“Stick around,” the old man tells me and Bill as he looks up at the midday sun and strokes a panting brown Chihuahua. “She comes home for lunch this time every day. Can’t stand to miss her soap opera.”
Bill pokes me in the side with his blackjack, cuing me to ask a question. “Is your daughter-in-law staying off drugs?” I say.
“Ask her yourself,” the old man says, closing the top button of his light blue bowling shirt.
Ten minutes later, his daughter-in-law shows up wearing too much lipstick and distressed blue jeans. “What the fuck’re you guys doing here?” she says, barging up the steps and into the house. “Don’t I got enough problems with my regular probation officer?”
“We just wanted to ask a few questions,” I say.
She’s already in the house, with the Chihuahua trailing her and the screen door closing behind them. Angel, Bill, and I bound up the steps and in the door after her.
The house is neat and clean with an orderly kitchen to the left of the foyer and a spacious living room to the right. The woman is already turning on the TV and lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. She puts the wrong end in her mouth first.
“So ask, ask, ask,” she says irritably as she collapses on a sofa and the Chihuahua yaps around her feet. “What do you want from me?”
“Baum,” Bill murmurs. “Take a look around the place. Make sure she’s still living here.”
I start to argue, but think better of it. I’m definitely out of my element and I decide there’s no harm in verifying that this is the woman’s true home. I make a quick tour of the seven rooms. Most of them look exactly like any other room in any other suburban house I’ve ever visited. Andrea must’ve grown up in a place like this. No wonder she was so dismayed by my apartment. I wander into the little girl’s room; there’re stuffed animals and a down quilt on the bed and pictures of Mickey Mouse and Snow White on the walls.
The shock comes when I go into the room where the woman sleeps with her husband.
It’s like stepping into another universe. Or a third world country. The walls are bare and scraped in places. Clothes are strewn all over and two filthy, smelly mattresses, without blankets or sheets, are laid end to end on the floor. I wonder if this is the kind of place Darryl King comes from. On my right, the closet door is open a little bit. It’s dark in there and for a second, I think I hear something stirring inside. The sound leads me into a daydream of what it would be like if Darryl King was hiding in there, waiting to jump out at me. I can see his angry eyes and his hand coming up at me. When I find myself reaching for my gun, I decide it’s time to get out of there.
I take a quick look in the closet and step back out into the hall. It’s confusing and disorienting to see that the rest of the house has remained unchanged and suburban.
I go back into the living room. Angel is trying to talk to the woman, but she’s just staring straight ahead at the soap opera on the television.
“So who takes care of your daughter?” Angel is asking.
“He does.” The woman points at her father-in-law standing in the doorway, but doesn’t turn her eyes to look at him.
“Are you still taking drugs?” I ask. I’m surprised to hear some anger creeping into my voice.
“Just the methadone,” she says nonchalantly. “And cocaine like once a night.”
“Why’re you doing that?”
“Because the methadone makes me so tired that I’d go to sleep otherwise,” the woman says as if she can’t believe what an idiot I am for not understanding immediately. She’s so out of it that it doesn’t even occur to her to lie.
A beady-eyed actor on the screen is kissing a blonde actress. The father-in-law glares at the woman from the doorway. I can tell the old man truly despises her for being a bad mother. Just then, Bill moves to my side and gives me an elbow in the ribs.
“Hey, Baum,” he mutters. “Check out the dog.”
I scan the floor and finally spot the Chihuahua squatting near the woman’s knee. Amazingly, the dog, who can’t be more than eighteen inches in length, is harboring an eight-inch hard-on and quietly working himself into an autoerotic frenzy.
“Oh shit,” I say.
The Chihuahua, seeming to sense everyone looking at him, slinks behind the sofa, toting his grotesque erection. The woman briefly glances after him.
“Aw, he’s all right,” she says. “He just needs a girlfriend. That’s all.”
