Target Practice
When Paranoia Met Guns in 1973
Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
Chapter Nine: Target Practice
I've been back at Steve's three nights now. Sleeping in my tent 50 yards into the orchard. Trying to create some space of my own. Midnight. Still carrying the redwoods inside me, that soft glow from the medicine wearing thin against his darkness.
Walk up the dirt drive. Smell of gunpowder cuts through the sage. Something different in the air tonight. Not just the usual pot smoke and eucalyptus. Something sharper. Metallic.
Find something new in the yard. Makeshift gun range—cans on fence posts, paper targets stapled to plywood. Spent shells glinting in the dirt like scattered teeth. Target practice. But for what?
Steve standing there, flashlight in one hand, bottle of Jack in the other. Studying tire tracks in the dust. The beam wobbles as he sways.
"Someone was here," he says without looking up.
"When?"
"While you were gone. Look—" The beam traces patterns. "That's not my tire. Not Dan's either."
Watch him circle the tracks like a detective. Or a paranoid speed freak. Hard to tell the difference anymore.
"Could be anyone, Steve. Delivery truck. Someone turning around."
"No." His voice flat. Certain. "They're watching. Testing response times."
The redwoods have given me something—patience, maybe. Or just enough distance to see him clearly now. This isn't the guy who talked philosophy in the Penn dorms. This is someone else. Someone the drinking and the dope and whatever else hollowed out and refilled with static.
Later Dan catches him pissing against the house at 2 AM. Right against the kitchen window.
"Bathroom's twenty feet away, man."
"Marking territory," Steve mutters. "Confusion to the enemy."
Dan just shakes his head. Walks away. We've all been walking away from Steve's explanations lately.
Then the guitar at 3 AM. Stratocaster amped up, feedback screaming like a wounded animal. I stumble out to the porch. Moths dive-bombing the bare bulb. Steve in his underwear, guitar slung low, playing the same three notes over and over.
"Steve, what the hell?"
"Can't sleep. They're broadcasting frequencies. Can't you hear it?"
"All I hear is you, man. It's three in the morning."
"Exactly. Three AM. That's when they transmit. I'm jamming their signal."
Lights flash on in the main house. Here we go. Dan's silhouette in the window. This won't end well.
Three more nights of this. Each one worse. Each one further from the Steve who wrote letters about California freedom, about making it real out here. What happened to that guy? When did the dream curdle into this?
Morning arrives hot and bitter. Dan and Martha outside the coop when we wake up. She's holding a notebook. He's got his arms crossed like a disappointed father.
"This has to stop," Dan says. "The music. The urinating. The shouting."
"I don't shout," Steve says. Still in his underwear. Scratching absently.
"You were yelling at your car yesterday for twenty minutes."
"That's different. That's—"
"We've documented everything," Martha says, lifting the notebook. "Time stamps. Descriptions. We're done being patient."
"One more incident and you're out. I mean it." Dan's voice has that finality landlords perfect over time.
They walk away. Steve watches them go, eyes narrowed.
"Informants. Has to be. Nobody complains that much unless they're being paid."
"Steve, they're just tired of—"
"You don't see it, do you? The patterns. The connections." He turns to me. Something wild in his eyes. "Maybe you're one of them too."
That lands cold. After everything. After I came out here on his word. After I've been here, trying to be a friend, breathing his paranoia, trying to hold onto some thread of connection to reality that probably snapped weeks ago.
Afternoon crawls in. Hundred degrees. The heat makes everything shimmer like a mirage. Maybe it is. We're drinking warm beer, Steve pacing the small space, restless as a caged animal.
"Need to do something," he mutters. "Can't just sit here waiting for them to make their move."
Disappears into the garage, comes back with a .22 rifle I haven't seen before. Starts cleaning it with the same ritual precision he applies to his .38. Oil and cloth and metal. His hands steady when they're doing this. Only time they are anymore.
"You shoot?" he asks.
"Not really."
"Come on. You need to learn real skills. Not that hippie guitar shit."
There it is. The sneer. Like my music is somehow less real than his midnight feedback symphonies. But I follow him anyway. Last loyalty to whatever we used to be.
We walk through the neglected orchard. Old Santa Rosa plum trees gone wild. Unpruned branches creating tunnels of shade. Steve stalking, paranoid-careful. Not hunting careful. Like he thinks the trees have eyes. Stops every few yards. Listens. To what?
Nothing to shoot at. Just heat and dust and the sound of our footsteps. He hands me the rifle.
