I had interviewed the police spokesperson just a few days earlier to get a quote on the progress of the investigation, and even at seventeen, I could tell that the police were uninterested in pursuing the abuse of justice because the kid had been an illegal, and he had no family pushing for transparency. The only people who were keeping the story alive were the Yankee do-gooders—copy editors and reporters sent to Brownsville from the colder states to earn their stripes, like the BBC dispatches its reporters to the Congo, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, right here on the Texas border.
Point being, I was suddenly aware of the vulnerability of my situation. And I was frightened by it. So I fought back in the only way I knew: being loud and fashionable, like the Mimis.
I took off the watch and threw it into the box I was supplied for my belongings. The twenty-year-old kid was taking inventory. One of the thirty-year-old mother-types sorted and packed. This part, I’d seen in the movies, so I played along.
“One wristwatch; brand: Swatch,” I yelled and threw it in the box, already pulling off my British Knights. “One pair, used, British Knights, size ten and a half! One T-shirt, white, with Robert Smith of the Cure on the front! One pair of trousers, blue denim!” Each one of these instances was punctuated emphatically with my thrusting forward the described item into the awaiting box. I had the whole office watching at this point. They’d never seen anyone with a command of English before, obviously. Or such an obnoxious prick getting arrested.
The older woman holding the box was not playing along. She muttered something to the boy who was trying to keep up with my list, obviously struggling with either the pen or the language. When I was down to my underwear, again, I leaned forward and said, “You get all that?”
He didn’t answer, finding it difficult to wend his way through my verbal karate.
“La cadena,” the woman said, pointing at the chain and lead pendant Gramma had given me.
Somehow, and I’m not sure why, but this infuriated me. Maybe because it was the last thing that tied me to my family. “Take it!” I yelled suddenly, and yanked it from my neck forcefully, and threw it on the pile. This made anyone who wasn’t watching by this point begin watching.
The woman muttered under her breath in Spanish, clearly unthreatened. She shoved my jailhouse issue orange jumpsuit into my small chest. I’d be spending the night in these, like bright orange pajamas.
Now, I’m afraid I’m going to have interrupt my narrative here, bring down the fourth wall. Remember: I’d been arrested only for being drunk and making that fantastically stupid call. At this time only I knew what my larger crime had been that night.
I was absolutely certain they were going to realize at any moment that the vile, impossible vandalism at El Jardin school was somehow related to the drunk, “Where am I going with my life?”, lying teenager at the phone booth not one hundred feet from the school grounds. At any minute, they’d make the connection. Any minute now. Now. Now. Maybe now.
The suspense was torturing me. But I dutifully put on my jumpsuit and waited for the other, heavier and dirtier shoe to drop. I zipped up the suit and stood before the twenty-year-old kid, still scribbling away on his clipboard, the older woman who was probably his aunt, and the three-hundred pound jailer probably his father.
When he finished, the kid handed me the clipboard with my list of charges and personal belongings and asked me to sign it quickly, so we could get on with the internment. (My words, not his.)
He handed me a pen and I stopped cold: Drunk as I was, I was certainly not going to sign something so ripe with misspellings and egregious syntax.
“What—who?” I stammered, attempting to make sense of this Arabic.
“That’s not how you spell ‘jeans,’ just try ‘pants,’ in the future, and it’s a ‘Swatch,’ a brand of watch, not ‘suatche’ with a ‘u’ and ‘e.’ It’s not Spanish. And it’s ‘British Knights’ with a ‘K,’ not as in ‘nights.’ And it’s ‘public intoxication,’ not ‘drunken in public’—and really—can you call that ‘public?’ Have you ever been out to Boca Chica? It’s a desert out there. And it’s a ‘broken necklace’ not a ‘neckless—broke.’ I’m not signing this until it’s right.” I pushed the clipboard back through the window.
At this point, no one was looking my way, in my earnest attempt at making friends, except for the guys in the overnight cell: They were enthralled, lined up against the bars and snickering.
