Postcards from State Avenue

The Pitch staff had so much fun on last year's road trip that we had to do it again this year. Toward the end of last summer, we grew restless. We simply had to get out of the office. So we all got in our cars, like any respectable Johnson Coun- tian would do, and drove down Metcalf Avenue. Making random stops and talking to people along the way, we rediscovered one of the city's main arteries. (We published our findings a few weeks later in "Cruisin' the 'Calf, September 23, 2004.)

This year, our travels took us to State Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. We were drawn, perhaps, by how the Old West (the Lewis and Clark trail, the Wyandotte County Fair, the cornfields that still line stretches of the road) meets the New West in an explosion of NASCAR-driven commerce. Or perhaps we were lured by our certainty -- confirmed by our expedition -- that even on a street that's marked by the sad-looking husk of the Indian Springs Shopping Center, there's life in them 1960s strip malls! Or maybe we just wanted to hang out in a part of town where the Cutting Edge Hairstyling Academy advertises $5 haircuts for a limited time only, where Christ Church of the Jesus Hour meets in what looks like a former grocery store, where a brand-new Harold Pener clothing store is under construction and the Regency Inn is under new management.

We didn't spend the night. But we had a great time. Wish you were here.

10 a.m.
Have Guns Will Rent
1313 State Avenue 11 a.m.

Jerry Vest flings an anvil in the direction of his visitor.

It's Styrofoam, only painted to look heavy and imposing, like the 15-foot statue of Julius Caesar that stands watch over Vest's auto-body repair garage. The Vietnam-era machine gun mounted near the ceiling, however, is real.

Vest's repair shop pays the bills, but his real love -- OK, one of many -- is the theater. In a building connected to the garage, Vest and his wife, Linda, own a costume shop called Have Guns Will Rent. Its walls drip with packages of fake eyelashes, tiaras, wigs, masks, makeup, hats and props. The Vests brag that they officiate at medieval wedding ceremonies, outfit high school theater productions with swords, dress Rebel and Yankee armies for Civil War battle reenactments (and provide the pyrotechnics!), manage the grounds of the Kansas City Shakespeare Festival, and make the best damn snow cones anyone at the Renaissance Festival ever tasted.

A plaster Elvis, a UFO and a knight in armor keep watch over the street in front, luring customers in from State Avenue. Inside the store, a plaster pirate stands with one foot on a barrel, dumb to the fact that Vest's real treasure is upstairs.

It's an arsenal of the wiggy, rooms crammed with weaponry and books on weaponry. Dusty rifles and swords are stacked haphazardly in every corner, and the walls are mounted with guns. Vest figures he has a thousand guns or more, if you count the ones at the couple's farm north of the river.

Vest has connections in Hollywood, and he points out weapons mounted to the wall, naming the movies they appeared in: Saving Private Ryan, Return of the Mummy, Shanghai Knights. Two bazookas -- one German-made, one U.S. -- are propped up near the racks. Without moving more than 3 feet in any direction, Vest can put his hands on a Viet-Cong arrow; a Persian mace; an African spear; and what he says is a 400-year-old, gold-plated, rhino-hide shield. He has one particularly heavy sword, at least 5 feet long, that he calls his "sweetie."

Vest says he's got weaponry from every U.S. military conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam, plus a healthy stock of the same guns "our boys" are carrying right now. But he can't rent active guns, so he takes expensive firearms like, say, an 1897 Winchester, plugs the barrel with lead and deactivates the trigger, then rents it for $50 a pop. To his gun-nut friends, it's sacrilege akin to using a bust of Charlton Heston for target practice. But it's worth it; rent that baby five times and it's paid for itself.

Beyond yet another gun rack, past a taxidermic duck and around a corner, in a locked, glass case with a sign reading "Not For Sale!" is his collection of stuff he calls "primitive": mastodon tusks and vertebrate pulled from the Kansas River, the fossilized rib bone of a prehistoric sloth, an Australian boomerang, a woolly mammoth tooth, a shrunken head from Brazil, a gift from a friend who claims to be a descendent of Confederate soldiers who didn't surrender but instead fled to South America to start an American settlement.

Years ago, one night in October, Vest says he was working late, experimenting with a new brand of makeup he'd ordered. While he was working, someone tried to break into the costume shop. The robber obviously didn't know about Vest's upstairs armory and the hundreds of ways that Vest could slice him, impale him or fill him with holes. At a later trial, Vest testified as to what he was wearing the night of the robbery. He points out a picture of himself tacked to the wall; in the photo, his face has been manipulated, his chin elongated, his eyebrows arched and evil, his face painted red. "I had to tell the judge that I chased him away dressed as the devil," he cackles. -- Nadia Pflaum