A Seat At The Table

“In Missouri, we hunt deer. After you shoot them, you drill holes in their hooves and hang their bodies upside down in trees with rope—” I interrupted Chance, a tall, tan surfer with broad shoulders and long sandy-blond hair.

“You hang dead Bambis in trees?”

“Deer, not Bambis,” Chance said, and continued.

“Then we skin and gut them. I don’t even wear gloves when I do it.” He said this with enormous pride, like he was saying, “I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” He looked at me with anticipation, and I felt like he had told this story before, to many different audiences who probably all shared a similar reaction. He was waiting for mine.

“You reach inside a dead Bambi that is hanging from a tree, and you pull out its organs with your bare hands?” I said, both in horror and awe.

Chance nodded, beaming at his accomplishments. “People in LA think I’m a barbarian,” he said, nodding. “But in Missouri, that’s what you do. You hunt.”

From first glance, Chance looks like he was born and bred in California, but the second he opens his mouth, everything comes out dripping in the dirty, dirty South, and you realize he grew up tossing deer innards over his head before uniting a dead hoofed woodland creature from a tree and bringing its flesh home to Ma for dinner.

“But just you wait. When the apocalypse comes, everyone in LA will be dead, and I’ll be eatin’ deer and rabbits,” he said proudly, crossing his arms across his chest.

“Why harmless deer and bunnies? Why not rats or… cockroaches?” I said.

“That’s foul, Jenn. Why would you want to eat a rat?” His face was scrunched up in disgust.

“Why would you want to eat a bunny?!” I exclaimed.

He continued to carry on, but I was heading in a different direction now. Why would you rather eat a cute deer or bunny and not a hideous rat? Why are you a villain if you kill a deer, but a hero when you kill a rat? Even morality has aesthetic standards… Nietzsche was on to something.

I tuned back into Chance.

“Yeah, rabbits explode when you shoot them, just poofs of fur. I could show you how to make traps, and maybe we could hunt Jim—I mean, not kill and eat him obviously, but catch him in traps.” He was referring to Jim Morrison, our friend’s pet rabbit. I imagined Chance and I running around setting traps and releasing this tiny ball of fluff named after the infamous Doors front man, the Lizard King, and trying to catch him for sport.

“Chance, do you kill cats?”

Chance paused. “Now, I don’t like cats all that much, but I don’t kill them.”

“What about dogs?”

“No, never dogs.”

“What about birds?”

“Of course. Crows are extremely smart, by the way—”

“What about other animals people domesticate… like gerbils?”

“Why would you kill a gerbil?” he asked.

“I feel that way about Bambis,” I said somberly, “and now for rats and cockroaches…” I trailed off. This is why people are vegans.

Chance rolled his eyes. “You know, y’all pay tons of money for ‘organic grass-fed beef’ or whatever, but out on the farm where I grew up, we raised the cows, fed them, and ate them. I mean, that’s as organic as you get. I actually knew where my food came from.”

“You do have a point,” I said sincerely.

Chance grinned, standing there in his oversized tank, camo pants, and flip-flops. He’s an alien, I thought. Then I remembered something.

“Speaking about surviving an apocalypse, did you know you can eat Crocs?”

“Crocs? Like the shoes?” he responded.

“How would you eat a Croc? Where do you come up with this stuff?” I also was wondering how or why I knew this, but I was at a loss. Did someone tell me that?

“You’d boil them… I think…”

Chance stared at me. “I’d rather eat a rabbit than a shoe, Jenn.”

Chance had wandered onto the porch. We were in Malibu at Aviator Nation, a clothing store we both worked at. He began to cut the bushes in front of the store, and I grabbed a broom and followed him. As he chopped and I swept, the ocean mere feet away, a car drove by and some guys hollered out the window. Chance looked at me.

“Why do people do that?” I asked. “What’s supposed to happen?”

“What do you mean?” Chance responded. “What do you mean? It’s just for fun. When I worked in construction, we used to holler at hot cats all the time. You’d be on a roof in the heat and some hot cat would walk by, and you’d just be like, ‘YeeeeEEEEeeeeeeEEEEE, look at that!’”

I stood holding the broom and staring at him in silence.

“Hot cats?” I repeated.

“Yeah, hot cats,” he said.

I put my broom down and popped my hip out, flipping one side of my hair with my hand. “YeeeEEEeeeeEEEee! Look at that!” I shouted as a middle-aged man with a farmer’s tan shuffled by, afraid and confused, crossing the street to get away from me.

“No, no. I don’t think you hollerin’ at hot cats is a good idea,” Chance said, gently grabbing me by the shoulders and leading me back inside as I protested, “Why’s it okay for you to do it while sweating and wearing a neon-colored vest?”

In lulls at work, I always ask Chance to tell me a story. He doesn’t even pause to think of one. He just starts going on and on about a truck rolling down a hill or a fat girl running into a barbed-wire fence, and I sit there listening, silently lusting after a childhood in Missouri.

“What adventure,” I tell him.

“I told that story about the fat girl running into the barbed-wire fence in my public speaking class in high school,” he told me, adding, “the class looooved it.”

The only thing Chance and I have in common is that we both live in Los Angeles and work at Aviator Nation. Besides that, we are oil and water. Politically, if we begin a discussion, it ends in bloodshed. If politics were not a part of life, we would just be friends: me appreciating his ability to live off the land and Chance appreciating my appreciation. But politics is always happening, infiltrating our daily lives and, in present day, polarizing us into groups and pitting us all against one another.

