The Vocabulary of Guns

66.

Who doesn’t love a Stuckey’s? The damn places have everything. Hot dogs, pecan logs, ceramic plates shaped like each state. Row upon row of glass and porcelain knick-knacks, untouched, undisturbed, unsold for the lifetime of the store. Not that Stuckey's has much competition out here in the middle of the rice fields outside of Houston. The only structure for miles around is another Stuckey's directly across the road. Get us coming and going. They get me coming as I wheel into the parking lot and go inside for coffee. I hold off on gas, figuring my half tank will get me to about this same place heading home. I wander the aisles for a moment like a dazed spaceman returning to a futuristic earth. The hard fluorescents, the elevator music, the calm and well-ordered world keeping perfect time at 3:30 in the morning. A pimple faced girl behind the counter offers to sell me a lottery ticket from her high school. The grand prize is a brand new shotgun. I decline.

“I wish I could enter,” she says as she rings up my coffee and map of Houston. “The first thing I’d do is shoot my daddy.” With that she gives me my change.

Fortified with hot Joe, I join the race to Houston, Texas. There’s no apparition in the front seat to talk me through the times and that’s fine, I don’t need distractions, I need rock and roll music and the pedal halfway to the metal and here it is, salvation on the radio dial, AC/DC to get me through the slalom of big rigs and fools like me whipping through the night. She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman that I ever seen. Love these guys. If I could meet the band I’d tell them that they had gotten me through some dark days. How ‘Back in Black’ saved my soul, kept me in high school, kept me alive. How I rocked the house with my tape purchased through Columbia Records. I had ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ on vinyl and I burned out the needle with that brain shaking riff. I played ‘Highway to Hell’ deep into the night, sang it to myself in my private moments. Night prowler, I sleep in the day. Night prowler, get out of my way. Night prowler, watch out tonight. I’m the night prowler when you turn out the light. A song about rape. A rapist’s fantasy or a fantasy about a woman’s fantasy, it was hard to tell. Their music was full of that noise. Let me put my love into you babe, let me put my love on the line. Let me put my love into you babe, let me cut your cake with my knife. What a lame rhyme. And what was I singing about anyway? Is this the kind of music I’m supposed to hear? No one’s gonna warn you and no one’s gonna yell attack and you don’t feel the chill ‘til it’s hanging down your back. Is this the soundtrack of badness, sensory elements telling me it’s okay, it’s what girls want, a little rough stuff, tie them up, break into their bedrooms, do anything for love. The romantic fool who doesn’t exactly think with his dick so much as his dick thinks for him. Is that what I am, am becoming? Confused in the nonce, I am finding myself perplexed in the extreme. I see my sweet JW in my mind followed instantly by a blur of other images, all the dirty deeds that have been done to her dirt cheap. I see her and the night prowlers, her and her stepfather and he’s saying let me put my love into you. It’s terrible and terrifying, this inability to control your own thinking, your own thoughts. Too much coffee, I suppose, and not enough sleep and the whir and hum of 300 miles of road but I swear to Christ I truly feel sometimes that I am gonna lose my mind. She told me to come but I was already there. Then the walls started shaking, the earth was quaking, my mind was aching and she was saying that you shook me all night long.

I forgot my wallet at Stuckey’s. The thought hits me like sniper shot to the chest. Hot then cold. Shit a mile! And you know to turn around is futile if you left it on the counter but maybe not so turn around anyway which is not so easy, the exits are miles apart and then race back the way you’ve come, only twenty minutes or so away but it always feels like time moves faster and the distance is farther and you at last pass the east bound Stuckey’s, identical to its sister in every way, the same pecan rolls, the same angry teenager making change and then beyond to another exit and now back to the first Stuckey’s and pull into your same parking spot and hustle on in expecting to find Darlene or Roxanne or Tiffany or Sharon but there’s a dude behind the counter, he says the girl’s shift is over, she’s gone home or wherever and nope, nobody turned in a wallet. It would be stupid to even think much less suggest that you left it on the counter and the daddy-hating cashier walked off with it, your money, driver’s license, library card. Stupid to think but not impossible. So back in the car and the coffee has cooled and you still have some gas but no more cash so be careful, whatever that means, drive the speed limit I suppose, 55 is fast enough my ass, I have a job to do, places to go, people to see and kill. Crank that FM station. You’re beyond the Mississippi now and the call letters all begin with K. K-Rock, save my soul, bubba. Save me from myself and what I’m going to do. Save me from madness and badness and dangerous to knowness. Save me, save me oh gods of rock and roll. Let me be righteous and not rapist. Let me be not changed, metamorphosed into the evil twin that walks the earth in our skins, undoing all our good deeds, committing in our names the most heinous of crimes. And the gods save me. They put on the song that I need at this exact place and time. Radio salvation. Do you hear it? Do you hear that opening jam? Do you recognize that distinctive guitar riff and that pulsing drum beat and the background singers saying whoo-whoo? And when the singer says it, says what we all want to hear, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, what I mean. He says, We got a thing that’s called radar love. We got a line in the sky, radar love.