Chattanooga Pulse

I had the dream again for the first time in a very, very long time.  I’m sitting in a high-backed chair at a long table covered in fine china and rotten food, fruit spoiling to the point that its putrefied liquids are slowly dripping onto the mildewed and soiled lace table cloth below it, and meats falling apart and discoloring with equal vulgarity.

As before, there is only moonlight illuminating this scene from a far window and a faint breeze causing napkins to stir—and the perplexing lack of flies and maggots, given the presence of such rot.  And as before, not just rot from the food but from the dozens of dinner guests with me, all dead and in various states of decay, only their eyes uniform in their glossy blackness from lid to lid.

Unlike previous versions however, they aren’t all just staring at me with their dead eyes in complete silence; they are almost imperceptibly moving their heads around in a sort of social discomfort, as if to give me a break from accusing dead stares.  I do not sense release from blame, but I do sense a hint of pity and the dream ends as it always does, me awaking bolt upright and sweating with a quick scream, having been unable to do so at the table I pray is only a figment of my imagination.

I realize this isn’t my normal cheerful fare about law enforcement tomfoolery or the elderly fornicating in unfortunately public places, but I can’t get the sense of loss of the past month out of my head, or the numbers that go with it.

As of this writing, there have been 53 people killed in seven separate shootings in just the past 30 days, and seven of them were cops.  Not since 9/11 has there been such a singular loss of officers’ lives in a single day, and with that news comes the resurgence of emotions from our own dark days locally in the latter part of 2001 and mid-2002.  The sense of grief is nearly palpable, and I do not like the doorways it pushes us through…even when the dead are mildly sympathetic to our plight.

While I am technically a “columnist”, I am fully aware that as far as writers go it’s more technically accurate to just call me a “freak”; a rare element in journalism, in that I am not supposed to exist in the mind of the Average Joe because beat cops are generally stereotyped as ignorant thugs not smart enough to hold a “normal job”, much less have a regular gig in a weekly alternate newspaper.

I’m actually OK with that, because underestimation comes with many, many benefits…but weeks like this are tough for us oddballs because sometimes, it really is hard to take the uniform off.  More so when that uniform’s badge has a wreath around it to honor its fallen, and never more so when you see protestors cheering on the deaths of those cops from the scene of their murders.

Four dead in one day.  I work in an area where that many officers constitute an entire geographical workforce; the thought of a whole team being wiped out on one call is unimaginable, yet in effect it happened to the officers of the Oakland P.D., and just shy of that many in Pittsburgh days later.

Writing is a catharsis, but today it provides neither relief nor even the briefest respite from the crushing depths large-scale despair can lay on you.  It fills every crevice of your heart with black oily smoke, and there is no relief but time…and the hope that the old dreams will once again fade.

To those killed over this last senseless month, I salute you…both those that wore a badge and those on the other side of them, for you all shared the same violent and unnecessary deaths.  There is no light-hearted comedy in me this week, but I can assure you there won’t be any light-hearted comedy on the streets after this, either.

Back to the dinner table and its long shadows.  There is still plenty of moonlight. And maybe it’s the dead that need cheering up for once, and not me.

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Alexander D. Teach is an occasional student of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a graduate of Central High. In his spare time he enjoys carpentry, auto mechanic work, boating, and working for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.