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.)

Warm, woolen wrappings hung from the coat racks in the church of my youth. In the hallway, outside the room where families gathered to praise God and pass an abundance of homemade delicacies on wintry Sunday evenings, I would play a game. Escaping from the big people whose hands I had to shake firmly because my mother said so, I would hide among the weighty coats, weaving between the tweeds, the camel hairs, the felted cloaks, exploring hidden treasures in pockets, breathing the scent of sheep’s wool damp with winter rain, the huge leather gloves, rabbit-soft on the inside. I would settle on the warmest coat with the best smell and reach up into it. Then God would wrap her arms around me, and there we would whisper secrets to each other until one or another of my siblings tracked us down to fetch us for the meal.

It was a church I knew as well as my own bedroom: a place to run and play and sing, a place where I knew the love of God, a place where I could always find her when I needed her.

Then we moved to a new state and a new church, and God of course moved with us. She made herself at home in the larger sanctuary, the lighter pews, the heavenly choir loft and the organ’s pipes that gave reed to seemly Southern Baptist hymns. Together we sang words of joy and adoration for each other.

And then one day, as my aunt circled the church looking for a parking space, she asked Sweet Baby Jesus to find us one. I wondered at the request, sure there were more important prayers for him to answer.

And then on a runaway adventure to the West, my brother reported finding Jesus. Unaware he’d been lost, I was grateful that all was well, but unhappy to be informed that I was going to hell because I had not also found Jesus, because I’d not invited him into my heart. I questioned the accuracy of my bother’s prophecy, though, because God and I were already in each other’s hearts — and why would Jesus relegate me to eternal and fiery damnation simply for failing to put him on an invitation list?

And then, when I carried my child in one arm and in the other a sign that said to keep abortion safe and legal, women clutching Bibles to their breasts screamed foul things, calling me an evil baby killer, shrieking that God knew I was an unfit mother. I cradled my child and whispered gentle secrets to her, that different people understand God in different ways, but that God does not scream at people, that she loves all of us — even the women who were so unloving.

And then Pat Robertson proclaimed that God belonged not only in our hearts and in our churches, but also in the White House. I suspected it was up to the president to decide when to have God over to help and when to do the best he could with the gifts she gave him. The president agreed.

But then the next president claimed God was indeed in the White House, and dropped her name every chance he got. Except, I couldn’t find her face among the mostly white men who proclaimed God’s co-sponsorship of their bills and battles. Although they intoned her name, she did not attend their ritual signings, nor lend her name to their memos endorsing torturous retribution. No, she was not there.

And then I realized how much I missed the church of my youth, the believers who carried their politics to the polls and God’s love in their hearts. I wanted to find them again, and I searched. But at the first church and the second and the third, the cars bore bumper stickers that did not speak of God, but of the foolishness of saving God’s trees and animals, the treason of those who prayed for peace, the stupidity of reproductive rights, the abomination of the wrong kind of marriage, the condemnation of all but the passengers in those vehicles on that parking lot of that creed. There was no parking there for me.

So now it is no surprise that the percentage of people who disclaim religion has increased from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008 (see the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, released last week).

I bet, though, if we could find the right coat rack, God — who would not favor one nation over another, one political party over another, one gender or race or orientation or faith over another — would join those of us who don’t have a place in the parking lot, and she would embrace us in the warm, woolen wrappings of my youth.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo of Hilltop Church, Mendham, N.J., the church of my youth, from the Library of Congress’ Historical American Buildings Survey.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

As she has done every anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision since her epiphany, since her wrenching acknowledgement of the sin upon innocent preborn souls, Mary prepares to go forth and spread the word of God’s forgiveness; to preach the sanctity of life; to witness unto those women weak of heart, frightened, confused; to stop them before the clinic doors and save them and their precious preborns from the wretched contemplation of unholy murder.

