by Josh Barkan
“Hey, you! Midget,” he said. “Where’s your boss.”
The dwarf dropped the rabbit to the floor, gently. He seemed calm. He seemed like this wasn’t the first tense moment he had experienced in his life.
“The manager is out now,” the dwarf said.
“No, he’s not,” the young man said. “Who the fuck is that behind you?” And, for the first time, I noticed a man counting money in the back of the trailer. The man at the end wore a suit. I realized, now, he had been the ringmaster during the performance.
The young gangster grabbed the hand of the dwarf and lifted him in the air, so he dangled with his legs kicking. The gangster went to the back of the trailer to the ringmaster. “You’re late on your fucking payments,” he said.
“Business has been slow,” the ringmaster said.
“Liar. The tents are full. I saw it myself, today. And the jefe doesn’t care if your business has been slow. I’m taking the midget as payment, for now. The jefe says he wants a midget. He says he wants someone to dance for him. He says he’s bored.” The gangster pulled out a gun. He dropped the dwarf to the floor. “Get up,” he told the dwarf. “Stand up. Or are you too short? Dance for me. Dance for me, you ugly piece of shit. Dance for me and maybe you’ll grow.”
The dwarf looked at the gun. He stood up from the floor and began to dance.
The gangster looked over at Arturo and me. “And you, faggot!” he shouted, pointing his gun at me. “What the hell are you looking at, you fucking pansy? Does this make you sick? Does all of this dancing make you sick? Take off your pants. Take your pants off and dance with the midget.”
I took my pants off and moved next to the dwarf. The ringmaster made no sounds of protest. Arturo said, “No,” but the gangster shot at the floor in front of him and the sound of the gun burst through my eardrums.
“Get in front of the midget,” the gangster said. I walked in front of the dwarf. “Now, you! Midget. Pretend to fuck the faggot. Show him who’s on top. Get up on a stool and show us you can make him your whore.”
The dwarf got up on a stool and pretended to press his body against me like he was making love. And maybe it was the sight of the priest, earlier, coming out of the circus tent, but I felt, once more, the presence of Padre Francisco, and I bent forward crying.
The gangster leaned back, roaring. “Oh, I knew it. I knew you were a maricón! This is too much.” He wiped tears of laughter from his eyes. He took the dwarf and went to the door. “If any of you says a word about this, if any of you says anything, you’re dead.”
He pointed his hand in the air like a pistol and fired; then he left with the dwarf.
—
This morning, I went up to the elevated highway to run. I needed time to think. I needed to make sense of what had happened to me at the circus. Arturo was looking frantically for his friend, the dwarf. The ringmaster had told him to keep quiet about the whole affair. He’d told Arturo he would make the payment soon, and that the dwarf would be returned then. He begged Arturo not to go to the police. “Just shut up about the whole thing,” he said. “Shut up about it and everything will turn out best. If you get the police involved they’ll come after me. They’ll say I did something wrong. They always screw up everything.”
The ringmaster was asking for silence in a country that is always asking for silence. This morning, before I went running, I picked up the newspaper, and I saw a headline about the new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. The president told the press they were writing too many negative things about the country. They were writing about too much crime instead of all the wonderful, positive things taking place in the country. “Write about the real news,” the president said. “Don’t write about the junk.”
Arturo told me he wouldn’t stay silent about his friend. After the circus, I had accompanied him to the police, at the nearest station. We went in to file an urgent report of a kidnapping. We told the police officer exactly what had happened—minus me standing without my pants and the dwarf pretending to have sex with me.
“When do you think you will have some information?” Arturo said. “When can we expect to hear something? I don’t want this case to become just like one of the others. I want you to do something about this man. He’s like a father to me.”
“You can rest assured we will look into the matter fully,” the police officer said. He took the printout of the case and put it on a stack of others. There must have been twenty-five cases sitting in the tray above his desk. He seemed in no rush to touch any of them. He asked his secretary for some tea. “Give me some extra sugar,” he said, and he squeezed at her bottom.
