By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(My thanks to Brian Brown and the National Organization for Marriage for providing the majority of this fable’s dialogue and a significant amount of the narrative — from the last four year’s of NOM emails, media releases and website content, for example, click here …)

In 2010, California Federal Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. He determined that the ballot measure, which defines marriage as only between a man and a woman, violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Leaders of the anti-same-sex marriage lobby were crushed by the decision, although they continued to tilt at homophobic windmills until the final legal blow to their cause smote them impotent, along with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). But as time passed, they saw that traditional marriages were not, after all, diminished by same-sex marriages. Realizing the error of their rationale, they all trotted off to happier pursuits. All but one, that is. Brian Brown, ill-equipped for mainstream employment, struggled to redefine NOM’s mission, to reframe his marriage message, a message that would support a new cause and his continued income. And so, one day, he was found doggedly pursuing his mission along the streets of Fallbrook the Friendly Village. …

One blustery Wednesday afternoon, in a burst of unprecedented rejection, Brian Brown, president of NOM, struck down the request of a senior citizen who was seeking assistance to cross Elder Street in Fallbrook, California

“I only asked him for an arm to lean on, to step down from the curb,” said Rose Kaminski to the chubby Eagle Scout who came to her rescue. The petite octogenarian wore a mint-green polyester pantsuit and sneaks, the balls of her Peds, a perfectly matching hue. She knew she looked just lovely. “It’s a special day for me, so I’m trying to look my best. But my, oh my, that young man nearly jumped out of his skin when I asked for his help — I just had to pick up my marriage license, oy! The little nebbish, I guess he’s not used to folks being friendly. Between us, Bubele — shush, now, you didn’t hear this from me — he favors the Pillsbury Dough Boy, don’t you know.” She chuckled as she tucked a Macy’s shopping bag under one green arm and with the other hand clasped the Eagle Scout’s elbow. The poor boychick, she noticed, was devastated by pronounced acne. A little chicken soup, maybe? she wondered, as together they toddled across the street.

Meanwhile, pedestrians waylaid by Brown’s boorishness gave witness to a growing crowd that his unthinkable behavior did in fact happen, as wrong and outrageous as it was: an openly Christian man, throwing a little old lady’s harmless request into a dustbin like so many pieces of dirty paper, declaring his imperial will should trump her plea. Although, as the people chatted among themselves, no one was quite sure what that will was.

“Why would he do it?” they murmured to one another. “How could he?” And then, “Brian, Brian!” they called to him. “You must explain yourself, Brian!”

Brian considered turning tail and running like hell to his “Autumn for Marriage 2011: One Man, One Woman of Child-Bearing Age” tour bus, but he took so long to consider his exit that he was surrounded before his legs got pumping. And by then, the group was rapidly expanding, thanks to the residents of Shady Oaks Rest Home who had hit the street for their daily power walk.

Brian eyed the fomenting mass, whispered a prayer, rolled up his sleeves and said, “I’ll take your questions now.”

“How could you refuse such a benign request, Brian?” asked Cecil Adams, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Palomar Community College; although at the moment, he was moonlighting as a skateboarding pizza delivery person, a pragmatic move he would soon abandon with a modicum of nostalgia, as spring enrollment increased at the school. “All that sweet old gal wanted was a hand down the curb, Brian. And on her wedding day! Where’s your soul? Don’t you aspire to a higher plane? What gives, man?”

Brian put his right hand to his heart, NOM’s polling having indicated that 67 percent of respondents interpreted the gesture as strongly positive.

“Now, let me just preface this with my absolute assurance that I bear no ill will toward senior citizens,” Brian intoned. “I harbor no prejudice in my heart. I have senior citizens who are friends and family! Nonetheless, that woman is headed to meet her partner at Town Hall and apply for a marriage license, and that jeopardizes the definition of marriage across this great nation of ours. Senior-citizen marriage is threatening to strip millions of Americans of our core definition of marriage — of our right to traditional marriage!”

“Oh, yeah?” the philosophic pizza person asked as he passed out slices to the agitated crowd. “How so?”

“Senior-citizen marriage will undermine the institution of marriage as we’ve known it for millennia. That’s why I’m — we’re — on this bus tour — to make it clear that the people of this country will not be silenced and that activist judges who try to defend senior-citizen marriage do not have the right to impose their views on the people of this country. We need to make it clear to the Supreme Court and we need to make it clear to the out-of-control Congress. Senior-citizen marriage conflicts with marriage’s central purpose — of procreation!”

“Well, yep, she looked a bit old to have a bun in the oven.” Cecil twirled an empty pizza box on one finger and the audience politely applauded. “But you haven’t answered my question: How is senior-citizen marriage threatening to strip millions of Americans of our right to traditional marriage? That smacks of a non sequitur, man.”

“Advocates for senior-citizen marriages are threatening the definition of marriage as we know it. The sheer audacity of senior citizens, wanting to redefine marriage for everyone else, as though it’s their civil right to do so! The sheer ego mania of it is startling to the core, the ah, the very definition of marriage that is the basis of our nation, the procreational purpose that marriage is intended for, one husband, one wife, ah — procreating. You know what I mean.”

“Brian, are you speaking in tongues, man? You’re not making one iota of sense, dude.” Cecil sucked some pizza sauce from the COEXIST tie his former wife had given him for Co-parents Day.

“I know, but our polling indicates that 79 percent of respondents have a very strong positive reaction to statements about protecting their right to traditional marriage, so I’m supposed to say it whenever I get a chance — because you, too, have the right to traditional marriage and your right deserves to be protected from special interests who are trying to redefine it.”

“You take direction well, Brian. Gotta give you credit where credit is due, man. But I’m divorced, and you know senior-citizen marriages don’t hurt anyone else’s. How can you justify all this effort to oppose a problem that doesn’t exist? How can you try to stop seniors from being married? Come on now, guy! They might be a little shriveled, and there is that oldster talcum powder smell, but they’re still human beings. Don’t they deserve the same rights as the rest of us?”

“Yeah, that!” the crowd chimed in.

Brian eyed the riled folks and his sweat glands gushed. “We’re not trying to ban senior-citizen marriage, but we are against redefining marriage. And those people have civil unions at their disposal. Traditional marriage is the exclusive right of a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation. It’s what’s best for children, for families, for the nation!” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and stopped the salty flow at his chin. “It is an abomination to redefine marriage as anything else. It’s just wrong. Very wrong. And we will fight back! And we will win! Because senior citizens don’t have the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us. And, and they are too old for, you know, procreation!”

