PROJECT EQUUS

Face down behind the Stoned Age, inhaling the dank alley. The moments before Sass dug his fists into my skull on rewind, skipping like an obsolete tape past my eyes.

Look, there I am, the idiot grifter trying to pull the Switch, slamming into a sucker tourist with his wallet out to pay for a Miller. There's Sass the bartender, his eagle eyes not missing a trick. Years scanning the jungle foliage in Vietnam and Cambodia taught him to spot much less. And there I am again, shaking beneath his gaze, lifting my own wallet off the floor instead of the mark's. But it doesn't matter. Sass is finally fed up with me, fist reared back, anger spraying from his mouth like semi-automatic fire.

He probably would've let it go again, but I had pushed my last envelope. We were tight like that once, shared similarities: military fathers that traveled base to base, staying only long enough to teach us the way to use women and spread pregnancies like colds. He even gave me a job as a janitor at the Stoned Age, but I fucked that up too. Sass had a good heart and was a brother like me, still trying to figure out war and loss. But that was before we found his pop hanging from a bed sheet down at his cell in the Port Economicus police station.

“That him?” the gruff pig asked, not giving a shit. They hadn't even bothered to take him down.

I watched Sass shake uncontrollably, unable to answer. Words were useless. No need to talk. Run. Hide. Kill.

“Look, man, we need an ID here. I know it's tough but we need you to tell us if this is your father.” The paper routine danced off his tongue like spit.

Sass could only nod. Afraid to turn around or talk, because the feeling from his gut wanted to unlatch the safety strap on the holster, pull the gun and empty its rounds into the whole precinct.

Maybe it was that rage Sass felt in his throat when he turned on me, pounded my face like he was trying to reach the back of my mind. I never saw it coming, just went to the ground and accepted my beating. Watched the tourists back out of the bar and vanish into the rain, eyes infected with fear.

***

I decided to keep rolling. I didn't want to help him or intrude. Plus, I only had enough battery power to last me an hour or so. So I stayed hidden and watched the bum pry himself from the alley floor, soaking wet from blood and rain.

He looked like the pressure of Everyday Life had reached critical mass.

I followed him home, filmed him grabbing two rusty steak knives lying on the dilapidated kitchen counter, before he left the apartment for the last time without closing the door. I caught a little B-roll footage of his place before he got out of sight. Nothing of value: a few pictures of his father in uniform, piles of ramen noodles in the cupboard where one door hung low because of a faulty hinge, endless grime in the bathroom, windows with horizontal metal bars and bullet holes, a decaying coffee table, corners full of cobwebs.

When I got close enough to film him again, he had made his way to the City Park Projects. I was in the open but no one seemed to care as I followed him past the decrepit swingsets and unwieldy merry-go-rounds littered with rough teenagers in Nike sweatsuits, pagers and fake gold. They sat in utter silence as if they had paid admission, but paid no attention to me. I felt invisible.

He made his way to the courtyard of City Park 's garrison of housing projects, a panopticon-in-reverse, where individuals in cells voyeuristically stared for daily reminders of their social place and psychological position. It seemed to be the type of audience he needed: a community of like-minded individuals looking for the right spark to stoke their potential fire. Everyone seemed to approach their windows, lazily hang over sills and peek frightfully behind dirty curtains, ready for his spectacle.

The bum began to disrobe and a communal gasp was heard as his bruises and gashes came into view. Dwindling and atrophied, he mustered all the strength he could to shout some indistinguishable name before he began to force the steak knives into his eyes. A scream that outdistances language tore from him as he dislodged both of them.

But someone had called the cops who pulled up, sirens blaring, television crews in tow behind them.

“Get the fuck out of the way!“ they screamed at the gangbangers on the swingsets. Guns drawn, the cops raced toward him and trained their sights on his chest. “Put down the knives, sir!” they shouted over each other in clipped cacophony. "Now!"

Their presence seemed to galvanize him, offer a new and unexpected pain and clarity. Barely able to stand, he stumbled towards them, screaming, furious at his interrupted Moment, tasting blood and desiring revenge. Without further warning, the cops shot twice into his midsection. He fell like a puppet who's lost his puppeteer.

“Call an ambulance!” some of them shouted to the unresponsive crowd. The cops huddled around him, some on their knees to administer aid, but none of them seemed to notice that the spectators were beginning to feel a sense of betrayal creeping into their minds. There was a palpable dread in the air, and it sent a chill up my spine. But I kept my eye plugged into the viewer, determined to record it all.

“Someone call a fuckin' ambulance!” one of the cops on his knees screamed again. Barely conscious, the bum spent what little energy left in him meeting knife with voice and stabbed the cop in the stomach, before falling again to the ground as each officer backed up and opened fire on him.

Only after the echo of gunshots receded did the policemen notice how utterly silent it was. They stopped, lowered their guns and seemed to note each detail of the outside world in the mirrors of their eyes. But every eye in the projects and its courtyard crept from particularity to particularity, and there was not an exhalation to be found among its spectators: the previously lounging gangbangers, the frightened onlookers, the edge-of-oblivion cops, and, most of all, the poor bum, whose empty, crimson sockets gazed upward into silent sky.

Slowly, the crowd moved in on the police, first muttering malevolent promises of vengeance, then barking in brash sentences, then finally shouting in fury at the top of their lungs. Then they started running at them, the echoes of their shuffling feet reverberating off the metal merry-go-rounds and staircases. Some of the gangbangers pulled their guns first and picked off two cops in a heartbeat, running without fear at them, guns cocked sideways in their hands, firing without pause.

Soaked in fear, the cops backed off quickly and headed for their cars. One received a bullet between the shoulder blades right as he reached the door handle, and fell backward screaming, clutching the cinematic sky.

The rest piled into one car and screamed out of sight, as a massive throng of infuriated spectators closed in, like the living dead, on a setting sun.

Scott is the publisher and editor of the alt-satire pusher otherwsie known as ...

...as well as a a contributor to suckers like Wired, LA Weekly, Salon, Alternet, XLR8R and onward. This excerpt is from his novel The Dangerous Perhaps. If you like it, let him know.