The crystal chandelier shatters. I can’t say I wasn’t expecting it. I was. But you can’t expect people to believe you if you don’t make a show.
There’s a moment of hesitation, you can tell everyone stops breathing-it’s like, what’s wrong with this picture here?-because in their minds the gun isn’t perfectly real yet, it’s a glaring discontinuity, something that doesn’t belong. I don’t belong, but they don’t know that. Yet. They think I belong and the gun’s the thing that’s foreign. Nothing fits their expectations.
It’s sunny and brilliant outside, everyone’s happy, love is in the air, or at least lust, and these people can’t understand why is there this perfectly normal woman standing in the middle of the hotel lobby with a gun in her hands. They’re thinking, does she even know how to use a gun? They’re wondering, is this a joke? Then they’re thinking, I thought crazy people were supposed to look different.
Seventeen people in the room; eleven men and six women. Ages spanning sixty years.
I close my eyes a blink and feel the unwieldy realism of the thing in my hands. In my mind I can hear the string section of an orchestra laying out the sinister form of a jagged crescendo, a soundtrack of innuendo. The gun’s the only part of me that’s real. Everything else is just part of a long list of details that may or may not be factually accurate. Meaningless, more or less.
I feel like I should be in a bank, or a diamond store, or someplace else. But instead I’m here.
Some simpering jackass in a crisp black suit says, “what do you want,” his lower lip quivering. He works here, I think. A loyal hotel employee. He wants me to make demands so we can all just play nice and then go home.
“Who do you think you are?” asks someone else-a staunch hero-type-in a quiet, arrogant sort of way. There’s a sense of calm entitlement in a voice, like he feels he deserves an answer.
“I think I am Gwenfrewi Jaussi,” I say.
“Oh,” replies Mr. Staunch Hero-type. Maybe he recognizes my name from somewhere, or maybe he just realizes that I’m not going to play his power games. I’m in charge here.
I have six bullets left. Or is it five? Either way, there are a set number of bullets between me and losing control. Because I will lose control, eventually. Everyone loses control sometime. Now I have it. Maybe you will later. It’s hard to say. I can’t help but notice, I’m losing control. Bullet by bullet, I’m losing control.

“Gwenfrewi-Miss Jaussi-go home, please,” says the voice of a woman. Dignified, calm, restrained, her voice. I know that voice. “Gwenfrewi, go home, please. Please, go home. Don’t do this. You know you don’t want to do this. Don’t let the story do this to you. You’re in control.”
“You can’t talk your way out of this like you did before,” I say.
“The police know you’re here. They’ll soon be here.”
“I know.”
“Gwen-”
“Yes Maple?”
I sparkle. I’m in control.
“Gwen, dear, go home.”
“I can’t. You really don’t understand, do you?”

And for a brief, brilliant instant, I’m like a movie star.
I’m a movie star, baby, and you’re my cake.
It ends in a rabid flurry of bullets. You wouldn’t want to be there. Grisly and boring, all of it.

Me? I first became interested in the 1947 Sweet Dreams Massacre during my honeymoon. Elvis and I booked our stay at the Sweet Dreams Hotel with only the best of intentions. Plus the rates were unbelievably good and we’d heard wonderful things about the hotel: excellent service, fantastic spacious gorgeous sumptuous rooms, etc. etc. Great things. Elvis and I had met not twelve months earlier in a sixteen-car pileup. In the midst of the orgiastic fray of automobiles, Elvis’ caracus red 1997 Mitsubishi 3000GT coupe and my white 1994 Mercury Topaz became inextricably bonded, literally. We never could part the cars, and both were lost. But from then on I felt a kind of peculiar closeness to Elvis that I simply couldn’t shake.
I guess that’s another story, though.
Because this story is the story of another kind of inextricable bond; it’s the story of how I became hopelessly entangled in the legacy and the mythos of the 1947 Sweet Dreams Massacre.
How I, Gwen Jaussi, was re-created in the image of someone else.
Who, I don’t know anymore.