“That’s how high it came,” the lady says, pointing at a faint brown line drawn straight by the waves, high across the exterior of her broken house. She gives us water and lukewarm orange juice, and we do our work. 



The woman’s fake eyelashes caught my attention as I dug away the mud. Half of them were still clinging on, although most of those remain- ing were half-hearted in their fight, drooping in strange angles from the side of her eyes. She was in her late twenties, and she was there for a week. As we carried back the sacks of dirt back to the white, beaten-up truck, she told me that her arms and thighs were sore from all this carrying. Usually she was a stylist, and she picked out clothes for wealthy women in Shinjuku. She was also known as the one who had the portable air shampoo. When evening came, women flocked around her large orange suitcase. One by one we took turns to sink the prongs on top of the air shampoo bottle into our hair. Water wasn’t running in the tsunami regions, then. 



With her holding the other edge, I concentrate first on removing the tatami. The straw mats are light when dry, but hard to get rid of when sodden with seawater. Too delicate to remove by machine, but too heavy for easy human removal, tatamis were usually one of the last pieces of debris left in tsunami areas. I was too weak to carry it alone. Thin slabs of tatami dotted the beaches of fish- ing villages, attracting flies. Sometimes, a tatami would split in the middle of a removal, presenting a mass of maggots and dirt wriggling at your feet. 



The ground left after a tsunami has a fine, gritty texture, dried dirt peppered with slivers of plastic and wood. We all try to move efficiently. I scrape away at the first layer, rubber strips peeling away from the metal of my shovel. Mud from the bot- tom of the sea bed, hugging asagao plants and tomato plants in the garden. I throw the dirt into a sandbag. There is just so much sludge. At first, teams talk amongst each other, commenting on the thickness of the toxic waste, the photographs. But after a while, we drift into silence. 



When we left Tokyo for the tsunami-stricken regions in the north, the bus stalled, waiting for a man to run on. He was a salaryman, 30 or so. He carried a big duffel bag over his Comme de Garçons suit and shirt. Snug in his arms were metal lined boots, minted fresh, and he slung his regular bag to his back so he could carry the duffel bag with convenience store food in his arms. As he sat and the lights dimmed on the bus, he muttered apologetically that he had to finish something overtime. No one really heard him, and the bus left for the north. 



II 



Aftershocks are fairly dependable and predict- able, unlike earthquakes. Their occurrence and magnitude follow certain empirical laws, and the number of aftershocks can be trusted to de- crease in time. In 2011, in the month of March alone, 2941 aftershocks rippled through Japan. Ten days after the main shock, there were only a tenth the number of aftershocks that rocked the island on the day of the quake. The release of the energy resulting from the fracturing of rocks relieves the stress at the earthquake’s focus, but also transmits the energy to nearby rocks. This causes new stresses in rocks, stress that had never existed before. 



When I left there was a big debate going on about whether young people should even go to the north to help out. Stereotypical disaster guilt. Fresh-eyed volunteers would arrive in a disaster spot just to leave a few days after, to satisfy their own need to help out. Going home to Tokyo, chanting that they had done what they could, and promptly forgetting whatever they had seen, except to humbly mention that that they had been there and had tried to help. Pundits argued. Newspapers proclaimed that the youth were apathetic. Groups on college campuses rallied and sent busloads of their students up north to retaliate. Loads of volunteers kept on pushing their way to the grimy truck heading back home, and girls in makeup back home played guessing games to figure out whether that last aftershock was a 4.5 or a 5.0. Why go. Why stay. Why leave. Why do we remain? 



In April my mom drove me to the big Costco out in Makuhari and bought me a good sturdy jacket and dozens of air masks—she tried some on herself, noting that the air in the north was toxic, according to national television—and heavy boots, and a duffel bag full of dried food. I asked around and found myself accidentally at a Peace Boat gathering, an organization that usually ships students around various continents on a big cruise ship to volunteer for a meaningful experience. They suspended their usual activities and were organizing volunteers to go help out with tsunami relief efforts. I wasn’t sure about the meaningful experience but they were the only organization that took those under the legal age—twenty. So I sold my so-called interpretive skills, and was told that I could be helpful, since there were a lot of foreigners helping out. I was on a bus the next day. 



