Bob Goes to Jail

by Rob Sedgwick

  “No, he is. Really.”

  The cop started cuffing me.

  “Really? You mean you can talk to him and stuff?”

  “Yep.”

  The wrist bracelets hurt.

  “Does he know you’re driving with a suspended license?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. And while I’m a huge fan, I have to take you in.”

  “But they were just bicycle tickets.”

  “How the hell do I know that?”

  Julie started yelling at him again. I asked her to please not, told her to get my ATM card, and politely asked the cop how much he thought my bail would be.

  He said around $250.

  I thought I was going to get off, but this was not a happy thing. The cop made his point and took me to the Mount Pleasant police station, which was a sad strip mall of a place and the opposite of pleasant. He made sure to tell everyone in the station that he had nabbed Kevin Bacon’s brother-in-law, and when Julie came back with the bail money, most of the cops came out to look at the car and smile at it adoringly. Some actually touched it. I was ultimately fined and would have to pay the tickets. Upon sentencing, the judge said, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. The state requires you to pay a fine of thirty-one dollars, and upon payment of that fine you are released. And I must say: don’t they have anything better in New York City to deal with than bicycle tickets?”

  When I told the pathetic tale to Jordan, he said, “I bet you were hoping this wasn’t shades of things to come.”

  “Yeah, I was, actually.”

  “Don’t worry about it. That’s not going to happen.”

  It drove me nuts when Jordan said that. I hated it. And he said it every time I asked the question. I had told him what Hank said and he just shot back at me that he had everything under control. His tone was always so condescending and kingly, like he had a get-out-of-jail-free card and I was an idiot to even dream that something could go wrong. So I kept telling myself everything was fine, like everyone else does when they know something bad could possibly happen but they don’t want to deal with it.

  However, I still retained my criminal swagger. The confidence that came with it bled into my acting life and subconsciously impressed the movie powers that be.

  I booked another studio movie— Tales from the Darkside—that I shot before Tune in Tomorrow. It was an asinine movie, but a studio movie nonetheless. I was the tennis-racket-wielding, polo-playing dickhead who deserved to have his brains ripped out by a mummy.

  Next came Tune in Tomorrow, the big-budget Hollywood movie I had auditioned for some months before, starring a sitcom actress I remembered from my youth. I was cast as a melodramatic radio soap opera star. For about thirty seconds there in my film career, I was in some semi-lofty company.

  The sitcom actress drank even more than I did. She played my mother-in law; her character and mine were having a lurid affair behind my wife’s back and would look on, clutching each other, as my wife had our baby not ten feet away. She would say to my character—Elmore—as I was sensually clutching her in the delivery room, unbuttoning her blouse, “Elmore, stop! That’s your wife who is having your baby!” To which I responded lustily, “I know, Margret. That’s what excites me.” On the plane ride back in first class, the stewardess couldn’t get her an “eye-opener” fast enough. After we took off, she said dreamily, “Robert, look at the clouds. They’re so puffy.”

  But with the movies came big-shot-itis. I started drifting from Julie. I might have liked the notion of the regular day-to-day life that most people led, but I wasn’t well acquainted with it.

  After she moved in, that new dimension of normalcy became the bedrock of our relationship. I was there for her, she for me. I started loving her. I began to cherish her. No one was going anywhere. But with that normal and familial bond, I no longer felt I could treat her as a sex object. I felt tender toward her. She was a three-dimensional person with feelings I had to consider and respect. I missed not having to think about any of that. I missed her glorious pornography. I missed seeing her as a monument to female perfection at the strip club. I missed the dangerous drunken dungeon nights of fucking and dangling her over the balcony of the twelfth floor on sweaty summer nights—one slip, and Robert Chambers, here I come! I missed the violence, the hate, and the disdain. The absence of intimacy and the compulsion to receive and inflict pain with the remote but very real possibility of actually killing each other. I missed the sheer animalism.