I was their copy-editing Spartacus that night. It was either that, or they wanted to kill me, for making a fuss. One toothless old man in the isolation tank, looking through a porthole, started making catcalls as I scratched out and rewrote whole passages on my induction forms after they were handed to me, for validation.
“¡Traímelo páca!” he yelled. (“Bring him over here to me.”) He cackled with his face pressed against the porthole glass, his mouth open and revealing his one last remaining tooth.
He was asking the jailer to throw me into confinement with him. To have sex with him. As soon as I was done correcting the grammar on the arrest report, and he cackled again, I launched across the floor—the jailer reaching out and just missing me—and I slapped the glass as hard as I could with an open palm and frightened the evil buggering pederast and threatened to relieve him of his final tooth.
Now this guy, I was pretty sure I could take. He was like, sixty, weighed about a buck-five. Besides, his wretched depravity—you just knew he hadn’t developed the taste for children in jail—brought out a lot of primitive fear in me. Fear and anger.
But, oh, real power transitions quickly, and the gargantuan jailer took real pleasure in hoisting me solidly toward the overnight cage, opening the door, and shoving me through, now that I had signed the paperwork. Paperwork good. Drunk teenagers bad.
The incarcerated men, silent, shifting about noiselessly from foot to foot, or craning to view images on the television in the enclosed office, most of them in Texas illegally and awaiting transit back to Matamoros in the border town “catch and release” policy—only to make it back within the next few days—these indigent men all parted like the Red Sea before me, and I stood there nearly catatonic as I heard the gate close behind me.
They parted not because I was formidable, or an alpha male, by any stretch of the imagination. They parted and avoided looking at me because they thought I was crazy, and they wanted no trouble, transparent as the holding cage was. Had it been otherwise, I’d have probably been much assaulted, much beaten. Guys like that don’t like loud mouths, fast metabolisms, in the same way a pit bull doesn’t like a yapping Chihuahua.
Once the cage closed behind me and the snickers of delight from office workers and guards had died down, the crowd healed itself behind me, and so I moved over to a corner where I figured I could fend off an attack, and tried to blend in.
I stood, then crouched, then leaned, but nothing felt natural, with all the men meandering and wandering and mingling as if nothing was wrong. Some of them slept. Some laughed at the television they couldn’t hear. A guy I knew from high school with a terrible dermatology problem and who really was crazy walked by in front of me, smoking the nub end of a joint, and you can let your mind wander as to how that got in there.
A few hours later, after I hadn’t been eviscerated, hadn’t lost a kidney to a shiv or been buggered like a rent boy in Picadilly, I began to relax. I made my way to a bench where a guy was sleeping and I pushed him wordlessly over to one side, in a manner aggressive and unaccustomed to me. It wasn’t me doing this. It was my jailhouse self.
He wilted perfectly—didn’t even look my way—and just did my bidding. Moved over and gave me room.
I’m thinking, “Hunh. Maybe I’m not the jailhouse bitch tonight,” and then I hear, “Eh, Domingo! Como va la cósa?” (“Hey, Domingo! How goes the thing?”)
And I respond reflexively, with a smile in my voice like I’m walking down Oklahoma Avenue, “Eh, pínche Juan! Náda, náda aquí. Que es tú honda?” (“Hey, fu
ckin’ Juan, man! Nothing going on here. How’s things?”)
It was Juan, my neighbor from across Oklahoma Avenue, about three years younger than me, himself doing a little overnight time, just saying hey as he wandered over to palaver with his ilk, and I gave absolutely no thought at the randomness of coincident involved in running into my neighbor here, at the Brownsville City Jail, on New Year’s Eve.
It was just understood that sometimes, as a boy king, you end up in slam overnight.
It was here, about four in the morning, that I started to nod off, thinking about what was going to happen the next morning. Thinking about the cops making the connection to El Jardin, and my stomach started to knot, and not from the hangover.
