There’s a certain kind of peace you can only find in a moment of controlled violence. I always felt it clay shooting, bird hunting. The quick, natural draw, the line of sight becoming an extension of your own goddamn will, the beautiful, quiet discipline of the trigger pull. I enjoyed hitting the target, sure. But it was more than that. It was a moment of pure, honest connection between intent and result. A clean transaction in a world full of dirty deals.
For years, I did it with borrowed guns, shitty guns, tools that felt foreign and clumsy in my hands. But then, I got a little older, a little wiser, and I had a few dollars in my pocket. I was still married then, living up in Oregon, trying to play the part of a respectable man. I was in a gun store one afternoon, and I saw her.
A Remington Golden Clay Semi-Automatic.
She wasn’t just a shotgun. She was a goddamn work of art. A walnut stock so rich and dark it looked like it had been soaked in a century of good whiskey. An engraving on the side, a goldfish plated in real gold, a perfect, beautiful, and completely unnecessary piece of poetry on a machine designed for death. I picked her up, brought her to my shoulder, and it was like shaking hands with a part of my own soul I didn’t know was missing. It was an extension of me. We connected. An eight-hundred-dollar price tag, and she was mine.
I took her hunting in Kansas with my organic father. He was a man who understood guns, and even he was impressed. He had his own collection, of course, a stable of old, reliable tools that he’d let his other sons, her sons, shoot with. But he had his own special one, the one he kept for himself. And he saw the look on my face when I pulled that Remington out of the case. He saw the way I held her. And when I started shooting, Christ. I couldn’t miss. It was a dance. Draw, point, shot, target down. A perfect, clean, and beautiful rhythm. For the first time in a long time, in front of him, I felt like I knew what the hell I was doing.
Then the divorce came, a long, ugly, and beautiful demolition project that took everything. The house, the money, the wife… and the guns. All of them. She took them all. And just like that, a part of me was gone.
I was at the bottom. Living off my savings, no job, no income, just the quiet, grinding noise of my own failure. My father and I, we were talking on the phone a lot back then, for hours at a time. A new thing for us. He knew I was in a bad way. And then he said it.
”Why don’t you come out for pheasant hunting? Don’t worry about the shotgun. I’ll take care of you.”
Those words. “I’ll take care of you.” A beautiful, simple, and completely intoxicating promise from a man who had spent a lifetime doing the exact opposite.
So I got on a plane. A long, ugly flight to Denver, which isn’t really in Denver but in some goddamn corner of nowhere forty-five minutes away. A long drive back to his house, a million-dollar fortress in the mountains, a monument to a life of quiet, respectable, and completely passionless acquisition. We stopped for drinks. We were going to head out to Kansas in the morning.
When we got to his house, he had that look on his face. A little smile, a secret. “Hey,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
I followed him down to the basement, where he had all the hunting gear laid out, ready to pack. He walked over to a brand new, hard-shell rifle case, the kind you buy for a gun you really give a shit about. He laid it on the table, and he looked at me, his eyes shining with a strange, unfamiliar light.
”I want you to take a look at this,” he said.
He undid the latches, and he opened the case, slow and deliberate, like a priest opening the ark of the covenant.
And there she was.
A Remington Golden Clay Semi-Automatic shotgun. Walnut stock. Gold-plated engraving. The same goddamn gun. My gun.
And in that moment, the whole rotten, beautiful, fucked-up world just… stopped. The cynical, beaten-down, fifty-six-year-old bastard I had become, he just dissolved. And in his place was a little boy. A little boy who had been waiting his whole goddamn life for this one, single, beautiful, and completely impossible moment.
He’d bought me my gun back.
He’d seen me, at my lowest point, a broke, divorced, and completely useless man, and he had reached out with this perfect, beautiful, and completely redemptive act of fatherly love. It wasn’t about the eight hundred bucks. It was about the gesture. It was about him seeing something that was important to me, something that had been taken from me, and making it right. It was a quiet, unspoken apology for a lifetime of indifference. It was the one, true, and honest “I love you” he had never been able to say.
I was getting emotional. I could feel the hot, ugly sting of tears in my eyes. My lower lip started to quiver, a pathetic, beautiful, and completely honest betrayal of the hard-ass I was supposed to be. I had to catch my breath. I was ready to say thank you, to finally, for the first time in my goddamn life, look my own father in the eye and thank him for something real.
And then he spoke.
”Now you can use my older one,” he said, his voice all bright and cheerful, “and I’ll use this one. It’s almost exactly like yours was. I can’t wait to take her out and…”
And the world came crashing back in.
The beautiful, perfect, and completely imaginary moment shattered into a million little pieces. The little boy was gone, and in his place was just the same old, stupid, and completely heartbroken bastard, standing in a rich man’s basement, looking at a gun that wasn’t his.
The fucker had bought my gun for himself.
The emotional whiplash, the violent, brutal, and completely silent snap of your own heart breaking… there are no words for that. I just stood there, in the quiet, awkward aftermath, feeling like the biggest, dumbest, and most pathetic fool in the entire goddamn world. I had assumed. I had projected my own desperate, childish need for a father onto a man who was, and always had been, completely incapable of being one.
It didn’t bother me, not after a little while. I got over it. I went on the trip. I shot the old, shitty gun. I played the part.
But even now, I think about that moment. Because that’s what I wanted to happen. That’s what a real father would have done. It’s what I would do for my own kids, in a goddamn heartbeat. It was never about the gun. It was about the love that was supposed to come with it.
And that’s the whole goddamn story, isn’t it? That’s the daddy issue. That’s the engine that has been driving me my whole life. The quiet, desperate, and completely all-consuming need for the recognition of a man who was too much of a coward to give it. A man who was so completely and utterly owned by his wife that he couldn’t even perform a single, simple, and beautiful act of love for his own son without her permission.
And so I learned, in that one, beautiful, ugly, and completely honest moment of pure, uncut heartbreak, the only lesson that ever really mattered.
I learned how to get even.
It’s not about forgiveness. It’s not about healing. It’s about winning. You make more money than they do. You’re better than they are. They want to put their kid up against mine? Fuck you. Put your kid up against me. I already won. You want to put yourself up against me? Fuck you. I’m not even in the same goddamn league.
And don’t you dare come at me with your quiet, respectable, and completely bullshit definitions of success. “Oh, but you’re not married. You don’t have a dog. You don’t have a mortgage.”
Fuck you. You’re just another unhappy pussy, living in a quiet, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing cage of your own making, and you hate me because I’m free. Fuck you all.
And that, right there, that’s the whole goddamn lesson for the day.
Why do I do the things I do? Why am I the way I am?
Because I come from fucking white trash. And the world is full of entitled, soft, and completely passionless fucks who think they’re better than me.
And I get up every goddamn morning with the simple, beautiful, and completely honest desire to prove them wrong.
All because of a shotgun, and a coward, and a little boy who finally, at the age of fifty-six, learned that the only love you can ever really count on is the quiet, ugly, and beautiful love you have for your own goddamn survival.
