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Authors: Peter Nathaniel Malae

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BOOK: What We Are
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“This country is dying,” my uncle mumbled now.

“What about the job?”

“Pause means you don't want it.”

“Right you are, uncle o' mine. Were saying?”

“It's too much, too much. Stuff.”

“Here?”

“It's more than that, though. I could talk for days. You know what I just saw at a real estate barbecue in the hills of Via Santa Teresa?”

“Golden silverware?”

“Some show called
Survivor
.”

“Yeah. Been around for a while.”

“You a fan?”

“Hell no,” I said. “I'll watch that show when they airdrop ten .44 magnums onto the island. See some
Lord of the Flies Redux
go down.”

“We the people are weak.”

“Suddenly survival has nothing to do with staving off death.”

“No guts. Even me. I've gone soft. I was a kid in the bush back in 'sixty-eight who'd whip the man I am now.”

“Come on, Uncle.”

“Listen. That's the truth. Do you know that I live in the last region in San José with any natural beauty?”

“Of course I do. The Silicon Valley is L.A. minus twenty years.”

“Trees, trails everywhere. They go up the hillside to the silver mines.”

My Uncle Rich has got a pukka estate in New Almaden with a crew of paisas cleaning and trimming it, a vast and vacant guesthouse, an artificial lake stocked with trout and black bass, and three different half-mile driveways to the place, the south, the north, and the northwest entrances.

“And so every morning for twenty years I've started the day saying I'd climb one. The end of the day? Haven't gone out there. Twenty fucking years, Paul. Twelve-hour days.”

“Too busy buying property, selling it. Need to appreciate poetry of the eye.”

“I'd say your generation is even worse. Far worse. The most selfish buncha jerkoffs in the history of mankind.”

“Don't remind me.”

“The Me Generation. Hah!”

“I feel you, Uncle Rich. I can't talk to anyone under thirty.”

“I love you 'cause you ain't like 'em, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“But I'm telling you, nephew. Don't listen to me and my sniveling. You gotta change it and go with the flow. You won't make it the way you are. You know that?”

“Let me take you home, Uncle.”

“Let me give you a job.”

“Come on.”

“Listen to me! You gotta smash some of your antennae. Break 'em off at the root. You gotta turn off the awareness for a minute.”

“I don't know how,” I said.

The Beatles came on over the juke, that masterful last jam session of songs at the end of
Abbey Road
and their togetherness, and my uncle jumped off his stool and started drum-soloing on the air at “Mean Mr. Mustard,” and I began to nod at the rhythm and the sadness of the scene—and yet I also felt compassion for my uncle who was nakedly sharing with me in his most pathetic state of existence, and then I was actually standing and singing at the top of my lungs, perfectly sober, drunk on the nuttiness of life, TVs above us behind us around us in this dark cave of Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap, some random brotha suing Nike and Michael Jordan for eighty million bones because his life as a warehouse foreman has been ruined by mistaken identity (he's five-ten to the six-foot-six of His Airness), another winner lacing his kid's dinner soup with prescription drugs to set up a lawsuit against Campbell's, a far cry from little Max coming back from his dream of where the wild things are to find “his bowl of soup still warm,” the strange weather in one corner of the screen, the elapsing time in the other, a tape-thin line of steady clips running along the base and leaving forever, one in English, the other in Spanish, Sunni and Shia dividing votes, Brangelina giving cash, hugs, and birth, O.J. saying when or if I did it here's how, Rockabilly
Kim Jong Il with the bomb, Coney Island contest of hot-dog eating won by a 150-pound Japanese teen, starving Dinka boys decapitated by white-robed camel-mounted swordsmen called
murahaleen
, Hugo Chavez hugging Cindy Sheehan, a cell phone's disco tune in the wall-carpeted corner of the bar clashing with McCartney's melodic “and in the end, the love you take is e-qual to”, a whore with no pimp or client in the other corner scratching her scratchy legs and playing electric solitaire on the house machine, and then my uncle, in tears over more than his dead daughter, a
Suicide Girl
gone bad, whose spread-eagle picture of gothic piercings is still plastered on a depraved Web site on the Internet, my uncle, leaning on me, whispering, “The truth is, nephew, I don't know a thing about this life. Each day it's less and less. Nina was like you. Always thinking, watching. I had a little more to believe in than she did. That's all. It's no good, no fucking good.”