Mary pulls her long, brown hair into a tidy ponytail and dresses in practical layers to accommodate the variable temperatures of a daylong vigil. She straps on her pro-life fanny pack, loaded with blessed tracts and embryo dolls. Forsaking all adornment but her cross, she practices her look of fearsome love before the bedroom mirror. Confident and ready for battle, she clutches the bigger-than-life-size poster of aborted fetus parts in one hand, her Bible in the other, and marches to the local abortion mill, where the profit motive thrives under Satan’s leering eyes and abortions are encouraged, to provide lucrative embryos for ungodly research.

Mary takes her post, armed with the righteous assurance that she is doing God’s will. She waits for the poor misguided mothers to arrive, bearing their preborn to slaughter. And come they do, in numbers that torment Mary’s heart with the horrid image of God’s beloved preborns torn asunder by evil and torturous tools in the hands of Death’s doctors.

But stalwart she stands, sure in her knowledge of God’s intent: that virtuous blood not be shed; that she salvage one desperate soul and, with it, another precious innocent dangling at the great abyss of immoral destruction.

“Wait!” she calls and reaches for the nearest sinner, a young woman in immodest jeans from which the girl will soon burst forth in the full flower of maternal fertility, can Mary save her.

“Don’t do this,” Mary says. “There are other choices before you; this is not the only way.”

“Huh?” the girl asks, disinclined to remove her iPod earphones for a stranger.

“Do not renounce God’s marvelous gift growing within you,” Mary says. “Already she feels. Already she knows life. Already she loves you. And we love you. We can help you.”

“Excuse me,” the girl says, “what did you say?”

“I know you’re scared, but don’t succumb to the fear of your situation, to the temptation of a seemingly easy solution. In truth, it is not easy. There are better ways. There is help for you. God has sent you his love and support, and I’m here to give them to you. Let us help you and your preborn child. You have other choices.”

“Say what?” The girl reluctantly unplugs herself from her music.

“Choose life,” Mary implores her, putting down her poster and Bible and pulling tiny plastic embryos from her fanny pack. “Look, choose life for the blameless preborn baby God has given you, and you will receive his endless blessings. Choose life for your baby and heavenly eternity for yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl says, stepping around Mary.

“Oh please!” Mary pleads, grabbing the girl’s hand and dropping to her knees, struggling to remember good sidewalk counseling technique. “Please consider your options. There are others who would love to have your baby. God’s innocent fruit grows in the garden of your womb. Please!”

“Let go!” The girl leans away from Mary’s passionate grasp.

“No, please stop!” Mary cries. “Don’t do this. We will help you through your pregnancy. I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there. I thought I was alone, and I made the wrong choice, and I’ve suffered for my sin. But you are not alone, really. We will help you!”

“I said let go, you weirdo! And mind your own business!” The girl pulls harder.

“Wait, please! Before God formed the sinless one in your womb, he knew her. His hands shaped and made her. Would you now turn from him and destroy her?” Mary weeps, wrapping her arms around the girl’s legs. “Don’t do this! Don’t kill her! Don’t murder your baby! Please! Please!”

“Lady,” says the girl, pushing Mary sharply away with her foot. “Cool your shit. I’m just here for a pap smear.”

“Oh. … Oh, never mind.” Mary struggles up from the ground, brushes dirt and leaves from the seat of her pants, and goes in search of the next baby killer.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Anthony Easton via Creative Commons License.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The woman was looking into the eyes, sad and old, of a bright young man when she was reminded of an even older scene that absorbed her focus, and her stare turned blank.

In the moment long gone, the woman was loving her six-year-old daughter, returned from a day of finding her place in her first-grade world. The child nestled into her mother’s lap and declared it a good day — because she’d made friends with Chrissy, the really nice girl with wispy blond hair and eyes as blue as the marbles in the marble jar, and they’d both gotten smiley faces on their writing worksheets and they had matching pencils and they were going to be best friends and do the monkey bars together during recess and they were not going to be friends with the stupid Spanish kids on the playground.

