More Gunn Shots

Having related the End of Gunn, I find myself unable to leave some stories untold. Not always did Jack Gunn figure in the active role for some of his capers. Sometimes he was the faciliator and idea man, staying out of the actual deed.

Jack Gunn’s Final Volley

Jack Gunn lived to see his daughter married, his friends all settled down and sedately spending their golden years without rowdy adventures and epic tales. Jack lived much as he always had done, sauntering through the bars and parties, spending time with girlfriends past and present.

Jack and his youngest ever wife, Miriam, as I have earlier related, split eventually, more amicably than might have been expected. In due course, Jack took up with the Last Girlfriend, a woman considerably younger than Jack, as was his inclination, who a number of friends urgently warned him was more volatile and unpredictable than even Jack himself. The warnings Jack disregarded. He never hesitated to go in harm’s way, in love as in the rest of his life.

Jack Gunn’s Girlfriends

Constraints of space, time and my own memory really limit what I can tell on the Gunn girlfriend subject. Jack had many girlfriends, three of whom eventually became his wife for a while. Something about matrimony always worked against domestic tranquility with Jack, as I mentioned in the tale of how his first marriage ended, with his wife and two young children catching him with eventual wife number two.

One difficulty with girlfriends and wives for Jack was not letting them overlap. Not every meeting was as dramatic as that one in Lenox Square Mall, “Look, Mommy, there’s Daddy with Mrs. Bailiff!” Jack sooner or later ended up in a domestic train wreck, however. One of the problems was that Jack genuinely liked his girlfriends, in addition to lusting after them. Inevitably, he went along with them when he should have known better. After two long sieges, for instance, he married girlfriends, converting them into wives two and three. I liked both girlfriends/wives, bright, attractive women with warm affections, and weaknesses for charming, witty and unsuitable men. They worked long and hard, both of them, to persuade Jack to convert cohabitation into marriage.

Mrs. Gunn number three, Miriam, who like number two lived with Jack for years before getting him to marry her, is my favorite. Much younger than either of her predecessors, she was twenty-two when she first caught Jack’s eye; he was sixty. This was shortly after Courtney Bailiff, wife number two, had enough of Jack, and his philandering.

Freshly divorced, Jack was making the rounds one night when at a local bar he saw Miriam for the first time. A daughter of a Scots-Irish mother, and a Lebanese father, Miriam was in the bar costume for waitresses, low-cut frilled blouse and short, flared skirt. The skirt showed off her fine legs, and the blouse barely contained a world-class rack. Miriam had a beautiful face, as well, with pale, opalescent skin and dark eyes and brows, under an abundance of silky, black curls. Jack cruised in for the first contact.

Smiling his lopsided, conspiratorial smile, giving Miriam a long, slow look up and down, Jack said, “I would really like to see you naked.” Shock value of this sort often worked for Jack.

Miriam gave Jack a long, slow look up and down, stared straight into his eyes, and said, “I would really not like to see you naked,” then turned and attended to another customer, ignoring him. Jack was nailed to the floor, he began to laugh, shaking his head and knowing that this was the girl for him. He made little progress that night, but there would be others.

Eventually Jack prevailed, as he often did, and Miriam moved in with him. In spite of their shared condo, Jack kept to his independent ways, and often went off on adventures of his own. Once committed to Jack, however, Miriam was not to be deterred by evasion. She tracked him down. The best example of her skill was the time Jack took off with some friends drinking their way across town, ending up on a houseboat belonging to one of them. On the spur of the moment, they decided to cruise upriver a few miles to a resort and bar complex on Lake Chickamauga.

Miriam was working that night at the bar, which relieved Jack, since he felt pretty sure he was beyond even her tracking ability. In the early hours of the morning Jack stepped off the houseboat onto the dock at the marina upriver, meaning to pee into the lake. He saw some movement along the dark bank close to the dock, then a bobbing white shape emerged from the darkness. It was a woman trotting onto the dock, heading his way. Jack noticed that the woman was holding her breasts with her hands as she ran. Although he couldn’t see her face, he knew her. Miriam, still in her waitress costume, had tracked him through all the bars and ten miles upriver. Given her abundance of endowment, Miriam whilst running had to support her breasts with her hands.

Eventually, Miriam wore Jack down, as Courtney had before her, and became Mrs. Gunn. Until the marriage, like the others, fell apart. After the divorce, and a little time, there came the Last Girlfriend. I capitalize her title because she was the last, and Jack’s undoing. The last adventure is not for this chapter. The story of How a Woman Did Jack In will have to wait.

