was done by Haden when he was quite young -his rendering of “Guns & Roses”

Click HERE to go to Haden's Mom's Rebuttal to this story

The Year: 1985

The emotions were confused and conflicted when I awoke that morning. It was a Saturday, which was good, it was autumn, which in Connecticut is very good, and I was going “hunting” at the age of 10, which was well, if anyone knows my mother, the source of my confliction that morning.

Let me give you some background here.. My brothers and I were brought up with two fundamental rules in the house, No Guns and No Gum. In retrospect the guns rule was understandable, for obvious reasons; the no bubblegum 2nd commandment however holds up far less to historical scrutiny. Anyone who has gone to an A’s game with my mother and seen her gnaw down on that watermelon bubblicious will know what a hypocrisy this rule was. However, any argument that the No Gum policy was an ideology from a previous era that evolved to be more liberal as the “bubblegum” facts came in (or as the A’s won more pennants) will be rebuked by this next story…

I have a passion for the game of baseball which was injected into my DNA by the women in my family (of which there aren’t many). My grandmother “Dang” – given this name by my older brother Michael after she proclaimed that she would be called the first thing that her first grandchild called her (a brave thing to do knowing what comes out of kids’ mouths) – was an avid Yankees fan who raised her children under the pinstripes doctrine. This was then passed down to me through my mother and, though I am not a religious individual, I still remain, to this day, devoutly faithful to the manifest destiny of the Bronx Bombers. Some others out there have lost their faith and drifted to the dark-side of the AL West but I won’t name names.

Anyway, I played little league baseball in Washington Connecticut. It was something I was good at, something I enjoyed, but something that my nerves had a hard time dealing with. I was brought up in a family where competition was not encouraged, love for the game kind of stuff. The higher I climbed in the ranks of Little League, the more it became evident that we were out there to win games. Believe it or not, this was a new concept for a 7-10 year old kid, particularly a kid in Montessori who’s being taught the value of “mutual aid” and the pitfalls of social Darwinism.

I was a cross between Mickey Mantle and Peter Kropotkin at the plate, not exactly a combination that’ll knock it out of the park! To alleviate my nerves and help me build confidence and a killer instinct (I assume as there really isn’t any other justification for it) my mother, violating her 2nd commandment, decided to buy a tin of snuff (otherwise known as chew, dip, chaw, etc.), empty it, and replace the vile tobacco contents with the even more evil molecular combination know as…GUM! So here I was, a 10 year old kid with, what looked like a hockey puck in my back pocket, which anyone who has watched a baseball game would know is a tin of dip. I can only imagine what the other parents thought. Thankfully, she used individually packaged pieces of gum (I think they were of the bazooka brand) so the menthol flavor of the Copenhagen didn’t seep into the

bubblegum flavor too much, but when you opened that tin, oh yeah, you could smell it. I passed it down the bench, and me and the team had a good time packing our pre-game chew before our match against the Mets (I of course played for the Yankees). I wonder if I had taken up a passion for rock and roll if she would have sent me to my guitar lessons with a Jack Daniels bottle filled with apple juice. Coincidentally, I did wind up having a nasty habit of chewing tobacco in high school and college, not pointing fingers, just pointing that out.

I’ve gotten off track…

The main point of this story is rule #1, No Guns. The reason I wound up with this hunting engagement that glorious September morning was due to the house we were living in, and more importantly the family that

owned it. We were “house sitting” for an elderly man named Charley Pavek. By “house sitting” I mean “we” were taking care of him. By “we” I mean my mother. Charley was an amazingly interesting guy, especially for a 10 year old. He was very successful in his day, although I can’t remember what exactly he did, but this success was evident in his home. The place was huge! I’ve always wondered how this house would look to me now as a grown (at least in the physical sense) man but as a child it was huge. Surrounded by forests it was like some kind of Aspen lodge that lost its way and found a home in Washington, Connecticut. It had a hot-tub and pool table to boot, which to a 10 year old represented true opulence. The place was beautiful, but it came with a hitch; Charley Pavek, as extraordinary a man as he once was, was not well. I was never told what sickness Charley had - in retrospect I assume it was some kind of Alzheimer’s – but I do remember how difficult it was on my mother.

