The Acrobatic Dancer
How did I get here? Somehow no one else here seems to be asking that, and while it doesn’t seem to lessen the urgency of this mission, it does kind of make me wonder about their sanity. I want to accept these fellow insurrectionists as brothers. And sisters, because about a third of this restless citizenry seem to identify as female. They always have.
The president had said guns were okay, but there was talk it was all just a setup for Antifa Democrats to seize them. I’m clutching a piece of broken cement block; my father-in-law, who is around here somewhere, has a hoedad.
I get to carry a walkie-talkie, too. I’m hearing lots of impassioned voices in its speaker; I haven’t contributed much to the conversation except to say “copy that” and “roger.” Confirmations. Things I learned from watching movies and GI Joe commercials when I was a kid. I keep it brief, because it hurts my throat to growl-shout the way most of these guys do. They must have packed some lozenges.
I don’t dare so say, but the vibe is much like the cops-and-robbers dramas my generation played out as children — the games that always ended with one kid yelling, “I got you!” and the another crying, “No you didn’t!” Then they’d argue, eventually going off to play something else. I’d hear them outside while I was in my room practicing my acrobatic dancing.
“Hey faggot!” one of them would call up my way sometimes, inviting me to play with them. I usually demurred. But not this time. This time I’m in it to win it. My dancing days are through, as the song says.
When I try to figure out how I got from acrobatics in my room to joining a extremist group breaking into a government building to change the results of a federal election, it’s as if something short-circuits in my head, and I can’t think back further than a month or two.
So I thought I would just start writing it all down. I know I got arrested. That was awhile ago, maybe three months? I was driving to a concert, Bonny Light Horseman was the band, and trying to find my way into downtown Townville, South Carolina. I was looking for Townville Town Hall. The signage was horrendous. Townville seemed like endless sprawl. There was no there there, or at least not anywhere I looked.
When I finally spotted a sign reading, “Historic Townville,” I turned and hit the gas too excitedly, and saw the flashing lights behind me. While I searched my wife’s car for insurance, registration, etc., one of the police officers performing his job to the best of his ability shone his flashlight on my door’s armrest, which had a pipe resting on it, and an almond-sized morsel of marijuana within its bowl.
“Step out of the car, please,” advised the officer of the law. Although I told him the marijuana was medicinal, kind of, because it would help keep me awake for the long, late drive home, the lawman didn’t seem interested. I was handcuffed and loaded into a squad car, which took me past Townville Town Hall to Townville Department of Corrections, where a cell awaited me.
Though I was treated kind of brusquely by all staff and lodgers there, there was a particular inmate, a woman with arms zip-tied to a chair, who either hated the very look on my face, which was dejection or horror or some combination of the two, or hated all mankind. “Don’t you fuckin’ look at me, you fuckin’ rapist!” she screamed, and no one rebuked her.
When I tried to explain how I was actually looking at a shadow on the wall above her head, a security guard who must have been having a rotten day advised, “Don’t you fuckin’ talk to her!”
I thought it best to obey. I paced my cell, singing quietly my favorite song at the time, “Imagine,” by John Lennon. Its incongruity with my crude surroundings calmed me a bit, until I was told my bond had been set at $8,000. It was the kind of money I did not have; nor did my horrified wife, to whom I’d placed my singular phone call. Mad enough at first to be content to let me stay where I was for a few days, Bernice eventually calmed enough to begin rummaging her brain for how to raise that unseemly sum. My time limit left me hearing this final sentence fragment: “I’m just going to have to call my dad and….”
“No!” I yelled, “I’ll get a bondsman!” But Bernice didn’t hear that part, and two hours later I was freed into the brisk Townville night. I approached a guy in an unmarked white van whose job, it seemed, was to drive freedmen to the town’s one motel for an unreasonable forty dollars, which I had in my possession so I could buy myself a Bonny Light Horseman T-shirt during better times.
His name was Frank. We didn’t make much conversation.
The hotel was dank. I didn’t get much sleep.
Bernice was not responding to my calls, nor any of my text messages save for one: “You will be picked up at your motel at ten.”
The picker-upper was not, in fact, Bernice. I remember my surprise, then dread, when I saw the white SUV and its white-haired driver, my father-in-law, Ken. What could I do but get in?
Somehow, I’m thinking now, as my compatriots and I plow through barriers and break glass to gain us entry into the capitol, if I hadn’t gotten into that car, I wouldn’t be here today. But if I’d walked away, would Ken have not run me down? Or shot me with one of his guns? He was mad enough to do so.
