We previously met Male Concubine during our chat about underwater shooting. He wanted to let everyone know that the opinions expressed within these interviews are solely his own, not those of the management.
ED: Hey there, Male Concubine. Thanks for joining us again.
MC: No problem, my pleasure. That last interview blew up exactly how I told you it would, didn’t it? I warned you.
ED: Well, I hope you had plenty of popcorn.
MC: So what are we gonna talk about today?
ED: When I met you many years ago, one of the first things you ever told me about yourself was that you had once been married to someone who shot at you. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about domestic violence here so I wanted to ask you about that if you don’t mind talking about it. Because you’re still here and alive to tell the tale.
MC: I’m still alive to tell the tale.
Long story short, in my previous occupation, I met a female who was aspiring to become a physician. We began dating, but then my work took me to the Philippines, and while I was there she came over to visit me, at which time I hastily proposed and she accepted. So by the time I returned to the United States and got married, I’d had some second thoughts. But I figured, I’m a guy, I can fix anything.
My post-proposal experience, however, indicated that I couldn’t fix this.
ED: Was she someone who was trained in shooting or had experience with firearms?
MC: This individual had a high IQ with schizophrenic tendencies. Initially, she lacked the paranoid delusions associated with homidical actions. She had a master’s degree with Ph.D. work in artificial intelligence. On paper, she was about a 168 IQ but she didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with conflict.
So, as our personal relationship developed, when there was conflict, she responded physically. And then, very shortly after getting married, whatever tenuous control she had on alcohol consumption dissipated. So factor in emotional instability with drinking, plus she was putting herself through medical school after getting fired from the Department of Defense. She had some lower-quality weapons, and was capable of okay shooting Not great, not bad, but was extremely resistant to intelligent and methodical correction of shooting techniques.
ED: So you’re saying you tried to teach her?
MC: I tried to help her. She asked me to. One of the things I learned from being raised with four sisters is that I couldn’t tell girls shit. The only way that the information’s gonna resonate is if they ask you, and if they ask you when they are prepared to accept the input.
My ex wife was not capable of that kind of acceptance so I didn’t offer until she asked. At some point, though, her need to be smarter than me took over, so she finally asked. But since she considered herself smarter than me, she then wanted to do it her way. Skewed logic. No matter how smart you are, if it doesn’t work, you gotta change what you’re doing to make it work. Her mindset was that she was never the cause of any problem, though.
As she ran out of invented ways to express her displeasure with me, that was when she commenced shooting at me. The insult was that she was shooting at me with a weapon that I bought her so that she could have a conceal carry weapon. It was a Model 640 Smith & Wesson five-shot .357 with a stainless steel shrouded hammer. Basically a J-frame on steroids.
ED: So wait…It sounds like this happened more than once.
MC: It happened four times. Not one after the other. There was a remission period here and there of her symptoms. After the first time, I got her friends involved because they understood her grasp on reality was tenuous. After the first time, it was actually about a year and a half before she shot at me again.
ED: I have to ask. What was your thought process about continuing to be married to someone who had shot at you? For most people, I kind of think once would be enough.
MC: The easiest way I can explain this is that my parents were married until my mother passed away. And they weathered her extreme alcoholism along with all her aberrant behavior associated with that. The fallacy in my thinking was since my father could weather this, he must have had an active hand in keeping my mother from getting even worse, which was erroneous. I realized much later in life that he was actually dealing with it by just going to work and avoiding the whole thing and letting nature take its course.
When I began to take some type of active interest in gently trying to herd my ex wife in the direction of treatment, utilizing clergy, friends, and mental health professionals, we all thought that she was receptive. Initially she began to follow that, but it didn’t last long.
ED: So did you take her gun away after the first time she shot at you? You didn’t say she hit you.
MC: She didn’t hit me. The first time she shot at me she was from about 20-25 feet away. I replaced the door jamb after that 146 grain softpoint bullet broke it, since I couldn’t close the door in the house. I also had to repaint the pickup truck, since she put two holes in the cab and one in the bed. I had to fix those holes and then repaint.
