First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  As my voice and vocabulary developed, my brat self began to come out with flashes of wit, malice, and occasional wisdom that Mother and Father heard with uneasy tolerance. For many of the things I mouthed, they could probably find no root in themselves. Like any boy, I was full of cheap enthusiasms and echoes of my environment. And that—abetted by the Cannery Row scene and with fantasies of being an international jewel thief, secret agent, kung fu master swirling in my head—wasn’t exactly their environment. I also read a ton of books and watched people. I judged people, if I remember rightly. I was a brat, really self-centered. But I’ve since learned to live with myself.

  “How do you do?” said the future Salinas Valley Lettuce Queen, lightly pressing the fingers of the grinning puppet who smelled like a horse.

  “Okay, ’n’ you?” I mumbled.

  The two other girls giggled, Alice smiled faintly, and Sensei Kan nodded and adroitly wheeled them away across the floor. Right then I could have killed him—if I’d had a hand grenade and room to throw it.

  For the rest of the hour they stood on the sidelines watching the class, talking among themselves, and occasionally pointing and giggling. At me, or so I believed.

  It turned out that the other girls thought karate was too much like work and decided to take the mace course instead. Alice, however, had found something graceful and meaningful in the movements. She bought a gi, signed up for the beginners’ eight-week course, and I taught her.

  For two months, I gave that girl personal attention. I held her beautiful feet straight while she practiced stances, steadied her hips while she kicked, braced her shoulders as she punched. In sparring, I even let her kick me—hard—in the stomach. And I only occasionally peeked between her lapels. Because the gi jacket tends to fall open in a side kick, most girls wore a tee-shirt under it, but Alice always wore an iridescent leotard with an interesting neckline.

  No one was more patient with her, no one more loyal and devoted. She smiled, nodded at everything I said, and still learned nada, zip, zero. Alice was graceful, all right, and worked hard, but she had absolutely no spatial sense, no timing. She also confused left and right. She must have made cheerleader on her smile alone.

  And yes, for those first two months I thought about asking her out for a date. But every time my internal ear could hear her saying no, she had to wash her hair, study for a test, catch up on her letter writing, et cetera—just like every girl I had ever wanted.

  I was still a virgin at sixteen, at least as far as girls were concerned. Boys didn’t count. I had played my share of grab-ass in the showers, had explored my section of the sand hills, and made the obligatory jokes about it. All the time we were also talking about girls and how to get to them. Whatever we boys might do, it wasn’t “balling.” The official thing was Doing It With a Girl.

  After two months of positioning Alice’s feet, fists, and elbows during class, I finally got up the nerve to ask the future runner-up Miss California for a date. Right away she let me take her to Fleur de Lis on Cannery Row and later, in her father’s car, let me manipulate her limbs in other ways.

  During the year and a half that we went around together, Allie showed me that girls worry just as much about impressing boys as boys do about girls. Sometimes more so. It’s just that boys are like weasels in their curiosity and their pleasure, being wired directly. Girls are more like kittens or butterflies, being wired obliquely.

  Alice also taught me that a beautiful girl needs love and companionship, just as much as a plain one. Often more so. You see, a heartbreaker like Alice, even if she’s never done a thing, soon gets a reputation among the boys: She is at once a whore and unattainable. A whore because sex is all they can think about when they see her. Unattainable because they are intimidated by her and by the others they are sure compete for her attentions. A truly beautiful and sexy woman frustrates—and so angers—the average man, who usually thinks himself homely and unworthy.

  After a couple of months of straightening her feet and uncrooking her wrists on the twist punches, I was seeing Allie as just another goofball white belt who had a long way to go before she’d be any good at karate, if ever. Then I could love her: She had become a definite person, not just a beautiful face and body in the abstract.

  I soon discovered that Allie also had a head, as well as a cutting sense of humor. With her, boys and boyish conceits were all presumed to be just a little absurd. So when I told her about becoming an international jewel thief, she just laughed.

