By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“My son was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
My son was murdered!”

– Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar J. Grant III, shooting victim

I thought it was my Taser, not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
I thought it was my Taser, not my gun!

– A confused rapid transit police officer

We’d have decided the same for a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
We’d have decided the same for a black officer!

– A jury with no blacks

It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay!

– A public agency facing a wrongful death suit

Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets!

– A black man who knows the outrage of police behaving stupidly

“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”

– Oscar J. Grant III

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

An Evening With Bestselling Author T. Jefferson Parker

Thursday 11 February, 5:30 p.m.

Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA

5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 to 7:30 T. Jefferson Parker reading, Q&A and book signing

In T. Jefferson Parker’s new novel, Iron River, detective Charlie Hood is running the California-Mexico border with the ATF, searching for the iron river — the massive and illegal flow of handguns and automatic weapons that fuels the bloody cartel wars south of the border. Gunrunners by nature aren’t exactly ethical, but the lengths they’ll go to, and the innocent lives they’ll risk, are shocking even to Hood. Most shocking of all is the close personal connection Hood finds wrapped up in events south of the border — a connection that shakes him to his core!

Parker immerses Hood in the very real, dangerous and lawless place along the U.S.-Mexican border, giving us a window into the current problems law enforcement from San Diego to Corpus Christi face everyday.

Join Parker and his Southern California fans for an evening of reading and discussion with the author. Iron River will be available for purchase and signing.

For more information, contact Kit-Bacon at kb@kbgressitt.com or 760-522-1064.

Our special thanks to Mysterious Galaxy Books for providing T. Jefferson Parker’s books for sale and signing at the reading — or order your copies in advance for delivery at the reading. Click here to order in advance and be sure to order only those books identified as ON OUR SHELVES NOW. You can reach Mysterious Galaxy at 858-268-4747.

At Fallbrook’s Writers Read

Bestselling author Jan Burke, describing her heritage: I’m half German and half Irish. As my cousin says, we want to rule the world so everyone can drink.

Ms. Burke, illustrating the joys of being able to revise a draft manuscript: If you’re piloting a jet plane, you don’t get a lousy first draft.

At Major Market

Checker, after scanning champagne, caviar, cheese and bread: Having a party?
Customer: Nope. Having a moment.

A week’s worth of Sheriff’s log for Fallbrook

20 Nov.

S. Mission Rd.   Comm’l burglary
Porter St.   Death/suicide
W. Clemmens Ln.   Stolen vehicle
Rainbow Glen Rd.   Grand theft
E. Alvarado St.   Fraud/ID theft

21 Nov.

Potter St.   Spousal abuse
Felicidad   Spousal abuse
De Luz/Murrieta Rd.   Grand theft
Ammunition Rd.   Vehicle burglary
S. Main Ave.   Shoplifting
Via Casitas   Death
E. Alvarado St.   Possession of marijuana
S. Main Ave.   Arrest/receiving stolen prop.

22 Nov.

W. Aviation Rd.   Trespassing, poss. drug paraphernalia
Retreat Ct.   Missing juvenile
Calle Caralene   Stolen vehicle
Alturas Rd.   Spousal abuse
S. Vine St.   Possession of stolen property
Cookie Ln.   Vehicle burglary
Willow Glen Rd.   Vehicle burglary

23 Nov.

El Caminito   Assault with attempt to rape
De Luz Rd.   Possession of marijuana
Reche Rd.   Curfew violation/juvenile
E. Alvarado St.   Petty theft
Gum Tree Ln.   Annoying phone calls
E. Fallbrook St.   Residential burglary
E. Fallbrook St.   Residential burglary
S. Wisconsin Ave.   Death
De Luz Rd.   Vandalism
De Luz Rd.   Possession of marijuana
Sweetgrass Ln.   Family disturbance
Pala Lake Dr.   Spousal abuse
Potter St.   Under influence drugs/alcohol
De Luz Rd.   Vehicle burglary
Alturas Rd.   Vehicle vandalism

