Not to jump the gun but…

I meet Graham Irvin for one night only. Sitting in the backseat of my wife’s car, he’s had a couple cold beers, and he’s on his third rendition of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” We’re driving across the BU Bridge, heading home from our Davis Square reading, and Graham has just met the whole Boston crew for the first time. He’s fitting in perfectly: “did you know ‘Fast Car’ is about this city?” 

We’re laughing and singing and I queue up “Dancing in the Dark” because I have a feeling Graham’s gonna be into that, and I’m right. I can’t really hear myself sing along over the boys, but I notice for (somehow) the first time that this song has a gun in it. It actually has the word gun in it four times. Graham’s book has the word gun in it three hundred and thirty-one times. We made him check.  We’re being so silly along the skyline and Bruce is crooning

You can't start a fire

Worryin' about your little world fallin' apart

This gun's for hire

Even if we're just dancin' in the dark

Before reading I Have a Gun, I was prepared to disregard the importance of whether or not Irvin’s narrator has a gun. After a few pages, though, I decided it was actually pretty fucking important whether there’s a gun or not. The speaker of the segmented, longform poem that constitutes the book is not exactly a stand-up guy. Not really a big gun. Just a lamenting, frustrated boy like the one you dated in college or met wreaking havoc in highschool homeroom or accidentally hooked up with once before you realized just how goddamn self-victimizing he is. He could be your ex or your brother or your future husband or the weird guy who stands too close to you at work. In Irvin’s world, this guy is definitely the type to call you a bitch but feel bad about it. But also maybe the type to save a neglected chameleon. Duality of man, etc. 

We know that a girl is a gun. But I think Graham is making the point that a boy can be a gun, too. Dangerous, fickle, loaded. I’m not a man but I spent a few months going to a Zoom group on the theme of “healing masculinity.” It’s actually what prompted me to write my own first book. So, I think about masculinity a lot, whether it’s capable of being healed. I think Graham must think about this a lot, too. I’m not here to comment on anyone’s journey to divine masculinity, but I am here to say that this book is not a metaphor for anyone’s dick. The speaker says so:

what I’m really saying is

the gun metaphor

isn’t a long winded way

to make people think about my dick

if at any point up to now

you’ve thought about my dick

when you read the word gun

gross 

stop it

that’s not what this is about

I don’t usually go for violent books, or books written by men, or boycoded books on the precarity of violence. You might even say I’m a little gun shy. Actually, I don’t usually go for books that remind me of my own intrusive thoughts. To bring the Madness into it a little bit, I really struggle with my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and I have since I was a little kid. I don’t need to explain this to Graham. Walking to get coffee before the reading, I nervous-laugh while directing, Don’t split the pole! as we meander around streetlamps and stop signs. Usually I have to explain the grey area between illness and superstition, free will versus good fate, life and death. Graham just says, “OK.” He gets the grey area. You should read this book.

Bruce Springsteen has another song that’s about a shotgun wedding. It’s called “The River,” and Bruce says this thing…

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true

Or is it something worse 

Graham’s protagonist might be telling us nasty lies or relaying his dreams or spilling his guts to the most rudimentary of self-limitations. Does he have a gun? I don’t know. Is there something worse than having a gun? Is anything worse than the question we’re asking the narrator?

Haha…but…do you really have a gun ???

I Have a Gun by Graham Irvin, Rejection Letters (2024), $20 on Rejection Letters.