by Dan Barden
During a brief period between big luxury cars, Terry tried a Porsche Boxster. Something disturbed me about my big-boned, pale-faced sponsor driving recklessly in such a small car.
“I didn’t beat him because he was Mexican,” I said. “I beat him because I was mad. He just happened to be there, resisting arrest. He just happened to be Mexican.”
“Sometimes,” Terry said, “it’s not so helpful to look at your intentions. You gotta look at what happened. Did you, in fact, beat the shit out of a Mexican-American citizen of this country?”
“I did, but—”
“There’s no ‘but,’ ” Terry said. “A big part of this deal is getting used to the idea that there’s no ‘but.’ That’s what you did. Therefore, that’s who you are. You’re a guy who beat a Mexican nearly to death. Can you hang out with that for a while? It’s like a can of tomatoes on a shelf. You just want to notice that it’s there. There might be some corn next to it. What you’re going to do is write down that there were some tomatoes, and then you’re going to write down that there was some corn. Or maybe you’re going to write down that you don’t have any more corn. We’re not going to judge any of this shit right now. We’re just going to call it by name. We’ll sort the rest of it out later. You get that?”
“No,” I said.
“Can you do it anyway?”
“Yes,” I said.
Manny Mendoza got my call at around eleven-thirty that morning. I pretended it was a whim. “I’m about to commit a crime. You want to have lunch and try to talk me out of it?”
“Why don’t you stay down south with the crazy white people?” Manny said. “Maybe they’ll let you found a cult or something.”
“Been there, done that. But hey, I’m learning Spanish. My crew is teaching me lots of filthy words.”
“Charming.”
Neither Manny nor I should have become cops. Manny because he should have become a professor or a priest. Me because I have an appetite for self-destruction and violence that no cop should ever have.
I’d been telling myself all week that I wasn’t headed north—in the direction of both my past and Terry’s death—but after this morning’s events, the gravity of Santa Ana caught me. My sister hadn’t been this pissed off with me in eight years. MP had never been this pissed off with me—which made me think about how my marriage ended, which made me think about getting kicked off the force, which made me think about Santa Ana: the scene of my crimes.
A.A. newcomers are often warned to stay away from “people, places, and things” that remind them of their drinking. In the hierarchy of good advice, that’s right up there with the rhythm method and using the Hells Angels for concert security. Some days breathing reminded me of my drinking.
Manny and I met at Knowlwood burgers near the Santa Ana-Tustin border. I paid for the big baskets of cheeseburgers and fries because I still owed him. I would owe him forever.
“You still making lots of money?” Manny asked.
“Shitloads.”
“How long has it been since we talked?”
“Three weeks,” I said. “I called you about Terry.”
“I mean talked,” Manny said.
“Five months, maybe. Let’s say six. That bother you?”
Manny took hold of his burger but didn’t lift it to his mouth. He tried on his scary look, the kind that he had perfected playing football for Mater Dei in the early eighties. His hair had been buzzed back to nothing, and he was sporting a goatee that gave his broad face a definition that I liked. He probably weighed about 230, most of it in his chest.
“You been laid since the last time we talked?” I asked.
Manny shrugged and took a bite from his cheeseburger. He finished chewing before he said, “Why do you speak to me like that?”
“It’s another disease.”
“Cure it.”
“I bet you won’t even cash your first pension check before you sign up for the seminary.”
Manny laughed. He wiped the cheeseburger grease from his goatee. “That’s not what I want. Too intellectually constrained. I’d only do that if they gave me a fellowship to the Vatican. Let me play with the big boys for a while.”
“You could do that.”
“With a degree in criminal justice from Long Beach State? Not many cardinals with that résumé.”
“Hey,” I said, “maybe they’ll pay me lots of money to design homes in Laguna Beach? Maybe I’ll live with a woman who doesn’t hate me? No, you’re right. Those things will never happen.”
