by Mike Roberts
“I don’t know where it is. We haven’t checked in. We said to all meet here first.”
“What is your name?” I asked, but the girl didn’t hear me.
“I’m sorry. I’m scared.”
I nodded absently. She was thin and vulnerable, and really very pretty. She had a kind face, and I was drawn to this idea that we could help protect her.
Out on the infield, the cops were losing their sense of humor, and people were getting hurt. More police were arriving, along with ambulances, and even the heartiest stragglers were beginning to turn away. A police van pulled up onto the sidewalk where we stood, and I dropped my champagne bottle to the ground, reflexively. I looked around for the Israeli girl and saw her wading back into the sea of bodies. Lauren took my hand and pulled me out toward the street.
“What about the girl?” I asked.
“Who cares about her,” Lauren said. “Let her go.”
I nodded blankly, but this wasn’t what I wanted. I looked back again, wanting the girl to stay with us. She could come to our hostel, I thought. She could use our computers, or our phones, at least. I still wanted to help her find her friends.
“She’ll be fine. She’s an adult,” Lauren said sourly. “Besides, I don’t even know if I believe her.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“I mean, for all we know, she was trying to scam us. I would check for your wallet, if I was you. And your passport. I watched her grab your arm.”
“Jesus, Lauren,” I said, pulling my hand away, and we separated in the street.
“What? Is that really so crazy? Why are we even fighting about this? You should have just gone with her, if that’s what you wanted.”
I stopped walking then, pissed off. Lauren kept going and didn’t stop for ten more feet. Finally turning with a deep sigh. “Why are we even here?”
“I don’t know. Because we wanted to come! Remember? We planned it out; we bought our tickets; we spent all our fucking money! Shit, Lauren. I’m doing the best I can!”
Lauren suddenly started to cry. All at once, without a buildup, or a warning shot, or anything. This wasn’t a thing she did, and it confused me. It seized me up and made me feel awful. And underneath it all I couldn’t stop being angry.
“Stop,” I said. “Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” she said, blubbering.
“No, don’t be sorry; I’m sorry. Just cry, it’s fine.” But this only made her cry harder, and I pleaded for her to stop all over again. Just for the night, just so we could go to sleep now.
“Please. I’m an asshole, fine. I’ll let you yell at me in the morning, all you want, I swear to god.” I was begging her for a smile, but she wouldn’t. “I just need to go to bed now. I’m just tired. I’m sorry.”
For some reason Lauren started to laugh, which only made her cry harder again. These teary jags that made her whole body shake, and I felt sick.
“What? What did I do?” I asked, exasperated. “Tell me what it is and I’ll stop. Tell me and I’ll change everything.”
“No, nothing, I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I’m crying. I’m not even really upset. I just can’t stop. I just … gimme a second.”
This was stress, I knew. You could only hold it down so long before it popped on you. It’s just too hard to walk around feeling all shut down. I could feel my whole face begin to open in a smile, a victim of my own stress. I felt so strange and powerless, standing on this drippy Paris street corner, waiting for Lauren to stop crying.
“You should learn how to treat a lady, mate.”
I looked up out of my smirk and found this Australian backpacker wearing a short-sleeved soccer jersey with a scarf. He was watching Lauren cry.
“What?” I said in disbelief.
“This gal’s in tears here and that’s funny to you, eh? Does it make you feel like you’re a tough man?”
“Fuuuuuuck you!” I said, laughing in his face.
“What did you say t’me?” he said, puffing up.
“I said, I’ll make you cry, you little baby bitch.” It felt good to yell. I wanted to wind him up and make him angry. Who the fuck was he? Let him take a swing, if that’s where this was going. I couldn’t care less.
“Unbelievable, unbelievable,” he said to himself, nodding and exhaling, trying to work himself back down. He pointed at me suddenly. “You’ll watch your mouth, mate.”
“Eat a dick, mate.” I was mimicking now, of course.
“You okay, sweetheart? Heh? You know this guy?”
“Will you fuck off already? Please! Jesus Christ,” Lauren screamed, startling the Aussie. I couldn’t help my smile again. I’d never been so proud.
The guy finally quit then, throwing up his hands and cursing us under his breath. “Fucking cunts…”
“You’re the cunt,” Lauren shouted back. “You cunty, cunting, cunter!”
Well, shit. I was in tears, I was laughing so hard. Doubling over, with my hands on my knees. And this dude looked like he was about to explode. Turning back with his jaw in a vise. Balling his fists to let me know that this was real. He would knock me down and teach me a lesson. This would be his pleasure.
But Lauren and I were laughing too hard. We were laughing at him, and laughing at nothing. It was a tired kind of laughter that can’t be slowed down or turned off.
“Fucking American assholes! Go home!”
And we roared as he said this to us, laughing. Tears in our eyes, we were laughing so hard. We held each other up in the street, just laughing. Everything would be all right if I could just keep Lauren laughing, I thought. That was all I wanted.
LIFE DURING WARTIME, PART II
“Hey, fuck you!”
