And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (7 page)

“Tommy,” I called and he looked up, veering toward me. I could hear him muttering, absolutely spitting mad and noticed that his T-shirt was wet. It took me a second to realize that Will wasn't with him and judging by Tommy's gait, I wondered if he had murdered him and fed him to the dogs. It turned out I wasn't far off. “Where's Will?” I asked as my twelve-year-old cousin drew closer.

He looked me straight in the eye and spat, “I can't get any Goddamn respect around here.”

“Tommy, where's Will?”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Where's Will?” I asked, feeling a sense of genuine concern by this point.

“He sprayed me with the hose, so I locked his ass in the kennel,” he said and walked past me into the house. Even now, just remembering the moment, makes me chuckle. Partly it's because I love the idea of the much smaller younger brother succumbing to his own fury and managing to throw the older brother into a dog kennel and partly it's because I know this is going to be Jack and Dylan someday. The age difference is about the same, and so are the personalities.

I doubled over laughing and went inside to tell Rebecca and Linette what had happened. Rebecca had the same reaction as I did, a combination of mortification, admiration, and hysterical laughter. This was, sadly, not Linette's first rodeo when it came to refereeing the boys, and it wouldn't be her last.

“Thomas, you march back over there and let your brother out of that kennel,” she snapped. And Tommy, a good son at heart, did as he was told, but the moment he left the house, she laughed so hard she cried. We all did that night. We all laughed about it. Even Will. Then we played a few games of canasta.

Ever since that particular moment of that particular trip, I've looked at Tommy as my coconspirator. He's been my point of contact with the Iowa relatives and the person I turn to when I need a good laugh.

He gave me some advice about clothes and equipment, reminded me about the things I would need to do in order to hunt legally, and even recommended a book about the ringneck, one I had not seen on Amazon or in Barnes and Noble. He even agreed to go with me and offered to let me use one of his shotguns if I needed.

T
he next day the drive back to Cincinnati was dull and gray. A freak spring snowstorm had blanketed much of Iowa in white, and the sky—cloudless and pristine on the drive over—was hung low with clouds. I couldn't stop thinking about my dad, my uncles, the great men of the Midwest. And the more I thought, the more I felt this weight of unmet expectation on my shoulders.

I looked around as I drove, at the farms, the fields, the wide-open spaces and was, somehow, cut raw by the nobility of it. I imagined the farmer working the land, tirelessly putting forth effort to make things grow. I was enamored by this place, these people. The Midwest, which for so long was nothing and nowhere to me, had me intimidated. And I began to wonder if I can ever rise to meet its gaze.

The thoughts came like raindrops—individual and constant. I needed to pull off, to take a break. I stopped at a truck stop to stretch my legs. I went inside and walked around the food court. I was thinking simultaneously about my uncle Don—whose funeral was a reminder of the power a man derives from being honorable, decent, and interested in other people's lives, as he must have been to the five hundred or so people who came to the visitation. I'm thinking about my own funeral and what people will say—

“He was pretty funny.”

“He was punctual.”

“He was very tall.”

“He really liked to read.”

“He was a pretty good guy, but his dad was better.”

Jesus, what's wrong with me?
I wondered.

And then I heard something that brought everything back into perspective, that immediately put an end to my self-flagellation. Three people were sitting at a table in the food court, wrapped in heated conversation. Two men, about my age, were arguing with a woman who was maybe a little older. The men looked like truck stop sophisticates—cheap, pseudodesigner jeans adorned by custom leather cell-phone/chaw cases. One had a hands-free microphone in his ear. It wasn't the kind you see on urbanites, but, rather, the kind you see on drive-through attendants. The content of their discussion reminded me that not all midwesterners are great:

Man 1:
“No, no, you're wrong. He's not your first cousin.”

Woman:
“Yes, he is.”

Man 2:
“No, he's not.”

Woman:
“How do you figure?”

Man 1:
“Because he's not the oldest.”

Man 2:
“His older brother is your first cousin because he's oldest.”

Man 1:
“David is your second cousin because he's the second oldest.”

Woman:
“Wait, so what's Karen?”

Man 2:
“She's your fourth cousin.”

Woman:
“Because she's the fourth oldest?”

Man 1:
“Yeah. Don't you get it? You can't be this stupid.”

Woman:
“No, I get it now.”

Man 2:
“Good.”

Woman:
“Nobody ever explained it to me before.”

