The Glass Cafe (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

S
o what the woman didn't tell us was that she was with the juvenile welfare division of the state and was a caseworker for abused kids. It was her first mistake but it still might not have been so bad if she hadn't done almost everything else she did as wrong as she could do it.

First she did not come alone but arrived accompanied by a policeman. He was nice enough but he was armed and stood too close to me. I could see that it bothered Al right away.

They came exactly at eleven. Al had put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and had had her coffee so she was awake and alert and did not like Mrs. Preston from the moment she walked in the door. With an armed man, as Al said later, who never had his hand that far from the butt of his nine-millimeter. Al does not like guns or what guns do or the people who use guns or the people who sell guns or the people who make guns, even guns for hunting, which she thinks is immoral and wrong although I've never heard her call it patently absurd.

“Let's see,” Mrs. Preston said, taking out a folder and a ballpoint pen before she had been there ten seconds. “Your name is Alice Henson?” The pen hung over the paper.

“What is that?” Al asked, her voice cold.

“This,” Mrs. Preston said, “is the initial investigation form we must fill out.”

“Why must ‘we' fill it out?”

Mrs. Preston looked at the policeman and raised her eyebrow as if to say, Oh yeah, one of these smart ones.

“Mrs. Henson, there has been a complaint lodged.”

“A complaint about what?”

Another raised eyebrow and I thought, Oh, this is just great—the cop will have to pull them apart in about a minute.

“I think it would be best if Officer Bates took Anthony into the other room so we can discuss this alone.”

“No.” Al's voice was cold, seemed to make the room cold. “Officer Bates isn't taking my son anywhere.”

Mrs. Preston took a long breath and looked at Officer Bates again, the eyebrow raised again, the almost sneer again. “Look, you don't seem to understand. We're here because a complaint has been filed that you are mistreating your child—”

“No. I'm not.”

“—and if we want to or feel it is necessary we can take the child into protective custody.”

Al turned an ugly shade of white, almost gray, really, and her eyes got very bright and sparkly, like the time just after the biker said the thing to her that I didn't hear when Al told him about the hammer and then the biker got real nice to us both. I'd only seen her eyes look like that the one time before and, even though things worked out with the biker, this time everything went downhill so fast it seemed like we were riding on a greased sled.

Looking back, I try to make it slow motion in my mind which Miles says he does sometimes when he is rehearsing a scene or a part for a commercial.

First I stepped away from the cop. I think he thought I was going to run when really all I was going to do was get a better view of the fight I was sure was going to start in about half a second between Mrs. Preston and Al. It turned out I had the time right but the target wrong.

As I moved, the policeman reached out for my arm and missed and his hand bounced off my shoulder and hit the side of my head. It wasn't much of a hit—there was no pain or anything—but I must have winced because I saw Al's eyes go bad again and she said a word to the cop which I had heard the biker use on more than one occasion and she swung around and picked up a table lamp and hit the cop across the top of his head so hard it sounded like somebody dropping a watermelon the way Miles did in the commercial.

It's funny but I always thought a lamp would break if you hit somebody over the head with it. I had seen people getting hit with things like the lamp in movies and the lamp always broke only this time it just went “thunk” and the cop went down on his knees and then down on his face making a sound like the little pump motor in the fish tank in the biology lab at school, which is called a simile, and Mrs. Preston grabbed me and fumbled for a little radio in her purse and yelled the address and then screamed:

“Send backup! She's evading! She's evading!” But I really think what she meant was that Al was resisting because in no way did Al try to evade anything or anybody but instead when she saw that Mrs. Preston was trying to pull me out of the room, she dropped the lamp and came toward us like a tiger except she didn't growl but said another word that I'd heard the biker use. Mrs. Preston was digging in her purse again and brought out a Mace sprayer.

For a second there was some struggling and some more bad language, surprisingly enough from Mrs. Preston this time and then Mrs. Preston leaped back and said, “I've got you now!” and cut loose with the Mace except that it had gotten turned around and she sprayed herself in the face.

Mace smells pretty bad if you're just in the room with it and what with Mrs. Preston taking a full dose in the face and now rolling around on the floor I thought it might be a good time to take Al by the arm and lead her outside for a breath of fresh air.

Just for the record we did not evade arrest as the paper said later. When backup came it was a SWAT team and we were sitting on the front steps of the apartment and moved over nice as could be so the SWAT team could get by and I think it would all have settled down then except the biker came out of his apartment just as he saw the SWAT team come into the courtyard and he yelled something about black helicopters and ran back into his apartment and came out with a very realistic-looking but plastic toy M-16 which he aimed at the SWAT team and pulled the trigger so the toy made a popping sound and sprayed a plume of water.