  “You’d be caught in two minutes, Jay. You’re too basically honest, aren’t you, to creep into people’s houses and take their things? Besides, if you were really interested in becoming a jewel thief, you’d study gems, not locks, because you don’t know a thing about diamonds or emeralds. You don’t know much about being a thief, either, because nobody locks up her jewels with a padlock, f’gosh sakes. It’s either a safe with a combination, or a bank vault. So you’d have to study dynamite and demolition. Risky, dear. … Study business or law instead. With your wits and quick mouth, you’d be good at them.”

  And then she would show me what else a mouth was good for. That was a nice summer.

  Mother hated Allie.

  “She’s just a little tramp who wants to get you into her pants, James. I’m not saying she doesn’t have good taste. But you have to have the good sense, and the self-restraint, to put a trollop like her in perspective. She’s not really up to the level of a Scoffield, or a Corbin, is she?”

  “Well, Mother ...”

  “You want to find a woman with whom you can share your life, your ideals. You’re still …pure ... aren’t you, James?”

  “Yes, Mother.” That was the least of the lies I told her.

  What was school—my high school, not the Sensei’s dojo—like?

  The Sixties doctrine of “relevance” still held the neck of education in steel fangs. Irrelevant courses like ancient history, dead languages like Latin and Standard English, and arcane sciences like physics were dropped from the curriculum as quietly as corpses slipped over the rail of a plague ship. Nothing that did not prepare the student for the “real world” was permitted to survive. We were to be indoctrinated in the ways of work and play and politics of what, so our teachers thought, would be the twenty-first century. We took courses, complete with lesson plans and outside readings, in computer games theory, cryogenic medicine, situational ethics, Swahili culture, and economic feminism. The soft sciences had hardly escaped the relevance craze; these were downright mushy.

  Teaching was out, process was in. We held study groups. We did independent research. We “immersed.” We assembled “postulate outlines” of clippings from the news magazines—that was for a hist-soch course. We played with half a megabuck worth of cameras and editing equipment as part of an “appreciation of video” course.

  We touched the fashionable high points and learned nothing deep. But the twentieth century was a screwup anyway. Going deep into it was like scuba-diving in a pot of boiling pasta: tangled, slimy and, ultimately, you come up covered with burns.

  I liked languages. Learning a new one was like dressing up in costumes. So before my senior year, I had pinches and puffs of French, Bantu, Russian, Japanese, Thai, and Turkish to go along with the Danish and Italian. I learned enough on the oral-aural method to conjugate a few verbs, put together simple sentences, and imagine myself a countryman. But I usually bombed out when we got into translations of milksop versions from the national literature. Translating always seemed mechanical to me: pick up the next word, look it up in the dictionary, fit it into the syntax. Coding and decoding. Today we have specialists who do that—dull ones.

  It was not until my second year at Berkeley that I was introduced to a language that was no longer spoken and not relevant to a war-torn country. I took two semesters of Latin grammar because my major was, loosely, pre-law and my advisor was a disorganized romantic who filed my cards too late the previous semester to get me into “Leninism and the African
Enlightenment” or some equally solemn three-credit sophomore seminar.

  For fifteen weeks, I struggled through the declensions of agricola and gladius. I learned verb forms and tenses that slithered and scraped like rusty armor. Latin is a language that’s bolted and hinged like a machine and to my ear—which was comfortable with the syntax and phrasing of “We was down to the drive-in”—it sounded hard and brittle, like a roach in a pie tin.

  That was the first semester. In the second, we began translating Caesar and that was worse. I knew as much about Gaius Julius Caesar as any high school boy: Bald man. First of the Roman emperors. Stabbed by a ring of fellow senators twenty-one times in 44 B.C. Or was forty-four times in 21 B.C.? Anyway, I had once heard “Beware the Ides of March” and always confused it with income tax time.

  After three chapters of Caesar’s kindling-dry prose, I was ready to stab him myself. “At the sounding of the trumpet, we marched forth four days and met the Belgae ...” Poor Belgae! To be run over by the Roman mowing machine. March, fight, camp, march. That’s all Caesar wrote. For a great general, he came across as a stuffed shirt, a cunning diplomatist, and a steel-hearted surgeon when it came to letting blood. It wasn’t until much later that I would read his life with more interest and understanding.

