The Implications of Savagery For the Nuclear Family On Holiday

Crispy shreds of fried potato broke beneath the press of the well-used fork I wielded in my right hand.  Then, a liminal moment of spearing and lifting before— sublime pleasure— a bite crackled between a crown and a filling.  Latkes, it would seem, were every bit as addictive as I’d been led to believe by one of the myriad Youtube videos my wife and I had watched about food in the waning hours of our shared evenings.  Channel name and creator’s face forgotten, all that remained, crystalline in my memory, was the content and its accompanying compulsion.  

Potato pancakes on the menu of a Jewish deli in downtown San Antonio?  Fate had found me.

As I chewed, my eyes scanned the room. “Oldest Restaurant in San Antonio,” proclaimed a nearby poster. The glazed tiles of the uneven floors caught this bold-print claim, throwing it back.  The poster, too, was reflective, encased as it was by a glassed frame.  And so, reflection compounded upon reflection, an echo stretching beyond my ability to perceive.

Next to me, my eight-year-old forked another bite of diner-style pancake into his mouth, syrup seeping from where it had soaked into the already sweetened flesh of the essential American pastry.  This component of our cultural sensibility had always baffled me; we seem to have an innate inability to appreciate subtle flavor, demanding, instead, to be taken to the very boundary of sensory overload.  Sweetness must tremble at the edge of cloying, and saltiness must  choke us before we admit its too much.  And so, Gordy drowned cakes— literal cakes— in an added sweetener that someone back east had thickened out of a maple’s lifeblood.

Or maybe that was melodramatic.  I shrugged, acknowledging that I’d long ago lost the ability to distinguish between the actually weird, and the merely curious.  Growing up as product of two different cultures will do that.  Having spent my childhood in Argentina and Chile, so many of my sensibilities were Latino, despite my caucasian heritage.  Alternately, as the child of gringo parents, I’d never really fully fit in there, either.  No more than I did in Texas.

And yet, the weight at my hip, tugging on a steel-ribbed belt of thick, black leather, represented a Texan sensibility so ubiquitous that it was almost a cliche.   I carried a semi-automatic pistol there, concealed beneath an untucked, buttoned shirt.  Like the echoed poster, which harkened back to the city’s cowboy historicity, I, too, echoed western sensibility in my decision to carry a gun.  That the world was inherently dangerous, I had— and have— no doubt.  Though I had never yet found cause to draw the weapon out of it’s holster, in my childhood I had seen things.  

A memory resurfaced: a woman bursting out of the front door of an short apartment screaming, “Auxilio, assessino!”  

Help!  Murderer!

Behind her, in frothy pursuit, an almost comically smaller man wielding a kitchen’s paring knife who, when he caught her, snaked an arm around her waist while laying the blade against her throat.  Hauling her back into the darkness of the building, he kicked the door closed behind him.  “Walk faster,” I’d said to my sister and her two girl friends.  I had been escorting them to the nearby mall when this scene interrupted.  I was eleven.

Walk faster, they did.  

I told my parents when we got back home; I don’t remember if they believed me.  I’d been an imaginative kid, and might have given them reason to doubt the sensational story.  Perhaps they should have read the truth in my confusion.  A made up story is exciting to tell.  A real one, often, is suffused with a sense of directionless circumstance, absent the meaningful, decisive actions of a protagonist.  I hadn’t been excited by what I’d witnessed.  I’d been dismayed by how fast it had happened, and that I had no idea what happened to the woman.  Worse, there was no sense of what to do about it; no overarching heroic dictate punched through the chaos of reality for me.  

What good, then, the novels and movies?  The fantasies of heroism?

“Can we go see the Alamo?”  Gordy’s question punched through the cloud of memory, catching me off guard.

Sarah glanced from me to our son.  “Did you learn about it at school?”

He nodded.  “Yeah.  The Alamo’s in San Antonio, and I was hoping we could go see it.”

 I retrieved my phone from it’s cargo pocket in my shorts and opened Google Maps.  “Huh.”

“Is it nearby?”  Sarah’s fork clattered to her plate as she swallowed the last of her Coke.

“It is.  We’re less than a quarter mile away.”

Gordy brightened.  “So we can?”

