I cut a deal where the DA dropped the trespassing, the b-and-e, and reduced the attempted 187 to assault with bodily injury. He offered two years in the pen, no second strike, so I signed on. Before I got shot off on the silver-bullet transport bus for Quentin, Cyrus came to visit me at the county jail. Our visit was less than a minute long. I didn’t do any of the talking. Cyrus was dressed in an ironed navy pullover parka, the rim of gray hair on his timeworn gray head was greased and combed, and his beige work slacks flared just a bit at the ankles. He was dabbing on his eye and his nose even as he picked up the phone and nodded courteously, solemnly. He was an old man and I’d made him older.
“You are staying strong,” he said, wincing. “We can no longer have the communicating. I was leaving Iran because of men like you. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
8
Here Was Prison
HERE WAS PRISON: Keep your back to the wall, your head up, keep the poisonous mouth shut, remain polite but never weak in gesture, idiosyncrasy, or posture, keep the trinket of hope contained in your pocket, never initiate a conversation with a cop, never say a cop is cool or of some kind of worth or anything close to redemptive or even necessary, never broadcast your crime as if you were the heir to Billy the Kid, never leave a stamped envelope unused, unsold, or untraded, stay with your own race at all times as you have a race indeed and will be given a race if you’re under the politically correct impression that you don’t have a race, don’t play cards, eat, or shower with other races, don’t workout anywhere near other races, don’t don’t especially don’t cut a deal for contraband like weed, heroine, or crystal meth with other races, don’t look into the eye of a member of other races unless you’re in church, in which case you can with a civilian chaplain, keep your issues to yourself, keep your date of release to yourself, keep away from those cats who don’t have a date of release, always clean your plate, always drink your milk, always eat your hard-boiled eggs just like your mother, if you had one, always said, try and find something solid to read for the vacuous torturous twilight hour like the harsh winter novels of the Russian masters or the pure struggle poems of the Harlem Renaissance and then finally take one incident that you’ll find nowhere in the world but the mad slammer and laugh about it the many days you’ll need it like the time a big steroid head named Rambo got knocked the fuck out beneath the pull-up bars by a brotha half his size named Droopy who, without his diploma, GED, or facsimile thereof, shouted, “I’ll pop you like a balloon, you muscular dysmorphic mutherfucker!”—pop!—because he’d been studying obscure psychological conditions in his spare time.
9
This one is clean and Uncalligraphied
THIS ONE IS CLEAN and uncalligraphied, sufficiently lit for late-night reading, newly painted and, most importantly, except for me, unoccupied. I lie down on the steel bunk and try to nap, but my mind refuses the body its rest and starts up again. Cells, American cells, are often nice enough. This is almost my thousandth day officially locked up and I have no doubt that if life relegates me to another thousand for the present insurrection, I won’t necessarily be casual about it but I won’t bullshit about it either. I like that everything stops. It’s a break. If you summoned every techie on the planet, you still couldn’t convert this dead time to a video game, a virtual reality. You’ve just gotta sit back and look at the black screen. Suddenly your inner life, if you still have one, is all that matters. Your wants evaporate, every hour and day you wait and wait and wait and are finally provided through the power of another entity only what you need, sometimes not even that. All else you earn yourself in the hours.
You learn to appreciate the principle of deprivation: When does the berry break sweeter upon the tongue than when one longs to taste it? Everyone, especially cops and judges and politicians, especially attorneys and movie moguls and megalomaniacs on cable news, PhDs, and the intelligentsia—would do well to spend a little time behind bars. Half the New Testament was birthed of a jail cell. Like an institutional retreat, a lock-and-chain sabbatical, you’ll be right there with yourself, whatever’s still real in there, pure you. Certain celebrities might survive by shouting out their broadcasts through the spaces in the bars, under the crack of the door, to the concrete walls, but they too might capitulate to the invisible forces at work against them, as they’re right there in it when the lights go down, right there in the spook of themselves.