My mind wandered at that moment to the quandary of relativity. I questioned my uncle's suffering, I actually did. I considered mass suicide at Masada, the Chinese in Nanking, 1942; I pondered a rotting George Chuvalo, the old Croatian boxer who took Ali the distance in 'seventy-two and paid the price for his fifteen minutes of fame by playing a twentieth-century Job, losing son number one to suicide, son number two to suicide, son number three to suicide, and finally wife to suicide, not at once but over the course of ten years, '85, '93, '93, '96, his entire family, bit by bit, gone; there is worse out there, always, there is worse. Much much worse than my spoiled, confused, bulimic cousin of nineteen years of age who tried to seduce me once at a beach party in a Capitola cove, who thought she knew enough about this life to quit it, who was screaming for tragedy, or love, or something she never found.

Maybe the dead are lucky, for my uncle goes on, as we all do. Is he weak or is he sensitive? Is he in love with his daughter, whom he probably never knew like he wished he had the courage to know, or
is he in love with his own story? Is that, in the end, what grief is? Love of thyself, of thyself in connection to the dead?

Clapped into jail by consciousness
.

I don't know now in this goddamned police van and I didn't know then in that dead-end bar, so I just stood there and nodded when I had to, squinted my eyes when I had to, finally joined him in knocking back coal-filtered vodka without a chaser, wincing at the fire in my heart and my gut and my loins and my lungs, and when he called a taxi to return to the mansion in his idyllic untapped hills, I went back inside the Redi, told the wannabe Indian behind the bar, Fuck you and your fake-ass dreamcatcher for laughing at my uncle, offered the whore half a free bed at the Motel 6 I was “staying in for the night” (I didn't want her to know I lived there or she might come back the next day), and we left with a good yard of space between us, and nothing else.

6
They've Got New Machines Now

T
HEY'VE GOT NEW MACHINES
now that prevent the messy process of having to stain the thumb and index finger with ink, yours and theirs. Now you just lay your hand on a transparent counter of lasers that looks like a Xerox machine without the hood and press it down evenly when the cop says, “Press it down evenly,” and there it is, your epidermal ID. They can hunt you down anywhere in the world by a downloaded map of your palm. A snap of the finger, press of the button.

Eternally.

The American in me can't accept the suggestion that I've no right to an older, alternative method of fingerprinting. When the cop says, “Please place your hand above the machine and relax, sir,” I say, “No. That's okay.”

“Please, my friend, let us do this civilly like gentlemen.”

That's a first: a booking cop calling me friend. He has a slight accent which I'll nail when he talks a little more. His tone has the decorous Victorian ring that a hooked-on-phonics tape evokes:
Hello there, boyo. And how are we today, chappie?
I'm getting excited in that region—southern, center—where it counts, and I wonder why.

Princess Di on the beach?

No, posthumously disrespectful.

A Spice Girl?

No, musically irrelevant.

I feel like I can test this cop, test the red tape, so what the hell, I'm bored. And though I haven't seen my face after the mess at Cesar Chavez Park, I can tell by how tough it is to keep my eyes open, the itch and scratch in my nose, and the mealy-mouthed feeling when I talk that I'm blackened and swollen and pulpy. That should give me a little leeway to say whatever I want.

“This thing is a hotbed of invisible cancer-causing lasers, officer, and I'd rather get ink all over my hands and face than get some radical cells going in my system. Already got millions as it is. I mean, I ate your institutional food for a couple years.”

“You are on parole?”

“No, sir.”

“You discharged your number?”

“I never was on parole.” He wants to know how it's possible. I'm about to tell him. “I did my time straight through. They wanted to kick me out in a year and a half, but I stayed in and finished it out.”

“I have never encountered that before,” he says. “You are unique. Everyone accepts the terms of an early release.”

“The terms mean you're still officially incarcerated. Same condemned status. And for another three years they do what they want with you. Send you back for sleeping in late.”

