Baby Chicks and Free Speech, a short story

Baby Chicks and Free Speech, a short story

Here I am, sitting on the long, narrow side patio of “Ye Olde Neighborhood Coffee Parlor” listening to yet another, tiresome & self-aggrandizing, homeless guy tell some adoring young female his “war stories.” So this one night, under this bridge… they usually begin, as does this one.

And then they arrive as quickly as possible (as does this one) at the “no one dares to call the police on me anymore,” stage, or is it no one dares call the state troopers, or the FBI, or the CIA, or the NSA? Whatever. Boils down to the fact that some dangerous, or just plain, old, drug-addled sociopath, is trying to pick up a drunk, defenseless-seeming chick (and I do mean chick – even her hair is fluffy like a newly hatched & dried chicken’s) on the side porch at “Ye Olde Neighborhood Coffee Parlor.” Then I hear the magic words: crazy bitch! Bingo!

So, to cut a long, boring, pointless ordeal short, I let him have it in the face with both barrels. Told him from where I sat, not even lifting my head to look, or my pencil from page of the blank composition book I was writing in, that if he could call someone a “crazy bitch” loud enough for me to hear him all the way at the opposite end of the uncovered concrete patio, then I could call him a “stupid, fucking sociopathic, prick asshole” as loud as I wanted to, from my end of the patio.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s your right of free speech.” And then he went inside to have the management call the cops on me. Ooh, he just trotted back out to tell me he works at the College of Law — he’s real important!

The poor, homeless chick I was afraid was going to end up as a body dumped by him somewhere along the nearest exit of the nearest interstate is not going with him now, she’s clutching her head and moaning how she was “just on my way to the lake, man!” She sounds like Janis Joplin after a shot of heroin and half a bottle of whiskey. I just kept telling her I loved her, over and over and over. And that he most definitely did NOT love her. Or have her best interests at heart.

I gave him a fucking piece of my mind. Maybe I didn’t save her life, but I definitely saved her poor, little, skinny ass from a predatory, muscle-bound hunk of steroidal ego-maniac-ism. With a tanning booth tan, or maybe it’s a spray tan, who gives a fuck. I think the other patrons inside this place just told him to get the hell out of here. We’re all here, some of us twice a day, almost like clockwork – since this is the first time I’ve ever seen him, I doubt he is a “regular.”

Oh, but the poor, unjustly accused, wee man-child protests plaintively he was “just trying to do somebody a favor, buying a homeless person a cup of coffee.” The “crazy bitch” he referred to outside on the patio was, drum roll please… his mother! Wow, there’s a shocker. What sociopath/serial killer/manipulator/user/con man/misogynist/racist/violent/physically or emotionally or financially abusive A-hole doesn’t blame their “crazy bitch” of a mother for everything they’ve brought on to themselves!

I told him she must really love him, his mom, especially when he calls her “crazy bitch” to her face on Mother’s Day! I thought his head would explode right there, all over the rusty, rickety, nasty tables the owner is too cheap to replace. Why I keep coming back here, I’ll never know. My nephew says it’s haunted… maybe the spirits are trying to get me here so they can tell me something I desperately need to know. What if I don’t want to listen to them? And I don’t! Not the bad ones, anyway. So I generally try to ignore them all, altogether, because trying to sort the good spirits from the bad spirits seems like tempting fate.

Miss “Chicken Little/Little Chicken/My Little Chickadee” would have paid handsomely for that “free” iced coffee drink with a priceless piece of her tiny, bony ass. Look on the bright side: maybe she would have left him with a little something infectious and/or potentially itchy to remember her by. Of course, if she had gotten pregnant, he would have denied everything, including ever having met her. And pity the poor child born of such a freak-o-zoid union!

Now the musclebound sociopath is gone, back on his expensive racing bike, continuing on his way to the neighborhood weightlifting “meat market” joint three blocks down the road, where he can peacock his spray-tanned asshole-ry around for all the other macho/macha bodybuilders. College of Law employee? We’ll just see about that. Yeah, that’s what I thought… nobody on the staff possesses his distinctive face. How considerate of the College of Law to have its own mini-facebook thing! Legal Sociopath Dude vacated the premises, and quickly. Thank you, all good spirits haunting “Ye Olde Neighborhood Coffee Parlor!”