Going To The Mattresses
I drove
over to Jean’s house to help her gather up all of the guns John had spent
decades collecting. I walked inside and
saw that she had already put out more than twenty rifles, pistols and gun
cases on the furniture in the living room.
The vast majority of the collection was made up of airguns and this had caught the attention of a collector
in Texas
Jean
took me into the back bedroom where most of the guns were stored including forty rifles leaning up against one wall, eight in the closet and a half dozen
in cases strewn about the room. We found
a dozen rifles in a cupboard in the hallway, another ten rifles on top of a dresser in another bedroom and lots more in the garage. We
wanted the guns to be easy for Larry to examine (Christ, he was driving all the
way from Temecula), so we spread them out on tables, beds and chairs in every
room of the house except the kitchen and bathroom. The inside of the house was pretty dark and gloomy since Jean, not wanting the neighbors to call in the SWAT team, had closed the shades and curtains on every window. I couldn’t stop thinking of that part in The Godfather where they “go to the
mattresses”.
I know nothing about guns of any type having decided long ago that I would be happiest if I could live the rest of my life without firearms and Irish music. It soon was apparent that Larry knew a great deal about airguns. It was as though the Antique Roadshow had come to Jean's house. For three-and-a-half hours Larry moved non-stop from one gun to the next identifying the country of origin, manufacturer, model name and number and date produced. The majority of the rifles looked identical to Jean and me but Larry was able to determine all of this from ten feet away without even picking up the gun. In addition to the basic data he would also include any historical significance attached to a particular model. One such gun Larry informed us was the first "break away" airgun ever made which he promptly demonstrated after seeing the blank look on both Jean's and my face.
When Larry came to the end of his soliloquy for each gun he would pick it up, test it, indicate if any parts were missing, point out special features such as scopes and off-set butt plates, assess the condition, state how rare it was and suggest an asking price. It was a virtuoso performance and you could tell he was only scratching the surface. Since there were four rooms and over 100 guns to go through before trying to beat rush hour traffic back to Temecula, he was limiting himself to a lead paragraph. He was genuinely shocked when he came across a gun that he thought at first he had never seen before. He soon figured out that it was just a one-off homemade piece of junk. Yet, the point was made, there is no gun anywhere that Larry hasn't seen before. There were two of the same model Sheridan airguns that Larry physically separated, telling us one was in mint condition while the other was worth far less as the stock had been refinished. I looked closely at the two guns after Larry left that afternoon and I'll be damned if there was anyway to tell which was which.
The method Jean used to tell which is which for all the items was to scribble down cryptic notes on bits of paper which she left behind like a trail of bread crumbs as we followed Larry from room to room. It was like watching Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men where he becomes totally wired by twenty cups of coffee as he plies incriminating details from a young woman in her apartment using matchbook covers and torn napkins to jot down the info.
We were through half of the collection when Larry suggested that recording the information onto tags that could be attached to the guns with string might be the way to go. It was too late of course to be of any help that day but I assume he meant it would be something to consider if Jean were ever able to locate and decipher the notes she had littered throughout the house. Watching Larry handle the guns was a treat. In those darkened rooms it was like watching the scene found in every assassin film where the sniper assembles his weapon from parts he has extracted from a wheelchair or a cigarette case.
Larry spent a little extra time telling us about two of the airguns that were disguised as canes. They both came apart like an expensive pool cue and fired lead balls like one of Davy Crockett's muskets.
The rarest and oldest airgun came from England and was made in the 1700s. It came with a detachable reserve tank for the compressed air that was filled with a manual pump which Jean was also able to find. When Larry began to comment about the 300 year-old gun, you began to get a glimmer of what he and John saw in these guns. Larry said, "Shit, we weren't even a country when this gun was made."