He would have his good days where he was the Charley we always knew, and then there were his bad days. His bad days weren’t so bad for me though, in fact, honestly speaking, they were amazingly informative. See, Charley would have fits of paranoia where he thought my mother was a secret agent for the CIA out to get him. I loved this idea, as any 10 year old would! I think he felt that he could confide in me and even possibly recruit me as a potential ally so he would be rather open with his theories and suspicions. He even tried to bribe me once with his 30 year collection of Playboy magazines, but I had already found the sacred stash three months earlier.

Towards the end, I think Charley understood and accepted the inescapable situation in which he found himself. My mother the Montessori school teacher, was good, real good, and his only hope for escape rest in the hands of a 10 year old who ate gum out of a Copenhagen tin and was most likely sitting in his hot-tub “reading” his Playboys.

I will always remember Charley and those years we had with him. I have a disturbing premonition that I, too, will be under house arrest from CIA agents, I only hope that mine are as kind as the “Montessori teacher” and that I have more to bargain my release with than a stack of pornography.

Damn! Off track again….these stories are tough…

So, now you’ve got a sense of where we’re living at this point in our lives. As Charley got worse, his family would come to visit him more often. I took a liking to one of his sons; I think his name was Patrick Big guy, I mean huge. He must have weighed 300 pounds. He’s another thing that I always wondered what would look like to me now as a grown man, but as a child, like his father’s house, he was huge. Patrick was one of those mid-80’s alpha-males who became a defense attorney in Colorado and was very successful in defending top executives who didn’t quite understand that Reaganomics was not a license to exploit the poor (The “trickle-down effect” had nothing to do with urinating!) He would take me golfing with him and his buddies and let me drive the golf cart, something that I, at the age of 32, am no longer permitted to do (something to do with the insurance policy at Cedar Valley Golf Course in Antigua.) He helped me out in my first bad bet when I wagered that a penny would dissolve in a glass of coke (another horrifying scientific concoction that my mother lobbied against – soda.)

My reasoning in this wager was from a science class I had on the corrosive effects of cola. As usual, I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the experiment where a tooth was placed into the glass, not a penny. I believe a penny experiment was done that day as well to show how copper interacts with something, at least this is what I tell myself. The alternative is that my dyslexia is so off the charts I confuse money with teeth; maybe I should have become a dentist. Anyway, he took the penny out of the glass, leading me to believe I had won, and paid me my well deserved payback of $1. Of course I don’t know for sure that he did this, but in my subsequent years of science labs, I have never been able to prove how a glass of coke ate a penny in 24 hours.

Haden in a H.S. Science Lab

He also had this very cute wife (better than Miss November 1968!) who I was fascinated by; it was the first time that I saw what power and self confidence could produce. And it was this very morning that I was determined to see what power and self confidence could destroy: Patrick had invited me hunting.

His hunting trip did not emulate the kind of stereotypical guys-out-to-kill scene, like DeNiro in Deer Hunter. First of all, we were just going to wander back into the woods behind the house. This negated the whole, pack-up the station wagon, secure the guns on a rack, make sure we’ve got enough rope to tie the poor animal to the hood kind of stuff. We just wandered off into the woods, like we were taking a walk….with guns.

I of course was not given a gun, nor did I want one. I was brought up to believe these things were evil incarnate and just to touch the cold steal of the barrel was like licking the metal bars of the jungle gym in winter….torture but irresistible. Honestly, I didn’t like the feel of the gun once they handed it to me. First of all, it was super heavy, I mean real heavy, and it was super cold, real cold. It was decided, much to my relief, that I should take a few shots at non-living targets (sorry you tree lovers out there) and then go back to the house. I’m not sure if I was slowing them down or they were concerned I might be mistaken for a shaved boar in a parka but either way I was happy to be going home.

