Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (31 page)

That evening I went out to meet the other guests. There was one couple here: John and Doris White. John was a big and bluff American in his mid fifties, Doris fifteen years his junior. She was from Córdoba in Argentina, and he was from Minnesota – he had an identical twin who had also married an Argentinian. This he told me within a minute of meeting me, because like many Americans he was generous with his facts. I liked him. They had already paid for their hunt – four springboks, two blessboks and three ostriches – and both their faces were flushed with excitement at being here.

John had been raised with guns, like many American hunters I had met. He had been taught to shoot a .22 rifle by his grandfather, but years in the American Air Force flying Lockheed C-130s out of Panama, Spain and Greenland meant he had only recently returned to this passion. Now, with Doris, he was set upon taking down an ostrich – a hell of a bird to get up close to. The two of them, in matching camouflage T-shirts and trousers, were in hunting heaven.

The other guest that night was Jéane Grieve. He was a local taxidermist – in the trade for ten years after quitting his job as an aircraft engineer. American hunters like John made up almost all of Jéane’s clients, and that explained why he was here – to drum up some more trade. Americans like to commemorate their hunts. Between 1999 and 2008, two-thirds of the 5,663 lions killed in Africa ended up being shipped out to the US.
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And when it came to their trophies, the Americans wanted them big.

‘They like full body mounts,’ Jéane said. ‘The rest of the world, except possibly the Australians, prefer bleached skulls.’ I had never met a taxidermist before and knew nothing of his art. So I asked which was the hardest animal to work on. He was quick to answer.

‘The porcupine. A full mount would be one of the hardest; the skin’s paper-thin, particularly around its backside. It’s a real pain.’ Sometimes the issue is not the detail, but the time it takes to prepare an animal, he said. Elephants take two years to mount – his company has to outsource the task to others, they are so big. His own outfit has a warehouse with thousands of carcasses in it
that are being treated. One client had 146 mounts ordered in one go. Many others want to have the big five mounted – the lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros.
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I looked a little shocked that anyone would want all five in their home, but he had a straightforward attitude to the animals that were hunted. ‘I don’t see a difference between hunting a kudu or a leopard, as long as it is properly managed.’

Hot plates of meat and potatoes were brought through, and we sat down at a long table to a dinner of hearty red Cape wine and freshly hunted springbok – imbued with a taste so far from farmed meat you cannot call them the same thing. The conversation turned, naturally, to hunting.

Each flowing idea was to some degree bold and, to an urban creature like me, previously unconsidered. Why not have a rhino farm where you could shave the horn annually, like shearing a sheep? Condemning the hunting of rare animals is myopic. In any pride there would be ageing females and males no longer fit for breeding, so why not license those for the hunt? ‘They’ll die anyway.’

‘Human beings have caused the decline of predators,’ said Richard. ‘Now you have wild animals that need to be controlled. They need to be killed anyway. What is the difference between natural culling and a trophy hunter? You can’t put a wild springbok in an abattoir anyway. By the time you did, if you could, you would stress them out so much that you’d have to tranquillise them.’

He said that their reserve helps protect habitats for wildlife, on land that would otherwise be turned over to agriculture. ‘Sheep and cows create a farming monoculture of grazing that is deeply destructive.’ Safaris have revitalised the land. In the 1950s, there were 500,000 game animals on South Africa’s plains. Today there are 20 million, bred for hunting and conservation.
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The gun did that, he said.

What about guns, I asked. Didn’t all these guns increase the likelihood of people being shot?

‘People kill people,’ Richard replied. ‘Guns don’t kill people.’ And, from his perspective I could see why he might believe this – farm murders are few and far between out here. But I had not come here
to talk about gun murders – at least, not the killing of people. Besides, it was late, and I was due to get up before the dawn.

The plains were laid out below us, and above us thick clouds that never seemed to rain cast long shadows across the stretching emptiness. The wind was light, pushing the rough grass with jagged jerks. I clutched my rifle. Through my telescopic sight I picked out distant blesbok in the quivering crosshairs, but they were too far away. We had been out for two hours now and nothing yet.

