Before he passed a couple of years ago, everybody in this town knew my father. Jim Stevens. Jimbo. Ask around City Hall. Ask Andy Maurodis, ask Bill Ganz, ask anybody who worked in that building. People would wonder, and ask, “Chaz is your son,” and he’d smile and give two thumbs up. We were nothing alike and everything alike. We both shared ASD. He pulled public records for me. He served on the police pension board. He was, by every account you’ll find, a genuinely good man.
Somebody sent a kid to attack his house anyway.
This was a few years before COVID. I’d been retired from the Deerfield Beach activism business for the better part of five years. No columns, no fights, no reason for anyone to come looking. I didn’t even live in town anymore. I was up in Jupiter, down for a night fixing something at my parents’ place in the Cove.
Ten, eleven o’clock on a weeknight, windows open, and I hear it. Thump. Thump. Thump. Against the house.
Understand what two decades of threats does to your ear. I didn’t hear pranks. I heard suppressed gunfire. I grew up on a farm, learned arms training from genuine WWII experts, so loaded guns are around. And in my room, down at Mom and Dads, was a laser-scoped Bushmaster, and inside of a minute there was a red dot on the chest of a figure standing in front of a green Toyota SUV in the dark, throwing something at my parents’ home.
Finger off the trigger. You identify before you do anything else. What is he throwing? Molotovs? What in the fucking hell is this?
Eggs. A kid in shorts, chucking eggs.
I had him dead to rights, and he was a teenager throwing breakfast at an old couple’s house. I screamed out the window, he jumped out of his skin, dove into the passenger side of the Toyota, and he, and his driver, off into the night.
I called BSO the next day. Don’t take my word for it. Pull the CAD for my parents’ address. It’s a public record. It’s all there.
Days later, I am on my bike to Sprouts, rolling past the house of a woman we will call Waddles McGee, a lady with an ass the size of a semi and a hatred of me to match. She knows who she is. Deputies had already been there about that night. Ask her. Parked out front, a mile from my parents’ place, a green Toyota SUV.
Fuck you Waddles.
No really, fuck you.
I cannot see inside her kitchen. I cannot quote the dinner. Her contempt was not a secret. A kid drove to my father’s house, a man who never did a thing to her, and threw things at it in the dark. The vehicle matched. Draw the line. I already have.
That kid came within one bad assumption of dying in the street. One more thump before I saw the eggs. Worse light. A worse man on the trigger. Dead teenager on the tarmac. A mother explaining how talk at her table ended up in a police report with a body attached.
Hatred does not stay on the plate. It soaks the people next to you. One of them, younger and loyal and dumb, carries it somewhere with a driveway. You do not pick the landing zone. You do not know if the house on the other end has a rifle and a reason to expect the worst.
So when a candidate tells people to find the courage to pick up guns and fight in public, in person, I do not hear a figure of speech. I hear the thump on my father’s siding. The gap between a mouth and a front yard is that short.
My father did nothing to anyone. His house got hit anyway, because I was hated and he was reachable. Waddles didn’t hear the terror in Mom’s confused voice, wondering what the hell is going on.
Rhetoric does not hunt the target. It hits whoever is standing closest.
Like I said, fuck you Saran Moran.
May you burn in hell.