“You have a point.” Manny set down his burger and commenced on the excellent fries. “That’s an entire theology right there.”
Manny didn’t have a high opinion of A.A.; he respected it because he loved me. Still, he had to imagine it was for weaklings. Worse than that, he had to imagine it was for people who didn’t really want to know God. Manny had walked away from the barrio without so much as trying a drug. I’d never seen him with a drink in his hand, either. As for God—that big idea that A.A.s thought they knew so damn much about—Manny barely understood how He could be packaged by a monolith like the Catholic Church, so he didn’t understand at all how a group of people who drank too much coffee and talked mostly about themselves could hope to understand Him at all.
He knew what Terry meant to me, though. And, of course, he already knew why I was here. “I was wondering when you’d ask,” he said.
I’ve never liked motels because I’ve never known much good to happen in them. Following Manny up the concrete staircase facing the parking lot, I thought about all the times the two of us had walked up similarly ugly staircases, wondering if we were about to get shot or shoot someone, wondering what the hell awful thing could be going on behind that row of doors. This time I had at least some idea what awful thing had happened.
“So why did it take you three weeks?” Manny asked. “I expected you to be over here the day after the funeral.”
“It’s a good question,” I said. “It deserves a good answer.”
“You haven’t been a cop in a long time.” Manny stopped before the door. “I put myself at risk when I let you pretend you are.”
“I thought once we were cops, we were always cops. Did I remember that wrong?”
“You know what I mean,” Manny said. “And let’s hope you remembered that wrong.”
“Listen,” I said, “if SAPD says it was a pure and simple overdose, who am I to argue? I spent every day of the past three weeks telling myself that it wasn’t my business. My business was to remember my friend the way he was. We had a memorial, right? Do we really need an investigation, too? That was my thinking, anyway.”
“That’s the way I see it.” Manny made no move toward the door. “I looked into it because I figured you wanted me to. I didn’t see anything but—”
“—a junkie who ODed?” I said. “I gotta run out the string, Manny. I’m sorry, but I want to know everything.”
“I’ll help you until I can’t help you anymore.” Manny had borrowed a key from the manager. He unlocked the door and led me in.
It was exactly the kind of room where you don’t want your friends to die. It smelled awful, and there was never going to be any good way to air it out. The carpet was stained and ground nearly to dust except for a man-sized section that had been cut down through the flooring. Bright plywood told me exactly where Terry had died, his body leaking toward the ground floor.
The law had forced the motel to dispose of all human waste, but apparently, it hadn’t forced them to replace the carpet.
I walked in first, and Manny followed me. Neither of us spoke for a long time. There was a queen-size bed on one end of the room, a round dinette on the other, a TV on a cabinet, a short hallway to the bathroom, a closet, lamps, an unwholesomely bright bedspread, no dents in the drywall that I could see. The stains on the floor were disgusting but not out of the ordinary. They probably had nothing to do with Terry’s last night.
“Report for overdose,”
Manny started in. “No response, dead for about two days, based on lividity. I tried to get you the paperwork, but I couldn’t. I read it all very carefully, though.”
“Tox report?”
“Heroin and methamphetamine,” he said. “Speedballs. Nothing unusual. Acute intoxication of heroin.”
I took a moment to process that word: “intoxication.” We were talking like cops, but that was the extent of my calm. “Was there alcohol in the room?”
Manny shook his head. “The rig was in his arm. Did he have some kind of tattoo?”
I tapped my left forearm. “The Chinese characters for prosperity to cover up some vein damage from the old days.”
“That’s where he shot up,” Manny said. “Into the tattoo. He was right-handed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Check-in?”
“He paid cash,” Manny said. “The clerk remembers him. Again, nothing unusual. He checked in under his own name. Clerk didn’t see anyone else.”
“No trauma on the body?” I asked. “Bruising? Petechial hemorrhaging? Evidence of asphyxiation?”
“No,” Manny said. “None of that.”
“Did he fall when he died?”