The assembly, comprising a goodly number of senior citizens, drew a collective gasp and stepped back from Brian — that he was imagining them in flagrante was grossing them out. “Damn voyeur,” they whispered, exchanging winks.

“Brian, Brian, Brian!” Cecil said. “Get your mind out of the gutter! Don’t you pay attention to the stats? We are an aging population. Don’t mess with the dominant demographic’s sexuality! The Baby Boomers, man — they might be cruising into their golden years, but they’re still having plenty of nookie.”

Brian shuddered. “Eeuwwww! It’s unthinkable — senior citizens — the death knell of traditional marriage — how can they? — marriage is for pro– procreation! — unthinkable — but when I do think — Sweet, Baby Jesus! — Grams and Granny going at — you know — gyuhhcchhh! — God almighty, it’s — disgusting!!”

A low rumble burbled from the depths of the throng, and Cecil, an intuitive philosopher, leapt back from its center just as the people swarmed Brian, who disappeared amid blazing knock-off purses, rolled newspapers and well-aimed Shady Oaks water bottles.

Cecil thought about stepping into the fray to intervene, but decided to let natural law run its course. Besides, he had to get back to Pizza Hut and explain the disappearance of four extra-larges.

As he skated out of sight, the mob quickly thinned, and Rose returned with a hefty man on her arm. “Did we miss something?” she asked the stragglers.

“Not much,” said Rod “The Rod” Robertson, a retired professional wrestler and occasional birthday party clown. “Just took care of some pipsqueak senior citizenphobe.”

“That nebbish who wouldn’t help me across the street? I told you about him, Bruno. His poor mother, what a disappointment he must’ve been, what a heartache.” She patted her fiancé’s arm. “Not like my Bruno.”

“Yes, Sweetie.” Bruno gave her a reciprocal pat.

“You look just lovely today, Rose,” The Rod said, silently mourning Bruno’s success.

“Thank you, Rod. Aren’t you a mensch. See you at lunch!” Rose waved as she and Bruno strolled up the walk to Shady Oaks. “Well, it takes all kinds, don’t you know, but between us, Bubele — shush, now, you didn’t hear this from me — that young man favors the Pillsbury Dough Boy.”

“Yes, Sweetie, I’d wager he does.” Bruno had heard the story twice before, but he knew how to make an old gal feel good. He gave her a love pinch and said, “Rosie, would you like to take a little nap before the wedding, Sweetie?”

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

Note: A different version of this piece was published in 2010.

He arrives after morning service, having thanked God for another day in an upright position. He stops at the nurse’s station, not to check in, but rather to greet whomever is on duty by first name, applaud the glorious weather, ask about the family, chuckle over the latest joke and say something as sweet and charming as his tousled white hair and proper bow tie.

He makes his shuffling way through the unit to his loved one’s room, wishing a good day to those he passes. He arranges tidy, fresh flowers in the vase on the bedside stand, saving the day-old blossoms for the aide to give to someone who has been forgotten by family and friends. He pulls the chair closer, takes pale, curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses cool, brittle lips, his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the day fifty years ago when they knelt before each other with open hearts, fearless of the future, kissing away each other’s tears.

He begins reading the news, his tremulous voice breaking at the headline that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are on the table, breaking at the ethos of national politics. He touches the still, cool hand for emphasis, editorializing on other issues, the fickle path of redistricting, the unyielding hope for a more considerate era. He poses encouraging questions, filling the silence with cheerful answers. After the paper is read, he rises to stretch and adjusts the blinds. He checks the nursing chart, which never varies, and says another prayer for recovery.

His lunch tray is delivered as he talks of the garden’s status, the latest goings on of the neighbors. He eats intermittently, distracted from the stillness by the rhythm of the respirator, the beeping pumps, the steady tempos that sustain life, their life. He closes his eyes, remembering the summer they danced so closely in the gazebo, swaying to whispered things not yet come to pass.

When the meal is finished and cleared, his voice resumes to fill the poignant voids with talk of moments that make his eyes moist. He asks if there’s anything he can do, and adjusts the pillows, fingers a tendril of gossamer hair.

He selects a book from those neatly stacked on the small shelf, settles into the chair and begins the afternoon reading. This day it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. He reads with the passion of the words on his tongue and strokes the vein on an unmoving arm as only a lover can. He reads until the dinner tray arrives and silence returns, the respirator and pumps carrying the conversation. After dinner, he touches a cheek, a thigh, a belly, absently tapping to the beat of the machines.

At 8:00 p.m., when visiting hours are over, he takes pale, curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses cool, brittle lips, his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the chilly day, when they danced by the fireplace, grateful for the enduring joy of each other. Then he departs as he came, saying goodbye to the nurses and wishing them a peaceful night filled with sweet dreams.

And so he has done every day since the stroke, every day since a miracle interrupted death, every day. And so he will continue. He will continue to wait for an awakening, for his loved one to come back to him, to dance with him again, the moonlight glowing in gossamer hair and arms so light around him.

He doesn’t hear the doctors who say there’s little brain function, the chaplain who says it is not a sin to let go, the social worker who tells him to get on with his life. This is his life.

So he thanks God for Medicare, which pays to keep lungs breathing, hearts beating and food pumping through tubes, day after day.

Just as he thanks God for President Obama, whom he prays will have the wisdom to make the nation’s anguished decisions.

Just as he fears what those decisions might be.

Love,
K-B

Note: Previously published in a different form.

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag, Progressive Post and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

California’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina died Saturday when her Retire Boxer Money Bomb exploded prematurely, killing Fiorina immediately and injuring a campaign aide. Fiorina, the infamously fired CEO of computer giant Hewlett Packard, was 56.

Distraught and slightly singed campaign manager, Marty Wilson, stood outside Fiorina’s Sacramento campaign headquarters as firefighters extinguished a small fire caused by the explosion.

“We don’t know what happened,” Wilson said. “Carly was getting ready to launch the money bomb email. She’d just put another million bucks into the campaign, but that was it; she wasn’t going to risk any more of her own money, so we really needed contributions. Anyway, the fuse must have been faulty. The thing went off in Carly’s face. It’s gotta be [U.S. Senator Barbara] Boxer’s fault. Or [President Barack] Obama’s. We demand an immediate investigation and an apology to Carly and the California voters, not only for this deliberate assault but for Boxer’s refusal to have an honest and serious debate about the issues during this crucial time for our nation!”

Paramedics treated Wilson on the scene for a minor head injury and first-degree burns.

The deadly explosion followed another life-threatening incident just two weeks ago at the Republican Party’s Hispanic 100 Awards Gala in Newport Beach. According to an event volunteer, Fiorina had been “slamming down tequila shots, trilling her tongue and shouting ‘Andale!’ in this really pathetic accent. Then she passed out. We thought she was dead at first. But, nope, she barfed and got up to dance.”

