by Robert Cohen
“So that’s why you’re here then? To get away from all that?”
“I am here? I am here because it is my nature to be trusting and optimistic. I am here because when my no-good brother by marriage writes to me from Toronto and says, ‘Tahir, I have investors who wish to meet you,’ I come. In Toronto it seems there are many homesick subcontinentals eager for good food. So we open a fine establishment near the hockey arena downtown. Nostalgia, you see? The farengee dreams all his life that he will come to the New World. But then he arrives, and so what is left to dream about? The old one. Kebabs, buranee, pilau. So we are very profitable. But then my brother by marriage goes off to Vancouver with a prostitute—excuse me, a nice young lady from Vietnam who he meets in a salon for nails. And after this we encounter labor difficulties. And this becomes all she wrote.”
“Union problems, huh? I know about those, believe me.”
“Not unions,” Tahir said, “cousins. I am blessed with two cousins in Toronto who come to work for me quote unquote. They are never on time but, okay, people have obligations to others. They steal meat from my walk-in but, okay, they have been poor, they are hungry. They abuse my customers but in fairness my customers some of them are quite abusive too. But then I catch these cousins in the bathroom doing all this coke up their noses on the dinner shift, so I fire their slovenly asses at once.”
“Good for you.”
“Yes, it felt good. But then they must have their revenge on me, so they whisper bad things to the health inspector, maybe one-half true, one-half false. So I get closed down. No more restaurant. I pray to Allah for guidance but he too has obligations to others it seems. But then one day a customer comes to see me, a very prosperous man. He says, ‘Tahir, you are a fine cook, we will get you into the U.S., just three thousand dollars, I will arrange all the papers, we shall start again with a new establishment.’ Sounds good, yes? Only at the border it seems my new papers are not so in order. And too I am Muslim, which supplies its own problems. They have their own little room at the border station, you know, just for talking to us. I assure you it is a dark one.”
“Listen, my wife’s a lawyer. Let me talk to her.”
“Yes, yes. Certainly. I would be grateful.” Tahir did not look grateful however. He looked reserved but polite, a little embarrassed at having shared his story with a stranger.
“It’ll work out, you’ll see. They can’t keep you here too much longer. You’re obviously a nice, decent, hardworking guy.”
“Ah, but you seem this way too. And yet they say that you are terribly perverted and make pornographic pictures of little girls.”
Teddy nodded wearily. He lapsed into silence, but not from offense. It had been a hell of a long day.
“Listen, thanks for the sandwich,” he mumbled. “It hit the spot.”
For a town as small and remote as Carthage, the jailhouse certainly offered an impressive display of diversity that weekend. Aside from Tahir, the inmates included a Latvian cabdriver, two Jamaican fruit pickers, a Serbo-Croatian plumber, nine Taiwanese dishwashers-in-training—Mimi’s friends from the lake—and a trio of Dominicans from Washington Heights caught speeding west on Route 17 with a trunkful of Chinese heroin. That was globalization for you: the whole border concept was coming apart, clunking toward obsolescence like a GM car. Imports kept zipping by, passing on the left. Barriers falling. You could hardly tell the native from the foreign.
Nonetheless, as the only white American in the place, and a local at that, Teddy’s position was awkward. He might have been a consul in some distant beleaguered embassy. If he came on too friendly, he’d seem clueless or condescending; if he remained too aloof, he’d seem privileged and smug. Everyone knew the score. He was the one with diplomatic immunity; he was the one who could at any moment be airlifted free. And the helicopter only had room for one.
So he kept pretty much to himself. He met twice with Fiona Dunn, who had agreed to represent him in court, going over the particulars. No one else came to visit. Okay, fine. He tried to read, but the bad light, and the monotonous beep-beep of the Road Runner on the lounge TV defeated him. In the end, he gave himself over to simple tasks: eating, sleeping, crushing spiders against the wall with the heel of his shoe, and trying to avoid any provocative encounters that might lead to violence or male rape. Fortunately no one seemed much interested in him in that or any other way. It wasn’t a sexual environment. And he towered above most of the other fellows. Indeed, viewed objectively, if anyone in the lockup looked capable of violence or male rape, it was Teddy himself.
