Dueling Protestors
OK, so the exit I usually take at the BART stop on 24th and Mission has no escalator, just a lot of stairs. There are other exits, and I suppose any one of them could have an escalator, but by the time I stop to consider that, force of habit has already carried me far enough along to commit to the one that definitely doesn’t. This morning, I passed two people passing out flyers–a thin, unsmiling middle-aged man, stationary, with an unthin smiling young woman pacing around him. People who strayed into her orbit got a flyer placed in their hands; the few who actually looked down at it grimaced as they started up the stairs. I skirted the edge of flyer-passing range, close enough to hear the repeated words “against the war.”
I guess at this point I should mention that, on the train, the driver had asked us to stay on the lookout for a missing 290-pound autistic man. That might possibly be connected to what follows.
So I’m halfway to street level when I hear a bass bellow–”No!”–echoing up the subway exit as if it were the inside of a musical instrument. Because our long staircase is unautomated, nothing keeps carrying us forward when we all stop and turn as one to track the source of this bearish threatening noise. “No!” the roar sounds again, bigger and closer now, and a hulking red-faced man puffs into view at the bottom of the stairwell. He’s got glasses, he’s balding, he seems about equally tall and wide. He’s dressed in a white and gray gym outfit, t-shirt and shorts, too light for a cold morning. And now he’s got about a twenty-person audience.
“Don’t you know what you’re doing?” he barks at the two flyer-passers. He’s huge, and furious, but he doesn’t quite seem to present a clear threat to the pair–his voice has an autistic’s flat, unmodulated quality. Despite the arm-waving and shouting, he scrupulously refuses to close the last six feet between them. Everyone is silent. He looks up at us for the first time, and with a grand sweep of his arm delivers his next line:
“Abortion is murder!”
Now, every traveller who’s gotten this far is aware that the flyer-passers are anti-war protestors. So a wave of sheer cognitive dissonance sweeps through us, front to back, like one of those expanding fiery doughnut-shaped explosions that were so popular in late-’90s movies. The flyer woman sizes up the situation poorly, and shoots back a bit too quickly:
“War is murder too!”
But her enormous debate opponent is ready for that one. “Well, abortion is about cutting the heads off of the little babies!” he booms in reply.
“Nobody’s cutting anybody’s head off, all right?” says the flyer man slowly, moving from his spot for the first time and stepping between them. The big guy slumps his shoulders in defeat, and on that signal our communal sense of show’s-over sends us back to our stair-climbing. With his theater falling apart around him, our star rallies and gives us his very best effort.
“I hate abortion!” he screeches, his voice rising alarmingly to the register of a frightened child. “I hate the women…and the babies…and…”
He’s got us.
“…and…”
We all stop.
“…and the cunts!”
And with that he runs back into the station. I’ve read that autistics find it very difficult to tell a lie, especially about their own thoughts or feelings. Maybe today I met the world’s most honest anti-abortioneer.