I've done some research since and those SWAT men are trained in RR (Rapid Response) and TR (Target Recognition). I think there were just six or seven SWAT team members but it seemed like a couple of hundred and what's amazing is that in all the confusion only one of the policemen didn't instantly realize it was a squirt gun and, in his defense, he only shot Mr. Gomez's door which was next to the biker but did you know—this is an aside—that they don't have to buy you a new door when they shoot one off your house?

Even though the biker was fine and, to be fair, he started it, he started screaming about police brutality and how when he was a baby somebody put a chip in his butt so he could be tracked by satellite wherever he went because they always wanted to know where he was except he never said who “they” was except that they all seem to have black helicopters.

We were sitting there by the side of the entry when they led him out, chained with his hands to his waist and down to his legs, and I was sort of thinking it was all over when Mrs. Preston came stumbling out of our apartment, rubbed the last of the Mace from her eyes, pointed at Al and me and yelled:

“There they are! It's those two. Assault and resisting arrest. Get them!”

Which is how I came to be arrested and ride in the back of a patrol car with handcuffs and spend the night in a green room with boogers on the wall and a ten-year-old boy named Benny who said he was trying for the world record in stolen bicycles and was over two hundred and fourteen and had only been caught sixty-four times.

CHAPTER SIX

A
ll right so now there has been some character development and a lot of conflict if you consider the cop hitting me and Mrs. Preston pulling me and freaking out Al and the SWAT team shooting Mr. Gomez's door next to the biker but none of that explains how I might come to be the youngest person in America to own a Corvette if I can talk Al into it, which is giving something away but is done in the interest, as Ms. Providge would say, of “further plot development.”

Of course a lot of it has been in the papers and on television which is how I found out I am photogenic although it doesn't matter because I'm never going to be an actor or work in films. But I found out one thing about television and the news media which is that when they write about me or Al and what happened a lot of what they say is just flat wrong, like when they say we were rich, which we weren't then but kind of are now, or when they say everything turned out all right because Al was a close friend of a senator who offered to help us. Except that the senator was a woman who Al met in a yoga class and not a man who offered to help us because Al is beautiful and an exotic dancer, like the press said, so it makes you wonder about everything they say, the press I mean.

The truth is we got arrested and held that night and Al called a friend who was a lawyer and the lawyer came down that night and talked the way lawyers talk and in the morning we were released without bail which made me feel all right because I was sick of looking at the boogers on the wall but not all right because I was still talking to Benny about breaking records. Not by stealing bikes, because that was Benny's idea, but I thought breaking a record of some kind might be the way to get famous and rich.

We went home and for a week nothing happened except that the biker stopped me outside one day and held his hand up to slap mine and said:

“Hey, cool, man . . .”

Which I think meant he liked me because I'd been arrested and maybe had a chip in my butt now so I would be tracked by the black helicopters too. But it didn't matter and Waylon and I went down to the beach and spent a day and I went back to school and I thought that was the end of it.

Then Mrs. Preston filed formal charges of assault and resisting arrest against Al and then added charges of child endangerment and mistreatment against Al and the television crews came to talk to us and the newspapers came and they spent more time than they would have spent because I'm a little photogenic but Al, she's
really
photogenic and knows how to stand and smile so they kept coming back and the headlines read:

STRIPPER MOM FIGHTS SYSTEM

And:

MOM BARES ALL FOR ART

And they had some pictures from the brochures and posters from the club and that brought the press back again and then they published the drawings I'd done of the girls and that brought them back again and by the time we were scheduled to go to court for the first hearing everything was completely out of control and the press was there from all over. We had to fight our way into the courthouse and the camera flashes were going off so thick inside I was half blind.

We had spoken to our attorney, a blond man named Wilton, and he was joined by an attorney from the art people who showed my drawings and they were joined by an attorney from an artists' rights group who said our freedom was being infringed upon which I agreed with and thought they should go talk to Mr. Gomez whose door got shot as well but they brought another attorney who was a specialist in family matters and he took Al aside and said:

“All right, in which ways were you accused of mistreating the child?”

“
The
child—you mean Anthony, you mean
my
child?”

“Whatever. Yes. Not that it matters because this is just a preliminary hearing and I don't think they've got a case but how did you mistreat him?”

I could see it coming in her eyes and I thought it might be bad form—I've always wanted to use that phrase, “bad form,” but never had a chance until now—to attack your own attorney so I tugged on Al's arm until she remembered I was there. We went into the courthouse without bothering to answer the attorney.

If I thought it was going to be calmer in the courthouse I was completely wrong. If anything it was worse. I found out something I guess I never knew before which is that people
want
to be on television. Judges and lawyers are just people and they see a camera and they smile and talk a whole lot like everybody else and inside the courthouse there seemed to be more cameras and reporters than there were outside.

“Look over here, Tony, over here. Look this way. When did your mother stop beating you, Tony? Alice, over here, Alice, stand sideways, Alice, give us a profile, Alice . . .”

