CHAPTER 4: GRANNY’S GOT A GUN

EVERY SUPERHERO has an origin story. And my superheroes —my legendary uncles and my ma —had an origin story too.

Grandpa was the only one of his brothers and sisters born in America. He was short and stocky. His skin was so dark and olive-colored that he looked like one of those Italian mafiosos, which is probably why everyone in the neighborhood thought our family was Italian. But Grandpa was a Welsh man through and through.

While his brothers were all coal miners, Grandpa worked at a flour mill. He had the forearms of the old cartoon character Popeye and a big barrel chest. His fingers were so thick he couldn’t fit a ring on them, and when he curled those fingers into a fist, they became a sledgehammer.

Grandpa never worked out, but he was naturally strong —freakishly strong. He was the only guy at his flour mill who could take two one-hundred-pound bags of flour, one in each hand, and fling them onto each shoulder simultaneously like they were a couple of kindergarteners’ school backpacks.

Unlike my ma and my uncles, Grandpa was quiet. But we all knew his quiet strength could turn violent at the drop of a hat. Even though Grandpa and Grandma were weekly churchgoing Baptists, Grandpa’s hair-trigger temper frequently got the better of him. Relatively minor grievances easily erupted into full-blown violence.

There was a legendary family story from long before I was born that captured the paradox of my grandpa’s churchgoing ways and his unbridled temper. It was one of those favorite stories my uncles loved to tell and retell when they gathered around the kitchen table at my grandparents’ house.

“It was a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon,” Uncle Dave was recounting. “We were in the car after church —Ma and Dad took us to Bethany Baptist every Sunday to give us some religion. I was twelve at the time, and Bob was eight.”

“They took us to church, but it didn’t take . . . for most of us, anyway,” Uncle Bob interjected, with a dismissive laugh.

“Mom and Dad were in the front seat, and us kids were in the back of the family station wagon,” Dave continued.

“We were on our way to Luby’s Lakeside Cafeteria to eat lunch,” Bob said, trying to hijack the story again. “The one at Lakeside Mall. Dad must have been drivin’ slow or somethin’, ’cause this guy races his car up next to us, flips Dad off, and starts cussin’ him out through the open car windows.”

“The guy pulls into the parking lot and parks his car, and Dad pulls up right behind him,” Dave said, taking control of the story again. “Dad gets out of the car, hands his fedora to Mom, and walks up to the driver’s side of the guy’s car. This poor guy, who was still sittin’ in his car, probably wasn’t the least bit worried about this guy who was all dressed up in his Sunday best with a station wagon full of kids.

“So, the guy makes a wisecrack to Dad. And all of a sudden, Dad grabs him through the open car window by the shirt with his left hand, pulls his head just out the window, and smashes him with a short right hook. He hit the guy so hard he flew all the way across the front seat and shattered the passenger’s side window with his skull!”

“Clean across the front seat!” Bob emphasized. “Knocked him out cold with one punch!”

“I ain’t ever seen anything like that since. Clean across the front seat!” Dave said, shaking his head in admiration as he relived the vivid memory from his childhood.

“When Dad got back in the car, nobody said a word,” Bob continued. “We just looked at each other in stunned silence. Then we went into Luby’s Cafeteria and ate our Sunday lunch like nothin’ had happened.”

“None of us ever doubted Dad’s strength after that,” Dave said. “In fact, if anything, it probably motivated all of us boys to want to grow up to be strong like him. That’s probably why we all worked out so hard. Dad came by his strength naturally from his work at the mill, but we had to build our muscles by pumpin’ iron at the gym.”

Even as a kid, I found this story confusing. How could Sunday churchgoing and such explosive anger settle in side by side? But even though violence and the quest for God made for strange bedfellows, both had taken up residence in my grandparents’ home.

While my grandpa set the standard for strength in the family, it was Grandma who set the standard for toughness.

For as long as I can remember, I knew Grandma was tough. She kept both gum and a gun in her purse.

But what made Grandma unique was that she was, in many ways, a traditional, typical grandma. She loved family gatherings and made fudge for everyone at Christmastime. Being the mom to five boys and my ma, she knew how to cook for her large, perpetually hungry family. Plus, she was a first-class storyteller. My uncles learned the art of skillfully regaling a crowd with a suspense-filled story from her. And she loved to laugh, always giggling a distinctive, “Oh, gosh!” at the end of her frequent spasms of laughter.