  Without all these relationship-on-a-ledge excitements, the notion of having sex with her became uninspired. So that overwhelming urge dissolved and became an obligation, and obligation became routine, and that way lies the death of relationships. I didn’t talk to her about this. I just let it go. And by letting it go, it metamorphosed into its own being. An overwhelmingly large being that we both knew was there but didn’t talk about.

  During Tune in Tomorrow, I figured I was far enough away from New York that no one would know, so I ordered a hooker. She was North Carolina, Holiday Inn yuck (the cotton candy hair, the mascara, the piano legs). I felt the “wrong” when I opened the balsa wood hotel door. It came slicing down in front of me like a guillotine. The airless Howard Johnson hotel room suddenly stunk of rotting perfume and fear sweat. She was standing there waiting to be asked in with a put-on working woman smile. There was nothing wrong with her. She was a person. With hopes and bills like everyone else. But I knew if I took the next step, this would be a portal through which there would be no return.

  What would Tybalt think?

  I had an attack of conscience and told her I couldn’t do it.

  “You shy? A perpendicular problem?” she asked in a slight Dixie lilt.

  “No, not at all. I just have someone, and I feel bad and I can’t. So…”

  “You still have to pay me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you do.”

  “I don’t see why. Services were not rendered.”

  “Honey?”

  “Yes?”

  “Now.”

  My default cheapness kicked in.

  “But we didn’t…”

  She flashed open her purse.

  “Render this.”

  I looked into the purse and saw a nickel- plated revolver. My hand jumped out of my pocket and put the money in her hand. And I heard her exclaim as she lumbered down the hall, “Goddamn Yankee”.

  The movie wrapped, and I arrived home, got limoed back to Eighty-Fifth Street. God, movies are easy.

  Julie was there in the apartment. She kissed me, smiled—and BAM, “I’m pregnant and I want the baby.”

  Oops.

  It was one of those moments when life stops and it takes you forever to wrap your head around what you just heard.

  A million miles came between us instantly. I felt cold. My life was dying at twenty-nine, shackled to a baby I didn’t want or plan on. How would the rest of my life play out? What if it would be just like this: a forever-flat staleness, living day to day with no passion, no urge, only the exhaustion and zombie-like devotion to take care of a child, my youth and energy spent completely on him and any notion of reaching the cloudy heights of success I had always yearned for over for good. There was the feeling in my intestines of water spinning down the drain. We had never talked about this. I went from loving and trying to want this person to “She is the enemy and how do I get out of this?” in a flash.

  And a baby? Being a father?

  How does one comprehend that, especially someone drinking so much of the time and whose favorite subject was the tale of himself? I knew that babies—kids—were twenty-four seven. That they would need and want: attention, experience, wisdom, selflessness, steadiness, calm, and a foundation of granite that could bend and adjust to any and all mayhem that life could throw.

 
To a large extent, this was Julie.

  It was galaxies from me.

  I told her we had to get an abortion, otherwise there would be no “us” anymore. I didn’t know if there would be any “us” anymore anyway, but I knew we had to get the abortion. This instantly became my all-encompassing fixation. Fatherhood was something I could not look in the eye. She had never told me she wanted a baby. Or maybe I was too drunk to remember. Maybe I blotted it out. But we had never sat down to have a serious talk about it. That I would have remembered.

  She acquiesced as if she were in some foggy stoned dream and could be easily steered. I said maybe we could have kids down the road, but not now. I knew somewhere far away in my head I was lying, but I went with it. She was always so powerful and remarkably competent at everything, but now she was depressed, broken.

  I told Kyra, and she was devastated for both of us. She told me to go to her doctor. She would pay for it.

  We went for an abortion. But Julie was hysterical and had such a death grip on the wheel of the car I couldn’t get her out, even though I pulled for all I was worth. I felt terrible, but I knew this was my only shot to get this done. The nurse came out to the car and said they couldn’t do anything with her in such a state. We had to go home. I was livid and felt I had been duped. Why hadn’t I been paying attention?