Arturo and I had spent the last two days driving around the city looking for any sign of the man with the baseball cap and the red leather jacket. If we could find him, Arturo said, we would tell some other police officers where he was located. Or we would free his friend the dwarf and not even bother with the police. “That’s the only way to get anything done in this country now,” Arturo said. “If you see your own bicycle has been stolen, you have to steal it back.”
I was petrified, of course, as to what would happen to Arturo’s friend. The more hours after a crime begins in Mexico, the less chance it will ever be solved. The case slips into a collective amnesia. The whole country is weighed down with the guilt of disappeared people who were loved but forgotten.
But as I ran, what concerned me most wasn’t, I have to admit, the dwarf. What concerned me most were my own efforts at amnesia. I had never told anyone of Padre Francisco. I had never shared my inner secret. And the wound that was festering within me wasn’t only the wound of being abused by him. In my mind, the questions that I had turned over and over, and that I turned over and over again as I ran, were: Was I responsible for my abuse? Had I somehow led Padre Francisco on? Had I enticed him? Or, was I gay because he had somehow made me that way?
And yet, as I ran along the upper floor of the highway, it came to me that for far too long I had been conflating the two—Padre Francisco and me. I had been assuming there was some relationship between the two, when there was none. I realized this as I thought about the dwarf being forced to entertain the gangster, and as I thought over the whole incident at the circus. The gangster had forced the dwarf to perform for him. The gangster had put a gun in front of him. What choice did the dwarf have? If he didn’t dance, he would have been dead meat. The gangster had ridiculed the dwarf for being a dwarf, but he didn’t become a dwarf because of the cruelty of being put on exhibition. He was a dwarf and had always been a dwarf. And he would die a dwarf. The cruelty of the gangster had nothing to do with who the dwarf, fundamentally, was.
Likewise, I had intertwined the two. I had confused my sexuality with the abuse of Padre Francisco. I had assumed I was somehow responsible for what he had done to me, and though I knew it shouldn’t be the case, I felt guilt for being gay. I felt that being gay was a sin. I felt that my sexuality—who I was at my core—was wrong. But if the dwarf was no more responsible for himself than being born who he was, then why should I torment myself for who I am?
Slowly, methodically, I worked through these ideas as I ran along the pavement. It might seem I should have come to these conclusions years ago. It might seem these ideas were so simple that surely I would have understood them before. But until the violence of the moment of being forced to dance with the dwarf, of being forced to be his victim, playing out the role, in some way, that I had once played out with Padre Francisco—yet as a full grown adult who could now think about what he had just experienced—I could not come to these conclusions.
I ran along the upper roof of the city, and I could see layers of clouds upon clouds, just as the mind is layered in all of its confusion. I saw the twinning of lampposts as they came out of the sides of the pavement, climbing up with hard metal, splitting forcefully into two lights that lead against and away from each other. I saw a crow attack a smaller bird and dive at it and try to humiliate the other bird, forcing it away from its hidden
nest beneath the highway. I looked down at the traffic on the lower floor, rushing back and forth, cars coming in and out, and I realized the cars stop for no one, you have to break your own path forward through the traffic.
—
This morning, after running, after taking a shower to clean every inch of my body, I put on my crispest white cotton shirt. I took out an old iron and unwrinkled the fabric. I put on a tie, although I never wear a tie to the office—only when I go out on the road to sell and promote U.S. Wheat. I put on a blue blazer, a pair of smooth khaki pants, and I polished my shoes. I didn’t have to go into the office, today. Technically, I was off because I was headed out on the road tomorrow.
I put my running shoes in the closet. I had been running away from myself for years.
When I arrived at the office, I asked my boss, the secretary, and my other coworker for a meeting at eleven. They looked at me, surprised to see me in the office and so dressed up. My boss looked me up and down. He said, “What’s up with the spiffy clothes? You going to communion today?” He said the last words in a sarcastic tone. He knew I almost never went to church. “How about at eleven-fifteen?” he said. He always had to have the last word.
“I can’t do it then,” I said. “It has to be at eleven.” I was tired of him always pushing us around in the office. It was all the same to him—11:00 or 11:15—so I told him it had to be at eleven.