35
HERE WAS THE NEW thing on the street: When the police came to arrest you, you didn’t run. You just stood there and gave them attitude. Yeah. What’s up? What you gonna do? You gonna shoot me? Stupid teenage macho shit.
But the kid they picked up outside the bodega robbery on East Tremont was different. The ones who’d actually jumped the guy behind the counter and taken the money were across the street already, strutting around and flashing their new rolls at everybody like they’d earned it themselves. But the kid in the unseasonably heavy parka was still hanging around by the mangoes and the melons at the stand. He kept tucking his head inside the coat and quivering, as though he was laughing or crying to himself.
In fact, Eddie Johnson wouldn’t have been taken in at all if the patrolman hadn’t bothered to pat him down and find the unregistered handgun, the marijuana, and the chicken bones in his pockets.
36
THAT NIGHT, I TRY to call Andrea, but she’s not around, so I leave a message with her roommate. With these new hours, it’s hard to keep up with anybody.
I dig up my photographer friend Terry Greene and we go to have dinner at an Upper West Side coffee shop and maybe catch a movie. I have tuna on rye, which is what I always eat, and Terry has ice cream and seven-layer cake. I don’t know why he never seems to gain weight, though I notice he’s more jittery than usual these days. I hope he’s not doing heroin again. Afterward, we go for a walk around Lincoln Center.
“I don’t know about this field job,” I say as we circle the fountain in the middle of the complex. “I’m way behind on my paperwork now. What I’d really like is to see a couple of my old clients again. That way I’d feel like I was still doing serious work.”
“I thought this was what you wanted,” he says, scratching the purple streak in his hair, which he’s accentuated into a kind of a Mohawk. It looks a little pathetic since he’s almost thirty. “You’re actually getting to see where these people live, instead of just talking to them in the office.” He stops and tries to light a cigarette, cupping his hands protectively around the flame.
“Yeah, I suppose I am getting closer to the source.”
“Hey,” he says abruptly. “What about My Life as a Dog?”
For a second, I think he’s talking about the aroused Chihuahua I saw earlier today, but then I see he’s pointing to a movie poster with that title in the window of a nearby video store. “We could rent it and go back to my house,” he says.
I shake my head. “I really don’t feel like seeing a foreign film right now.”
“Okay,” he says wearily as he stops scratching his arm and goes back to scratching his head.
“It’s just this field job makes me wonder if we’re accomplishing anything. I mean, we just go marching into people’s houses and start ordering them around. I don’t know if that’s so great …”
I notice that he’s wearing a pin on his lapel for Peru’s Shining Path movement. But when I ask him about it, he gets very defensive. “I just been reading about them,” he says. “I think what they tried to do is really interesting.”
“But aren’t they kinda right wing?”
“So?”
“I thought you said you were a socialist.”
“I said I was trying to develop anarchist tendencies,” he insists. “That’s why I stopped reading the TV listings …”
“Anyway,” I say, rubbing my eye where the contact lens was poking it, “I was getting a little fed up with the way things were going in the office, but that doesn’t mean I want to become a f
ull-time cop.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?” He looks at me the way he’d look at an alarm clock waking him from a peaceful rest.
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“That I might start liking it.”
37
“ALL I’M LOOKING FOR is a little comeback,” Richard Silver said. “You know what I mean? Just a little comeback.”
He clenched his teeth and all of the tendons and veins in his neck stood out. Slowly, he lowered the 350 pounds of weight he’d lifted while on his back.
“You look stiff,” said his personal trainer, Sandy, a blond-haired, blue-eyed former surfing champion and Vegas bodyguard.
“Stiff? I got pressures like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Keep your back straight,” said Sandy, kneeling by the Nautilus machine.
Richard Silver looked straight up at the ceiling and did five quick reps with the 350 pounds. While he was catching his breath, a buxom redhead in black nylon stretch pants paused in front of his machine and pulled up her white T-shirt, exposing a smooth flat stomach.
“Jesus Christ,” Richard Silver said.
