On Friday at 20:30, piercing the calm air, a chilling, murderous voice rings out.
“Get back here!”
There is a pause. Silence. Then the voice screams again.
“G-E-T BACK HERE, NOW!”
A big, muscular Rottweiler runs through the intersection from Ballard public library to the adjoining park, glancing back briefly, its legs never breaking stride.
On a stroll in the park, a man and his two kids walk towards the direction of the dog. The man is quite big and muscular. The dog, looks at the threesome, and heads directly towards them. On seeing the dog, unleashed, coming towards his children, the man calls out to no one in particular “This dog should be on a leash.” His voice is firm, but slightly high, giving him an unnatural feminine tone.
The owner of the dog comes into view. His face angry with emotion. Seeing the dogs owner, the man with the children repeats his paternal warning
“This dog should be on a leash.”
“He will be punished!”
The dog goes to the far side of the park and crouches under a bench at the rim of the skate pool. Sitting on the bench are 5 high school and junior high school kids. The owner approaches the bench.
“You don’t walk away from me! I’m the one that feeds you! You aren’t anything without me. I’m going to kill you, the next time you do that to me!” The kids do not get up from the bench, but they slightly lean away as the man reaches under and grabs the dog’s collar, pulling him out from his hiding spot.
The man tugs the dog out from the skate-pool bench, down to the street, in the direction of the library. He cannot contain his anger. On the sidewalk of 57th street in front of the kids in the skatepark, the man yanks the dog by collar. The dog sinks to the ground instinctively, waiting for his beating. The owner yells “You motherfucker, you just try that again!”, and then he spits on his dog.
A 20 something year old kid, baseball cap with bill unbent, small tattoos on his arms, impulsively hollers angrily at the dog owner
“Don’t spit on your dog, man!”
“Shut up kid. He’s my dog!”
“Don’t give you the right to spit on your dog!”
“I can do whatever fuck I want with him”
“If you can’t take care of him, give him to me, man.”
“Shut up you little shit!”
“Don’t tell me to shut up. You shouldn’t be treating your dog that way”
“I’ll rip you fucking head off!”
“I’m right here.”
“FUCK YOU! I can do whatever the fuck I want!”
The dog owner moves out of earshot. The skateboarder looks calm. He says to a friend “You can’t treat a dog like that!”
“Yeah.” his friend replies in support.
Other kids look in awe at their new hero. One kid remarks in a gossipy voice “That guy threatened us. He said he had a gun in his car! He said he would come back!”
The next day, at 13:30, there are kids with spray paint cans in their hands in the skate pool. Fresh, bright orange spray paint on the opposite side of the pool reads in neat print “Fuck the law. Fuck the system.” A shout comes from the balcony above the QFC “Quit painting the park, or I’m calling the cops!” The kids panic and decide to flee.
Wednesday, 9:00AM, there are two cleaners at the skate park, which is now cordoned off with red caution tape. There are brooms in the pool. Two men stand talking about the problem with the skateboard park. One man, in his 40s, with John Lennon glasses, wants to get pictures as evidence to use for prosecution - his end goal would be for the perpetrators to clean the skate park. The other man, African American, with long dreads, also in his 40s, thinks that this mess needs to be cleaned up sooner. “As soon as one person sees it, other kids start doing it too.” He reckons that in the last 5 years, this park has been cleaned close to a hundred times.
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