The Great Ruby Falls Murder: Jack Gunn’s 15 minutes

The 15 minutes referenced are, of course, Warhol Minutes, the fifteen minutes of media attention all people will receive in the Future Tabloid World, as decreed by Andy Warhol. Jack Gunn was contemptuous of the Andy Warhols of the world, although he found amusement in them as well.

It is ironic, then, that Jack did in fact receive his Warhol Minutes. It was in 1957, as I remember, and the same cast of characters featured in The Suitcase Full of Snakes participated. I have mentioned Lookout Mountain, the narrow plateau on which the Town of Lookout Mountain is located. In addition to an upscale suburban community, Lookout Mountain has several tourist attractions, including Ruby Falls, a cave with a spectacular underground waterfall. This complex of parking lots, tourist shops and elevator facilities that efficiently parts midwestern tourists from their money is located on the two-lane road up Lookout Mountain. The residents of Lookout Mountain pretty much despise tourists, who clutter the roads and ask stupid questions of residents, such as “Where is Lookout Mountain,” usually asked while actually on top of said prominence.

One summer afternoon, the Usual Suspects, Jack and his homies, provided themselves with certain props, piled into a sedan and drove down the highway towards Ruby Falls. At the upper edge of the Ruby Falls property, the others dropped Jack off, and he started walking down the road towards the middle of the parking area, in front of the main building.

Jack’s buddies drove on past the Falls and turned around, timing their return going the opposite way to allow Jack to reach the middle of the most crowded part of the parking area. Gunning their car up to a point opposite Jack, then screeching to a halt, the conspirators giggled as one of them leaned out the car window and fired several shots from a revolver. Jack staggered back, clutching his chest, his shirtfront reddening dramatically as he sagged to the ground. Two of the guys jumped out of the car and heaved Jack’s now limp body into the back seat, jumping in after him; the car laid rubber up the road leading back to the top of the mountain.

For a hundred feet around, the whole parking area was seething with screaming tourists seeking cover behind, under and flattened against cars, horrified at what the news reports later called the “apparent gangland-style slaying.” Desperate employees of Ruby Falls placed a frantic call to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office, reporting this horrific deed. All available officers were called in and deployed in a massive search, augmented by an all-points bulletin to other law enforcement agencies in the area.

In the small offices of the Police Department of the Town of Lookout Mountain, a retired former City of Chattanooga policeman who was working for extra money to beef up his meager pension heard the APB. This man had several years experience dealing with Lookout Mountain types, on top of his long service in the tougher areas of Chattanooga. Sighing, he said to himself, “That sounds a whole lot like Gunn’s bunch.” Rising from his chair, he walked out to his patrol car and drove straight to the one soda fountain on the mountain.

In the soda fountain were the three boys who had helped Jack pull off the caper. Jack himself had been dropped off at his house over the state line in Georgia, in order to clean up all the ketchup that he had released when he slapped his chest, bursting the paper bags carefully stored under his shirt. The revolver had been a starter’s pistol, firing blanks. A few sharp comments and queries from the cop silenced the boys’ snickers, and resulted in them riding in the back of the patrol car downtown for an interview with the Sheriff. Jack stayed at home, in Georgia, so he escaped interrogation.

Both local newspapers reported the incident, and one editorialized in a most Improving Manner about teenagers’ Lack of Respect for law enforcement, not to mention the sensibilities of witnesses.

Jack avoided any meeting or contact with the Sheriff until years after the man retired, and Jack was out in the world earning his living. The Sheriff was still Un-Amused.

How Jack Gunn Didn’t Go to Webb School

Jack’s education was as variable and dramatic as everything else in his life. He claimed to have attended every high school in Chattanooga, a claim which only slightly exaggerated the facts. Chattanooga had two private military schools for boys in the 1950s, and Jack started out at one, the McCallie School. Discipline and marching didn’t agree with him, and after a couple of years, his parents decided that a school specializing in spirited young men was needed.

This school was the Webb School, in Bell Buckle, TN. Yes, that was its name. About 50 miles northwest of Chattanooga, in an isolated little country town. The other campus of Webb was in Knoxville, TN, a private prep school for more malleable young persons of good family. Bell Buckle was where you were sent for…correction.

Told by his parents of their plans for him, Jack immediately told them no. He was not going off to a rich kids’ reform school in the middle of a cow pasture. A long siege ensued, in the month or so before school started, and even as Dr. and Mrs. Gunn delivered Jack with his foot locker into the waiting grasp of the Headmaster, along with a tuition check, Jack was still calmly telling his parents that he was not staying at Webb.

