What We Are (11 page)

The CO looks back at my cell door and gravely shakes his head at me. Oh, I see. Suddenly we have standards, do we, Mr. Leviathan? Suddenly life matters? Get up there and slip on your soapbox, hypocrite. This guy should thank me for my insurrections with the law, he should treat me with respect: Without me and men like me he wouldn't get a fat-ass check each week cut by the Governator himself of sixty-five plus guaranteed g's a year for pressing buttons and counting sleeping bodies.

He's still looking over at my cell. Maybe his muscles have atrophied so badly he can't move his monstrous head back to its original position. Like everything else about him, there's a dinosaur age between movement. He points at me and then down to the ground. I know what he wants but I won't give it to him.

He does it again—pointing in my direction, then at the floor—but I've got my rights: I can more or less do as I please in here as long as it's not (1) flooding the toilet, (2) shorting lights, (3) smoking or slamming anything into veins, (4) shouting out threats, (5) sawing on the bars, (6) masturbating, (7) fornicating or fighting with my cellie, (8) blocking the window with cardboard from the lunches, (9) getting naked. I ain't sitting down. Just like him, I'll never get the fuck back up if I do. Plus I want to see him stand up, put the chips down, get off his fleshy backside, and do some work.

Just as he's pushing himself off the chair, I hear the outer steel door in the sally port slam, and that means more cops or more inmates or more both. Over the desk radio the confirmation: more inmates—the
midnight cranksters and restroom perverts and barroom brawlers rounded up and herded in tonight in the city of San José and its flanking suburbs. He plops back down into his chair, forgetting me at least for the moment, looks back at the sally port and flicks a switch, which at the same time activates a buzz sound heard in every cell.

The doors to the block open, and in come five, six, seven, eight guests in their loose, saggy orange issues and dog-eared plastic sandals, all carrying the generous accouterments of the county: one mattress, one towel, one ten-cent shaving kit, one Tylenol. Trying like hell not to stand out, even at 2:24 in the morning, hyper aware of each other, of us ghosts behind the shatterless glass, looking like sheep in the field with their dirty noses in each other's asses.

He gives the new arrivals an order and they follow it, finding a steel chair each. One cat drops to the floor and falls asleep. He looks vaguely familiar. The CO says, “Hey.” He starts to snore and another inmate with swastikas on his cheeks and forehead and over the bald white scalp puts his foot under the guy's chin and balances it on his toe, this Zinedine Zidane with his soccer ball. The CO watches, amused. The guy on the floor wakes up with his fists in a foist position, though he's still on his back, wild-eyed, the Nazi Zuzu's foot sliding up his face. It looks like the crankster I'd slapped in the Jack-in-the-Crack.

The CO says, “Go sleep your fix off in there, you burnout,” pointing to my cell.

The cell door clicks and in comes my cellie. It's the crankster, all right, but he's got no clue where he's at. He doesn't know who I am because he doesn't even know I'm in here. Christmas-tree hair matted on his head, he's already starting to fall. The walls catch him. He crumples down right at the base of the door, his head smashes into the steel toilet, and he's out. I arrive upon an idea I hadn't thought of before when he hit me up for a meal: I don't want to get too close to the guy: hep B, hep C, West Nile, staph, avian flu, typhoid fever,
consumption, the black plague, cooties—you never know what kind of rebellion some microorganism is staging in the sickly immune systems of our have-nots. He's breathing, and that's good enough for me. Tomorrow I'll walk around the cell with a shirt scarf across my face, the anti-germ Jesse James look. Maybe he'll have forgotten our little encounter. With cranksters anything's a possibility. If the CO lets us into the dayroom tomorrow, I'll read a book for the stretch, even a crock book from a crock writer, I'll play bones with the brothas, run a game of gin rummy with the Asians, sling a handball with the
eses
, all to avoid this bacterial breeding ground of a cellie and his unlikely memory recall.