“Stupid!” was his greeting.
“I know.”
“You don’t know! And here I am, bailing your ass out!”
I mustered my most sincere tone when I said, “Thank you so much for doing so, sir. I — ”
“What choice did I have?” He was having none of it, my earnest gratitude or my respectful questions about how he had been. In a way, I was relieved, because displaying false interest makes my face do weird things and, if extended over hours, can start to physically hurt.
The conversation lagged for a while, but then gathered some steam as Ken began enumerating my flaws as a husband, father and breadwinner. From there it moved to our nation’s “fucked up culture,” where no one had any accountability and everyone expected to be saved from every plight and predicament. Ken, an heir to an Fayetteville filbert fortune who had only himself to maintain it, understood what it was like to rely on one’s own wits and not ask for handouts.
He was on a roll. As we passed through the town of Hartwell, everything he saw seemed to remind him of how soft and stupid everyone was getting. “No one cares what’s happening in the inner cities,” he said. “The nonstop crime and indecency! No, instead, it’s all about all the supposed white collar crime. Does white collar crime ever make you feel like this?” Stopping for a red light, Ken reached under his seat and pulled out a pistol, which he put against my head. “Huh?”’ he asked, though I hadn’t said anything. “How do you defend against this? How does it feel? White collar crime doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?”
I was more worried about someone seeing our silhouetted drama and dialing 911 than his actually pulling the trigger. But I felt like I’d be letting him down if I didn’t exhibit at least some terror. “Please, sir,” I stammered. “I’m too young! Please don’t kill me.”
His laugh was chilling. “Not letting you off that easy,” he said, tucking the gun back under the seat. “But you and I are going to do some things together. You need help. I’m not giving up on you.”
I sat with that one a while before saying, quietly, “Okay?”
“First thing, I’m getting you a gun license and tomorrow we’re going to the range.”
“You’re, you’re staying with us?” I asked.
“Damned right I am. I have more work to do. With you. On you.”
Sleep deprived and stripped of all dignity, compliance fit me like an old suit if I hadn’t gained so many recent pounds. Someone taking charge seemed just like what the doctor would order if I had health insurance.
The next day Bernice and I took a nearly wordless drive back to Townville to retrieve her car from the impound. The silence left room for thoughts. I wondered if she knew how much I had tried to make her life as easy for her as possible (as limited my capacity to do so was). Often my attempts to do so were read as lucky outcomes, or at worst, weakness. I load the dishwasher according to her philosophy. I have never left either of our two toilet seats in the upward position after urinating.
Recently, during an argument, she revealed she’d thought all these years I’d peed sitting down.
Picking up her car from the impound, she seemed more on the side of the dismissive officer on duty than on mine. On the way home she left me and my old Dodge Caliber in the dust, and when I got home she was gone. Ken, however, was waiting for me. Off we went to the range, where I shot bullets at silhouetted images of people who I was told were trying to take what was rightfully mine. I was happy when I struck the intruder’s wrist or knee, two shots that would stop nearly every mortal from seizing my property. It would certainly stop me, I thought, looking at Ken for his judgment on my progress.
“You shoot like a girl,” he said. “You need to shoot through the body, not at it.”
I thought of Annie Oakley and that other wild western markswoman whose name escaped me after another sleepless night. Wild Belle Hitchcock? My brain felt feeble and malleable. I felt very fortunate an older man was taking me under his wing and the time to teach me something useful.
One of my first impressions in my lesson that day is that there are different guns made for different situations. For instance, if I’d been possessing a firearm that day in the car when Ken held a gun to my head, a rifle or bazooka would have done me little good. To fend off Ken’s execution-style, close range attempt on my life, a pistol would have served me best.
However, if Ken were chasing me through the South Carolina forests, an AK47 semiautomatic rifle would have allowed me to hide behind a tree, poke the barrel of the gun out, aim it in his direction and let loose a torrent of bullets that, if not killing him instantly, would have slowed his advance.
Other guns, I think, are just for farting around, or brandishing in front of unarmed friends, just for kicks.
Still others are meant for shooting folks breaking into your house in the dead of night.
As they say, different gun for different fun!
Up ahead about ten yards, the insurrectionists of which I am somehow a part have successfully wrenched a door open, and there’s a push forward I am both helpless to stop and excited to participate in. All systems go!
Townville once again beckoned. My Caliber had died, and I was hesitant, if not loathe, to ask Bernice to borrow her car again. Hence my buddy Gus drove me back to Townville to plead “no contest” to possession, which earned me a year’s probation. Free at last! I thought. Gus got a speeding ticket on the way, and was fairly quiet after that.