The irony I have to accept now or explain to family or future women I date is the charge of a hate crime against a minority, me with one-half Samoan blood, the quintessential American minority. Plus assault and battery and disturbing the peace. I guess I could file a countersuit of hatred, have an arsenal of ambulance-chasing attorneys running their mulis off to solicit my Polynesian muli, testify at the proceedings that the other party had said I was a “coconuthead,” have cousins and aunties show up at the courtroom in garish ie lavalavas and colorful leis. When it comes to a jury, image is more important than veracity of story. Their ascribing of verdict is a bit like kids picking football teams on the playground. The blind lady in the flowing gown is losing control of the imbalanced scale in her hand, a goddess drunk on judgment.
Well, so be it. In these times, today’s news is out the window before today ends. That’ll save me, give me another breath of impure oxygen. I’ll wear the scarlet A for a day. The minute they coax me into moral shame, they’ll be ushering me out the door—or, rather, flushing me down the toilet for the next momentary load of waste. They won’t remember my name. I guess I’m like anyone else out there: guilty. I harbor a capacity to hate. This time they’re right.
To calm, redeem, or at minimum keep me busy, I pace for a while, reciting a few odes of Keats, get my persecution complex on and roll into a little street ditty by Tupac, thumping beats off the intransigent wall—boom, chit, boom—and somehow segue off that into “I’ve Just Seen a Face” from Rubber Soul of the Fab Four, the twenty-second piano concerto of my man Amadeus, recite a few lines of a Nobel Prize–winning speech, starting with “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man but to my work” and ending with “not for glory and least of all for profit,” then stop at the door of my cell and look out the slit of a shatterless window enmeshed in chicken wire.
In the middle of the pod in the jagged shadows, the correctional officer: a big pink ball with a fat chaw in his cheek, leaning back in the swivel chair, two army boots kicked up on the control panel, a bulbous Copenhagen spitter sitting upon a layer of chin on the upper chest, zoning out to the evening news. I have a good angle on the television and can see two thirds of the screen. All the other lights in the cell block are out, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s sleeping. Along the second tier I see eyes in the corner cells, I see eyes along the ground floor where I’m at, I hear voices echoing through the vents.
The CO’s fiddling with something. I can’t see what it is, but my safe guess is: edible, processed, packaged, high in trans fats. I’m right: a family-size bag of Spicy Cheetos that the paisas (whom I, according to legal sources tonight, hate) straight-up love. The CO’s pawing four or five at once and, without removing the chaw, is slamming the chips into the Antaean mouth, tonguing the fingers.
Is a display like this supposed to imply masculinity? Is that what we men are now: lethargic, overweight, brainless button pushers? A generation of emasculated Playstation fiends encrusted on couches across the country? There are still men out there—right?—digging holes and laying brick and pouring cement and driving truck and lifting weights at the gym not for the mirror or the Maxim recommendation on how to get women, but to—what’s this?—be brave and strong in the endurance of pain and to dispense their masculine anger in a socially acceptable venue. I mean, right? We’re still out there, us dying men, dying to die for our woman, our child, our cause, whatever it is, and if we can’t, then just being strong for them, being strong period, imperturbable in this storm of life.
What a romantic idiot I am.
The modern American alpha male snaps his fingers to emphasize a point, lisps his t’s and s’s, shaves his eyebrows and weeps on television, has three pairs of shoes for Monday. If he’s even got a woman, he doesn’t fight it out with the mugger; he doesn’t whip out his cock and say, “Take a look at this, mutherfucker.” The A-male now whips out his cell phone instead, his balls shriveling up into peas in his little tiger-striped G-string, dials 911, lets a cop in a squad car do his birthright duty. All to avoid the scratches on the elbow, the sweat and blood, the lawsuits.
The CO stands and decides to make the rounds. Late-night count. He’s a bit shameless, this one, carrying the Spicy Cheetos as he walks, looking into the cells. Halfway down the first tier he stops, digs into the bag of chips, heads back to the control station. So lazy he doesn’t even make a complete trip around the block: twenty-five cells, two tiers.
On my toes, I can see the television over the control station. Tonight the lastest scandal: Mayor Gonzales has pilfered funds, pocketed overflow. Took kickbacks from a garbage company meant to clean up the dirty city of San Jo he inherited. Council members are lining up for the kill, circling the blood, hyenas howling in city hall. And to spice up the salsa they’re charging him with a felony, the homely yet sexy Carolyn Johnson of Channel 11 News says.