“Without any bruises,” Manny said, “I’d guess that he slid when he died.”
Taking it all in, I recognized that this was mostly what I’d been avoiding: an accurate picture of his death. Drugs didn’t just kill you; they made you look like an idiot.
“They must have found the Mercedes about ten minutes before it was stripped?” I asked.
Manny stroked his goatee and then returned his hands to his hips. “This is a better neighborhood than it used to be. The car was there for two days without a scratch on it.”
“Who noticed the car? The manager?”
“You think someone here called in the car?” Manny frowned. “You think these people have time for that? You’ve been in Laguna too long.”
“How’d they find him, then? All we were told was that it took two days.”
“Someone called 911 a couple days late. Didn’t do pendejo much good, but it probably saved the fucking Mercedes.”
Off my look, Manny backed down a little. He loved me, but he wasn’t going to waste his heart on some asshole attorney who couldn’t even shoot dope in his own town.
It was significant information he’d given me: it’s one thing to call 911 when someone is in trouble; it’s another thing to call 911 two days late. That detail probably told a story about more than one person, maybe even a community of people. Someone certainly had time to think about it, to decide how much he wanted to be involved. That detail stood for a lot of information about Terry’s death that I really fucking wanted to know.
“Maybe someone feeling guilty way after the fact?” Manny said.
“Maybe,” I said. I made myself look at the plywood where Terry had died.
“Or maybe the person who made the call,” Manny said, “wasn’t the one who was actually here when it happened.”
“Whoever it was,” I said, “I need to find the guy.”
“Gal,” Manny said. “Probably Mexican. She spoke Spanish for the first part of the tape.”
I turned away from the bright plywood. “I want them to put some new carpet in here. I’m not going to be able to sleep thinking about that cutout. You think we can lean on the manager?”
“We can pretend we’re cops,” Manny said. “It’s probably some code violation, anyway.”
I had a box of Arturo Fuentes for Manny when I said goodbye. And a birthday gift for him that I’d put behind my truck seat two months ago and forgotten to send: a first edition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, which MP had suggested. Manny nearly danced a Mexican jig in the parking lot. What kind of cop gets excited about Jesuit anthropologists? Manny was a good guy, though. I needed his friendship more than he needed mine. If he’d known how much I was hurting—how much I wanted to crush my heart in my fist—he wouldn’t have let me drive home alone.
On the surface, Terry’s death wasn’t so extraordinary. But it bothered me that the circumstances of his death weren’t anything special to Manny and weren’t supposed to seem special to me. Terry was a junkie, and this was how junkies died. Failing to hook Claire Monaco back into his drama, he’d probably found another woman to spend his last night on earth with him, and apparently she spoke Spanish. I wasn’t sure what that meant for Claire’s “electrician named like a dog” yet.
According to Manny, the 911 had come from a pay phone on Flower Street near the Civic Center. I assumed the caller was a prostitute. Hookers and heroin overdoses went together like, well, hookers and heroin overdoses. I drew a grid between the motel and the pay phone and slowed my truck to talk with every loitering woman I passed, asking about the silver Mercedes. After promising I wasn’t a cop, I showed a picture of Terry from the program for his memorial. I folded back the part that talked about his fifteen years of service to A.A.
On the street behind Saddleback Inn, I caught up with a Latin American woman wearing Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and a backpack ornamented with tiny stuffed animals. Her location gave me a shudder—I had spent prom night at Saddleback Inn, and now it was a crackhole with some amazingly articulate ornamental iron and a swimming pool plugged with concrete. I was just about to head home—no, she didn’t recognize him, no, she didn’t remember his silver Mercedes—when she bent closer into my passenger window. She smiled. “Where’d you go?”
“Pardon me?” I had the awful feeling that I knew her. That’s one of the great things about blackout drinking: you never know what new story you’ll hear about yourself. You thought you weren’t the kind of cop who slept with hookers, but maybe you just didn’t remember.
