I nearly faint.
I expect him to whip out a warrant for my arrest on felony burglary charges.
Instead he says, “We’ve had a noise complaint, ma’am,” resting his hands on his utility belt, inches from a very large gun. I am sure it is Mrs. Slatter who complained. Now that she’s back from Vegas, I’m sure she’s been calling the police every hour on the hour, given the number of people in my apartment.
A quick look behind me and I take in the scene as he sees it: loud, thumping music that is shaking the walls. An apartment jammed full of drunk, disorderly groupies smoking pot. Bob in his pink bathrobe. Vishnu, who looks like she’s in the process of removing her shirt.
“Can I speak to a Jane McGregor? The person who lives here?” he asks me.
“Er,” I pause. Now would be a good time to lie. “I don’t know her.”
“Jane!” shouts Ron from the back of the room. “Jane McGregor! I’ve got something that will cheer you up.”
I ignore him.
The officer looks at me.
“Jane!” he cries again. “JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANE.”
He’s staring right at me. So is the officer.
“You don’t know her?” the officer asks me skeptically.
“Er,” I say.
Ron, who is coming closer, is doing a few wild, gyrating spin-moves to the dance music.
“Right, well, I’ll turn it down, officer,” I say.
“Turn it down now,” he says.
“I will,” I say, watching Ron making progress toward me.
“Now,” he says.
“OK.”
“ ‘Now’ means I’m not leaving until the music is turned down,” he says.
Ron is almost to me. He does one last spin-move, during which his curled up flip-flops get trapped in the giant cuffs of his oversized pants. Flailing, he wildly flaps his arms, looking like some scrawny, plucked bird trying to take flight. I see him coming in slow motion, his long, wirelike body a tangle of limbs headed for me. He collides into me, sending me into the officer, and the impact of the collisions shoots a small baggie of white pills into the air, which I see explode over our heads as we tumble into the hallway.
We land in a heap on the floor, and a small shower of white E pills rains down upon our heads.
The officer sighs loudly, before struggling to his feet.
“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” he says, dusting off small white pills from the front of his uniform. He grabs me by the arm and lifts me to my feet. Ron, who is notorious for getting out of tight spots, points to me.
“Those aren’t mine, officer. They’re hers,” he says, beating me to the punch by about half a second. I would be quicker, except the fall knocks the wind out of me.
“Would you believe they’re aspirin?” I cough, lamely.
The officer is examining one of the pills.
“Aspirin, right,” he says, taking me by the arm. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Where?”
“I’m going to have to take you both in,” the officer tells me. “Don’t try anything funny, all right?”
I can’t think of a single, solitary joke, anyway.
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS
MUNICIPAL DEPARTMENT
SUMMONS FOR TRIAL
The plaintiff(s) named above has filed a complaint in this court to have you evicted. A true and complete copy of this complaint is attached.
THEREFORE, you, the defendant(s) is/are hereby summoned to appear in person before this Court on May 30, 2002 at 9:30 A.M., at which time and place a trial will occur.
Signed:
DOROTHY BROWN
CLERK OF THE CIRCUIT COURT, COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR DEFENDANTS:
ON THE DATE AND AT THE TIME SHOWN ABOVE, THE COURT WILL DECIDE WHETHER YOU WILL HAVE TO MOVE OR WHETHER YOU CAN CONTINUE TO STAY. YOU MUST BE ON TIME FOR COURT. HAVING TO GO TO WORK, BEING ILL, OR DOING SOMETHING ELSE DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN MISS YOUR COURT DATE. IF YOU DO NOT COME TO COURT, THE COURT MAY ORDER YOU TO MOVE WITHIN A PERIOD OF NO MORE THAN TEN BUSINESS DAYS.
19
Ron and I don’t speak as we sit side by side in the back of the squad car.
Ron attempts a conversation with a “Dude, this sucks,” but I ignore him. I am so angry at him, I could spit.
At the county jail, which looks less like a jail and more like a really old college dorm, I am booked, fingerprinted, and photographed. Of all the people at Ron’s party, I can’t believe that we’re the only ones who get dragged away in handcuffs. Ron and I are separated after the booking, when Ron shouts to me, “Don’t tell them anything until you get an attorney,” which causes all the cops in the place to give me a suspicious look.
“I don’t have anything to tell, you moron,” I shout back at Ron.
I am put in an open cell-like room with a few metal cots cemented to the walls. It looks more like a really poorly funded camp than a jail, and I almost expect to find the guards wearing red T-shirts with Camp Woebegone on them. In the corner, there’s a pay phone, with a line of three by it. I take my place in line and try not to make eye contact.
One woman, who smells strongly of gin, is passed out in the corner, and next to her are two very pregnant women sitting and talking.
I have never had much upper body strength. I suspect if any one of the women wanted to take me — even one of the pregnant ones — she could. But they seem less interested in fighting and more interested in talking about whether or not J. Lo has had a butt implant.
“You know that’s just not natural,” one of them is saying.
“It is,” another answers.
“It doesn’t move like a natural butt.”
“What does that even mean?” the other one says.
And on and on.
I feel like I’m in a salon, not a jail.