As they drove away, the elder Gunns saw Jack still standing in the doorway of the school administration building. They did not relent. Exhausted by the emotional, mental and physical strain of delivering Jack to school, Dr. and Mrs. Gunn took their time on the drive back, stopping in Sewanee, halfway home, for a leisurely lunch at a swankly rustic restaurant adjacent to the University of the South, where they had once hoped Jack might go. The prospects seemed dim for such an exalted goal, but they were cautiously optimistic that Jack would settle down at Webb, so that he could return home for the next year of school. The relieved couple felt that hey had done the Right Thing for Jack.

Late in the day, the Gunns finally rolled into their driveway, after the long drive and long lunch. Mrs. Gunn peered out the car window at the front door of their house, which was open behind the screen door. “Oh, look, honey, somebody must have broken into our house, I know we locked that door and the children aren’t home yet.”

Dr. Gunn looked at the door. He looked back at his wife, “The other children may not be home yet, but I think Jack is.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, dear, we left Jack at Webb.”

“No, Olivia,” Dr. Gunn sighed, “we may have left Jack there but I am afraid he has beat us home.”

And so it was. Jack was stretched out on his bed upstairs when his parents came in, and he smiled broadly at them, with, no doubt, the same sardonic twist that stayed with him all his life.

On being questioned by his parents, Jack cheerfully told his story. He had walked over to the little railroad depot in Bell Buckle, and before his parents had reached Sewanee, he had jumped a freight train. He was making his way out of the Chattanooga train yards before they probably had finished their long lunch at the swank restaurant. He hitchiked home, and had been waiting for them for some time.

“I told y’all I wouldn’t stay at Bell Buckle.” And he didn’t, and his parents sent him to school in Chattanooga, where many further adventures awaited.

Jack Gunn: The Father

Stories about Jack so often involve social disasters and hilarious tricks he pulled, that you could get the impression Jack had no more respectable side. Untrue. Despite the unfortunate encounter with his wife and children in the middle of the Mall, while his girlfriend was hanging on his arm, Jack loved and took care of his children. Not that their lives were dull. With Jack as a father, that wasn’t going to happen.

His son, Jack, Jr., and daughter Jonquil always knew their daddy loved them and wanted to be with them whenever possible. Jack ended up moving in with his girlfriend, Courtney Bailiff, after the Lenox Square Debacle, and they cohabited for five or six years before finally marrying. Things went downhill from there, but that is another story. Courtney fully approved of Jack’s love and concern for his children, and did everything she could to help with the kids.

Courtney enthusiastically shopped for bedroom furniture, clothes, and every sort of toy and book the children could want. The times Jack had visitation, he always found Courtney enthusiastic about having the children. Life was positively wholesome and tranquil when the kids were around. Jack always attended any athletic or school event for either of the children, managing to perserve a seemly peace when Marigold was also attending, which happened often.

Jack did sometimes have a little fun at these events, however. One soccer game when Jack, Jr. was appearing, Jack saw Marigold surrounded by admiring mothers, as she showed off her brand new baby boy. Marigold had re-married. Oddly enough her new husband’s family had been friends of Dr. Gunn, although Pudge, as I will call him, was actually several years younger than Jack or Marigold. Seeing the new mother in her blissful state tickled Jack’s sense of mischief, and he sauntered over to the group. The other mothers exchanged anxious looks as Jack approached, broad smile on his face. Marigold’s chin set like day-old concrete.

“Hey, Marigold, that the new baby boy?” Jack was beaming.

“Yes.” Was Marigold’s dismissive answer.

Jack grinned at the other mothers, nodding down at the baby, “Doesn’t he look just like me?” reaching up to touch his glasses, Jack continued, with an air of pride, “Just needs glasses like mine and the resemblance would be complete.” Several women smothered giggles.

Marigold flushed deep red, eyes snapping, and Jack sauntered back over the group of fathers he had left, which included me, favoring us with his account of the exchange. Marigold looked daggers at all of us. We avoided eye contact with her. Jack continued to chuckle, and re-told this little story for a week or two.

The legend continued.

Suitcase Full of Snakes

Subtitle: Jack Gunn’s Posse Takes Them Downtown

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Jack and a few of his more disreputable buddies compiled quite a record of memorable stunts around Chattanooga and environs. One of the group, whom I will call “Slim,” was fascinated with snakes, which he could find all over Lookout Mountain, the rocky-cliffed plateau overlooking the city.

Jack felt that there ought to be some creative use to which this talent could be put. Framing a plan, Jack one summer afternoon collected his buddies and an expensive suitcase liberated from the attic of one of the boys’ homes. They all piled into Jack’s car and cruised the more wooded parts of the Mountain. Slim the Snake Handler found enough snakes to fill the suitcase. It didn’t take long. Slim knew his snakes.

