What We Are (10 page)

I didn't. I stood up, kicked him once across the mouth, watched the eyes roll back into the head in a flaring pool of blood. In the gray of the lot, the blood was black like oil, shiny liquid obsidian. I reached down, reclaimed the wallet, and tossed it toward Cyrus without turning my body. The old man was flailing his chicken-neck arms above his weary head, limping like some frantic gimp in the easy suburban twilight, “You stop it, Paul! You must right now stop it!”

Before I cut out, I wound up like a striker on penalties and kicked him one last time in the rib cage. I heard Robin scream from the ramp. She hadn't moved the whole time.

I sprinted around the block, then slowed to a casual speed walk. An older Filipina in a flowery bonnet passed me on the street on a ten-speed. When she was out of range, I cut through the campus of a junior high school, boosted myself up an eight-foot ivy-strewn cement wall, landed on a hillock, and twisted an ankle. I reached down through the weedy grass to massage the swelling, looked up and read:

Feeling down in the mouth?
Come in for a faithlift!

A plastic billboard for The Neighborhood Church. I limped past the sign and, opposite a row of state-funded apartments, saw a dislodged window, just above head level, to the church. I pulled myself up off the good foot, crawled halfway through so I was positioned on the bridge of the sill, stretched out my hands for the rim of a
toilet, dipped incrementally down until one shoe, on the good foot, crashed into the water. I stepped out of the toilet, put weight on my now swelling ankle long enough to grunt, “Shit,” and then, as if I were in a fucking
Scoobie Doo
cartoon, covered my mouth. What a joke. I sat down on the toilet, shook out my dripping foot, dried it with a toilet seat cover.

I had no plan, no statement. I liked, maybe loved, the old man and I detested, maybe hated, the kid, whoever he was, that jacked him. But I didn't know anything about the kid, really, so maybe I just hated him at that moment. That's all I could say. Oh. And then I hated Robin in the moment, too, the cya observer, innocent and clean by uninvolvement.

But my lens wasn't trustworthy, isn't. I may have hated myself, too, just for the hell of it, and was only trying to save Cyrus in some crazy hope to get shot, stabbed, whatever. I cannot say. I like to think I was good, but I truly didn't know. Wherever I stood on the spectrum of humanity was a straight-up mystery. There was nothing to do in the relentless silence of the stripped church but contemplate problems infinitely bigger than my lowly self, so I lay down in the pew farthest from the pulpit, right under a sign that read
SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT JESUS MAKES ONE WEAK
, used a hymnal for a pillow, and fell asleep.

The cops came in the early morn and woke me up. It went down all right, no drama. I came out the church in cuffs and saw behind the menagerie of lights Robin nodding to a husky cop with a pen and a leather-bound notebook: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes....”

When I got to court five weeks later, she embellished the case for the state by saying she'd once had a conversation with me where I'd admitted to having fantasized about stomping a man to death with a giant steel-toed boot while a vestal virgin looked on. I laughed aloud, and my attorney clutched my knee under the table. She was playing her crooked part, helpless, with the lisp of a little girl who just lost her front tooth.

Old Cyrus refused to testify against me. In fact, he refused to testify at all. The district attorney, a little red-faced baboon named Espaniola, decided to charge me not only with attempted murder but with trespassing and breaking-and-entering as well. At a downtown English pub called Trials, he tried to turn Cyrus's silence into a win when he told my lawyer over a black-and-tan that, anyway, he couldn't put a foreigner like that on the witness stand. He'd meant a man who spoke English that badly. They already had Robin and her healthy Freudian imagination. But it didn't matter if Cyrus spoke perfect English: he wouldn't roll on someone who helped him. I knew that and so did Espaniola.

I cut a deal where the DA dropped the trespassing, the b-and-e, and reduced the attempted 187 to assault with bodily injury. He offered two years in the pen, no second strike, so I signed on. Before I got shot off on the silver-bullet transport bus for Quentin, Cyrus came to visit me at the county jail. Our visit was less than a minute long. I didn't do any of the talking. Cyrus was dressed in an ironed navy pullover parka, the rim of gray hair on his timeworn gray head was greased and combed, and his beige work slacks flared just a bit at the ankles. He was dabbing on his eye and his nose even as he picked up the phone and nodded courteously, solemnly. He was an old man and I'd made him older.

