The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Some bondsmen must not have liked that development, I remarked.

  It did take away their bread and butter, the Commissioner laughed.

  So more misdemeanors get cited out, but—

  But meanwhile, there’s an increase in the jail population in this state due to the increase in wobbler charges. The bail people have failed to understand that almost all street activity is now criminalized. They want a piece of that, but they don’t understand that these street folks don’t have any money.

  * * *

  A HYPOTHETICAL “WOBBLER” CASE

  Suppose that a man strikes his wife, who calls the police.

  Penal Code 273.5 (misdemeanor) Corporal injury by spouse of person cohabitating

  BAIL: $2,500 (1997-98)

  BAIL: $5,000 (1998-99)

  or

  Penal Code 273.5 (felony) Corporal injury by spouse of person cohabitating

  BAIL: $10,000 (1997-98)

  BAIL: $25,000 (1998-99)

  * * *

  In effect, wobblers allow the court to choose between making bail just barely affordable (or not) for hard-pressed defendants, or else utterly beyond reach. In the hands of wise magistrates, such discretion must be beneficial. In careless or brutal hands, it enables abuse. —Penal code 11337, Lam was saying, is possession of a controlled substance. It can be either a felony or a misdemeanor. But in many jurisdictions, the D.A. will automatically file a felony every time.

  That fact told more about the D.A.s in those jurisdictions than about the defendants, and it made me sad. I remembered reading about the Greek lawgiver Solon, who supposedly made death the punishment for every crime. When they asked him why, he said: For the lesser crimes, death is deserved, and I have no greater penalty left for the greater crimes. In the prosecution of such wobbler crimes I seemed to see (on a lesser scale, to be sure) the same sort of ruthlessly inflexible punitiveness.

  It may be that too much discretion and too little are equivalent judicial evils. Perhaps gloomy disgust is the inevitable byproduct of any human attempt to quantify justice. Bail! How strange, bitter, and slippery it is!

  | 157 |

  I mean, where are our priorities here? said Commissioner Lam. This one defendant, all we did was give her a set of teeth and she started smiling. These people don’t wanna be out here smelling like they do. What we do at drug court is teach. I release him; he’s high; and he’s gonna get high again. You wanna plant that seed for next time and next time. I say to them, you’re taking that jailhouse with you everywhere you go until you give up that jailhouse.

  Would you favor O.R. over bail, or vice versa?

  I do not have a big isssue against O.R. or against bail. Both of them have a place. But one thing I will say. When you bail somebody, you can just bail them. But when you O.R. somebody, you can attach conditions like they have to attend a drug program. And one other thing I want to say: At least eighty percent of my O.R.s do show up in court.

  Well, can you suggest any improvement to the way things are now?

  What I dream of is a pretrial triage system, he said. I want a pre-arraignment multi-service center. Wouldn’t it be great if somebody was there to say: This guy’s issue is mental illness so let’s treat him for that, this guy’s issue is drug abuse so let’s put him in rehab, this guy’s issue is he’s just a bad actor? So many defendants would be better served in another arena than the criminal justice system. But it’ll never happen.

  And I closed my eyes, and saw still another handsclasping defendant sitting with his legs braced apart on the floor of the public defender’s office and his bearded head sunken in sadness.

  * * *

  •BOOK XI•

  * * *

  “Easier Than You Might

  Ever Dream”

  (continued)

  •

  * * *

  You will come in as flowers and not as fruit.

  Witches’ curse upon grapes (France, 16th century)