Republican Party insiders had purportedly been concerned about Fiorina’s “self-sabotaging behaviors” since she became an economic advisor to the 2008 McCain-Palin presidential campaign, which made Wall Street and CEO compensation reform key platform issues. Skydiving into a campaign event, Fiorina had become entangled in the lines of her golden parachute, preventing the chute from fully opening. Skydive experts at the time said she would have plunged to her death had she not had the presence of mind to pull the cord on her bonus chute. Still, she made a hard landing when she said Sarah Palin was unqualified to run a corporation, and the campaign fired her from the media circuit.

Although Fiorina’s tenure at Hewlett Packard was longer lived than her time on McCain’s campaign, she suffered a more devastating crash from HP and was eventually ranked by Portfolio magazine as one of the 20 worst CEOs ever:

“A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005. THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.”

Despite her very public HP failure — or perhaps because of it — Fiorina was determined to prove herself in the public arena, and Boxer’s senate seat became her next target. She reconciled with Palin, who endorsed her in the primary, when Fiorina depended on the conservative Republican vote to topple moderate Republican Tom Campbell.

But just last weekend, noting Palin’s sagging polling numbers, Fiorina declined to appear with her at a Republican event in California. Palin’s husband, Todd, subsequently leaked a scathing email:

“Sarah put her ass on the line for you, Curly [sic]. She thought you were the real deal. But you and me both know you’re no Joe Sixpack. All that crap about starting as a secretary. You pulled yourself up with your family’s gold plated bootstraps. And now you can’t answer a simple invitation with a yes? Please explain how this endorsement stuff works, is it to be completely one sided, cuz if so, you don’t have a wolf’s chance in Wasilla of getting a cabinet seat in Sarah’s administration. You think you can throw a punch, but my Sarah can take you out in one shot! From a helicopter!”

Fiorina’s past job performance was not her only weakness on the campaign trail. She was A-rated pro-life in a pro-choice state. She supported offshore drilling in an anti-drilling state. She supported Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law in a state where 71 percent of Latino voters oppose it. And, in her op-ed piece announcing her campaign she highlighted her failure to exercise her right to vote: “Admittedly, I have not always been engaged in the electoral process, and I should have been.”

One of the few votes Fiorina reported casting was for California’s anti-same-sex marriage ballot measure, Proposition 8. That revelation, apparently intended to woo conservative voters, attracted the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay lobbying organization, which invested in anti-gay, pro-Fiorina advertising targeting Latino voters.

“Wouldn’t you know it!” said Juan Bautista, an independent gay voter, who was passing by Fiorina headquarters when the money bomb exploded. “One of the few times Fiorina bothered to vote, and it was for Prop. 8. What a poop she is, er, was. And the NOM ad, have you seen it? It’s pure manipulation. At least it’s not as bad as that pissy Sharron Angle ad telling Arizona Latinos not to vote at all. ¡Pendejos racistas!”

Most daunting of all Fiorina’s political challenges was her claim to be a jobs champion, which was contradicted by her corporate experience, noted for mass layoffs and outsourcing jobs overseas, strategies that have not been forgotten by California’s workforce.

Pedicab driver Bobby Sneed, who dropped off a fare just before the explosion, had little faith in Fiorina’s commitment to creating jobs for Californians.

“She laid me off from HP, shipped thousands of jobs overseas, and got a $45 million boot out the door. Now I’m essentially unemployed, she’s worth $120 million, and she was asking voters to give her money? Good lord! She wanted the senate badly enough, she should’ve just sucked it up and bought it, like Meg Whitman. Look, Fiorina soared to the corporate heights by whatever means she had at her disposal — and her dad’s telling her she’d never amount to anything surely motivated her — but she lacked the ability to translate her personal ambitions into a vision that captured the voter’s heart. And, I know it’s petty, but I couldn’t get beyond that snarl she was always trying to hide.”

Perhaps feminist activist Gloria Steinem captured the tormented essence of Carly Fiorina best, after Fiorina committed a live microphone faux pas in June:

“We had the prospective joy of two powerful women competing for a U.S. Senate seat. And in a moment of unintended, unedited honesty, what did we get from Fiorina? A pearl of wisdom? A poignant revelation? No. We got a snarky comment about Senator Boxer’s hair. That, Sweetie, is not feminism.”

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Carly Fiorina image from Carly for California campaign ad; Carly punch, from Californians Opposed to Carly Fiorina Facebook page; Carly Out of Control from Carly for CA website.

California gubernatorial candidate, billionaire and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman was killed Saturday in a gruesome accident at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park during a campaign event, bringing to an end a tough campaign and a tough corporate executive-turned-politician. She was 54.

The Republican candidate was torn asunder when she became entangled in the tether lines of two animals, an African elephant and a domestic donkey. The animals had been positioned for a photo opportunity at a Whitman rally that had attracted hundreds of gun rights and anti-illegal immigration activists, and a smattering of Chanel-clad businesswomen.

Park employee Juanita Calderon, a shaved-ice vendor and college student, recounted the horrific incident.

“Whitman is telling this crowd of white people that she doesn’t own a gun, but if she did, gun control fanatics would have to take it out of her cold, dead hands. And then all these people cheer, and some NRA nut — he’s wearing a t-shirt that says ‘You name it, I hunt it’ — he fires a shot in the air, and the elephant and the donkey go crazy! And Whitman is trying to placate them, but she’s caught in their ropes. And then, well, it was just horrible, really gross! And as security is carting the shooter off, he’s yelling, ‘It wasn’t me! It’s the gun’s fault — hair trigger! — the gun did it!’ And then the paramedics show up, but they just stand around kicking the Astroturf, because there’s really nothing they can do, because she’s, like, in pieces.”

The sudden end to Whitman’s campaign has left California Democrats stunned and relieved. Charles Garnier, a spokesperson for Jerry Brown, Democratic gubernatorial nominee and former Jesuit seminarian, said by phone that Brown was not available for comment, but offered the candidate’s condolences.

“He’s at church making a novena for her soul, and he sends his heartfelt condolences to her family and campaign staff. … Guess she won’t be a whore for the unions anymore, cutting deals for endorsements. Uh, hey! Am I still on the call? Oh, shi—! Hey man, don’t print that! What’s the real story here: Whitman’s swapping endorsements with unions to save their fat pensions while she cuts everyone else’s or my sexist comment? Well? Well? Oh, you guys’ll just go for the juice, but the union pension deals are the story. It’s the pension deals, you whores! But, no, Whitman won’t talk about that. She’ll just play the victim, like she’s never used the word herself. Whore, whore, whore! Oh, but, yeah, she’s dead. Never mind. Bye.”