"Your turn. Shoot something."
"What?"
"Anything. Just shoot."
"Steve—"
"Come on, college boy. Or are you scared of a little .22?"
That old competition from Penn. Who's tougher. Who's more real. Except now it's got an edge like broken glass.
The rifle unfamiliar in my hands. Sweat making the stock slippery. This is stupid. This is Steve's paranoia bleeding into afternoon boredom. But I can feel him watching. Judging.
His Plymouth sits fifty yards away, windows down, baking in the sun. I aim at a fence post near it. Just wanting this to be over. Squeeze. The bullet goes wide, punches through the door. Safety glass explodes inward like diamonds catching the light.
Time stops.
Steve's face. White to red in two seconds. The kind of red that comes before violence.
"My fucking car! You shot my fucking car!"
"Steve, I'm sorry—"
He rips the rifle away. For a second I think he's going to hit me with it. Or shoot me. His whole body vibrating with rage. Veins standing out on his neck like rope.
"Get the fuck away from me."
I back off. Give him space. Give him the whole burning afternoon.
I sit on the porch steps. Listen to him banging around the coop, tools clattering. Glass being swept. Cursing that comes and goes like waves. Finally, footsteps.
"I can fix it. Just... don't touch my stuff again."
"Sure. Sorry."
But something's broken between us now. Not the window. The last threads of whatever this has been. Can see it in his eyes. I'm just another problem now. Another person who can't be trusted. Another disappointment in his California dream.
That night, lying on my sleeping bag, I think about the redwoods. How clean everything felt there. How the mind could actually rest. Here, even the air feels suspicious. Steve's up again, flashlight beam sweeping across the yard. Looking for what? New tire tracks? Hidden cameras? The thing is, he'll find them whether they're there or not. That's how it works when your mind becomes your enemy.
I think about his letters. All that promise. "Come out here, man. It's real out here. None of that East Coast bullshit." But what's real? This chicken coop? His paranoid fantasies? The gun oil under his fingernails?
Morning comes gray and already warm. August light has a particular weight in California. Presses down like a hand. I'm packing before Steve wakes up. Rolling the sleeping bag tight. Fitting everything into the backpack like a puzzle I've solved a hundred times.
The truth settling in as I pack: I never really knew Steve. Knew a version of him. A dorm room philosopher. A guy who could talk about Kerouac and revolution and make it sound possible. But that guy might have been the fiction. This might be what's real. The paranoia. The anger. The slow dissolution.
Or maybe California did this. Maybe it does this to people who come looking for something that was never here. All that freedom just another kind of cage.
Pack my stuff. Not much to pack. Everything I own fits in the backpack with room to spare. That wrinkled piece of paper with the San Rafael address still in my pocket. Written down at Penn, carried three thousand miles. Time to finish what I came for. Time to see if anything out here is what it promised to be.
Steve comes in. Shirtless. Ribs showing. His .38 in his hand like it grew there.
"You leaving?"
"Yeah."
"Coming back?"
"Nah, I'm headed south."
He looks at me. Through me. Already somewhere else. Some frequency only he can hear.
"Whatever." He waves me off. Already walking back to his car. Already checking over his shoulder. "Watch out for the informants."
"OK, Steve."
Stand there for a moment. Should I say something else? Thanks for the hospitality? Go fuck yourself? Hope you don't shoot anyone? Nothing fits. Nothing would matter. He's already gone, poking at the bullet hole in his car door like a wound that won't heal. His .38 still in his hand.
I head out the long driveway, shouldering my pack, my guitar in hand. Each step lighter. Leaving Sonoma fog for whatever waits in San Rafael at the Grateful Dead headquarters. In my pocket, barely enough money to make it back east. In my head, that image of him pointing a gun at his own head. But also the redwoods. The silence. The possibility that not everything out here is broken.
The pilgrimage beginning. But feeling less like I'm heading toward something than running from something that's already over. And that's okay. That's honest. Sometimes the best you can do is recognize when to leave.
Hit the main road. Thumb out. First car passes. Second. Then a VW van slows down. Of course. The universe has a sense of humor.
Steve in his coop with his guns and his fear.
The trees in their grove, holding their silence.
Everything in its place, playing out its nature.
The August sun climbing. The day opening up like a question. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's all there ever was.
→ Next Chapter: Chapter 10: Let the Guitar Decide - "Jerry Garcia's blessing at Grateful Dead headquarters changes everything"
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