  * * *

  •

  | 158 |

  What did that bitch wanna get noticed for? sneered Chocolate. I don’t wanna be noticed. I don’t want the police to see me all the time. So today when a black-and-white tried to overshadow me, I said, use your brain, girl. I started sneezin’. I said to the pigs: Now I got a cold and tryin’ to go home. —The tall man likewise scorned Domino’s carelessness, but when the Queen emitted her imperishable word, he angelically descended toward Eight-Fifty Bryant without question, treading concrete with silent lengthy steps. He was not in the least interested in what the blonde might have done. What principally occupied him, since his blood currently bore a sufficiently high level of speedball to keep him well, was a domestic question—namely, was Strawberry holding out on him? He hadn’t sniffed out any demonstrable lies, and yet whenever he lurked and guarded the morbid peroxide beauty which grew by night along Capp Street and South Van Ness, he seemed to see Strawberry leaping into strange men’s cars more often than she reached into her stinking brassiere to present him with the latest twenty or forty she’d made. His conscience directed him toward the gentle path of mere watchfulness, since he’d once knocked one of her teeth out for what transpired to be no cause; but his other conscience, the Old Testament one which he knew as well as the many lines of shadow on the soles of the Queen’s feet, demanded utter punishment for infractions of law. His agitation had become by virtue of its very habitude incapable of satisfaction. The Queen’s rule held his worst impulses in check, and thereby stained him, as it would any of us whose lusts and cruelties have been thwarted, with a resentment against the Queen, which his love of her allowed him to avoid acknowledging. Upon what object then could he vent himself? —Strawberry, of course. His love for her licensed him to hate her, while his lack of fear of her incited that hatred. Waking up beside her at eleven that morning in a crack-smoked room of the Topeka Hotel, he’d been seized by so powerful a loathing of her scars, her smelly flesh, and her greedy piglike snores that he almost punched her. Bad control, he told himself. But what if the bitch were holding out? The Queen said never mind. The Queen said that if Strawberry were hiding some cash then that would only be natural. This had merely confirmed him in his suspicions, which were as cruel as Strawberry’s silhouette against a brick wall whose every brick leaped sharply out in sun and shadow to prove itself more durably unfeeling than she. (When he expressed those, the Queen, squatting on a concrete block there in the old factory with her head between arms, stared into his eyes and sadly whispered: What am I supposed to be, though? How long do I gotta be perfect? You think nothing ever goes wrong for me?) In short, she’d insisted that he treat Strawberry as if she were innocent. —You know, Justin, Mr. Cortez the bail bondsman had once said, the first thing you learn when you visit the jail is they’re all innocent! —And he’d laughed his hard laugh. The tall man, as tall as one of the Golden Gate Bridge’s pillars, had heard all that before.

  Beneath the Hall of Justice’s twin flags, laughing portfolio-carriers allowed themselves to be ushered through the metal detector, while defendants on bail huddled on the stairs, perimetered by their associated pacers and sitters. But outside and across the street the freedom lottery advertised itself in the boldest colors: KING BAIL BONDS, DE CORTEZ BAIL BONDS, neon handcuffs blinking and springing off a neon wrist. The Queen’s crowd used to go to Crown Bail Bonds because they’d take almost any collateral, sometimes even a mere signature, but one day a lady-in-waiting—Sunflower, in fact—had skipped bail, and by the time the bounty hunters settled things, bad feelings had also settled all around. So Mr. De Cortez, whom everybody called Mr. Cortez, had become the new favored tool.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Cortez, who always cracked his knuckles and polished his glasses and cried out: Well, if it isn’t my old friend Justin! wasn’t there. A young lady whom the tall man had never seen before opened the door.

  Yes? she said.

  Wearily, the tall man took his finger off the buzzer and followed her in.

  The individ
ual’s name is Sylvia Fine, he said, standing.

  Please sit down, sir. You’re making me nervous. Is that Sylvia with a “y”?

  Yep.

  Does she have any priors?

  Yep.

  Case number?

  Just do your job, said the tall man. I’m so irritated about this.

  Sir, I’m going to have to have the case number.

  You see that green binder over there? Open that up. It’s three pages before the last page.

  Oh, here she is. AKA “Domino.” And you said this is a drug possession case? Priors, priors . . . Yes, I should say she does.

  What the fuck do you care about priors? Mr. Cortez he don’t talk down to me like this. You shouldn’t even be keepin’ that information. Long as you got the collateral, baby, what the fuck’s the difference if the bitch got priors?

  And your name?

  Justin Soames, the tall man said, already taking a California identification card from somewhere inside his shirt.

  No, we don’t need that yet, Mr. Soames. You don’t have to get ahead of yourself. Will you please sit down? This is going to take a few minutes.

  How many counts she got?

  Sir, I—

  How much this gonna cost?

  Well, if you’ll kindly be seated, sir, I’ll just call Room 201 and find out.