Then, John Sihelegu, my guide, touched my shoulder and pointed to the right. There, above a rocky gully, stood a springbok female. Perhaps seven years old, she had not seen us and was high up, framed against the cobalt blue. Only her top half was visible. Fine thatching grass covered her legs and belly.

I turned and raised my rifle. It was an awkward shot; the red rocks behind me dug into my kidneys. I felt the smooth wood of the Finnish rifle’s stock on my face and closed my left eye. The sights lined up, and the crosshairs pushed down to the spot where I had been shown to aim, the best place to take her down: the heart, just beneath her shoulder.

My finger caressed the trigger, and I breathed in.

The shot rang out, and she fell. Then there was a flurry of noise as the staccato report carried across the plains and a push of pounding hooves as the herd rushed down the gulley before us, leaping over the ochre rocks in their fear and confusion. Five, six, seven young springbok flew in front, muscles taut. They sped out down into the plain. I reloaded.

All had fled down, except the one I had shot. She lay above, unseen. Then I noticed that a small springbok, the last down to the gulley’s exit, had stopped, her tail quivering. She turned and looked for a second back up the ravine. She was turning for her mother and then she too was gone, bounding after the others. I had a terrible, lurching feeling in my stomach.

I stood up, gripped the rifle and, pushing away from the jutting stones, turned up the hill. The springbok lay there, twitching. She was not dead. I hurried to her and she panicked through the pain and the sweat. She tried to run but she could not; her shoulder was no longer there, and she could not stand.

The guide said, ‘Take her. Quick. Put the sights to three and aim just there.’

I twisted the scope back from 6: 5 . . . 4 . . . 3. Then raised the rifle. I was five feet away and picked out the spot and again pulled the trigger. The springbok convulsed, and a small red dot appeared. Then she lay still, and that was it.

I felt nothing but sadness.

The guide told me to pick up the dead animal. ‘Time for a photo,’ he said. A large string of bloody snot was oozing from the beast’s nose. Her muscles quivered, and her eyes quickly glazed. I picked up the warm body and pulled her onto a termite mound. And in the flipping, saw what the bullet had done. It had left a small entry point, but the back of her shoulder had been blown clean open. A hole, a deep cavity was there, just below her spine, and all the bones and muscles were exposed in an open, bloody mass.

I shifted the antelope’s hind legs and placed it on the rust red earth. Then the guide told me to hold its neck. He wanted me to position it so that the best picture was possible.

‘That’s right. Just there. Take off your hat,’ he said. The muscles in the animal’s neck contracted. The picture was a good one. The scudding clouds behind me were full. The colours were vibrant, and the animal looked dignified. But my face in the photo was not one I had seen before: my eyes looked like the eyes of a killer.

I stood up, and we got to work on the felled animal. A slickened knife opened up its gut, and its entrails spread in a slurry over the stony ground. Then it was lifted and hoisted down off the peak, its head lolling to the side, and with each step down I thought of the sharp crack of the rifle and the calf that looked back for its mother, and I wondered what this journey was doing to me.

11. THE SEX PISTOLS

Interview with ‘God’, a porn starlet called Stoya, in Las Vegas, USA – sex and guns – things seen in a different way – a Brazilian gangster, armed with his gun and his ego – men as victims not violators – the Pakistan conundrum – the persecuted journalist and the male logic of being armed and dangerous – talking self-defence with a mother of six in Washington DC, USA – a lawyer’s interpretatioin of statistics – asking why liberals don’t talk much about guns in New York City

Perhaps it is not that surprising that at the same time the Shot Show – the largest gun show on earth – is happening in Las Vegas, so too is the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the self-proclaimed ‘World’s Largest Adult Trade Event’.

