“Everyone getchur hands up!” the bank robber yelled, spit flying all over the pistol he was waving in the air. He reeled off a shot to show he meant business.
I gasped.
The bank manager, obstinate, refused.
The robber pointed his gun at the beautiful young woman in the lobby. “Open. The. Safe.”
Suddenly, Jimmy, the young bank assistant, leaped at the robber, sending the pistol flying.
Jimmy loved this girl. She didn’t love him back, but even still, he dove for the gun.
Screams, the sounds of the two men wrestling. A gunshot ripped into the ceiling. Then, a final thud. The robber had buried his knife in Jimmy’s chest.
The whole crowd, myself included, fell silent.
Another gunshot. The robber grabbed his gut and then fell over dead.
The sheriff had arrived just in time. Or perhaps too late. Jimmy was dead.
“They buried Jimmy later that day at old Boot Hill,” the narrator said as the pretty girl cried into her handkerchief.
The crowd applauded. I was 6, and we were at Old Tucson Studios for the day. I grew up on John Wayne and Kirk Douglas; being here where they made these movies was like being Catholic and going to lunch with St. Peter.
The bank robbery drama was a silly excuse to do stunts and fire cap guns. The actors probably got paid $25 bucks a show and lived off of In-N-Out Burgers on their commute back to their mom’s house.
But as they took a bow, I stood there lost in something I’d never felt before. That line: “They buried Johnny later that day at old Boot Hill.” I could see the young woman crying. She hadn’t given Johnny the time of day before; now, he was her hero. I carried it with me the rest of the day and the week and can recall it now, 27 years later.
Something in me had changed, like a river carving a new canyon. It was my first memory of a story that left me different from before.
What exactly happened? Science might say my temporal lobe and frontal cortex were being stimulated as I responded to the survival knowledge that evolution has programmed me to respond to in a simulation of experience (aka a story).
This is why scientists make for terrible poets and worse lovers:
The limerence I feel for you, my limerent object
is my response to your worthwhile genes
Will thou,
pass on our genes with me?
I didn’t learn a thing about survival that day. The character I most wanted to be like literally died in the story. I think that was the first day I learned how to not be boring.
If that survival stuff is true, then how come the greatest stories are about love, you know, the real kind of love (not limerence) that causes a man to want to die for someone?
Stories do a lot of things, but I think their highest function is reminding humans that we don’t have to be boring.
Think about your favorite movie/book/TV show, whatever; where did it leave you?
Throw aside the thought of “escapism.” If an excuse to shovel popcorn into your mouth and not think about real problems is all you’ve gotten out of a story, I don’t know if I can help you. You need to watch better movies and read better books.
Because my hope is that you remember walking out of the theater and feeling a charge in the air. You set down the book and run your fingers over the cover, feeling a tingle in your fingers. And somewhere deep in your chest, water began to carve into rock: you were getting deeper.
What is happening to you? You’re remembering. It’s as if, during the story, a voice snuck up on you and whispered, “What do I remind you of?”
I don’t fully know what that answer is for you, but I know it’s not supposed to be boring!
A boring story is a bad story. Your life is a story, so if it is boring, then it must not be a good story.
I hate to leave you here with a shell of an idea. But that is as far as I can go. The rest you must do yourself. Should you quit your job to go search for the Ark of the Covenant? Maybe, especially if the Nazis are trying to get there first and harness its power to conquer the world.
But a good story is also inviting friends you haven’t seen in a few months over for dinner. A good story is raising children. It’s being the “fun aunt” or “the uncle with the silly jokes.” It’s taking an extra day of vacation to see a soccer game. It’s writing a song and playing it for someone or writing a song and playing it for no one but God. It’s the smell of a campfire, the lines of a poem, the beams of a well-made house, and the kind words of a friend.
It’s also loving the people in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina who’ve lost homes to Hurricane Helene; they might need your money, they might need you. It’s praying for peace for the people in war zones from Gaza to Ukraine to Myanmar. It’s with the neighborhood of people who call the woods behind Food City home and with the refugees speaking broken English at the food bank.
And I’m just reminding you of what you already know, the same thing all the great stories say: love makes life worth living (and much less boring).
That is beautiful. Thanks for sharing.