The Robbery

by Susan Cameron

When I turned sixteen, I landed a part-time after-school job with a loan company. I did the usual office grunt work (which perfectly suited my limited capabilities), and I felt so happy. I loved going to the office. I enjoyed practicing my new typing skills and actually getting paid for it. I had fun answering the phone in my most professional, grown-up voice: “Beneficial Finance. May I help you?” I got along with the boss and enjoyed the joking and office camaraderie of my half-dozen co-workers. At sixteen, I liked my job, I liked school, I liked my boyfriend – in other words, I believed I had the world by the ass.

One beautiful spring afternoon, I bounced happily into work as usual, did some typing and filing, made some phone calls, then took over the front desk so Claudia, the receptionist, could take a break. A man walked in and told me he wanted to take out a loan. I smiled my cordial, professional smile. “Of course, sir. Please have a seat. Have you ever had a loan with us before? Yes? Your name, sir? Robert W. Jackson? Fine, I’ll get your file. A loan officer will be with you in just a moment.”

I searched the files but couldn’t find his old paperwork. Damn! I must have misunderstood his name. I walked back to him. “Excuse me, sir, did you say your name was…” My voice died in my throat as I stared at the blue steel revolver pointed at my heart. I looked up.

He smiled his own cordial, professional smile. “Have a seat,” he said. I sat down and froze in the classic holdup victim position, hands open and raised, staring at his gun, at his face. He stood up and roared, “This is a holdup! Do as I say and nobody gets hurt!” Two more men with sawed-off shotguns ran through the door.

Not again! I’d looked down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun just a month before, when two other robbers burst in. I was talking on the phone and didn’t even know they were there until the gun was in my face. “Put down the phone,” the man had said. I did, and the robbery was over in a flash. And here we were again.

“Everybody down on the floor! NOW! Except you,” he said softly to me. (Except me? Why not me?) “Who has the keys to the safe? Get off the floor and give me the money!”

I heard Mr. Bond’s voice behind me. “No problem, man, no problem. We don’t have a safe, we write checks, but just stay cool and I’ll give you what we’ve got, including what’s in my wallet.” I heard him get off the floor, heard some fumbling, saw him hand money to the thief. The manager backed away out of my peripheral vision, and I heard him lower himself to the floor again.

The thief pocketed the money. “Everybody take off your shoes!” he yelled. Then, quietly, he said, “Except you.” (Why not me? Why me?) I heard the others moving on the floor behind me, shuffling noises, muffled sobbing; stillness. Then the gunman spoke to me again. “Now, I want you to take off your blouse.”

I looked at his face, in his eyes. I heard someone gasp; I heard Claudia start crying. Then I heard myself speak – not with my professional, grown-up work voice, but with my real voice, the clear soprano voice of a sixteen-year-old virgin who had decided that today was a good day to die.

I said, “No sir, I won’t do it. But I’ll take off my shoes like everybody else, though. And I’ll get on the floor, too.”

I looked away from him. I removed the first shoe, then the second. I heard him say, “All right, then.” I lay down on the industrial-grade carpeting and shut my eyes.

I heard the men leave. I heard Claudia break down completely, heard a man saying, “Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ.” I felt my breath come in; I felt my breath go out. I opened my eyes and shakily got off the floor.

Pandemonium. Police. I felt calm. I gave precise, highly detailed descriptions to the cops: facial features, three different shades of brown skin, heights, weights, clothing. Mr. Bond, giddy and incredulous: “It’s like you took their fucking pictures! Kid’s got a fucking computer for a brain!” Nods of agreement from my co-workers. “Why didn’t you take off your shirt, though? The only good part of the robbery, and you had to fuck it up!” Hysterical laughter all around. “We never even had a robbery until you started working here! Are these guys all buddies of yours?” The laughter got even more hysterical, especially mine.

I crawled under the desk in the fetal position and laughed until the tears ran down my face. So this was how life was going to be from now on. It didn’t matter. I wanted to live anyway.

“I quit!” I screamed, laughing. “Seventeen! I want to be seventeen some day!”

Joyce and Tim went down to the liquor store and bought vodka and orange juice, and when they got back I crawled out from under the desk and pounded down the very first screwdriver of my life. I wasn’t drunk when my grandfather came to take me home, but I felt much better.

* * * *

I recounted the robbery story to my mother a few days later. She was out of the hospital again, taking her meds, working at a downtown Detroit dive bar slinging shot-and-a-beers. Upscale establishments would not have hired a middle-aged ex-mental patient to tend bar, but she was still reasonably pretty and most definitely white, which made her an anomaly and a major draw. I told her the story, and gave her a detailed description of the man with the gun.

Her eyes grew wide, and she gasped, “Jimmy! That son of a bitch! Am I ever going to give him a piece of my mind!”

“Who’s Jimmy, Mom?”

“The man who robbed you. He’s a customer who comes into the bar.”

I smiled. “Oh, come on, Mom. What are the odds somebody who comes into your bar just happened to rob us?”

“I know it was him. He just got out of prison. It was definitely Jimmy. I told him where you worked.”

It took a moment to sink in. “Uh…what?”

“I told him where you worked. When I passed your picture around the other day, I told him where you worked.”

“You…what? Did what? Passed my…what? What?”

“Your picture, from school, the one where you look so cute. I brag about you all the time, my smart, pretty daughter. Guess I shouldn’t have told him what a cute figure you have.”

