Guts

Fiction

Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash

*This short story is loosely based on a real event (click here)

~

The noise woke me and I opened my eyes, darkness around me, and at first I forgot where I was. The only thing available to me was the smell of dirty laundry and vague body odor.

Then I remembered.

My wife and I were in a shitty motel room on Nob Hill off Jones Street in San Francisco because we had an appointment—an “interview”—the following day at 10am downtown to see the person who would take our documents and passports and everything we had and would make sure everything was in order and would then send it all along by mail to Austria, to the Austrian government, where we were hoping to move. We would receive a reply within a month about whether our visas were accepted or not, they’d told us.

The noise rose up again. It was a male and a female voice. It seemed to come from the room next door.

My wife turned in that moment and groaned lightly and suddenly yawned and said, “Did you hear that sound?”

Clearing my throat I said, “I did.”

“What was it?”

“Kids playing or something, I think, a girl and a boy.”

My wife snatched her phone from her small bedside table. “Baby. It’s 3:13 in the morning. No way there are kids playing right now.”

Glancing out the window across our sordid room I saw only the general outline of distant buildings facing west, towards the Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge. Once, many years prior, before New York City and all the other places, I’d lived in this city. Most of the memories from that time were vague, blurry, serenely impossible, like a dream which had also been a nightmare but had never quite actually happened in real life. I’d still been drinking like a wolf back then.

The noise came up again.

This time the voices were much louder, cutting through the fairly thin walls. It was definitely not kids. The clear voice of a man said, Fuck you do that for, bitch? Huh? Why’d you have to do that? And then a woman’s response—she sounded Hispanic, maybe Mexican—said, I didn’t do shit, Lamar. You’re drunk. Leave me alone!!

My wife and I both shot up in bed as if we were automatons. We looked at each other. My wife appeared scared, her almond eyes pleading.

Then there was a tussle between the two mystery people; we heard a chair’s legs scratch roughly along the floor, two thumps against the wall, some angry words exchanged once again, and then the inescapable sound of a hard slap to the face and then silence and then the woman said, Do you feel like a man now?

“He fucking hit her!” My wife whispered loudly, staring at me. “You gotta do something, Paul.”

I gaped at her. “DO something? Like fucking WHAT???”

Her eyebrows creased downward. “You’re a fucking man, aren’t you? Some asshole is beating on his girlfriend next door. We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

“Maybe we should call the cops.”

She rolled her eyes. “Cops might be worse for them. That never ends well. Just go knock on the door and see what’s going on.”

“We know what the fuck’s going on!”

She ogled me, her eyes firey and hardcore, unrelenting.

“Alright, god damn it.”

Sighing, I ripped the duvet cover and sheets off my body. It was cold as hell. As I searched for my clothes we heard the voices rising up a third time. He called her something and she screamed at him and then there were the distinct sound of tears and the bounce of the bed springs and then the noise of the chair legs dragging once more. What were they doing?

I found my jeans and threw them on, then socks and my old crusty Black Sabbath tee and my leather motorcycle jacket and finally I slowly slid my Adidas on and took my time tying the thin black laces. Being “a man.” What a thing that was. Something women never had to worry about or even consider. It was always up to we men, we had to “do” something, we had to take care of business, stick our necks out there, risk our lives. Right about now I’d rather be my wife, a beautiful woman laying in bed, warm and safe. Women never thought about the simple fact that it was also men who were killed most often…by other men. Not that women didn’t have their own problems, including rape, sexual assault, violence by men. But it was more nuanced than the binary of men vs women. It was also men vs men.

I snagged our room key. Walking across our small room I gazed at my wife, lying there on her side of the bed. She looked spectacular, beauty incarnate. I walked over to her, bent down and kissed her. We eyed each other fiercely for a moment.

“I love you,” I said.

She tried to smile but failed. “I love you, too.”

Just then there was yet another bump against our mutual wall and then the voices rose up again and they were in a new physical tussle, it sounded like.

I faced our motel room door unhappily. I didn’t even have a weapon. I’d never been a fighter. Even during the old days, the drinking years, I’d almost never started fights. Only a few isolated times when I was close to blacked-out. I always got my ass kicked. Especially when I was drunk. I was strong, but also scared and lacking the full, firm nuances of courage. I didn’t have what it took to take someone down, commit violence against another living body to prove something. Growing up in Southern California many of my working-class friends had, though. I’d watched many a fistfight when I was 12, 14, 18, coming of age down in Huntington Beach, between fellow surfers, skateboarders, at raging LA house parties. Those fights had always fascinated me. But terrified me, too.

I stepped to our motel room door and silently turned the dirty brass knob. I stepped out into the small, narrow hallway. I closed our door and saw that it was painted thick red on the outside and said #347 in tilted, fake gold lettering. I hadn’t even noticed the color or the number when we checked in yesterday. I swallowed. Facing next door—#349—I waited for a moment. There was silence. I walked to their door and, without a sound, gently pressed my ear to the wood. I listened. All I could hear were slightly muffled low voices. I kept listening. Then suddenly their voices started rising again and I heard the woman say, Let me go, Lamar, you’re a fucking psychopathic ANIMAL!!! And then Lamar said, “You ain’t going nowhere, bitch.”

Goddamn it.