I forgot to mention my phone call home.
I got the “one phone call” right after that episode with the corrections, before I was shoved into the cell. They handed me a receiver and asked if I had anyone to call. I gave them my mother’s number: 831-4961, that first home number like a tattoo on my soul, as every child from the 1970s must have equally scratched into theirs.
She answered on the seventh ring, I remember, waking her up, Derek likely asleep next to her, at four years old. I think maybe this might be the night that our relationship matured, changed colors.
“Mom?” I said.
“Yeah? June?” she answered, sleepily.
“Mom, I got arrested. I was walking home and some fat cop arrested me.” I said this in front of the jailer, who was standing next to me, and the other people listened from inside the office. The boy who had processed my belongings had been adequately ashamed for his poor, poor grammar and busied himself elsewhere for a while. I was mad, but not crying yet.
“June, calm down,” she said, her voice clearly awakening. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the jail, Mom. These people don’t speak English, Mom. I corrected their spelling.”
“June, tell me where you are. Tell me what happened,” she said, trying not to panic.
“OK, you get off now,” said the fat jailer.
“I’m at the city jail, Mom. They say you can come get me at six tomorrow morning. Mom, this is the fat guy that killed that kid!” I said, looking right at him, not sure it was really him, but it could have been.
“June, just be quiet. Quiet now,” she said.
The woman and the guard became insistent, shouting that my time on the phone was done, behind me. Mom could hear their hatred of me through the phone.
“Mom, come get me at six, please; these people hate me.” Here the guard grabbed for the phone, and I pulled away. “They hate me because I corrected their English!” I was able to yell into the phone, and I heard mom say, “Oh God, oh my God,” before the phone was hung up. And for emphasis, I decided to slam the back of my own head against the wall. I’m not sure why, but it made sense at the time.
I managed about two hours’ sleep, sitting upright like John Merrick, holding the blanket they gave me at processing, but I had given the pillow to some other bloke. I was doing time.
Breakfast sounded at five o’clock, and the place went fucking bonkers, though silently, like a buffet at a POW camp.
I sat back, still terribly hungover and totally overcautious. But I stepped up finally when everyone else was done and was given a tray, like back in elementary school.
A single serving of milk in a container and a white-bread sandwich with a powdered egg and ham mixture, with a cookie for dessert was our breakfast, and these guys took to it like it was manna.
I held it in front of me for a beat and then turned and held it out in offering to the swarm. Hands reached from nowhere and plucked each item from the tray, and then I handed the emptied tray back to the jailer outside, without looking at him.
An hour later, my name was called. Or rather, I was called by el necioso. The . . . well, shit. This is a tough one to translate. The annoying one. The nag. The jerky-asshole guy. The guy who corrects your English, loudly, in front of others.
I was given back my clothes and threw off my jumpsuit, put my cheap Swatch and BKs back on, the necklace looking back at me sadly and in pieces, and I put that back into my pocket.
I was certain by this time at least, they’d seen the damage wrought at El Jardin, and I was just waiting for them to enjoy that bit of “justice,” where they’d let me walk and then quickly yank me back in. But it didn’t happen.
Instead, I was given more paperwork to sign—photocopies of the copy-edited originals, and newer, jurisprudential ones, with the adopted corrections, some part of me noticed—and I initialed here, signed there.
“What happens now?” I said to the auntie woman.
“Now you come before the jutch!” she cackled. “We send you a notice and you have to come to cort!”
She yells this loud enough for everyone in the cage to hear. She was back in charge. Even the old man in the solitary drunk tank managed to express a mildly cross look across his silent face that his favorite potential bride of the night before was being given his papers.
All these things were stuffed into an A-9 envelope and handed over to me with a sort of delighted satisfaction this woman rarely experienced, it seemed.
I was shown to a side door that coincidentally emerged into the same corridor and past a dismal cafe that I’d visited not a week before, triumphant as a junior reporter and flush from a journalistic mission, feeling terribly superior to all the people needing to be here, because of work, because of misdeeds, because they wanted nothing else, because they were in Brownsville fucking Texas.
