Prying My Toilet Paper from My Cold Dead Hands
The news of the week down at the Yacht Club before they closed their doors due to the plague and social distancing was the sudden upturn in gun purchases across the coronaviral landscape we once called the South End. Apparently unarmed households, worried anarchy was being unleashed, were buying up pistols, shotguns, military assault rifles and anything else that might protect them from the urban hordes who survived the pandemic and now roamed the countryside in search of toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Zombie apocalypse was nothing compared to what was coming, or so said Fat Freddie as he swilled his third pint of protective anti-viral panacea. “Mark my words, boys, they’ll be coming here to take what’s yours and you’ll be defenseless.”
Big Walter was three quarters in the bag sitting with his back to the far wall, his usual place in the Pilot House Lounge, giving him full view of the door and whatever threat might bust through. “Let em come to my house and see how they like a burst of semi-automatic lead.” Big Walter was full bore National Rifle Association long before Charlton Heston made the phrase Cold Dead Hand a rallying cry. Walter lived down past the Tyee Store in a dilapidated single wide back in the blackberries and nettles. To get to his swampy acreage, an army of plague victims would need to navigate the most rutted road on the South End, rattling mufflers and setting off Walter’s hounds in a baying alert.
None of us knew what kind of arsenal the minuteman had in there and none of us wanted to find out. Two Toke certainly didn’t, but he didn’t mind needling our resident Survivalist either. “Folks probably heard you had a stockpile of Charmin down here,” he told Walter. “Rumor has it you got more toilet paper than Costco. Might just be,” he said, pointing his ale at Walter back in the corner, “you’re the reason these urban desperadoes will come down here. Puts us all at risk, Walt, endangers the entire South End.”
“Let em come, Tom, see what they get. I got enough firepower to fight off all these kung flu fighters, trust me on that.”
“Kinda my point, Walt. You got an Alamo down there, but the rest of us, well, we’re easy targets.”
And so it went, that last night in the Lounge before the doors closed due to the Pandemic and we all drove back to our quarantined shacks. Driving home in the dark, I thought to myself, it seems like the Past has come to pay a visit, all of us isolated in the backwash, keeping to ourselves, hermits once again. I don’t expect anarchy to descend on the South End. What I expect is the same quiet we once had back when I first rolled down this blacktop road on a rain-swept windy night back in 1977. Paradise. Just a few of us escaped from the lives we’d given up on, the only dreams the ones we’d start working on right then. If we had to start over, not a bad place to begin. Maybe instead of guns, we should buy hoes and shovels, axes and rakes. It gladdened my heart to see the lights from our house pouring out onto the lawn. I thought, we’ll be okay. Hell, we’ll be fine.
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Tags: Guns into Plows Shares on the South Endhe, Pandemic Panacea, Prying my Toilet Paper from My Cold Dead Hands