by Dan Barden
Isanov laughed again. “Troy told me about him, too.”
Troy beamed. If we’d been in my shop, I would have asked him to make coffee. Given him something to do.
Instead, I said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Mr. Isanov? Has Troy told you about Jean Claude’s? It’s not Seattle, but it’s an institution.”
“That’d be great, Randy.” He smiled his big smile. When it became clear that I wasn’t moving on yet, Isanov said, “And then, maybe later, you’ll let me buy you a meal. I’m staying at the Ritz-Carlton. We can eat there and then bring some cigars to the beach. Troy says you like cigars?”
Looking into his eyes, I said, “How about I catch up with you in a half hour?”
Maybe I imagined that the same pleasant denial which allowed the two of them to ignore the gun would extend to excusing me for a few minutes while I shot John Sewell. That I was completely insane at the moment was indisputable.
Isanov held my arm and gently drew me away from the fireplace, far enough so he wouldn’t be heard, but I never took my eyes off Sewell.
“Can I be blunt with you, Randy?” he asked.
“Blunt is good,” I said.
“Troy wants you to calm the fuck down,” Isanov said, “and he brought me here to help you accomplish that.”
“No disrespect, Mr. Isanov, but my being calm is none of your business.”
“Bullshit, there’s no disrespect. You use that gun, you disrespect everything you’ve achieved with my son.”
Looking over at Troy, I had to give it to his father: this wasn’t my finest day as a sponsor.
“You’re a moron and my son is moron,” Isanov continued. “But that’s God’s blessing on you. Maybe you’re an artist, like Troy says. But don’t make a mistake, Randy. The world is full of people like me, who live in the hell of not being morons. Please give me that gun.”
I gave him the gun. The truth will set you free, but first it will really piss you off.
“Now,” he said, “let’s talk about this ugly business you’re involved in. First let me tell you that if you get my son mixed up in something like this again, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”
“Whatever I do, Troy’s going to make this life hard for you. It’s his special skill. I know you think you’re up for it, but trust me, you’re not up for it.”
“Do you understand?” Isanov repeated.
“Yes, I understand,” I said. “Do you understand?”
“Better than you know,” Isanov said. “Please take my son outside so I can fix this for you.”
Troy and I walked around the side of the building, which was high above PCH. The ocean was blue like the blue on a map and oddly static—like if you threw yourself against it, you would bounce right off.
“What’s he doing in there right now?” I asked.
“His thing. Which is good for you, because I don’t think he’s going to be doing his thing too much longer. We had a long talk today.”
“Did I just put a judge in Anthony Isanov’s back pocket?”
Troy laughed. “You really want me to answer that? All you need to know is that it’s out of your hands now.”
“I would be happily on my way to prison,” I said, “if you hadn’t forced me to do your goddamn fifth step.”
“That’s a beautiful thought. Me, I wouldn’t have to make something out of my life.”
Troy’s father joined us on that pretty hill above PCH. “Judge Sewell won’t bother you anymore.”
“Thanks.”
“Can you give Troy a ride to my hotel?” Isanov said. “I’ve got a few details to iron out before we have dinner.”
I looked around the building to see if Sewell was still there, but his car was gone. Isanov got back into his rented Navigator, and he drove away, too.
AT SOME POINT NEAR THE END of my career as a Santa Ana police officer, I started to think that ironwork on doors and windows was beautiful, in the way that fire escapes in New York City are beautiful. The bars on Balthazar Bustamante’s house were better than most: wild teardrops that looked like paisley. Sitting in my truck across the street, I wondered if I should have talked to Manny first so he could dissuade me. Maybe a quick café con leche at the supermercado to think it through. Now that I was there, though, my truck didn’t seem to want to move, so I continued to admire the ironwork.
I had been on my way to Fullerton for Paloma’s quinceañera after her Mass at St. Joseph’s when my truck seemed to drive itself, like the arrow on some huge Ouija board, toward a small fortified home near Chapman Avenue.
