Rough Likeness: Essays Read Online Free PDF Page B

erase, though? Why deny the relief of a shared, common phrase—novelistically charged, not the worst imaginable? You know gunmetal and I know gunmetal: why not meet there? Pretend it’s a bar of the same cool name, “Gunmetal’s” (brushed steel, understated track lighting) and relax, converse, affirm each other’s positions on many Big (or breezy and minor) Life Issues. Since I had nowhere to go this evening and you were free, and isn’t that better than staying home? Even if I know where the conversation’s headed? And really, you’re perfectly decent company, you aren’t at fault. But after an evening like this, I’m way more antsy and hardly refreshed, since I’m not at all changed or challenged or stretched. And neither are you.
    And yes, the coldness of a gun pertains. A gun is, when you first hold it, very cold, and way heavier than you’d think—say a .22, hitched right up against the shoulder. At least the one I shot weighed more than I expected, made as it was, of . . . I don’t know what. Gunmetal, I guess. I hardly have anyone to ask about this. One strictly seasonal pheasant-hunting friend, who will answer modestly and not say one thing beyond what he knows. Another who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, and though that’s long ago now for him, I hesitate. Because maybe it’s not so long ago, the way rogue scenes slide in when you’re making a sandwich, washing your hair, touching your sleeping child’s face.... Also, I’ve seen that tree, in the photo in his living room, the tree he’s standing so uprightly next to (he in his uniform, and both so thin they look related) and something came just before the photo and something happened just after it, to the side of the tree, or behind it—it’s that the tree’s starkness is a point of reference. There is, I think, a lot more he knows, for example, on the subject of grenades, that I don’t want to ask about either, there being no “grenade blue” I’m harrying here. Though there’s a sky for that, too. A misty tint, a haze indicating surprise detonation, rain turned to hail, very suddenly.
    But I want to know what “gunmetal” means, and found the perfect guy to ask, a friend of a friend, a gunmaker out west, who’s currently working on a matchlock from 1510 (“older than all my friends combined” he says.)
    My questions, of course, are embarrassingly basic.
    And yes, I do need to start at the beginning.
    Jim writes: Glocks are made of plastic with metal inserts in the receiver or frame (the part you hang on to), the slide and barrel are metal and the color is determined by the options you choose . (He’s seen pink as well as sky-blue ones). The basic metal a .22 is made of varies but it is always shiny silver, what we in the trade call “in the white.” This reflects that it has not been colored or coated yet. The coloring (whether it be bluing, Frenching, coating or browning) is put there to keep the metal from corroding or oxidizing in an undesirable manner. “Gunmetal” as a color is usually a gray, more technically called “French gray.” Think of the dark ash on charcoal, only shiny.
    The shiniest guns would be chrome or nickel-plated, the blackest ones would be the black epoxy-coated; black chrome is black beyond belief, but is shiny like a mirror. These coatings can be applied to any firearm. I have examples of almost anything you would like . . .
    Almost anything I would like . . . as, too, this sky is variously compounded, concussive, concupiscent, and oh, could be layered with names transfinitely: it’s the rivery color a silver spoon turns when held in a flame. It’s the color of a well-used plumber’s wrench. A perfectly battered railroad tie. I try on: A burnt-spoon sky . Below a sky where we sat down, under wrench-colored clouds. Before the sky opened and a rain as hard as railroad ties fell. ... It’s the color of a cataract (which, very like “promontory,” is not much in use, ever-nailed as they are to the