rattling the coffee cups
Lately all the boyz at the Diner can talk about is guns. Guns and ammo. We got a new waitress, Anita, who keeps their coffee cups rimmed and what you got is a dangerous combination of testosterone and caffeine. Expletives about gun control and the 2nd amendment ricochet off the back mirror and the grill hood like an AK-15 on the firing range.
“They’ll have to pry my gun outa my cold dead hand,” Walter likes to shout every time some ‘pablum pooping pacifist’ in a corner booth tries to make the case for maybe banning at least semi-automatics. Walter worries he’ll need an arsenal when the government comes to take away his freedom, which, he’ll remind his target de jour, it’s doing Right Now. “You gonna stop an army with a baseball bat when they come for you?”
Big Larry usually has to come out with a spatula dripping bacon grease to calm Walter down to a reasonable decibel level. “Nobody’s coming for you til you finish breakfast, Walt, so eat up. You’ll need your strength.”
Some of the boys have started to wear their NRA caps, I guess to show South End Solidarity. Me, I’m not a big gun-toter, but since I own my grandpa’s old shotgun, I’m evidently no pablum pooping peacenik either, even if it hasn’t been fired since 1975. And once upon a time, living in an old farmhouse in Northern Wisconsin, I got wind of a rumor that the Posse Comitatus, a redneck right wing anti-about-everything group of good ole boys, wanted me and my friends to move back to whatever hippie commune we’d crawled out of — or else!
I kept more than my gramp’s 18 guage rabbit gun then. Kept 7 rifles loaded and ready . Two were semi-automatic .22’s, pull the trigger fast as you can go and watch the bark peel back, no point aiming through the sights. Later my neighbor across the field told me he kept an arsenal too for the night they might come in half a dozen pickups.
It’s not the government I worry about. It’s the Walters. But I can’t live with that much paranoia. Why I moved here. Walter just likes to rattle the coffee cups, I know . But, there are places where they do more than that….
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