I considered.  “We can go see it, Bud, but I don’t really want to take the tour.  From what I remember, it’s not that interesting.  Will that work for you?”

Smiling, my boy bobbed his head.

“Sounds good,” Sarah said.

I called for the check, paid, and we made our exit.

The streets of the city that had given chile con carne to the world were thinly trafficked that morning.  Of an Easter Sunday at nine AM, few people walked the streets.  Mostly, we passed folks whose dress and manner suggested they were homeless rather than landed locals or, more likely, tourists such as we.

I was walking in the lead, with Gordon following, and Sarah trailing at the rear.  Caboose, we called her position.  Whoever was up front in our file would cut the trail and keep an eye out for trouble, while Gordon followed closely behind.  The parent at the rear of our family formation kept an eye on him, making sure he wasn’t lagging, or too distracted by the city to see oncoming hazards.  Once, at about his age and on the same route where I’d witnessed what might have been a murder, I nearly stepped off of a curb and into the path of an oncoming city bus; I was hoping to help my son avoid that particular scare.

“Good morning!  How y’all doing this morning!”  The voice that called was cheerful, but rasping, even in that gravelly, good natured greeting.  The woman wore a sunhat and a threadbare sweater over a faded, dirty dress that had been pink in another lifetime.  Her smile showed grey-black nubbins where teeth should have been— obvious signs of methamphetamine addiction— but her demeanor was open, genuine, and her eyes were clear.

“I’m still in one piece, ma’am.  Kind of you to ask! ”  The smile I offered her, too, held my best reflection of the cheer she’d extended to me, like a kite of human connection.  Her following laughter gave me hope she’d found some. 

A quick check of my phone confirmed that we were still on the route, and I made to cross the street.  I punched the button that, according to local legend, informs the traffic light that pedestrians are waiting for a crossing light, though I’ve never confirmed this to be more than superstition.  

Movement farther down our road caught my attention; a potential problem stepped— danced, rather— into our path.

The Riverwalk, one of San Antonio’s most prominent attractions, runs through the heart of downtown.  One of the bridges spanning the river ran perpendicular to the street on whose sidewalk I waited with my family.  From the stairs that led down to the river, located on the far side of our crossing, a bucket-headed person holding three-quarters of a .750 bottle of vodka emerged..

He wore an eclectic mix of of shirts, and two pairs of shorts, one of which he somehow managed to suspend by stretching the waistband between his knees.  Being a highschool teacher, I’d seen plenty of young men sagging their pants, but never before had I seen a physics-defying feat as I witnessed here, where a pair of basketball shorts refused the earth’s natural call, choosing, instead, to preserve whatever modesty this man’s knees were owed.

His did not walk.  Rather, he danced to music only he could seem to hear, as the orange Easter-bucket on his head bobbled with his movement.

The light changed, I crossed the street, allowing for a slower pace to give the man reasonable space.

He and we came to the next light while it was still green, and I remember what happened there vividly.  Rather than crossing with any degree of urgency, he continued to gyrate as he pirouetted off of the curb and onto the painted stripes of the crosswalk. Feeling my internal sense of alarm escalate, I realized that, unless I intended to pass him by on the crosswalk, that he would still be there, bebopping to the metaphysical music only he could hear.

The light changed; Bucket-man did nothing to acknowledge that it had.  

Rather, he turned to face the traffic that, reasonably, expected to be allowed to pass.  His dance morphed into a pop-and-lock, the contents of his bottle sloshing a liquid imitation. The blare of electric horns lent him an audible chord, if an arrhythmic one, and still he defied their right of way with his implaccable humanity.  

And really, what stopped them?  What kept them from taking what was theirs by law?  Civilization, I realized.  A mere scrim, that taming, tacit agreement that he held over them was the reason that they would not— possibly could not— intentionally grind his body to paste in the growling, implaccable momentum of their steel and chrome machines.

And so, defiantly, he danced.

There he is, I thought to myself.  There’s the essential savage, revealed.

And he was.  He knew what he was doing, flaunting his disobedience to the traffic laws and, more importantly, the norms of social expectation.  What could they do?  Call the police?  He’d be gone by the time they arrived.