And then there’s me—There I am! (“a man whom authorities say interrupted a peaceful march”)—being dragged off in cuffs like a bag of potatoes. And there she is (“while we organizers were minding our own business in the quad”), the goddess of wisdom and war shaking her beautiful head at the depraved racism of her brother in peace, pleading into the mic for a better, brighter day despite the badness out there. And there he is (“the brawl resulted in serious injuries to one unidentified”), the nameless paisa on the gurney being wheeled up the ramp of an ambulance, a heart-shaped see-through oxygen mask over his thick mustache and smashed mouth, his hands crossed at the lap of what appears to be a truly relaxed—or truly injured?—illegal immigrant. I get my answer when he puts his hands behind his cowboy hat which, amazingly, is still on his head. The sympathizers clap at his courage. He’s cool, kickin’ it.
The CO looks back at my cell door and gravely shakes his head at me. Oh, I see. Suddenly we have standards, do we, Mr. Leviathan? Suddenly life matters? Get up there and slip on your soapbox, hypocrite. This guy should thank me for my insurrections with the law, he should treat me with respect: Without me and men like me he wouldn’t get a fat-ass check each week cut by the Governator himself of sixty-five plus guaranteed g’s a year for pressing buttons and counting sleeping bodies.
He’s still looking over at my cell. Maybe his muscles have atrophied so badly he can’t move his monstrous head back to its original position. Like everything else about him, there’s a dinosaur age between movement. He points at me and then down to the ground. I know what he wants but I won’t give it to him.
He does it again—pointing in my direction, then at the floor—but I’ve got my rights: I can more or less do as I please in here as long as it’s not (1) flooding the toilet, (2) shorting lights, (3) smoking or slamming anything into veins, (4) shouting out threats, (5) sawing on the bars, (6) masturbating, (7) fornicating or fighting with my cellie, (8) blocking the window with cardboard from the lunches, (9) getting naked. I ain’t sitting down. Just like him, I’ll never get the fuck back up if I do. Plus I want to see him stand up, put the chips down, get off his fleshy backside, and do some work.
Just as he’s pushing himself off the chair, I hear the outer steel door in the sally port slam, and that means more cops or more inmates or more both. Over the desk radio the confirmation: more inmates—the midnight cranksters and restroom perverts and barroom brawlers rounded up and herded in tonight in the city of San José and its flanking suburbs. He plops back down into his chair, forgetting me at least for the moment, looks back at the sally port and flicks a switch, which at the same time activates a buzz sound heard in every cell.
The doors to the block open, and in come five, six, seven, eight guests in their loose, saggy orange issues and dog-eared plastic sandals, all carrying the generous accouterments of the county: one mattress, one towel, one ten-cent shaving kit, one Tylenol. Trying like hell not to stand out, even at 2:24 in the morning, hyper aware of each other, of us ghosts behind the shatterless glass, looking like sheep in the field with their dirty noses in each other’s asses.
He gives the new arrivals an order and they follow it, finding a steel chair each. One cat drops to the floor and falls asleep. He looks vaguely familiar. The CO says, “Hey.” He starts to snore and another inmate with swastikas on his cheeks and forehead and over the bald white scalp puts his foot under the guy’s chin and balances it on his toe, this Zinedine Zidane with his soccer ball. The CO watches, amused. The guy on the floor wakes up with his fists in a foist position, though he’s still on his back, wild-eyed, the Nazi Zuzu’s foot sliding up his face. It looks like the crankster I’d slapped in the Jack-in-the-Crack.
The CO says, “Go sleep your fix off in there, you burnout,” pointing to my cell.
The cell door clicks and in comes my cellie. It’s the crankster, all right, but he’s got no clue where he’s at. He doesn’t know who I am because he doesn’t even know I’m in here. Christmas-tree hair matted on his head, he’s already starting to fall. The walls catch him. He crumples down right at the base of the door, his head smashes into the steel toilet, and he’s out. I arrive upon an idea I hadn’t thought of before when he hit me up for a meal: I don’t want to get too close to the guy: hep B, hep C, West Nile, staph, avian flu, typhoid fever,consumption, the black plague, cooties—you never know what kind of rebellion some microorganism is staging in the sickly immune systems of our have-nots. He’s breathing, and that’s good enough for me. Tomorrow I’ll walk around the cell with a shirt scarf across my face, the anti-germ Jesse James look. Maybe he’ll have forgotten our little encounter. With cranksters anything’s a possibility. If the CO lets us into the dayroom tomorrow, I’ll read a book for the stretch, even a crock book from a crock writer, I’ll play bones with the brothas, run a game of gin rummy with the Asians, sling a handball with the eses, all to avoid this bacterial breeding ground of a cellie and his unlikely memory recall.