  I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, said the tall man. He walked out, strolling that freedom strip, which was all bail bonds establishments with the exception of the auto glass place, the mecca for concrete hardeners and a couple of delis, and in the parking lot by the Inn Justice he smoked a rock, feeling an almost intolerable bitterness. In his imagination he raped the woman (who at that moment was gossiping about him on the phone, saying: There are those you have to chase. Over the years you get to know . . .), and then he slowly sawed her head off. He knocked the rest of Strawberry’s teeth out. He blew up the Hall of Justice with its blank whitestone walls and whitestone steps on which unfortunates were sitting or standing, waiting for their own funerals or for some metaphor thereof, guarded by the triple mailbox and the police cars slowly cruising round and round. He won a million dollars in the lottery. He went fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. These pleasure-strategems relaxed him slightly, so that he was able to smile at his reflection in a massage parlor’s silvered window, with a hooded brilliance equal to Domino’s whenever that lady recollected the time when, aged thirteen, she’d helped her sister’s boyfriend torch the Catholic high school.

  A white boy wandered uneasily by. The tall man said: You lookin’? You lookin’?

  Maybe. What do you have?

  China white. One eight G.*

  Dime?†

  Uh huh.

  Sure, I, uh . . .

  Suddenly the boy ran off.

  Boo! the tall man laughed, making a monster face.

  A dragon made of cloud reared above the swiggling Victorian dormer windowfronts. He glared at it for half an hour.

  Ms. Fine appears to have no permanent address, the woman said. You understand that we have to be very careful when transients are involved. Usually we don’t even deal with them. They’re too great a risk.

  The tall man, still standing, clenched the edge of the desk.

  Moreover, she has a number of nonappearances.

  Yeah, well, you gonna get collateral, so it’s no skin off your nose.

  In some counties they fine you for nonappearance.

  What about this one?

  Mr. Soames, I’m trying to break her out for you. But you need to cooperate. The big powers, they don’t usually issue bail to you until you show that you write carefully. You’ve got to get property, deeds of trust and so on. Because an original bond is like a check. And so I have to write this up very carefully.

  And if she don’t appear—

  If you fail to appear, there’s an immediate bench warrant. We have no control over that. We get a forfeiture notice, and we notify the indemnifier—that’s you. And then—

  Yeah, lady. I heard all that before.

  Now I’m ready to see your identification, the woman said. Is this your current address?

  Sure.

  Mr. Soames, I’ll need verification. I have to protect myself, you know.

  From li’l ole me? chuckled the tall man, towering over her, stinking of anger and hatred.

  If somebody just takes off, we’d be responsible to the court, Mr. Soames. So in that case we get somebody to track the defendant down . . . .

  How much is the fucking bail, lady?

  Mr. Soames, every once in a while I get somebody who raises my flag. You’re one of those people.

  You fucking ho bitch. I ought to cut you up, said the tall man, exiting. He went to Norris’s, where a friend of his had once gotten sprung in those long-ago days before he’d even heard of the Queen. Mr. Norris gave him a cup of coffee and found out without any fuss that Domino’s bail had been set at fifty-five thousand five hundred dollars, which he was able to reduce to twenty-five thousand after three phone calls to the judge.

  Fuckin’ ho bitch always costin’, said the tall man, who was now in a very ugly mood.

  Well, it’s Friday, Mr. Norris consoled him. On Friday, everything that could go wrong, goes wrong.

  I’m sick of that bitch.

  Yeah, Justin, I understand.

  Do you really?

  Well, for somebody who has a lot of money, twenty-five thousand dollars for bail isn’t that big a deal. He can just put it on his credit card. For somebody living day to day, ten dollars is a lot of money.

  Damn right.

  See, I told you I understood.

  The tall man grimaced.

  And how’s her life?

  Look, Mr. Norris. You ain’t her shrink, so don’t be her shrink.

  You know, Justin, in this job what I like to do is make a difference. I like to think I can help somebody else, see ’em turn their life around.

  Fine, so lemme call you Jesus. Me, I got the Mark of Cain.

  The other part is when you watch people’s lives just dwindle away. You watch ’em throw their life away. And it’s sad, but that’s the business we’re in.

