AOL, god help us all, is up and running. Word seems more or less happy. The new 1.44 MEGABYTE FLOPPY DRIVE is perking right along. All the data is now triple-redundancy saved on the Cube's HD, the outboard LaCie HD and on CDs.
My new book proposal, BULLET POINTS: Postcards from the Heart of the Gun Culture, is about half done, and, if I say so myself, it's pretty good. Here's the lede, so feel free to say it sucks:
The odd thing is I don’t remember the first time I had a gun in my hands. It seems like something I should remember, some profound milestone to mark the passing from childhood to the mysterious realm of the adults. But...nothing. I do remember my father and his brother, Uncle Sonny, sitting on the porch of my grandparents’ ramshackle house in rural Mississippi, not far from the crossroads where bluesman Robert Johnson made his much-noted deal with the Devil, shooting .22 Shorts at a coffee can filled with sand. It was high summer, blazing hot, and both men were in white James Dean t-shirts and skin-tight Levi jeans with the legs rolled up. My father, who had killed men on some nameless island in the South Pacific, and my uncle, who ran moonshine in a big Pontiac sedan , were particular about their jeans and would put them on and sit in a tub of hot water and vinegar, then wear them until they shrank and dried.You know, not to sound like a complete lunatic, but I've thought a lot about that crossroads where Robert Johnson cut his Deal signed in blood. Yeah, I know were all past that now, because people like me have recycled the History of American Music so many times that everything is overplayed, over-extended, over-hyped, over B-S'ed. I'd like to say I'm sorry, but in truth I needed the money, so I wrote the words.
The can was about 10 feet away from the porch steps — an amazing distance to a little kid! — at the base of the huge oak that dominated the dirt front yard of my grandparents' house. With each “pop!” of the little .22 revolver, a Ruger copy of an old cowboy single action, the can would jerk.
“You want to let him do it?” my uncle asked, nodding toward me. I was aching to get my hands on that gun, to feel the smooth grips and the little shock of recoil, to watch that can shiver as the tiny slugs hit it. I must have been five, maybe six, years old, and I’d cried when Brandon de Wilde yelled, “Shane! Come back! Come back, Shane!”
“Not yet,” my father said. “He can shoot just fine, but he can’t hit what he’s shooting at every single time.”
“Hell,” said my uncle the moonshine runner, “neither can I!”
Both men laughed, in the way I thought real men laughed when there wasn’t a mom around to tsk-tsk about profanity, a fellowship born of the blistering heat and the unmistakable smells of Hoppes-9 solvent and smokeless gunpowder. My father let me hold the little Ruger, but he didn’t let me pull the trigger. Even so, I’ve always counted that day as my initiation into the culture of guns...
But I've been down to the crossroads, and I do believe that if anyone was going to cut a deal with the Ole Scratch, that's pretty much where he or she would do it. I once drank too much whiskey at a juke joint in Alabama, and in some kind of drunk stupor I wandered down a road called Seven Bridges and ended up — honest; who could make nonsense like this up? — passed out on Hank Williams' grave. Woke up just before dawn, to the sound of train whistles. It made me think of my other grandfather, who was a dandy on Beale Street in Memphis in the 1930s, and carried a .38 Colt he once threw at a man when it misfired.
"Son," he told me not long before he died. "Always carry the Good Book and gun. Make damn sure the gun works, too." I have his pocketwatch and his gun. I had the gun fixed, just in case.
I can't remember the first time I held a gun, either. But I remember the first time I tried to shoot a pistol. It was a K-38, and too big for my hands. I couldn't shoot it double-action, and I need three hands to cock the hammer ... Pop had to do it for me.
ReplyDeleteI didn't hit the target I was aiming at, but I hit the ground right next to the tree the target was nailed to.
Kind of like the first time I tried to rope a calf a brandin', de-ballin' and ear-notchin' time. I threw a big loop, and the calf ran right through it.
That's the way I shot IPSC, too. And if I was a tobacco chewer, there would be one pristine coffee can beside the porch, swimming in a pool of gravy-brown spit-slime.
You go finish that book, Michael, and I'll buy you a big ol' dinner at some nameless steakhouse in Reno.
As I recall, you bought last time for SWMBO and me. Must be my turn