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Even pesky reporters get a little time to themselves sometimes, and I endeavored to do just that last week, forsaking the bayou for a brief trip to Pensacola, a town I have visited before but never spent much time in.
The intent was to watch a country-western performer named Unknown Hinson. He is the voice of Early Cuyler, on the Adult Swim animated comedy “Squidbillies.”
He writes and sing songs that parody the genre. He is also a greatly under-valued lead guitarist.
The Vinyl Music Hall was the site of the performance.
There are few seats, but a big area between where tables and chairs are and the stage, kind of a mosh pit, where the audience gathers and gets in the way of everyone who sits down.
Music did finally start, but not until 8 p.m., and it was an opening act.
Nick Flagstar and His Dirty Mangy Dogs blew my ears out with a majorly high-volume sound configuration. The group could best be described as “Grungabilly” by me – kind of a combination of grunge rock and rockabilly.
The next act came on stage, a group called Bear With Me and they are a roots-folk kind of a band, with guitars and even a banjo.
So there I was drinking in the music and my phone vibrates and there is a message about a shooting in Lafayette.
About this time the lead singer, Joe Davis, who is a really talented kid, was singing a song called “My Pistols.”
Performed at the double-quick, the singer goes on about “Ain’t nobody going to protect me when the bullets begin to fly… My pistols, my pistols, I’ll never give up my pistols, after all the things that I have seen.”
The reports from Lafayette could not be ignored and they kept on coming.
We don’t cover Lafayette, generally. But a lot of people here, in Houma and in Thibodaux, know people in Lafayette. It’s not like it’s a foreign country or something.
In a movie theater, a place where people go to make memories, to be relaxed, the devil had raised his head yet again. Evil took the form of a ne-er do well with a gun, and as a result lives of some were lost and the lives of others were shattered.
So there I was in a place where nobody likely could find Lafayette on a map, in Florida, listening to a guy sing a song about how he doesn’t want his pistols taken away. There was nobody to share the horror of what I was learning with that could possibly understand at this venue.
I didn’t know then that their names are Mayci Breaux and Jillian Johnson. But I do now.
And for me they will always be special, because like me they lived in the boot, here, in Louisiana, and the boot’s people become a part of you whether you ever knew them individually or not. You know what they have tasted, smelled and seen, to some degree.
The man I had come to see took the stage, finally, and while I enjoyed the performance I was understandably distracted. I couldn’t get that song from the other act out of my head.
I have rarely heard of someone with a pistol protecting himself or other people when the bullets begin to fly in a theater or a school or a church. But I do know that in each of these cases somebody had a gun, usually someone who had no business being near one.
And I know that making it harder to get guns will not stop every maniac the devil takes hold of. But I know that in some cases it might stop some, it might save a life here and a life there, if it was just that much harder.
And I know something else. If it meant that one of those precious lives lost last week could have been saved, I would gladly endure inconvenience and stronger scrutiny. I might even give up my pistols.