When Ken came back a few weeks later, we attended a meeting of citizens concerned about the direction our country had taken. It was in a city ten hours from my home. I was glad Bernice was getting a break from my folly. She was having a friend over to sip wine on the back deck I had put off restaining and, as a result, was starting to decay. (The deck, not Bernice.)
Of course, home projects had to take a back seat to the more pressing issues of our nation. And I had to take a back seat to the potpourri of weaponry Ken had stacked in the front passenger’s seat of his Expedition. It left me a lot of room in the seats behind him. It reminded me of how my own dad would take me along on his shoplifting excursions to area hardware stores, how I took a back seat to the hammers, sanders, planers and grinders that emerged from his bulky coat when he descended into the driver’s seat and hauled ass.
“I was talking to my friend Sully at a gun show, and he was telling me about a Russian guy, Sergei, whose uncle owned a gun shop in downtown Raleigh,” he began, and I struggled to keep up with the intricacies of the story. “His uncle was actually not an NRA guy, didn’t even vote Republican except for Mitt Romney, because he’d had enough of Obama and his plans to seize guns. Well, Sergei learned everything there was to know about the guns at his uncle’s shop, even ended up being pretty good with a 16 gauge sniper’s rifle.”
Ken was looking more at me than the road, and I made sure to meet his gaze even as he was driving 55 mph in the passing lane of the highway and I could sense the palpable anger of the drivers behind us.
“The uncle gave him a vintage Glock from the second world war, and instead of displaying it the kid ends up showing it off to his friends at a barbeque. He shoots into the air, and everyone is cheering and cutting up, until the bullet comes down again and goes through the left shoulder and hip of a fella who wasn’t even supposed to be there; he was supposed to be at a football game where his kid brother was playing quarterback, and the kid ends up having the game of his life. Anyway….”
I was dumbfounded by the detail, the stream of consciousness riffing and editorial asides in his ten-minute story. I felt as though I was in Pat Conroy’s dream, floating along aimlessly, waiting for the next bombastic, implausible plot twist.
To condense the remainder of Ken’s story, Sergei ended up ditching the gun into a wheelbarrow full of used motor oil and was never charged. I knew the story had a something to teach me, and I mulled the myriad morals as Ken went on to another story, something about an armed hayride and a moose.
It’s amazing to me now, as I am crushed within a desperate torrent of angry citizens forcefully taking their country back, that it took me so long for Ken’s stories to really begin seeping in. I’ll admit right here that I was naive, much like the capitol policeman who thinks he can fight us off with a shield and billy club. I recognize in that officer’s eyes my own fearful ones from only a few months ago. I failed to recognize the importance of dominating those trying to dominate you.
Perhaps a bit of planning and building of defense would have thwarted us. something like a trap door beneath us, sending us all careening down a greased slide straight to the city jail. Or a cauldron of oil, fully heated, not just warm, spilled upon us as we advanced toward traitors’ offices to defecate and disgrace. Instead, I see a guy saying, essentially, “Hey now, you folks, you need to turn right back around and go home.”
Well, now he’s screaming in agony, because somebody is impaling him with a flag pole. But I believe his initial failure to dominate was what made him most vulnerable — and the simple math of his being outnumbered 2000-to-1.
Ken’s story was winding down. “And that’s why you never climb onto a hayride unarmed,” he concluded. “You’re pretty much signing your own death warrant.”
I wish I had had the persistence to ask him to repeat that story; I was still entwined in the magical series of events of his first — the Russian, his uncle, the sniper’s rifle and the motor oil. How did it all fit together? What was the message?
A red Camaro passed us on the right, his horn blaring. Ken waved to its driver, and continued on to the next exit, where he finally left the left lane and exited.
The meeting was held in a back room of the Munitions Mart. Used also for the storage of empty cardboard gun boxes, it was lit darkly, for what I soon learned was dramatic effect. A large greaseboard gave off most of the light, and there was some sort of diagram scrawled on it. Ken introduced me to men with names like Snakebite Muncey and Thor Culpepper. (Well, I guess there aren’t really any names like those.)
“This him?” said Beck “Brick” Brockington, not looking at me but at Ken. Even after Ken’s affirmation, Brick didn’t look at me as he took my feeble hand and crushed it with his; he had squeezed a lot of triggers. A stringy-haired, round-faced, denim-vested, pot-bellied warrior, he was not only the owner of the shop, but the leader of this meeting. “Stumpie!” he yelled, evidently toward his son, who was minding the store, “get up here, we’re startin’ it up!”