After the earthquake in Tokyo I heard dozens of stories about what it was like in the north. Don’t tear the photographs of boys in sodden bowl cuts, stories stamped and sodden. You will meet people who had seen cars being dragged along six foot waves, filing up with water, with people in- side them. Women who had to leave their bedrid- den parents on the ground floor as they escaped upstairs with their children. How fast it must have seemed, to run up the stairs, and leave a lifetime of photos behind. A few minutes of warn- ing. And troops, troops of volunteers, stamping across toxic mud. The famous flying bus, lifted up into the sky by the waves and balanced on top of two twelve story buildings. Volunteers march- ing with Kodaks and Nikons. Tetanus, through a thin sneaker, by kitchen knives sharp and still hidden in the mud. 



III 



When I went back three years later, everything had changed. The streets were cleared of rubble, and I couldn’t find a trace of mud. The gargantuan towers of car metal and truck were gone. I visited the headquarters of one of the local news- papers. Their building looked half-done. It was spanking new on the bottom and old and wave- torn on top. 



I entered their machine room in the basement, led by a reporter who had been in the building the day of the quake. There were three printing presses, all of which went under a few minutes after the shaking. As their basement filled with water, the newspapermen were silent, and they clung to the windows on the highest floor of the building. They saw cars and trees pass. As soon as the black water receded, they would go down and survey the damage. They would divide into teams and go out to their neighbors to record, as quickly and accurately as possible, the typeface information: the number of dead, the locations of shelters and those still living. But their only means of doing so was underwater, and their ink was staining the mud of the sea. 



So the bureau chief bit his lip and unfurled a man-sized roll of paper—thankfully, the paper for distribution was stored on the second floor— and took out a big fat marker. The newspaper- men looked at each other, and they watched as their chief hauled and balanced his big body over the clean white expanse of machine-use pa- per. He drew a shaky box on the right side with the marker. Inside it, he wrote: 



March 11th. 2011. The pen squeaked. 



He kept on writing: numbers, figures, locations. The junior bureau chief took over when his hand was tired, and the next junior member after that. A fifty-year old Japanese man’s handwriting is not the most legible thing in the world, but it had to do. By the next day half of the bureau wielded markers and pens, while the other half were out gathering information. Beats, jurisdictions, as- signed topics—assignments and who-wrote-what didn’t matter anymore, as half a dozen reporters collaborated on one handwritten article. On one sheet, a sentence would break off, and the thick, tired dashes of a masculine hand would twist into the thinner swoops of a female reporter. With no backshift, mistakes were crossed out in red ink. This is how they did it before, they told each other, as they took shifts to prevent cramping. This is what we have to do. As soon as a sheet was finished they sent a runner to pin it on the bulletin boards of relief shelters. 



A week passed until they were able to find a print- ing press that worked. Three years later, the first sheets that they had hand-written were on their way to Washington D.C., to be preserved for posterity. On one of the sheets were lists of names, 



names of those who were in a specific relief shelter. “There were too many who passed,” the bureau chief said. He pointed to a few names writ- ten by a shaky, smudgy hand, and told me with an embarrassed smile that that was his writing. “At that point, it was more important to chronicle the living.” But the living names would go unrecognized in D.C. And soon the living beings those names represented would pass, and then the paper would simply be paper. 



IV 



There’s a blue bridge that crosses into a wide street next to my house in Tokyo, and the river is lined for a mile with persimmon trees. A name- less man planted them after the war, and when you bike down the street, every other tree flashing by would be a thick persimmon tree, followed by a cherry blossom tree. Come autumn, thick, waxy leaves bundling orange persimmons would collect on the gravel roads, and come April, drudges of pink-brown blossom petals would line the concrete encasing the river, and stink. 



One April afternoon after the quake I crossed over the bridge on my bicycle, heading home from school. I heard the whirring of a bicycle behind me, and a man’s voice saying that I had dropped something, stop. So I stopped and the man’s voice came closer, and I felt something, a petal maybe, touch the back of my neck. But it was the man’s finger, and he was asking, “What color is it?” 



