norwalk, 2009

A woman wearing a pink sweater and a skirt with pink flowers on it hoists herself onto a table and begins speaking in a shaky voice. The employees of the Norwalk, California In-N-Out Burger look very confused--one of them calmly tells their frustrated Drive-Thru customer to Please hold on and that There seems to be a problem--but they nonetheless listen, intrigued, to her story. She talks about how she used to be addicted to drugs (Like really bad ones, she stresses) and how bad things got for her, and how she had to start stealing things from both friends and total strangers to support her habit financially. She talks about how she hit her all-time low when, in a fit of intense withdrawal, she sold her dog, a big and beautiful Basset Hound named Tammy who she loved very much and who she would never have intentionally tried to harm, ever. She says she sold Tammy to her dealer who she knew to be very violent and impulsive and that she hated herself for selling Tammy to him and that she still hasn’t fully forgiven herself for it. She lets out a yelp of intense pain and stands there, on the table, in silence for a few seconds before continuing with her story. She says that, a few days after selling her dog, she took an extremely dangerous amount of drugs and went outside into the city and walked around for a few hours, wallowing in hatred and denial and hallucinating a lot and feeling like she was going to die. She starts to cry here and then says that she walked down an alleyway to look for her dealer and instead found Tammy, her beloved Basset Hound, dead on the ground next to a dumpster with her leg severed. She describes in detail how the leg-less hip of the dog looked, how it had tendons and ligaments sticking out and how the blood had crusted over and turned a sickly violet, and how she, upon seeing the dog, crumpled pathetically to the floor and hugged the dog’s dead body close to her and lay there for twelve hours before the police came to pick her up. She pauses here and then looks down at the table on which she is standing and says Thank you and then the employees and customers at the In-N-Out all begin to clap. She steps off the table and onto the floor and then sits down and finishes her burger and fries.