But this ain't that bad: he's better than a cellie I'd have to talk to, listen to, convince myself each long minute of the long day not to whip into shape. And believe it or not, this guy is helping me, man, he's actually helping me. When someone is so high on life he's unconscious, it's like: What's the point? Don't break him down. Don't throw him into the bottomless pit of comparison. Who cares if he wakes you up and shouts, “Didn't you bitch-slap me once in the Burger King?” You just say, “I never been to that joint in my life, mu'fucker,” and let him struggle with the image. Whatever goes down, so be it, it's going down, that's it. Maybe
way
down. I put my nose up to the humming vent so I don't catch any of his shit and take in the dusty cold air to my lungs, wrap myself up in the gray wool blanket, a human burrito, use the palms of my hand as a pillow, just like the happy paisa on the gurney, no complaints. Then I take my cellie's lead and convince myself—
just take it, man, and shut the fuck up
—not to think about anything, not even nothing.

I
AM DREAMING
about the loss of blood when over the PA in our cell a voice says, “Tusifale. Pack your bags.”

I know I'm not OR'd, released on Own Recognizance, so someone must have bailed me out. And I know that with an assault charge and a hate crime to match, the bail had to exceed fifty g's. Neither of my folks would know where I'm at, and big sister Tali wouldn't put up the cash even if she had a million bucks. Her husband would, though. All anyone has to do to get old Gaelic McLaughlin digging into his personal stash is drop a few Samoan words his way and remind him of the integral unit of Samoan culture, the
aiga
, the family. All the guilt that McLaughlin has over not being Samoan would then rise to the fore and he can parlay through another strange day in his weird little world of cultural denial.

When I first met McLaughlin, I saved him. I was at an afterparty of a local
halau
, a hula dance-off between competing troupes of Philipinas, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, and Tongans. I'm sure the Hawaiians, who weren't there, would have appreciated the very Polynesian get-together, both in timbre and proportion: much love and music and aloha in the air, much grinds and drinks and inflated
stories about the islands to be bellied. It was all good three hours into the little
hukilau
when a cousin of mine, Aleki, arrived from Daly City in red rags and looped earrings, his homeboy, Lafa, tagging along, dragging his feet. They said, “Wassup, Paulo,” we hit each other's knuckles, I saw the cloud of weed in their eyes, smelled the Olde English on their breaths, and they went inside the house. I should have left. But if I'd left I would've never met my future in-law.

McLaughlin arrived with another of my cousins, Malia, on his bony white arm. He had on an aloha shirt circa 1965, Don Ho, and about six or seven leis up to his nose and the bottom of his ear, so that his head was slightly tilted backward, like an old lord of the manor overlooking his labor force. He wore Bermuda shorts that betrayed his bony white knees and slippas that said
SURFAH
on the plastic loop. I'd seen his kind before, white people raised around Polynesians who deify being down for the brown. Who love the alchemy of a people who combine brute force with an inherently gentle and generous nature. It was a little sad to me. You knew they could never be what they wanted to be, it was impossible, like a blind man who idolizes fighter pilots. But you could see this guy was going to get as close to the jet as he could, even if just for a powerless ride-along where he could feel the torque of the g forces at work on his guts. My cousin, who wasn't the smallest of women (five-eight, 210 pounds), but was average size for a Poly, was nowhere near the doctor's chart for her height (145 pounds). She was throwing McLaughlin around like a raggedy doll—very much, in fact, like a copilot in the cockpit of an F-15—and he straight loved it. He was on his way to romance with Malia, joint damage and whiplash.

Even that was all good until someone shouted out, “Go grab some grinds,” and they went up the steps and inside the house to get a plate of
kalua
pig,
tako poke
, Hawaiian kimchi and mac salad. Three minutes later, McLaughlin was flying out the door, his body parallel to the earth, hands extended outward like some crash test dummy,
the leis nowhere in sight; over the steps he went and down, tumbling across the cement, centrifugal speed sending him into a face-first collision with the mismatched planks of the fence. The cheap wood initially took the force of the blow, wobbling, and then in a long second where I could envision the ensuing scene, it toppled over into the neighbor's yard.