So they handed me the rifle for my two farewell shots and told me to aim at a birch tree twenty yards away and shoot. Now, birch trees are not that wide, and I remember there was an oak not too far off to the left that would have been a better target for my ego, but I agreed and took aim at the beautiful white birch…. I can’t say if I hit it or not. I was flat on my ass before my mind even recognized that I pulled the trigger. I don’t know what kind of gun they gave me (my ego tells me it was a Howitzer) but I assume it was just an everyday rifle. Regardless, the kick-back on that sucker was too much for me to handle. I never got to my promised second shot, and I can’t say I was disappointed. In fact, to date, I have yet to shoot a gun again.

So, with ringing in my ears, a sore shoulder and butt, and a deflated ego, I was picked up off the ground and sent home to soak my sore bones in the hot-tub. I remember that walk home like it was yesterday. I felt no shame or embarrassmen; I did not hang my head low and dwell on my folly, instead, I pondered the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the bizarre and unexpected realization that….my mom was actually right, guns sucked! I felt pride as I turned my back and left my platoon of grown men wearing camouflage pants and shirts under bright orange vests (what’s with that?) and headed back to my pile of porno and my mother with the knowledge that the woman is sometimes right.

I know I told you the story was about rule #2, No Guns, but its’ really about what the confirmation of this rule’s justification led too. It led to faith; not in God, penny eating sodas, the informative articles of Hugh Heffner, or even the Yankees, but rather faith in my mother. That gun kicked me like a mule. No one warned me; in retrospect I think this was intentional, but regardless of the sinister plan of Patrick to get laughs from his alpha-male cronies, that gun’s kick-back was, to me, a knock upside the head as much as it was a kick in the arm. She warned me; I ignored her, and now my shoulder hurt; this is pretty simple language for a child to understand. How did she know this gun would kick me? Maybe she really was a secret CIA agent posing as a Montessori school teacher!

Soon after this incident, the lives of my mother and me changed dramatically. Charley died, and, while the family allowed us to stay at the house after his death, we knew this was temporary. Right about this time my mom took a trip to visit her sister in California. When she came back, she informed me that she had bought a condo in a town call Petaluma, and we were moving away, far away. She brought me boxer shorts as a gift from the west to show how hip and cool they were out there. Not exactly Vasco da Gama returning with treasures from the new world, but I was pretty impressed with my new Berkeley tie-dyed underwear. Previous generations were lured out west by the promise of prosperity and the hope of finding gold. For me, I went for better, more stylish, underwear. How times change! Of course this was not the reason I so readily accepted my mother’s proposition to pick up shop and move our show 3,000 miles west. The true reason was faith, in her. She had some crazy ideas about California, and the boxer short thing might have led me to believe she was truly nuts, but she had been right on the guns, and if she was right on the guns, then she might be right on this Petaluma idea, and maybe even right on this underwear revolution, but I wasn’t holding my breath. So, I was pretty much ok with this big move at this point.

But then the bad news began to trickle in. I knew we were going to have to drive out to California, rather than fly, which seemed like a fun adventure, but then I was told that my mother had recruited a co-pilot, my 6th grade teacher Sarito Lief. Sarito was a nice enough woman, but still she was my TEACHER! Not exactly a dream summer vacation to leave school and then get locked up in an 8’ x 6’ box on wheels for seven days with your teacher!

The second piece of bad news came when my mom informed me that we could only take what we could fit in the car. We had a two door Saab at the time, not exactly a moving van. This had me more upset about the Sarito news as it now occurred to me that my TEACHER would be using up valuable real-estate that could have accommodated my toys. I think the reasoning behind not shipping things was the romantic idea my mother had that we were starting over. This move was not just a relocation but was also a purge of the past. This is not to say this was a purge of the memories and friends we had in Washington, only the junk that reminded us of them (just kidding). Seriously though, it was a brave thing my mother did, in deciding to move west, and I think it was important for her, and me, that we not tip-toe into this new adventure but dive headfirst. There was no going back, at least not for her, (I only lasted two years in that crazy state).