His voice seemed as though it had ordered a half ton of gravel and demanded it be forced into its larynx. “Let’s get the shit goin’.” Ken seemed to shrink next to him, and I realized with a degree of awe there were men even more intimidating than my father-in-law.
In an unconscious effort to hide while still participating, I took a seat at the table at the center of the room and quickly learned it belonged to Rod Suckerling, better known as “Sucker,” a red-faced, gristly fella who looked down at me as if I had given him that name. “Wanna try a fuckin’ seat that ain’t mine?”
I did. There was a chair in the far, unlit corner and I was just taking it when Ken called to me from the opposite corner. “Christie! Over here.” He seemed embarrassed, probably for me. My name had not been revealed, until just then. Until just then, I’d been his son-in-law, little else.
It seemed like an excruciatingly long walk across the room, like a sixth grader’s green mile down a bus aisle on the first day of middle school. This time, no one tripped me; I would have almost preferred a harmless tripping, however, to the punishing flurry of stares I absorbed as I made my way toward Ken’s red face. He grabbed my sleeve — too roughly, I thought at the time — and muttered, “Just stay close to me and don’t speak ’til spoken to.”
He walked me like a guard taking a shackled prisoner to the courtroom, and I sat next to him near the rear of the table. As per Ken’s instructions, I kept my mouth shut. I learned the shutting of one’s mouth is the best way to not only survive a first meeting with these men but also to learn a lot of things they don’t report in the “lamestream media,” a funny play on words that nearly made me laugh out loud. Again, though, staying mute served me best in that situation.
Oddly, Ken seemed to be employing that same strategy. Gone were the barrages of words and intricate yarns with myriad meanings. He, too, seemed like he was here to learn. We faced the white board and waited.
The wait was well worth it. The things Brick brought up, diagrammed and intertwined had my head spinning. I had no idea, for instance, that Hillary Clinton was actually a man! A really bad one, with an annoying voice, bent on destroying everything we’ve built. I didn’t believe it until I saw the dots practically connecting themselves.
I cultivated a hate for her, sorry, him so potent that in a way I wish we were storming his house rather than this historic building full of politicians who run the gamut of varying degrees of evil. I mean, how do you prioritize whom to apprehend? Say you’ve got a fairly bad one, but then you see a really bad one sprinting down a hallway twenty yards away; do you let the moderately bad one go and hope you can somehow catch up to the really bad one? I guess that’s where instinct kicks in. I trust I’ll know what to do.
Ken knew this, I think, when he took me to training. He believed in my instincts. I truly believe that. Otherwise why would he bring me here, this place, with its sublime decor and seemingly endless halls?
To find and execute traitors! Fleetingly, however, I wonder if this ostensibly unhinged mob knows what it’s doing. Is everyone in this building a traitor? If not, how will it know whom to execute? Will it recognize each one by sight? I’m thinking we should have had a meeting or two.
Meetings like that one with Brick and Snakebite and Stumpie. Where things were spelled out and repeated until they stuck in our memories.
I realize I haven’t seen Ken in a while, and hope he’s okay. Maybe he’s found someone to whom to tell another story. He seemed almost crestfallen when the Proud Boy guy said to leave his guns in his car — though the hoedad, a digging tool somewhat like an icepick, he found in the back under some gun magazines seemed to cheer him up a bit. Ken parked the Expedition at a Perfect Princess, a chic business that specializes in nose piercings for adolescent girls. (Actually, he parked in the loading zone, reasoning, I suppose, that how much can there be to unload at such a place.) “If they tow us I’ll shoot ‘em,” vowed Ken, putting on some black leather gloves. Off we went to the capitol, me fondling the hunk of concrete in my coat pocket, Ken with his hoedad resting on his shoulder like a prospector in the California mountains. I wondered if, as with the California Gold Rush, it was disadvantageous we were getting there late.
As we walked, he told me another story, about a man who buys and sells gun safes and how he let his chihuahua hop into one as he polished the outside of it. He unthinkingly closed the door when he was done and, in his panic, forgot the combination. By the time he opened it with three well-placed rifle shots, the dog had suffered considerable brain damage. Necessity being the mother of invention, the man fashioned a shoulderbag — complete with a zipped “escape hatch” through which to evacuate excrement and urine — he now wore to carry his pet everywhere he went.