“Is that enough weight for you?” Sandy asked.
“Hell no.” Richard sat up for a moment and twisted from side to side. Sweat matted his hair and ran down the front of his blue T-shirt. “Gimme four hundred.”
“I thought you already had too much pressure.”
“Hey, Sandy, do me a favor. Don’t be funny. Help me get big, all right. That’s what I pay you for. Jesus Christ. As if I don’t have enough problems.”
He lay down on his back again as Sandy added more weight. On the other side, a dozen lissome women were bouncing up and down to a frenetic disco beat in their aerobics class.
Richard Silver caught sight of himself lifting the weights in the floor-to-ceiling mirror while Sandy stood there admiring his own biceps. It made him think of an old bull trying to pull a cart past the new stud on the farm.
“You got business troubles?” Sandy asked, throwing back his mane of blond hair.
“The worst,” Richard Silver grunted between reps. “There’s gotta be ten people now devoting themselves to making my life miserable. You go out of the picture awhile and everybody tries to change the rules on you. They turn everything upside down.”
“Yeah,” said Sandy, who had no idea what Richard Silver was talking about.
“Hey, Sandy, you don’t know anybody who’s into offshore banking, do you?”
“I don’t know.” Sandy reached down and ever so subtly realigned the position of his balls in his jockstrap.
A refrigerator of a guy was standing by them now, waiting to use the machine.
“And then there’s my wife,” Richard Silver said, extending his bulging arms.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“I should say my ex-wife. She wants to give me a hard time about seeing my son. You believe that? She goes around saying things about me. In front of my son.”
“It’s not right,” said Sandy, turning to give a wide smile to a slim-hipped blonde passing by.
“Ah, what do you know?” Richard Silver dropped the weights with a loud crash and went over to the next machine, which looked like a medieval torture device with red cushions. Sandy adjusted the weight to 425 pounds as Richard put his back to the machine and started lifting. He stopped after ten reps. “The head of the investment firm you train, can he do that many?”
“Almost.”
Richard Silver did ten more reps quickly. He stood up and held on to the hems of his shorts while he caught his breath. His biceps strained against the sleeves of his T-shirt. “I’ll tell you something, Sandy,” he said. “The more time goes by, the more you find yourself doing things you never thought you’d do in a million years. Just to get by. That’s the sad part.”
“Huh,” said Sandy.
“If you could put yourself in a time machine twenty years ago, you’d never recognize yourself now. That’s how things change.”
Sandy wasn’t listening. He was too busy staring at a full-lipped brunette, who was wearing hot pink shorts and lifting at least three hundred pounds by spreading her legs on the Y-shaped machine across the room.
“Hey, Sandy,” Richard Silver said. “Tell me something. You fuck a lot of these girls?”
“A few, I guess.”
The girl in the hot pink shorts smiled at Sandy and closed her eyes as she kept lifting.
“Jesus Christ,” Richard Silver said. “Jesus Christ.”
38
THE NEXT DAY IN the field begins a little more promisingly. Just before seven, we arrive at a tall, red brick housing project that takes up an entire block near West 134th Street.
As dark clouds gather overhead, Bill, Angel, and I have a conference with the four other probation officers in the plaza outside the building. Officer Jocelyn Turner takes out a manila folder and reads from the file about the guy we’re seeking.
“This mutt has really been acting out lately,” Angel says in his peculiar mixture of cop talk and social work jargon.
His name is Cecil Shavers. A twenty-two-year-old male black with a long history of drug arrests and violent behavior. His regular probation officer set up a violation hearing after Cecil got rearrested and then failed to report. Of course, Cecil did not show up for the hearing either, and the judge issued a warrant for the unit to pick him up. According to the reports, Cecil’s father is wheelchair-bound and lately Cecil has taken to tying him up and beating him to get crack money. The report also mentions that Cecil’s mother works as a cleaning woman and his younger brother has cerebral palsy.