Man 1:
“Glad to be of assistance.”

A few minutes later, another overheard conversation reminded me yet again that I'm not as bad off as I sometimes think myself to be. I was standing in line to prepay for some gas. Toward the front of the line was a woman in her early twenties. She had bleach-blond hair arranged in a trailer park version of dreadlocks, a pierced eyebrow, and a bolt through her nose. She was holding a case of Budweiser, waiting her turn, and I couldn't help but notice how she was dressed. Tight jeans and white loafers like the ones Cousin Eddy wore in
Christmas Vacation.
She was wearing a tight, low-cut T-shirt, the kind popular among loose coeds, only this one revealed all the wrong things. Rather than flattering her figure, it revealed her midsection—like ice cream melting over the edges of a cone. She turned to the man behind her—maybe forty—in a flannel shirt and thick spectacles.

“Johnny, you want to come over and have a couple beers with me?” she asked in a tone three steps beyond coquettish.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Johnny. He motioned to a little girl standing next to him. She was around twelve, round in every way and, oddly, dirty. “I've got to help her buy some cigarettes first.”

The woman didn't blink at this, just flirted a little more, then turned to pay for her beer. At this point, Johnny turned to the girl standing next to him and said, “So how come your momma doesn't buy your grandma's cigarettes?”

“She didn't want to leave the house,” said the girl. “It's my fault, I guess.”

“How's that?” asked Johnny.

“I shouldn't have showed her that I have five dollars. Soon as I showed her my money, she sent me over here to get Grandma's smokes.”

Johnny helped the little girl, waved lasciviously at the bleach-blond ice cream cone, and then offered them both a ride home. They jumped into the back of his truck and turned into a trailer park across the street.

I
got a call a couple of days later from my dad. I was at work, between meetings, when my cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Scoop,” he said. “I've got a little reporting project for you.” My dad has called me “Scoop” since I took my first job at my hometown weekly newspaper, just days after I told him I had changed my major from marketing to journalism. Well, not so much told as blurted in fear and frustration. It was the summer after my freshman year in college. That spring semester, I had toiled, slogging my way through calculus, which was a prerequisite class for all business majors. I had known early on that I wasn't going to be an engineer like him. I simply didn't have it in me. I was too dreamy, too in love with Kerouac and Yeats. But, like many dutiful sons of German fathers, I wanted to do something that would please him, so I went off to school to study marketing. Which lasted until midway through second semester when I found myself unable to understand a single thing my professor was saying during my eight
A.M.
, five-days-a-week calculus class. Then there was economics, equally as mystifying to my poor brain. The only class I was doing well in was freshman English. Really well. I loved going to that class, loved reading the books by feminist authors I would never really understand, then writing lengthy term papers about them. I was under the spell of my professor, a doctoral student named Dair. To this day, I don't know if that was her real name or not, but she encouraged my writing, encouraged me to pursue it. There's something about being away from home for the first time. You fall prey to the strangest things.

I met with Dair to review my midterm paper. I had gotten an “A,” but that was only because she was required to give grades. If it were up to her, I'm sure my paper would have earned a rainbow sticker and my efforts would have been rewarded with a drum circle and dance around a tribal fire. But, either way, she asked me about what I was going to do with my life. I told her that I would probably end up working in a cubicle, figuring out a way to improve sales of industrial solvent, and she convinced me that doing so would be a waste of my talent, that I belonged in the English program. Visions of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, of long nights spent reading by a crackling fire danced in my head, and I went straight to the registrar's office to change my declared major from marketing, “MKT,” to creative writing, “ENG.”

Dad didn't ask me about the “D” next to economics or “D-” next to calculus—the final for which I wrote an essay laying out an argument why it would be bad for the professor's chance at tenure and, thus, citizenship to fail me—on my report card that summer. He asked me why it said “ENG” next to the word
Major.
I knew I couldn't convince him that I was now an engineering student, but I realized in that moment that changing my major to creative writing was a silly and futile thing to do.

“I changed my major to um, um, journalism,” I told him. Not so much a declaration as an excuse, like what you tell your mom after you get home late from making out with your girlfriend—“we, um, fell asleep?”

