I choose an all-orange silhouette, number 14.
“Put all your equipment on before you enter the range,” he demands. (Side note: I really like this guy, and if I ever find myself Team Captain of Operation Apocalypse Now, he’s going to be my first draft– right after Michael Sam of course.)
I’m stationed in booth number 10. There are warnings everywhere. “WARNING, DO NOT AIM AT THE TARGET CARRIER. BULLET FRAGMENTS WILL COME BACK AND HIT YOU AND THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU WITH ENOUGH FORCE TO CAUSE INJURY OR BLINDNESS.” OKAY? COOL!
“WARNING, DO NOT STEP OUT OF YOUR LANE WITH YOUR GUN LIKE A DUMMY. YOU MAY KNOW IT’S NOT LOADED BUT YOUR NEIGHBOR WILL NOT. DON’T BE A DEAD DUMMY.”
A guy down in lane number 3 is waving his rifle around. Instead of shooting him, I head back into my stall.
I soon find that loading a magazine without a clip is supremely difficult. By the sixth bullet my hands are cramping, and though I’m trying to remember my teacher’s sage advice to push the loaded bullet down with my left hand and load the new bullet in with my right, I’m just shoving these things in any which way they’ll go, which seems smart.
By the time I get the seventh bullet pushed in there, I think what the hell, I don’t need ten bullets to put a hole in the orange man’s head. As it turns out, I need about same number as your mom needs to be to get a senior discount at the local movie theater. Meaning: 60 plus.
As my papered acquaintance flies down the shaky zip line to his demise (or rather his napping place, where my bullets miss him time and again, even though HE’S NOT EVEN MOVING), the Mexican girls in the booth next to me fire off the first round from their AK.
The sound gets me before the nerves do. It’s louder and bigger than the kaiju’s shriek—the iconic, earth-shattering Godzilla roar. It bounces and resounds. Cortisol leaks from my eyes.
There’s nothing like the volley of bullets and rogue shell casings flying into your peripheral that makes you understand your mortality. Not even the freeway can do that.
Every single bullet that escapes their gun hits straight to the center, right to the heart, and every echoing boom, the successive cacophonous bangs make my heart jump and my hands shake; a temporary arrhythmia has taken over an otherwise healthy heart.
It’s an unsettling, stomach in knots noise, that quickly reminds you, lest you’ve forgotten, that you’re in the very close proximity of death—one day of skipped meds and the crazy next to you could just fire off a round into your stomach.
It doesn’t happen, but it could.
Standing there, Glock in hand, looking the opposite of however James Bond does (dashing and not terrified?), I feel as if I’ve swallowed my ten-year-old self on the first day of 5th grade. Excited but nervous with anticipation to see the boy I loved the year before for the first time since getting my first (totally unnecessary) bra. (Would he notice that I’m a woman now?? No, no he wouldn’t.)
“You’ll get used it,” someone offers over my shoulder, my jolts and fits that visible, but I think there’s no glass of whiskey or ginger ale that will calm the tempest in my stomach.
How the f**k am I supposed to shoot a gun now?
But I bite the anxiety bullet, take my stance, hips apart and insert my seven-projectile-strong magazine into its hole. As I pull my hands up to fire one off, the first bullet hits clean into the target’s right shoulder before I even know what’s happened. If the orange man were real, he’d be dripping with red now and looking like the bell pepper selection at the supermarket.
The next six bullets hit a variety of places, none of which I am too proud of (I’LL NEVER BE TEAM CAPTAIN of OPERATION APOCALYPSE!!), many being the rubber tire buffers hanging overhead to catch stray bullets.
The short and long of it?
If my bullets were cats they’d be all over your neighborhood, getting in your trash and pissing on your lawn. Still. Though I don’t manage to get a bullet to my friend’s brow, or get one, not ONE, shot to his heart, I conclude that I have most certainly hit a main artery and could survive a minor mutiny. (Presuming I never have to load my own magazine.)
Oddly enough, or not oddly at all, standing in this weird, dark little alley of a gun club affords the opposite experience to standing in front of a newsstand at the airport or in front of magazines at the market, wondering which glossy might leave you feeling the least insecure or brain-blown: “How to Get Bathing Suit Ready” (I don’t know, put on a f**!ing bathing suit), “Selfie-Made,” “Is Swiss Chard the New Kale?” “The One Braid You’ll Want to Wear All Summer,” “Style Guide to Polka Dots,” “Can You Create a Cat Eye with a Spoon?” “Celebrities Doing Things,” “Celebrities Wearing Things.” Somebody shoot me. (NOT YOU, MAN IN LANE NUMBER 3.)