24 Nov.

Lake Circle Dr.   Fraud/ID theft
Old River Rd.   Fraud, grand theft
Gird Rd.   Burglary in progress
N. Vine   Under influence drugs/alcohol
Ridge Pl.   Residential burglary
El Caminito   Residential burglary
S. Mission Rd.   Petty theft
E. Alvarado St.   Armed robbery, kidnapping

25 Nov.

Ammunition Rd.   Residential burglary
Ammunition Rd.   Residential burglary
Wrightwood Rd.   Recover stolen vehicle
Del Cielo Este   Violation of restraining order
N. Main Ave.   Under influence drugs/alcohol

26 Nov.

Felicidad Dr.   Weapons surrendered
Amigos Way   Grand theft
E. Alvarado St.   Petty theft
W. Mission Rd.   DUI, evading officer

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

He left through the side door of the court building and started across the street mid-block, leaning with years, awkward but sturdy, the sun igniting his silver hair. His blue overalls were hitched up at the waist with a workman’s belt, a trick of the shrinking elderly.

I slowed down, not annoyed by his jaywalking, but certainly noting it. Then his pace got the better of me and I enjoyed the moment it allowed to watch the sun find its way through the wind and the trees to drop blind spots on my windshield. The city isn’t so terrible when there are trees, and I imagined the old man, pruning his own.

He would trim them with care, cutting only the weak, the unnecessary. Strong arms shaping strong arms. And tending a small urban garden, perhaps. Tomatoes, certainly, some peppers, maybe snap beans. He’d bring his grandchildren to the plot to teach them the miracle of planting and nurturing food from the earth. For them, only the crisp sweetness of beans fresh from the vine, the warm joy of afternoon tomatoes, blood red as God meant them to be.

The old man stumbled, hesitated for a moment and hopped a step or two. I pulled up, not too close, and waited for him to finish crossing, hoping for his parking place. He was not, after all, so old, maybe a middle-aged man, Latino perhaps. The thick, purple-black hair of his ancestors remained with him still, shielding him from eons of heat and rain. Its sheen must have reflected the sun’s rays. That’s what I had seen, not the halo of a silver-haired old man.

And what had seemed the stoop of age, was, more likely, the twisted result of bending over to pick the produce of another man’s vines. Bending and reaching, bending and reaching, but never tasting the fruit. Maybe he left a family in his homeland, as eager for the spare words he scribbled to them each month as for the currency he sent, while he risked his dignity to a hostile nation. Cowering in a canyon at night, among his compadres, they would seek flickering warmth from their shared misery, feed one another on the constant desire for something better.

In the center of the road, he stopped and looked toward me, so I waved him on. He raised his hands slightly, oddly, gesturing something, I wasn’t sure what. I smiled and nodded to reassure him he was safe, I would not hit him, and I waved him on again.

He turned back to his destination as an animated branch blocked the sun from my windshield, and I saw his workman’s belt become straps and steel, and the chain forcing his slight stoop, thick enough to keep a bull in tow, shackled his limbs to the impenetrable leather at his waist. Then the sun meandered through some shifting leaves and found the man’s hands, only to be frightened off by the muzzle of the flat-black gun he clasped.

He stumbled again, and the chain snaring his legs clanged against the ground before him. He squinted at me once more over his shoulder.

Looking around the sun’s rays, I caught his eyes, dark and frightened. He was eighteen at most, and sad, fearfully sad — a lost soul loved only by a mother fettered to her child’s failure. A mother hoping to save her boy who was hopeless. She would kneel every night and pray to the Madre de Dios for his salvation, for him to know some peace, for him to escape his anguish. Then she would sob, not trusting God to give her weak one this miracle.

Did his mother know, deep in her heart, his only escape would be found the next day in the angry aim of a policeman’s gun, in the speckled shade of a backyard garden, his crimson fluid seeping into the earth, feeding the tidy rows of tomatoes and snap beans?

The boy ran a hobbled race the final yards, his prison blues marked with the sweat of his effort. A passenger door swung open, an engine revved. He looked back toward me one last time, and I waved him on again.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Vicky Sedgewick via a Creative Commons license.)

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.)