The mother’s heart crashed to her womb as she searched through tumbling brown curls, into the deep black eyes of her child, her child of the blended histories of old Puerto Ricans and Southern slave owners, of Spanish fishing villagers and Western pioneers.

Her beautiful child with ugly new distinctions.

Then it was another more recent day, and all the parents waited at the schoolyard gate to embrace their children and return them to the safety of home. But one father, wild with intoxication, his eyes aflame, frightened the others. They ran to the office; they begged the principal not to allow him to take his child home, a home that could not possibly be safe. The principal reassured them with her concern. She asked which one he was, which parent, she asked, the Mexican?

She was wrong.

Then it was yet another day, the dawning of a president of color. And the couple who had supported him drove into the resort town center to stock their vacation shelves, to continue their celebration, not yet ready to remove his bumper sticker from their car. They walked past two men, leaning against a pickup, who did not offer reciprocal nods as the couple walked past, but, instead, invoked an invigorated Klan, “Nigger lovers,” the men said, kicking dirt and hate.

This, in our state, the couple mourned.

And then the woman was back in the here and now, looking into the sad, old eyes of a bright young man. He was telling her about the day when he was walking home from school, and someone yelled racist slurs at him and he cried, he cried because he was no longer safe. And he will cry again, because many white people believe his people cause all the problems in their town.

But still he is a student of hope. He believes in peace for his community, for the next generation of children walking home from school, for his whole town, his whole town.

We’re all just people, with the same needs, the same aspirations. Right?

So he said maybe things will be better now, now as the country learns from its mixed-race president.

She said her daughter has survived and thrived without the hate school once taught her.

He said the forty percent increase in hate crimes against Latinos is not a forecast, trends change.

She said those who blame immigrant gang members for all a community’s crimes — when so few of its crimes are gang-related — will surely be enlightened by truth.

He said the forty-eight percent rise in the number of hate groups will reverse as Bush’s fear fades, as the economy recovers, when leaders no longer incite discrimination.

And so they shared their prejudice for hope.

The risk of hate: Salaspils Concentration Camp Memorial, Latvia, where an estimated 53,000 people were killed. "Beyond these gates the earth moans."

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Kit-Bacon Gressitt ©2008)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

He arrives after morning service, having thanked God for a new president and 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 her first name, applaud the election’s outcome, ask about her 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 wife’s room, wishing a good day to those he passes. He arranges tidy, fresh flowers in the vase on her bedside stand, saving the day-old blossoms for the orderly to give to someone who has been forgotten by family and friends. He pulls the chair beside her, takes her curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses her cool, brittle lips with his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the day sixty years ago when he knelt before her, imploring her to be his forever, and she held his head in her lap, loving away his tears.

He begins reading her the news, his tremulous voice breaking at the 364 electoral votes inviting a new gentility and ethos to national politics. He touches her hand for emphasis, editorializing on the other campaigns, the fickle path of ballot measures, the hope of a neophyte era. He encourages her with questions, always ready to fill the silence. After the paper is read, he rises to stretch and adjusts the blinds. He checks her chart, which never varies, and says another prayer for her recovery.

His lunch tray is delivered as he tells her of the garden’s status, the latest goings on of the offspring. He eats intermittently, distracted from the stillness by the rhythm of her respirator, the beeping pumps, the steady tempos that sustain her. He closes his eyes, remembering the summer dance when they waltzed so closely in the gazebo and she whispered of a child to come.

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 her if there’s anything he can do for her and adjusts her pillow, pretties the bow in her 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 her pale arm as only a lover can. He reads to her until the dinner tray arrives and silence returns, the respirator and pumps carrying the conversation. After dinner, he touches her cheek, her thigh, her belly, absently tapping to the beat of the machines.