And now, clutching my legal papers to myself, cold in my T-shirt and denim jeans and humbled horribly, I walked this hallway like a beaten kid. The cafe was in its opening groans, and as I left through the front doors, I saw the sweetest sight I think angels and soldiers see, when all gets lost and then gets found again, and it’s Mom, in her beat-up silver Taurus, too many years too old but still her reliable car. And Derek, standing in the front seat in his pajamas, and looking through the windshield, pulled his pacifier out of his mouth and waved at me, and I waved back, and Mom gave me a sad smile, waving back, and I walked toward them, got in the back seat without saying a word, and Mom drove us to McDonalds, a huge cleft in my brain waiting for the crack detectives of the BPD to make the connection between my arrest and El Jardin.
Mom was gentle, left me to myself. No longer the mother of a child, she felt, somehow. Derek was a great comfort to me in his innocence, and for the next two weeks or so, as I worried, worried and slowly began to recover from the horrible anticipation of my foul, foul deed, and the shoe that never dropped, well, it just never dropped.
The citations and orders to see a judge never visited our mailbox. My record, when revisited a few months later by the Marine Corps recruiting officer, had no mention of a P.I.
(Point of fact: I didn’t go into the Marine Corps, though I had done all the processing, went through all the preparations. Mare led me through the maze of Pell Grant applications and enrolling into college at A&I, where she was attending after I graduated high school, and instead of getting on that bus headed out to San Diego, at the very last minute, I ended up going to college. For a while.)
“You didn’t even have to go to court?” asked Segis some time later, when I was finally able to talk about that night. He was the only other person who knew I’d been picked up for P.I. I didn’t tell him about the school.
“No,” I said. “It just sorta disappeared.”
“You lucky fucker,” he said.
I’m assuming that either I was still considered a juvenile, and it didn’t stick after I turned eighteen—however Segis was sixteen when he was picked up, and duly processed—it was either that, or the paperwork was too embarrassing to bring before a judge and was ditched in a trash can by someone unwilling to point out his illiteracy to the court system.
Either way, I never owned up to what I did at El Jardin. I never told anyone about it, either. I never told Mom that the reason why I looked so dark
for weeks after was not from the shame she thought I was experiencing from the things she’d known I did, but from the secret things that grew much further down in a person, things that have no explanation when they blossom virulently in the dark. Things that are not for a mother to forgive.
I never told anyone that story, or what had happened inside that jail. I was too ashamed. But somehow, the night I saw my very French friend, Philippe, worrying over a bad day at work, I just blurted it out over dinner at a Seattle bistro, where he was disgusted by the food. I didn’t see him very often, as he lives in Los Angeles, and did remote work for the publishing company where we both worked, him as a publisher and me as a designer.
Somehow, I thought the Sturm und Drang of the tale would take his mind off things, if only for a bit. When I finished, he seemed puzzled, bemused as to why I was telling him that story.
“I dunno,” I said, shrugging it off. “It was both horrifying and quite funny, I thought.”
Philippe thought about that for a moment.
“That’s certainly a stone in your garden,” he said, as he picked something distasteful off his plate.
Philippe said things like that, things translated literally from the French, phrases that make much more sense in the places they originate.
Chapter 22
CRYING UNCLE
It was Father’s Day when Mom and Dad were invited to Kingsville to be with my three sisters and their respective boyfriends for the weekend, at their college, to legitimize further nuptials.
I wasn’t invited along, but I preferred it that way, as I was accustomed to being alone and I’d have the place to myself without having to wonder when they’d be coming home, what they’d see if they did. Not that it mattered at this time, since I was producing a crap local political publication and making enough money so that I no longer depended on them for much. I was nineteen years old and had just dropped out of college, though not consciously. I just didn’t go back, for now, until I figured out what the hell it meant.
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