Turner shows me the file photo of Cecil. He has a bony face, cornrowed hair, and eyes set far apart. Suddenly, playing What’s My Crime? at the office seems like a long time ago.
We walk through the plaza to the building’s entrance. Bill warns us all to look up at the roof and make sure nobody is throwing anything down on us. A light rain is starting to fall. From the old green benches, two old women, four little kids, and a man in a wheelchair watch us approaching.
“Should we show them the picture and ask them if Cecil still lives here?” I ask Bill.
“No way. The old man over there is probably his father,” Bill answers. “Fuck ’em, we don’t want them to know we’re coming …”
The glass in the front door is cracked into a spiderweb pattern. Jocelyn Turner tries to check the apartment number in Cecil’s file with the directory by the aluminum mailboxes. She gives up after a few seconds. “If the name is still on the directory, that usually means the people are gone,” she says. “And if the people are still here, they’ve probably ripped their names off the directory. Same shit, every time.”
The building is about thirty years old. The lobby smells like piss and motor oil. There are a few graffiti scrawls on the walls and a couple of crack vials on the floor. A little boy in a New York Mets cap sits outside a first-floor apartment and asks us if we can fix his family’s air conditioner.
We have a bumpy ride up to the twenty-seventh floor in the steel elevator. At one point, I make the mistake of leaning on the wall with my hand. A mysterious brown liquid gets all over my palm. My fellow probation officers convulse with laughter.
Jocelyn Turner walks up to the door of 27K and starts knocking with her blackjack. The door is covered with a large black-and-white poster that says “Crack Shatters Lives” in bold letters surrounded by broken glass. It takes two minutes of continuous pounding before a woman’s voice from inside shouts out, “Who is it?”
“Police. Open up,” says Bill loudly. He gives me a conspiratorial grin. “That always works better than saying we’re probation officers,” he explains quietly.
Turner pounds on the door again. “Let’s go, ma’am. Open it up, now.”
The door finally opens. A round-faced, fiftyish woman in a white housedress stands there, rubbing her eyes. Turner shows her the shield. The woman doesn’t
bother to look at it.
“Is Cecil here?” Turner asks.
“I dunno … No.”
“Are you his mother?”
“Uh, well… yeah.”
“Then make it easy on all of us,” Turner says. “Where is he?”
“I don’t think he’s here,” Cecil’s mother says with a bit of confusion. “I ain’t seen him in a long while.”
“That’s a lie,” Bill mumbles to me. “He’s right here.”
“Ma’am, we’re gonna have a look around here for ourselves,” Turner says, pushing past the mother and heading through a narrow corridor with her gun drawn.
“What makes you so sure he’s here?” I ask Bill.
“Believe me, I know,” Bill says. “These people just get into the habit of lying. They do it every time. Once you do this a few times you’ll see. They never tell you when a guy is there.”
I follow Turner and the others around a corner and into a dark blue room. In the bed on the left, Cecil Shavers is naked and lying on his stomach. His head is turned just enough to the right so I can see his eyes are closed and his mouth is half open, revealing a gold front tooth next to a chipped one. Under him, a fragile-looking young woman in a ripped pea-green nightgown seems to be struggling for comfort and air. I can’t tell if they just got done fucking or are about to get started.
They’re being watched from the bed across the room by Cecil’s brother. He’s about a year younger than Cecil. All his limbs are withered. He looks both horrified and fascinated by what his older brother is doing to the girl in the bed. A triangle-shaped bar hangs over his head. He’s naked, except for the bed sheet covering his lower body up to the start of his pubic hair. His right hip bone protrudes at an unnatural angle and his left arm is about a third the size of his right. He twists his head as though he’s in great agony.
There’s a poster on the wall between the brothers’ beds. It shows a teddy bear in a slumped position with a bottle in his paw and a slogan scrawled over his head, “I have a drinking problem—Only one mouth and two hands.” I assume Cecil was the brother who put the poster up.
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