At eleven we all gathered around the conference room table. The boss had a box of Cracker Jack with him. He didn’t care for local, Mexican snacks, and he bought junk food at the U.S. embassy commissary.
When they were all gathered, I closed my eyes and I saw an image of Arturo’s friend, the dwarf. I saw him encouraging me, pulling his handkerchief longer and longer until I laughed. I saw an image, in my mind, of Padre Francisco behind me, and I took the handkerchief and I tied up Padre Francisco with the dwarf’s cloth, binding his hands and feet, wrapping the cloth, of bright yellow and blue handkerchiefs, around Padre Francisco’s eyes. I did not open my eyes, at first. I kept them closed as I spoke. “I have something I want to tell you. For thirty-seven years I have denied who I am. I have been in the closet my whole life.” I paused. My voice had started out quavering, a bit, but now it was strong. “I am gay,” I said. I opened my eyes and looked firmly at my boss. His mouth was paused, in midair, with bits of snack floating in mid-arc. And then he continued chewing and said, “You need to get me that presentation to go to Colombia. You’re late on that. Everything else is going to be fine.”
THE PRISON BREAKOUT
This morning, I took the first steps to help a prisoner in a maximum-security prison in Mexico make a breakout. I brought in a metal file in the base of my briefcase. I have a black, simple nylon bag, which I have worn for years, as I speak to death row inmates. Usually I carry the bag in the U.S., bringing files to support and represent death row cases in the U.S. I have been living in Mexico City for twenty-two years now. I am a U.S. national. I am also a writer. I was down in Mexico City for five years, writing away, trying to have an intellectual life, reading books seriously, and living the cheaper life that is possible in Mexico, writing some fiction but then basically getting more and more involved in tracking down nonfiction stories for magazines and putting together a book of essays about all of the humanity that I found swirling about me in Mexico. That wasn’t going to pay the bills alone, so I took a job working for the U.S. government, looking into the background of death row inmates in the U.S. who are Mexican. Before any of the cases is finally exhausted someone has to, by law, check to see if there are any mitigating circumstances that might help in favor of the death row inmate. Someone has to go into the town of the inmate, or wherever they come from, and speak to the family members and to the people who grew up with the inmate, to see what kind of circumstances the prisoner grew up in, and to see if there is any background information which the court should know about that might help to explain how the prisoner became such a deadly individual.
This is strange work, in that I am constantly surrounded by people who know they raised a killer, a true killer; and I myself, while I have a lot of sympathy for these killers, do not deny that in 97 percent of the cases the man in prison is someone who genuinely did murder someone. But the more you get into this business, tracking down information about the people behind bars, you can’t help but notice many of the cases do not stack up. Many times, it’s clear someone behind bars simply could not have been the person who committed the crime he’s been convicted of.
For years and years, when I came across those cases, I simply presented my findings to the court. I did my research as best I could. My job has not been to reopen cases, and I don’t generally see my job that way. As I said, in most cases the man is guilty. But guilty or not, you can say I am hired to see the humanity of the prisoners as they work their way through the U.S. justice system, until most of them, after they exhaust all possibilities, are finally put to death.
My work, which is paid for, is for the criminal justice system in the U.S. I am not paid to help or to work with prisoners in Mexico. Down in Mexico, they don’t have the death penalty. But they do happily put prisoners behind bars.
The case of Jésus Martinez, in Mexico, is a case I would normally never have been caught up in, precisely because there is no one to investigate cases like Martinez’s in Mexico. There are no court-appointed researchers in Mexico to find mitigating circumstances about someone put in the slammer for life. Finding an “impartial judge” is even harder in Mexico. There is not a jury system in Mexico the way we have in the U.S. There are not the checks and balances that can force a judge to hold back, to momentarily pause and consider which ways he may be wrong in his assumptions, or which ways the police may have taken evidence improperly, or which ways witnesses may be lying. Instead, the judge is like a god down here, who processes case after case, slowly, with witnesses often rounded up by the police and told they’d better write down on paper what the police want or they’re going to be beaten up. I don’t want to crap on the system of justice in Mexico too much. No system is perfect, anywhere. Some systems don’t even exist, in some countries—that is, in some countries, where there is, for example, shariah, the victim is lined up at a stake and stoned to death to enforce God’s will. Mexico is nothing like that. And yet, even with a judge, a robe, and the occasional Latin word thrown in, it is certainly not a place where I would want to be charged with a crime.
