Savages

131

He has a point, so Chon and Ben hit the shooting range.

Chon goes to the range all the time not because he’s preparing for the revolution or the Reconquista, not because he has phallic wet dreams about protecting home and hearth from burglars or home invasion. You gotta love “home invasions”—we thought it would be Mexicans, turns out it was mortgage companies.

Chon likes shooting guns.

He likes the feel of metal in his hands, the kick, the blowback, the precision of chemistry, physics, and engineering mixed with hand-eye coordination. Not to mention power—shooting a gun projects your personal will across time and space in a flash. I want to hit that and that is hit. Straight from your mind to the physical world. Talk about your PowerPoint presentations.

You can spend fifty thousand years practicing meditation or you can buy a gun.

On the shooting range you create a neat, tiny hole in a piece of paper—the crisp entry but not the sloppy exit wound—and it’s deeply satisfying. Anyway, Chon likes firearms, they are the

tools

of his trade.

(The distinction, anthropologically speaking, between a “tool” and a “weapon” is that the former is used on inanimate objects and the latter on animate objects, if you can get with the concept of animate “objects.”)

Not so much Ben, who has been taught to loathe guns

And gun owners.

Who were, in his liberal home, the object of derision. Atavistic redneck goobers and right-wing crazies. His parents would shake their heads and chuckle sadly at the old bumper sticker You’ll take my gun when you pry it out of my cold dead hands. How sad, how sad, how backward. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. (Guns do kill people, Chon says—that’s what they’re fucking for.) Yes, people with guns, Ben’s father would opine.

Anyway, Ben is nonviolent by nature.

132

“Impossible,” Chon argued with him one time. “We’re violent by nature, nonviolent by training.”

“Other way around,” Ben countered. “We’re socially conditioned to be violent.”

“Look at chimps.”

“What about them?”

“We share ninety-seven percent of our DNA with chimps,” Chon said, “and they’re violent little fuckers who kill each other. You can’t tell me they’re socially conditioned to do that.”

“Are you saying we’re chimps?”

“Are you saying we’re not?”

Of course we’re chimps.

We’re chimpanzees with guns.

Chon recalls some old saw about if you leave enough chimps in a room with enough typewriters eventually they’ll bang out Romeo and Juliet and wonders if the same theory holds true for guns. If you left enough chimps in a room with enough MAC-10s, would they eventually all shoot each other?

All you’d really need is that one forward-looking chimp. That one sociopathic Cheetah with enough curiosity, brains, and inner rage to point the gun and pull the trigger and then it’s on, man. Monkey see, monkey do—lead and pieces of Bonzo would be bouncing off those walls until the last chimp left standing (as it were) was mortally wounded.

Chon wonders if God (assuming a fact not in evidence) ever wondered, Hmmmm, if you leave enough humans on a planet with the atom, would they … Of course we fucking would, Chon knows, of course we fucking will, we fly airplanes into buildings intentionally, in the name of God. (Well, not in the name of “God,” exactly, but …)

Anyway anyway, be that as it may.

133

Chon takes Ben to the firing range.

Which is filled today as usual with police types, military types, and women, a few of whom are police or military types.

OC women love shooting those guns, man. Maybe Freud was right, whatever, but they’re in there with their earrings (off for the headsets) and jewelry and makeup and perfume blasting away at potential burglars, home invaders, rapists, and actual (okay, not actual) husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, lovers, fathers, stepfathers, male bosses, male employees who give them shit …

It’s a truth-worn joke that women at firing ranges aim not for the head but the groin, that they’re shooting not for the bull’s eye but for the snake’s eye until the instructors just give up and teach them to aim at the knees because that pistol is going to throw high so they’ll catch boyfriend/hubby/daddy/ex-boyfriend/ex-hubby square in the junk.

Take O, for instance.

Chon took her to the range one day for giggles and shits.

The girl could shoot.

A natural.

(We mentioned that O likes power tools, right?)

She squeezed off six shots—two at a time, like Chon told her—and smacked each of them into fatal spots on the target. Lowered the pistol and said, “I think I came a little.”

Now Chon hands Ben a pistol.

“Just point and shoot,” Chon tells him. “Don’t overthink it.”

Because Ben overanalyzes everything. Chon is surprised the boy can piss without succumbing to mental paralysis. (Would it be better to take my dick out with my right hand or my left hand? Would the choice of left hand have a subconscious connection to concepts of “sinister,” as opposed to my right hand feeling “dexterous,” and why is urine running down my leg?)

And truly, Ben is looking at the target silhouette and wondering if there are African-American shooting ranges where the target is a white figure on a field of black, a menacing KKKer coming out of the Mississippi night. Probably not. Not in the OC (which zealously guards its Second Amendment rights), anyway, where they should just put a sombrero on the targets and get it over with.

Take that, Pancho. And that, and that.

Ben hates this, how totally out of place he feels in this very weird, neofascist sandbox, looking at the black, albeit deracialized, silhouette figure staring menacingly at him as Chon is saying something about—

“Point and shoot twice.”

“Twice.”

Chon nods. “Your hand-eye coordination automatically corrects for the second shot.”

“What should I aim at?” he asks Chon.

“Just hit the damn thing,” Chon answers. At the range they’re probably thinking about, it won’t matter, and anyway, hydrostatic shock is going to do the job. The bullet hits, creating a wall of blood that hits the heart like a tsunami wave—side out.

Ben points and shoots.

Twice.

Bam bam.

Misses the whole silhouette.