Someone yells this at me, or I am yelling it back. It doesn’t matter. A man gets out of his car and challenges me to a fight. This has happened. More than you might think, actually. Who are all these men who no one really knows? One thing is certain, the quicker they get out of the car, the less they have to lose. All around. This is what makes these guys so dangerous in the first place. You would have to kill this fucking dude to make him back away from a fight. Put your hands up, faggot, you have suddenly become a concubine for this man’s violence.
So you fight. Or you don’t. Those are your only real choices. It depends on many unnamed complexities in the great natural order of men. Just like the cavemen must’ve done it. There is the night itself. And probably there is alcohol. We are fighting with our girlfriends. We hate our jobs and our coworkers. We have grudges with our parents and our siblings. We have friends who have disappointed and abandoned us. And now we have both been out in the city tonight, and this street is not big enough for the two of us. I don’t know this guy and he doesn’t know me, but we are about to get intimate.
And now, oh, boy, look, his trashy bitch girlfriend is out of the car. Talking with her hands and screeching something awful. This is bad. She is pissed off at him, or at me, I can’t tell. She is talking too much, too fast; she doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up. And this is getting sort of good now because she has him off his game.
“Get back in the car!” She is saying this to him, or he is saying it to her. And I’m just standing there, smiling that big shit-eating smile that I do. Making that one face.
“Shut the fuck up, bitch!” I am yelling this at her now, or he is yelling it at me. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Mother. Fucker.” Everyone is yelling, yelling, yelling.
And then there is nothing to be done for it. We have exhausted all good street diplomacy, and there are consequences to be paid out. So, okay, sure: let’s fight. It’s easy for me to imagine this man closing his eyes and uncoiling his body into a single punch. Smashing me in the face. This flash of white light in his hard, closed hand. I can feel the slap my body will make when it hits the cold concrete ground.
But as he roars forward like this, it’s me—I’m the one who inflicts the first blow. The only blow. Fighting dirty, because fuck him.
Hitting him hard and breaking our every unspoken code, right off the bat. I pull the U-lock from my back pocket and I swing it around wildly, like I’m trying to bury a hammer in his head. Hitting the bone. Connecting with his skull and felling him like a fucking oak tree. I see a spark suspended in the dark, static air where I’ve hit him. The delayed sound of it: CRACK! I think I’ve just broken my bike lock. I’ve never hit anything this way before, and it makes me feel a thousand feet tall.
I stare at him, rolling on the ground, holding himself so strangely, and I can’t figure out what just happened. How did he end up like that? How did his body get so small? I surprise myself with a laugh that comes rushing out like a tremendous expiration of breath. Confusion. Exaltation. Release.
But now his girlfriend is screaming. Really going nuts, with that face that she painted up for a night out on the town, running and melting all over the place. I take a step backward, stunned. Waiting for what comes next. Waiting for her to give me mine now. And when she doesn’t, when she just bursts into tears and shrinks down onto her knees, I can’t even look at her anymore.
I pick up my bike and I ride it away as fast as I can. I am standing up on the pedals, pumping like crazy. Taking off. Fleeing. Flying through the thin air. But I’m smiling again, too, and I can’t even help it. Unscarred; unscathed; untouched. It makes me turn away down a street that I don’t know. And then again, down another. And I end up taking this long circuitous route home through the neighborhoods. Because I have to now. Because it’s necessary. Because I’m so fucking smart. Because I am scared.
* * *
It would be impossible to count up all the times and ways that it has almost come to this. The simmering violence of traffic. There are days when it feels like every single car is about to pull out in front of you. Charging you at a stoplight and leaning on the horn. Accelerating through an intersection and brushing you in a blur. Sometimes traffic sharpens up and closes you into corners. Sometimes it slows down and makes a threat through the window. Laughing it or screaming it. All these angry people pointing their cars and trucks in new and threatening ways. Taking something out on you. There will always be somebody around to pay for everything.
People like to watch you flinch and stop. They like to see your foot come down off the pedal. You are expected to yield or they will show you just how close the whole thing can come. It pisses them off if you don’t. It pisses them off if you hold your line and just keep going. And it really pisses them off if you do something strange, like lean into their mirror as you pass them. Because no one is expecting real contact, no one wants to see any real violence—that will be your idea. Unwinding your fist into their door so that it dents, so that it hurts. That can get expensive fast. And now you’re the one who is looking back for a reaction. You want to make sure they’ve seen you shrug it off and ride away smiling. Because this is your neighborhood, and there is no way for them to find you here. These traffic circles and one-ways are like a forest to you. No, they don’t like your violence, either, which is what has made tonight so inevitable.
* * *
A car actually hit Lane that winter, which put everyone on edge. Lane, it’s worth noting, collected a tidy little sum for his troubles. The settlement paid his medical bills and allowed him to quit working for a year. He was ecstatic, even with the hard new limp. Lauren was convinced that Lane had let the car hit him on purpose, but I didn’t want to think about a thing like that.
Believe it or not, I used to get really angry. I used to want to fight with people. I used to want to provoke and harass them, the way that I felt harassed. I used to court violence just to see where it would go. But I’d been trying to stop all of that. It just wasn’t tenable; it takes too much out of you. It was a zero-sum game that you were never going to win. And how long could this angry-young-man phase go on for, anyway?
