My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (6 page)

Without unclenching his jaw, still staring down, burning holes in the tile, Anthony nodded.

“Good,” said Chris. “Now hug it out, you two. Seriously. Go on. It’s part of the deal.”

Shyly, like two bludgeoned boxers embracing at the end of twelve rounds, Anthony and Mr. Liu edged near each other and slumped close in a kind of half-hug, patting each other quickly on the back, but not without an evident bit of emotion.

Darla started clapping, and I found myself joining in, unexpectedly stirred; soon Kandy, Vernon, and even Mrs. Liu were clapping, too. Chris was beaming. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s perfect.” I had goose bumps. My only sorrow was that Lauren wasn’t there to witness the moment.

Chris laughed, growing comfortable in his role as peacemaker. “Now, before we hit the bar to celebrate—and drinks are on me tonight—there’s just one more part of the deal.”

Mr. Liu eyed him nervously.

“If it’s not too inconvenient,” Chris said, “I was hoping we could all dig in to some grub. Golden Panda leftovers, I don’t care. I could eat a horse, this guy’s been on a bus the last twenty-four hours”—he pointed at Vernon—“and this girl’s eating for two,” with a sideways nod toward Kandy. “What do you say?”

“No problem,” said Mr. Liu.

All of a sudden, his daughter Mary shrieked and leapt to her feet like she’d been stung on the butt by a bee. She let out some rapid birdsong to her parents in Chinese and Mr. Liu took the laptop from her hands and inspected the screen while Mrs. Liu threw her arms around Mary and began to sob into her shoulder. Mary looked at Anthony, tearing up herself, and cried, “I got in! I got in! Medaille College e-mailed me! Anthony, I got in!”

*

A half hour later, well fed, all nine of us were crammed into Chris’s Explorer, speeding toward Freighter’s. I sat up front in the passenger seat; behind me sat old Vernon Wallace, his great-granddaughter Darla, and Anthony and Kandy. Squashed way in back, and squealing like kindergarteners with every pothole we bounced over, were Mr. Liu and his wife and daughter. Chris was driving, phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, talking to his older brother. “Shawn, just meet us there. It’s good news, I’m saying, though. I’ll tell you over a beer and a couple shots.”

I could hear Chris’s brother chewing him out on the other end, calling him a moron, a loser, and a punk. All of the merriment and gladness quickly drained from Chris’s face. “Yes, Shawn. Okay. Okay, Shawn. Yes, I understand.” He closed his phone and tossed it up on the dash, shaking his head and biting at a thumbnail. In the back, full of jolly banter, no one else had caught the exchange.

“Fuck that dude,” I said to Chris. “Shake it off.”

“It’s not that easy,” he said, hurt and sinking. He mashed on the gas pedal and we veered right, back tires sliding out a little, and bolted through a light that had just turned red. A few blocks down, the five-way intersection with Lauren’s bar came into sight. I felt supremely nervous, but fortified by the size of my brand-new posse.

Chris clouded over with a look of fierce intensity. He reached for his phone again, dialed his brother, and propped the phone to his ear, battle-ready. Then, without warning, a siren whooped in the night, and a blinding strobe of red and blue lights filled the SUV. “Yo, man,” said Anthony, “you just blew right past that stop sign.” I twisted around and saw, through the back window, a cop car right on our tail, flashers twirling giddily, high beams punching the air, one-two, one-two.

“No fucking way!” Chris cried, as the phone slipped from his shoulder to the center console and tumbled to the floor at my feet. “What the fuck do we do?” He kept rolling forward, while everyone in back began shouting instructions in both English and Chinese. I was pretty sure that only Vernon and me knew that the truck was stolen. A forlorn tide rose in my chest.

I could hear Shawn’s voice on the phone, saying Chris’s name. I plucked it up and said, “He’s gotta call you back,” and folded the phone closed.

“Okay,” said Chris frantically. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna pull over up here, and then all of us, we’re just gonna scatter in every direction. Just fuckin’ haul ass into the alleyways, all these side streets, into the bushes. They can’t get more than one or two of us.”

“Are you crazy, boy?” said Darla. “You think my granddaddy’s gonna take off running? You think
I
am? I ain’t got nothing to hide from. Cops can’t fuck with me.”

From the way back, Mary said, “You know, there’s always policemen at the restaurant. I know a ton of ’em. I got my friend out of a speeding ticket once.”

