“Clarify then why you assaulted them.”
“I didn’t assault them. They assaulted me. And the reason for that is they’re no different from anyone else. They protect their own, that’s how it is.”
“I see.”
“Just like anyone out there. It’s a power play, from both sides, from every side. And that fucks with the notion of justice, with what’s right.”
“Or wrong,” he says.
“Which fucks with my ability to act with conviction.”
“So what you’re saying is you couldn’t decide who to support?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“But it does.”
“Of course it does,” I say. “We’re born into this age with a Verifiably Committable stamp on our birth certificates. I mean it. I know it.”
“So why were you at the rally then?”
“I don’t know, man. For some reason, I keep hoping that life ain’t as disjointed as it always seems to be. That there are more bridges than canyons between us. But I’ve spent the majority of my life keeping friends away from friends, family away from family, because they can’t get away from some claim that defines them. And as all of these people and their positions are in me, by inference I don’t mean a thing.”
“Because you can’t take a stance?”
“That’s right.”
“And you want to take a stance.”
“More than anything, man.”
He nods. “I told you I met a friend. This ain’t a topic change.” He looks over at the couple and their leashed child. “The question is: What about them? Is that their stance?”
He downs his Hefe-Weizen and doesn’t look back over his shoulder. I’ve been watching the table, even in my rant: The kid knows the limits of the leash. In everything he does—rising from the woman’s lap to look into the restaurant window, squatting down to play with the laces of his shoes, reaching across the table for ketchup or water or silverware to rattle, turning to embrace his mother—the leash gets primary consideration. He’s methodical in his upper body movement, frugal in head movement. His right hand, subconsciously designated the save-me hand, always lingers close to the leash in case slack is needed. The kid’s learning geometry at three, conceptualizing radius and circumference, a kind of physics confined to five feet.
“I’ll let you have this one,” I say.
“Well,” he says, shivering as if it were cold on this warm patio, “those two parents on the cutting edge of what’s hip are under the impression that life is theirs and theirs alone. You and I both know their notion of control is an illusion. Like anything else in this life, it can be smashed. And will be. It’s a question of when; maybe—if you’re a voyeur—how.”
He lifts his pint and drains it, I follow suit. To hell with the happy yuppies and their errant flippant chatter. A slew of hot and slick twenty- to thirty-five-year-olds, this fake-and-bake crowd reveling in their temporary glory, their masquerade of fraudulence. The life force drawn from their Ayn Rand books of absurd objectivism, self-help gurus justifying their greed in a large-print book of clichés, the natural embodiments of Roman decadence, all on the verge of something huge: huge fake tits for the ladies, huge calf implants for the non-ladies, huge promotion at the place of employment, huge hierarchal notch up on the auto scale, huge trip to Cabo Wabo.
But maybe they’re not that bad. It’s just us, the reflectors. We must be a reminder of the exact kind of life they’ve been working so hard to avoid, a dual portrait of pariahood invading this warm safe plastic haven. What’s strange now is how little it would take to be like them, to in fact be them, a tiny adjustment in the circuitry, the ousting of a glitch. Something has got to be turned off to survive in this century: not turned on, turned off.
I give the kid on the leash a quick glance, a safety measure: his teeth are too few and too dull to chew through anything. My newfound friend twists and puts an arm out. He and his index finger have ID’d the culprits for everyone to see, there they are. Right there.
He stays in this position for a long time, so long it pisses me off: not at him, at them. No one notices a thing, immersed in their own public private vacuums. A patio of mind-thy-own-business etiquette, let the authorities handle the problem. There may not even be a problem. I suspect we’re the only two deviations who think there’s something gangbusters wrong with this scene.
A waitress appears, the third in the last hour. I suddenly see the strategy employed by someone working the patio. There’s a row of empty tables that have cleared out over the past hour and no one’s filled them. So we’ve been sequestered off in the corner from our fellow citizenry.