Lauren and I would ride our bikes together, and I would watch her suffer something else. Catcalls and drive-bys with different laughs completely. My instinct in these situations was to pull us back. I didn’t like for Lauren to escalate a confrontation with these men. The world is a sick and dangerous place, I would tell her. Be safe, play aloof; don’t give them the satisfaction. But Lauren would laugh and tell me I was a hypocrite. Everyone needs to push back against aggression. There are spaces around our bodies that we need to protect. A car would cut Lauren off at a light and she would fly her middle finger through its open window. Arresting somebody with a scowl. Calling people cunts and cocksuckers, just to see their faces blanch. She would freeze these drivers and take the last word as she rode away through the red light.
These were survival techniques. It didn’t matter if someone wanted to laugh and pretend they weren’t affected. Everyone is affected.
* * *
But even Lauren couldn’t just walk through the world saying fuck you to everyone. You have to read these situations carefully. You have to give some ground, too. There was an incident, recently, in which she had been driven home in the front seat of a police car. Coming into the house, after midnight, looking frantic. Lauren woke me out of a dead sleep to tell me how this cop had harassed her. This disgusting goateed animal, with fat shoulders and matted hair. He had turned off the engine in front of the house and insisted on taking her phone number. One last piece of business before Lauren was allowed to leave. Sitting there, in the dark of the police car, under the guise that this was all just standard operating procedure. After all, this was the man who had stopped her from getting arrested.
“Arrested for what?” I asked, sitting up in the bed. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
I had left Lauren at a bar, in Northeast D.C., and come home early. After the bands played, and the room cleared out, Lauren found herself walking the streets with Tom and Derek. The same street names, the same architecture, and yet it all felt completely different here. We almost never came to the Northeast for anything.
They eventually found themselves circling a derelict theater with boards on the windows. Its crumbling marquee shooting high above the street. They just wanted to see it, they said, as they squeezed through a hole in the fence. Stalking around the edges in the dark. Tom went up to one of the doors and pulled the handle, stepping back as it swung open and banged against the wall on the other side. To their astonishment, every light in the building was on and burning brightly. The shock of this alone almost turned them back for good. But the whole space breathed a kind of emptiness that pulled them forward. Holding their breath as they entered each next room. Derek finally broke this tension with a scream meant to announce their arrival completely. And when nothing came back they were ecstatic. Set free to go romping through the ancient hallways at their leisure. Upstairs and downstairs. In and out of offices and dressing rooms. Everything was totally and utterly wrecked; gutted and left in a magical state of disrepair. There weren’t even any seats on the main floor of the theater.
But there was, in fact, a stage. And Lauren couldn’t help herself from climbing up on it. Leaping and pirhouetting, as she performed to the empty house. Tom and Derek scaled a ladder hidden behind the curtain, and all at once they were standing over top of her. Bounding across a narrow iron catwalk. They called out, with their voices ringing off the ceiling, entreating Lauren to follow.
But as she put her hand up to shield against the glare of the lights, she thought better of this. Sitting down on the stage, she told them she would wait where she was. There was an echo of footfalls, and the whoosh of a metal door, before the room went silent. Lauren looked up at the ceiling again, noticing the frescoes in the arches for the first time. And, in this moment, she thought of me, thinking how excited she would be to bring me back here.
This was the exact moment when the lights cut out.
Lauren froze in the vibrating darkness, listening for something, anything, before calling out for Tom and Derek. Getting no response, she hurried up the seatless aisle, under the dim light of her cell phone. Down a hallway and past a concess
ions stand. Into the lobby and out the front doors. Lauren suddenly found herself standing below the once-grand marquee, staring at an empty police car. As she gathered herself to run, a second cruiser came barreling in on top of her. She froze as the goateed cop jumped out, demanding to know if she had come from inside the theater. Lauren looked at him blankly and answered no. The man paused before pushing past her and rattling the heavy door himself. Finding it locked, he turned back to Lauren.
“This was the cop who drove you home?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. He was actually trying to help me,” she said. “It was the other cops who were assholes. They dragged Tom and Derek out of the building and made them lie facedown in the street.”
This was criminal mischief in the age of the Patriot Act. This was misdemeanor trespassing in our proud National Seat. Because misdemeanors weren’t misdemeanors; they were felonies. And felonies weren’t felonies, either; they were veiled acts of terrorism. But all of this was just bluster, too. Intimidation was an instrument of control. And Lauren’s cop told her this as he moved her back, away from the scene, urging her to stop cursing the other police.
Technically, Lauren was free to go at this point. But she made the decision to follow Tom and Derek to the police station, to see if she could help. It was there that she found the goateed cop suddenly doting on her. Offering his assistance in any way he could. And, quite frankly, Lauren was in no position to reject a friend. This good-natured authority figure doing everything in his power to get a decision made on bail. But it was no use. Tom and Derek were spending this night in jail.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.
“Because you were asleep. It wasn’t like I was being arrested. You couldn’t have done anything anyway.”
I couldn’t help but bristle at this. I didn’t like hearing these kinds of things after the fact. I wanted to do something now. I was ready to hold somebody accountable.