“What are you in for?” says a woman to my right. She’s wearing a bandanna across her forehead like the Karate Kid.
“My ex-boyfriend threw Ecstasy pills into an officer’s face,” I say, and then immediately wish I’d said murder.
Bandanna woman laughs. “I boosted my ex-boyfriend’s car,” she informs me.
The woman on the phone starts to yell.
“You just tell Marla she better stay away from my man,” the woman says. “I mean it. I don’t want to find one of that skank’s Lee Press Ons in my bedroom, or I swear, I’ll kill that bitch.”
It figures that women let men drive them to jail. What sort of power do they have over us anyway? It just doesn’t seem fair.
I finally get the phone after waiting an hour, and I call my dad collect. For health reasons, I hold out the phone about a foot from my ear, which makes hearing and speaking difficult.
Dad answers, sounding bleary, like he’s been sleeping.
“Charges? What charges?” Dad is shouting at the operator who is trying to get him to accept the collect call.
“Dad, it’s Jane. I’m in jail,” I say. “Accept the charges!”
The operator asks Dad again.
“Who?”
“Jane. Your daughter, Jane,” I say, but the operator is blocking me out.
“We don’t need any vinyl siding,” Dad shouts, and hangs up the phone.
I sigh.
I call Todd next. Surprisingly, he does accept the collect call charges. It seems he’s been expecting me to call from jail.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Mom?” Todd cries, first thing. He doesn’t even seem interested in the fact that I’m in jail.
“Todd, I was going to call, but everything happened so fast.”
“Well, you should have called me. Mom called me herself and told me about everything.”
“Did she tell you where she was?”
“No, but she said she’s talked to a lawyer.”
“Really?” My heart sinks. As much as I think my dad has been a terrible pill the last few months (and really, almost their entire marriage), the
thought of my parents separating makes me feel sad and more than a little guilty. It’s clearly partly my fault for bad-mouthing Dad constantly and for living in an apartment I can’t afford.
“Who’s going to take care of Dad?” Todd asks, as if Dad is an invalid. “What will he eat?”
“It’s about time he learned to cook for himself, I think,” I say.
“Excuse me, but I really need to use that phone,” says the woman standing behind me. I can only imagine she is a prostitute, since she’s wearing silver platform boots and a flamingo-pink micro-miniskirt.
“Enough parent-talk, Todd. Can you get me out of jail?”
“Everything is always about you, isn’t it?” Todd sighs.
“I’m in jail. Forgive me if I can’t afford to be sensitive at the moment,” I say.
“What have you done this time?” Todd asks me, as if I am a repeat felon.
“It’s a long story,” I say. “It’s not my fault.”
“It never is,” Todd says.
I give the short version of events. Todd is laughing so hard on the other end of the phone he can barely talk.
“That’s not helping me,” I say.
“Only you, Jane,” he manages after taking a few deep breaths. “Only you would end up in jail because of an ex-boyfriend drug-dealer. Wait until Kyle hears about this.”
I panic. “You CAN’T tell him,” I shout.
I can’t imagine anything worse than Kyle knowing.
“I am so going to tell him,” Todd says, reverting to a kind of Valley girl lisp.
“You can’t. I’ll kill you. I swear.”
“I am going to call him right now.”
“TODD,” I scream, desperate. “Please don’t. PLEASE. He’ll never let me hear the end of it. Todd, I’m begging you. Don’t.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”
“TODD! If you tell him, I’ll tell Mom and Dad who REALLY broke grandmother’s antique vase.”
“I doubt they’ll care about that now,” Todd says, but he sounds uncertain.
“Mom cried about that for a week,” I say.
“Well,” Todd hesitates. “Breaking a vase doesn’t compare to jail.”
Everything is always a contest to Todd.
“Just don’t tell Kyle. I will KILL you.”
“Maybe,” he says.
“Now, will you get me out of here?”
“OK, I’ll make some calls,” Todd says, switching into problem-solver mode. “Oh, and Jane. Don’t drop the soap.”
“That’s only in men’s prison,” I snap.
I suppose it is official. I am now not only an unemployed degenerate, but also a jailbird. I think this is about as far as I can fall.
I’ve never wished so hard to be back at my parents’ house, even if it may be a broken home. There are many worse things, I decide, than having to go live at home again. Jail is definitely worse.
I spend the night awake, fearing that one of the pregnant women might stab me with a shiv while I sleep (I’ve seen Oz, I know how it is), and blinking back the garish fluorescent lights overhead that never go off. It’s almost like being trapped in a cubicle, except for the gray metal bars and the fact that instead of plastic potted plants as decoration, there’s a small pool of vomit in the corner, next to the seatless aluminum toilet.
The next morning, as most of the other women get out, I sit and wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
My clothes are beginning to smell. I wish that during my layoff period I’d taken some Zen meditation classes. They would have come in handy now.
I decide that perhaps I let things go too far. That perhaps my whole problem is that I don’t set up boundaries with people. That despite the fact that I can be hostile and generally unfriendly, no one seems to take me seriously. I must look like the sort of person people can walk all over. I must look like a wimp.