But this ain’t that bad: he’s better than a cellie I’d have to talk to, listen to, convince myself each long minute of the long day not to whip into shape. And believe it or not, this guy is helping me, man, he’s actually helping me. When someone is so high on life he’s unconscious, it’s like: What’s the point? Don’t break him down. Don’t throw him into the bottomless pit of comparison. Who cares if he wakes you up and shouts, “Didn’t you bitch-slap me once in the Burger King?” You just say, “I never been to that joint in my life, mu’fucker,” and let him struggle with the image. Whatever goes down, so be it, it’s going down, that’s it. Maybe way down. I put my nose up to the humming vent so I don’t catch any of his shit and take in the dusty cold air to my lungs, wrap myself up in the gray wool blanket, a human burrito, use the palms of my hand as a pillow, just like the happy paisa on the gurney, no complaints. Then I take my cellie’s lead and convince myself—just take it, man, and shut the fuck up—not to think about anything, not even nothing.
10
I Am Dreaming About the Loss of Blood
I AM DREAMING about the loss of blood when over the PA in our cell a voice says, “Tusifale. Pack your bags.”
I know I’m not OR’d, released on Own Recognizance, so someone must have bailed me out. And I know that with an assault charge and a hate crime to match, the bail had to exceed fifty g’s. Neither of my folks would know where I’m at, and big sister Tali wouldn’t put up the cash even if she had a million bucks. Her husband would, though. All anyone has to do to get old Gaelic McLaughlin digging into his personal stash is drop a few Samoan words his way and remind him of the integral unit of Samoan culture, the aiga, the family. All the guilt that McLaughlin has over not being Samoan would then rise to the for
e and he can parlay through another strange day in his weird little world of cultural denial.
When I first met McLaughlin, I saved him. I was at an afterparty of a local halau, a hula dance-off between competing troupes of Philipinas, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, and Tongans. I’m sure the Hawaiians, who weren’t there, would have appreciated the very Polynesian get-together, both in timbre and proportion: much love and music and aloha in the air, much grinds and drinks and inflated stories about the islands to be bellied. It was all good three hours into the little hukilau when a cousin of mine, Aleki, arrived from Daly City in red rags and looped earrings, his homeboy, Lafa, tagging along, dragging his feet. They said, “Wassup, Paulo,” we hit each other’s knuckles, I saw the cloud of weed in their eyes, smelled the Olde English on their breaths, and they went inside the house. I should have left. But if I’d left I would’ve never met my future in-law.
McLaughlin arrived with another of my cousins, Malia, on his bony white arm. He had on an aloha shirt circa 1965, Don Ho, and about six or seven leis up to his nose and the bottom of his ear, so that his head was slightly tilted backward, like an old lord of the manor overlooking his labor force. He wore Bermuda shorts that betrayed his bony white knees and slippas that said SURFAH on the plastic loop. I’d seen his kind before, white people raised around Polynesians who deify being down for the brown. Who love the alchemy of a people who combine brute force with an inherently gentle and generous nature. It was a little sad to me. You knew they could never be what they wanted to be, it was impossible, like a blind man who idolizes fighter pilots. But you could see this guy was going to get as close to the jet as he could, even if just for a powerless ride-along where he could feel the torque of the g forces at work on his guts. My cousin, who wasn’t the smallest of women (five-eight, 210 pounds), but was average size for a Poly, was nowhere near the doctor’s chart for her height (145 pounds). She was throwing McLaughlin around like a raggedy doll—very much, in fact, like a copilot in the cockpit of an F-15—and he straight loved it. He was on his way to romance with Malia, joint damage and whiplash.
What We Are Page 8