  You philosopher, said the tall man, transforming the word into an obscenity. He counted out Mr. Norris’s ten percent: ten twenties, five tens, a fifty, and twenty-two hundreds. The collateral, which Mr. Norris kept on what might be called a permanent loan, consisted of a television, two VCRs, title and registration to an old red Ford pickup truck, a mink coat and an album of rare stamps. Every item had been stolen. Mr. Norris knew this hoard to be worth much less than the tall man believed, but as long he believed it, he’d stay honest. Thus ran Mr. Norris’s theory, which was not only philosophical but also empirically scientific in the best sense.

  Very good, Justin, he said. Now let me just walk over to Room 201 with the information sheet and this receipt. I think we’ll have your friend for you within the hour.

  Fine, said the tall man. Break her loose.

  | 159 |

  When the Queen bailed her out of jail, the blonde felt herself suddenly invulnerable. (How could Dom get popped out of jail so quick? marveled Strawberry. I mean, they caught her with crack right on her body. I heard they found a baggy inside her pussy.) The Queen had protected all Domino’s clothes for her, hiding them in some recess darker and grimier than all the secondhand furniture for sale on Mission Street’s sidewalks, and so every last beautifully silver garment had been saved. Domino knelt. She smiled somberly, thin-lipped and glowing-eyed, with all the grey freshly dyed out of her long blonde hair, and suddenly the Queen saw in her the same immense and speechless patience which she always marked in Beatrice; as if Domino were saying to her just then: My life is mine; I own it; I acknowledge it; I will live it out to the bitter end and do whatever I have to do to keep on being me, and if doing those things becomes sometimes bitter or hellish I will still be me at any cost; I’ll never disappear into Nirvana as Sunflower did . . . —Whereas Beatrice represented softly givi
ng endurance, Domino possessed many plans which were square-angled like late afternoon shadows on Capp Street. Already she could see herself marching into the Wonderbar where Loreena the barmaid would cry: Hey, kid! and Domino would flash her bright red, sneering, crooked smile. She would never be afraid, no, never. She slipped around her Queen’s neck a wilted red ribbon which under cover of amplified Spanish-language paeans to Jesus she’d stolen from a pharmacy on Valencia Street. The Queen kissed her lips, and she stuck her tongue up the Queen’s mouth, as happy as she’d ever be. The Queen granted her some fresh hot spit, whose psychochemicals made her pleasantly drunk. Then Domino shinnied into her best silver high heels, turned a trick (and here we ought to remind the reader without any sarcasm whatsoever that Domino could ride her tricks as agilely as a stewardess can brace herself against the ceiling of a small plane, defying turbulence, carrying drinks which tremble in the plastic cups—in other words, Domino knew exactly how to move and how far to go, being perfect at what she did), and in her sexy cat’s-eye sunglasses she lolled naked on the strange man’s couch with a toothy grin and clenched fists, thinking: Well, even in my thirties I still have something they want—I’m still in business! —I still get paid! (but the blonde suddenly shuddered as she shoved away a memory of double dating with the late Sunflower, a memory neither particularly familiar nor fiendish of two men’s penises straining at their faces as she knelt beside the other whore in the back of a flatbed truck, saying over her shoulder: You wanna suck that, Sun? —Okay, said Sunflower dully, scratching her goosepimpled thighs). At least the strange man paid well—which is to say, Domino gaffled him good and proper. Almost drunk with joy, she spent the money on “white girl” cocaine and a rum and Coke at the Wonderbar, coolly watching the way Loreena’s face widened when she smiled, as if Loreena were an interesting creature which Domino could vivisect whenever and wherever she chose. She turned another trick on Mission and Fifteenth, which act she later would not remember because this time the money was not so good, and after that, paranoid about what our televisions like to name “a police presence,” took the bus to Larkin and Eddy, where Vietnamese restaurants presented to the world their blue and red awnings. Inside the nearest one, Vietnamese guys in caps whose brims sometimes projected forward like bills, sometimes backward like ducktails, raised their beer-glasses and turned the place blue with cigarette-smoke. A cellular phone rang; the waiter brought more Budweiser all around.