Weekend Murder at the Meat Market
Latent savagery wore a disarming smirk, walked a Boxer named Jaws and lived behind me.
Thursday he helped me throw garbage in the dumpster somebody just plopped in front of it. Our respective canines smelled each others butts by way of reacquaintance, while we jokingly bitched about the neighborhood sloth. The dogs, familiarly comfortable now, started dancing around the parking lot together. He watched for a minute, a sneer on his face, before gathering his leash and heading back towards his townhouse, in the building behind mine.
Friday he shaved his head, put on some “warpaint” and a gas mask, and walked into JBs Nightclub with two shotguns and two handguns, killing three and maiming twenty-two, before four patrons dogpiled him while he was reloading.
Glibness -- so quick to the tongue when similar events happen what seems a world away -- fails when the yellow tape adorns someplace so familiar. Not surprising knowing one of those now lifeless bodies CLTV so callously showed laid out on the sidewalk served you more than one MGD Light with unfailingly good humor over the course of the last decade.
You marvel you weren’t included in the body count. You easily could have been. An invitation had been extended but declined. The Meat Market status of JBs always annoyed you -- the Sports Pub across the street being the preferred low-key watering hole -- but the lure of a Karaoke rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody by some of the invitees held a certain allure. They never got to that rendition. One ended up with a bullet in his gut, another hunkering down behind the bar, finding the God they lost ten years ago in two horror filled, blood bathed minutes.
Saturday on your way to your weekly watering hole excursion to the Sports Pub, you wonder what he must have been thinking as he drove the same road you drove now. Did he visualize the coming mayhem -- the screaming, the praying, the spray pattern of the brain matter splattered on the wall -- with that smirk still playing on his countenance?
As you approach the turn to the Sports Pub, you see the yellow tape cordoning off the parking lot across the street, and you make a crack to your best friend -- who also, totally out of character, had refused the same invitation on Friday as you -- about hoping there’d still be seats available. He punches you in the arm and says that’s sick even for you.
To say this establishment is subdued is to say there’s lying in Congress.
Everyone watches the door intently, noticing everyone coming and going. Nobody believing the maxim about lightning not striking twice on this night. Somebody at the end of the bar is going on with much macho bravado about how differently the night would’ve turned out had he been across the street last night. He finally shuts up when somebody offers, yeah, the body count would’ve been one higher.
Makes you pause and consider. How would your presence have affected the events, if at all? If his eyes met yours, would you have begged for your life, as you heard another did. Or would the moment you’d shared with the dancing dogs the day before been enough for him to turn his weapon aside and unload it into the person next to you. Such thoughts cause your guts to gnarl with something akin to survivor guilt.
Later that evening, you hear a third person has died. You hope it isn’t anyone you know. You wonder why this coward is still alive. Wouldn’t one of those heroes, who finally dogpiled him, been perfectly justified to turn his own weapons against him?
Sunday you hear the ultimate irony as you walk your critter past his house. Neighbor is standing staring at the For Sale sign on the shooter’s unit. Just shakes his head when an innocuous comment about all the excitement lately is offered. Neighbor says yeah, the shooter thought he’d get out of here before the complex went totally to seed, seems he didn’t like the unsavory element who’d been taking up residence.
Go figure.
From April 16, 2001
Writers Digest entry in 2001 Essay contest