And I answered with a rush of adrenaline and my foot stamped on the pedals, but his arm was wrapped around the head of my bicycle, his thumb on my brakes. The light touch moved from my neck to my collarbone. With that I swung my leg off my bike, surprisingly easily, and I started to run. I wondered if they recognized what was going on. The grandmothers in motorbikes, buzzing along in their white, plastic helmets. The boys playing with insects on the gravel. The pastel colored houses snug right next to each other, pushing bicycles and schoolgirls through their narrow streets. Middle-aged couples talking to their pets. Looking up, then look- ing down. 



I reached the front gate of my house, and his voice turned into an image. He was on a slender red sports bike, and he wore a yellow shirt. He was waving at me, and his grin blended into a white flash as he sped past. “I’ll see you again!” he said. The police came to my house and asked if I was wearing a skirt while I was riding my bi- cycle. A week later I left for the north. 



In the morning we had camp-wide morning exercises, radio calisthenics. Just like the old days. We spreaded out evenly across the university yard and picked our patch of grass. Then we swung our arms and stretched in unison to the rasping music from the radio. Most of us had been do- ing this since we were children, and our limbs swung automatically to the coordinated routine. The elderly do it to keep their memory fresh, and every time I swung my arms to the crackling I remembered with a laugh that my grandpa said he liked it because the Americans had banned it for a while, because it was too militaristic. One of the veterans led the radio calisthenics, though it doesn’t really need leading, as we all knew the routine anyway. He sported a black jacket and a black square mask and black boots. He lugged around a black megaphone, and—I checked— he had a black tent. 



There was a system of hierarchy, at least in the place where I was, which was the makeshift camp for Peace Boat in a local university. The man with the black leather jacket held the pow- er, because he owned the fleet of buses and vans that transported mud, food, debris, and water. Anyone who stayed longer than two weeks was called a veteran. 



Many would stay, accepting a new skin of dirt and donated food. But most would leave. And every Monday, the bus would leave and a pile of a line of unpopular ramen and beans would be carefully left in a big cardboard box, and veterans would swarm around the pile, picking up favorites from the fresh plastic debris. 



V 



While we ate, we talked. There was a big communal stove, and we dumped our ramen near it, while a veteran would find a big pot. 



Do you know the story about Kikosama and the 



scandal about how she bullied our Empress into mental breakdown? That’s why she won’t have any more children, poor woman. 



One time my boy got home and realized that he didn’t have his key to open the door. So— this is what he says, I can’t believe I wasn’t there to see it—he climbed up the fence and scaled the wall to our third floor window, which he knows is usually open, through using his ties as rope! 



So this happened to my friend, Saori. She was on the elevator one day and a man came in with a cellphone and a cap. Saori was looking at the mirror and he had come in and his cell- phone light flashed. She looked at him, and of course she said “Wait,”—matte, stop, wait, don’t move—“Did you just—” 



And the elevator door dinged and it was the first floor. With a shrug she walked out but before she did, she tripped. She tripped on his shoe, an oversized white shoe with two velcro pads, and dropped her bag. And then he ran out of the elevator and knelt down beside her. “Are you hurt?” he said. He ran two fingers, two surprisingly clean fingers, she said, up her forearm. And there they stayed. She looked at him and he looked at her, and she felt how nervous he was, and it scared her, she said. And then he said again, “Are you hurt?” and she ran. 



But the police of course did nothing and her parents decided not to change apartments. And then he came again. And his knife grazed her skirt and she knew she had to leave somehow but he pressed the button, B1, to the basement garage. Saori told me then that as she pressed herself against the cold linoleum, as he cut off the but- tons of her blazer, she thought about all those times when she had been grasped on the elbow by a scout from a modeling agency in Shibuya. She would be walking with her friends and they would appear from nowhere but they would have those voices, and of course you would say no— fathers, you know, hate that kind of thing—but you would take their company card and show it to the girls the next morning and complain that another one of those scouts had assaulted them on the street the other day. But somehow this wasn’t like that and she was actually scared be- cause the man’s pants were yellow. They were chemically yellow at the hems, stained yellow with chalk, and rode low on his hips, baggy like a construction workers’. And he was now taking off her socks, and putting them into his pocket. She didn’t resist because she had heard they let you off easy that way. The elevator wasn’t moving though. He’d noticed too. He banged the elevator door and the doors jolted like they were answering but our trusty Mitsubishi elevators don’t really work that way. He pressed the B1 button again. The elevator was too narrow. She’d told the police, hadn’t she, she’d done everything right. And they had said everything was going to be all right, nodded to her parents, and bowing, of course, they had left the apartment. 