  But this was my life. If something displeased me or was inconvenient or I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t pay attention. I didn’t pay attention to the law, so why should I pay attention to birth control and being a responsible partner?

  We agreed to try again, that an abortion was the right thing to do, even though all her body language was twisting the other way. The feeling of not wanting to be around her was excruciating. The love or whatever it was that I had felt for her was hard and dead. The more we talked about it, the more it was plain as the load of marijuana in the living room that she had been angling to have a baby the whole time. But I hadn’t been paying attention.

  The second time, she met with the doctor alone. When I was brought in, his face looked as though he had put on this face many times before for men like me: deadbeats. You couldn’t say it was “righteous indignation,” but he did a hell of a job making me feel guilty without pointing fingers. I knew what he was going to say.

  “Julie has decided to go ahead with the pregnancy, and if you’d like to participate, we’d love to have you.”

  I chose to punt.

  The ride home was silent, a hearse.

  After we got home, I went into the study at the end of the apartment to get away from her, made some phone calls to whomever would listen about what happened from my side, and after about half an hour wondered about the silence in the rest of the apartment. She was gone. But more importantly, Tybalt was gone. I flew down the twelve flights thinking the worst, but when I got outside the building, I saw the van. She was just Sunday driving around the block with Tybalt sitting in the front seat for company.

  They looked like a family that belonged together—one that wouldn’t be together anymore.

  I left her in my grandparents’ apartment on Eighty-Fifth Street so she could take a couple of days to get her things together and leave. I took a toothbrush and Tybalt and hightailed it out of there to my sister’s house on Riverside Drive. Per usual, she and my brother-in-law were away doing some movies.

  I knew it was wrong, but I had never felt so relieved. I jumped into the nearest cocktail I could find to try and forget, to obliterate conscience. Tybalt would roam around my sister’s place, agitated. He would scratch at the front door. When I left him in the apartment, he would cry and moan this awful yelp. When I returned, he was seated by the front door, which had been scratched so deeply there were paint chips on the ground.

  A couple of days later, I peeked up the street and Julie was just finishing up packing the van. There was such a heavy tug in my chest about abandoning her, but I just felt rooted to where I was standing, unable to walk up to her and say, “Stop. Come back. We can do this.” That would have been the right thing to do. Here I was, confronted by one of life’s big choices and in life’s eyes doing the wrong thing, a thing of weakness and failure, the kind of choice that defines a person badly. But your gut is the truest voice you have, and mine was saying, “Tiptoe away from this as fast as possible.” So I went with what I knew I could actually handle, what I could live with. With tail tucked, I tiptoed back to my sister’s place and gave it one more night just to make sure she was gone.

  Tybalt and I moved back into Eighty-Fifth Street the next day. The apartment echoed too much and seemed overly large.

  Tybalt poked around most of that day trying to find her. A couple of times, he looked at me dead on and just kept staring at me, into me. He would just sit there for minutes at a time, motionless. I couldn’t meet his eyes. His centuries-deep, monolithic stare that knew dimensions of compassion, decency, and empathy I could not begin to comprehend.

  —

  What to do, what to do?

  We had been dry too long at this point, and there were no more movies on the horizon. I called Jordan obsessively to see what was up. He wouldn’t call back. I biked down to Stanton Street—where he lived to stay under anyone’s radar. I wanted to have a long sit-down about our venture. I had no idea how the business actually worked. As with most things in my life, I only tilled a small plot of the vineyard, ignorant of its connection with the rest, but felt strongly that, by sheer force of will, I could resuscitate the situation.