He stared at me, and my mouth began moving on its own. It didn't matter that I wasn't sure if my university had a journalism major. It only mattered that in that moment I believed it did. I told him about how I had a plan to write for free for the local paper to get experience, about grad school, about wanting to cover business rather than be a part of it. He looked at me a bit longer, before relenting under the pressure of my verbal onslaught. It was good enough. I went that afternoon to the paper down the street and made good on my bullshit. The first time he read my byline above a story about a local school board meeting, he started calling me “Scoop” and it's stuck ever since. (My university did, it turned out, offer a journalism major, in which I enrolled, but I kept the creative writing major and, just to ensure that I would never make much money, declared a minor in American history, with an emphasis on the South from Revolution to Reconstruction. I guess I decided early on that being rich would never be a priority.)

“What kind of journalistic project did you have in mind?” I asked him.

“Well, Uncle Mark called and he and I are going to the NRA show in Pittsburgh and we think it would be cool if you got a press pass and came with us.”

The show was two weeks later and I had no idea how I would go about getting a pass on relatively late notice, but I decided to take the challenge anyway. I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell them both that I wanted to come to Iowa in the fall to go pheasant hunting. I also figured that I could impress them a bit with my ability to nose my way into the show without paying for admittance. That would be pretty cool. Cooler than calculus anyway.

7

Into the Lion's Den

I
got up at 4:31, hit snooze once, and, after washing my face and getting dressed, I kissed my wife on the head and lit out into the predawn darkness bound for the National Rifle Association's Rivers to Freedom convention—sort of the ultimate gun show and a gathering of gun-loving, Second-Amendment-defending sportsmen, collectors, and enthusiasts. Okay, so maybe it's not quite as noble as that. Maybe it's a hundred thousand people getting together for the common purpose of touching thousands of firearms and complaining about Presidents Obama, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, and Roosevelt. Kennedy gets off the hook because, you know, he was assassinated and got us into Vietnam and, also, because he was a lifelong member of the NRA. Either way, there's bound to be a lot of guns for me to touch and mount as if I know what I'm doing.

The plan was for me to meet my dad and Uncle Mark at the media registration area at nine. Pittsburgh is usually about a four-hour drive from where we live in southwest Ohio, so I thought leaving by five would be fine. And, to be honest, for most of the way it was. I was on the outskirts of Columbus by the time the sun started to warm the eastern sky and east of the city, cruising unmolested by traffic on I-70, by the time the pinkish-gray morphed into a sunny orange. Overhead and stretching into the distant east were low-hanging clouds that reminded me of sand in the shallow waters of the beach—rippled and undulating as if washed by an ebbing tide. I put my Pontiac on cruise and listened to Brad Weiner read his
The Geography of Bliss,
which recounts his search for the happiest place on Earth. I imagined, based upon how excited Uncle Mark sounded on the phone the night before, that he was going to his happiest place. Pittsburgh, as the site of the convention, had little to do with his bliss. As a lifetime Benefactor member of the NRA, Uncle Mark is not only a supporter, but also an enthusiast. He speaks of previous conventions as if he had seen heaven and only wished to go back. I was excited too, but it had more to do with a road trip and spending a little time with him and Dad—basking in their enthusiasm—than anything to do with the conference itself.

I was just west of Zanesville—named after Ebenezer Zane, an ancestor of its most famous native son, the western writer Zane Grey—the town that would become infamous later in the year when amateur animal keeper Terry Thompson would release more than fifty wild animals from his backyard cages before killing himself. The police would spend hours hunting down the lions, tigers, bears, and wolves and find Thompson's body serving as a buffet for a lioness. But that was months later. I was passing Zanesville when I realized I needed gas and, from the rumbling in my stomach, a bathroom. I found a gas station off to the side of the road. It was one of those megastations that cater to truckers, with lockers, pay phones, and DVDs of movies that were bad when they were released in the '70s. I like these places. The coffee is usually strong, the snacks are terrible for you, and the CD stand is bound to feature at least two versions of Conway Twitty's greatest hits. I pumped my gas, then pulled forward to a spot near the door. I always do this and it usually makes my wife mad. “Why move the car?” she asks and I tell her that I have a phobia of making other people wait—particularly little old ladies—for me. She doesn't get it, but she also doesn't understand why, at the mall, I intentionally choose a spot far from the door. Same logic applies. Save the close spots for the gray hairs and asswipes, I always say. So I pulled into a spot away from the pumps and stepped out. Right into a pile of, what is that? Oh God, gross. It's about two and a half gallons of discarded chewing tobacco and associated juices. I slipped in it. It squished, oozed even. I thought I was going to vomit, but with my stomach still rumbling, I thought it best to wipe the nastiness off my boot and move on.

