The Accidental Gentrifist: The Fall of Man

He darts past a parking lot and hangs a right, bolting up the hill at 9th Street, his lungs burning against the sudden incline. Near the top of the hill he hangs another right and dashes between two old houses, sprinting straight to the backyard. There, he comes upon a dense thicket. Even in the moonlight, he can barely make out his surroundings, and there's hardly any light filtering through the thick tangle of brush. He can make a few points of light here and there, each bubbled by the thick chemical saturation deadening his brain, each bubble bouncing in rhythm with the pounding of his arteries, like hammer strikes in his eardrums and in the back of his throat. Hearing the cops draw closer, Ronald scrambles through the live oaks and scrub brush. The cops, the cops. They’re calling out to him, panting, getting closer, too close, cursing when caught by a branch or tripped up by an unseen stone, giving Ronald a precious extra second or two. They call for Ronald to Halt, which means they’re probably close enough to see him. Ronald's pulse races and looks back, just for a split second, sees the bouncing beams of flashlight glare through the trees he just tore through a moment before. The Vicodin has seeped deeper into him, almost to his bones. It’s getting difficult to run. His knees have become something like mashed potatoes, his ankles broken springs. Or maybe it’s the Earth, softening herself under his shoes, conspiring with the pigs to bring Ronnie down, punishing him for some grievous trespass he’s long forgotten.

His knees buckling with each step, he fights through the clawing branches, plunging forth toward moonlight, or lamplight, or some kind of view of the city. Above him, a floodlit ancient oak glows like pale green cauliflower. The lights of the city float unfixed behind the needles of coniferous boughs. Each glowing point begins to gravitate toward the frenetically bouncing beams of the police flashlights, one ray of light trying to engage the other in a swirl of magnetic coriolia. His heart thumps harder, but it’s Ronald’s poor head that’s both the axis and the membrane of a percussive crescendo. He pauses momentarily, trying to catch his breath. Branches snap behind him. He can hear the cops breathing, still cursing. For the moment, still searching. Their heavy, doggish breath is behind him, to the left and to the right. There could be a thousand of them,waiting, yellow-eyed in the darkness. Then, suddenly, Ronald sees a break between the trees, a clear space, air, one cool breath in the opposite direction of the advancing cops. Ronald goes for it.

The first five steps plunge Ronnie toward freedom. But the sixth step finds nothing but air.

Ronald Hood falls twenty-two feet from a limestone cliff to an empty bar’s asphalt patio. He lands first on a steel handrail for a wheelchair ramp leading to an astro-turfed stage, breaking his vertebrae in two places, resting finally on a jagged pile of unplugged spotlights. Well past last call on a weeknight, the patio is unpopulated, the bar visibly empty through its back door, except for a barback stocking six packs of Dos Equis in a reach-in cooler, a bartender counting the drawer, and a cocktail waitress in the back, nearly hidden in shadow until she approaches a flickering Venetian candle, bending over to blow it out.

Hearing the crashing impact of Ronald’s body falling to the earth, the bartender emerges from the red cinderblock building in time to see three cops twenty feet above him on the precipice of the limestone cliff, guns drawn, each sweating in the heat. Ronald Hood moans at the bartender's feet, almost imperceptibly. “Don’t Move!!” one of the cops screams, his black gun quivering, spittle flying from his mouth, temporarily illuminated in the beam of his flashlight. The bartender smirks up over Ronald’s broken body. “I don’t think you have to worry about him going anywhere.”

In a few minutes more cops appear on the patio, the barback letting them after a harsh depression of the panic bar bolted on the side gate. In another minute, the red walls of the bar are bleating with the arrhythmic strobe of a half dozen flashing police cruisers. Then the paramedics arrive, the diesel rattle of their great neon yellow ambulance making conversation all but impossible.

Then a bicycle cop shows up. “Hey,” he says, “I know this guy. His name is Ronnie. He goes to the Brackenridge ER and complains about some fictional injury until they give him some pills so he’ll go away.” He looks down at the semiconscious Ronald Hood. “Isn’t that right Ronnie?”

Ronald moans.

The bicycle cop says, “Looks like he’s gonna have real pain tomorrow.”

“Not if he’s paralyzed,” the female paramedic responds flatly, using a pair of penny shears to cut away Ronald's blood-soaked jeans. She reveals the jagged points of both femurs, broken clear through the skin of each thigh.

Another cop rolls on a pair of latex gloves and gingerly lifts the remains of Ronald’s jeans. He prods through his pockets and extracts an empty orange plastic pill bottle and a little white piece of paper, folded in half and only barely stained with blood. He opens it up and says, “He’s right. Look, it’s a prescription.” He reads aloud: “For Ronald Hood, 10x 5mg Hydrocodone. Prescribed for back pain related to a fall from a six-foot ladder.”

The bartender laughs and turns away. The cops, the barback, and even the paramedics crane their heads up, toward the cliff, to measure the height and calculate the difference.