Shooting Away My Misery

My father has cancer and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. But I'm back in Texas, and that's something at least. All I can do is force a smile?a big, greasy salesman's grin, desperate for a sale or a miracle?while my father fights for a breath. It's a rotten state of the union and the only recourse is to wait and stew in a sour broth of panic and powerlessness.

There's another recourse, though, besides taking my daily medicine in chilled, bottle-sized doses. So in the gaping vacuum between bleak diagnoses, I head for Red's Indoor Firing Range. You don't need an appointment.

This is a grotesque and cathartic ritual I can only engage in while visiting Texas, a state that is defensive about and secretly proud of its power lust. It was lust bordering on religious mania that won this land of swamps, deserts and great charbroiled expanses of nothing, that defeated Mexicans and Comanches and outlaws, and that same righteous passion still burns like a raw habanero in the gut of any proper Texan.

In the bleak and unforgiving geography of infant Texas, where scorpions and rattlers and thick, thorny bush baked daily, respect and reliance on personal power was the only way of staving off what always promised to be a gruesome death. Today, the Lone Star State is less a land of gun-blazing desperados and more an increasingly overdeveloped strip mall filled with hardworking, tanktop-wearing shoppers of every shape and hue. Neighborly by indoctrination, feisty and opinionated by disposition, Texans as a whole are ranches of one; they wear psychic fences like halos and are more than happy to jaw about the weather as long as you mind the "Private Property" sign. Their brains boil with lazy cowboy daydreams of a time when bullheaded self-loyalty was the only thing keeping beans on the table and scalps on heads. There's plenty of road, beer and salsa here, and you're welcome to it. But if, under the glaring lights of one of Texas' gargantuan grocery stores/warehouses, two sweet-faced women both stumble on the last frozen chicken cutlet, may the best mom win.

Having been raised back East, I'm a Texan by proxy. I always feel like I'd have ended up an arrow-riddled corpse collapsed on the border between Arkansas and Texas. The first greenhorn killed. A warning to others and a joke to diamond-hard men's men. I try, but machismo, I think, is taught in schools here, subsidized by the state, and while kids in San Antonio learn how to break stallions, I learned how to make pretty pictures out of pasta.

Red's is a long, rambling shack that sits under a knotted tree, next to a busy four-lane road swarming with shimmering, air-conditioned cars. It's surrounded by gas stations, taco shacks and run-down flea markets. You'd have to know it was there and what it was to visit. But it's always crammed with upwardly mobile men and women reading boxes of ammo or peering out from behind tinted yellow sunglasses at racks of rifle scopes, studiously sipping cups of Starbucks coffee. For most of the country, guns are things that bad people use to kill good people, as well as overly curious children. Cops should have them. No one else should. Texas is different. Put faith in anything but God and yourself and your days just might be numbered.

I pick an HK 9 mm from a motley collection of revolvers and assault rifles in a glass case and hand my New York City driver's license to a meatball with a crewcut. He is unimpressed with my ID, frowning and crisply handing it back to me as if hurrying me through customs and into his civilized country. Traveling between Texas and New York, you'd think the world has two centers.

I have a lot of experience handling firearms and, eager to impress upon the perpetually half-camouflaged assembled that I'm not just any gutless, big-city pansy, I make sure my every move smoothly communicates I'm in "the know"?a member of "the club." Not the NRA, exactly. I'm sure of the dozen or so people in Red's, I was the only one not a member of that shrill, hyperactive organization of firearm divas. No, the club I'm speaking of is too primal to warrant a laminated card. To become a member, you have to fear and love bullets. Bullets that fly so fast that they break the sound barrier with a whipcrack the moment you caress the trigger. Now that I think about it, maybe an NRA card would get me an ammunition discount.

I pull the chamber back to show no round is in place, I point the barrel down and reverentially saunter to the lanes. Guns don't kill people, people do. I have the power in my possession. I wanted it, and I got it. To lust after something is to be slightly inadequate. And in the face of devouring disease, of unavoidable death and suffering, we're all impotent. Limp and lifeless. So my gun?my forged, semi-automatic phallus?imbues me with the ability to believe a lie. I am in control.

Of course, everyone there knows I'm a poser. Especially the wiry, ballcap-wearing old man giving advice to a middle-aged cherub about the difference between armor-piercing rounds and hollow-points. I assume he is Red himself because he chews what can only be Teflon-coated nuggets of lead with authority. His grim, stolen glances at me confirm that he knows I know he knows I'm just a sheep in wolf's clothing. But I paid in cash ($40 total), so they treat me indifferently as I play hotshot. What if I turn out to be some fancy-looking psychopath? I'm sure Red would pull out a well-polished snub-nosed .357 from behind his hubcap of a belt buckle and send me to the hereafter in pieces.

As a child, when confronted with creaking floors at midnight, or creeping shadows, I'd hide under my blankets. But now, instead of a blanket, I have a plastic and metal handgun snuggling my palm. I slowly push ten rounds, from a box of 50, into the clip. I have ear plugs, so all I can hear are muffled gunshots from other lanes. But I can smell the sulfur that sizzles in the empty, smoking cases. It smells like the Fourth of July. The clip slides into the gun butt and snaps into place like vertebrae teased into soothing alignment by a determined chiropractor. I pop off four or five shots at my target, a human outline dangling about 35 yards away. Because of recoil, you have to line your barrel sight up with the target, then aim a little lower if you want to hit the bull's-eye. For me, hitting the paper target is good enough. And hit it I do. Man, did I shoot that target dead, dead, dead.

My fury is full of smoke and thunder and from the first round to the last I have power. I can watch my father wheeze and whither, I can meet my mother's despair and hysteria with steely eyed reserve, I can convince myself that, regardless of the evidence against my living forever, I can fast-draw the Grim Reaper and vainly ride off into my own little sunset. I have 40 bullets and I use them all in about 10 minutes. My HK cools as I stand in a pile of spent shells. The adrenaline is gone, replaced with a lump in the throat, like a pimply adolescent holding a can of orange soda and watching his true love dance with the school's best haircut. I had hoped to triumphantly lash my grief to the hood of a truck, but the beast is bulletproof and so is the cancer.

I returned home anyway. And waited. And wept. And watched my father fight the illness, fight without weapons?fight to the bitter, bitter end?terrified and determined and outmatched.