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  • Small Talk, Gun ShopSan Francisco, California
  • Lili Loofbourow (bio)

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Police like to gossip at the gun shop on Mission Street. They don’t discuss the obvious or the general: You won’t hear about the store’s imminent closure or the changes in the neighborhood. Off-duty, out of uniform, they talk the way teenagers do in record stores. They chat. They confide. They lean on the counter. While a woman with a crewcut and hoodie talks to Steven Alcairo, the store’s manager, the cops talk about other cops. // “What’s he up to these days?” // “Surviving his marriage. He’s working the homeless park. He’s been working some overtime so he can get ahead, since his wife spends a little too much money. She’s staying home.” // “Sounds about right.” // The woman with the crewcut leaves, and I discover she’s a cop, too. “Q2,” one cop says. “She was giving some of us a hard time at Mission station.” Sit long enough and you become part of the landscape: One officer tells me about a tyrannical former city supervisor who torpedoed a friend’s coffee shop in North Beach just as it was about to open—everything was in order, but he hadn’t been personally consulted. “That’s how this town is,” he says, and sets his helmet on the counter. Alcairo walks over, and the cop perks up, hoping Alcairo will recognize him out of uniform. He does. // Alcairo tells me later that he often fills the cops in on suspicious activity at the shop. He even sometimes sends them video or snapshots he takes with his phone. He’s served as a witness in three court cases. // “What I’d like to see is more people being more active and being a good witness,” he says. “What we learned in private protection was how to be a great witness: When you walk down the street, take a look at the corner. Who stands out to you?” He gets quiet. “If more people did that, we would have more to give law enforcement. You know, my partner was shot. Nobody saw anything. How about that? Nobody saw a thing at the Fillmore—are you kidding? At 9 P.M. on a Saturday night nobody saw anything, not so much as a man running away? It’s ridiculous,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah.” [End Page 15]

Lili Loofbourow
@millicentsomer
Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Slate, Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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