As news of Whitman’s death reached the public, reactions revealed mixed opinions of her, her candidacy and her legacy — even at an impromptu memorial Saturday evening, outside her home in exclusive Atherton, California.

There, a consultant to California’s troubled Republican Party, who spoke on condition of anonymity from behind a hedgerow of oleanders, suggested Whitman’s faulty campaign was symbolic of the party’s schism between extreme conservatives and moderates.

“Meg didn’t understand how to finesse the duality of the party or of independent voters — she needed them most. But she tried to placate our loonies by opposing gay marriage, while she supported gay adoptions. She wanted to put limits on abortions, but she supported public funding. She hit her Republican primary opponent for supporting Democrats but she contributed to Senator Barbara Boxer and endorsed her in ’03. Meg was kind of bipolar, but voters are more schizophrenic, and she ended up antagonizing everyone. We all play to the factions, but she jumped in before she understood her target base. That kind of naïveté is as toxic as these oleanders. And, wow, quartered by an elephant and a donkey; it’s grotesquely poetic.”

Mourner and eBay Distinguished Engineer Mortimer Snerd begrudgingly acknowledged Whitman’s business acumen, but took issue with her forceful style.

“Yep, yep, she was a pretty good corporate leader type — except for the outsourcing and shady stock deals — sure enough. But she was always pushing people with her big CEO shove as though we were her puppets. May as well have tried putting a dictator in the governor’s seat. Yep, always pushing — just like Elaine on Seinfeld, except more hostile, and Meg danced pretty weird, too. Anyway, I guess someone finally pushed back, yep. Or, in this case, it was pulled back. That’d be Karma, for sure.”

Despite her critics, Whitman was widely recognized for her keen ability to acknowledge mistakes while shifting gears mid-spin. Her campaign staff began referring to her as the “Non Sequitur Nabob” when she became plagued with questions about her repeated failure to vote in public elections.

“I’m not proud of my voting record, and I have apologized for it, and tonight I apologize to everyone in California. It was not the right thing to do and no one is more embarrassed by it than me, and if I could change history, I would. But what I can do is tell voters about how I believe we can turn this state around. This state is in an enormous mess. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results.”

It is not yet clear if Whitman’s death will bring an end to the tenth-hour attack from publicist and attorney Gloria Allred, targeting Whitman’s illegal hiring and inopportune firing of an undocumented immigrant housekeeper. According to The Bay Citizen, a “very informal survey” of the “average Jo” on the street, conducted before Whitman’s death, revealed that “few people” had heard about the MegsMaidGate scandal — a very informal response rate that matched the number of respondents who had actually heard of Whitman, despite her substantial investment in her campaign.

Indeed, of the $138 million in expenditures reported by the campaign, $119 million came from Whitman’s personal fortune, a figure that seems to belie her statement at the September 28 debate between Whitman and Brown.

“I don’t think you can buy elections. I think Californians are too smart.”

Whatever Whitman’s ultimate legacy, her final gesture was one of generosity. A rumor that half of Whitman’s billion-dollar fortune will go to a new shelter for Atherton’s battered spouses and household employees was confirmed late last night by Atherton Mayor Kathy McKlite.

“You’d be surprised how much domestic violence our little community sees,” McKlite said by phone. “Abuse occurs in every socioeconomic category, but we really can’t expect our people to head to a shelter in Menlo Park! This bequest is a fitting legacy for Meg, given, well, things it’s not seemly to mention. Nonetheless, it’s wonderful to see some of Meg’s money go to a truly worthy cause!”

Love,
K-B

Note: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. And you can help.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Crossposted at San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

The catsup and voting record photos are from Meg 2010 Facebook page; the debate photo is from the UC Davis debate website.

Christine O’Donnell, Delaware’s controversial Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, is dead. And the Tea Party mourns.

But O’Donnell’s lunacy— er, her legacy lives on in the hearts of those nutty Delaware citizens who would have cast their votes for the anti-masturbation, witchcraft-dabbling, sexual-purity touting, resume-embellishing pauper — had she not dropped dead on the campaign trail Friday.

Yet O’Donnell’s death is testament to her passion for the causes she embraced during her forty-one years. After playing the strumpe— the trumpet in college, she dedicated her life to abstinence, a dedication so fervent, it killed her: O’Donnell died of an apparent saltpeter overdose.

Saturday, at a Republican Party event celebrat— announcing O’Donnell’s death, with a backdrop of balloons and “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Delaware Republican Party Chair Tom Ross said:

“We’re in shock. At first, I thought Christine couldn’t get elected dogcatcher. But her ability to dodge past indiscretions, well that was really something to behold! I’m not at all surprised she would die trying to stay in character — er, in control of — well, whatever. She was something, all right! Say, have you tried the Cool Whip ambrosia? It’s pretty darn good!”

Although O’Donnell’s death was met with a sigh of relief— of remorse from GOP quarters, Democrats were devastated by the news. They could not have manufactured a better opposition candidate for their senatorial nominee, Chris Coons.

And those of us in the media will sorely miss the unbridled entertainment O’Donnell brought to the political stage. Who could ever forget her explanation of the evils of human cloning?

“American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains!”

Or the press release she purportedly wrote for Concerned Women for America, in which she opined that homosexuality was an “unhealthy lifestyle” and described AIDS education as:

“…a platform for the homosexual community to recruit adolescents and lure teens into a self-destructive sexual lifestyle.”

Whooeee! We would normally have to make this stuff up, but not for O’Donnell. She wasn’t known for her generosity, suffering from chronic indebtedness as she did, but what a gift she was on a slow news day! O’Donnell regularly tossed verbal alms that fed hordes of hungry commentators and journalists.

Her 1996 statement on MTV’s, Sex in the 90s, when she headed The Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, is particularly memorable:

“The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust. … You’re going to be pleasing each other. And if he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?”

Yes, O’Donnell had a gift for posing the perfect question — and for thinking out of the box, as she did in a 2006 interview in which she redefined the psychology of homosexuality:

“People are created in God’s image. Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors. It’s an identity disorder.”

Although media curiosity was piqued by O’Donnell’s morbid obsession with others’ sexuality, in-depth reporting on a probable cause was regularly derailed by Bill Maher’s obsession with embarrassing the candidate by revealing a series of video clips of her more startling pronouncements.

However, sexpert Dr. Ruth speculated that, unlike the “nature” of homosexuality, O’Donnell had a problem that likely stemmed from a “nurture” crisis in her developmental years.