I shook my head in wonderment over Ken’s acumen for detail and suspense. Two stout men wearing bandanas and fur-lined denim joined up with us, one of them saying, “Yeah, I locked my cat in my gun safe, she wasn’t so lucky.” I offered my condolences. The man pulled out his wallet and showed me several photos of the gray tabby who ended up spending her last minutes scratching frantically at the inside of the safe door before expiring. The man ran his hand down his face and the five inches of his white beard. This, from what I have learned, is called “tearing up,” what strong men do when they’re emotional, but not outraged. “That kitty was like my own kid,” he growled, and then I saw that his companion, who’s looking sadly at the ground, was probably his son.
I saw also he carried in his wallet a membership card to Leaders of the Pact, a group of American patriots aiming with heart, mind and gun to preserve “everything we’ve builted.” As he took the wallet back, I saw that several, and then most, of the crowd had broken into trots. Something was happening. Ken has sciatica, and I stayed with him as men, women, flags and phones streamed past us.
To pass the time during our slow march, Ken treated me to a tale about his track and field years, and how stupid the coach was to not make the shotput and discus throwers run as many laps as the others. His ears turned a crimson red, and I saw he was reliving the outrage as he recounted. Ken’s ability to put himself back in the time period and emotion of the story he’s telling is what sets him apart.
Brick, I recalled, had seemed to have little patience for Ken’s stories, and it made me wonder if, in between all his visits to websites that expose nefarious conspiracies perpetrated by The Left, he finds time to read books. Even a graphic novel or collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics can do wonders for one’s attention span.
It was surprising to see someone treat Ken with disrespect. Especially in front of a group of men meeting about hard things in a basement. “Was he named after a supermodel?” Brick had asked him in that gruff growl, referring to me. (I wasn’t.) I could see Ken didn’t know whether to join with the others and laugh it off or come back with an insult of his own. Something like, “You look like you ate a supermodel.”
I certainly wasn’t going to say something like that.
But Ken was never one for jokes. He doesn’t think Tucker Carlson’s bowtie is funny. When we were watching one of Carlson’s broadcasts, I quipped, “Is he going to referee a fight after the show?” Although I thought (and still think) the comment was funny, Ken’s expression didn’t change a bit.
“Listen to what he says,” he said.
I thought, fleetingly, that this wasn’t part of the unwritten bargain we’d made, the agreement being I would listen to Ken and Ken would show me how the world works. (It certainly hadn’t gotten me too far with my scofflaw dad.) But, as with Brick, I trusted Ken’s feel for people. The more I watched Carlson, his feigned concern for silly, misguided liberals conveyed with his scrunched brow, his drippingly sarcastic wonderment via a mouth perpetually forming the letter “o,” the more I seemed to get it. Ken knew what he was doing. His aim was true; he was pointing me in the right direction.
Meanwhile, my own marksmanship improved with each visit to the shooting range. Judging by my strike patterns on the paper people, I had become someone more likely to shoot folks in the chest than sending weak messages with glancing blows to the limbs. At the end of one flurry of gunplay, Ken sidled next to me, put his arm around my shoulders and said, memorably, “Not bad, kid.” It seemed I had seen this scene in a movie a while back. Or maybe my life, incrementally since my arrest, had become as dramatic as an action film. Finally, at a crucial crossroads in my development, an older man was proud of me. I let the new feeling wash over me.
Bernice and I weren’t spending a lot of time together, but I attributed that to her letting me have my space and my time with her — well, our — father. Judging by the news stations she had on while she cooked or cleaned, however, she was not on the same trajectory as me, at least not in the way we saw the world.
As Brick might have said, Bernice was still “drinking the Kool-aid,” a reference to the cult led by the Reverend Jim Jones, who took his parishioners down to Guyana and served suicidal refreshments. Though my wife was not that far gone, who could tell how far she would take this commitment to fake news?
A case could be made, and surely will be made, that my companions and I have gone too far, with our surge into the capitol building and whatnot. Lamestream media, predictably, will focus on the cop impaling and the poo-smearing rather than the good things we’re doing here. For instance, I saw a woman getting trampled by some folks, and I, along with a few other patriots, helped her up and reunited her with her machete.
Now, fully inside the building, I’m wondering about Ken, and starting to worry a little. What if he is suffering the same fate as the woman, and people are trampling him as well, thinking they are merely stepping on a thick rug or a traitor? But the sheer volume of charging citizens is making it impossible to double back. And Ken, being Ken, wouldn’t want help anyway; he’s a big believer in the pulling of oneself up by one’s bootstraps. And now, with his help, so am I.