And that was good. Wow, that helped a lot. Because once you wiped violence and male rape off the blackboard of potential outcomes, jail lost much of its shock value. Jail became just another waiting room, another sparsely appointed teachers’ lounge, with the same stale air of boredom and retreat, the same acrid smells of cheap disinfectant and bad coffee left too long on the burner. Maybe this was where he belonged. For he too was waiting. Better to wait down here, among these troubled men, this melancholy tribe, than to go on living a solitary sentence on the outside.
Was this what Philip had discovered in those final weeks? The clarity of an absolute state, where everything has been taken from you? His brother had never lost his temper in the hospital, the way sick people do. Had never been mean or small. He’d just lain there listening to Dylan on his black boom box, eyes bright and keenly extruded, as if he could see it approaching: that clean hard floor, where all the cushions were gone. To be sprung from all the little traps and caught at last in the larger one. To finally touch bottom. To know for a change that the bottom was there.
Teddy got down on his knees. He’d heard some of the other guys doing exercises in their cells, as if in training for whatever would happen next. Now he would join them.
He forced himself through a brief, desultory set of push-ups. Christ but a body was a heavy thing to lift. Still, one had to carry the burden; he’d better get used to it. He was damned if he was going to sit around getting fat, passively bemoaning his fate. Actively bemoaning his fate was another story of course. Teddy was not the passive sort. He was the impulsive sort, the foolish sort, the blundering-coyote sort admittedly. But not passive. Even when he made a mistake—and he made a lot of mistakes—even when he went plunging over the cliff to the canyon’s bottom, he kept getting up again, and resuming the chase.
And that was how he spent the rest of the weekend. Pushing himself up, letting himself down, sitting himself up, lying himself down, as if the body were some knotty, insoluble algebraic problem that had to be worked through anyway, had to be tested and tested and tested some more.
Afterward he’d lie breathing hard on his narrow cot, his nerves buzzing and humming like a train. True, the train had entered a long, dark tunnel. True, the tracks were rattling, the ties popping loose. True, life was a torment and a tease, a moronic chirping bird that would not stand still. But what could you do? It was the only program on.
At last Tuesday morning rolled around, and he was permitted to dress in his own clothes again, with his own wallet and keys and change, and proceed upstairs to the courthouse for arraignment. On the way out he waved a fond but sheepish good-bye to Tahir and the others. “See you soon,” he said. But he did not really expect this to happen.
His case was second on the docket. A good omen. According to Fiona, the judge, Richard Tierney of the Eleventh District, was at his best in the mornings. Not that his best, she conceded, was so distinguishable from his worst.
“Now what fresh nonsense is this,” the judge said in a voice like crushed stones. His robe was creased. His face had a yellow cast, like a night clerk in a failing hotel. The ruptured vessels in his nose were like scars from lost drinking wars, from his three failed bids for state Senate, from his spectacular follies in lakefront real estate. Every so often he’d pick up his gavel and swat petulantly at his block. He might have been a child hammering some errant nail.
“Your Honor,” said the DA, Jerome Gash,
“may we approach?”
Tierney nodded grudgingly from his elevated desk, which had cost the taxpayers of Carthage County $1,300, not including the chair. Jerry Gash sauntered forward in his blue suit, beaming and expectant, an altar boy with a receding hairline. Teddy knew Gash from that other court, their weekly basketball game at the municipal gym. He was plodding, unimaginative, and finicky about fouls. The two lawyers whispered for a while. The judge leaned toward them, his face stern but vacant; you could see in his eyes the boredom and deferral, the reluctance to contemplate any issue larger or more pressing than what to order for lunch. This was just a show they were putting on. A little burlesque. The legal issues had been worked out in advance. Already the lawyers were headed back to their respective tables, Fiona, smiling grimly, in her good mint-colored court clothes, giving him the nod. Everything was under control. Teddy had only to play his part, the role he and Fiona had rehearsed together in the lockup over the weekend. Plead nolo contendere on all charges. Participate—“cooperatively participate,” Fiona emphasized—in a six-month Court Diversion Program. In exchange for which his record would officially be wiped clean, and he could get on with that prolonged and depleting exercise, his life.
