It was the woman with the shopping cart. I saw her when I was driving over the railroad tracks down in the industrial river area. It was an early December evening, cold and wet and dark and the wind was blowing hard. It was that kind of cold sharp rain that blows sideways right through you and makes you want to get away from it right now, immediately, to stop it with anything you can, a car door or a quickly arriving bus or a hundred dollars.The woman was just standing in it under the lamppost light. She didn’t have an umbrella in the cart. She was staring up at the light, shaking her fist and yelling angrily. She was mad at it. The only relationship she had had turned bad on her.
I drove on and left her there because it seemed there was nothing I could do for her, or rather I didn’t know where to begin, what to do, or how to do it. You see, in the first place I didn’t have a degree which is a kind of mutant gene of our culture but without which you are hardly fit for survival. I know the woman under the lamppost light didn’t have a degree. If she had she could have worked out her relationship with it. She would have known about conflict resolution theory and co-dependency insights. I thought about how the homeless advocate Mitch Snyder had spent his life trying to help them and all we did was make a crummy T.V. movie about him. He didn’t get anywhere close to what Martin Luther King did for his people and he was killed for his efforts and then I thought how even the whole Soviet Union had tried to save the woman under the lamppost light and failed so what could I do, where could I begin, an unemployed middle age man without a degree.
Anyway, it was then I realized all I could do was shoot the Mayor, which I really didn’t want to do, what with the season and all. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I didn’t want to kill the Mayor, just a flesh wound, a modest act really. You see it’s mainly that it ruins my evenings when I have to pass the people with the shopping carts on my way home to my warmth and shelter and privacy. It tarnishes the joy I get from my toilet and bathtub and bed and I just want somebody who is supposed to be, to be responsible, to care, someone who represents us all, the human people who live here in our city.
If I was the Mayor and had a degree I would be worried sick about people who had been that far away from good fortune but the Mayor like me, drives past them to a warm home and is seen smiling and happy in the newspapers and on T.V, only the thing is the Mayor is not like me, the Mayor has a degree and ought to be doing something about this immediately, right away. So that is why someone should shoot the Mayor only I can’t because I’ve had a history of depression and had to go see someone with a degree and you know what the media would do with that. They would take this civic minded act and trash it. They would say I was deranged and unstable. The whole thing would be diminished and ignored.
So it would be better if a city council member did it. Someone new and popular and clean, one of those Frank Capra, “It’s a Wonderful Life” kind of people. Or even better, a Governor or Senator should shoot the Mayor, someone with a clean record and a degree. If I were a Governor or a Senator and had a degree and drove past people who were cold and wet and had unhappy relationships with lamppost lights I would shoot the Mayor.
"Good taste is the death of art." Truman Capote
Check in at The Cirrhosis Motel with your host, freelance literary loiterer and epicure, Dennis McBride
photo by John Hogl
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