The last known address for the guy who cost me my job and kicked my ass into A.A.
It had been four weeks since I took Troy’s fifth step, two weeks since Troy’s father had treated us to the best meal with cigars after that I’d ever experienced. And now I sat there watching a little old man I didn’t recognize sitting in a lawn chair on the concrete porch. When I turned off my engine, he looked at me for a minute, then leisurely stepped inside. A minute later, a younger man came outside whom I did recognize. Eight years ago, Balthazar Bustamante had been a white-T-shirt-bandanna-under-the-baseball-cap scumbag. Today he was wearing a vintage polo shirt and green cargo shorts, and his hair was clippered at the shortest setting to camouflage his baldness. He rubbed the soul patch on his chin as he crossed the well-kept lawn. I couldn’t remember Bustamante’s street name. It was his full legal name that had been typed across my entire life.
“¿Qué onda?” I got out of my truck. “¿Cómo estás?”
“Bien,” Bustamante said. “Pretty fuckin’ bien.”
Who knows what I expected, but this wasn’t it. Bustamante smiled at me. “Now you speak Spanish?” he said.
“My new job requires it,” I said. “Could have used it on my old job, too, I guess.”
“I heard about your new job,” Bustamante said. “You should give me a percentage. If it weren’t for me, you’d still be a cop.”
“This is true.”
“Did you come here to apologize for almost killing me? For giving me headaches every day for two years? For costing my dad a shitload of money that he still doesn’t have?”
“Not exactly an apology.”
“Is this some kind of reality-TV show where the lowlife cracker gringo asshole finds redemption and understanding by confronting his racist past?”
“No,” I said. “Not that, either.”
Bustamante laughed. “I’m taking a course at Cal State Fullerton: postmodern popular culture. I’m thinking there’s a video camera in that van over there where some producer coached you to apologize but then get pissed off and start a fight because that’s good television.”
“You’re in college?”
“Don’t congratulate yourself,” Bustamante said. “Maybe I’m trading crack for English papers and running volleyball players as whores.”
“How much crack can you get for an essay these days?”
“You don’t know shit about me.” He pointed at my face. “You could live in my house and eat my food and suck my dick for ten years before you’d know less than shit.”
He held my eyes for no longer than ten seconds, but it was the same bump in testosterone that almost killed us both eight years ago. This time I would have let him hit me. Eventually, Bustamante stared down at his feet. I followed his eyes, and maybe we were wondering the same thing: was he really wearing Birkenstocks?
“Why you here? You find fucking Jesus or something?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s more like—”
“Because I did,” Bustamante said. “My old man finally got me to go to church when I was still in the cast. The Holy Spirit hit me so goddamn hard, I thought I was having a stroke.”
Laughing, I looked back toward his house, where his father was standing in the doorway. “Nice shoes. Jesus tell you to become a beatnik?”
“With a name like Balthazar, you gotta feature yourself. The chicks at Fullerton dig it.” Balthazar kicked at the grass. �
�Soon as my dad came in and said you were at the door, I thought, Shit, that cracker motherfucker. I kept thinking I was going to find you, explain what happened. I haven’t sucked a pipe or had a drink since God whacked me over the head.”
“Good for you, man. That’s great. I’m sober, too.”
Miracles, the old-timers say, are God’s way of staying anonymous. It was hard not to be impressed. But I would never turn this into an inspiring A.A. story. We still hated each other. If anything, it had become a pleasant hatred.
“What do you guys call this thing you’re doing so poorly?” Balthazar said.
“You guys?”
“You’re in A.A., right? Just because I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid doesn’t mean I can’t recognize cultlike behavior.”
Manny would love this guy.
“We call it making amends,” I said. I stood there for a minute.
“I’m listening,” Balthazar said.
“Okay,” I said. “I take responsibility for the whole deal. I was a homicidal cop, and you were an innocent victim of my rage. You can record that and take it to the grand jury.”