In the case of Martinez, the main piece of evidence against him is that he is deaf and he knows sign language. Someone went into a bank and pointed to the teller, and without spoken words, using only his hands, directed the teller to give him all the money. He had an accomplice in the case, a man he used sign language with during the robbery. Everyone clearly saw two men using sign language. The teller behind the counter put money into the bag she was given, at a Bancomer bank, as slowly as possible. She followed the procedures she was given when she’d trained to become a teller. She put an ink bomb in the bag with the 500-peso notes the thief was taking. The ink bomb was supposed to explode, later, to mark the bills, so they could be tracked down by the cops. But as she was following the procedures, perfectly, and after she’d pressed the button beneath her counter to indicate a robbery was in progress, and just as the co-conspirator in the robbery was holding an elderly woman hostage in the back of the bank to let the tellers know they should hand over the money quickly and without fuss, the teller handed over the money in the bag the robber had given her, the bag was just in front of the face of the crook at the counter, and the ink bomb exploded in his face. In pandemonium, the second bank robber, holding his gun to the temple of the elderly woman, shot her dead. Both of the men committing the robbery signed back and forth it was time to flee. Apparently, according to someone watching the whole thing—there were fifty at the crime scene in the bank—the first robber signed to the other in sign language, “What the hell have you done? How could you have killed that woman?”
T
he second signed back, “I didn’t mean to, but you scared me when you jumped back from the bag.”
“Run, run,” the first crook signed.
They ran out of the bank, to bicycles they had waiting. They were both dressed in black, wearing ski masks. The crime occurred in the part of Mexico City where the Avenida Isabel la Católica enters an area of printers’ rows, where hundreds of little businesses print T-shirts, plastic mugs, and business cards, etc. The two rode off on small BMX bicycles, riding as fast as they could, the first crook holding the bag of money, a burlap sack that normally holds coffee beans and that was covered with ink stains and filled with worthless bills. They swerved in and out of the hundreds of small buyers who had come from around the city to order their little entrepreneurial projects in the printers’ rows. The crooks disappeared behind the printing machines, into the cracks of Mexico City. The few, fat cops—otherwise known as panzones—ran after the crooks, one of the cops trying to shoot at the criminals as they escaped, but failing to shoot either of them. Back in the bank, people fell to the ground in fear. The old woman, a grandmotherly type, in a nicely ironed brown dress with a sash carefully tied around her waist, her gray hair neatly combed back in place, had crumpled to the ground, dead. Her family would never see the lovely abuelita again.
Needless to say, the case was a mess, as all cases are a mess, in that there was a genuine victim, a genuine tragedy at hand. A week later, Martinez was hauled in to the local police station by a local cop. He was a deaf man. He knew sign language. He had a BMX bicycle, which he liked to do tricks on. Never mind he didn’t fit any of the other descriptions of either of the thieves. He was short when the men who’d committed the crime—everyone agreed, when I eventually interviewed them—were tall. Martinez didn’t have any money when they found him. There was no evidence of any coffee bag and none of the 500-peso bills were discovered with him. His whole family agreed, independently, that he had been at a birthday party at the time of the crime—a party for him. He worked as a mime in a troupe, making money downtown doing street theater, when he wasn’t working in the mechanics’ garage where he worked the rest of his time. The man who ran the garage was questioned independently, by me, about the birthday party. Everyone agreed on the color of clothes Martinez had been wearing at the birthday party; where the party had been held; that friends of his, who he mimed with, had been at the party; what food they had eaten at the party; and the exact time of the party, because the performance troupe of a friend—a group of clowns—had been brought in to perform.