Right to Bear Arms

A Story by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Through heavy brown air, the sun is hot enough to stew the tar, bubbling from a terminally neglected street. Mingled with impotent wafts of twice-smoked cigarettes and desiccated human excrement, the sizzling urban exhaust sticks in my throat, leaving me gasping for breath. So I pause, as usual, to yearn for the cool mist that hovers just above the waterfalls in the torn cigarette poster taped to the back of the cash register.

Here, each morning, the besotted buy their 99-proof and I, in my tidy little pumps and ambitious suit, buy my unbranded bottle of water. But the falls are only paper, and the stagnant stench of the city invariably jerks my violated senses back to rank reality and the daily rhythm.

“Hola, chica. Seventy-nine cents. ¿Hace calor, eh?”

“Si, Señor, really hot. Muchas gracias. Bye-bye.”

“De nada, Señorita. Hasta mañana.”

Still, the street offers an odd and occasional respite from the snot-green walls of the snake pit I call work, one of the many private hostelries crafted decades ago by Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial cost-cutting and civil rights for the tormented gone awry.

Inside, the howls of the chronically terrified and forgotten echo through the veins of sixty-seven clients, ages twenty-two to a shrunken unknown. Their shrieks bounce off the frames of denuded sofas and urine-sopped cushions littering the hallways. Their fears bind them to horrid things others cannot see. And their lucidity, resurrected with decreasing frequency, is inevitably felled by the ferocious thwacks life deals them.

Once a month, they are lined up for their hallucinations to bounce off the chill steel wall of the visiting Medi-Cal shrink. Their torments dribble into puddles of quivering pleas for help on the institutional-linoleum floor, while he preens over his designer prescription pad and coffee.

Today, the good doctor is too busy flirting with his new answering service operator to approve hospitalizing the suicidal Chinese empress for a medication adjustment. The teeth marks with which she has tattooed her arms are not enough to get his attention; neither are the razor blades we’ve indelicately manhandled from her. Not even my suggestion that he stick his Moroccan leather pad someplace scatological elicits anything more than a snickering invitation to join him for an adult beverage after work and help him perform that enticing activity.

So I take an angry hike for the great outdoors to vent my self-righteous rage.

With my tasteful pumps, I stomp over the bodies of addicts, stoned near to death by failed choices. I storm around the cardboard condominiums filled with humans as hungry and parasite-wracked as their dogs. I fling myself away from it all into a futile rant.

Halfway around the decomposing block I’m stopped by a sweaty, unwashed kid with a knife.

“Whaddaya got, lady?” he snarls, oblivious to my good intentions, my hopeful aspirations.

Confronted by this little shit blocking my path and threatening me with a sharp object, I wish for a split second that I have a gun.

Now, it isn’t as though I would propel society’s paranoia into the chest of a beloved security guard at a museum intent on just saying no to hate. It is nowhere near the realm of the playful five year old who crashes her own birthday party with the disregard of her grandfather’s unsecured .22. And it’s a far cry from the family whose domesticity is discharged with abusive daddy’s death by gunshot.

Nonetheless, if I had a gun, I would aim it right at the kid’s pubescent face, the pimple on his nose for a target. I would pump him full of seething rage at a system that rejects the humanity of the recipients of its stingy offerings. In the stormy flush of utter frustration, I’d splatter his youthful flesh across a cityscape that would simply add his shredded carrion to its endless pit of stinking detritus. I would blow away that scrawny sack of symptoms of poverty, inequity and corruption. Yes, I would do to him what the psycho Med-Cal prick does to my clients.

If I had a gun.

But I don’t.

And I am too busy picking at my fiery ire to respond to the boy’s unseemly overture with appropriate fear. Instead, I hiss at him through gnashing teeth to get the hell out of my way or I’ll hurt him — fuck him up, in fact.

“OK, lady, OK, lady,” he backs away, pocketing his weapon.

I watch him retreat.

Distracted by a neglected adolescent with a rusty, broken steak knife, I head back toward the mayhem of a system that has abandoned its victims to hell, and I wonder, “Hmm, who in her right mind would wear pumps on this street?”

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by John Anderson via a Creative Commons License.)