The Attack by Kurt Schlichter

Author:Kurt Schlichter [Schlichter, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

21.

Houston, Texas

Jace Gillette and Clement Willis seem a superficially unlikely pair. Jace is dressed with edgy flair, with a light blue blazer and expensive sneakers befitting his position as an art gallery manager. Clem, with a shaggy red beard, wears a gray work shirt bearing the logo of the tire store he owns. While Jace drives a Tesla, Clem has a Ford F-150 with a Texas flag sticker on the tailgate, along with one that reads, “Faith, Family, Flag and Fishin’.”

Jace: Face it. We’re a couple of stereotypes come to life! And I’m comfortable with that.

Clem: The only good thing about all this was us meeting Jace and his friends and he and them meeting the congregation and finding out that, you know, we’re pretty different but we got a lot in common even if we don’t agree on everything.

Jace: How did this all happen? Well, the thing about Houston is that there’s no zoning. You can have an Arby’s, a mattress store, and a strip club on the same block.

Clem: We all live in a small neighborhood southwest of downtown. Rosewood Avenue is the main way to enter the neighborhood. The Rosewood Avenue Church of Christ is right there on the edge of the quiet, more family-oriented part, and across the way it’s a little funkier. Lots of people who are not so traditional live there.

Jace: He means gay! Anyway, the Cellar is a club just across the street from the Church, and as you might expect there was some tension. I’m not pointing fingers about who started it.

Clem: We could have been nicer, more Christian and neighborly.

Jace: And some of us went out of our way to get a rise out of the church people. We did not have to moon them.

Clem: We mostly ignored each other. We thought they were sinners and they thought we were a bunch of hicks, and I kind of am. Proud of it too. No one was throwing fists, but we didn’t like each other.

Jace: I was at the gallery in Montrose when the Attack started on the 27th. We are on Central Time here in Texas, so it was about eleven. I was already thinking about this new Bangladeshi place I was going for lunch.

Clem: Bangladeshi? What do they eat?

Jace: I tried it later, and frankly, gimme a Whataburger. Anyway, I start hearing shooting outside. Now, I am from Texas, so I know the difference between a backfire, a firecracker, and a gunshot. This was gunshots, and lots of them. I thought it was some kook on a shooting spree, but it just went on and on. Now, I was the president of Gays With Guns because I was never going to be a victim. I had my CZ75 pistol and you know I had it out.

Clem: The attacks started kind of far from my shop, but we saw it reported because we have Fox on in the waiting area. My front desk guys yells, “Clem, there’s some kind of terrorist thing going on.

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