And everything was going to be alright, though Saori hadn’t known it then, doesn’t really know it now, she says. The elevator had stopped on the first floor and a woman with her dog had come in and screamed and the man with the yellow pants had run out, leaving the knife and Saori on the floor. The woman rode with Saori down to B1 and up to the seventh floor where Saori’s mother had been waiting with her dinner and her piano lesson. And then Saori’s parents decided to change apartments. 



Did you watch the new Ghibli movie? I’m so jealous, I love Porco Rosso, can’t stand Spirited Away, thinking about re-watching Nausicaa again. Let’s watch it tonight, my computer still has a bit of battery left. Don’t call me otaku, I’m not like that, more like obsessed, more obsessed than too obsessed, you know. You know. 



They say that the next earthquake will hit Tokyo within the next five years. 



You wouldn’t believe it but I think I might want to stay here for a little while longer. 



 



I left after a month, and returned to the rhythm of my life in Tokyo, feeling the shiver of the ground underneath my feet. Out in the universe, even mud shines beautifully. 

Let me begin. I am 



a Grinder. Bones are what I grind. 



  



I come from a long line. 



  



And I haven’t spoken recently 



to a child, but 



I remember 



  



childhood well – 



  



remember half cocked, livid, nowhere to climb. 



I mean to come on strong; 



  



maybe we can get acquainted here. 



  



You can’t know a man until you know his profession. 



Will you get to know me, boy? Will you 



  



walk with me while I explain 



how to grind an Englishman? 



  



In my work 



  



I don’t use many metal tools 



save a knife to ease the husking; 



  



instead I push my hands 



  



at what-was-flesh, unrigging it, 



at huddled masses of unincorporated cells 



and through fluids. 



  



Where at first they are dead bodies, tangent to my table, 



  



when I’m halfway through they carpet it 



and run apart through its grooves. 



  



And then the grinding of the bare bones. 



And then the baking of the white meal, 



  



alchemy! born 



  



into bones into 



bread I come (from a long line) from my workshop 



  



stained 



  



with no remorse Jack 



I am tired though 



and a Grinder is what I am; 



  



when I go to church my body 



is loose lost fumbling in the blind pew. 



  



Still you don’t know that my mother asked for no husband, 



  



and raised me up in this tall thin house; 



suckled me in the nursery down the hall, you must have passed it. 



  



And I chose to walk the church with a ruddy girl, 



  



purple pink and dust her skin - 



but you’ve met my wife. You clung to her 



breasts like her own babe, though I think your thoughts were less than filial. 



  



But you will never know her, never 



  



work in her as sunrise works in night, 



as my grindstone in bone. 



  



Jack, Jack. 



  



I still remember - it’s not easy to forget - 



my mother’s motto, passed to me: 



  



fee, fie, foe – 



  



meaning first 



the holding of land 



second the cursing of lovers 



  



and third, one on whom you’ll have to set your sight, 



  



someday, Jack, who will 



want you gone. 

I stood in the backyard in Berkeley (behind the tree, next to Marion’s easel and paints) and flicked off the little red safety.



Marion was inside, in our dirty kitchen, heating water for pasta while dicing sausage for sauce. *If I don’t come back in a few minutes*, I had told her, *something is wrong*. She had laughed at me.   



I pointed the capsule towards the ground. I offered a licked finger to the wind, but it didn’t cool. It was a still July evening in the East Bay. *Check for a breeze*, my boyfriend Jared had told me, and then you can test it. *You won’t be able to use it when you need it if you don’t test it. *



I wrapped the capsule’s Velcro handle around my fingers, and pushed the trigger down.