I don’t know if Ken was, but I was surprised when Brick contacted him one morning and asked for money to help “continue his research.” If he, Brick, had an Apple MacBook, he could dive deeper into some nefarious crevasses he’d been exploring lately, centering mostly on Democrats and their persistent campaign to expand their pedophilia into third-world countries. Generous to his core, Ken quickly agreed and wrote Brick a check.
A few weeks later, when I saw Brick at a gun show and asked how the research was going, he just looked at me, either meaningfully or confrontationally, not sure which, and said, “Fine.”
“Good,” I answered. “That’s good to hear.”
I just hope Ken lives to see the fruits of his investment. It’s been about 20 minutes since I’ve seen him, and I’m unable to check on him because the push forward, as I pass into the, er, foyer? of the capitol is a force I’ve not experienced since the Wham! concert in the nineties during which I lost my virginity and on which I’d rather not elaborate.
Above the din, I hear choruses of “Naaancy! Naaaaannnnnceeee!” For a second I think they’re referring to me, and I turn to run. But then I realize they’re calling the Speaker of the House.
Someone just a few feet in front of me suddenly blurts, loudly, “Hang my pants!” I wonder if he’s wet them and needs a woman to pin them on a makeshift clothesline.
Visibility is low due to the crush of people. I get on my tiptoes. My predecessors here have already made quite an impact. Shattered glass crunches under my feet. A sculpture has been toppled and smashed. Not to dwell on it like liberals will, but I’m wondering now if pooping on the floor and smearing the feces on the walls and portraits of the capitol is an essential part of the ritual in which I’m participating, or are merely the unfortunate acts of a few who have spent the night in their cars. I don’t think I could defecate in front of so many folks, but then, I’ve surprised myself before — including at that Wham! concert I just mentioned. True patriots have to reach deep inward when things get hairy. It would seem we have really gotten our shit together.
And if you think a little ca-ca on the walls — and, wow, a bit on the ceiling there — of a government building is bad, you should see what the libs have been up to, watch Brick draw crisp lines between rising taxes, California homeowners getting huge checks from the federal government, their homes being threatened by the wildfires out there, and a laser beamed from space at the dry grass from a rocket owned by, you guessed it, George Soros, a known liberal financer and pedophile. I may have missed a few things there, but I’m sure you get the connection.
We’re here to save American children, and if we have to defecate our way to glory, we are armed and more than willing.
My resolve is stronger than ever when a police officer presses a nightstick against the very expensive leather vest Ken handed down to me last week. “Back up, sir,” the cop says. I take my block of concrete from my pocket and hold it high. Not high enough, however, for someone takes it from me and clocks the policeman on the cheek. Baton flying, he goes down so quickly I am, for a moment, shocked at the efficacy of the blow. I look at the assailant; it’s an elderly white woman using a flag as a kind of sarong. She disappears into the crowd, but not before placing the block back in my hand. I look down at the victim. There seems to be a red hole in his cheek, which he clutches with both hands in an effort to keep blood loss to a minimum. “That was for Townville!!!” I scream at him before I can stop myself. His eyes suddenly dart to mine questioningly.
As I move past him to the staircase that would lead me to the floor where the traitors are convening, I hear someone bellowing from the top. “The president is tweeting!” he announces, and the echo is sublime. It’s as if God Himself is addressing us. “THE PRESIDENT IS TWEETING!!!”
Things get quiet really fast.
I crane my neck upward and see a man kind of crouching and looking into a phone. A cellphone. His free hand is held aloft in a “wait” pose. Everyone is looking upward, waiting — except for the bleeding policeman, who groans in pain. About a dozen patriots shush him. I feel as if this is a defining moment in my nation’s history, and I’m glad I’m here to take it in.
“He says….” His pause is unbearable. “He says, GO HOME. LEAVE THE CAPITOL AND GO HOME.”
There is an audible deflation amongst my brethren, like a home crowd watching their kicker botch a game-winning field goal or coup. I drop my cement block fragment into the trash can at the foot of the staircase. Someone, an old man from the sound of it, is sobbing. Someone else says, “Was that really him tweeting?”
“It could have been that guy from Saturday Night Live who does him,” says a fella wearing a flag in a fashion somewhat like a diaper. A man comes from behind him and shoves him in the back with a hoedad. The diapered man screams and falls, and I see the aggressor is Ken.