  Absent from all the languages we sampled in school was Spanish. It wasn’t something we studied because it came at us from the air, off the street, on certain bands of the AM dial, and over the counters of every dimestore in town. Spanish was the second language of California and, if you didn’t have at least a lick of it, you were blind and deaf to half of what was going on. For a gringo, I could work my way along poco a poco in conversation and with signs and notices. That helped a lot when we took the AirCav into Yucatan.

  Hispanics were never a problem with me. They are survivors. Whether it’s the religion, the Indian blood, or the years of making do on their own and never leaning on the government—because no government ever truly belongs to them—they get by, raise kids, raise corn, walk slowly into the years and through the generations. They don’t go crazy in the head, eat their children, worship cats, and blow the price of a BMW 740iL up their noses. Or not many of them do. Indian and Spanish ancestors alike, they were done with all that big government, the bureaucracy, the terror, the Inquisition, auto-da-fe, and blood sacrifice on a carved stone. … All of that happened to them hundreds of years ago, and now they’ve outgrown it. Survivors.

  So it was sad that my first personal kill, the first man—boy, actually—that I took out with my own hands, was a Hispanic.

  That was one evening about six months after Allie and I had started going together. We were hanging on the edges of the crowd at The Whaling Station, down on the Row, getting beer from anybody who would order two extra, taking hits off whatever was passing around, and listening to the band, which was off key, off the beat, and off the top of the charts.

  It was a Thursday night, October, and the sun had gone down early behind a rack of clouds that could be sea fog, but might be the cutting edge of the first winter rains.

  The Hispanic boys were five, making a knot in the crowd and moving against it, tough and brittle. They had Fifties-style combed-forward haircuts, tight black jeans, and long-sleeved nylon-satin shirts in solid fluorescent colors, citron, garnet, and amethyst, all looking like Bernahhhdo out of West Side Story. They definitely did not blend into a down-jacketed, suede and blue jean crowd that in about three hours was going to scatter toward the Seventeen Mile Drive, Carmel, and points south.

  Like iron filings to a magnet, the five of them circled and then settled around Alice, who was a bright spot of golden hair and white leather jacket in the darkness of the bar.

  Cooing, chirpy voices caressed the air around her, giving her “Hey, chickie!” and “Wanna good time?” and other slightly lewd suggestions. All with heavy-lidded smiles. They were giving her one-finger touches, light brushes that were a cross between homage and dog-pawing while cutting me deftly back into the shadows of elbows and shoulders. At first Allie was laughing with it, because it was all friendly, and then she started looking my way with a frightened lift of the eyebrows.

  “Come on, Al, time to go,” I said, reaching in through their circle and extracting Allie almost faster than her feet could move. The five boys could see I was annoyed, not taking it friendly. And perhaps I used a few words and hand gestures that someone who was less buzzed with beer and pot, more sure of himself, and not so touchily proud of his beautiful lady might have avoided.

  Anyway, the circle came with us until we were all standing out on the street. The wind was kicking fretfully at papers in the comers between buildings and flagging Allie’s hair. The boys’ hands went, slowly, casually, into jeans pockets and hung there. Suddenly I didn’t want to know what was in those pockets.

  It was bad luck that her car was parked up the Row, away from the wharf, at the dark end where the asphalt breaks up in sand and weeds and rusted railroad tracks. As Allie and I headed up there, the circle of five followed like a dog pack, making growly, barking noises. The fun had quickly faded and a waspy, crawly, serious note had come on. The hands never left their high slash pockets. In the glances I took over my shoulder, I could see that the pressure of palms against hips was making them swagger like girls.

  Flankers were moving out fast. In another ten paces they would have us surrounded again. My beer buzz was clearing up fast.

  “Can you keep one of them busy?” I asked quietly, out of the side of my mouth.

