Later on it got a little sketchier; by the time I was in high school, the management had realized that the location afforded the unique opportunity to add the northern half of the state's only topless bar, because there was no local government to stop them, and in the last few years the place was open, pretty much nobody stayed in the motel itself other than the dancers (none of whom were locals).

A few years back, the guy who ran the place died quite suddenly, and the motel and bar both closed immediately. Like, whoever his heirs were evidently had zero interest in operating such a suite of businesses. The two buildings stood empty for a number of years, and then one day workers moved in and started stripping them of anything of value that might remain. Demolition followed, and then the site stood empty for an unusually long time before signs of construction started appearing.

Since the site is right off the main road between where I live and the Interstate, and I drive past there an average of at least once a week, it was pretty easy to keep tabs on what was taking shape. Where the bar had stood there was nothing, but in place of the L-shaped motel rose a long, narrow rectangular building with a larger, squarish bit at one end. The final stages of this build included a huge air-handling system on top of the narrow part of the structure, far bigger than a building that size would need just to meet its HVAC needs.

Leaving out the decade I spent out in the Real World doing Failed College and dotcom things, I've lived in this town for nigh-on 35 years now, and for at least 25 of those I've wished there was an indoor shooting range anywhere withing decent driving distance. The nearest there's ever been is one that opened a few years ago that's ~80 miles away.

So naturally, now that I've lost most of the feeling in my dominant hand and my eyes can focus on the rear sight, the front sight, or the target, but no longer any two and certainly not all three; now that my revolutionary nickname would be Comrade Shakey; now that, in short, shooting is hard damn work and really not much fun any more... someone has built one.

(Also, I'm broke as fuck because out of the three of me, the ever-dwindling pool of potential employers, and the federal government, guess which one doesn't agree that I'm too broken to do useful work? But I digress.)

Anyway, between that unfortunate convergence and the fact that they opened right before The Virus arrived, I didn't actually go in there until a few weeks ago, when I finally scraped together enough social capital to give a try--partially because I wanted to check it out, and partially in hopes of selling something to them to keep the household afloat a while longer.

Well, it turns out that it's a really nice place. The range is a little short because of the constraints of the site--only 75 feet, which is a decent size for handguns but kind of underwhelming for Serious Rifle Enthusiasts, although then again, those people mostly prefer to shoot outdoors anyway--but well-built and well-equipped, and the guy that runs the place is an enthusiastic young man (well, I say "young man", he's probably circa 30, but I've gotten to the age where everyone under 40 is a teenager) who's a lot more fun to deal with than the usual grumpy specimens you run into in these parts. He likes weird guns and gets excited about stuff he's never heard of before, which is, well... you can probably guess how that goes down with me.

So I've sold him a few of my things, with the greatest reluctance because I hate to part with anything ever, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. And I've done a little shooting here and there, both to try and get my hand in (however benumbed it maybe) and to give Scott some business as I can. Sometimes I take stuff over that I'm not ready to sell yet just to show him. Today it was that PPS-43 I bought a few years ago, the one that I got an ATF tax stamp to make into a short-barreled rifle but never figured out how to fix the welded folding stock on.

"Oh, lemme see, I used to be a welder," he said, and then, after examining the welds, "Yeah, I think we can fix this, let me do some research." So I guess that's a project now? He's a pretty busy guy, so I dunno when exactly, but hey, I've had the tax stamp since 2017, it's not exactly a pressing priority...

(Also finally took the AR-15 for a walk, which was fun except for the cheapass Russian ammo I bought. It worked fine, but it made a smell when fired which was exactly like that taste in the back of your nasal cavity after a heavy nosebleed. I can still smell-slash-taste it on my clothes. MaxxTech, for the record. Not buying that brand again!)

When I was in there last week, selling him (alas!) my Yugoslavian SKS, I noticed an odd pistol on the wall behind the counter. The stock there is a little sparse, because the market was so deranged when Scott was originally stocking up the store, but by the same token, he ended up with a few random oddities in the process of buying up whatever he could find so he wasn't opening with bare shelves. One such item was a pistol that both he and I initially misidentified as a Llama M82. The M82 is a 9mm Parabellum service pistol made by the sadly-now-defunct Spanish corporation of Gabilondo y Cía for the Spanish Army in the 1980s; it's basically a riff on the Beretta 92 (not unlike the Croatian PHP). There's nothing particularly special about them, excep that they're still in service with the Spanish armed forces and haven't been dumped en masse on the surplus market, so it's unusual to see one in the United States.

Today when I went back, I noticed he still had the Llama, and since I'm supposed to be shrinking my hoard right now, offered to trade him something for it so that I was at least maintaining zero growth. (That something ended up being the CZ 82, the departure of which I mourn less than the SKS, since it hurt my hand every time I fired it.) I brought it home and started looking it over to get the appropriate numbers and stuff to log it in my records, and realized as I did that it's not an M82... it's something much, much weirder.

"There's ball bearings inside there! Who puts ball bearings in their pistol?!"

Well... Gabilondo & Co., that's who.

Anyway, the moral of that long and rambling story is that even in my present diminished circumstances, with my shootin' hand gone south on me and my eyesight not much better, my groups the size of dinner plates at embarrassingly short ranges, and the axe of necessity falling on some of the old favorites of former Gun of the Week fame... weird guns still find me. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

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Lime2K
The One True Evil Overlord