“I’m not worried about a damn ticket,” Chris said.

“Well,” said Mary, “if we are gonna run, could somebody please pop the hatch door? I think we’ll lose some valuable seconds if me and my mom and dad all have to climb over the seat.”

Anthony sat forward and got close to Chris’s ear. “Nobody’s running,” he said. “Chris—listen to me—you got warrants?”

“No.”

“Is this shit hot?”

Chris nodded. “Burning.”

“Okay. Listen, just pull over and talk to the guy. Just act like it’s nothing. Play it cool, like everything’s cool. I’m telling you, I’ve seen dudes talk their way outta way worse.”

“I’m not going down tonight,” said Chris. He was so deeply spooked, it made me remember the time I’d suggested he incorporate his time in prison into his stand-up routines and he’d told me with a grave, distant stare that there was nothing funny about being in prison.

“That’s right,” said Anthony. “You’re not going down. Now pull over and talk to this man.”

Chris pulled to the curb and turned off the radio. He reached slowly for his shoulder belt and clanked it into its buckle.

“The guy’s coming!” Mary called from in back.

I watched the cop’s cautious approach. He wielded a powerful flashlight and shined it at each of our windows, but they were so fogged up from all the bodies in the car, I doubted he could see much. He took position just behind Chris’s window and tapped on the glass with gloved fingers.

Chris lowered the window. “Hello there, sir, good evening,” he said, laying on a healthy dose of Canadian politeness.

“License and registration.” I couldn’t see the cop’s face, but he sounded young, which to me seemed like a bad thing. Seasoned cops, I’d found, were more likely to play things fast and loose; rookies went by the book.

“Here’s my license,” said Chris, passing over his New York State ID. “As far as the registration, I don’t have any. I just bought this thing yesterday at an auction in Rochester. I know I shouldn’t be driving it around till I get over to the DMV, that’s my bad.” Fat snowflakes spiraled in through his window and tumbled along the dash.

“You know you ran a light back there?”

“Yes sir. I believe I ran a stop sign just now, too. I was talking to my brother on the phone and I got distracted. That’s my bad. I’m really sorry about that.”

Chris was handling things as well as he possibly could, I thought. But once the cop checked the plates, we’d be doomed. If I bailed and ran, it occurred to me, maybe the cop would chase after me and Chris could peel away. My heart jangled, and my fingers crawled to the door handle, ready to make a move.

“You been doing any drinking tonight?” asked the cop.

“Not really, sir,” said Chris. He ejected a barklike laugh. “Planning to, though. We’re just going up there to Freighter’s.” He hitched his thumb toward me. “Even got a designated driver.”

The cop bent his head down and poked his flashlight at me. He had dark, close-cropped hair, and was maybe in his mid-thirties. I dropped my hand from the door handle. Then he leaned through Chris’s window a shade more and played his light over our bizarre array of passengers—four generations of black folk in the backseat, and a Chinese family in the trunk. His face crinkled up in utter bafflement. Either we were human traffickers with a payload of Asians or a tour bus covering the last leg of the Underground Railroad.

I heard Mr. Liu’s daughter call out from the back, “Officer Ralston?”

He ducked his head further into the Explorer. “Who’s that?”

“Mary. From the Golden Panda.”

“Oh!” said the cop. “Mary! Hey, is that your dad?”

“Yeah. Guess what? I got into Medaille College! We’re all going out to celebrate. These are our employees and some of our regulars. You might know some of them.”

“But you’re not old enough to drink.”

“Don’t tell the bouncer!” Mary giggled, playfully—even masterfully—redirecting the conversation. “I’m just gonna have a glass of wine.”

The cop said, “All right, then,” and withdrew his head from inside the truck. He handed Chris back his license. “I’ll tell you what,” he told Chris. “No more driving with your head up your—you know. Especially when the roads are this bad. You all take care.” He doused his flashlight and headed back to his cruiser.

Chris zipped his window up. “Wait for it,” he said tersely. “Wait for it.”

The cop’s flashers went dark, and a moment later his squad car swished past, hung a left at the next side street, and disappeared. Chris turned to look at all of us and broke out into relieved, maniacal laughter. “Holy shit!” he said. “What just happened? This is a magical night!”

Even as everyone began cheering and dancing around in their seats, slapping each other on the back, a cold ball pitted itself in my stomach. It was time to go see Lauren Hill. I prayed our magical night had one more trick up its sleeve.

