When I was 11, my family got lost in rural Tennessee and stopped at a fireworks store to get directions. Mom pulled our Honda station-wagon with its Garden State plates into the dirt parking lot, and I went into ask the way to the Hungry Mother Campground. The woman behind the counter was overweight and heavily tattooed, and a strange flag was hanging above her on the wall: the Stars and Bars with a flaming skull in the center encircled by the words “The South Shall Rise Again.” It was my first encounter with the Confederacy.
Suburban Yankees are always secretly surprised by regional differences, probably because we spend our formative years learning to think of cultural contrast as the difference between the Gap and Aeropostale. I’m trying to shed this narrowness — I’ve been to Graceland, I love fried green tomatoes, and recently I even saw Gone with the Wind. Then a couple of weeks ago I got the urge to break one of the biggest Yankee taboos. I decided I wanted to learn how to use a gun.
My first problem was knowing what to wear. Is shooting formal or casual? Can I wear sneakers, I wondered? Is camouflage required? In the end I settled on khakis and a navy polo shirt — an outfit that said, “I can use the Glock, or we could go grab a latte.”
I located a gun store with a shooting range attached someplace well outside the Beltway, and when I got there, I was relieved not to see anyone who looked like David Koresh. I stepped up to the counter and told the clerk that I wanted to rent a gun and get a lane to do some shooting. I confessed, “I know nothing about guns.”
He gave me a pained look and asked, “Revolver or semi-automatic?”
I opted for the semi-automatic because that’s what Samuel L. Jackson uses in Pulp Fiction, one of my favorite movies. The clerk showed me a case with about 25 pistols in it. I asked him to pick one for me, and he pulled out a Smith & Wesson 9mm, which pleased me immensely because it sounded so menacing. Then he produced a sheet of paper and instructed me to sign by the X.
The form attested that I was familiar with the safe operation of firearms and that my knowledge of gun laws, both state and federal, was comprehensive. I crossed my fingers and signed, thinking what a great story this would be if I were a producer for 60 Minutes.
As I passed the piece of paper back to the man, he handed me my Smith & Wesson, a pair of earphones, and a box of ammo.
“You have lane ten,” he said.
I spent the first half hour in my lane playing with the gun. I pressed all of the buttons and moved all of the moving parts, trying to figure out what went where. I decided that robbing convenience stores must be harder than it looks, because I was getting nowhere fast.
A pair of 12-year-olds in the next lane over were firing enough bullets to conduct a small war, with the sort of solemn, dedicated expressions you’d expect to see on the faces of kids aspiring to the Sturmabteilung. I stepped back and watched them for a few minutes as they effortlessly put round after round into a tiny black star on a square target 30 feet away.
When one of them caught me staring, I had a brief vision of him pointing his silver Luger at me and coolly saying, “This is for the War of Northern Aggression, Mister,” before filling me full of lead. Instead, he gave me a polite, toothy, adolescent smile and asked if I needed any help.
After five minutes’ instruction, I was ready. I stepped into my lane and flipped a switch that sent my target — a big one, in the shape of a man — 25 feet out. With one swift motion I slammed a full clip into the grip, jerked a round into the chamber, flicked off the safety, and — Bang!
Well, it wasn’t quite the stuff of Delta Force, but I did hit the target. As a matter of fact, I hit it more often than not. I was even starting to fancy myself a good ol’ boy by the time my 50 rounds ran out. I felt elated, suffused with an unfamiliar destructive exuberance.
But the feeling soon wore off. As I drove back toward the city, past miles of cookie-cutter developments, my euphoria subsided, and I realized I’d been play-acting. The people I met at the range go shooting because they enjoy it. I went to pose as a southerner.
And I shed the pose as easily as I would shed an ill-fitting pair of chinos. It turns out you can take the boy out of the mall, but you can’t take the mall out of . . . well, you know. Hey, I’ve got to run to Starbucks.
JONATHAN V. LAST