Unlike her husband, Grandma wasn’t physically intimidating in the slightest. She was a bit overweight and suffered from heart problems for decades, but those challenges didn’t keep her down. Anyone who crossed her reaped the whirlwind. And she didn’t pack that gun in her purse just for show. She knew how to use it and didn’t hesitate to do so.

One particular incident that occurred up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado was seared into my memory with crystal clarity.

The smell of the pine trees and damp earth filled the air. The clear, cobalt-blue sky dazzled my city-kid eyes. The mountain air was cool and crisp. I was in heaven! Camping with my grandparents was the highlight of every summer.

Grandpa and I would fish while Grandma stayed at the campsite, puttering around with food preparations so she’d be ready whenever we returned with our fishing trophies and tales of the big one that got away. Fishing was actually kind of boring for me because I had to keep quiet so I didn’t “scare the fish away,” but I enjoyed being with Grandpa. Throughout the course of an entire day of fishing in a sparkling mountain river, Grandpa might only speak three sentences to me, but it didn’t matter. As a kid who had no dad at home, Grandpa was my only father figure —and I was in awe of him.

On this particular day, we were fishing half a mile or so away from our campsite when we heard a couple of gunshots. The sound of gunfire wasn’t too out of the ordinary in the mountains of Colorado. But by the time we made our way back to camp, Grandma had quite a story to tell us.

“Didn’t I tell you I smelled trouble!” Grandma said with a knowing toss of her head toward the now-empty campsite near ours. “I knew that passel of loud, rowdy, long-haired hippies causing all that commotion last night were up to no good.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, they bit off more than they could chew when they made the mistake of threatenin’ me! They had the gall to walk up to the edge of our camp and say, ‘Hey lady, we’re comin’ through your camp to grab a few things.’

“Like I said,” Grandma continued, “I smelled trouble from the start, so I had my .357 magnum revolver ready to go. So when they bragged that they needed a few things and were goin’ to help themselves to what we had, I simply smiled and said, ‘Just give it a try!’ Then I lifted the pistol into the air for dramatic effect.

“The hooligans looked at each other, snickered, and came a few steps closer as the ringleader confidently boasted to the rest of them, ‘Don’t worry, the old lady doesn’t even know how to use that thing.’

“So I fired a couple shots in the air to show them that I did. Then I lowered the gun toward the stunned ringleader and said, ‘The next one’s goin’ right through your skull.’

“They packed up and hightailed it out of here in no time flat!” Grandma added with a laugh. “They’re probably in the next county by now!”

Oddly enough, neither Grandpa nor I was the least bit surprised.

There were other stories too, like the time she shot a circle of bullets into the car door of two guys who tried to rob her. She fired her bullets into the shape of a circle so the police could easily identify the car and arrest the culprits.

Even in her later years, Grandma was feisty and refused to let anyone get the better of her. She kept her large key ring wrapped around her fingers to use like a poor man’s brass knuckles if she ever needed to punch anyone. Once, when a thug attempted to mug her in a parking lot, instead of getting her purse, he got stitches. She was in her late seventies at the time.

Still, my favorite Grandma story as a kid had nothing to do with a gun but with a garden hose.

Old Miss Jay was our next-door neighbor during one of the times Ma, Doug, and I temporarily moved in with my grandparents at 22nd Avenue and Irving Street in North Denver. She was the kind of mean old lady who would just sit and look out her front window, waiting for one of the neighborhood kids’ balls to accidentally land in her yard. Whenever a stray ball invaded her space, she would waddle her oversized frame outside, snag the ball, and add it to her collection. She was generally smart enough to avoid my grandma. Until one memorable day in July.

It was the hottest part of summer. Colorado’s scorching sun and semi-arid climate left our lawn parched. So Grandma routinely watered the front lawn with a garden hose to keep it from shriveling up and dying. Our front yard was so small that Grandma had a system down where she could sit on her front porch while she watered the front grass. She used one of those spray nozzles that constricts the water into a powerful stream that could shoot all the way to the far corners of the yard.