“Here’s the thing though, Fiona,” he’d said during their strategy session the day before. “What if I don’t want it wiped clean. What if I insist on keeping the record as dirty as possible?”
Fiona contemplated the sight of his big hand with its angry red hairs crumpling the sleeve of her rayon blouse. “I’d say you’re off to a good start then.”
“You don’t think this deal’s selling us a little short? You don’t think I should maybe contest the charges, plead yeso contendere?”
“No.”
“You don’t think if I stood up for myself in there this would all be dismissed as a ridiculous farce?”
“With Dick Tierney in the chair? No.”
“Listen, maybe winning or losing isn’t what’s important here. Maybe what’s important is just making the point.”
“Oh?” she said. “And what point is that?”
Teddy hesitated. Honestly, when you thought about it, there were so many points to be made. His innocence for one. The point that in a free democratic society no one should be bullied into subjugation by the arbitrary enforcement of an arbitrary law. The point that even if you were bullied into subjugation, you didn’t have to go down quietly—you could go down noisily, like a freedom fighter, a revolutionary hacking out a path through the jungle hills.
All of which went on one side of the ledger. On the other side went the counterarguments as outlined by Fiona. The local press coverage, which would be embarrassing at best. The potential loss of his job, which would be messy and difficult at best. The costs involved in going to trial, which would be ruinous at best. Plus that other morbid and depressing little fact Fiona insisted on bringing up: that if they did go to trial, he was likely to lose.
“They were nude pictures, Teddy, of a sixteen-year-old girl. How’s that going to look to a jury of your peers? This is New England we’re talking about, a place with a proud tradition of repression and denial to uphold.”
“First of all she wasn’t nude, I told you that. She was wearing a towel, more or less.”
“The pictures suggest less.”
“Secondly, it’ll look like what it was. A homework assignment. An exercise to get us comfortable with the camera. Get a feel for our, you know, material.”
“You got a feel all right,” Fiona said. “But whose material are we talking about, yours? Because I must tell you that in Jerry Gash’s office, and the judge’s too, they’re inclined to be more protective of hers. They’ll say you violated the privacy of that poor girl.”
“Look, the only violation here is what happened to my privacy rights, thanks to some disturbed young punk who gets minimum wage for standing behind a counter being rude to people. If anyone’s a victim here, it’s me.”
Fiona snorted cheerfully through her nose. He needn’t have worried about inconveniencing his wife’s partner by dragging her down to the jailhouse on a gorgeous July weekend; he was supplying her plenty of recreational amusement.
“If that damned photo clerk hadn’t called the cops, the only ones who’d have seen those damned contact sheets would be the people it was intended for—me and my photography teacher. Who wouldn’t be shocked, let me tell you. I mean, you should check out the slides she shows in class. You should see the nipples and pubic hair on view today in the great galleries of the world. Hooboy!”
“Thank you, Kenneth Clark, for the art lesson. I’m not a Philistine, Teddy. I’d wager I know a lot more about the history of portraiture than you do.”
“Good! Then back me up! Do your job! Tell the judge! And tell Jerry Gash to get his mind out of the gutter while you’re at it, and stop worrying so much about other people’s bodies. Sheesh, it’s not my fault his wife’s put on all that weight.”
Fiona smiled wearily, with a mild inflection of disgust. Always a tactical error, he thought, making reference to the weight troubles of a middle-aged woman in the presence of another middle-aged woman. Their bodies, themselves. Besides, he was no one to talk. He’d put on a fair bit of weight himself.