“First of all, let me tell you that Christine’s concept of sexual purity was stupid,” Dr. Ruth explained. “Her childlike perception was typical of those who step off the healthy path at the religion-sex crossroads. Human sexuality is actually pure in whatever way we express it — gay, straight, bi — as long as we honor our safewords and, of course, unless we repress our sexuality into a teeny tiny ball, tighter and tighter and tighter — until it explodes in a gooey mess all over us! You could take one look at that poor woman and know she was horny as a toad. I would posit that it’s not the saltpeter that killed her; it’s the denial!”

Nonetheless, O’Donnell did have a fun side. She was a delight at cocktail parties, sipping her Virgin Marys and expounding on her sexcapade— her escapades while earning her bachelor’s degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University (which she did not actually achieve until this September after finally finishing her coursework and paying her tuition debt), her time at the University of Oxford (which was not as an Oxford student), her Constitutional Government studies at Claremont Graduate University (of which the university has no record) and the Princeton University masters degree program she indicated attending (but for which she wasn’t qualified to apply).

Yes, O’Donnell occasionally two-stepped around the truth, and Dr. Phil was asked to weigh in on this self-harming behavior, but he was too busy telling a depressed cancer patient to “Get real!” On the other hand, O’Donnell looked like Sarah Palin, which made everything okay — that and her faith.

She once reported that God had said “credibility” to her, “audibly — it wasn’t a thought in my head.”

Indeed, O’Donnell trusted God to just nudge her in the right direction and then she would march forward with the confidence of the crazed— of the saved.

Her commitment to small government and fiscal conservatism resulted in her rejection of the liberal establishment’s unreasonable fiscal dictates. She bravely declined to pay the IRS’ usurious tax bills. She daringly attributed personal expenses to her campaigns. And she deftly shifted blame for her insolvency to her political opponents — possible comeuppance for demeaning her candidacy.

Yes, O’Donnell’s bold stances were perched on a firm foundation of evangelical faith. As long as she had an audience, she was ever-eager to confront the most treacherously complex of faith-based topics with an unusual idioc— an unusual intelligence, topics such as evolution:

“Evolution is a myth,” she declared on Politically Incorrect in 1998, offering as proof, “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

And she drilled head-on into virginity in her article, “The Case for Chastity.”

“I know many physical virgins who are not sexually pure,” she wrote. “I know many virgins who are into pornography or who are ‘doing everything but’ with their boyfriends. On the flip side, I know many non-virgins who live beautiful, holy, pure lives through the power of Christ’s blood.”

Hmm, profound … profoundly … profound.

Whatever she is or was, controversy has inevitably followed O’Donnell to her grave. A former campaign aide, David Keegan, minced no words while reveling at Saturday’s Republican gathering:

“God smote her down. When God said, ‘credibility’ to Christine, it was a criticism, not a compliment. She was an embarrassment, a liability to His cause, so He just smote her down!”

Whether it was saltpeter, sexual denial or God that did her in, O’Donnell was a true American character. Only in the United States could such a candidate get so far with so little.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Note: Photographs from Christine O’Donnell for US Senate.

Crossposted at The Progressive Post and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A man with the body of a boy peddles up the pitted road. His wheels send small puffs of hopeful dust up to God and crush harvester ants that do not recognize the border between safety and peril.

He leans his rusted bike against the fence and rattles the gate with the tentative gesture of one who would ask for something. A woman comes out, just as tentatively.

“Please, lady, work for me?” he implores with head bowed, braced to sustain the blow of another no.

Awash in conflicting monolingual ignorance, basic questions and answers are elusive; subtleties seem impossible. The woman wonders: How did you come to be here; do you understand I have a child and a mortgage and hence no piles of money laying about; but do you camp in a barranca, under an oleander hedgerow, it’s toxic leaves for your pillow; do you endure usurious fees for sending meager earnings home to family; do you suffer here, yet remain?

“OK, Señor, trabajo para usted.” Giving him work is easier than not, easier in many ways.

She points to the neglected fruit trees, the tools. He understands the task. And she flees inside to avoid his simple poverty, her unsettling discomfort. But he soon follows her with a quiet knock on the door.

“Perdone, please, lady, sandwich for me?”

She puts out food and cash and flees even further — to spend four times the man’s pay on cheeses, meats, on produce marked up for the honor of being out of season, harvested by his compatriots on distant lands.

When she returns from the market, he is gone, his dishes stacked neatly, the napkin folded, and much more work completed than requested.

Embarrassed by her suspicions, she resists checking the jewelry box and instead puts away her bounty and forgets about the man.

Until another day.

He returns to rattle the gate and ask again for work. She points again to the trees, the tools, and goes in to cook for him while he toils.

“Señor,” she comes back out, “food — comida.”

“¿Es para mí?” He is surprised; he had not asked to be fed this day.

He looks into her eyes for the first, fleeting time, revealing his dark brown sadness and one opalescent orb that does not see the physical world around him. “Gracias,” he says. “Dios te bendiga.”

She wants to hug him, but the line between them is formidable. Instead, she touches his gnarled hand and carries his blessing inside, and she ponders what it is about him that frightens people into hate. Do we imagine this man with the body of a boy and an eye that cannot ogle our opulence becomes, in greater numbers, a ravenous beast, greedily consuming our rich resources, stealing our comforts, rending from us what is manifestly ours?

And what if he did not migrate across the border, if others did not follow him, even then, could we possibly believe our schools would suddenly be adequately funded; our healthcare system would tend to all our ills; our emergency rooms would no longer bear the brunt of ailing, child-bearing indigents; our jails would become under-populated; our social services would enjoy a surplus of unclaimed resources; the graffiti, the roadside litter, the illicit drugs, the sins ascribed to the unwanted would all be swept up and away in a wave of homogeneous consideration?

No, she imagines, in the immigrant’s absence, people still would complain about misspent funds, about inequity in the allocation of the nation’s resources, about things and people and motivations we don’t understand. Still we would bellow our fear, our frustration, our prejudice, drowning out his soft supplications for labor and a sandwich.

The man comes to the woman’s gate to work and to eat — and to hope — the same reason we all rattle the gate.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photograph of migrant worker camp, 1939, courtesy of Library of Congress.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you,” he said. After his briefcase hit the empty seat.

I looked up from my book and was not surprised by what I found: older white male, expensive suit, assumptive bearing, and a physique to match the sonorous voice — he was too large even for the exit row. But upon a second, sneaky glance, while he stowed his luggage and adjusted himself into his seat, I noticed the faint hand tremor, the thinning hair approaching white, the hint of a stoop revealing his seventy, maybe seventy-five years.