“You are staying strong,” he said, wincing. “We can no longer have the communicating. I was leaving Iran because of men like you. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

H
ERE WAS PRISON:
Keep your back to the wall, your head up, keep the poisonous mouth shut, remain polite but never weak in gesture, idiosyncrasy, or posture, keep the trinket of hope contained in your pocket, never initiate a conversation with a cop, never say a cop is cool or of some kind of worth or anything close to redemptive or even necessary, never broadcast your crime as if you were the heir to Billy the Kid, never leave a stamped envelope unused, unsold, or untraded, stay with your own race at all times as you have a race indeed and will be given a race if you're under the politically correct impression that you don't have a race, don't play cards, eat, or shower with other races, don't workout anywhere near other races, don't don't especially don't cut a deal for contraband like weed, heroine, or crystal meth with other races, don't look into the eye of a member of other races unless you're in church, in which case you can with a civilian chaplain, keep your issues to yourself, keep your date of release to yourself, keep away from those cats who don't have a date of release, always clean your plate, always drink your milk, always eat your hard-boiled eggs just like your mother, if you had one, always said, try and find something solid to read for the vacuous torturous twilight hour
like the harsh winter novels of the Russian masters or the pure struggle poems of the Harlem Renaissance and then finally take one incident that you'll find nowhere in the world but the mad slammer and laugh about it the many days you'll need it like the time a big steroid head named Rambo got knocked the fuck out beneath the pull-up bars by a brotha half his size named Droopy who, without his diploma, GED, or facsimile thereof, shouted, “I'll pop you like a balloon, you muscular dysmorphic mutherfucker!”—
pop!
—because he'd been studying obscure psychological conditions in his spare time.

T
HIS ONE IS CLEAN
and uncalligraphied, sufficiently lit for late-night reading, newly painted and, most importantly, except for me, unoccupied. I lie down on the steel bunk and try to nap, but my mind refuses the body its rest and starts up again. Cells, American cells, are often nice enough. This is almost my thousandth day officially locked up and I have no doubt that if life relegates me to another thousand for the present insurrection, I won't necessarily be casual about it but I won't bullshit about it either. I like that everything stops. It's a break. If you summoned every techie on the planet, you still couldn't convert this dead time to a video game, a virtual reality. You've just gotta sit back and look at the black screen. Suddenly your inner life, if you still have one, is all that matters. Your wants evaporate, every hour and day you wait and wait and wait and are finally provided through the power of another entity only what you need, sometimes not even that. All else you earn yourself in the hours.

You learn to appreciate the principle of deprivation:
When does the berry break sweeter upon the tongue than when one longs to taste it?
Everyone, especially cops and judges and politicians, especially attorneys and movie moguls and megalomaniacs on cable news,
PhDs, and the intelligentsia—would do well to spend a little time behind bars. Half the New Testament was birthed of a jail cell. Like an institutional retreat, a lock-and-chain sabbatical, you'll be right there with yourself, whatever's still real in there, pure you. Certain celebrities might survive by shouting out their broadcasts through the spaces in the bars, under the crack of the door, to the concrete walls, but they too might capitulate to the invisible forces at work against them, as they're right there in it when the lights go down, right there in the spook of themselves.

The irony I have to accept now or explain to family or future women I date is the charge of a hate crime against a minority, me with one-half Samoan blood, the quintessential American minority. Plus assault and battery and disturbing the peace. I guess I could file a countersuit of hatred, have an arsenal of ambulance-chasing attorneys running their
mulis
off to solicit my Polynesian
muli
, testify at the proceedings that the other party had said I was a “coconuthead,” have cousins and aunties show up at the courtroom in garish
ie lavalavas
and colorful leis. When it comes to a jury, image is more important than veracity of story. Their ascribing of verdict is a bit like kids picking football teams on the playground. The blind lady in the flowing gown is losing control of the imbalanced scale in her hand, a goddess drunk on judgment.

Well, so be it. In these times, today's news is out the window before today ends. That'll save me, give me another breath of impure oxygen. I'll wear the scarlet A for a day. The minute they coax me into moral shame, they'll be ushering me out the door—or, rather, flushing me down the toilet for the next momentary load of waste. They won't remember my name. I guess I'm like anyone else out there: guilty. I harbor a capacity to hate. This time they're right.

