What We Are (20 page)

My newfound friend says something else, and I catch
fucking
and
dog
and
block
and stand up just as I notice that the yuppies at the tables next to the kid have stopped eating.

I'm right behind them now. I see
Miller and Co
. on the customized collar. So it's manufactured in some makeshift warehouse, profitable 1-800 crap from late-night TV.

The dad says, “Why don't you mind your own business?”

“I'm gonna take that leash and tie
you
up so you can see how it feels.”

“I don't exactly understand how that would solve anything.”

“Hang you from the rafters of the Rock Bottom sign right there, so you'll understand that all things move toward the center of the earth. And the center of the earth is hell.”

“You need some help.”

“No, I don't. I'll do it myself right here and no one'll stop me. That's a fact.”

“I meant,” the dad says, his gray eyes rolling with contempt, “you need some professional help.”

“What'd you say?”

“Hey, bro,” I say, reaching out for his elbow. “Let's go.”

The child is now being rocked heavily in his mother's arms, she's whispering a lullaby in his ear.

“Yes, I'd say that it's time to go,” says the dad. “Why don't you escort your friend directly to the insane asylum?”

I feel a river of blood rising in my chest.
Prison makes the good bad, the bad worse, and the free all high and mighty
. I want to walk calmly over and line my feet up shoulder width in a linebacker stance, sturdy and implacable, bend at the waist to dust off the David Beckham rouge
from this metro's cheeks, then get a good grip on his orange-skinned neck and choke his ass right there in his seat. It has nothing to do with loyalty to my newfround friend. I just would like to watch his flat gray eyes wane into humility, then I'll let him breathe. Yes, I want to rip the leash off the kid. In fact, that's first. And yes, I want to make all the Pontius Pilates of the patio at least passive witnesses of an active truth, to be the proxy signature of their names on the dotted line, have someone appreciate the meaning of present in body only. But mostly I want to put my head under a faucet and run a stream of ice-cold water, breathe in deep through the nostrils.

I say, “Forget about it, bro. Let's get out of here.” The hue of the skin on his neck and cheek is clouding like an octopus on the reef: red, white, brown, purple....

“You better take that leash off right now.”

The dad's frown lines bunch up and he looks around. “Am I on Candid Camera? Is that what this is? Okay, okay, I get it. Hah-hah. Good one.”

Someone from the crowd, a woman, shouts, “Can't you just leave him alone?”

The dad perks up, this show-off mutherfucker. He knows who's in the right with this crowd. Honor thy father and mother (or get choked). He closes his eyes, throws his arms up in the air as if he's about to embrace my newfound friend, and cries aloud, “Why can't you just mind your own business?”

Suddenly this little guy is standing next to me, his head high as my shoulder. I put it together fast: restaurant manager, Napoleon complex, law abider, police caller. He's so grossly violated my personal space that I have no choice but to turn and get in his face, or get in the top of his head.

“What's the problem, dog?” I say, feeling a little stupid.

He lightly taps, caresses my arm. “Your friend here is going to have to leave.”

“That's cool, bro,” I say. “We'll just finish our drinks and bounce.”

“No,” he says. “You both have to leave now.”

My newfound friend takes a step toward the metro father and shouts, “You know what I'm gonna do with that leash?”

A lady from the circle shouts, “Just go already!”

“Fuck you!” my newfound friend yells into the crowd.

The metro throws his hands yet again in the air. “Why can't you just mind your own business?”

“That,” my newfound friend says, pointing at the kid, “is my business.”

The manager says, “You're going to have to leave.”

“Yeah!” a sympathizer calls. “Leave!”

“Let's head out,” I say, “while we can.”

The midget manager is red-faced and worried but cool. “Please,” he says to me.

“We'll cut out, man. Just relax. All right?”

The manager nods. I start to walk toward our table. My newfound friend's already there. I think,
That's good, anyway. Good
.

He picks up the pitcher of golden Hefe-Weizen, one last drink to finalize capitulation, looks over at their table, grits his teeth, says something vicious in what sounds like Russian, winds up like a discus thrower, and hurls the pitcher at the head of the metro father. It whips past the ear of the target and shatters the glass window of the restaurant. A woman screams. The kid screams too, is screaming.