“You passed my picture around the bar? You told them where I work?” It felt like somebody had tossed a hand grenade inside my head. “Mom. Do not pass my picture around the bar. Do not talk about me. Do not tell anybody anything about me. Do you understand me?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I won’t do that any more.” Her lip trembled, and her hand shook as she lit another cigarette and drew the smoke deep into her lungs. She looked at the cigarette, cocked her wrist, the way the glamorous movie stars once did it, and slowly exhaled. We sat and watched the smoke curl around the silent room.

copyright 1993, Susan Cameron

First Light

This piece was written as part of a collaborative effort with all the ladies of Tasty Sauce. Each of us has worked on a particular character, and mine is Emma Braddock, a sixtyish woman who has recently been widowed. Here’s Emma’s answer to the question: How well do you sleep?

First Light

I used to sleep like a baby, but now there’s the nightmare that comes every night, the one where James is dead and the heart monitor is screaming its single sustained note. It’s been a year since that awful day, a year without a good night’s sleep.

When the nightmare haunts me, I startle awake and fear going back to sleep. I get up and write in my notebook, hoping that if I write it all down, it will be out of my head for good, drained from my brain, through my arm and hand to the pen and onto the paper. But so far that hasn’t worked. I think the words must run back up my arm and back into my head to whatever corner of my brain they inhabit. In a perverse way I think James still lives in there with the words, and maybe I don’t really want to empty out all the words, because that would empty James out, too. It’s a dilemma I admitted to Georgie and Louie last time we met for dinner.

“That’s absurd,” Georgie said in her don’t-mess-with-me voice. “You could never forget James.”

“It’s not about forgetting,” I said. “It’s about losing him altogether, like he’d be emptied out of my head. I know it’s nuts, but in some way it feels like he’s still alive if I have this dream every night. If I don’t have the dream, I don’t have anything of James left.”

“It’s not about your brain at all, or emptying your brain of James,” Louie said. “James is in your heart and always will be.” She paused and studied me before she said, “His aura is still here, you know.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Louie,” Georgie said. “Don’t get off on that stuff again.”

“But I see it all around Emma,” Louie said calmly.

“What’s it look like?” I asked, looking around and behind me. I couldn’t see a thing.

“Warm and protective,” Louie said. “I see James with you all the time, looking after you.”

“Shouldn’t he be crossing into the light?” I asked. I have become a big fan of Melinda on The Ghost Whisperer and I was suddenly worried that if James was still with me, he hadn’t gone into the light to his eternal rest. I didn’t want to be the one keeping him from heaven.

“Would the two of you stop with the mumbo jumbo,” Georgie said.

Just then the waiter came with our dinners and the clink of forks on china replaced the talk of auras and crossing over.

I took a sip of my wine and glanced over at Louie, who smiled at me and mouthed the words, “He’s fine,” like she really knew that he was. For some reason that comforted me, and I dug into my pasta as if I hadn’t eaten in weeks.

That night I slept undisturbed until the morning sun shone through my bedroom window onto James’s side of the bed. I placed my hand there on the covers and turned it in the sun until the diamond on my wedding band caught the light and gleamed.

Copyright 2010 by Liz Zuercher

Why I Love New York

I love New York because of the architecture...

The neighborhoods...

The museums and the art...

The theater...

The street fairs...

The people...

And, well, I could go on and on, but let's just say...

Courage

by Susan Cameron

I had a friend who did a tour of duty in Vietnam. He came home with only one functioning eyeball and over a dozen medals testifying to his courage. He thought the medals were incredibly funny. "We were on patrol and got ambushed. Shrapnel hit me in the eye, but I kept shooting. What else was I going to do? Of course I kept shooting! When it was all over and I was about to leave the hospital, there was a big ceremony, and I had all these medals pinned to my chest. Hey, a bunch of guys were shooting at me, and I shot back. What choice did I really have? Is that courage?"

I think my friend was excessively modest, but I understood his point. To say that he acted courageously implies that he had a choice to act cowardly; since acting cowardly would have resulted in his death, acting courageously required no conscious choice at all. My friend was amused by the bits of metal and ribbon his country gave him for his bravery, but at least America acknowledged his suffering and his sacrifice. Most people who perform acts of courage remain anonymous and unrewarded.

For example, look at the business executive hauling his briefcase into a conference room full of hostile faces, about to give a presentation that will decide his career's future. Walking into that room takes courage. He is as fearful as a grunt humping through the boonies cradling an M-16 in his arms, wondering if he's going to be ambushed today. If the businessman does well, he may get a raise or a promotion, but nobody will praise him for his guts. Look at the laborer working in the hot sun and cold wind, enduring the daily grind so he can put food in his children's stomachs and keep a roof over their heads -- no medals, no glory, but doesn't he have courage? Isn't a man who endures the hardships of the workplace year after year for his family's sake as brave as a man who faces bullets once in his life for his country's sake?

There are no medals for courageous neighbors who band together to fight crime rather than put up "For Sale" signs, or for whistleblowers who risk their jobs or even their lives when they expose their employers as polluters or crooks. There are no congratulatory ceremonies for brave women who slap their bosses, or sue them, rather than tolerate sexual harassment. Fifty years ago, white southerners who courageously defied their community's standards and fought for civil rights for blacks were ostracized, harassed, or murdered, not lauded in speeches; today, black children in America's ghettos who dare to attend school, study and get good grades in defiance of their community's standards often meet the same fate. Examples of courage are all around us, if we stop and look.

Leo Tolstoy said, "Any idiot can face a crisis. It's this day-to-day living that wears you down." Everyday life can require more courage, tenacity and resolution than warfare on a battlefield. Courage is the will to endure, whether the extraordinary hardships of war or the mundane hardships of ordinary life. Courage is choosing to do the right thing even when it's easier or safer to do the wrong thing.

Robert Louis Stevenson summed it up: "The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat."

copyright 1993, Susan Cameron