People say Lovelle Mixon’s going to hell because he killed four people. Hell must be a helluva place. There’s death on practically everybody’s hands, one way or another. The police chief of Seattle said recently that soldiers follow orders, police officers make decisions, and police officers are not soldiers. Something happened when the police heard that the first two cops had been gunned down that Saturday. That’s when the clusterfuck started. That same police chief said we’re a nation of 300 million guns. When they put on the Kevlar vests, you knew the SWAT teams were about to come in the DMZ. The police stopped being police and turned into soldiers. But who was giving them orders?
The po-po, cabbies, neighbors—they all knew 2755 74th Avenue. Notoriously, a woman was found strangled with her own drapery cord. Police knew it was her ex, but they classified it as suicide. I never heard of suicide by drapery cord. I rode her around a lot. She could buy out a dollar store with a twenty and still have cab fare left over. She didn’t take her own life. Murder, yes. Suicide, no. But the po-po say what’s convenient and let the badasses roam wild.
Here’s a parable: I call it the Parable of the Two Brothers, both dead now. Before Brother #2 died, having been a drug dealer, user, convict, hustler, parolee, he went around in his last days to see his kids, grands, and say goodbye. Even went to his social worker, caught up to her on his old stomping grounds, heard her telling a user, “If you can, stop using between tests and not just the day of the tests.” Brother #2 told her, “Scolding won’t work. Give him something he can’t get out here.” She didn’t know what that could be. Brother #2 said, “You can’t give money, or drugs, or women. Give him praise. That’s what you gave me.”
Brother #1 was dying, same period. Drugs, they shorten your lifespan, don’t matter if you’re a rock star or a hustler. Brother #1 hustled me out of three hundred dollars twenty years ago, so you could say I’m biased. But in his last days—he had AIDS—he kept travelling to Africa, back and forth, back and forth. Word is he had women over there under his ladies’ man spell. I didn’t buy that. It’s just that AIDS is so out of control there that he didn’t face a stigma.
Brother #1 and Brother #2, different paths to the grave, one got more wisdom than the other, but he had done more dirt on the whole. They went the same, six feet under. Which one’s going to the crowded place?
March 27, 2009
Here’s the definition of awesome. Twenty thousand police and citizens converging in Oaktown for the funeral of those four dead cops. They came from all over the country. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And all 815 OPD attended, according to the Chronicle. So who was minding the shop? Fifteen law enforcement agencies from Alameda County, CHP’s, and local police departments. Bagpipes, a twenty-one-gun salute from a military cannon, and of course a couple dozen helicopters buzzing overhead, more than the usual four circling the hood. Ah, man, and the OPD told Dellums, Shut your black mouth and sit your black ass down. They wouldn’t let him speak. If we have to let you be here, then be unheard. Word is that the mayor had mispronounced the officers’ names at a previous memorial. The PBA didn’t want that again.
Yeah, a likely story. Remember lynching, back in the day? Crackers went for the black middle class, the shopkeepers, the folks who were coming up in the world. Envy, pure and simple, it’s human. But what you do with it is the right or the wrong. One week before 9/11, Colin Powell was at an international conference on racism in South Africa. He said the US wasn’t about to apologize for slavery if that apology involved reparations, and the United States delegation got up and walked out, in front of the whole world. What a meathead.
New Year’s Eve, 2010
I dropped my last fare of the day downtown and stopped at the Bank of America near Lake Merritt at two thirty p.m. Later that night the bank showed up on the TV news. It was the scene of the last homicide of the year—at three twenty p.m. That meant I had dodged a bullet by forty minutes. Witnesses said two Latino males and two African American males had a parking lot altercation. The Latino used an ethnic slur, and one of the black guys pulled out a gun and shot him. The two blacks drove off. Bruno, who was from Brazil and delivered pizza, for God’s sake, died on the spot.