ED: But you didn’t take the gun away?
MC: Nah, I left the house for a couple of days until she stopped drinking and calmed down. She was super paranoid about the public finding out, so I just talked to her privately when I went home.
Yes, I know I should have removed the weapons from the home at that point. But I started working with her and things seemed to kind of even out and there were periods of relative normalcy. The problem was that things could shift in a nanosecond. You could never tell whether she was going to respond appropriately or with violence.
As distance grew between us, I changed the combination on the safe so that she couldn’t gain access to the weapons. And I gave her that old five-shot Charter Arms that I talked about in our first interview that I still had laying around instead.
ED: Wait…you gave her another gun?
MC: I made the lesson less mechanically reliable to assuage her suspicion that I was limiting her exposure to weapons. So I just gave her one that didn’t work so well. It would fire a live round maybe once every 15 or 20 trigger pulls. It was like sawing a piece of wood, you had to work at it. You could get there, but you would work up a sweat doing it.
I gave it to her because I’d noticed that she would feel satisfied if she pointed a weapon at me and squeezed the trigger. The fact that it wouldn’t go off was completely secondary.
ED: But didn’t you feel worried that during one of those 15 or 20 squeezes it would go off?
MC: I figured I generated the original problem by asking her to marry me. I was either going to fix it or die trying. Hey, you asked.
So, the first and second times she shot at me were with the 640. The third time she tried to shoot me was with that Charter Arms. She just kept squeezing the trigger and eventually it went off. After that I locked up all the weapons and changed the combination on the safe. That was when she gave me the permanent scalp damage by hitting me over the head with a frozen liter bottle of Corona beer, trying to knock me out. It cracked my skull at the juncture of three plates. I’ve got a permanent depression in my scalp because of that.
After that happened, I sat down with her after she sobered up and said, “Look, I’m done. You’ve shot at me three times, so you’re leaving me no choice but to get the cops involved.” And then I made a near fatal mistake.
ED: What was that?
MC: I didn’t leave. We went on a vacation together, and when we came back, that’s when she shot at me for the fourth time with the 640 and the sheriff finally got involved. I still don’t know how she got into the safe. It ultimately cost me as small fortune to deal with a situation that ended in her being tasered out of the house.
ED: You must be glad that you actually couldn’t teach her to be a better shot.
MC: Until this moment, I’ve actually never thought about that. I’ve had several instances where I know the Lord has been a presence in my life, and the last time that she shot at me, there was ample evidence that despite my horn dog ways as a younger man before I got married, I had finally paid my debt for the ways I had hurt women earlier in my life. It was an act of penance that I believe was a result of my behavior earlier in life. Not physically, I was never abusive, but if it had a skirt, I was chasing it.
ED: So did you regard this as being kind of like doing Hail Marys, only through someone shooting at you?
MC: I never thought about it like that. I just knew that I was less than desirable. If I’d had a son, I would not have wanted him emulating my behavior. I would have been quite disappointed.
ED: Why do you think your ex wife missed you so many times?
MC: Oh, the Lord. The very last time, she was less than two feet away from me. I was looking down the muzzle of the weapon. But somehow it struck the ground by my left foot. I was so close that there was no powder stippling or burns on me anywhere. But somehow that round didn’t hit me, and then I watched her try to fire the rest of the rounds and the 640 wouldn’t go off. I know she tried. The Lord saved me that day. There’s no question about it. He wouldn’t let that gun go off.
I stood up and walked past her out of the house. And as I got to the door, the Lord whispered in my ear. He said, “It’s all on you.” That was my walk of faith.
In my life, I’ve been shot three times, stabbed twice, been in several rotary and fixed wing forced aircraft landings. And that day was the only time in my life I’ve ever thought I was going to be killed.
ED: And here you are.
MC: Here I am.
ED: Thanks for sharing all that with us.
MC: You’re welcome. Thanks for asking.