She’s nineteen or twenty, pierced in random spots across the face. You’d think by the light blond cilia on her arms that she’d also have blond hair on her head, but everything’s dyed black. You can’t think like that anymore, match up body parts like puzzle pieces. Now it’s all just black.
She says, more sentence than question, “Would you like to close out your tab.”
I smile and shake my head, my newfound friend squints and laughs out loud once, like a cough. She takes it as a yes. “I’ll be right back with your bill.”
He turns over his empty glass and says, “Did we ask for our bill? You act like you don’t want our business.”
“Well, we just want to make sure that—”
“We’ll take another,” says my newfound friend, handing her the glass.
“Would you like a pint, too?” she says to me, her perforated face starting to sweat.
“No,” he says, handing her the empty pitcher. “A pitcher. We want a pitcher.”
She walks off and we lower ourselves back into the conversational abyss. I tell him about La Dulce’s virtually real son. He says, “In thirty years, no one’s gonna leave the room. Everything’ll be right there within arm’s reach.”
“I know it. Fuck. But we can’t stop time.”
“If only there were a reset button.” His eyes are bottle-cap big. “We could start all over.”
“You’re talking like the Unabomber.”
“Kaczynski was brilliant. I read his prison journals. He had too much vision. And commitment.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Mostly that.”
He starts coughing into his elbow. It sounds bad. He strokes the ends of his goatee into a downward arrow and says, “Now I’m a little faded.”
“As am I.”
“But tonight you’re gonna witness me trying to save this story.”
“Oh. And I thought you were just spinning yarns. Being a good raconteur for your brothers and sisters.”
“No, no. Tonight you’ll get your chance to take a stance.”
He stands and stretches and I immediately look to the kid. He’s finished his dinner early and is pricking his palm with his fork. He gently pushes his plate forward, then jumps down off the woman’s lap and carefully circumnavigates the table. He goes around three times, on his toes, heels, he’s bored. Runs the slack of the leash through the palm of his little-boy hand like a rock climber preparing to descend the face of a mountain. Finally he stops, looks back at the blushing-of-wine man, who’s either fully indifferent to the kid or totally absorbed in himself, and leans outward to test the pressure of the leash. No more slack. The kid’s out over his toes, looking down on the ground, turning a little but smiling, a bona fide image of gravity. The turtlenecked metro wrist-taps the leash like an old stagecoach driver on the reins, and the kid obediently leans back in toward the table.
Before I can say, Vayan con Dios or Esperas: ¿como te llamas? my newfound friend’s walking over to their table. The metro is swishing wine, holding the glass by the stem between thumb and index finger. The woman and the child stretch their necks out and around my newfound friend and find me. I nod assuringly, smile at the kid. His eyes are so big and unblinking that I want to comfort him, take him inside the restaurant away from all the heat of the patio and say, Don’t worry: on your side. Keeping an eye out
for your future. He looks up at his mother for guidance. The woman taps twice on her thigh and the little boy jumps up on her lap.
I can’t hear what’s being said, but I can see the face of the father. He expects a friendly encounter, briefly conned. His mouth is slowly opening. Finally, he’s shocked. He recrosses his legs knee over knee and says, “Excuse me?”
My newfound friend says something else, and I catch fucking and dog and block and stand up just as I notice that the yuppies at the tables next to the kid have stopped eating.
I’m right behind them now. I see Miller and Co. on the customized collar. So it’s manufactured in some makeshift warehouse, profitable 1-800 crap from late-night TV.
The dad says, “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“I’m gonna take that leash and tie you up so you can see how it feels.”
“I don’t exactly understand how that would solve anything.”
“Hang you from the rafters of the Rock Bottom sign right there, so you’ll understand that all things move toward the center of the earth. And the center of the earth is hell.”
“You need some help.”
“No, I don’t. I’ll do it myself right here and no one’ll stop me. That’s a fact.”
“I meant,” the dad says, his gray eyes rolling with contempt, “you need some professional help.”
“What’d you say?”
“Hey, bro,” I say, reaching out for his elbow. “Let’s go.”