“Right in front of the poor boy!”

I want to say, I didn't throw it, man, I didn't do it, but for once no one's paying any attention to me.

I
MAKE MY BREAK
backward, tiptoeing as if I were covering my tracks in the snow.

Now everything's slo-mo, drunk time under water, the betting lines are up. Everyone, even me, is looking at my newfound friend, several women sounding the siren in the early evening.

You better about-face
, I think,
before the mace and guns get here
.

He nods at me as if he's read my thoughts, puts his head down, and jumps over the manzanita bush, already running north toward Mrs. Fields and Buca di Beppo. He cuts through an approaching crowd, dodging a biker in fluorescent spandex.

Keep on running, dog. Go, go!

If he makes it past the Bank of the West, his chances are good. Too many cars and not enough road to be chased by a roller here in the Pruneyard. Then it's ten seconds to the cover of two-dozen apartment complexes, where a potential witness will mix up the scene like a bag of Jelly Bellies.

I'm holding my breath, doing my damnedest to leave the air undisturbed. I'm the benefactor of that pedestrian tendency to ogle the accident. Not one patron of the patio follows me.

I jump on my bike, virtually clear of the scene, and he appears. Like a ghost out the kitchen. Untying his Rock Bottom apron with the subtle flair of a matador, macho aplomb foreign to these watered-down shores, the paisa cook with the two black eyes I'd laid on him at the rally tosses the apron into the crowd and gives chase to my friend. The son of a bitch. Is there square footage anywhere in the greater South Bay that this mutherfucker doesn't claim?

Okay, Twisted Fate: I'm in.

I bike down the lot behind the cover of seven straight SUVs, paralleling their path from fifty yards. I'm making ground on both of them. They're banking toward Barnes & Noble and Barbecues Galore, and I can't see them for three or four seconds. I pass the other end of the olive green bookstore and its monolithic display of a book whose cover—a blond leggy bulimic dominatrix—makes me think
Godless, Godless, Godless
, the book's exact title in blood red, and they shoot out across the intersection of Campbell Avenue amid honking horns, weaving and juking through traffic, the paisa at thirty yards from my newfound friend, zeroed in on capture.

I behold in my head the headlines tomorrow in the local section of the
San José Mercury News:
: GREEN-CARD CHEF ON THE SUBURBAN HUNT.

But I'm gonna get to him first. He doesn't think anyone's trailing him and why would he? Who around here is desperate enough to take the risk?

¿Quien de los Americanos tiene huevos?

I reach the end of the lot perpendicular to traffic. My newfound friend veers right toward downtown Campbell, away from the triple canopy maze of apartment complexes. He's got one way to go now—directly down the artery of Campbell Avenue—and it all depends on me to see he makes it. I'm gonna trip the paisa up like a bad comedy, watch him slide into his new home base. Paint some strawberries on his knees and elbows before he's hailed a hero in a foreign land.

So you want to put your ass on the line, amigo?
¿Aqui?

Okay. All right.
Ya estuvo
.

I put my head down and grind hard on the bike's crank, my heartbeat as rapid as a small bird's. The stricken streets of downtown Campbell are vacant. My newfound friend cuts to the right of the chevron-shaped billboard:
WELCOME TO DOWNTOWN CAMPBELL: YOURALL-AMERICAN CITY
. I accelerate past a four-stop-sign intersection, across the green grass of the county library, around skaters doing rails and ollies on the steps, up the alleyway behind Molly Bloom's Spirits, diagonally into a hidden quad of dentistry, ferns and ivy hanging over the gutters, and hop off the bike, breathing hard.

Right then the message on his chest flashes by—
ZYZZYVA!
—two yards from where I'm crouching behind a plastic recycling bin. He ducks up an alleyway lined with dumpsters, Winchester Avenue on the other side, a definite out from this dead-end Dodge.

I wait. Keep my neck craned so I can see five yards from my position, but the paisa's nowhere in the vicinity. I lean out a little farther and look up the walk and see nothing but empty storefronts and two kids playing rock-scissors-paper in front of Recycle Bookstore West. I pull back, wait another three or four seconds, finally step out of the alleyway.