I let a sigh slip. It was the damn tremor that swayed me, forcing me to close my book — Sue Townsend’s cruelly hilarious spoof of the British royals — and exercise the social graces Mother taught me. Besides, if he’d offered a question rather than a declarative before tossing his briefcase, I wouldn’t have thought twice about his claiming the seat. So I turned to him and said, “Of course not — please join me.”

He looked down at me without making eye contact and nodded a suitable smile in my direction as he unfurled his Financial Times, and I thought I caught disappointment flit across his visage. If only he had boarded a little faster, he might have landed next to the babe who’d sashayed down the aisle before me. She had a caboose even I noticed — as did the hungry hunter who snagged the seat next to her, licking his chops in anticipation of getting a mouthful of those sweet cheeks. So the poor old fellow was stuck with me — baggy jeans and sweatshirt (Father always said I dressed like an old boot) and a befuckled mood (I’d lost the joy of flying when the airlines stopped providing those cool little salt and pepper shakers in coach).

A flight attendant distracted our minimalist encounter when she requested verbal affirmatives from those of us in the exit row, thereby committing us to assisting in the event of an emergency. With the threat of terrorists misbehaving on planes, I took this responsibility quite seriously, but checking out my fellow prospective heroes, I had to question the legitimacy of the airline’s process.

There was one brooding skateboarder, who, upon declaring “Yes” that he was ready and willing to assist, reinserted his iPod earbuds, despite having obediently turned off the contraption, and pulled his baseball cap over his eyes, assuring neither social interaction nor emergency readiness. He was probably dreaming about the sashaying caboose.

Next to him was a gal who appeared to be on her first solo flight post aerophobia treatment. With clenched knees and jaws, her wild-eyed stare boring into the seatback in front of her and barf bag in her lap, she clutched the armrests as beads of sweat grew on her blanched face and nervous snot flicked from her nose.

Clearly neither she nor the kid could be counted on, which lent a new appreciation for my presumptuous seatmate. He looked as though he might still be strong enough to help me hoist the 70-pound door and I, having worked in social services, had proved my crisis-management abilities manyfold. In fact, the aerophobic’s nose reminded me of one such incident at the program I once directed for multi-handicapped blind adults.

I’d received a frantic call to my office from the nurse’s station one sunny California afternoon. “Conrad bit Nadine!” the shift supervisor shrieked.

“Is she OK? Did you isolate Conrad?”

“He bit her! He bit her!”

“Yes, I got that. Take a breath. Is Nadine OK?”

“He bit her! He bit her nose! In her room! There’s blood everywhere!”

“Bring bandages and an icepack to her room.” I ran from my office and met the supervisor at Nadine’s door, where Nadine stood silent and still, hands covering her face and blood drenching her blouse.

“Conrad bit my nose,” she said, dropping her hands to reveal a bloody void where her nose once was.

“Shit. Where’s the nose?” I asked the supervisor. “Did he swallow it?”

She was busy tossing her lunch in Nadine’s trashcan, so I had Nadine press a bandage to her new facial concavity, and I dropped to the floor. There I was, in my tidy little business suit and pumps, crawling across the institutional carpet in pursuit of a nose — which I found under the bed, right where Conrad had spit it.

Later, when I asked him why he did it, he said, “She was rude to me, so I felt for her nose and I bit it.”

So, yep, pushing people down the inflatable slide seemed manageable, as long as the old fellow could indeed help me lift the door out of the way. This thought shifted my predisposition from dislike to acceptance of the man.

Except then he blew it. After folding his newspaper and tucking it in the seat pocket, he settled his elbow on our shared armrest. Now, this alone is an annoying but common maneuver on a plane. Men do it to women without a thought, although bold women preempt it by getting there first. But it was the subsequent pressure of his upper arm against mine that set me off. I shifted every body part that I could toward the empty space between my seat and the emergency exit door, but it was not enough. Still his arm pressed to mine. It was surely an intrusion, and it was unbelievable that he couldn’t feel it.

Now, my Southern upbringing precluded my saying what I was thinking — that he move his fucking arm — so out of desperate discomfort, I leaned forward and buried my face in my book, determined to disregard him the rest of the flight.

But he had other plans. Having consumed his Financial Times, he proceeded to interpret it for the rest of us. “Obama Bin Laden,” he chuckled, “he is doing everything he possibly can to slow down our financial recovery.” My hackles began to rise, and I pretended to continue reading.

“People of wealth will never vote for him again,” he continued, “and the young derelicts who did in 08 might actually acquire the discernment to think twice in 2012, particularly the trust fund kids. I have one client whose offspring have probably voted away their inheritance.”

My pretense shattered and I turned to him, preparing to challenge him for likening the President to Osama Bin Laden.

But he prattled on: “Thankfully, it doesn’t much affect me. I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime — of course, I am bragging — but, yes, I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime. It’s long gone, now.” And then he paused, looked at me directly, and laughed a melancholy little laugh. “Most of my colleagues invested in commercial properties, things like that, but I didn’t. I saw the world instead.”

This time, it was that little laugh that swayed me. If nothing else, he deserved some consideration for his regrets, whatever they were. And there was that pesky Southern thing again. So I listened to his stories and nodded, oohed and ahhed in all the right places, and learned that as a young man he’d ridden his motorcycle across Europe; he was divorced years ago and never remarried; he didn’t usually reveal that he was an attorney, but he was; the district attorney and he barely tolerated each other, but he was friendly with a lot of the judges; he had no children he owned up to; he smoked fine Cuban cigars, but of course, he said, he was bragging again.

I patted his arm. “You’re entitled, Honey.” And he regaled me with his stories for the rest of the flight, while the skateboarder snored under his baseball cap and the aerophobic came to her senses and demanded to be moved from the exit row.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

The lawyer was on my mind as I drove home from the airport. When I arrived, I Googled his particulars and found his name in an attorney directory, where he mugged with one of his spiffy cigars. I searched for more and found an article. “Sweetie,” I called to my husband. “Look at this. I chatted with this fellow on the plane. In the 80s, he got into a wee-wee contest with a judge over wearing a turban in court.”

“Was he packing explosives in his underwear?”

“I think that’s probably racist, Sweetie. Besides, you joke like that and I’ll have to frisk you.”

“OK, then I’m packing explosives in my underwear.”

“Funny boy.” I kissed him. “Seriously. He refused to explain why he wore the turban, and the judge insisted that he couldn’t wear it without stating a ‘legitimate’ reason. He prevailed eventually.”

“Was he wearing it when you met him?”