How else to explain the fact that my apartment is now a halfway house for the city’s worst degenerates? Or that I’m in jail because I’m friends with the city’s worst degenerates? When I get out of jail, I decide, I am going to work on setting up boundaries. I’m going to work on telling people “no.” Maybe that’s my whole problem. Maybe it’s not that men like Mike take advantage of me, but that I let them do it.
The guard calls my name around ten, when I’m starved, and I think I might eat my own shirt. Todd is waiting for me in the adjoining room. The minute I walk through, he snaps my picture with the digital camera.
“Blackmail material,” he says.
“Great,” I say.
“You smell,” he tells me when I get close enough to punch him in the arm.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You know I had to take a sick day for this,” he says. Todd never calls into work sick, and he hardly ever takes his vacation time. He hoards it as if, like precious metals, it will gain value over time.
“I appreciate it,” I say.
“Do you have any idea how much it cost to bail you out?” he asks me. He doesn’t wait for me to finish. “Let’s just say you really owe me.”
“OK, I get it,” I say.
“I’m thinking indentured servitude,” he says.
“Fine,” I say.
“You’re lucky Mom isn’t around at the moment to see you like this,” he says.
“Great,” I say.
“Between jail and losing your jobs, you sure make it easy to be the good kid in the family,” Todd says.
Todd drives me home in relative silence. He asks only what jail was like, taking an unusual interest in small details like the group toilet.
“Todd, are you gloating?” I ask him.
“Maybe,” he says.
At my apartment, I discover that Landlord Bob has made good on his promise to change my locks. My key no longer works. I ask Todd to wait for me.
“What’s wrong now?” Todd whines.
* * *
I am buzzing Landlord Bob’s apartment, but he refuses to answer. I know he is in there, I can hear his raspy breathing, but he refuses to open the door.
Finally, after ten minutes of pounding and tapping out messages in Morse code, he shouts, “GOEZ AWAYZ. NO TALK.”
“Bob — open up and come talk to me like a man!”
I don’t know why I felt the need to add “like a man” because Bob in his pink fuzzy robe is not much of a man to begin with. Still, I have the court notice in my hand and it says I have a place to sleep for another twenty-four hours.
“At least unlock it for me and let me get my clothes,” I say.
Bob considers this a moment. “NO!” he shouts.
I kick his door hard in frustration, then I remember my bedroom window, and in a few minutes I am snaking up my fire escape like Ron and attempting to sneak into my own apartment. The window slides open, and I sneak inside. There’s no sign of the muses or any party-goers. I try not to assess the damage to my apartment, although I can see plenty of empty beer cans and there’s the distinct smell of a fraternity house. Instead, I run to my bedroom and throw clothes in a bag, along with Mike’s folder from under my mattress.
“You’ve been evicted?” Todd cries, when I come down carrying my duffel bag. “Unbelievable.”
“Can I stay with you?” I ask, hopeful.
Todd scoffs. “Well, you can if you’d like, but my girlfriend’s moved in.”
“Deena? You let Deena move in with you?”
“We’ve gotten to that stage,” he says.
“Todd,” I say, flabbergasted. “You never get to that stage.”
“Well, what can I say? Even I’m not immune to love.”
“Now that’s a serious personal milestone for you, Todd. I’m really proud.”
“Oh, stop it,” Todd sighs, but he’s smiling. “At any rate, it’s probably better if you go back and stay with Dad.”
“Great. But I need you to take me someplace first,” I say.
Todd pulls up in front of the Kinko’
s near Dad’s house and puts the car in park. Todd has assumed I am making photocopies of my resume.
“I’m surprised you want to do this now,” he says. “Surprised but impressed.”
“I’ll be fifteen minutes,” I say.
Dusk falls and the wind picks up as I duck into Kinko’s. Instantly, I smell Wite Out and photocopier toner. There are college kids on the computers in the corner, dark circles under their eyes, hunched over their grande lattes. I’m going to finally make Mike pay, I think. I’m going to make two copies of his personnel file and send one to his fiancée and one to CNBC.
I pick a machine, put the card in, and start making copies. One piece of paper comes out before the machine jams.
I glance over my shoulder at the Kinko’s worker behind the counter who is trying to pick up a stick of a woman wearing red-striped jogging pants. She’s trying to get pricing on spiral-bound notebooks, and he’s trying to look down her shirt.
I move over to the next empty copier, and start copying.
The second machine spits out a piece of paper that’s black. Entirely black. I touch it and my hands come back covered in toner — the powdery substance flaking off my fingers and spilling onto the toe of one of my shoes.
I look up, but the Kinko’s guy is still occupied. There are no other empty machines.
I wonder if this is a sign.
At the front service counter, I wait in line behind the woman in the red-striped jogging pants. She can’t seem to decide whether she wants a blue binding or a red binding for her term paper. The Kinko’s employee can’t seem to decide whether he wants to concentrate on her left or right boob.
I look at the folder in my hands. Mike deserves it and much more. He deserves to lose his job, and his fiancée, and his new shiny silver Porsche. If there were justice in the world, these files would be printed on a double-spread in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times, and there’d be a billboard on Waveland, outside Wrigley Field, detailing his many misdeeds.
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