I had been to both. The two audiences were not dissimilar: single white guys. They shuffled, were modestly overweight, had unexplained stains on their checked shirts and sported beards. They were also very passionate about the subject matter. And 30,000 visitors to the latter of the two shows had been drawn towards this desert city in Nevada by the whiff of sex, making a lonely pilgrimage to gawk and take photographs.

There were other similarities. Like the Shot Show, the adult expo had the latest in accessories, each taking a basic concept to its logical consumer extreme. There was a dildo that you could strap onto your feet; vibrators that connected to your phone; and masturbating toys called Fleshlights made from moulds of porn starlets’ genitals.

But it was not the allure of bullet vibrators that brought me to a sex convention. I was here for Stoya – a raven-haired adult entertainer and the queen of alternative porn. I wanted to speak to her because she had – for reasons unknown – appeared as a sniper in one of her latest films.

I had first heard of Stoya on an arts website. She had starred in a series of films called ‘Hysterical Literature’. Its conceit was simple: a camera had filmed some of New York’s most liberal women reading from works of fiction while, off screen, they were pleasured with a high-speed vibrator. The camera whirled as each woman was brought to a climax. Stoya had orgasmed while reading aloud about death, from
Necrophilia Variations
– a monograph on the erotic attraction to corpses. It was an intriguing choice of fiction, and so I looked up her name and found that Stoya, as well as being a muse on New York’s art scene, also had sex on camera for a living.

She had joined the US porn scene at a unique moment. She was not a typical Barbie starlet: she wore Vivienne Westwood and had short hair. In her own words, she was gamine with small breasts. But clearly she had something about her, and awards for her sex scenes soon followed. In 2008 she won ‘Best US Newcomer’; in 2009 she won a gong for the ‘Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene’. But it was her role in
Code of Honor
, for which, in 2014, she won the ‘Best Scene in a Feature Film’, that intrigued me, because Stoya had been cast as a sniper, a character called ‘God’.

So here I was, in Vegas, waiting to interview Stoya, because I wanted to know why playing a sniper was at all sexy. I had no idea. And in a sense I thought that ‘God’ could tell me.

She had asked to meet me outside the Expo next to a restaurant called the Pink Taco in the Hard Rock Casino. I arrived early, sat down in the soul-sucking light that permeates all of Vegas’s casino floors and watched a series of enhanced blondes totter past on impossibly high heels.

Before our meeting I’d done some research and seen that Stoya had starred in another series called ‘Stoya Does Everything’. On first reading the title, I had imagined illicit pleasures, but it turned out the films were for die-hard Stoya fans who wanted to see her doing
stuff that did not actually involve her getting naked – things like pinball, ghost hunting, cosplay. In one she had visited a gun range.

The clip began with her line: ‘Guns make me very nervous.’ Then – a heavy-metal soundtrack kicking in – she was shown putting on a bulletproof vest and holding up a T-shirt that said ‘Zombie Repellent’. She then headed down to the shooting range, and a man in military fatigues showed her a pistol. ‘Big,’ she mouthed, her fingers outstretched.

She opted to shoot the smallest gun there – the Mosquito.
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She seemed anxious; it was hard to tell if she was acting or not. But with her second shot, a projected shell casing spun out, knocked off the side of the gun range partition and hit her: ‘Son of a bitch!’ She left the range upset. ‘There’s a shell,’ she said, pointing at her breasts, ‘in my shirt.’ Later, dragging on a cigarette, she turned to the camera: ‘Now I am all freaked out and I don’t want to touch guns again.’

Stoya arrived at the coffee shop in the flesh. She was louchely smoking Parliament cigarettes and wore a demure smile, a safety pin in her ear and a black basque on her slim frame. It was all very porn chic. But she spoke softly and with consideration, and it was clear she knew how to put someone at ease. She showed me her Vivienne Westwood get-up (‘I live in New York and keep my shoes in LA’), talked a little bit about her cats and told me how she had a secret horror of Las Vegas (‘five miles of death’). It felt entirely normal to be in a badly lit coffee shop interviewing her next to a porn convention.