“I’m telling you, Fiona, talk to my photography teacher. She’ll explain the whole thing. It was a class assignment. Document the natural forms that surround you, she said. The substance and the, um, quintessence. Of natural forms! Which are already there all around us! Is it violating an ocean to take a picture of it? Is it violating a flower?”
“That depends on if the flower is under eighteen. And on the opinion of a court-appointed psychologist.”
“Everyone’s so protective of that girl now. Where was all this protection when she was off at the lake with your son doing god knows what? And why doesn’t he call her anymore? You should see her mooning around at night. What, out of sight out of mind? Isn’t that a violation too?”
Fiona’s mouth went tight. “Please, don’t make me regret my decision to represent you any more than I do. The conflict-of-interest pile is high enough already. The question is, how much of your time and savings are you willing to part with to fight this?”
“All of it,” he cried. “What the hell, I’ll take a second mortgage on the house. It’s a principle worth defending.”
“Amateur pornography? Endangering a minor?”
“Artistic freedom.”
Fiona clicked shut her briefcase with a laugh. “No offense, Ted, but you’re nobody’s idea of an artist.”
“Who’s to say? Jerry Gash, that boob? The man can’t read a simple give-and-go. He’s been falling for the same pump fake for ten years now.”
“Be that as it may, there’s still the judge. Let me assure you, to him you’re no artist in a beret—you’re the guy who until recently has been officially responsible, in loco parentis, for three hundred sixty of our impressionable youth. What will they think when they see this on the police blotter in the Carthage Courier?”
“They wouldn’t do that, would they? Put me in the paper?”
“Not if we can work this out before the arraignment and get you into the Court Diversion Program. You’re a first-time offender. Show the right attitude, write a nice, remorseful essay, agree to do some volunteer community service like, I don’t know, Meals-On-Wheels…you may have a shot.”
“I wouldn’t mind doing Meals-On-Wheels,” Teddy said.
“That’s just one possibility. It could turn out to be something else. Hospital work.”
He closed his eyes. “Dear God.”
“Maybe it won’t be a hospital. The point is to get you into a diversion program and go on from there.”
“And if I don’t show remorse? If I wind up writing the essay I want to write, not the one they want me to write?”
“Then you go to trial, and probably lose. Then you’ve got Social Services to deal with, no job, no probation, and maybe a chunk of jail time up in Fair View added on. Who kn
ows, you might like it there. They’ve got a nice library, you’d get a lot of reading done. And you’d be able to share your views with all the other nice, unremorseful guys in the sexual offenders program.”
“Boy,” he said, knotting his moist hands together. “They do put you in a corner.”
“I’m afraid you put yourself into this one, old friend.”
He bowed his head, as if from a blow. The idea that he had courted his own ruin, had desired it, wooed it, coveted it, seemed ludicrous. And yet here he was. “What did you mean before, until recently?”
“Let’s talk about it after the arraignment.”
“What, they’re giving me the boot, is that it? Tossing me over the side?”
“The board, since you ask, has communicated a number of legitimate concerns. They’ve expressed a desire to meet and discuss these concerns with you in executive session. At your earliest convenience, is how they put it.”
“How delicate they are, those cowardly pricks. They must be loving this. They’ve been after me for years.”
“They’ve actually been very decent under the circumstances. They’re aware that the difficulties of these past months, your brother’s death, your little health scare and so on, may be contributing factors to any so-called erratic behavior you may be showing—”
“Erratic! Erratic to whom? Trust me, Fiona: when you carry a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.”
“On the other hand, there’s the liability issue. So. The current thinking is, presuming all goes well with Judge Tierney, a year’s leave at least. Personal time.”
“A year!”
“That’s not bad. It’s a lot better than what they gave Bobby Murtaugh.”
“That creep?” Murtaugh, a music teacher down in Wallingford, had been caught in the act with a second-chair violinist after the spring concert. A sophomore. “But there’s no comparison.”
“Believe me, if word gets out, there’ll be comparisons.” Fiona put away her notes. “Now, as to your salary. That may be iffy. But I think I can get you half. You’ll need it too, to defray the mandatory counseling.”