“Excuse me, officer?”
My voice is small, respectful, modulated.
The cop who is driving glances in his rearview mirror, seemingly surprised to see me there.
“Yeah?”
“I think there has been some mistake.”
“Uh huh.”
“I have never assaulted anyone in my life.”
He goes back to sports, now onto golf. He presents an interesting thesis about professional golf having lost its soul, with a series of identically stenciled players and no one who misbehaves, which in his view, is the point of watching sports. I consider countering with a philosophical view that golf is not really a sport, but more of a craft, and that when observing a craft well executed, personalities become less important. But the little thought still nags at me.
“Officer?”
He casts an irritated eye into his rearview mirror.
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t assault people because they tend to hit back. I’m telling the truth here, officer.”
“Shut the fuck up or else I will pull into an alleyway and beat you with a rubber hose.”
I consider this for a while and whether this sort of thing still goes on in our fair country. I decide that it does not and that he is just kidding me.
“Officer …”
His partner swivels around in one smooth motion and brings the flat of his hand down on the top of my head, somewhat like swatting a fly. It makes a very loud noise and hurts like a motherfucker. The loud noise is more alarming than the pain. It sounds somewhat like a cymbal.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”
I make a mental note to discuss Iranian law enforcement with Farzad next time I see him, to interrogate him as to whether any similarities exist between our two countries, given my fresh new understanding of the subject. It would go a long way to support the liberal cliché that our similarities are more important than our differences.
We reach the station. I am led from the car, and my handcuffs are removed, to be replaced by a meaty hand gripping my forearm. My pockets are emptied, my belt is removed (I find out later this is to prevent a suicide attempt), and various paperwork is filled in. As I am being led to lockup by the cop who whacked my head, I suddenly, in a moment of crystal clear stupidity, twist out of my handler’s grip and swing my open hand down upon his head, figuring misguidedly that payback will be understood and accepted. Not only do I miss by a mile, but the cop, being an old hand in placating violent arrestees, proceeds to plant a practiced fist into my solar plexus. I drop to the corridor floor, gasping.
“I thought you said you never assaulted anyone?” He says this while looming over me as I try to catch my breath.
I am tossed into a holding cell. As the pain of the punch subsides and my breath returns, I look around. There are about fifteen people with me in a small, windowless room. There are no chairs, everyone is sort of slumped in degrees of unhappiness and agitation on the floor. Most people are silent, looking at the floor. A few eye me malevolently. I am the oldest person in there. There is one conversation in process, between two youngsters dressed in gang threads, low pants, hoodies, tattoo identifiers of some sort on ears, cheeks, necks, back of hands.
“I love her man, but I had to cut her. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t be dissed like that.”
“Yeah.”
“I was pretty high when I cut her. Not sure what went down. She was bleeding like a cunt.”
“Yeah.”
“Man’s got to do, you know?”
“Yeah.”
He turns, catches my eye.
“What you looking at, bitch?”
I look down. This is perfect.
“I’ll hurt you, mothafucka.”
I continue looking at my feet, which suddenly look remarkably small, almost girlish. Out of the corner of my eye I see the gangster stand up and start walking toward me. My fight-or-flight or play-dead instinct kicks in, contrasting with the instinct to wail and cry like a little mama’s boy. Two feet appear in the center of my vision, outfitted in clean Nikes.
“Stand up, mothafucka.”
I look up. He is glaring down at me. One of the tattoos appears to be a set of teardrops dripping down from the corner of his left eye. I seem to remember that this signifies something very, very bad. Like a predilection to stomp forty-year-old software engineers to death. I am briefly consoled by the thought that death by stomping is slightly preferable to death by gang rape.
“I think I’ll stay here if it’s all the same to you.”
He sets his foot on my shoulder and pushes hard. I fall back from a sitting position to a pathetic, sniveling rat position.
“You don’t stand up I am gonna take your eyes.”
I search his face for signs of irony or perhaps even the beginning of a humorous anecdote. There are none. This whole eye thing opens up a whole new vista, so to speak. The vista is rather dark and featureless given that I am soon to be blind. I consider this for a second. I would still be able to play sax, this is good. And there are all sorts of technologies to enable the blind to be excellent software engineers. This is good. On the minus side, I will never see Isobel, Innocent, Grace, or indeed anyone else again. I will never be able to drive again. I will walk into walls and fall down stairs. If there is a piece of schmutz on my face, I will not see it in the mirror. No, having my eyes plucked out by a Central American gangster does not seem to have many advantages. I stand. Pretend to look tough, hoping he will ignore the fact that there is no blood in my face, and that there may or may not be a small wet stain beginning to spread on my trousers.
Another shape intrudes at the periphery of my vision. It is very large. It is another gangster—although I am not up on gangster culture, so perhaps it is just another mean-looking young man. He is black and pissed off and his neck is as thick as my head. I am about to get stomped to death by the rainbow-colored team of the historically marginalized. Perhaps there is some greater social retribution served by this and I will go down as a martyr to racial harmony.
The big black guy talks.