Not much happened. A stream of liquid coursed out. Fixated, I held the plastic down a little too long, then pulled my finger up too slowly at the end—the fluid dribbled, pooled on the ground. A successful test, and now I knew. It only took one press of the button: brief, decisive. The packaging said the capsule contained 20 sprays, and that one had been worth maybe 2. At the end of the summer, I still had 18 left.



I flicked the little red safety on, and went back inside the house. I tucked the capsule into a pocket of my purse, easily accessible to desperate hands, and went into the kitchen to help Marion with the sauce.  



 



***



 



The active ingredient in pepper spray is oleoresin capsicum, an oily resin that makes eyes burn and swell shut. It’s the same stuff that makes a good salsa. Last spring, chopping jalapeños for chili, I got a little juice on my hands and forgot to wash them. Thirty minutes later, after an absentminded rub of the eyes, I found myself bent double over a gushing sink, trying desperately to pry my eyelids open so I could flush them out. It felt like I was going blind. Even when I managed to force my lashes up, light and air made my whites and pupils sizzle, my vision blur. This pain came down to capsaicinoids, the compounds that make up oleoresin capsicum and determine its strength. The habeñero pepper rates 350,000 Scoville heat units. Pepper spray rates over five million.



A 1994 US Department of Justice report makes a strong argument for pepper spray as a weapon. It’s more potent than mace, affecting not only on the eyes, but the breath— inhaled spray swells mucous membranes along airways. Pepper spray rarely kills but almost always incapacitates, providing a viable alternative to guns and even tasers. Unlike tear gas, it works just as deftly on the drugged and drunk. It doesn’t linger on clothes; ventilation, soap, and water clean it right up. It’s great for riot control but banned in international war.



Civilians have access to the same caliber of pepper spray that law enforcement officials do. Sometimes it’s misused, but not often. Another Department of Justice report, last updated in 2011, documents 63 cases of death in police-civilian interactions where pepper spray was involved. Of these cases, most credited the cause of death to heart conditions or drug overdoses. In the few cases where pepper spray did link closely to victim death, causing positional asphyxia, it did so by exacerbating pre-existing asthma or other respiratory conditions.



 



***



 



I bought the spray last summer while working in the Tenderloin, a pocket of San Francisco named for an analogous neighborhood in New York City. Urban myth credits the name to a ‘hazard pay’ bonus for law enforcement officials, cash that the cops put towards fine cuts of meat. There are other namesake rumors: paid-off bribes (more money to eat well) and prostitute thighs (a different kind of flesh).   



Bad things happen everywhere. This is what I tell my nervous grandparents every time I pack a suitcase. One gathers stray caresses in Prague public squares, shares bedrooms with suspicious strangers in São Paulo hostels. But men also follow footsteps in the heart of affluent Cambridge, and malls get shot-up in my own small Oregonian town. Really, no city is immune. One must travel anyway.



The Tenderloin’s statistics, while troubling, are brighter than Rio’s or Harlem’s. And yet, this place shook me; it scared me.



The first day I went into the office, I mistakenly exited BART a few blocks too far from the building. To get where I needed to be, I had to cut through Civic Center-UN Plaza.



Civic Center-UN Plaza is officially the home of the glistening San Francisco United Nations building, bounded on one end by a city hall on a hill. Unofficially, it’s home to a huge encampment of homeless men, women, and children. There are needles in arms, wheelchairs, rooted up trash cans, women in short skirts soliciting, women in long skirts screaming. There is hunger there, the pervasive smell of urine. Cops with large guns stand outside the government buildings, surveying the squalor with guns slung across their chests. It’s far from a slum. There are theaters in the Tenderloin, and restaurants, and schools. Still, it is something to break a heart: to watch the men with briefcases and women in blazers walking at a clip, brushing off need like a pesky fly; to crane a neck at those government palaces, looking down on their Americans with chilled apathy.



The first day I went to the office, I was wearing a knee length skirt. That day I would learn that this look was too formal for the office’s casual vibe—and also, that this was much too much leg to go incognito. I had my phone in my hand (big mistake) cluelessly staring at a map. By the time I got to the center of the Plaza, and realized that I should have traced the perimeter, it was too late to stop.