I knew what was going down. McLaughlin had just been body-tossed by Aleki or Lafa. I didn't know why. I'd watched Malia get down before and I knew she would have been on top of him a little faster. I would have heard her first. They all spilled out the house: Malia piggyback on Lafa, yanking on his neck in a headlock, Aleki pulling on Malia. They looked like a World Wrestling Organization special. In mid-choke, the severed leis in his hands, Lafa stomped toward McLaughlin. So it was Lafa who was probably interested in Malia, the Poly prize of poor McLaughlin.

He came from Los Altos Hills, a haven for old aristocrats, a place where the estates have no fences and everything down in the valley is disposable. Whatever's not thrown out is exotic. Malia took McLaughlin to Filipino cockfights, Samoan-Tongan rugby matches, overnight
umus
roasting pigs and turkeys and tritip underground with lava rocks, banana leaves, chicken wire, and soaked burlap sacks. When it came down to it, she'd protected him, or at least laundered him past the bulls of these parades. But I guess the noxious cloud of South City
indo
got in the way, and McLaughlin finally had to pay the price for his girl.

I don't know why, really, but I stepped in on his behalf. ”
Fakali
, Lafa!” I said. “Calm down, man.”

“I'll kill you, you punk-ass
palagi
!”

Palagi
means white boy, though with a certain intonation of anger it's closer to cracker. McLaughlin jumped behind me and I said, “Hey. Lafa. Calm down,
uso
. This guy's harmless, man.”

“Paulo! Step aside. I'm gonna kill this fool!”

“Nah,” I said.

“Say what?”

“Nope. Sorry,
uso
. It ain't going down like that.”

Everything stopped, Lafa and Fatu exchanged glances, I stepped forward half a step more, and from that point on I knew neither mutherfucker would ever say a kind word about me to anyone. Would call me half-breed,
afakasi
, and white boy behind my back. South City, Daly City, San Bruno, anyone on the Peninsula crossing paths with these cats would hear a salted version of my treachery. Not only that. If something serious ever went down and I needed a little help from my brothers, it wouldn't be from them. Even Malia was a little surprised. It was all good if she looked out for her lay, but me, blood cousins with one of the aggressors, to whom she herself was also family?

That kind of shit, her eyes were telling me, will get a man shot up in this mutherfucker. You know that
.

I don't care one bit
, I told her back with my eyes.
Not one bit about the lucky bullet
.

So after Malia right-crossed McLaughlin later that night for not defending her, I set him up with my sister, Tali. Six weeks later they were married. Six months later, they had little Toby. No one but me did the math: my little neutered nephew with none of poor McLaughlin's blood. What's strange now is that they dress the kid up in
ie lavalavas
at my sister's insistence, even though he's whiter than his considerably white father, even though neither he, the kid, nor they, the parents, speak a lick of Samoan, even though Tali, in behavior and personality, lost or forewent her Samoan blood long ago.

My father left this country with his fluent Samoan and never came back. You could say this country killed my father's soul, killed our family. But some people would say, and have said, that it was a just killing. The USA birthed it, the USA buried it, that's the way it goes. But I knew it would happen years before it did, I knew it as a nine-year-old hope-filled kid. Our family was always looming beneath the
wings of disappointment. My father couldn't accept that there were many options when it came to behavior, that everything is up for discussion in America. Could be good, could be bad, could be neither. Each second he spent here was potential trouble. When he went back to Samoa during my seventh-grade year, a part of me was relieved. He's in the right place. My father being here was a mistake and maybe I, by inference, or by byproduct, am a mistake as well.

You know how it is with immigrants, I mean true immigrants from anywhere in the world except Western Europe: They calibrate all things by death; they come from places where the possibility of death, the likelihood of it, governs all action. Life was serious to my father, is. Now he's not displaced, his ideas aren't outdated. Every morning he wakes up at dawn and hauls his laundry to the beach to wash in the ocean water on the reef. Before he'd even shown up in America, the eternal bonds of death, God, and love were being put to the chopping block. But he married my mother under the auspices of all three: he didn't want the child, Tali, to die in the womb as all my mother's nipping American friends had wanted, he believed God would condemn him to hell if he didn't meet his duties as a man, and so he forced or forged love in his heart for a woman he'd only known for four weeks and a few days. That kind of purity of code gets diced up in the land of opportunity.