This guy's got an educated, even elegant look to him, despite the crew-cut. And he's got self-discipline, you can see it in his forearms, which are veined and thick as a dairy farmer's. He's trim in the mid-section, a runner, carved cheekbones and jawline. And were he not a cop, I'd say his posture suggests gentility, another first. I'm sure there are dignified cops out there, but I don't come across them as an arrestee. I suspect they're in the hidden offices of every jail and police station, polishing their boots, reviewing civic code, whistling
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” between contemplative puffs of a dry-leaf Cuban.

“Actually,” he says, smiling, “you're quite right.”

The hard-on is now raging in my pants and I wonder if it springs and eventually comes from the simple kindness of an unexpected source. Flattery from a dominatrix. Niceties from the executioner. Or someone granting what I've always wanted on every level:
You're right, my friend. Quite right
.

“You do have the right to be fingerprinted traditionally, should you so choose.”

“Then, I so choose, sir. Might I exercise my right for the ink?”

“You might, my friend. Please wait here.”

He leaves me alone, without cuffs. I just stand there, unwilling to turn around. No eye contact with the transient hooked up to the blue plastic chair behind me. I can hear him shuffling his feet, sliding in his seat to get my attention without words. He'll want me to snag something, a pen, a paper clip, an extra cheese and mayonnaise sandwich, anything to come up. The code of the streets is Machiavellian and jail/prison is the streets times five/ten. You get and keep whatever you can, when and however. But I feel this strange sense of indebtedness to the cop, not so much for trusting me, although that's the thrust of it, but more so for slipping protocol, breaking rank and being human.

“Hey, dog,” the transient says.

I turn, and his eyes are full of mischief. With evil. The smile cements it: I'm gonna have to fast for forty days in the desert to cleanse myself of this cat. His mouth is rotting from too many years of Dumpster diving. I can't tell from the weathering if he's Hispanic or white or a mixture thereof, but when I spot the bird on his neck, an institutional tag for peckerwoods, I know he's white. He says, “Pull the fire alarm, dog. It's right over there. He ain't gotchu in the computer yet, man.”

“Why don't you do it, bro? That way they can get your pearly whites on camera.”

“No, no, no,” he says, still smiling. “Trust me. They won't know it's you.”

It's funny, man. Too funny. Is this devilish arrestee offering me a pair of scissors to slice up the red tape I've just questioned in my head? Is it cowardice not to up and run if I can do it, get it done right now? If I were a lifer, heading off to High Desert or Pelican Bay, maybe. Escape or die in the pen. But then, too, the cop wouldn't leave me unattended. No: I don't like the idea because, whoever it's from, any kind of coaxing to me is like saying I didn't know the suggestion in the first place.

“Hey, bro,” I say. “You see my face?”

“Yeah. That's right. I get it.”

“You get what?”

“Go ahead,” he says. “Tell it, man. Tell it.”

He's fiending on the conversation he foresees between us. Vows of vengeance, a tale of treachery, the dawn of the dead. Vortexes and black holes and mosquito swamps of defeat. He's panting like a fucking dog. It's lonely looking for a co-conspirator down there in the gutter of sorrow.

I can't tolerate his scheming ill will. I'm going to punch him in his ear, get some blood going. Aim the right front tire of my street sweeper for his head. I look down at the fingerprinting station and by a herculean bidding of the imagination envision this hardened transient as a thin-skinned eleven-year-old, a Little League failure, a chubby right fielder with the dexterity of a manatee, the arm strength of a T-baller half his age, sipping on his melting Slurpee between innings, hoping that the demure brown-skinned Maria from Mrs. George's class will come to the next game to catch his team when he won't strike out three times—
whiff!
—won't drop a liner right in his mitt, won't boot a grounder that dribbled through the uncut
grass slower than a three-legged rabbit. He doesn't have to hit anything out of the park, he doesn't need to sit on anyone's shoulder after the game, he just has to do something barely acknowledged by coaches and team mothers and peers at the pizza parlor. Acknowledged through a greeting or inclusion in a conversation, a tip of the hat, a little nod to his little heart of the seminal universal need to belong. Anything that will keep the hope alive and give him the right to return to practice tomorrow.

BOOK: What We Are
9.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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