*

“Fuck no, you can’t bring all these people in here,” the massive bouncer at Freighter’s told me, shouting over the music. He eased from his perch and barged forward, using his bulk to crowd us back toward the door. He pointed at Vernon. “That dude didn’t have an ID earlier. And this little fucker right here”—he jabbed Chris in the chest—“he’s eighty-sixed for life.” He took a look at Mary. “She’s underage, I’ll put money on that, but she’s kind of cute; she wants to stay, we can probably work something out. Get the rest of these clowns out of my face. Try Cole’s, across the street. They’ll serve anybody.”

I said in his ear, “I’m Lauren Hill’s boyfriend. And these are my friends.”

“Darrell is Lauren Hill’s boyfriend,” said the bouncer. “Get your Rainbow Coalition the fuck outta here.”

Darrell? Who the
fuck
was Darrell? “Just let me go find Lauren,” I pleaded.

“Knock yourself out,” said the bouncer. “But these people got to wait outside.”

I hustled everyone back through the door, into the freezing night. “Just give me two minutes,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I rushed in, my neck hot, blood crashing through my veins. In the three or four hours I’d been away, the Freighter’s crowd had gone from tipsy to riotously drunk. Two old bikers had their shirts off and were holding a tough-man contest, affectionately slugging each other in the gut. A pair of young punk rockers dry-humped in a booth. People were screaming along to a song on the jukebox and hooting at hockey highlights on the TVs. At a table in the middle of the room, a man in a winter coat dumped a humongous boot-shaped glass of beer over his own head. I was desperate to be that drunk.

The crowd tossed and turned me like a piece of driftwood, until finally I reached the bar and stood a few feet from Lauren Hill, staring at the back of her neck and her bare shoulders as she mixed a row of drinks at the rear counter. I felt like a vampire, dying to taste her skin. Lauren turned toward me, and the whole scene seemed to grind into slow motion and go mute. I waited for the moment of truth—the expression on her face when she saw that I was back. She set the drinks down in front of the guys next to me, and as she looked up she saw me, and smiled, a jolting, radiant, zillion-watt smile. The room’s roar slammed back in and the world returned to normal speed. “There you are,” she shouted. “What do you want to drink?”

“I made some friends,” I shouted back. “Can you help me get ’em in?”

“Just tell Greg I said it was cool.”

“I think you better come with me.”

She looked around. The other bartender had left and she was now the only person serving drinks, but there seemed to be a momentary lull. “Okay,” she said. “Really quick.” She ducked under the bar and followed me through the raucous crowd to the front door.

“Come outside for a second,” I said. I blasted the door open and we spilled out onto the sidewalk, where a stocky, young white guy in a powder-blue FUBU sweatshirt and Timberland boots was talking to Chris and Mr. Liu while the rest of the crew looked on.

“All the food we want, all year long?” the guy said.

“My guests,” said Mr. Liu.

“Rock on!” The guy wrapped his arm over Chris’s shoulders, pulled him close, and rubbed his head with his knuckles. “I love you, ya little fuckhead,” he said, laughing. “You are just full of surprises.” This, I realized, had to be Chris’s older brother Shawn. Chris scrapped his way loose and looked up at me with a magnificent gleam.

“Davy! Let’s get our drink on,” Chris hollered. “They gonna let us in or what?”

“Yes sir,” I said. “But wait, you guys, everyone come here, I want you to meet someone. This is Lauren Hill.” The whole group gathered close, joining us in a tight little huddle. “Lauren,” I said, “these are my new friends.” I went around the circle, introducing her to each of them, and as I introduced them, they each gave her a friendly hello. “This is Mr. and Mrs. Liu, they own the Golden Panda on Randall Avenue. And Mary, their daughter, she just found out she got into college tonight! This is Anthony, and this is Kandy—they’re having a baby soon.” I patted Kandy’s stomach. “That’s little Floyd in there. And this is my Canadian friend Chris I was telling you about, a man of many talents. And, Shawn, right?”

He nodded. “That’s right. You’re Davy?”

“Yup.” I explained to Lauren that Shawn was Chris’s older brother.

“And evil boss,” said Shawn with a grin.

“But how’d you meet all these people?” Lauren said, a bit dazzled.

“Hold on.” I continued around the circle. “This is Darla Kenney. She lives over on the West Side, in Front Park. And here’s her grandfather, actually her great-grandfather, Vernon Wallace. Hey, wait a second, what time is it?”