“Hey beautiful,” a man leered, lurching in front of me. Whistles sprouted from points on the square. The sun was bright. I vaguely processed, heart throbbing, that I was getting too much attention. Too many eyes were on my legs, and on my purse. It was 10 am (I had been asked to come in late that day) so no other employee was out on the street. I was being followed, surrounded. Stubble floated in and out of my vision, deep voices in and out of my ears. I tried to decide: Should I smile? Should I frown? Which would provoke less of a response? I made it to the door of the building, fumbled with the lock. When the surly security guard let me in, I was sweating.



My least favorite part of each day was walking to and from work. Sitting at my cubicle, time ticking towards 4 o’clock release, I would shiver at the screams wafting up from the sidewalk—the cries of one woman, the same each day. My second day, walking from office to BART with a fellow intern, I made eye contact with a woman sitting on the ground. She stood, yelled, and pitched trash at me, hitting the side of my face. I covered my head with my purse and power walked for the BART entrance. The next week, I watched a man pick up a needle and inject it into his arm at the bottom of the subway stairs.



To get to and from my house in Berkeley, I walked down Shaddock Avenue, away from the tourist ice cream shops and into quieter residential areas. A man got down on his knees and proposed, citing my smile and eyes as rationale for wanting to marry me. A man on a bike shrieked as he careened into my path, shirtless and wild-haired. Two men called out to me as I strolled to work; when I didn’t look back at them, they whispered “bitch, you bitch” and wove through the crowd to keep up with me. I picked up my pace. That was usually my tactic: move faster.



I hate to admit how scared I was—I, who carry a stamped passport, I, who know the tactics to defend myself—a poke to the eye, a knee to the groin—and the right words to yell—‘Fire!’ or ‘Get away from me!’—and the wrong things to do—no solo taxi rides late at night, don’t wear your flashiest jewels on BART, don’t engage anyone on the street in conversation. The experiences I catalogued were disconcerting, but I know (and knew then) that they were far from true horrors.



I felt elitist in my fear, petty for wanting to protect myself. These were people without access to toilets or nutritious food, people with yellow eyes and sallow skin. Most of those who yelled at me were obviously out of their minds—schizophrenics, or deranged from drugs. My fear didn’t strip me of compassion, but it did make it impotent. Instead of handing out bottles of water and Band-Aids, I was scuffing past the debris, secluding myself in a cubicle, getting away from it all at any cost. On the train, I thought about the Gospel healings—equating the lepers and spirit-possessed screamers of Galilee to the junkies in the Tenderloin. What a thing it would be to make illnesses jump into pigs, to make this nation well.



 



***



 



Pepper spray is legal in all 50 states. In some, like my home Oregon, that’s a general ‘go ahead;’ in others, it’s qualified. In California, I could order a capsule on Amazon, provided I was over 18 and purchasing less than 2.5 liquid ounces. Most of the regulations are of the non-minor, non-felon sort. Many states restrict carrying in public places like schools. Of course, abuse is a crime, and pepper spray cannot be carried onto planes.



When I returned to Boston with spray in hand this fall, a local told me I was a criminal, that you needed a firearms permit to carry pepper spray or mace in Massachusetts, and that you could only purchase them from a registered firearms dealer. That regulation has changed, though; the local was ill-informed. As of September 2014, a provision in a new piece of state gun legislation makes it no longer necessary to carry a permit to buy. (Massachusetts had previously been the only state with such a rule in place.) You still have to buy from a dealer, and you can’t order through the mail.



The other interns in my office carried pepper spray. My parents advised me to get some. But ultimately, I ordered a capsule of Sabre because Jared asked me to. He came to visit me for a week, walked my streets. We ate yellow curry in Berkeley, hiked from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge. We also went to my office together. After his plane ride home, I received an email. It contained several links to Amazon pages.



*Please, please buy at least one of these. They cost practically nothing and they're a good investment for you even post-San Francisco, since you'll almost certainly be jogging and commuting in urban environments.I do think it will make you feel a little more secure and empowered. *



*I want you to get serious about learning to defend yourself. *



 



***



 



Growing up, my dad kept a baseball bat under my parents’ bed. He has retained all his muscles and used to play shortstop in high school. I have no doubt he could seriously wound or even kill an intruder with a few fell swings.