The bathroom wasn't much better. I walked in and was overrun by a stink that was not quite human, but also too bad for a beast. The stall next to mine was overflowing, putrid brown mostly water pooling in the drain below the divider. Noisy trucker gurgling was coming from elsewhere in the bathroom. I watched as the water encroached on my personal space and decided I needed to get the hell out of there. On the way out, the woman behind the counter—a toothless hillbilly who had probably done unspeakable things in pursuit of meth—said she hoped I enjoyed my stop and asked me how my day was going.

“It just got shitty,” I said, admiring my own pun.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” she said, friendly and guarded.

“You might want to have someone take a look at the stall in the men's room,” I said.

“Is it actin' up again?”

Acting up? What is it? A petulant child? No, it's not acting up; it's deluging shit. On to the floor. On to my boots. I wanted to complain, about the stall, about the chaw I stepped in, but thought better of it. “Yup, sure is,” I said, managing a smile.

I was determined not to let the truck stop incident deter my fun. I was a man on a mission, after all, and should not be deterred—not even for turd. I returned to my driver's seat and my book on happiness and continued blithely on my route. Less than an hour later, my GPS dinged to announce an upcoming turn. I merged onto a northbound interstate, then, almost immediately, was directed to take an exit onto a two-lane highway. This pleased me greatly. I love back roads, and Highway 23 through southeastern Ohio was no disappointment. Bendy, winding its way up and down hills with a fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, it was like bombing around the track with Jeremy Clarkson. I feel like a driver—up and down, left, right, on the brake, on the gas. A smile plants itself on my face. The sun is rising, the rain has stopped, and I'm cruising through a landscape redolent of Wales—lush green pastures undulating over hills and amid stands of oak. I saw a white horse galloping along the ridge of a hill and knew, instinctively, what it was feeling. I pass a sign for
DEERASSIC PARK WHITETAIL EDUCATION CENTER
and begin considering how I'm going to tell my wife that we're moving to the middle of nowhere in the sparse corner of Ohio.

Weiner was reading a passage about his time in an Indian ashram when I saw it, up on the left. It was a white, single-wide trailer with two outbuildings, one a garage, the other a shed. And in the front yard was a flagpole with a large American flag flapping in the light breeze. Just below it was a Confederate battle flag, equal in size and flapping right along with the one on top. The message was clear: We don't take kindly to black people, Catholics, Jews, or anyone else. My euphoria was immediately and irrevocably dashed. I was shaken from my automotive bliss, which was completely spoiled a few miles up the road when I rejoined the interstate, crossed through the northern spit of West Virginia, and found myself sitting completely still on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

I
'd been sitting still for more than an hour. Two or three hundred yards behind me is a sign along I-376 announcing that the city's convention center is just five miles ahead, on the other side of a tunnel and bridge. I passed that sign at 8:47
A.M.
It was now 9:52 and the overhead sign warned me that the aforementioned tunnel is still three miles ahead. Every direction I looked—ahead, to the left and right, behind me in my rearview mirror—are cars, trucks, and semis. All just sitting here on a gloomy Friday morning. The light drizzle on my windshield is a reminder of just how badly I have to pee and the thought of reaching a restroom burns in my soul, wrapped in a thick larder of hatred for this place.

Finally, after more than seven hours in the car, I found a parking spot in a garage on top of an organic grocery store and join the march of camo-clad men making their way toward the convention center. Dad and Uncle Mark have beaten me there, but only by forty-five minutes or so, and our predetermined meeting time of 9:00 becomes 11:45. I reset the pedometer on my iPod as I step from the garage and 1,913 strides later arrive at the registration booth to ask where I can pick up my press credentials and am greeted with a dumbstruck look.

I should explain that getting media credentials was no small feat. The NRA convention is free for any member and I wanted to avoid joining, so I sent an e-mail to the media contact person on both the NRA site and the site set up for the convention. A week passed. Then two. I sent another e-mail. Then another. Then, three days before I was going to Pittsburgh, I decided I couldn't wait any longer. Uncle Mark, in particular, really wanted me to be there and I had already agreed to go, so I needed to be able to get in the door. So I coughed up $35 for a one-year membership, the benefits of which include, I was immediately informed by an automatically generated e-mail, 24/7 protection of my Second Amendment rights, discounted life insurance, and a one-year subscription to a magazine of my choice—I went for
The American Hunter
because
American Rifleman
and
America's 1st Freedom
both sort of scared me—among other things.

