Today, I’m going to tell you about the time my grandfather shot a man in the ass.
The year was 1949. The place was downtown Los Angeles. The occasion was a robbery with violence. A small store, I think: a tailor’s, or maybe a family-run grocery market? History has not recorded all of the details.
It’s recorded of the details, though. “The guy was getting away,” my dad explained to me the other day. “He was running fast and he’d pulled a gun. In those days, in that city, when somebody pulled a gun on a cop, the cop had to pull a gun in return. The objective back then was that you had to shoot to kill. You never shot to wound.” Dad paused. Blinked. “But dad wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he’d killed anybody. So Dad shot this guy in the ass. He meant to shoot them in the ankle, I figure – nobody plans to shoot a guy in the ass. But he wasn’t as good a shot as he thought he was.”
Case closed, Donlan style. It was the only time my grandfather ever used his gun – and that’s just one of the things I learned playing L.A. Noire with my dad a few weeks back.
I don’t often play video games with Dad. He hates games, actually, or at least that’s the schtick. In his mind, they’re just violence and noise, and they’re all variations on Call of Duty multiplayer. “I don’t like the opportunities that video games present for reclusive men,” he likes to say, just before he asks – for the fiftieth time – why I decided to grow a beard.