  This wasn’t your hipster’s Lower East Side of today, where the Bowery is now Fifth Avenue. Oh no. This was when New York was interesting and filthy. When it took some intestinal fortitude to live here. Drug dealers swaggered everywhere, marking their territory. Addicts just loitered. Sometimes to get to Jordan’s lofty loft, you had to step over them. The apartment was nice: fluffy and flopsy rich with deep, caramel brown leather couches and chairs; Nikko’s artwork on the walls; tasteful and sturdy wooden tables, bookshelves; an amazing stereo with humongous speakers. Thick and tacky white wall-to-wall shag carpeting. The walk up the staircase was Serpico’s walk up the tenement steps before he got shot in the face. Jordan was the only white guy you could find for miles in the neighborhood.

  When I got down there, I became more without rhythm than usual. Jordan and I had coffee—at least I did. Jordan could deal with Jamaican jails and guns pointed at his head, but coffee made him nervous.

  He said the magic words: “We start again in January.”

  My whole system went bananas. That was a month away. I could taste it.

  “That’s fantastic! Why? What happened?”

  “Diego said we go in January, so we go in January. You need some money to tide you over?” he asked. I just looked at him pathetically like, “Yes, Daddy, I could use some,” and he slipped me two grand in cash.

  —

  The money was a quick fix and gave me a slight pep in my step, but it was temporary. Tybalt obeyed me vaguely. It was perfunctory. There was no charm, no fellow feeling, just a blank and neutral expression. He came when I called him to go out, when his food was ready. But that was it. If I wanted to complain about the depth of my sadness, he would walk away. He found a T-shirt of Julie’s and placed it in the telephone chair. It still smelled of her. At night he would crawl under one of my grandparents’ single beds and sleep there, refusing to stay in my room. When I tried to convince him to crawl out, he just ignored me. The apartment got bigger and echoed loudly. It was just men in the house without a lady and a bleakness that two grand in cash could not alleviate.

  I would get drunk and talk about it and lament. I would look at my sister’s child and weep through my martinis. She didn’t take sides on the subject because she knew there was a possibility (however remote) that Julie and I could get back together. But she was endlessly compassionate. She endured my weeping. I wept about many things: Shakespeare, life, Tybalt no
t talking to me, my inactive acting career, my child to be.

  But underneath all the drunken lamentation, I knew I would have been a lousy father. You needed championship-caliber stuff to pull that off, and at least I was self-aware enough to know that, at that point in my life, I was an emotional welterweight.

  The thrilling notion of the next load gave me something to look forward to other than the phone maybe ringing for a job, the gym, and a night at Brats, the bar, which had become my living room.

  At 5:00 p.m., Jordan left a message on my answering machine: “Call me pronto.”

  At last!

  Feigning indifference, I called him back, “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Hey, load’s coming in about two hours. I’m coming to you.”

  Ecstasy unbound.

  I had an appointment with my analyst right then, so we were able to discuss my problems in depth before the load came. I purchased the necessary accoutrements—moving tape, Hefty trash bags, Bounce, more duffel bags from Morris Brothers across the street—and strode into the therapist’s office happily displaying the tools of my trade. I was proud as a cock and surer.

  My therapist looked dismayed, but there is no stopping a fool and his dream. When they were handing out roles for this particular play, I was cast as the fool.

  Cue the Fool!

  After my session, I went back home and had only two beers and some cake from the deli downstairs, so I felt okay. Jordan called from the street. He was downstairs. The apartment was ready. Tybalt was going bonkers.

  I went downstairs.

  My stomach hurt. Was it the beers or the piece of cake?

  The Fool’s rationale.

  The doorman I didn’t like was on that night. Was he looking out the glass doors at something down the street? I figured I was just being paranoid. I also concluded that cake and beer was not a good combo, because my stomach was feeling really lousy. I looked down the street to see if we were being watched or if anything else was going on. But everything was hold-your-breath still. From Broadway to West End, the rows of parked cars appeared empty. Even the air around them didn’t seem to breathe. But their windshields wouldn’t stop staring at me. Something was palpably weird.