“Back off, hombre.” He is not talking to me.
“What the fuck …” the Latino gangster equivocates. He looks back at his buddy, who is studiously examining his fingernails.
“Back off now. I’ve had a bad night and I don’t feel like this shit.”
“Look, man, this is not your stuff, you know what I mean?”
“BACK THE FUCK OFF!” His voice is majestic. James Earl Jones. I wonder if I should invite him to sing with us.
The gangster looks at me, spits on the ground.
“I will catch up with you later.” He slinks back.
I look at the black guy, but he is already walking away to his spot in the corner. He sits and doesn’t look at me.
A cop arrives and unlocks the gate.
“Meyer?”
I stand up on unsteady legs. I look at my lord and savior as I leave, but he doesn’t look at me. I flick gangster man the bird, a foolish move, I am sure. His eyes bug out satisfyingly.
Mendel and Innocent are waiting for me in the front of the station.
“Mendel, my blood and tribe. Thanks for coming.”
“Don’t even talk to me, you piece of shit. My wife told me not to help you. You’re lucky I’m here.”
“Mendel, about the bar mitzvah …”
“Don’t want to talk about it. Have you lost your wallet recently?”
“Huh?”
“You lost your wallet recently?”
“Uh … wait, yes, I lost it at the bar where I play a couple of weeks ago. Got turned in at the end of the evening. Nothing was missing. Why?”
Mendel is holding my driver’s license. The one taken by the cop. The one used to interrogate willing databases all over the nation. The photo looks a great deal like me. Except that it is not. It is not my name, not my address. It is, in fact, someone else’
s. Presumably Mr. Assault-with-something-or-other. He does, however, look remarkably like me. Especially if you are a cop at night comparing face to photo by torchlight.
“Fuck.” This is all I can muster.
“You swear too much, Meyer. Someone swapped his driver’s license for yours. Nice crowd at that bar you play at. Now we are going to sue the LAPD for a king’s ransom for wrongful arrest.”
“Where is the cop who brought me in?”
“Outside, as it so happens.”
“I want to talk to him.”
I find him at the entrance.
“Officer. A word please?”
Mendel is not happy. “Meyer, there is nothing to say. We have them by the short and curlies.”
I wave Mendel away. The cop and I walk a few steps so that we are out of earshot.
“It was an honest mistake, sir. The photo looked just like you.”
“My lawyer wants blood.”
He says nothing.
“Specifically, he wants your blood.”
He still says nothing.
“I will walk away from this if you do two things.”
“I followed procedure, sir. The ID photo is easily mistaken for you.”
“Two simple things.”
He says nothing.
“You whacked me on the head. It was pretty sore. Undignified, really. Also unnecessary. And my neck is really hurting. Not sure whether it will heal.”
He says nothing.
“I want you to apologize for that.”
“And the other thing?”
“Huge black guy in lockup. Saved me from an ass-kicking. You know the one I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Drunk and disorderly.”
“Let him go.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Procedure.”
“OK, see you in court.”
He looks around nervously. The last thing he needs is a bulldog lawyer on his ass with a wrongful-arrest incentive.
“Wait here.”
“Hang on. Where is my apology?”
“I apologize.” Voice throttled with aggravation.
He disappears inside. Innocent and Mendel are peering at us from behind the glass window. I motion for them to wait.
About five minutes later the cop appears with my protector.
“OK, officer. Have a good night. Go catch some bad guys.”
The cop shakes his head and disappears inside. I look at the big guy. He is looking bewildered.
“Name is Meyer. Thanks for stepping in.”
He nods, says nothing. His face is inscrutable.
“Come by The Beast Belly on Vine Saturday night. I’ll buy you a drink.”
He says nothing. Then he just walks away into the night.
I am feeling good for the first time in a while.
CHAPTER 34
I PHONE JIM, the HR director, the next morning.
“Jim, I’ve got some family stuff going on. I need a few more days.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Bad stuff, trust me.”
“You know that you are out of leave days and personal days and sick days?”
“So?”
“We have policies, Meyer.”
“Jim, fuck the policies.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Innocent and I go to see Grace. No change. Doctors inscrutable. We sit in the room, silently, for an hour staring at what is, for all intents and purposes, a non-sentient mass of tissue and bone. I leave Innocent and head down to Kaiser to see Isobel. She is still spiking. The doctors don’t seem to have a clue, mumble obfuscations. Isobel looks terrible, feeble and tiny as though some regression has taken place, from teenager to scared little girl.
I sit with her for a while, holding her hand. I try not to cry. I try not to punch walls. I try not to think why me? I try, and fail, not to think why her? She sleeps for most of it.
As I get ready to leave she opens her eyes.
“Daddy, what’s wrong with me?”
“Some bug or other, honey. We just have to wait it out.”
“Am I going to be OK?”
“Of course, honey.” But this is just dissimulation, verbal salves to kid her and me.
My ability to process the past few days has disappeared completely, such is the scale of my undoing. I suppose there comes a point after repeated calamity and random acts of shadowed fate when one simply become unmoored, adrift in an unknown sea waiting for the next storm.