Had I been alone, I might have relished such a display of alcohol inspired audacity.  In company as I was, it marked him as a potential problem.  A man willing to intentionally upset the flow of traffic was a man willing to risk an encounter with road rage.  Then, the way he was dressed demanded attention.  This was a man who wore his unpredictability and refusal to conform like he wore his low-hanging shorts, or the easter bucket on his head.

I didn’t have to glance over my shoulder to know that Sarah had picked up on this.  She was dangerous, too; I knew this from personal, visceral experience.  Martial arts training being one of our joint pursuits, she had— on multiple occasions— strangled me unconscious, wrenched my shoulder, and punched me in the face.  It was just that her violence was stable, predictable.  Really, the fact that she was dangerous acutally meant that she was far safer than someone who had never explored or expressed their violence.  Those people have never mapped the wilds of their internal, psychological wilderness, and so have no idea where the edges are.

We need to get past him without alerting Gordon.

The problem was the Alamo.  It was ahead and around a corner.

Finally, bucket-man stopped dancing and finished crossing the street.  Some of the waiting cars blew past him with a final blare of their horns.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw bucket-man open up some space on his left, having moved closer to the buildings on our side of the street.

We crossed the street, and I held out my left hand.  In a moment, I heard a quickening of little feet, and felt Gordon’s hand fill my own.  Clasping it, I led him to walk beside me and on my left, shielding him, or at last adding a barrier between our little one and the dancing, drunken San Antonio savage.

We slipped past, as our problem had apparently halted his forward progress, and in a moment, he was behind us.  Breathing a sigh of relief, I quickened our pace just a little, and looked ahead to where the street opened up into the plaza.

The Alamo was ahead, and we could relax.

A glance behind me, toward the caboose, however, showed that Sarah had not followed.

She was behind us about fifty yards, a stone’s throw from where bucket-man had stopped.  She looked relaxed, but she had her phone out, and was busy examining it.  

Or, rather, pretending to examine her phone.

Okay.  That’s… every red flag.

I debated a moment, but her posture and mask of calm convinced me I could safely backtrack to where she’d chosen to pause.

“Hey, Sweetie,” she said as we approached.  “I’m just checking to make sure we’re still on the route.”  She wasn’t; she was keeping close to Bucket-Man for some reason.  What was it?

I scanned the street, saw the reason for the delay, and was shocked I’d missed it.

The storefronts of downtown San Antonio front the sidewalk with broad, glass panes, but their entrances are often recessed into an alcove.  Easter morning, most stores were closed, our deli notwithstanding, and many of the windows were gated with the rollable bars the shopkeep could pull down and lock after closing.  The door in the alcove, however?  They just locked.

In the alcove of the shop where Sarah had stopped, a well dressed, middle aged hispanic woman dug, half buried, in a purse the size of a travel valise.   Across from her, bucket man stood and stared.  No longer dancing, he had pushed his bucket back on his head to reveal a face that bore an unmasked expression of naked, predatory greed.

Could she not see?  Did she not understand what she’d done in cornering herself this way?  What could possess someone to blind themselves while openly advertising their vulnerability and wealth?  Worse, her inattentiveness and ignorant— or arrogant— recklessness had now put my own family in a situation that threatened to turn dangerous.

The moment broke when bucket-man noticed us.

Briefly, he scanned us, and his eyes found mine.

I read no hint of inebriation there.  None at all.

What he read in me, I cannot know.  Did he see the violence in me, as I had in him?  Did he sense that, in spite of our superficial differences, we had both become acquainted with the edges?  Possibly.  We who are savage among the civilized often recognize one another.  What I do know is that the look was only long enough for him to see that he’d been noticed.  After, he moved along, past us and toward the Alamo plaza.  He didn’t dance a single step.  I watched, following his progress.

Purse-lady’s emerged from her purse, the bag birthing her like some artificial, designer womb.  She wore huge, insectile sunglasses, which were, I assume, what she’d been hunting in the depths of the Balenciagan wilderness.

Dismayed, and forgetting myself, she caught me staring.  “Can I help you?”

“No Ma’am,” chirped Sarah, taking lead and leaving me to caboose.  “We were just on our way to see the Alamo.”

THE END