Sarito Lief

It all had to go! If we had stayed with mom’s romantic idea of definitively closing the book on this chapter and starting anew we should have probably just had a huge bonfire on Charley’s lawn and burned the Connecticut junk and watch designer boxers rise from the ashes! We needed gas money though so we had a yard sale instead. This was my only yard sale, and I don’t want to have another. It’s one thing when you want to get rid of junk and someone will give you money to take it off your hands. It’s a whole other ballgame when you really want to keep something and some jerk walks away with it for a quarter. My prize possession at the time was a life-size cardboard cutout of a girl in a bikini. It was one of those standing advertisements for films you see in movie theaters. This film was The Flamingo Kid and the girl was quite something. I know what you’re thinking right now, and I’m thinking that same thing for the first time; how could my mother have such strong convictions against the likes of gum and soda but not seem to care about life-size cutouts of scantily clad women and pornography collections, the size of which rival the Boston Public Library?

In her defense, she didn’t know about Charley’s Playboys, at least I don’t think she knew. As for the Flamingo Kid cutout, I believe this was handed down by one of my older brothers. If I had to guess I would say it was Michael, who probably got it in a trade for some software he pirated for the guy in the ticket booth at the local movie theater. Of course this defense only adds software piracy to her list….but at least there was no GUM!

Ok, ok, back to the story… My initial valuation on the full-size half naked girl was $100. Seemed reasonable to me, I mean how do you put a price on something like that? People walking through our yard sale must have been confused by the fact that they could buy my mother’s bed for $25, but if they wanted the girl it cost four times as much (a lesson learned by many a soldier stationed in Subic Bay). I wound up being forced, by my mother, to lower my prices and my bikini babe got snatched up by a lonely high school student for the rock-bottom price of $5.

So now everything was gone….and the next day, so were we. We packed up our clothes, which mostly consisted of shorts and shirts because, well you know, San Francisco is sooo warm, we didn’t have room for really anything else. The trip west began well. There were a few final stops in Washington to say goodbye, which were emotional, but soon we were on our way, no looking back!

We were about three hours into it when it happened….Sarito lit a cigarette. I had no idea she even smoked; teachers have a way of hiding everything human about them from their students to give themselves the appearance of paragons of moral purity and discipline. At this point I longed for the fake, deceitful, hypocritical Sarito I always knew, feared, and loved because this human one was making me sick. I was miserable for the first three days, but on day four I guess I got used to it and stopped complaining.

Coincidentally this was also the day that I finished my box of gourmet jelly beans that was given to me by a friend as a going away present. Jelly beans were huge at this time, I think because they were Reagan’s favorite. In a spirited economy like the United States, when there’s a fad, companies will take it as far as they can. I believe the time when this box was given to me was at the height of the jelly bean hysteria. While most of the beans were good there were some that could ruin an entire day for whomever consumed them. I mean when would a chicken parmesan jelly bean be something you would crave? This bag had steak, broccoli, carrot, and cheese cake flavored beans, a whole damn meal! So, I’m still on the fence as to who’s really to blame for the nausea I felt those first three days, Sarito or Reagan. I will say this, after my nasty chewing tobacco habit, I took up smoking and still smoke a pack a day. Not pointing fingers, just pointing that out.

Well, after seven nights of crappy motels, (which is what you get for selling valuable items for $5) we eventually arrived in California. The beaches, the sun, the girls, the palm trees, the HEAT, were all about as visible as the pair of tie-dyed underwear I was wearing beneath my three pairs of shorts! As we crossed into Petaluma the sign read, “Petaluma: the Chicken Capital of the world!”….what the fuck? Have faith Haden, have faith….mom knows what she’s doing. She was right about the gun, remember the gun!

A year later…. The emotions were confused and conflicted when I awoke that morning. It was a Saturday, which was good, it was autumn, which in California is very good, and I was starting at third base for the Petaluma all-star team at the age of 11, which was well, if anyone knows my story, the source of my confliction that morning. But with my mother and my tin of Copenhagen, I knew anything was possible!