Why You Can Shoot Children with an AR-15 but Not See a Nipple on TV

When I was living in Faribault, MN a couple years ago, I knew some young locals from a vintage movie theater I used to go to once in awhile. I wasn’t close to them per se but I chatted with them enough to have heard this story, and even played a small part in it:

I watched Darren get beaten. It was bad. Brutal. This was a couple years ago.

Kenny and his friends were known to be dangerous. Even to each other. Once they stole bikes and while riding them on a trail in the woods, Kenny kicked his friend into the creek bed. The kid broke his collarbone. They were a parade of delinquency and violence, a pack of bullies.

Kenny and his pack actually didn’t fuck with Darren much before all this. Darren was the type who was well liked by teachers, football players, and brooding musicians all the same. He listened to the kid in the motorized wheelchair that no one else talked to. He watched out for people. One day Kenny and his gang threw Eric Vanderness in the reservoir off the old rail bridge out East of town. He almost drowned. He told the police he had jumped in, playing around, but everyone knew the truth. Darren decided something needed to be done. That’s why he initially started talking to Kenny’s sister Sarah.

He wanted to see, through her, what he could understand about Kenny. In town there was a brick main street from the days before cars. Sarah worked in an old theater with a marquee out front and a ticket booth in the lobby. She would sit around reading yellowed film magazines from the attic. Darren came in one sunny day. Sarah was not shy about venting her frustrations.

She started with their dad. He was wasting away smoking cheap cigarettes by the carton and drinking cheap beer by the case and yelling at Kenny and Sarah without getting up from his chair. Or, more often now, he ignored them, just watching TV: dominant sports teams and war movies where the meathead good guys won. His only emotion was anger and you knew he was angry when he went off to the gun range to fire off a dozen clips. She was sad and pissed at him for dwindling away on the couch, but she knew it wasn’t all his fault. He’d seen some pretty fucked up shit in Iraq. Whenever she imagined her father smiling, he was younger; his hair was still brown. She never saw him smile anymore.

As for Kenny, when he was about eight, he threw Sarah to the floor by her hair, and their dad, with his coarse, oil stained hands, slapped his little eight-year-old head around the living room. He said, “Kenny, don’t ever hit your sister. You need to protect her.” Kenny now was mean and vile, and she had come to think that her needing his protection was super sexist, but inevitably, Sarah felt love for him because shortly after their dad straightened him out, she came home crying with blood on her knee. Through her sobs, Kenny learned some kid had pushed her down in the skate park. Kenny tracked the kid down and while holding the kid’s hair in his fist, made him promise never to bother his sister again. She remembered that night, sitting up late with Kenny by the light of a camping lantern laughing at comic books until their father yelled at them to shut up.

Sarah was perhaps the only person who could get right up in Kenny’s face and tell him off, which she stopped doing after she noticed that instead of getting back at her, he would skate off down the alley, and some poor kid would get his basketball knifed, or his bike thrown against the cinder block wall of an abandoned factory building.

So, in her opinion, Kenny was an asshole because his earliest experiences of validation came from beating on people. She tried to teach Kenny how to make a movie, thinking it would bring him the outlet it had to her. But instead, he made a horror sci-fi film, which bordered on snuff. Kenny held a bottle of hairspray to a lighter and torched an ant hill in slow motion as the final scene in an apocalyptic dystopian future where everybody worked on an alien world in robotic ant suits. The kids at school found that really cool. He made a fight movie too where one of his friends actually got punched in the face and blood streamed from his nose. The characters were a band of outcasts that lived freely on the edge, and performed stunts like jumping off a roof, onto a trampoline and into a tree.

For as much as the kids reviled Kenny the bully, they loved his videos. The school even implicitly condoned his work by programming his film for a school showcase. Once on a class project, Sarah had slipped a bare breast into frame, the flicker of the image, as a statement, and the teacher immediately had her cut it. So this, Kenny’s movie being chosen for the showcase, infuriated her.

In my opinion, she was probably going to run away anyway, even if what happened next hadn’t happened.

One day, not long after the showcase with Kenny’s film, Darren and Sarah were hanging out on the balcony, in busted velvet swing-down seats whose springs creaked unevenly. She was venting her anger when she had an idea: a feminist erotic film, no direct nudity, but love and sex. And they would be the leads. Darren was taken off guard. But they had similar taste in movies, they laughed together easily, and he understood her mission. So he said ok. They spent evenings walking in the dusk discussing the story. On one of these walks Sarah took a spontaneous turn and crawled under a broken barbed wire fence, into a vehicle graveyard. In the center of this field was a beautiful old bus. The tires were flat but the door was gone. They went inside. It had been converted into a kitchen, with a long bench in the back. Sara sat down on the bench. When Darren sat next to her she said “this is the place.” The story they came up with was a rather touching love story where two exes meet and as they are reminiscing in the old abandoned bus, with tall grasses growing all around it and the setting sun blasting its late day gold light through the row of windows, overwhelmed by seeing each other, they give in to having sex with each other one last time again, only to know for sure it really is over. Sarah insisted the sex be real, because the violence from Kenny’s movies was real. So the next day, they got a camera, went back to the bus, made love on the long bench and filmed it.

Sarah released it with all her contempt for her dad, her brother, the school, even her peers she found insufferable. Some people saw it at the theater where she played it. She also put it online till it was taken down. But everyone around town saw it or heard about it. It created a mad scandal and Kenny was so embarrassed he lost his mind. He rounded up a posse one night and caught Darren as he was coming out of the theater. As he rounded a corner into the darkness of a side street, they circled him. They didn’t give him time to talk before Kenny threw the first punch. Soon he was on the concrete and they were kicking him, in the back, in the head. I was walking along Main St by all the closed shops, the antique store and the defunct saddle shop, when I came upon them. I yelled. They ran away. I knelt down to turn Darren over and he was fucked up. His face was pulpy, red, and bleeding. Final tally was a concussion, a broken nose and a fractured rib. Everything healed eventually, lucky for him. That’s when Sarah packed her bags to leave town. Darren still had his bandages on when she came to visit him. He was lying on the couch. She sat by his legs, and invited him to come. He took a long deep painful breath, and said no.

Sarah got a bus ticket and went to the city. Nobody really hears from her anymore, though Darren is known to talk to her and it sounds like she’s enrolled in a film program. Kenny watches a lot of pay-per-view UFC fighting. He smokes too much to do it himself. He works on long haul trucks and lives in a trailer with a pit bull. Darren healed, and realized he could bounce back from adversity. So he’s going to law school to fight for sex workers’ rights, Planned Parenthood, and ethical porn.