“That’s easy to say, Officer Chalmers, now that I’ve signed the settlement and I can no longer sue your ass.”
“Would it have been easy for you to say?”
“Let’s find out.” Balthazar smiled. “I was a drug-addicted drug dealer bringing sickness and violence to my community. And you can’t record this because I won’t hurt my father again.” That also had the ring of truth. I could see on Balthazar’s face that he thought so, too. My old enemy laughed and shook my hand. “It’s done. Take it to the bank. I forgive you.”
“Just like that?”
“No,” Balthazar said. I remembered his street name: De Niro. Because of that scene in The Untouchables where the actor, playing Al Capone, kills a man with a bat, Bustamante’s favorite weapon. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Tell me.”
“Come to church with us sometime,” De Niro Bustamante said. “My dad will wet his pants with joy.”
The restaurant Paloma had chosen for her quinceañera was owned by an old character actor who’d had a long career as a movie gangster. The hallway to the banquet room was thick with pictures of the owner standing next to the guy who was standing next to the guy who was standing next to Marlon Brando. Or whoever. The restaurant itself was dizzying. The ceiling of the main dining room, which was twenty-five feet high, was covered with toys and circus memorabilia. They had probably been assembled over the years—the dust said decades—with no thought for any plan. It was an inexpensive place to eat Italian food, though, and the celebratory haphazardness of the decor encouraged a good time. The waitpeople wore white tuxedo shirts and smiled in a way that didn’t seem forced.
I turned from admiring the pictures on the wall to see my own heart looking back at me. Crash was wearing a white blouse, a brown skirt, and cowboy boots that her aunt had bought her. The boots reminded me that I owed my sister my life, not only for getting law enforcement off my back but for encouraging Crash to speak with me again.
“I guess your mom didn’t have time to say hello,” I said.
Crash checked me out for a moment like she wasn’t sure if she should stay. I took it like a man, mostly, and then I tried to meditate for the second time in my life, the way that MP had tried to teach me: I counted my breath, in and then out, in and then out. I got to a miraculous seven before Crash said, “I need to know something, Dad. Did you have anything to do with John going away?”
I took another deep breath. “More or less.”
“What does that mean?” she said. “Did you do something? What did you do?”
“John made his own problems. Maybe I increased them. It’s one thing I’m not going to apologize for. He would have hurt you and your mother eventually.”
“More than you’ve already hurt us?” Crash said.
“I deserve that,” I said. “And more. But I think you also know there’s no force in the universe that could ever make me go away.”
Crash smiled, so I put my arm around her and we entered the banquet room, which was festive with party dresses and paper flowers and a mirror ball hanging above it all. Paloma wore a tiara. Traditionally, the princess is escorted by several boys her own age—some of them relatives, some of them classmates—who wear faux military uniforms complete with epaulets and scabbards. The boys had begun dueling with their swords outside the Mass at St. Joseph’s and still hadn’t stopped.
“Hey,” I said. “After the party, you want to drive to Vegas, fill the back of the truck with fireworks, and blow up stuff in the desert?”
Crash narrowed her eyes. “I’m wearing a skirt, Dad.”
“Is there some law that says you can’t cause explosions wearing a skirt?”
She smiled, it seemed to me, with great compassion. As we made our way to the bar to get some Shirley Temples, I turned to face her. “Is it time to stop calling you Crash?”
“Alison is a nice name, too.”
I danced three times with Cathy, twice with my daughter, but only once with Paloma—the kids with the swords had kept her busy. I’d just finished some kind of Mexican hokeypokey, and Alison and I were watching little Danny practice his smiles, a skill she assured me he’d mastered only in the last hour.