He stands over his victim. “You watch Saturday Night Live?” he asks rhetorically. “Failing libtard bullshit show. Way better with Chevy Chase.”
He raises the hoedad, and the man covers his head and waits. “No Dad!” I shout across the, what, rotunda? What is this thing?
Ken looks up at me. Everyone has redirected his attention, it seems, from the tweet announcer with the cellphone to the red-faced, white-haired man with the hoedad poised over a hapless victim. Ken is surprised — or is it repulsed? — both by what I said and by the prone man before him. He narrows his eyes and looks away from me. “I’m not your Dad,” he mutters — or spits. Yeah, spits is the better word for it.
At first I think I’m getting him wrong. He’s wearing the expression he reserves for liberals and RINOs. He couldn’t be referring to me.
Or maybe he’s just gently reminding me how I’ve let his daughter down. There are always expectations, and I know I haven’t lived up to Bernice’s. To live up to Ken’s, well, I’d have to be Rambo or at least Ratzo Rizzo. Do Bernice and her dad talk about me? I’m probably not even worth discussion.
What have I ever done that registers on their scale? I have not earned much money. My job is so mundane I didn’t even mention it at the beginning of this story. I haven’t beaten anyone up — well, until today, ha (though I think I only get an assist for that)! No one has ever given me an award, unless you count that doubles pickleball trophy from 2016 that I wouldn’t have won if not for my roided-up partner.
Without glancing once at me, Ken drops his hoedad and joins with the current of people obediently leaving the Capitol. Slaloming around stunned folks, I reach the entrance/exit just in time to see his red cap duck under the steel-encased banner ten people are carrying back down the marble steps. (I guess they couldn’t find space on a wall to mount it inside the Capitol. They could have taken down — and stolen, but why? — the portraits of Benjamin Pierce, Millard Fillmore and Calvin Coolidge to make room. They could have used the same nails, assuming the banner had proper hardware behind. But then, no one asked me.)
I turn back around and see I’m amongst the stragglers, the chaff, of the protestors. No one but a few — like that weirdo coming down the stairs with the horns on his head— wants to stick around. Then it occurs to me I’m among crazy people.
The weirdo passes me like I don’t exist and he runs things around here. He stands two steps down from me and peers off into the distance as a weird king would his kingdom. I notice the skirt I’d seen him sporting doesn’t cover his backside. Rather than a skirt, it’s an extended loincloth. Perhaps for easier rotunda pooping?
“Naaannnncy!” he calls, as if she’s gone running out into the city. The call still makes me flinch. “Oh, Naaaaannnceeeee!”
I notice the steel sign with our president’s name emblazoned on it is no longer being carried, but dragged, leaving a long trough in the front lawn of the capitol. Ken is nowhere to be seen. Does he remember he’s my ride? Do I still want him to be?
I descend the stairs, feeling a bit numb, like someone who has just discovered he no longer has his wallet. Do I have my wallet? I check. Yes, it’s still in my fanny pack.
I decide to take a hard left and see where it takes me. I’m pretty sure I can find my own way back. If someone, say, a ten-year-old boy, can make it home after being left by his father in a bar because in his drunkenness he’d forgotten he’d taken his son there, I’m sure I can. I’m sure I did.
During my brisk walk leftward, I gain a better sense of just how large this building is. It would take hundreds of tons of human feces to cover the whole thing. And then there are the staircases!
The temperature seems to be falling, and I find it refreshing. I’m mostly alone, save for a few groups of folks standing safe distances back to get a good gawk at what all this is about. I see my path is now leading to a bench with an occupant whose back is to me. The head is bobbing up and down. Because the hairdo seems to be an afro, as they used to say, I don’t divert my route lest someone, probably me, calls me a racist. Of course, the fact it has affected my route at all makes me a different kind of racist. Maybe one who’s trying to get better.
My feet, plagued by hallux rigidus (an old acrobatic dancing injury), are feeling the effects of today. I’m wishing whoever is on that bench suddenly gets up and goes off to his life. I’d like that bench to myself. As I get closer I’m already looking for the next bench.
Then I hear the sobs. It’s a man’s kind of sobbing — fighting them off, choking them back, finally giving in to them. I always gave in too soon, according to my dad, but why postpone what you know is going to happen anyway?
I’m wondering if it’s one of the few black “patriots” who attended the failed march today. Then I see the patch on the shoulder, and the gun holster, and I hear voices on a radio. The man is a cop, a capitol policeman. Feeling bad about the man who was clocked on the head with my piece of cement, I feel it’s my duty to stop. “Are you okay,” I ask, “sir?”