Heading down the road to Chattanooga, Jack and his posse drove straight downtown to a street then known as 9th Street, a shopping area for the more disadvantaged citizens of town. This street, in the politically aware late ’60s, was renamed M. L. King Boulevard. A lively sort of place, with folk walking and laughing and cruising large, older Detroit Iron up and down.

Jack and the Bunch pulled over to the curb in the middle of the late-afternoon bustle and flow, and set the expensive suitcase on the sidewalk. They pulled out into traffic, moved a block up the street and parked where they could watch the suitcase.

Presently, a large four-door sedan of some age, full of young men, pulled up to the curb by the suitcase. One of the rear doors opened, and the suitcase vanished into the car. The smoking cruiser pulled out into the street and moved rather more quickly up the street, heading east up a long hill. Jack and company pulled out a few car lengths behind, keeping pace and watching the car approach the crest of the hill.

Just as the old car reached the top of the hill, suddenly it lurched first left, then right, as shapes of the occupants seemed to bounce about inside. All four doors flew open, and as the car continued to roll, young dudes burst from the car, hitting the ground already running in every direction.

The now-empty car motored on sedately over the hill, and Jack and his accomplices, barely keeping control of their car, convulsing with laughter, watched the car roll unattended down the hill until it came to rest against a bridge abutment. All four doors were still wide open, like the wings of some large, rusty insect.

Jack was vague on what happened to the snakes. Or to the suitcase.

The Jack Gunn Chronicles Cont’d

I am going to stop numbering these little tales, there are so many even George Lucas would be embarrassed at the idea. I will take a leaf from ol’ George’s book, though, and mix up the chronology a bit. I will jump ahead to the chapter I will call “How Mrs. Jack Gave Gunn the Gate.” Heh.

Jack had a long and chequered career with women, frequently to his discomfiture. Amazingly enough, his first effort at marriage had left him literally standing bride-less at the altar. The woman he loved had come to her senses and bolted. A few years later, Jack married a more optimistic woman, Marigold (of course another pseudonym, who would name their child ‘Marigold’?) . So the marital adventures began.

Jack had many enthusiasms, most of which were uninteresting to Marigold, who became the mother of his two children. As a particular weekend approached, when the children were about seven and five, Jack told Marigold that he was going to Indianapolis to watch motorcycle races all weekend, leaving Friday.

By this time in their marriage, Marigold, while resenting Jack’s tendency to do his own thing without reference to her wishes, found ways to enjoy his frequent absences. On Saturday morning, Marigold packed up the kids for a day trip to Atlanta, with shopping at Lenox Square Mall the featured activity. Her little boy and girl in tow, Marigold thoroughly enjoyed spending Jack’s money (or running up his credit card balance; money was mostly problematic in Jack’s life) and treating the children to ice cream and toy purchases.

As Marigold was intently surveying yet another store display, her little girl, Jonquil, tugged on her mother’s sleeve, exclaiming, “Look Mama! There’s Daddy, and he’s with Mrs. Bailiff.” Marigold looked around, and saw Jack with a woman she knew well and considered somewhat of a friend, although Courtney Bailiff was already on a second marriage, and judging by the way she clutched Jack, working on lining up a third.

Events took their obvious course, and Jack moved into “Heartbreak Hotel,” a small apartment complex halfway down the side of Lookout Mountain, a symbolic distance from his former home on top of the mountain with Marigold, but not all the way into the valley. Heartbreak Hotel was usually full up with Mountain husbands extricating themselves from one marital disaster and prepping for a follow-up.

Jack would visit the Hotel twice more in his long and eventful career as a wayward husband.

Jack Gunn Chronicles Part II

As he grew into young adulthood-agewise, anyway-Jack branched out into a number of new fields for his own amusement. One of his acquaintances, knowing that Jack was the son of a doctor and inclined to ignore morals, the law and the more burdensome standards of decency, came to Jack one day with a problem.

Jim Bob (I never knew this guy’s name, so “Jim Bob” will do just fine) confided that his girlfriend was late and demanded that Jim Bob “help” her or marry her. The second option made Jim Bob’s sphincter lock up and his heart palpitate, so he told the girl (who was under age, further complicating things) that he would find her some “help,” but first they ought to learn if she were truly pregnant. Jim Bob implored Jack to arrange for Dr. Gunn to examine the girl. Knowing that his father would never do this without the permission and knowledge of the girl’s parents, Jack told Jim Bob that his father was not available for such things, but Jack would be glad to officiate himself.

JimBob asked, “Do you know how to do this exam, Jack?”