To calm, redeem, or at minimum keep me busy, I pace for a while, reciting a few odes of Keats, get my persecution complex on and roll into a little street ditty by Tupac, thumping beats off the intransigent
wall—
boom, chit, boom
—and somehow segue off that into “I've Just Seen a Face” from
Rubber Soul
of the Fab Four, the twenty-second piano concerto of my man Amadeus, recite a few lines of a Nobel Prize–winning speech, starting with “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man but to my work” and ending with “not for glory and least of all for profit,” then stop at the door of my cell and look out the slit of a shatterless window enmeshed in chicken wire.

In the middle of the pod in the jagged shadows, the correctional officer: a big pink ball with a fat chaw in his cheek, leaning back in the swivel chair, two army boots kicked up on the control panel, a bulbous Copenhagen spitter sitting upon a layer of chin on the upper chest, zoning out to the evening news. I have a good angle on the television and can see two thirds of the screen. All the other lights in the cell block are out, but that doesn't mean anyone's sleeping. Along the second tier I see eyes in the corner cells, I see eyes along the ground floor where I'm at, I hear voices echoing through the vents.

The CO's fiddling with something. I can't see what it is, but my safe guess is: edible, processed, packaged, high in trans fats. I'm right: a family-size bag of Spicy Cheetos that the paisas (whom I, according to legal sources tonight, hate) straight-up love. The CO's pawing four or five at once and, without removing the chaw, is slamming the chips into the Antaean mouth, tonguing the fingers.

Is a display like this supposed to imply masculinity? Is that what we men are now: lethargic, overweight, brainless button pushers? A generation of emasculated Playstation fiends encrusted on couches across the country? There are still men out there—
right?
—digging holes and laying brick and pouring cement and driving truck and lifting weights at the gym not for the mirror or the
Maxim
recommendation on how to get women, but to—
what's this?
—be brave and strong in the endurance of pain and to dispense their masculine anger in a socially acceptable venue. I mean, right? We're still out there,
us dying men, dying to die for our woman, our child, our cause, whatever it is, and if we can't, then just being strong for them, being strong period, imperturbable in this storm of life.

What a romantic idiot I am. The modern American alpha male snaps his fingers to emphasize a point, lisps his
t
's and
s
's, shaves his eyebrows and weeps on television, has three pairs of shoes for Monday. If he's even got a woman, he doesn't fight it out with the mugger; he doesn't whip out his cock and say, “Take a look at this, mutherfucker.” The A-male now whips out his cell phone instead, his balls shriveling up into peas in his little tiger-striped G-string, dials 911, lets a cop in a squad car do his birthright duty. All to avoid the scratches on the elbow, the sweat and blood, the lawsuits.

The CO stands and decides to make the rounds. Late-night count. He's a bit shameless, this one, carrying the Spicy Cheetos as he walks, looking into the cells. Halfway down the first tier he stops, digs into the bag of chips, heads back to the control station. So lazy he doesn't even make a complete trip around the block: twenty-five cells, two tiers.

On my toes, I can see the television over the control station. Tonight the lastest scandal: Mayor Gonzales has pilfered funds, pocketed overflow. Took kickbacks from a garbage company meant to clean up the dirty city of San Jo he inherited. Council members are lining up for the kill, circling the blood, hyenas howling in city hall. And to spice up the salsa they're charging him with a felony, the homely yet sexy Carolyn Johnson of Channel 11 News says.

And then there's me—There I am! (“a man whom authorities say interrupted a peaceful march”)—being dragged off in cuffs like a bag of potatoes. And there she is (“while we organizers were minding our own business in the quad”), the goddess of wisdom and war shaking her beautiful head at the depraved racism of her brother in peace, pleading into the mic for a better, brighter day despite the badness out there. And there he is (“the brawl resulted in serious injuries to
one unidentified”), the nameless paisa on the gurney being wheeled up the ramp of an ambulance, a heart-shaped see-through oxygen mask over his thick mustache and smashed mouth, his hands crossed at the lap of what appears to be a truly relaxed—or truly injured?—illegal immigrant. I get my answer when he puts his hands behind his cowboy hat which, amazingly, is still on his head. The sympathizers clap at his courage. He's cool, kickin' it.