When I walk through a parking lot after a late night movie, I hold my car key between my fingers, ready to enter into an eye or slide up a nostril. In middle school, us girls sat on the gym floor with the physical education teacher and identified other common purse items that could be used as weapons: a comb, an uncapped pen.



My grandfather has owned guns all my life. He takes them to the Alaskan wilderness to hunt, hangs the heads of the animals around his pole barn.



But baseball bats are for baseball, keys are for driving, combs for brushing, pens for writing, and in this case, guns for hunting. There was something different about buying this spray.



What does it mean to carry something meant for hurting, and only for hurting? To carry it from a house in Berkeley, through the stiff air of the subway, down the blocks of the Tenderloin, into Celtic Coffee to get a Thai iced tea, and into a law school where women wear pearls?   



On a practical level, it would mean simply this: if someone came at me with a knife, or a gun, or a bicep, on my way to work or going home or going out, I would have a few extra seconds to escape, to shout for help, to get out my phone and dial three numbers. And that felt good. That’s why women buy this little container of liquid: to keep us out in the streets, going to work for legal think tanks, and having fun with friends.



On a philosophical level, it felt strange, even wrong. Nothing happened to me that summer in San Francisco except those catcalls—at most, there was the incident with the trash. I always walked to work in daylight. I never witnessed any crimes.  



And yet, I learned to avoid the inconvenience of others’ suffering—even though doing so made my conscience groan. I always picked a man in a suit to follow. I covered my wide eyes with sunglasses, and cast them down. I converted my nervous smile to a flatline frown. I never held my phone outside of my bag, and I clenched that zippered bag under an arm. I wore pants instead of skirts. I took the shortest way around the block. I held my breath to keep the urine stench out. I waited eagerly for market days, where the plaza was filled with stalls of zucchini and berries and I was assured an undisturbed walk. And I had that little canister in my purse: tested, ready to really hurt someone, someone on the kinds of drugs and with the kind of lung conditions one acquires from living outside that, with oleoresin capsicum in the mix, could maybe, it’s possible, result in death.



 



***



 



There are plenty of make-it-yourself pepper sprays on the Internet. Most recipes require crushed chili peppers and ground black pepper, heated and strained. Some claim Tabasco sauce will do the trick. Generally, the comments are more horrifying than the instructions.



 



*If a man dares to hurt me or rape me then I would do everything I could and if he goes blind he deserves it. He's evil and should be punished. If he's blind he will never do it again that's for sure.*



* *



*A knife would be backup to the pepper spray in case that does not subdue them.*



* *



*This pepper spray is a good one to use on incoming border crossers btw.*



 



There’s fear here, and perverted righteousness, too. I don’t trust the administrators of that justice—including myself.



 



***



 



As we strolled from a Tenderloin theater, a man grabbed my friend Ben by the arm, clung to it like a child, and wished him Happy Birthday again and again. The week before I arrived, Civic Center bloodied with an afternoon shooting and a woman named Kate was killed on the piers. One July day, there was a stabbing on the BART line I took to Berkeley; someone had knifed a transit employee while he stood post in his booth.



Nothing out of the ordinary for a city, but just enough to sustain my fear. It fed on of urban myths about meat and newspaper headlines about violence, on the worries of those who loved me, on possibilities. Fear settled itself over innocents, fogged my judgment. Nothing happened to me, and I did nothing. I rode BART in guilt. Women slumped in their seats trying to sleep, men with black garbage sacks mumbled songs to themselves, and I tried to focus on my book. Making eye contact would probably be okay—but what if it wasn’t? So I didn’t.



The pepper spray felt ridiculous. Could I even whip out the capsule in time, flick off that safety, press the button for the right duration and with the right force, when I really needed to? I wasn’t sure if I could. I was glad that I had it, sometimes: when the sky got dusky, or I heard the “bitch” whispers snaking behind me. The pragmatist rejoiced at those moments. Of course, I could hurt them if I needed to. I could and I would, I told myself. It was legal, I was exercising my shot at self-defense. But the idealist was saddened by my acquiescence to fear—my impulse to fight off the dangerous world with tooth, nail, and spray. I couldn’t tell how justified that impulse was.