Paloma had joined us, and she argued that Danny had been smiling before Alison started making faces at him, a point that Alison conceded by putting her arm over Paloma’s shoulder. I was wondering what would result from bringing my daughter to a party where she could become friends with the secret daughter of her almost stepfather when I looked over to see Troy and Emma dancing. That made me wonder how soon before they would be sleeping together. When Troy held out a chair for her after getting her a soft drink and a plate of cookies, I thought, Good for you, buddy. Good for you.
It wasn’t a bad night for me, either. I think that was Emma’s doing, but I didn’t ask. When I found a legitimate break in the action, I asked MP to dance. It was a slow dance, uncharacteristic for this party. I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “Can it be time for you to go on a date with me?” She pulled herself closer and said, “It can be that time not next Saturday but the Saturday after that.”
Even Wade found his way to the party via cell phone. As part of his coursework for his masters in social work—why should Troy be the only one going back to school?—he’d arranged a ride-along with Manny, and he wanted to let me know that he was in the patrol car right now. I invited both of them over for a piece of cake later on.
With all my life clustered around me, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the bartender tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I had another friend who wanted to talk. I found Sean sitting on a bench outside the front door of the restaurant. We’d been going to meetings together almost every night for a couple of weeks. A few nights ago, he’d told me that his boss wanted him to do a couple of late shifts, that he’d start catching a few more meetings during the day. That wasn’t the entire truth. There was a thickness around him like shame. And like being drunk.
“I’m assuming you did something really stupid,” I said.
“Pissing inside my supervisor’s locker?”
“Did anyone see you?”
“Dude, that’s half the fun.”
As we talked, my daughter came through the doorway with Danny in her arms. She helped him wave to me, and both Sean and I waved back.
“Is that Terry’s kid?” Sean asked.
“You can’t tell?”
Alison turned, still waving Danny’s hand as the heavy wooden door closed behind her. For the first time in forever, that squeaking Styrofoam ice chest in my head was quiet. The world was only the world: the coolness of the night, the slatted wooden bench under my ass, the traffic noise from Orangethorpe.
Once I was sure that my new sponsee was on the right side of things, I brought him into the restaurant. As the decor dazzled him, I asked the bartender to make us
both cappuccinos.
Who knew if Sean would ever get sober, but I loved him. The way I loved Terry and Wade and Troy and every other loser I’d known in A.A. Or, as an old-timer named Joey Buttons once told me: Jesus didn’t hang out with the thieves and whores because he wanted to save their souls. He hung out with them because they were more fun.
As Sean devoted himself to a plate of lasagna with a side of tamales, I watched Alison and Paloma charge around the room as though they’d been friends all their lives, navigating the happiness of the party with an intensity that was half modern dance and half street hockey.
When Cathy sat down beside us, she gave Danny to me without so much as a nod. I can’t understand why anyone ever trusts me, but I’m always moved when they do. Danny slept in my arms.
I started talking to Cathy about Terry. I’d never spoken to her this way. Sean looked up from his plate of food but then must have realized that it was just an A.A. story, one that he’d either heard before or would hear again, so he went back to eating. It was, in fact, the Italian food that had reminded me.
When I finished my certificate program at Art Center, it just happened to be the same week as my second A.A. anniversary. Terry and Wade were so proud of me that they decided to throw a party. They got it catered by this Italian restaurant in Newport Beach, and they decorated the courtyard of Terry’s condo with streamers and balloons and signs. They told me that all I had to do was invite anyone I wanted. They repeated that instruction many times: anyone you want. They were preparing “a big shindig”—that’s what Terry called it—and there would be plenty of food to go around.
When the evening came, they were in for a shock. Although I’d met and was friendly with hundreds of people in Laguna Beach A.A., I’d invited only five. The Italian sausages alone would have fed sixty. Wade had printed out from his computer a huge banner that said CONGRATULATIONS RANDY! The few of us milling around underneath it looked pathetic.
Terry must have been pissed. He made sure everyone had enough to eat before he retreated to his living room, where he smoked a cigar and left me to guess how much the whole deal had cost.