May 5, 2013
I drove a white Lovelle Mixon home one night from the Oakland Arena. Rolling Stones concert. You could hear Mick all the way to the BART station. I went to pick up this white kid, twenty-two or twenty-three, high as I don’t know what. Gets in my cab and my dispatcher says, “Take him to Sebastopol”—that’s a four-hundred-dollar ride. His father called in the fare. This kid is high out of his mind, all the way up there, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. But we get about a mile from his house and he sobers up enough to give me clear directions. The kid stumbles out, the father pays me double fare, and then he pulls out two more hundred-dollar bills. And thanks me for my troubles. White, black, same stupid kids, different outcomes.
The guy that’s teaching me dispatching says I’ll never be unemployed, right up to the end of my life, because there’s always a need for good cab dispatchers. I know, though, that dispatchers don’t have to see what cabbies see. Nevertheless, I like security as much as the next guy. I’ve seen enough to last me.
TWO TO TANGO
by Jamie DeWolf
Oakland Hills
Love is a straitjacket you’re waiting for someone else to tighten.
Oakland, 2004: I’m fresh out of the ground zero of a break-up with apologies stitched vertically on my left wrist. I move out of my ex-girlfriend’s house before she gets evicted; just another waiter with a misanthropic streak and cheap tattoos he buys with tips. I’m saving up by sleeping on any couch I can beg for, or any bed I can charm my way into. I’m homeless, living out of my backpack, hopping couches and BART stations. I have an appetite for destruction that wants dessert.
The night I meet her is a slow night at Van Kleef’s on Telegraph, and the saxophone player is six drinks in, slurring blues to the empty street. I’m writing poems on bar napkins but the ink keeps bleeding through with whiskey. I can’t afford a psychiatrist, but Jameson picks up the slack. The future is laid out in front of me like a railroad track I tied myself to. I have no idea what’s gonna fix anything, besides a deposit, two months rent, and anything that will make me forget today.
And in walks my future—Bettie Page in combat boots, damage in a dress. I smell her perfume before I see her, cinnamon mixed with cigarettes. She takes the empty stool next to mine. She doesn’t look like the other girls in the bar, with their thrift-store fashion sense and flower prints to complement the pretty umbrellas in their drinks. This girl has eyes dark as a black hole, lips red as an opening curtain.
She orders a whiskey neat, but a meathead stumbles into her, spilling her drink. She turns with her fists out, but he’s already moved too far past the sucker punch that had his name on it. She meets my eyes straight on and apologizes for the spill. I tell her it’s all right, she asks what I’m writing. I hold up the ink-blurred napkin—it’s my autobiography drenched in whiskey. Art imitates life.
She asks about the scorpion tattoo on my arm. I tell her poison should always be labeled. She’s a Scorpio herself, tells me her name is Syd, short for something she doesn’t want to tell me. She was just in the neighborhood, back home from a year alone in the mountains. She takes kickboxing classes and is working on a photography portfolio. She asks if I want the next round here or in a mansion alone with her. Easy question.
Fifteen minutes later we’re driving up in the Oakland Hills and she pulls up to a house at the top, buzzes open the gate, and I’m walking up the plush staircase past seascape paintings. Daddy’s liquor cabinet has got Scotch an Irishman can’t pronounce and sherry glasses. She pours us a Cognac, takes me to the basement, shows me her portfolio. Every picture is a self-portrait on a timer where she’s standing naked on a box with the words Whore and Slut scrawled across her in lipstick. She says this is how the world sees her, as if the Scarlet Letter was an entire alphabet wri
tten across her flesh.
She holds up the largest print, a photograph of her blindfolded in front of a mirror. She says this is how she sees herself. She says she loves how photographs take weeks to finish, like watching a scar heal.
In the living room, I toast to the ashes of the past. She says, “We can be as loud as you want,” and smashes her glass against the wall. It shatters across the living room, then she grabs my hand, puts it around her throat, and tells me: “You won’t break me. But I want you to try.”