Okay, not a bad deal. Not a great one, but not bad. At least the magazine came with it and I would be able to get into the show, which was the most important need I had at the moment. Such is my luck that I finally heard back from the NRA the next day, informing me that my press credentials had been approved. I half considered asking for my membership dues back, but thought better of it. I have always been a little afraid of an organization devoted to arming citizens, especially one with such high esteem for Charlton Heston. It's not that I disliked the man, but he did have a tendency to overact, that's all I'm saying. Plus, as a newspaper reporter, I was discouraged to join any organization with a lobby. And what a lobby the NRA has. According to a website I found that details the lobbying budgets and spending of organizations with a presence on K Street, the NRA was, as of 2001, one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country, as rated by
Forbes
magazine. At that time, it had a war chest of $200 million and maintained “its own $35 million lobbying machine” for the sole purpose of fighting any move to enact gun control laws in this country.

That's a lot of dough.

I felt a little strange giving $35 to an organization that thinks the answer to street crime involving guns is not to disarm the criminals, but to arm the victims. It's not that I have a problem with gun ownership. Lord knows, I understand the joys of shooting tin cans for hours, but the paranoia. I was once driving across Illinois and passed a series of small, roadside signs about the size of two Scrabble boxes stacked end to end. The message was this:

“Thugs won't wait”

“For cops to arrive”

“So you better pack heat”

“ 'Cause guns save lives.”

Apart from the childlike meter and simplistic rhyme structure, the signs reflect a certain degree of apocalyptic mistrust for which the implied remedy is to be armed at all times, day and night. The signs, and there were several of these series across Illinois, were paid for by the Champaign Country Rifle Association, a satellite group that, on its homepage (www.gunssavelife.com), encourages joining the NRA.

What was I getting myself into? I really did wonder. But, no matter, the money was spent, and I could always fall back upon my membership if my credentials fell through for one reason or another.

The problem is, of course, the people at the ticket booth have no idea where I should go to pick up my credentials. They point me to a woman working the door, a different one from the first one I spoke with, and she, too, denies my entry, telling me I can't get in without a green-and-white sticker. Those stickers are only given to members.

“But I have a press pass waiting for me inside,” I say.

“But I won't let you inside without a sticker,” she replies.

I point out that her logic makes no sense. I ask how I can get a pass if I am required to pay. I point out that she is a complete moron and should be smote by the gods of all things decent and holy. I tell her I want to speak to her manager, accuse her of extortion. I release all my passive-aggressive rage—the traffic, the racists, the chewing tobacco and shit on my boots. It's all her fault, damn it, and it's time that she pays.

Or at least that's what I do in my mind. I think, in reality, I grumbled something unintelligible and sulked back to the ticket booth. It had, after all, been a long day in the car already.

This time, the man at the ticket booth understood my dilemma. I told him about the press pass and the moron working the door and he nodded empathetically. There wasn't much he could do to get me past Brumhilda, but if I was a member, he could give me a sticker.

Wait a minute,
I thought.
I am a member! Paid in full for an entire year!
I told him this and congratulated my good thinking as he looked up my name and address.

“Um, I'm sorry,” he said. “You're not in the system.”

“But I am a member,” I said and pulled out my iPhone to show him the receipt still in my e-mail inbox from the transaction earlier in the week. “See? I've already paid.”

“Yeah, I see,” he said hesitatingly. “It's just that you're not in the system, and you have to be in the system in order to get the free pass. You didn't join long enough ago to have made it in the system.”

I must have appeared both bewildered and crestfallen at this news, because the man, who seemed to genuinely care, quickly made me an offer.

“I'll tell you what,” he said. “We're offering one-year memberships for $25 today. I can sign you up and then add that membership on to the one you've already paid for, so you'll get two years for the sixty bucks instead of $70. And you'll get another magazine subscription.”

For some reason, I thought he was making me a deal. I filled out the card he gave me, handed him my MasterCard and marked the box indicating that I would like a one-year subscription to
American Rifleman.
I walked away feeling grateful for the man and made it past my nemesis at the door—who, I might add, gave me a smug, satisfied grin when she saw my green-and-white sticker—and was halfway up the escalator before I realized: I am an idiot. In the last three days I have paid $60 for a two-year membership into a group I had no interest in joining, just to get into a show I had free media credentials to attend.