SHOTGUN

Chapter One:

It's like I'm dreaming while awake sometimes...they flow one into the other like snippets from so many bad dreams. I try to turn it off, to change the channel in my head with no results.
Manchaca road at rush hour, I'm chasing this kid, a runaway, he runs into the street and I follow. Screeching brakes and blaring horns greet us as we push off and jump around the hoods of rush hour commuters. By some miracle we both make it to the other side. I follow him over a couple of fences and we end up in some old mexican ladies yard, who watches with amusement as I am held at bay with a survey stick...a yellow pine picket with an orange plastic flag waved with the authority of a warrior with a sword. I have only my words, a combination of support, recrimination and veiled threats. In the end my pack of cigarettes saves the day...the kid relents with the promise of a smoke in the van on the way back to the center. In a show of solidarity between us, I allow him two smokes. I am written up for violating the smoking policy for allowing a patient to smoke...in a hospital vehicle no less.No mention is made of the creative intervention that led to his return to the hospital...no police intervention,no injuries. I refuse to sign the write up, calling it bullshit. Nothing comes of this, because it's bullshit and they know it.
And then my mind suddenly transports me to a thursday night in the security room hallway. We are trying to move a patient from the holding bench to a security room. A struggle ensues. I am wedged between the patient and another staff member, we are all pressed against the hallway wall. Somehow my forearm is pressed against the patients face and he is trying to bite me as we stumble down the hall. I am pushing his head against the wall with all my might to avoid the woodchipper that is his mouth. At this point I am in a cocoon of bodies trying to wrestle him to the ground in a narrow hallway. I take my free arm and jam my elbow up into his ribs as hard as I can while pulling his leg out from underneath him with a foot wrapped around his ankle. We all crash to the floor. He's big and pissed so it takes a few minutes to get him restrained for a carry to the security room. In spite of the chants from other patients in the other three security rooms, we manage to fold him up for transport and carry him into the SR. I am the jump off man. I have his arms wrapped around his neck and his fingers laced together, another pair of staff have his middle section and yet another has his legs folded and restrained. He's a "pretzle". I guide his head into the far corner of the room, and one by one the other staff jump off and leave the room. The last takes position at the door and I have him alone, wedged in the corner, one hand containing his arms, the other his legs. On a silent count of three, I release and race for the door. He unfolds and leaps up and chases me. It is the longest twenty feet I have ever run in my life(that night anyway). If he catches me before my coworker can slam the door shut I am at his mercy. I'm twice his age and winded. He would kick my ass. I can almost feel his breath on my neck as I run past the doorman and crash hands first into the opposite wall. The door slams shut and I lock him in.
And then I'm on the streets of Austin again. This time on south lamar chasing a fifteen year old girl back and forth across one of the busiest streets in town through traffic. One, two, three times across before she clothslines herself on a support wire for a telephone pole and tumbles into the ditch. I restrain her in the ditch and it's a couple of minutes before my back up can get there, so I'm rolling around in a ditch with a teenage girl in a dress that is now, by the law of gravity up around her head. She is totally exposed, bra and panties on display to the world and in uncomfortably close contact with me. As we roll around in the ditch and her intimate bits make contact with my body my mind is split between bringing her back and the very real fear of her making an accusation. I held my ground, she was returned to the hospital and she made no accusations.
And my mind is back in the security room hallway on a sunday morning, I'm the seven o'clock guy, alone till nine. Our one "guest" is a really fucking crazy girl from the intensive care unit ( That intensive care could'nt deal with her should tell you something.) She is covered in scars from years of "delicate cutting" (once, she had to have an x-ray on a possible broken arm and that x-ray revealed paper clips and staples healed into the musculature of her arm). At 8:30 am she decides to make a "break for it" and charges down the hall towards me. This is not a small person, she clocks in at probably 180 lbs. with a low center of gravity. I come around the desk and get to the hallway just in time to straight arm tackle her. She gets air and I land on her. There is no time for phone calls for help, there's no one else there. It's just us rolling around on the floor. I finally get her contained and the verbal intervention begins. I like this kid and she likes me, and after about twenty minutes of negotiation (and my phone ringing unanswered that I used to great advantage..." Someone else might need my help, and if I'm dealing with you I can't help them...you know how it is here...blah blah blah") I got her back in the room with a promise to read her poetry. I almost dislocated her shoulder and fucked up my back and in the end it was her poetry that ended the crisis. I read her stuff before the end of the shift, and continued to read it for the remainder of her stay and in payment she never fucked with me again. I often wonder what happened to her.
And then my mind snaps back to the present, I am on top of a ten foot ladder making up joints in a box. I'm an electrician now. That shit in the past is past. But it's not. It's like a shotgun blast, an explosion of pellets.
And each pellet is a memory.