  Allie had stuck with the karate course at Kan’s, but she was still only a green belt and had been talking for two weeks now of maybe dropping out. Tonight she was wearing skintight jeans and gray leather boots with four-inch stiletto heels. That made her just about helpless, unless she flopped on her back and shot up with those street-diggers. Accurately. Once.

  “I—I’ll try.”

  “Better stay behind me,” I decided. Except there wasn’t any behind. Before I could get my back to a car or something and limit the field of battle, they were around us in the center of the street. No taunting or standoff now, the first punch was coming in low at six o’clock in the ring even before the other boys were fully in position. I blocked it with a back-fist and countered with a hip rotation and mulekick to the groin that missed by inches and hammered his thighbone. If I had wanted to break out of the circle, I could have walked through him like a door. But that would have left Allie inside and vulnerable. So I spun in line one-eighty degrees and put the second kick high into the throat of the man at twelve o’clock. The bright-colored shirts were making their positions easy to spot in the shadows. Still, the kick skittered up his breastbone and thunked under his chin. Neither man went down and that was a bad sign. Three o’clock and nine came in to pin my arms. Where was the fifth man? I bumped Allie out of the way with my hip and snaked my arms up to escape the pin, then swung them right back down for simultaneous double-fists to the groin. Where was the fifth man? The move caught one of the boys low in the stomach, no help. But the other was hit square in the nuts and he cried out. That cry was a signal to my battle circuits and I flipped over to full attack. As he doubled over, I brought my left knee up into his face and both hands down in a cross-chop across the back of his neck. Bone snapped like a bundle of dry twigs. Where was the fifth man? A hot point dug into my back, just above the kidneys, from the twelve o’clock side. I was turning before I knew it, and a line of pain stitched across to my shoulder blade as the knife tried to settle in but slipped past. Was that the fifth man? My turn was led by a cross-arm block that bulled aside his knife arm. That opened him up and my counter punch went three inches into his solar plexus. The second alternate went into his throat. The third into the center of his forehead. And the fourth fanned the air because he was already down. The last beat in the series was a stab I took under the left armpit, straight in with a five-inch blade, and that was the fifth man. I could feel liquid metal begin to fill my lung and knew that in three seconds I wou
ld be bubbling and spraying blood. But I wouldn’t die for a couple, three minutes and before then the fight would be over. The idiot pulled his knife out of me, probably thinking he wanted to have it for another stab and not knowing that as long as it was in my side, he had a handle that could take me anywhere. I lifted into a sidekick that pulled all sorts of bloody strings under my ribs and put the edge of my foot squarely in his throat. He just about flipped over backwards. And that broke the circle.

  The count was two down and three wobbling when they scattered, one of them dragging the boy who took the three punches. That left me, standing tall and bleeding; Allie, with a face as white as her leather coat; and the man with the broken neck.

  Sometimes you can just walk away from a mess like that. Not always, but sometimes.

  His name was Emilio Lopez. They guessed that later from a tattoo and a steel ID bracelet. He was an undocumented alien, or the child of such, and didn’t have a scrap of paper on him. He wasn’t a citizen, anyway, and no one came forward to press charges.

  I was an Anglo from a good home, under eighteen, and only a brown belt at the time. It was a fight with knives and there was the honor of a white girl to protect. So, in the flashing red and blue lights of ambulances and patrol cars, the Monterey police wrote it up as self-defense while the medics packed the hole under my arm.

  They bundled me off to the emergency ward. The resident on duty probed and stitched, then confirmed that it was a muscle wound and the knife had turned on a rib. Meanwhile, the patrolmen finished up their paperwork and then told Allie and me to get our butts out to “Assholemar,” which is what they called our part of town, and to stay there.

  When we pulled into the driveway at the mock-adobe, it was dark. Both my parents were at sea, Father on the Petramin Explorer II and mother on the good ship Cutty Sark, which she had begun to sail with regularly. Allie took her wounded warrior upstairs, undressed him and made gentle, tender love with her mouth.