I stood there in front of the door like that for a minute. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared shitless. My heart was thudding so loud and so fast I worried they might hear it in their room. My adrenaline was burning like a wilderness forest fire raging, covering mass quantities of land, open fields everywhere being lit up, brush, plants, grasses, and trees going up in red-orange licking, popping flames. There was a fire in my solar plexus, rising and piercing from my guts.

Courage, I told myself.

Just as the voices started up again I finally knocked. Timid at first. There was a silence. I waited. I heard their low voices. Then I knocked again, harder this time. My whole body was tensed, rigid and alive, ready for anything. The voices rose up once more and then at last I heard the deadbolt being pulled back and another lock being twisted and then the door opened a few inches. A man’s face peered out at me. His skin was black and his eyes were red and bloodshot. He looked like he’d been crying. A crimson-colored beanie was perched on his head.

“Fuck do you want, Cracker.”

Swallowing again, clearing my throat as always, my body a bulk of hairy, tentative, electric vibrating nerves, I said, “We’re in the room next door. You guys are being really loud. What’s going on in here?”

The man looked me over, his eyes scanning me up and down. He would have seen a thick white man, early forties, intense green eyes, half-inch beard, brown Keen hiking boots, tight jeans and a leather motorcycle jacket, black hair and about 5’10.

“Listen man,” the guy said, whispering now, breathing right into my face; his breath wreaked of gin. “This don’t have nothing to do with you. Just walk away, before I have to do something you won’t like.”

A sudden bulge of ego and anger thrust itself upon me in that moment. I was a man, after all.

“We heard you hitting her. We’re gonna call the fucking cops.”

And then the door swung all the way open like a massive mouth trying to eat a man alive. The guy was at him then, two inches taller, leaner, more muscular, clearly much tougher. The man wore ragged black jeans, scuffed and holey, no shirt. He had the vague outline of an almost six-pack stomach. His nipples were lighter colored than his skin.

“Motherfucker I TOLD you,” he said, his eyes wide in rage, and he pulled a small black handgun out and was at me and held the cold steel muzzle at my temple. The metal was hard and very cold.

I put my hands up into the air. My hands were both trembling. I kept swallowing repeatedly. My throat was suddenly dry as a desert.

“Listen,” I said, unable to look into the man’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t want this.”

“You should have thought about that before your white-ass walked over here and fucked with my life, Cracker.”

“You’re right.” And finally I looked up and caught the man’s sinister gaze. His eyes were deep brown and bloodshot. He struck me as maybe a medium-weight boxer or something, that kind of lean, tough, muscular aura.

I heard the woman’s voice and she suddenly appeared behind us, in their room. She looked Mexican: Caramel skin, black eyes, gasoline-colored black hair. She was beautiful but in a broken way. Her right eye was already swelling, and she had a scar across her left cheek, a tiny bit of blood specked around it.

“Leave him alone, Lamar,” the woman said. She looked frightened. She wore blue jeans, a torn blue blouse, halfway unbuttoned showing off the tiniest sliver of a nipple, and a shawl which was wide open. She quickly pulled the gray shawl across her torso.

Lamar faced me still, ignoring her. She said it again, louder this time. For one instant she and I caught eyes and it was like we were nonverbally communicating the fact that, despite the odds, we were just now caught in very similar circumstances.

At last Lamar turned around and started yelling at the woman. His arms were out wide, his right hand still clutching the gun.

Something animalistic and primal rushed through me and I somehow in that moment lost all fear. I don’t know what happened. I leapt at him—he still facing away from me—and snatched the gun from his unsuspecting hands. He flipped around, angry, like a bull wanting to rush, but I held the gun with both hands, my arms and hands trembling, literally shaking the gun in exaggerated micro-movements, and I started backing up, away from him.

“Give me the gun, Cracker,” he said.

I kept slowly backing away.

“Don’t shoot him!” the woman yelled, crying now.

“Stay away,” I said, still stepping backwards. Fear circled within every pore and cell of my body. Anything unexpected might end up with any of us dead. I tried to concentrate but my heart was thundering so loudly in my chest that it was almost all I could hear against my eardrums.

“Give me the motherfucking GUN!” the man yelled at me, his bloodshot eyes maniacal now.

I cocked the trigger. “Don’t move. Stop stepping towards me. I’ll shoot you dead, man. Please don’t make me do it.”

The man smiled, continuing to slowly step towards me. There was a wall behind me about ten feet away. No escape. Where was my wife? She must hear all of this.

“Lamar, leave him alone!” the woman screamed.

From somewhere I heard voices—new voices—and heard the deadbolt being pulled back from a random room. Then a siren sliced through the early morning in the distance.

“Stay away, man, I’m warning you,” I said. Sweat was falling into my eyes, blurring my vision. I was nearly violently shaking by this point.

Then Lamar suddenly leapt at me and I freaked out and aimed low and fired a round. It hit him in the thigh. He stepped back, howling, yelling curses, grabbing his thigh, yelping in pain.

Our motel room door opened then and I saw my wife, who looked tragic, terrified and ghostly.

“You fuckin shot me,” the man said.

And then I heard the sound of voices down three floors below from the motel lobby, more voices, and then boots marching up the stairs. One floor below us I saw the men in black SFPD uniforms. The cops had their guns drawn. By now I’d lowered the gun.

“Police! SFPD!” the leading cop yelled.

Lamar sat down, blood going everywhere, and threw his hands into the air. The woman was silent but had her hands over her mouth; her eyes were wide. I set the gun down on the floor next to me and raised my hands into the air.

The cops were on us then.