She kisses me like anger is an aphrodisiac. We hit her carpet, our bones crashing into each other like a wet car wreck. After, she blows smoke rings at the ceiling, says, “You can stay here, you know. This house is too big for me and I can’t stand it alone at night.”
I was the right blend of poverty and horny. When you’re drowning, a partner can make you feel like you’re swimming instead.
The next night she cooks me a blood-rare steak, cracks open a bottle of champagne. A week later we’ve drunk half the liquor cabinet. We toss the empty bottles out of the third-story windows into the pool. We live every night like we broke in.
* * *
Every evening starts to get more physical. She shows me how she trains at her gym, swinging fists into my hand in combinations. Then she wants to wrestle and throw me against the wall. Syd rakes nails across my back until it bleeds, scratches her name into my chest until I can still read it the next day. We hit the walls so hard paintings fall. She wants a knife to her throat, she wants me to say things to her I’d never repeat. She wants me to love her like I want to kill her.
Self-destruction is lonely; she’s made it into a duet.
One night we lie there after and her hands trace my rib cage. She traces where she’d cut out my heart and keep it with her. I tell her this is moving a little fast. She says restraint is for hospitals and cops—don’t hold myself back.
I need a breath, a break. I tell her I gotta work double shifts for three days, and I don’t have a cell phone yet so I don’t have to worry about ignoring her calls. My friends haven’t heard from me in weeks. A buddy asks me why I keep picking poison. I tell him it’s because I learned to love the taste. I need to try something else.
I go on a date with a librarian, a quiet girl who wants to discuss Dostoevsky and Dickinson. She paints in watercolors, writes poems about trees, about weeping willows. We go to a café; she wants to kiss over a cup of tea. I see a life of yoga in the mornings, of easy nights reading in bed.
But I tell you, I was still hungry for the girl in the mansion who could make every night feel like my last one on earth. I kiss the librarian goodbye, tell her I have to go. I catch the BART to Oakland and Miss Matte Black is waiting at Van Kleef’s, smoking and smiling as I walk in.
“I knew you weren’t going anywhere but back to me.” She grabs my leg and says, “Just don’t do it again.”
Three rounds later and I’m back at her house, she’s pouring champagne down my chest. It feels like back to high times again until she breaks a wineglass and begs me to cut my name in her chest, brand her, make my words become flesh. She tells me the flesh is weak, but love is permanent. This isn’t love, this is a tango that’s turned into a mosh pit. The deeper we go, the harder it’s going to be to find the surface.
* * *
This time I vanish for a week, go back to waiting tables, and then the hostess tells me I have a new table in my section.
There she is, smiling, with a bandage on her arm. She unwraps it; a scorpion tattoo exactly like mine.
“I had to draw it out from memory but it’s pretty close, isn’t it?” She holds it next to my arm. “See? Now we’re a reflection of each other. You said poison should always be labeled.”
I tell her I’m not going to Oakland tonight. She says, “Don’t worry, I got us a hotel room. There’s a champagne bucket waiting for you.” She puts a bag on the table. “Open it.”
Inside is a pair of handcuffs. She says, “Come commit some crimes with me and when we’re done, you can arrest me.”
What kind of crimes?
She says that’d be premeditation. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before.”
I’m thinking, I haven’t even told you what I’ve done.
If she’s my reflection, then I wonder what I’m afraid to see. I ask her again what kind of crimes, but she says it’ll ruin the surprise.
She’s quiet on the ride there. We pull up outside a café, she turns the car off and points inside. “Now you can stop a crime about to happen.”
I look through the café window—the librarian girl I kissed a week ago is sitting at a table, sipping tea. “What the fuck is this?”
Her eyes flash. “You can stop a beating if you want to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, it’s simple: you could have stopped this girl from a beating if you didn’t kiss her last week. But you did, and now here we are.”
“You watched me? When?”
“It was by a window, you know. You weren’t exactly being sneaky about it.”
