I loved my Glock so much I was laying four of its six inches on my tongue, forming my lips around it, hooking my thumbs around its safe-action trigger. There’s no such thing as a safety catch on a Glock — you have to apply direct pressure in the right spot, or the trigger acts like a safety and refuses to fire.
My thumb was in the right spot. The rest ought to be cake.
I was telling myself that if I was a real man, I’d do it.
I was sweating bullets, staring down at the trigger cross-eyed. The last thing I’d see would be the knuckly creases on my thumb parting ever so slightly.
I depressed the safe action so it wouldn’t be safe anymore — and I wouldn’t be depressed anymore.
I did it. I squeezed the trigger.
It should have fired. But it didn’t. It jammed on me.
For the first time in my career, my Glock had let me down.
And now my hands were shaking and my heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. If I tried again, I was going to screw it up. And I didn’t want to fail.
I set the gun down. My stomach churned in disgust. With fumbling fingers, I tapped out a cigarette and lit it on the third match. It felt good to have that smoke in my lungs. The nicotine got my mind to thinking — maybe the ol’ Glock was giving me a sign, that I needed help, that something was terribly wrong with me. And you don’t argue with a Glock.
I didn’t know where to begin. The brass always encouraged us to use the departmental psychiatrists — but everyone knew what that was about. I couldn’t count on total confidentiality. Whatever was wrong with me might get leaked to IA. It might get subpoenaed in some future court case if my policing skills were called into question, and such a case was not outside the realm of possibility. It might simply get spread around as interprecinct gossip: Officer Grant’s a loose cannon. Yeah, you can’t trust Tom Grant as your backup. The guy’s nuts. Let’s find, him a nice desk job and pull him off the streets.
I couldn’t turn to the department. No sir, not on my life.
Facedown on the kitchen table in front of me lay the Village Voice. One of the classified ads on the back page caught my eye:
LONELY? DEPRESSED? SUICIDAL?
CALL THE 24-HOUR HELP LINE!
555-HELP 555-HELP 555-HELP
It looked like what I needed. Help was only a phone call away. Even though it was two in the morning, somebody would be there on the other end of the line to talk me down.
I picked up the phone and called.
“Hello?” A man’s voice, exceedingly mild, somewhat sleepy.
“Um, yes, is this the help line?” I croaked.
“Yeah, sure.” He cleared his throat. “How can I help you?”
“I–I just tried to kill myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“What happened? Why didn’t it work?”
“My gun jammed.”
“Oh, you’re using a gun? What kind?”
“What kind? Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. What kind of gun do you own?”
“Well, it’s a Glock.”
“Mmm,” said the guy on the help line. “What model?”
“It’s a seventeen-L. Semiauto, six-inch barrel.”
“What does that use? Nine-millimeters? Forty-caliber Smith & Wessons? Or forty-fives?”
“Nine-millimeters,” I said.
“How many in the clip?”
“I’ve got seventeen in the clip and one in the chamber. The one in the chamber jammed. I’m going to have to start all over.”
“How much does a gun like that cost?” the help line wanted to know.
“I don’t know what it costs now. I got mine, what, four years ago, when I joined the academy. It set me back about eight hundred.”
“The academy?” he said. “You mean the police academy?”
“Yes, I’m a policeman.”
“How interesting.”
“Listen, I’m serious about this. I’m going to take my Glock apart, clean it all up, reload it, and try again. Probably one chance in a billion that it’ll jam again.”
“Probably,” the help line said.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Aren’t you going to try to talk me out of it?”
“Why should I?”
“I thought that’s what you were there for.”
“If you want to kill yourself and you thought I was going to try to talk you out of it, why would you call?” he asked.
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“Why don’t you do it right now, while I’m on the phone?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Talk to me while you’re unjamming your gun or whatever it is you have to do. I’ll wait. Get it all nice and ready, and then do it. Just do it. I want to hear it.”
“Listen, maybe I dialed the wrong number, buddy.”
“No, you didn’t. You dialed five-five-five-H-E-L-P, didn’t you? That’s me. I’m the help line. You got what you wanted.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Who cares whether you understand? You’re about to kill yourself. In a few minutes, no one’s going to give a damn about you anymore. You’ll be gone, and we’ll still be here. It’s not for you to understand. Are you beginning to see my logic?”
“Not exactly.”
“How are you going to do it? Side of the head? In the mouth? Through the chest?”
“In the mouth.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s best. Side of the head, there’s too much chance you’ll turn yourself into a vegetable. Through the chest, you’re not guaranteed to hit the heart. You might only wound yourself, pass out, and wind up in the hospital.”
“I don’t need your advice,” I said. “I want help.”
“Help? You want help? What do you think I’m giving you?”
“Not that kind of help.”
“I didn’t specify what kind of help in my ad, now, did I?”
“No, but—”
“Everyone always assumes I’m here to rescue them. I’m not. You want to kill yourself, that’s fine by me. I can’t abide suicides who get halfway there and then can’t finish the job. Some of them only need a little push to be on their way. So I put the number in the paper. I want them to call me at that moment of crisis, when all they need is a little encouragement.”
“You’re sick.”
“Ho-ho!” he said. “You’re the one who’s already tried to kill himself once this evening, and you want to do it again. Which one of us do you think is sick?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and began to laugh. “I see what you’re doing. I can see right through you. You’re smart, you know that? You really take the cake. You’re using reverse psychology, just like my mother used to do when I was a kid.”
“Oh?” the help line said. “Just how am I doing that?”
“By pretending you want me to go ahead and do it, acting like you get some kind of kick out of other people dying while you hang there on the line. You think all we’re doing is feeling sorry for ourselves and looking for someone to hold our hands and tell us it’s okay, tell us we’re somebody special, tell us there’s a brighter day dawning somewhere over the rainbow.”
“Stop wasting my time. Are you going to do it or not?”
“See?” I said. “Instead of giving us soothing words, you give us abuse. You try to make us feel even more worthless, because you think we’re going to react against it and tell ourselves we’re really okay. We listen to you and think you’re a jerk, but we say to ourselves, ‘Hey, why should I listen to this guy?’ and before you know it, you’ve cured us of our mania and sent us on our merry way. Isn’t that how it goes?”
The voice on the help line gave a rude, audible yawn.