Paul just turned 20, lives in a remote Colorado cabin, and delivers pizza for a living. Despite this meager existence, Paul is a hit with the ladies. He’s got a live-in girlfriend, bohemian Lonnie, who comes from a higher socio-economic status but seems to enjoy “slumming” with Paul. Paul also shares intimacies with his female coworker Sabrina and any other woman who looks his way, including a randy tourist. But things get really interesting when Lonnie goes on an extended European vacation and Paul hooks up with his friend’s sister, Allie. Allie is young, smart, and sees through Paul’s ne’er-do-well facade.
“It’s like you’re purposely keeping your own and everyone else’s expectations low,” Allie tells him, later encouraging him to end things with Lonnie to strive for something more: “Takes courage to change, takes fearlessness and aggression, all the things you say are so important to you. It doesn’t take any balls whatsoever to stick with something that you know is going nowhere just because it’s comfortable. That’s not courage; it’s apathy.“
Allie chastises Paul for smoking, drinking, and riding his motorcycle without a helmet. Paul doesn’t understand—or doesn’t care—how his self-destructive behavior impacts those who care about him: “It seems absurd to me that anyone would give a shit about anything I did […] I needed a judgment-free zone in which to live like a lunatic.”
When Paul is tripping on acid, he feels connected to everything in the universe. But when he comes back down to Earth, he can’t connect to the people he is most intimate with. The end of Paul’s affair with Allie ultimately results in a moment of stark realization. He learns that his entire attitude was based on “genuine ignorance. It was ignorance of life, of women, of love and lust and wants and needs and the varying levels of each ingredient that exists within all relationships. Ignorantly believing my life had no bearing on anyone else, I plowed through my days with a boner in one hand and a beer in the other, running from laugh to laugh, incapable of understanding that my life actually had some impact on those closest to me, especially the women at the other end of my penis.”
Paul is a scoundrel when it comes to romance, but his lust for life and rugged individualism (further fueled by a deep dive into Ayn Rand’s work) are admirable. To Paul, driving recklessly on twisty mountain roads is as satisfying as sex. Interestingly, NUNS WITH SHOTGUNS shares literary DNA with Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Mountain’s prose is raunchier than Kundera’s, but both works feature an unfaithful male lead pondering existential questions of love, sex, and death.
It’s hard to like a drunken philanderer, but Mountain’s narrative voice is so honest and compelling that readers will want to stick around for his final transformation. Life’s greatest treasure isn’t found in exhilarating extremes, but in the bonds of love shared daily with family and friends.
P.H. Mountain was a lovable scumbag in his early years, and NUNS WITH SHOTGUNS is a hilarious romp that follows this immature young man as he slowly comes to grips with his place in the universe.
~Rob Errera for IndieReader