“You drove here from Oakland? You were fucking stalking me?”
“I missed you, that’s all, and you didn’t want to see me. And you didn’t see me. But I saw you. And her.” Her fists clench on the steering wheel.
“You’re just gonna walk in there and attack her? In the café? In front of everyone?”
“Unless you stop me. Just tell me you love me and you don’t love her. And you’ll stop a crime.”
I stare at her. “Tell you I love you. And then we’ll leave?”
“And then we’ll leave.”
I tell her I love her. I lie. Her fists come off the steering wheel.
I’m in a game I don’t know the rules of anymore. She drives away from the café, the librarian vanishing in the rearview. We’re back at the hotel, champagne in an ice bucket. She throws the handcuffs on the bed and says, “Good job, officer. Throw the book at me.”
I realize we’re alone in this room. No one knows where I am.
I open the champagne instead, start chugging until it froths down my shirt. Someone could die in here. She gives me that smile again over her shoulder. I feel sick. She’s a spider in skin.
She tells me that anyone can learn to love anyone, it just takes time. Then she tells me my time is running out. I pour the rest of the champagne on the floor and hold the bottle by the neck. I tell her, “I’m walking out of this room, and don’t follow me. Don’t show up at my work again.”
She doesn’t stop smiling but her eyes are blinking at a weird rhythm. Like a TV starting to fritz. “You’ll come back.”
* * *
I don’t see her for a month and I can’t believe I still miss her. I miss the champagne, the pornographic prologue turning into a horror film.
A month later, she walks into my birthday party, says she was just in the neighborhood, didn’t even know it was my birthday. She sits in the back corner while I’m going round for round with my friends.
She moves closer, joining conversations, buying me drinks. After the fifth round her hand slides up my leg and I don’t stop it. It’s closing time, my friends are offering me a couch to crash on, but she whispers in my ear, says a birthday boy should stay in a bed.
No, I’m done with that madness.
She says just for old time’s sake. I tell her no.
“Okay then, I’m sorry. How about a ride to your friend’s house at least?”
I slam back the last of my drink. “All right. It’s a ten-minute ride—but nothing more than that.”
“Nothing more than that.”
As soon as the doors lock to her BMW, I know I’ve made a mistake. But she’s got child locks, and I didn’t think of that. Thirty seconds later she’s driving 45 mph down a 25 mph street and has a slur in her voice I didn’t notice before—maybe I didn’t let her talk long enough, maybe I didn’t ask the right questions.
But then her voice gets real cold and quiet.
&nbs
p; “Anybody can learn to love someone, it only takes time.” She’s not even looking at the road, just at me. I tell her to slow down. We hit a speed bump so hard my head smashes against the ceiling. She’s listing off the reasons why if I knew myself, I would know I was in love with her. I would love to debate this paradox of me not knowing what I should know, but all I hear is the gas revving, horns blaring. I realize I’m going to have to jump out of a moving car. Every action movie I’ve ever seen is replaying in my head, like how the hell to roll once you hit the ground.
She blasts through a traffic light like it just wasn’t red enough.
“Slow down,” I plead.
She’s says, “What, am I taking it too fast for you? You want me to slow down? Tell me you love me!”
A man pushing a shopping cart leaps out of the head-lights. She doesn’t even notice. A three-way intersection is coming up fast ahead of us.
“Tell me you love me!” Syd screams.
“I love you, all right? Stop the car!”
“Love doesn’t stop.”
I watch a stoplight fly past above us. I put my forearms out in front of me.
We smash headlong into a sedan that goes spinning into the crosswalk, glass shattering across the street. There’s the sickening screech of metal grinding, the windshield cracking in pieces, the hood crunching into a twisted mess, then just broken glass twinkling down to the asphalt. I sit heaving for a second, hands on my face, moving my toes in my boots. Everything is spinning. My forearms are wet with the spit that flew out of my mouth on impact.
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