“You’re the cop who fucked up Balthazar.”
I was perversely relieved that she knew me by bad reputation only.
“Where you been? You didn’t go to jail, that’s for fucking sure. You with the sheriffs now?”
“I had to find a new way to make money,” I said. “They wouldn’t let me be a cop anymore.”
“That’s good,” she said. She slapped the side of my shiny black truck and walked quickly away. I turned my head to see the SAPD cruiser that had abruptly ended our conversation. He flashed his lights and goosed his siren. In a minute, I’d be looking at the badge of a twenty-five-year-old who wouldn’t know nearly as much about me as the hooker had. Resting my hands on the top of the steering wheel, I waited for permission to show him my retirement badge.
EVEN IN MY WORST DAYS, I’d always had one good thing in my life. I had something that Wade didn’t have, that Betsy and Jeep didn’t have. Something that Terry had wanted so badly that he’d tried to take it from Claire Monaco.
I had a child.
She lived in Anaheim Hills with her mother. She was the reason I never ate my gun. The reason I wasn’t in jail. Ultimately, she was probably the reason I wasn’t drinking. It was hard to talk that way in A.A.—the cranky old-timers would tell you that it wasn’t enough, that alcoholism was stronger than the bonds of family, that the vision of your adored tomboy daughter wasn’t enough to keep you on the wagon. They were right, of course. But they were also wrong.
I called her Crash, but almost no one else did. Her real name was Alison, after that Elvis Costello song. My ex-wife, Jean Trask, when she used to like me, would call her Crash sometimes, too. When she was a little girl, Crash loved arranging Matchbox cars into vast, noisy conflicts: car chases, multicar pileups, that kind of thing. Her desire to stage vivid confrontations hung on in our shared love of fireworks. “Fireworks” is a nice way to put it: “explosives” would be more accurate. On our favorite annual road trip to Nevada, we bought a truckload and then set them off all at once in the desert.
I used to pray that she didn’t become a cop. I needed to remember to pray for that again.
She’d been holding up pretty well despite the fact that her parents had been fighting over her all over again for about a year. I’d woken up
one morning near my seventh A.A. anniversary realizing that it wasn’t okay with me that I had no legal connection to my own daughter. I had been in the middle of a divorce when the DA was deciding whether or not to charge me with attempted murder and it was the bad end of my drinking. So it had made some kind of sense to give up custody. But I wasn’t that man anymore. The trouble was that I couldn’t convince my ex-wife. Now we were about a month away from the mother of all court hearings. My sister, Betsy, had helped me assemble a dossier testifying to my new standing as a solid citizen—statements from pretty much everyone I knew as well as magazine articles about my design work and every financial statement I’d ever filed. It was an impressive display that my sister was confident would do the trick if the judge was reasonable at all.
At the end of Jeffrey Road was a fire trail that ran through private land high enough so that on a good day, you could see the Channel Islands. Sometimes there was an old security guard who tried to run you off, but that afternoon we were lucky. I hadn’t originally planned to take my lunchtime trip to Santa Ana, so I hadn’t envisioned this bike ride as an antidote to Santa Ana, but it was working well. By the time I’d pulled the bikes from the truck, it seemed like Crash was already beating my ass up the hill. The switchbacks that reached up for the ridge were as lush as anything in Orange County: scrub, cactus, and mustard so vivid that it seemed to dim the rest of the vegetation. The snow that stuck to Saddleback Mountain looked close enough to touch.
We didn’t talk for the first mile or so because we were both pretending it was easy for me to keep up with her. When we reached a plateau, Crash broke the silence. “You have something for me this weekend?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
“That big?”
“That loud. But if you tell any of your pyro friends, I’m going to jail.”
If the state of California had just started granting learner’s permits at thirteen, Crash would have smiled a little wider. I experienced a nagging thought that, God help me, I’d had every day since she was born. This time, I said it out loud. “Do you think I’m a bad father?”