All that aside, Chance and I discovered we share similar characteristics of personality—the same sense of humor, goofy demeanor, and carefree, fun nature. We could go to the beach together and surf or drive down PCH to Hinano’s in Venice to eat burgers, but the environment in which we grew up, and fundamentally the way we viewed government and society, couldn’t be farther apart. It’s like we were miraculously living on two different planets on the same planet.

“There has to be some sort of common ground we can stand on, Chance. There has to beee,” I’d say after an exhausting debate over somehow, if you’re inside a uterus you are a person, but if you have a uterus you are not. “It’s not logical!” I’d say factually, like I was saying the earth is round, the sky is blue, 1 + 1 = 2, my name is Jennifer.

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying abortion is morally wrong.”

“But abortion isn’t just about the unborn life. What about the woman, who is already alive? What about her autonomy, her life? Can’t you connect the two, though? Or see how taking a woman’s rights away is, at the very least, unfair?”

“No,” he says.

“Why?” I say back, almost frantic at this point.

“Because of Jesus,” he says. He says this seriously. He says this as seriously as I am serious about a woman’s right to choose.

“Chance, can you imagine being a woman?”

Chance did, at least, at the very least, think about this for forty-five seconds before responding. “No. Also, I don’t understand why you’re saying we aren’t on common ground.” He marched in step and looked at me. “We are on the same ground.”

I was thinking. Chance is not an idiot entirely. He also is not cruel or intentionally wishing harm on anyone except deer and rabbits. He is not evil. I tried to imagine myself as Chance, born in rural Missouri, raised in a strict Christian family, how maybe I would view the world the same way. Our beliefs become imprinted on us, and why would anyone ever feel misguided otherwise? I’d adopt the belief that if I got pregnant with someone’s baby whom I wasn’t married to, it would be a betrayal, a sin, and abortion is not an option, so I better fucking not get pregnant. It would change the way I move in the world. Was I holding onto my current beliefs only because I was raised by progressives in slutty California?

Chance had moved to California mainly to go to the beach, and California was now showcasing his conservative Missouri upbringing in a different light. He was the odd one out, and his political stance was putting labels on his character, defining him unfairly. He’s a racist, bigot, barbarian hunting people’s pets and praising Jesus. He wasn’t really, at the core of him, any of those things. He was fun-loving, a gentleman when he wanted to be, creative, and hilarious. His political beliefs were contradicting his overall beliefs, his character, even his intentions, how he treats people day today. Chance believed everyone, no matter what, was deserving of human decency, of being treated fairly. But he was still going to vote against a woman’s right to choose what happens in her own body. And this, I had to get to the bottom of. If I framed the question in a way that directly affected him, I could get him to dip his toe in my pond.

“If a man raped your wife and she got pregnant, would you force her to have that baby?”

“No man would ever rape my wife, Jenn. I own guns,” he responded matter-of-factly, a smug look on his face.

Oh mah gahhhd. That was a whole other conversation for another time.

“Okay, if a panel of women controlled what happens to your body, would you be okay with it because of Jesus?”

Chance got angry. “How could they control my body? Absolutely not. That. Is insanity.” He paused. “No woman is going to control me.”

I was ready to bitch-slap him across the face.

“Would the panel of women be hot cats?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. “No. They would be the equivalent of old, saggy white men with no style or charm,” I said flatly.

“Old saggy women?” Chance said, repulsed, and I knew he was envisioning boobs tragically sagging to the floor.

“So why is it only unfair, inconceivable even, if it’s happening to you?” I asked, not getting it.

“Because in the Bible…” he went on and on.

“But you just bent the Bible’s rules over for yourself. And what if you don’t believe in Jesus?”

Chance scoffed.

“How can the rules not apply to you but to everyone else? If you”—I used my hands to create air quotes—“‘disobey the Lord,’ then shouldn’t everyone be able to? What are these”—air quotes again—“‘rules’ doing anywhere near policy?” I asked him, searching his face for some sort of connection, recognition, anything.

“Well…” Chance was stumped. I was stumped. Above, Jesus was stumped—and also low-key insulted and disappointed in us all. This was not my vision. We were all behaving like degenerates, and some of us in His name! I’m not supposed to be a scapegoat. The audacity.

We sat across from each other, arguing, eating burgers, our hair salty from the ocean. Two opposing views sharing a seat at the same table. It seemed impossible, like we were on the same basketball team, but we couldn’t make a play. Fumbling passes, trying to make all the shots ourselves. But we sat there long enough, and eventually we found an understanding, a rhythm, and we started to finally catch each other’s throws. We had a chance to win the game now.

There is a reason for separation of church and state (duh). Removing the Bible, this idea of a judging God, bad and good, heaven and hell—in its absence is also the absence of judgment. Without judgment, there is room to see, simply put, life happening to two people and the resilience that results from enduring life together. There isn’t fairness or equality, but without judgment blocking the road, there is a path to change, to progress. There is forgiveness.

I wish it was easier for us all to sit at the same table, to humble ourselves, really try to understand one another. It’s become too much, too complicated, too hateful. People are turning into monsters.

“Chance?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Can you tell me the story about the girl who ran into a barbed-wire fence?”

Chance’s face lit up. “First of all, Jenn, this was a big girl…”

Editor’s note: Croc shoes are not edible. Do not eat them.