At the corner of the street, the leaves of the elm trees are lit in patriotic red and blue. Two squad cars are angled into the sidewalk, and there's the paisa, already spread out on the hood.

I grab my bike and walk it toward the squad car. One cop is shuffling through the paisa's pockets, patting him down to the ankles, shaking his head. The other cop is listening to a citizen make her case about what happened. She keeps shouting it: “I saw it! I saw it!”

At twenty yards the paisa spots me. He raises his chin with remarkable coolness, and then he winks. Like:
This ain't nothing, puto
.

I don't know if he's recognized me from the rally or if he's just this way with anyone he doesn't like. I get on my bike and pedal
slowly toward the squad car, neither of us looking away from the staredown.

“That's not him,” the lady says.

The other cop torques a pair of cuffs tight around the paisa's wrists, and I nod at the green-card arrestee.
So how's that feel now, puto? On this fluffy cloud in middle-class America, you got taught a straight lesson about the hypocrisy of modernity, didn't you? Oh, amigo, we didn't mean for you to be that much of an individual
.

The cop spins him on his feet and presses him with one hand against the car door, turns, and puts a penlight in the witness's face.

“Do I gotta ask you for your green card too, lady?”

She's blind with obedience, dropping her head and saying, “But he's not the guy.”

“Doesn't matter if he is or isn't, comprendamente?”

Oh, she understands, all right. She walks. I ride past the scene, nodding innocently at the cops, six Hefe-Weizens to the wind. Toward the town's safe corridors where triple frappuccinos are being sipped, cell phones flicked open, electric mice rolled across laptops, the good people of Campbell shut off to the stories around them. Maybe even inside them.

Well, now the DA's got a weaker case in
The State of California vs. Paul Tusifale
, a fellow arrestee to take the stand against me. That seems, for the moment, fairly just. At least acceptable. Lift up your latte in a toast.
Salud
.

I bike on.

The conversation has got me wandering again. Thinking. About the world sitting in its own red rage on the leash of a tilted axis, needing good and evil to spin. I cruise through side streets dark and cool as the deep sea, follow the light behind the trees, and hit Bascom, heading south beneath the tittering stars, the punctuation points of heaven, if it's still there. The American dybbuk,
Lennon's Nowhere Man, ensconced in hunger. Thinking on error. On my own. Our own. Everyone's.

Married to failure unto death.

I hear a click in my head and pick up the pace. Fly down Bascom past the partially nude strip club of T's and the full-on real deal of the Pink Poodle, left down San Carlos and past the old school Falafel Drive-In and around all kinds of paisas and cranksters talking to themselves on the curb of the sidewalk, and sometimes paisa-cranksters holding up for their lunch or five-bucks-cash big picket signs about discount deals at pizza places, liquor stores, and furniture retailers, under the hanging giraffe-necked streetlights, over the long bridge ten feet above the bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic of 280 and its aerial cloverleaf of entrances and exits, and then the merging vein of 17 and that purple haze of smog that rolls and swirls of its own volition, down into the shadow of the valley of commerce between the hill of Valley Fair Shopping Mall and the newly built mountain of Santana Row.

I cut up into the Row for the first time ever to save time. I'd always avoided the place. This valley went from the rowed beauty of apricot orchards to the borrowed architecture of Beverly Hills. Like there was a shift in the San Andreas fault line one day, and out sprang a haven of materialism. Everyone gets to be an aristocrat for a few hours: teachers, janitors, plumbers, 49ers, putting down Manhattans and mojitos in the bright afternoon. Forget about the Burger King, Big 5, and the other middle-class mainstays surrounding this place. The walls are built so high and magisterial that once you enter the corrida, you can't see out of it or over it. You're a done bull, as they say,
un finito toro
. You've got whatever's in front of you, whatever's behind you, and that's it.

I'm inside the chute on the main strip called Alyssum Lane passing high-end monsters like Crate and Barrel and fashion
specialization shops with one-word monikers like Jacadi and Tumi and Furla, their gorgeous mannequins in suggestive poses on teak walls, done-up clients with spray-tanned honey skin, the same mucus-colored purse bouncing on their hips, posh art galleries with no more than four paintings on the wall, the proprietor in a kangol and woolen sweater ignoring you when you walk in.