The child is now being rocked heavily in his mother’s arms, she’s whispering a lullaby in his ear.
“Yes, I’d say that it’s time to go,” says the dad. “Why don’t you escort your friend directly to the insane asylum?”
I feel a river of blood rising in my chest. Prison makes the good bad, the bad worse, and the free all high and mighty. I want to walk calmly over and line my feet up shoulder width in a linebacker stance, sturdy and implacable, bend at the waist to dust off the David Beckham rouge from this metro’s cheeks, then get a good grip on his orange-skinned neck and choke his ass right there in his seat. It has nothing to do with loyalty to my newfround friend. I just would like to watch his flat gray eyes wane into humility, then I’ll let him breathe. Yes, I want to rip the leash off the kid. In fact, that’s first. And yes, I want to make all the Pontius Pilates of the patio at least passive witnesses of an active truth, to be the proxy signature of their names on the dotted line, have someone appreciate the meaning of present in body only. But mostly I want to put my head under a faucet and run a stream of ice-cold water, breathe in deep through the nostrils.
I say, “Forget about it, bro. Let’s get out of here.” The hue of the skin on his neck and cheek is clouding like an octopus on the reef: red, white, brown, purple....
“You better take that leash off right now.”
The dad’s frown lines bunch up and he looks around. “Am I on Candid Camera? Is that what this is? Okay, okay, I get it. Hah-hah. Good one.”
Someone from the crowd, a woman, shouts, “Can’t you just leave him alone?”
The dad perks up, this show-off mutherfucker. He knows who’s in the right with this crowd. Honor thy father and mother (or get choked). He closes his eyes, throws his arms up in the air as if he’s about to embrace my newfound friend, and cries aloud, “Why can’t you just mind your own business?”
Suddenly this little guy is standing next to me, his head high as my shoulder. I put it together fast: restaurant manager, Napoleon complex, law abider, police caller. He’s so grossly violated my personal space that I have no choice but to turn and get in his face, or get in the top of his head.
“What’s the problem, dog?” I say, feeling a little stupid.
He lightly taps, caresses my arm. “Your friend here is going to have to leave.”
“That’s cool, bro,” I say. “We’ll just finish our drinks and bounce.”
“No,” he says. “You both have to leave now.”
My newfound friend takes a step toward the metro father and shouts, “You know what I’m gonna do with that leash?”
A lady from the circle shouts, “Just go already!”
“Fuck you!” my newfound friend yells into the crowd.
The metro throws his hands yet again in the air. “Why can’t you just mind your own business?”
“That,” my newfound friend says, pointing at the kid, “is my business.”
The manager says, “You’re going to have to leave.”
“Yeah!” a sympathizer calls. “Leave!”
“Let’s head out,” I say, “while we can.”
The midget manager is red-faced and worried but cool. “Please,” he says to me.
“We’ll cut out, man. Just relax. All right?”
The manager nods. I start to walk toward our table. My newfound friend’s already there. I think, That’s good, anyway. Good.
He picks up the pitcher of golden Hefe-Weizen, one last drink to finalize capitulation, looks over at their table, grits his teeth, says something vicious in what sounds like Russian, winds up like a discus thrower, and hurls the pitcher at the head of the metro father. It whips past the ear of the target and shatters the glass window of the restaurant. A woman screams. The kid screams too, is screaming.
“Right in front of the poor boy!”
I want to say, I didn’t throw it, man, I didn’t do it, but for once no one’s paying any attention to me.
17
I Make My Break Backward
I MAKE MY BREAK backward, tiptoeing as if I were covering my tracks in the snow.
Now everything’s slo-mo, drunk time under water, the betting lines are up. Everyone, even me, is looking at my newfound friend, several women sounding the siren in the early evening.
You better about-face, I think, before the mace and guns get here.
He nods at me as if he’s read my thoughts, puts his head down, and jumps over the manzanita bush, already running north toward Mrs. Fields and Buca di Beppo. He cuts through an approaching crowd, dodging a biker in fluorescent spandex.
