If Worth a Reveal

It was easy to buy the gun. A few blocks from the Rescue Mission, on South Alameda, stood a concrete building with a steel door. The hot skies of Los Angeles beat down.

Elliot Cooper pushed the door open, entered. At the counter, a tattooed old guy with big arms polished a pistol.

What’ll you have? asked the old guy. He set the pistol down.

A good one, said Elliot.

They’re all good, said old guy.

Elliot knew that. Or so he'd heard at least. He didn’t really know. Kids with grudges usually don’t. But then most kids with grudges throw rocks from an overpass or kick a dog to loosen the stress. Most swallow the bile.

Not that Elliot hadn’t. Swallowed. Maybe that’s the problem, he might say if pressed. Maybe he had swallowed too much and that green stuff had seeped into his nerves, made them stiff. Maybe he was sick of the world and its rules. Or sick of himself.

Give me a black one, said Elliot. He liked black.

Here you go, said the old guy. Now money.

And that was that. Easy. No harder than a hamburger. Elliot Cooper, kid with a grudge, slid the black gun into his baggy pocket. The steel door closed behind him.

In the black heart of Skid Row, Elliot walked a sidewalk littered with discarded people. They sat on makeshift stools or under cardboard awnings and gapped their black teeth.

Got something? asked a guy.

Yep, said Elliot.

But he wouldn’t tell. The time wasn’t right. And homeless guys with gapped black teeth weren’t worth a reveal. They’d stumble on their misfortune for a while, and then tumble over life’s edge on their own. They didn’t need a push.

Elliot had a home. Real. Smelled of real sweat. It was part way underground, with brittle basement light that peered in through basement windows from the outside world.

Not much, but he had a bed and a hotplate.

And now he had a gun.

A purpose. A task.

Foremost, Elliot had a solemn duty. One that few could manage, few could endure. When buses screeched their brakes to free the rabble from their cages, and they shuffled out, Elliot recognized their desperation, their inability to cope, their quiet frustration. If not for Elliot, they would sure surrender. He cleared the streets for them. Carved his life for them.

On Stanford Ave a cop stopped him.

Where you going, son?

Elliot was young, but knew his rights. He didn’t have to say. He could reach into his baggy pocket, as if for a map, like a tourist lost, and come out with a secret gun, make a newsworthy scene.

But a cop wasn’t worth a reveal, either. Cops couldn’t see the light. Not like Elliot. He walked in it. The god light lit him. God light with a grudge.

Nowhere, said Elliot.

Then get there, said the cop. I hate trouble on my beat.

If Elliot had a beat, he’d hate trouble, too. But when all of L.A. is your legroom, there’s no space for small despise. Elliot dreamed large. He’d be somebody someday. If not today, tomorrow. Or next week. Elliot loved himself more than the world paid him back, even if his love was a black one, the thick sticky kind that flows from wounds.

And Elliot loved his mother, too. She brought root beer to his basement. She told Elliot to nurse his grudges, bandage them with vows of success.

Say it, she’d say.

Say what mom?

That you’re the best.

I’m the best, he’d say.

Still, late at night, when raucous trash trucks stripped the sheets from his sleep, Elliot rose from his pillow, and stared up through the basement windows to the street. He wasn’t the best. Not even second or third. People laughed at him, called him coward.

At night.

When the city died enough to listen.

Elliot heard their whispers.

But in daylight on Stanford Ave, after the cop brushed him down the block, and with a black gun that blistered his baggy pocket with its potential, Elliot Cooper relaxed his doubts and forced himself to see that he, son of some man, some stranger that passed, had both a grudge and a talent.

Endowed with aim.

The gift of capacity. High capacity.

The power to take.

And to receive.

Elliot entered a liquor store next to a vacant lot. Another old man tended.

Do you know me? Elliot asked.

Why should I?

You shouldn’t.

Why ask me, kid?

In case I should share my secret, said Elliot.

Get out of here, said old man. He put a hand below the counter.

Elliot backed out the door, turned, let his shame simmer. The old man had fooled him with his nonchalant courage, had called Elliot’s bluff.

That wouldn’t do. That made his grudge bulge, the veins in his forehead throb.

He hadn’t asked to be born, hadn’t begged to be a martyr. Elliot grew from normal seeds like normal boys who went to school and threw naked teachers down stairs in their farfetched lies and brags while they laughed and coughed cigarette smoke in the bathroom.

He hadn’t told his father to leave the bed cold, a passing man in a passing time with a name that had never been written. Elliot hadn’t asked for punishments he didn’t deserve, couldn’t control, and refused to accept. He saw only his own teaching.

Two blocks from the liquor store, Elliot turned east onto Sixth Street and saw a young girl go into a building mid block with an old man who held the girl with one hand and a thin paper bag with the other.

There. Another old grudge. Drugs or drunk or both.

Beaten down like the others. In pain. Body for sale.

For rent.

Time to collect a debt. Time for a savior. A judgment.

A reveal.

The girl would see. The old man, too.

The futility of age.

Christ, the whole world was falling into old, dropping into disrepair and illness. The world sat on its battered years and claimed wisdom.

Elliot could make it young again.

His youth and ambition could bring it back from the edge. From the threshold of neglect.

No one deserved to grow old and watch their limbs tremble, their skin wrinkle, their mind decompose.

Elliot could fix so much with his secret gun. He could bleed a new portrait on humanity’s canvas. A god in the light can choose. And with precision, stitch the right damage closed.

He walked to the door the girl and the man had entered. Upstairs somewhere, in a secret room, Elliot would find them. He’d share his own secret, hear them both thank him for his courage, his rejection of rules.

They might get on their knees and beg to be blessed. They’d see how rare it to be when a god revealed the discordant music of sin, shared a secret wish, offered a shot of salvation.

They would sure raise their hands. Praise their luck.

Watch their stars slam shut.

Or run out the back, hurried cowards with shoes in hand. Run from the light.

Small cowards who run from the light.

Elliot Cooper placed his palm on the door. His fingers burned nimble on its burnished metal bright.

He pushed it open.

Behind him, on the street, a car choked past on its way to nowhere, covered in black smoke and grit.