“No. I suppose he’d made his point when he won.”

“Hmmm. So, what’s your point?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. It’s just interesting. Nothing, I suppose.” I went back to reading the case, amused by his eccentricities and disappointed I hadn’t been a little nicer. But I don’t know, maybe it was just that Southern thing again.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

*Oh the times! Oh the customs! – Cicero, 63 BC

(NOTE: Photograph by Nathan Rupert via a Creative Commons license.)

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,500 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A few months ago, I received a letter from the California Employment Development Department (EDD), indicating that I might qualify for yet another federal extension of unemployment insurance (UI). As I wondered at this amazing government largesse, my dear, darling and gainfully-employed husband reminded me of the hundreds of thousands of dollars I have paid into government coffers over the last thirty-six years, taking the fun out of what had heretofore felt like a gift. Killjoy.

Anyway, the letter said if I were to qualify for the next extension, I could just sit tight because EDD would process the claim for me and keep on sending those bi-weekly claim forms and checks, so I could continue eating my chocolate-laced gorp; watching my lineup of soapy, scripted lives portrayed by unexceptional actors who forsook Hollywood hopes for the joys of regular paychecks; and ordering monstrosities made by enslaved children for other unexceptional actors to model on the shopping channels.

Impressed with the ease and respectful nature of the UI process (I had previously jotted notes of heartfelt thanks on claim forms, even though a heartless computer scanner was the likely recipient of my gratitude) and well aware that I could not get a live UI representative on the phone (I spent three hours and forty-seven minutes one morning when the cable TV was down hitting the redial button to no avail), I assumed a wait-and-see attitude and returned to my activities of daily living.

Shortly thereafter, I received the final UI check from the previous federal extension. Knowing it might be the last, I debated whether to spend it on Christmas gifts for everyone on my list who had not said anything idiotic in at least a fortnight or for everyone on my list who had voted for Barack Obama. The debate concluded when it became apparent the two lists were mutually inclusive. However, some weeks later, having received no communication from EDD — no bi-weekly claim forms, no checks, no love notes, no nada — I realized I had not qualified for the next federal extension.

That last check was indeed the last. So, in a fit of pique I took it to one of the many local casinos and blew the whole thing on five-dollar slots.

Not really. Although I’m pleased at least some tribes have figured out a way to be reimbursed for the lands the white guys with bigger guns took from them, I cannot condone gambling. No, no, no. In actuality, I went the Obama voter Christmas gift route.

Nope, didn’t do that either. In a burst of self-indulgence, I spent it all on slinky lingerie.

OK, if you knew me, you’d know that’s a joke, and you’d know just how absurd — and unbecoming — a thought it is. In fact, I put the check in the bank. And then charged a plasma screen TV. Just kidding — you have to find cheap fun when you’re on the dole.

A few weeks later, out of the blue, I received three bi-weekly claim forms from EDD for the next federal extension. Yippee! I resumed counting UI a nice benefit of these great United States, completed the forms, signed them and was about to stick them in their envelopes, when I noticed I’d filled in a “Yes” box on one form where I should have responded “No.” I distinctly exed out the “Yes,” solidly filled in the “No,” and dropped the forms in the mail, once again duly impressed with the ability of a vast bureaucracy to serve little old me with such relative ease. Then I waited for the checks to restart.

In the meantime, I spent my days dining on a healthier gorp blend (heavier on the blueberries and almonds for their anti-oxidant benefits and lighter on the chocolate); watching a new lineup of those humiliating judge shows, because they made my paltry unemployed life feel so exquisitely superior; and flaccidly cruising eBay, yearning — inconsummately, due to the delay of my UI checks — to purchase such gems as a collection of three vintage, mint-condition Cowsills albums that would be just perfect to take to Bob Cowsill’s upcoming concert in my little town of Fallbrook, along with my Cowsills fan club membership certificate and signed poster from 1969, if I could just find them.

One hot and sticky afternoon, with my tushy in the air and my head submerged under the bed, fruitlessly searching for my Cowsills memorabilia, I heard the faint opening and closing of the mailbox. Spitting dust balls and frustration, I retrieved the mail and found another EDD letter, hidden in a haberdashery catalogue. Unlike lingerie catalogues, clearly designed for the male audience, I find the intended target of haberdashery collateral mystifying. Nonetheless, the EDD letter was clear and direct. It indicated a telephone interview had been scheduled for me and firmly stated I had better be prepared to answer questions pertaining to why I had been unable to accept full-time work. “Or else” was strongly implied.

I cursed the computer that had neither noticed my appreciative comments nor my corrected “No” response to question number 2, “Was there any reason (other than sickness or injury) that you could not have accepted full time work each workday?” Then I added a bag of Ghirardelli chocolate chips to my gorp, turned on a novella (I figured I could at least practice my Spanish while losing myself in the soap’s misery), put the Cowsill’s album collection on the credit card, and awaited my interview to right the computer’s inhuman wrong.

On the appointed day, I received a call from a fellow with the singsong speech of a technical support person laboring in the bowels of Mumbai. I thanked him for the call, explained I had no tech support requirements, and tried to get off the phone. He was persistent and a little difficult to understand, but after my third “Excuse me?” I realized he was introducing himself as “Ben.” It seemed an interesting choice for someone working in an IT sweatshop in India. Perhaps it was a nod to Ben Franklin, a man of many accomplishments worthy of such sweet recognition. Or maybe the fellow was delivering some veiled commentary on our economic woes by assuming the given name of Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Bernanke.

As it turns out, I never learned why he chose Ben, because I suddenly recognized the words “Employment Development Department,” and I swiftly pedaled to correct our inauspicious start. “Ooh, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t quite hear you. How are you, today?”

“Fine, thank you,” and Ben proceeded to ask me if I were available for full-time employment. “Yep,” I said. He asked if I were doing anything that would preclude my accepting full-time employment. “Nope,” I assured him. “Because,” Ben said, “if you were offered full-time employment, you must be able to accept it.” “Well, of course,” I said. “You are certain,” Ben asked, “if you were offered full-time employment you would be able to accept it?”

This was a confusing interview, and I worried it might not end well. So, despite a sense that as a beneficiary of UI, I should embrace my Southern roots and just follow Ben’s manly lead, I decided to take a more directive approach.

“Oh, sure, I’d be able to accept it. But you know, I think the problem here is simply that I checked the wrong box on the form. If you have access to my claim forms, you’ll see I corrected it. That’s why you’re calling, right? But it was just an error, and I fixed it, and you know how computers are,” which statement caused me to stop short because, of course, he was not the tech support fellow I’d first assumed and perhaps he didn’t know how computers are and maybe I was a racist pig to have made the original assumption. Rats, I thought, and I wondered if I could cancel the Cowsills order.