And on and on and I looked over at Al and I thought this was horrible and she could see what I was thinking and it made her at first sad and then mad and about then a reporter jostled her and she turned and her eyes did that sparkly thing again and just then I was relieved to see that Ms. Klein had come for what she called “artistic support” and Miles was there too, because Waylon had told him what was happening and he is in the arts and wanted to help and that's when Miles met Al and the electricity thing happened and she forgot about the rude reporters.

I said to Al, “This is Miles, he's my drama teacher who faints sometimes when he reads Shakespeare because it's so good,” and she looked at him and smiled and said, “Sometimes Dickens does the same thing to me,” and the spark came and Miles smiled and I smiled and we went into the courtroom and the state had Mrs. Preston there and Mrs. Preston stood up and said to the judge:

“We were called in on a complaint, Your Honor, and during the investigation we were attacked by the defendant and in subsequent investigation it was found that the defendant is a stripper at a place called the Kit Kat Club, where she allowed her son to go and draw pornographic pictures of the other dancers—”

The judge stopped her by holding up a hand and he looked at Al and I thought he was being nice because he smiled although I think really it was probably for the cameras which were all across the back of the courtroom.

“Is all that true?” he asked Al, and her attorney started to rise but Al pushed him back down.

When she stood the room grew quiet except for the clicking of the cameras. She turned to look at all the cameras and then she glanced back at the judge.

“No.”

The judge waited for her to continue, and when she didn't, he said, “I beg your pardon?”

“That is a categorically false representation of the facts.”

The judge again waited for her to continue, and when she didn't, he sighed. “Let's do this another way. Let's try to find some facts. Are you a stripper?”

Al shook her head. “No. I am a provocative dancer. But it's more like the story of the Glass Café.”

“What story is that?”

Al took a breath and let it out and cameras flicked and flashed. “In Beirut, Lebanon, before it was destroyed by street gangs, when it was the most beautiful city on the Mediterranean, there was a place called the Glass Café. They served coffee in small cups with saucers and men who were professional storytellers would sit and tell stories for listeners who would put coins in the saucers.”

“I don't see—”

“The storytellers were very good and they knew just when to hesitate, when to wait in a story to leave the listeners hanging so they could not stand it and would have to put more money in the saucers to hear the rest of the story.”

“And the point of all this is . . .”

“I dance the same way. I make people think things, want to know more, and I use the dance to tell the story they want to hear. I am like the Glass Café.”

“But you take your clothes off.”

“It's part of the dance, part of the story, a costume, a nonuniform that becomes a uniform.”

He looked at the ceiling, then back down at the row of cameras, then at Al. “It seems a bit of a stretch.”

Al looked back at him, into his eyes. “I wonder—isn't that robe part of the costume you wear on your job? Isn't that the same thing except that you wear clothes and I take them off to help tell our stories?”

He didn't say anything to this but I saw several people in the audience—the courtroom was packed—nod and smile.

“Let's move on. The complaint says you allowed your son to make pornographic sketches of naked women.”

Al shook her head. “That's a judgment call that, frankly, Your Honor, no one here is qualified to make.”

His smile vanished. “Oh?”

“No. Number one, most important, they weren't pornographic, not in the least, they were artistically done and I have at least two witnesses who will state so for every one you find who says they were pornographic. Number two, they weren't naked women. They were nude, or one of them was nude, and the rest were wearing varying degrees of clothing.”

“Varying degrees . . .” He paused, seemed to consider her words.

“I graduated from college and began graduate school years ago,” Al said.

“Then why dance?”

She looked at me and her look softened and then she looked back at the judge. “Because I am privileged to be raising my son alone, with no help from the government or the father, and I can make hundreds of dollars a week dancing. I would love to pursue my doctorate in English literature but it wouldn't pay as well.”

He nodded. “Still, there is the question of assault and resisting arrest.”

So I had been listening and watching Al do it all and I thought, All right, it's time for me to pull my weight and I stood up from the lawyer's table where I'd been sitting watching and I was going to tell the judge that Al didn't allow people to touch me and that when the cop grabbed me it triggered her Target Response and that was why she hit him with the lamp except that the lawyer next to me, the same one who'd asked Al how she'd abused me but was now watching her with admiring eyes, grabbed on to the back of my shirt and pulled me back down into the chair I guess so I wouldn't interrupt the judge. Which might still have been all right except that just as my butt slammed into the chair, Al turned around and saw that yet another person had their hands on me and her eyes got very glittery again which we were all starting to recognize as a danger sign. Mrs. Preston, who was especially edgy and high-strung, seemed to panic when she saw Al get upset and yelled something else I'd heard the biker say which I think is physically impossible and grabbed her Mace from her purse and ran over to our table and started shooting but got the lawyer instead of Al, who started screaming, the lawyer I mean, about suing somebody or maybe everybody and then the whole courtroom blew up.