Farzad is nonplussed.
“Job.”
We are having a drink later that afternoon at the Formosa Cafe, a West Hollywood landmark on Santa Monica Boulevard. It is a bar and restaurant dating back to the Cambrian period of the great days of film, all dark wood and burgundy red, carrying the ancient fragrances of too many whiskeys and cigars and vaulting ambition, cozy too-small booths and tables and signed photos of greatly or barely remembered stars adorning the walls. The place and its history are fabulously and unapologetically authentic. The drinkers, by and large, are not—most of them are utterly unimpressed by the brightly lit characters in the faded photos and the short melancholy walks of fame foretold by their anxious smiles.
The venue is Farzad’s choice. He thinks he might be mistaken for Francis Ford Coppola, who once had a film studio nearby and to whom he bears utterly no resemblance other than a fecund beard. He also mentions the additional sweetener of the occasional passing hooker outside, whom he likes to rate for gender, this neighborhood being a smorgasbord of sexual oddities. It is also a place where one can, without irony, order a Singapore Sling from a remarkably hair-gelled and sculpted bartender who likely does not know that Singapore is a place.
“Huh?”
“Job, Meyer, Job. Think.”
“Mmm. No fucking idea what you’re talking about.”
“Did you not ever read the Bible?”
“Not more than absolutely required by my family rituals, no.”
“You are a deeply ignorant man, Meyer.”
“More to the point, why have you read the Bible? I thought your people were more Qur’an sort of people.”
“Ah, Meyer, Meyer, Meyer. Anyone with any interest in the world around him reads all of it: Qur’an, Old Testament, New Testament, Talmud, Kabbalah, Bhagavad Gita, Tripitaka, Tao Te Ching, Avesta, Evangelion. It is these books that form the basis for all good. And evil. Please do not tell me you have not read these books.”
“No. Sorry.”
“Why am I not surprised? You are barely literate, my friend. It is a wonder you can even find employment.”
“So what about this job?”
“The Book of Job, you brainless Semite.”
“Ah. The Book of Job. What about it?”
“One of the great tracts of literature in the Old Testament. You are a modern-day Job.”
“How so?”
“God is smiting you.”
“Great. Why?”
“Testing your loyalty.”
“What did he do to the real Job, of Old Testament fame?”
“Oh, nothing much. Job was a righteous man. So God sort of had a bet with Satan that suffering would not change Job. So he killed his ten children, had his livestock stolen or burned to death, conjured away all his wealth, and gave him terrible boils. That sort of thing.”
“All this for a fucking bet?”
“Yup. You Hebrews and your deity have a pretty weird legacy.”
“And did he remain loyal? Job, I mean.”
“Yup. As a reward, God gave Job a new family and restored his wealth.”
“Great. I’m sure that made up for the loss of his firstborn children.”
“It did. He rationalized it. God giveth and taketh away and all that. It addresses the question of why good people suffer.”
“Why do good people suffer?”
“How the hell should I know? It is your holy book, not mine.”
“Yes, you have it.”
“All this shit that’s happening to me is a smite? A splatter of smites? A storm of smites? A swarm of smites? A smittering?”
“Indeed.”
“Firstly, a Bible parable doesn’t interest me because it was written when people believed that the earth was flat, so what the fuck did they know? Secondly, I was never a really righteous person. I was kind of middling in the righteous stakes, perhaps even in the lower fiftieth percentile. Thirdly, I am a little dismissive of what and who is testing me for what purpose, since I am not much of a God believer in the first place.”
“You are an embarrassingly literal person, Jew. I feel like I am speaking to a child. Try, just this once, to think laterally. The Job story is interpretive. It has resonance for your life. Adapt it. Mold it. Learn some lessons from it.”
“I want another Singapore Sling, how about—”
“Shut up, I’m not finished. The last time we talked about your little problem I told you to toughen up. This was, I see now, a mistake, because you and toughness are oxymoronic, as are you and the concept of a decent-sized penis. You are, as you endlessly boast, a student of statistics. You have then, of course, studied not only classical statistical theory, but also the interesting extrapolations of Nicholas Taleb, of Black Swan fame, and who is, I think, vaguely related to my tribe. In any event, you are simply experiencing a set of circumstances somewhere near the tail end of the Bell Curve, as we all must, in all of our endeavor. The title of this particular Bell Curve is called ‘Smiting Meyer.’ Are you getting warmer now?”
“Well, I—”
“Shut up, I’m not finished. Your god is science and the deterministic unrolling of a disinterested universe marching to the beat of an immutable set of laws. This universe has taken a bet with you, my friend, although you do not realize it. And that bet is that you will whine tremulously why me, which will be a terrible surrender to the forces of superstition, and will taint you forever. If you are truly to remain loyal to yourself, you must conclude Black Swan and rejoice in the supremacy of science and logic, whose mandate will be certain to return you to the middle of the ‘Smiting Meyer’ Bell Curve soon.”
Imperfect Solo Page 16