He looks up at me and I see he’s in his late fifties, maybe, deep creases in his brow and cheeks. He’s lived. He shakes his head and looks back down at the ground. I’m not sure if he’s waiting for me to leave. Something tells me I shouldn’t. “Man,” he says. “Where are we? Is this even America?”
It’s a question I hadn’t pondered before. I’d always assumed it was. I don’t know what to say.
He looks back up at me, and I see he’s wondering if I had a hand in this whole thing. I don’t want to get arrested again. I sit down next to him and say, “Yes. Yes, it’s America.” I’m hoping that will make him feel better.
He looks over and me, and chuckles. Ruefully. “Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah. Thanks. It’s easy to forget.”
I wait, not knowing what to say.
He takes a few deep breaths. “When I was in my teens I joined the junior Black Panthers,” he said. “Heard of ‘em?”
I hadn’t. “I think so,” I say.
He looks at me, his eyes clouded with painful tears. “Really?” he says. “You hated ’em, right?”
“I didn’t really know what they were all about,” is my reply, thinking it safe.
He laughs, and I am glad and humiliated at the same time. It is probably his first laugh of the day.
“The Panthers were a subversive group that tried to make things right with the threat of might. Know what I mean? We tried to look scary. Big shades, big ‘fros. Thinking that was what would earn us some respect, right?”
“Right,” I answer.
He laughs. “‘Right,’” he repeats. “You know, I was nineteen. What do you think I really joined the Panthers for?”
I think hard about that one. Nearby, a news truck is parking in a loading zone and a crew is falling out of it, setting up cameras and sound. I think about what had brought me here today. “You…wanted someone to like…love you?” I answer, finally.
He looks at me and smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Her name was Bettina. Oh man. Was she stacked!”
“Yeah, she was stacked!” I agree, probably too vehemently. His smile evaporates.
“She didn’t want me. I was too young. Too stupid. She wanted a higher up. A Bobby Seale, maybe. Stokely. Whoever.”
I nod. A helicopter passes overhead.
“I didn’t know shit,” he continues. “And she knew it. She was friendly about it. But I knew she wasn’t gonna love me. And without that…without that hope, I just didn’t have the conviction to keep going to the meetings.
“So I just kind of…meandered through my life, eventually got married, had kids, went into security, got this job, but it was like I was just swept up in a river, you know? Life here. America. It’s a pretty seductive thing, the whole dream and all.”
“The American dream,” I say.
“I thought if I just, you know, tolerate things that were bad, just keep my nose down, do right, eventually things would just kind of even out.”
I think of my marriage.
“Things ain’t evening out,” he says, and sobs. Not knowing what to do, I put my hand on his shoulder. He puts a hand over my hand. And now I’m crying. We’re a man and a cop on a bench, in front of the Capitol, crying.
I’m not sure why I’m crying. I wish I were the kind of guy that in touch with his feelings.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” the cop says, not looking at me. I think he’s looking at the news crew as it approaches. My walkie-talkie, still clipped to my waist, its battery dead, starts digging deep into skin. “I don’t care. But you know how fucking wrong this was, right?”
“Yeah,” I answer reflexively, and then I feel it. What the hell was I doing here? Was it even my choice?
“I hope you do,” he says. “I hope to God you do.”
He places his worn face into his calloused hands. I get up and look around me. There’s a “PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS” sign, an overflowing trash can, an empty box of shotgun shells and a blanket. I get up, toss the walkie-talkie onto the trash, and put the blanket over me like an old woman in the cold. On my phone I play a song from “The Catherine Wheel,” an album by David Byrne of Talking Heads. I put the phone in my vest pocket and lock the flap. I walk slowly, dragging my feet past the cop, then suddenly spring to life, whipping the blanket around my head like a lasso, and finally flinging it over the trash can, which I somersault over. I set my landing almost perfectly. As I cartwheel past the man again, I catch a glimpse of his astonished expression.
It’s a routine adapted from a Twyla Tharp piece from the 1980s. I’m leaping around and over the bench, even throwing in a moonwalk here and there. I twirl. With each revolution the man’s face gets happier, and the Capitol building, a blur of columns and windows, seems majestic again. By the time I finish he’s clapping, laughing tearfully.
He gets up. “Oh man,” he laughs. “Can I give you a hug?”
He can. It doesn’t feel strange or embarrassing. At some point he asks, “Who taught you to do that?”
“My grandmother,” I answer. “She was in the circus. She taught me practically everything I know.”