I was sitting on the porch next to Grandma when old Miss Jay waddled across her front yard toward my grandma on a rampage. “I’ve had enough of your noisy grandkids!” she yelled at Grandma. “When they ride those Big Wheels up and down the sidewalk, they make a horrible racket. You need to keep those kids under control!”

Grandma just kept watering the front lawn as Miss Jay waddled closer and closer. When she finally got right next to our porch, Grandma turned the garden hose on her, full in the face. Shocked, the large lady let out a horrified scream, getting water in her mouth as she did. She hurriedly turned around and waddled back toward her own house as quickly as her massive frame would carry her. Grandma kept the hose on her the whole way, arcing the stream higher and higher to make sure Miss Jay was completely drenched before she escaped into the safety of her house.

Cool and collected, Grandma didn’t say a word about it. She just turned the hose back on the front grass and watered away with a satisfied grin on her face.

Grandpa’s freakish strength and Grandma’s shocking toughness became the quiet standard for the Mathias family tribe. Behind every fistfight, bodybuilding competition, and arm-wrestling match there was the looming image of Grandpa and Grandma, strength and toughness combined. Each of their six children seemed to receive an equal mix of that DNA, as did most of their grandchildren.

But not me.

I didn’t seem to fit into the family. I was not naturally strong or tough. I was a shy, insecure, bookish kid who used to try to find quiet places —under the sink or behind the couch —to read. Fighting someone was the last thing on my mind. Even when I started school at Brown Elementary as a first grader, I tried to avoid conflict. Kids would pick on me, and I would run away rather than stand and fight.

Halloween became one of my extended family’s annual opportunities to toughen me up by bringing me into their shenanigans. They wanted to show me how to “break the rules,” but in a way that wasn’t dangerous —just mean.

There was a huge tree in front of Grandma and Grandpa’s place on Irving Street. It had large branches that stretched like flexed, bark-covered arms over the front yard. The house itself was tailor-made for Halloween. Because it was built in the late 1800s from extra-large red bricks and old-school masonry, its narrow build shot to the sky like a spire and stood out from the other box houses in our neighborhood. Old Miss Jay’s house was of the same construction and relatively close to our house, so at night, by the moonlight, our houses side by side looked like twin towers of terror.

Every year on Halloween, our extended family gathered for an exciting night of scaring the little kids in the neighborhood. Spooky music played from an upper-story window. One of my uncles volunteered to be the ghoul. The ghoul took off his shirt and donned a full-head scary mask. When neighborhood kids innocently rang the doorbell to trick-or-treat, the door flew open and the hulking ghoul shrieked out a monstrous roar.

Without exception, the poor, frightened kids turned and ran down the sidewalk toward the street to get away from our homemade insane asylum. That’s when my brother and I kicked into action.

Each Halloween at dusk, we were instructed to climb the big tree in front of our house and wait. The uncles armed us with a life-size dummy that had a noose tied around its neck. Doug and I were told to tie the other end of the rope to the thick tree branch directly above the sidewalk that led to the front door. After the designated uncle ghoul scared the kids senseless on the porch, as the kids ran screaming down the sidewalk, our job was to drop the dummy out of the tree directly in front of them.

The plan was to terrorize the children so that they dropped their bags full of candy. And it worked about 50 percent of the time. My family got the biggest kick out of this annual Halloween ritual.

Crying kids ran home to tell their parents (back then, even in tough neighborhoods, moms and dads never went door-to-door with their children on Halloween), but no parent ever showed up at our house to complain. They knew who lived there. They knew what would happen if they dared to confront our family.

I hated dropping the dummy. I hated scaring those kids. Maybe it was because I related more to them in their fear than I did to my own family members. My experience of life in the middle of my chaotic, violent family felt a lot like those scared kids running from one terror to the next. But even though I hated the role I was forced to play in our annual Halloween drama, I did enjoy eating the dropped candy.

Still, Halloween didn’t toughen me up the way my uncles hoped it would. Instead, it left me fearful and racked with guilt. But that psychological impact paled in comparison to the trauma one of my uncles inflicted at a different holiday gathering.