Modern western civilization is not so different from the days of early settlements.
(Exercise: create a story from random story elements picked from a list.
Elements: The Wild West & Winter)
The mall had been dreadful, and I was quickly throwing my shopping bags into the trunk of my parents’ Chevy sedan as the rain poured down on me. It was a cold night in Los Angeles, unsually rainy during Christmas, and I was mad that every time I came to visit family the last ten years, I seemed to bring the dreary weather with me from out of state. I got in the driver’s seat of my borrowed car, soggy and frustrated.
But as I turned the key in the ignition, the engine didn’t turn over. Damn it, I had left the headlights on when I was shopping and I must have killed the battery. I pulled out my cell phone from my purse but I had been listening to Christmas tunes all day and it had died. Maybe I could flag someone down to give me a jump. So I threw open the door and stomped back over to the trunk, transferring my bags to the back seat so I could find the jumper cables.
Nothing.
Well, maybe some Good Samaritan would be a kind enough to supply them.
“Excuse me sir,” I said to the man buckling his child into the car next to mine. “My car battery died. Do you think you could give me a jump start?”
He stood up from his task and looked at me as if I spoke a different language. I repeated myself and he said “Don’t you have Roadside Assistance? It’s pouring and I don’t have jumper cables. This is 2022, not 1980.”
And he got in his car and sped away, leaving me in the pouring rain. It’s too bad it wasn’t 1980…at least there would have been a pay phone.
I tried to flag down several other passersby, and all of them looked at me like I was some thug or homeless person asking for a joint instead of a 40 year old woman in a red dress coat.
One woman, who had completely ignored me when she was getting into her mustang, pulled up next to me and rolled down her window. “Girl, you are going to get mugged if you keep asking for help from strangers. Can’t you call someone?”
“My cell phone died. Can I borrow yours?”
A car behind her honked. The woman’s shoulders tensed and her eyebrows creased as she glanced in her rear view mirror.
“I’m sorry Lady. I gotta go. Good luck,” the stranger quickly rolled up her window and took off and the guy behind her pulled into her parking space.
I decided I’d better ask for a phone at an establishment where people often needed to call an Uber. I sloshed through the parking lot to the bar with Christmas lights wound over a hitching post, clomped up the wooden steps and pushed through the saloon doors to the bouncer. “Welcome to Wild West, Ma’am,” he said to me, tipping his cowboy hat to his fingers. “Can I see your ID?”
I pulled out my ID from my purse to show him when someone burst through the door. I dropped my purse in the flurry and the man tripped over it, tumbling down the steps. The bouncer jumped up from his perch at the same time, and when he got to the man on the ground, he rolled him over to reveal a knife sticking out of his belly. In all my years growing up in CA, I’d never seen a cowboy bar and rarely ever encountered rain, but my home town was still the same wild west I remembered.
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