Gunpowder Punch (Patreon)

I'm as shocked as you that I needed to make a nonfiction tag.

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The summer when I was nineteen years old was largely composed of new experiences for me.

I had just come home from college; away from home for the first time and having rapidly come to the conclusion that I hated it.  I did not, in my four tormentous years of high school, make many friends.  I had largely saved actual friendship for being a junior, and only begun to polish my strategies halfway through the next year.  But the few friends I did have were incredibly close to me, and missing them for nine solid months hurt.

Arriving back to find my bedroom in my parent’s house mostly unchanged, and those same friends waiting for both myself, and access to the freezer chest of variety ice cream in my family garage, was a welcome reprieve from the isolation that college had brought me.  My family had run an ice cream and espresso parlor called Hullabaloo for a few years, and while I missed its existence, it did leave me with a strategic resource of frozen treats that really helped to make for a memorable series of warm summer evenings.

Later on in this same summer, in the tail end of August, I would head north of my own volition.  Several friends and I would be going to a video game and general nerd convention, where I would for the first time encounter several different things.  Wil Wheaton, whom I would quote the keynote speech of for the next five years.  The existence of Shadowrun, which would define my gaming life for the next… I’ll let you know when it stops.  And, perhaps more importantly (in my nineteen year old mind anyway), sex.  Specifically, in a Seattle hotel room with the guy who would become my boyfriend for the next three years until mutual lack of communication caused our relationship to implode.  Before we got back together.  For another five, six, seven years, before we screwed it all up again.

But in the middle of all that, in early July, before I had started learning how to box but after I had started learning how to make giant spiders out of parts from the Dollar Tree, my dad took me to the shooting range.

I have, of that day, a hundred small memories, many of them that have stuck with me for my entire life.

I remember the feeling of holding a pistol for the first time, and being shocked at how heavy it was.  Not metaphorically, just on a practical level.  A pistol looks so small, and yet, it is a compact brick of steel, aluminum, and plastic, filled with both intricate components and also more small chunks of metal and explosives.  The weight adds up.  And holding it, I was struck with the strange question of how people in action movies kept these things level all the time.  It must get exhausting.

I remember the beard of the range supervisor, braided and beaded and grey as bone.  He told us that business had been doing alright lately, since the police had stopped using the range.  They made everyone nervous, he said, because they’d sometimes give random orders that were supposed to be only from the range safety officer, and it confused everyone.  A room full of confused old assholes with guns, he’d told me with a wink, was a bad idea.

I remember the drive back home, in the cabin of my dad’s pickup truck.  I don’t remember the color of the car anymore; it has long since been replaced by an oscillating lineage of either sporty towncars, or more pickups or suburbans when he was working a construction job.  But on that day, it was a pickup, and it was the local rock station, and it was my dad calling the lead singer of Puscifer a fag because of how efeminate his voice was.  I didn’t think much of this moment at the time; it annoyed me, but that was all.  But in the years since, that annoyance has grown into a gnawing bitter anger, a secret knowledge that I’ll never be comfortable telling my dad everything about me.

I remember how the sun looked.  Cradled in the trees, a liquid ball of the deepest orange.  There was a Japanese jazz album that an aunt of mine owned, and the slipcover of it was orange like that; I imagine sometimes that all of human art has been a long attempt to figure out how to capture the color of the sun.

And I remember, after we’d used up the ammo that my dad had brought, being given a couple bucks to run to the vending machines.  I don’t drink soda, so I’d picked the good old standby of Hawaiian Punch, a drink that has very little to do with punch, and even less to do with Hawaii.  Though these days, I know that the US considers “punch” to mean “fruit flavored drinks with no juice in them”, I still reject the idea that the government is allowed to casually decide that the meaning of a word gets to invert with the swipe of a bureaucratic pen.

The can of juice was cold, and my hands were sore from having nothing but the grip of a pistol between them and a series of miniature explosions for the last couple hours.  It hissed and snapped when I opened it, and this was the first time I remember really paying attention to the little wisp of vapor that came out of the can.

Flavor is an interesting thing.  If you had told me, even a day before this, that the most delicious thing in the world was fruitless fruit punch, seasoned with dust from a gravel parking lot, sweat from the afternoon’s hundred degree heat, and the lingering coat of gunpowder that seemed to cling to my hands, to the vending machine, to every stationary structure, tree, and car within half a mile of the range?  I would have laughed at you.  I probably wouldn’t even have laughed.  Just rolled my eyes, called you an idiot, and forgotten it.  For all I know, my dad *had* told me that gunpowder should have counted as a culinary ingredient.  I don’t remember everything.

But I remember that.  The sharp flavor of too much sugar, with the tang of metal and smoke added in.  Washing away the layer of grit on my tongue, replacing it with the artificial sensation that I can only describe as tasting like ‘red juice’.  But with just that little extra reminder of where I was, what I’d been doing, and that I was probably going to need to wash my hands when I got home.

I wanted to tell this story because I wanted to ask the question of ‘how hard is it to share a sensation?’  I am, nominally, a writer.  Conveying scenes and emotions and feelings to people is what I enjoy doing.  But sometimes, it can be hard to know if a particular feeling is dragged across the endless gulf between us as individuals by the words I choose to put down.

If I say, in a sentence, that the sun was shining, then five different people are going to imagine five different types of sunshine.  There’s so many different ways the sun can shine.  It can be the early morning sun, just starting to cut away the mists of the night and leaving moisture awkwardly in the air like it’s the guy who doesn’t quite realize the party ended ten minutes ago and hasn’t gotten his coat yet.  It can be the sun of high noon in the middle of a farm in the middle of nowhere, where the sun exists for seemingly the sole purpose of making life worse.  Or it could be the sun of a winter sunset, shining up, *into* the clouds and not from them, painting the entire world in dark purples and stormy black blues.  No two people are going to remember the same sun, because for each of us, we have that one memory of the time that the sun *mattered*, and it’s burned into us as surely as if we’d forgotten our sunscreen and spent all afternoon on the beach.

That’s an extra type of sun there for you.

So extra words are required.  I want you to think of a fish.  Okay, I can do that.  What do I say?  Do I say ‘a fish’?  No.  Too vague.  We’ve all got a perfect, memory affixed fish.  I need you to see *my* fish.  My fish is long.  No, not that long.  Maybe an arm’s length.  It’s got a white belly, and scales that fade to brownish green along the top.  But in the inbetween spaces, there’s hints of red and blue and shimmering purples.  It’s eyes are wild, because it is a wild animal, but also because it’s been hauled out of the river water in a net, and in half an hour, it’s going to be someone’s dinner.

Did you see that fish, at first?  Do you, even now, see the fish I want you to see?  Should I have told you about the fins?  The tail?  The river?  The woman who’s going to cook and eat it over an open fire, here under the stars?  What do I need to say to make you see *that fish*?

I used, in that little snippet of my life, a little over a thousand words.  And for what?  To tell you what fruit punch tastes like?  Well, yes.  Because that was the one feeling I wanted to share.

Whether that matters is up to you, I suppose.  As is always the problem with writing, no matter how much meaning I want to put into something, ultimately, there is a big leap between my keyboard and your eyes.  Maybe the story wasn’t about the taste of gunpowder residue at all.  Maybe it was about how isolation wears on us, or about how a small word or two that you forget can last someone else’s entire life, or about how there’s always a strange and secret world for any hobby you care to take up waiting just around the corner.  Maybe it’s about all of that.  Or none of it.

But I don’t think that I could have even started to tell you what that can of red liquid tasted like without the whole thing.