Eyebrow raised in cynical amusement, Jack answered, “Why, hell, yes, my daddy taught me everything I know.”

Sighing in relief, Jim Bob thanked Jack profusely, and arranged to bring his girl to Dr. Gunn’s office on an off day, when Jack would have the office entirely to himself.

On the appointed day, Jim Bob and his girl, who to Jack’s satisfaction turned out to be a steamy little item of jail bait, met him at the office. Jack led the girl into an examination room, gave her a hospital gown and told her to take off all her clothes and climb up on the examination table. Jack turned to Jim Bob and told him that his presence was not required in the room. After a minute, the girl called out that she was ready, and Jack entered the room, closing the door behind him.

Minutes passed. More minutes passed, and try as he might, Jim Bob could hear nothing from inside the room. After a very long time, it seemed to Jim Bob, Jack came out, leading the now clothed girl by the hand. “Good news, Jim Bob, this young lady is not pregnant.” Nodding to the girl, Jack arched one eyebrow and gave his best confiding smile. The girl blushed and giggled. Jim Bob asked to talk to Jack for a minute, and Jack led him back into an office, closing the door.

JimBob pumped Jack’s hand as though he was going to wrench it off, smiling in relief. “Thank you, Jack, God, this is good news. You are a life saver. How’d it go?”

Sighing with pleasure, Jack said, “Oh, wonderful. I got her up on the table and her feet in the stirrups and poked and prodded and stroked everywhere I wanted. I enjoyed it a lot. She did too, after a while.”

“You dog! Hell, it was worth it, ’cause now I can relax, right? You found she wasn’t pregnant!”

“Hell, I have no idea if she is pregnant, Jim Bob, but maybe she isn’t, and if she is, at least you have a little breathing room.”

Turning pale, Jim Bob stammered, “But you said your daddy had taught you how…to do it, how to tell…”

Grinning, Jack said, “No, Jim Bob, I said my daddy taught me every thing I knew, not every thing he knew.”

Fortunately for Jim Bob, his girl and probably for Jack as well, the girl was just later than usual, and pregnancy was indeed, not in the works. Jim Bob learned more about Jack than he did about his girlfriend, that day. And Jack didn’t charge Jim Bob a dime for the pregnancy exam.

The Jack Gunn Chronicles Part I

“Jack Gunn” is not his name. My late, lamented friend had quite another name, but for reasons which will become apparent, his various surviving family members deserve some anonymity. Jack was born into a turbulent, large family of highly intelligent and hyperactive siblings, rather odd considering the staid, courtly and dignified physician who fathered them all. Of course, Mrs. Gunn was “artistic,” eccentric and equal to her husband in intelligence, so perhaps that explains their secular equivalent of the preacher’s wild children.

Several of his children followed Dr. Gunn into medicine, but not Jack. Jack was born with a sardonic smile. No, I can’t say that, I wasn’t there. But throughout the years I knew him, thirty-odd or so, I seemed to always to notice a knowing, lopsided smile as Jack nodded slowly to me, with an air of complicity in some wonderful joke.

And jokes there were, great capers that made Jack legend before he was out of his teens. The Great Ruby Falls Murder. The Suitcase Full of Snakes. The Escape From Webb School. How Mrs. Gunn Found Out Jack Left City High.

The earliest story Jack chose to share with me concerned a girl. So many of his stories came to that, to a girl, usually much to the girl’s discredit, not to mention Jack’s.

One summer day when Jack was about sixteen, his parents went to some adult daytime function with a neighbor couple, leaving Jack alone in the house for the afternoon. The neighbors had a teen-age girl who they likewise left alone for the afternoon. Inevitably, Jack and Darlene (not her name either, for, as I said above, good reason) got together and Jack persuaded Darlene to come over and take a tour of his older brother Malcolm’s photographic darkroom. Right in the middle of Jack’s demonstration of how the 6X enlarger worked, just as he was completing Darlene’s exposure, Dr. and Mrs. Gunn opened the door, standing there with the neighbor couple, Darlene’s parents. They had expressed an interest in Malcolm’s hobby. Jack just grinned, while Darlene struggled to pull up her Bobbie Brooks jeans. For the balance of the summer Darlene visited her grandparents in Mississippi, while Jack was on permanent house arrest.

There were so many stories. Jack was an inverse image of the repression of the 1950s, the age of I like Ike and Father Knows Best. He was a secret joy and inspiration to all us proper young boys and girls, even as we solemnly nodded assent to our parents’ stern admonitions against his example.

God bless Jack Gunn, wherever he is. I hope that in that distant place it is always happy hour, the whiskey never runs out and his tab is always forgiven.

The saga shall continue….