Keep on running, dog. Go, go!
If he makes it past the Bank of the West, his chances are good. Too many cars and not enough road to be chased by a roller here in the Pruneyard. Then it’s ten seconds to the cover of two-dozen apartment complexes, where a potential witness will mix up the scene like a bag of Jelly Bellies.
I’m holding my breath, doing my damnedest to leave the air undisturbed. I’m the benefactor of that pedestrian tendency to ogle the accident. Not one patron of the patio follows me.
I jump on my bike, virtually clear of the scene, and he appears. Like a ghost out the kitchen. Untying his Rock Bottom apron with the subtle flair of a matador, macho aplomb foreign to these watered-down shores, the paisa cook with the two black eyes I’d laid on him at the rally tosses the apron into the crowd and gives chase to my friend. The son of a bitch. Is there square footage anywhere in the greater South Bay that this mutherfucker doesn’t claim?
Okay, Twisted Fate: I’m in.
I bike down the lot behind the cover of seven straight SUVs, paralleling their path from fifty yards. I’m making ground on both of them. They’re banking toward Barnes & Noble and Barbecues Galore, and I can’t see them for three or four seconds. I pass the other end of the olive green bookstore and its monolithic display of a book whose cover—a blond leggy bulimic dominatrix—makes me think Godless, Godless, Godless, the book’s exact title in blood red, and they shoot out across the intersection of Campbell Avenue amid honking horns, weaving and juking through traffic, the paisa at thirty yards from my newfound friend, zeroed in on capture.
I behold in my head the headlines tomorrow in the local section of the San José Mercury News:: GREEN-CARD CHEF ON THE SUBURBAN HUNT.
But I’m gonna get to him first. He doesn’t think anyone’s trailing him and why would he? Who around here is desperate enough to take the risk?
¿Quien de los Americanos tiene huevos?
I reach the end of the
lot perpendicular to traffic. My newfound friend veers right toward downtown Campbell, away from the triple canopy maze of apartment complexes. He’s got one way to go now—directly down the artery of Campbell Avenue—and it all depends on me to see he makes it. I’m gonna trip the paisa up like a bad comedy, watch him slide into his new home base. Paint some strawberries on his knees and elbows before he’s hailed a hero in a foreign land.
So you want to put your ass on the line, amigo? ¿Aqui?
Okay. All right. Ya estuvo.
I put my head down and grind hard on the bike’s crank, my heartbeat as rapid as a small bird’s. The stricken streets of downtown Campbell are vacant. My newfound friend cuts to the right of the chevron-shaped billboard: WELCOME TO DOWNTOWN CAMPBELL: YOURALL-AMERICAN CITY. I accelerate past a four-stop-sign intersection, across the green grass of the county library, around skaters doing rails and ollies on the steps, up the alleyway behind Molly Bloom’s Spirits, diagonally into a hidden quad of dentistry, ferns and ivy hanging over the gutters, and hop off the bike, breathing hard.
Right then the message on his chest flashes by—ZYZZYVA!—two yards from where I’m crouching behind a plastic recycling bin. He ducks up an alleyway lined with dumpsters, Winchester Avenue on the other side, a definite out from this dead-end Dodge.
I wait. Keep my neck craned so I can see five yards from my position, but the paisa’s nowhere in the vicinity. I lean out a little farther and look up the walk and see nothing but empty storefronts and two kids playing rock-scissors-paper in front of Recycle Bookstore West. I pull back, wait another three or four seconds, finally step out of the alleyway.
At the corner of the street, the leaves of the elm trees are lit in patriotic red and blue. Two squad cars are angled into the sidewalk, and there’s the paisa, already spread out on the hood.
I grab my bike and walk it toward the squad car. One cop is shuffling through the paisa’s pockets, patting him down to the ankles, shaking his head. The other cop is listening to a citizen make her case about what happened. She keeps shouting it: “I saw it! I saw it!”
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