At 8:00 p.m., when visiting hours are over, he takes her curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses her cool, brittle lips with his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the frosty day — the children long grown and gone — when they waltzed 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 her stroke, every day since she died in the emergency room and they made her breathe again, every day. And so he will continue to visit. He will continue to wait for her to awaken, to come back to him, to waltz with him again, the moonlight glowing in her hair and her arms so light around him.

He doesn’t hear the doctors who say there’s little brain function, little hope; the chaplain who says it is not a sin to let her go; the children who say she’s had a good life; the social worker who tells him to get on with his own. She is his life.

So he thanks God for Medicare, which pays to keep her lungs breathing, her heart beating and food pumping into her stomach day after day.

Just as he thanks God for President-elect Obama, whom he prays will have the wisdom to reform health care, to make the anguished decisions inevitably necessary for the nation.

Just as he fears what those decisions might be.

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

CHAPTER 1. They meet at a mutual friend’s wedding.

“Oh yes, hi! Audry’s told me so much about you!”

“Oh yeah? Should I duck?”

“No, no. She’s your most ardent fan — and a great sales rep. My little heart’s going pitter patter in your manly presence.”

“She’s told me a whole lot about you too — every factoid of it favorable, of course, intentionally tailored to the male on the prowl. So, I suppose this is a set up?”

“We’d be fools not to admit it. But she does have lovely taste. Perhaps we should sample the glass before we reject the vintage?”

“Say what?”

“Oh, who cares if she’s playing Yenta? We’re the only two left at this shindig who’re young enough to remain upright without assistance. How about asking me to dance?”

“Dance? With you? Here, now? Well sure, yeah, I’d like that, a lot.”

CHAPTER 2. They close down the Moose Lodge Community Banquet Hall, drawing the last, weary notes from Joey Brown and His Band of Renown, a quintet that relies heavily on the Polka. But this isn’t the end of it. …

“Hi, I’m glad you called — a movie sounds good!”

“You sound good, exceptionally good. I, I’m attracted to you, and I’d like to explore this further.”

“You sound surprised?”

“Welp, dating’s no man’s forte. It’s always an adventure.”

“I understand, and I’m happy you’ve overcome your male enculturation. Forthright ranks high in my book; it’s a rare treat. Bravo! So, were you thinking sherpas and yaks, or something a bit more tame that would allow me to get all dolled up?”

“Ah ha, there’s a smart aleck lurking beneath that conservative exterior. I like that!”

CHAPTER 3. After many movies, moonlit beach strolls, sunsets — and sunrises — things are serious.

“Are you awake, Babe?”

“Not really.”

“Well, wake up, please? I had to take a leak, and standing there, I realized I have a status report I have to deliver.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. You, you are my joy, my anguish, my passion, my frustration, my effervescence, my hope. I thank God for nudging you across my errant path.”

“Oh, Sweetie, you know I love you, too. I love living with you, cooking for you, sewing your buttons back on. I’d be happy to grow old and crotchety with you — and wipe the drool from your chin.”

CHAPTER 4. Love is sweet, but not without its hurdles.

“Oh God, your mother detested me! She hated my outfit. She hated my hair. She hated my sense of humor. She hated my teeth. She hates me!”

“But, Babe, a good portion of the population hates you — oh come on, that was a joke. Where is that outrageous sense of humor when you need it most? Look, Babe, she just met you. And admit it: You’re not what she had envisioned for me all these years.”

“I know, I know. She was hoping for the four Bs: blond, beautiful, Bryn Mawr grad, baby-making material. Right?”

“Wrong. When it comes right down to it, she just wants me to be happy. And she did give you shortbread to bring home. She makes you shortbread; you’re in. So, relax. She’ll come to love you — but never as much as I absolutely adore every iota of you. I want you to be within reach always. Seriously, I want to be with you forever. Look, I’ll wash the dishes to my dying day, if you’ll cook. Will you marry me?”

“Yes, yes indeed I will!”

CHAPTER 5. And Tom and Harry live happily ever after in wedded bliss.

Don’t deny someone’s child — perhaps your own — the right to marriage.

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