“No,” Ben said, “we are calling because you reported that you had earnings. I see here you had earnings in April. What did you do to earn this money?”

I had written the answer to that question on the form under his nose, but I explained anyway. “I write occasional book reviews for a newspaper, which comes to about seventeen cents an hour, but I figure it saves the government a few dollars.” And then I waited for his expression of heartfelt appreciation for my honesty.

Instead, he said, “Please explain the work you did to earn this money.”

“Explain book reviews?” I was even more confused and began my typical diarrhetic nervous spew. “I read books and then I wrote critiques of them. You know, what I thought of them, as, like, books.” And then I rallied a bit. “Actually, I haven’t been particularly impressed by the authors so far — they certainly aren’t Salman Rushdies or Jhumpa Lahiris — but stringers can’t be choosers.” Nice touch on the Indian authors, I applauded myself. Sadly, it had no effect.

“Was this full-time work that you did?”

“No, I’m a stringer, a freelancer. It’s similar to piecework.”

“Did this work prevent you from accepting full-time employment?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you sign a contract for this work that would prevent you from accepting full-time employment?”

“Ah, nope.” This was weird.

“And this work you did, it does not prevent you from accepting full-time employment?”

“I sense you think I did something wrong by doing freelance work?”

“No, but you must be available to accept full-time employment. Are you available to accept full-time employment?”

“Yes, I am available to accept full-time employment.”

“You are certain you are available to accept full-time employment?”

I was certain of nothing at this point, but, in flailing defensive mode, I resorted to fabrication. “Yes, I am certain.”

“OK then. Thank you for your time. Good day.”

And that was it: The UI checks had stopped for ten weeks because I reported earning one hundred dollars for a couple book reviews — self-published books at that! I wondered what EDD would do when it laid human eyes on the teaching income I reported in May, then I contemplated the dismal descent into the hell fires of self-publishing and fretted that I might one day face the excruciating choice between that and full-time employment, and then a worrisome thought occurred to me.

What about the people who don’t have working spouses? What about the people who rely on unemployment insurance to feed their kids, to keep roofs over their heads? What are they supposed to do when they report a bit of income and their checks are stopped until their names pop up on the call list of flagrant abusers of the UI system? What about them?

Images of The Full Monty’s dancing dole line flashed before my eyes and I realized my hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to a bureaucracy that only works if you don’t really need it. This epiphany was more than I could bear in my flustered state. I reached for the gorp.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo “Gorped Out” by Stephen Cummings 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.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“Am I weird?” the teenager asked, balancing an old Ann Coulter book on her head, amid the bookstore’s discount stacks.

“You ask that as though ‘weird’ were a pejorative,” her mother said. “You don’t want to be normal, do you? Do you want to be like everyone else?”

“I know what ‘pejorative’ means, and, as for being normal, which that word is not, I think I’d just like to fly under the radar.” She shrugged and Godless slipped from her head, landing face up on the industrial carpeting.

“Yikes!” her mother stepped back. “Now, that woman is truly weird. The wrong kind of weird, the kind that verges on evil.” She looked almost serious.

“Hey, why would she wear low-cut stuff with a cross?” The girl picked up Coulter and traced her plunging neckline and the cross pointing into her cleavage. “She hardly has breasts, anyway. So, like, is she really evil?”

“She doesn’t deserve breasts, and she’s the closest thing to evil there is because she pretends to believe the outrageously divisive things she says for the purpose of inciting fearful people to reject the unfamiliar — people who are different, opposing ideas, whatever — and to look to her for bullshit passing as comforting fact.” The mother took a deep breath.

“Huh? What are you talking about? Why do you always talk like that?” The girl balanced another book on her head while exploring Coulter’s character in her book jacket.

“OK. She’s not really evil, but … let’s just say she’s full of shit. She’s full of shit because she tells fearful people outrageous shit, knowing it’s shit, and manipulating them into buying her shit.”

“We just learned about that, that thing you just did.” The girl flipped through the Coulter book, looking for more inappropriate pictures. “It’s called circular reasoning.”

“Well, Coulter has mastered it, that and the absurdly profane. After President Obama spoke at Notre Dame University’s commencement, urging pro-choice and anti-abortion folks to make nice, Coulter suggested that next year Notre Dame have an abortion performed live on stage, and that the “president throw out the ceremonial first fetus, like on opening day in baseball.’”

“Yuck! She’s gross!” The girl dropped Coulter on what she figured was her pulpy little ass. “Hey! If you look at it from this angle, the title looks like ‘Goddess.’ Do you think that’s intentional?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” her mother snickered. “Once you’ve contracted a severe case of superiority complex, you’re much more susceptible to delusional omniscience.”

“Really, do you have to talk like that?” The girl looked at her mother through the 3-D glasses she’d found in the book now perched on her head. “Don’t you want people to understand you?”

“Not always, but I’m OK with my kind of weird. Coulter has never written about a substantive issue she didn’t slander with superficiality.”

The girl continued to ogle the downed idol at her feet. “Well, I don’t know who she frickin is, but she looks like she’s trying to sell a book about religion with, like, sex. Not that she looks so sexy. Actually, she looks kind of bitchy. Why don’t you just say she’s a bitch? People would get that.”

“One can only hope they do,” her mother said.

“But do you think there are people who are really evil?” The girl looked around, still sporting the 3-D glasses.

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “Even the most horrible people always seem to have at least a hint of humanity. I’m sure even George Bush loves his kids.”

“Jeez. Bush isn’t evil.” The girl squinted at Coulter’s image to see if the 3-D glasses would make her breasts any bigger. “He was just too stupid to be president.”

“OK, just kidding about Bush. Dick Cheney’s actually the almost-evil one, with his fear-mongering crappola.”

“So, you’re saying, like, even Hitler must have done something good at some point in his life?” The girl stuck the 3-D glasses in a copy of Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex, which seemed funny, but she wasn’t sure why, so she didn’t mention it.

“Well, yes, probably, although it pains me to say so. Maybe Hitler once helped an elderly woman across the street or wiped his pee off the toilet seat.” She picked Coulter up from the floor. “So even this nitwit could have the capacity for truth and love,” the mother said unconvincingly, returning the book to the discount stack.

“Well, anyway, so am I weird or what?” the teenager asked, balancing A Thousand Splendid Suns on her head.

“You’re my favorite kind of weird, Sweetie; you’re wonderful.”

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Editor’s Note: This piece is cross-posted with www.ivorytowerz.com.)