Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  And it was then, in that church, that I first sensed why gamblers like Tom bet on horses in the first place: Every person on earth ends up trying to love someone else, and let’s face it—it shreds your heart to try at love and lose, whether it’s because love was never destined to come your way, or it was but your lover’s moved on. I mean, the thing about trying to love is that no victory in love lasts. No matter how joyful you feel, no matter how young and healthy your beloved and you might seem, you can never, in truth, rely on love, because as love plays out, if you get right down to it, there’s never any permanence of victory.

  But in horseracing there is. There are races of certain lengths, with certain numbers of entries. And there’s always a definite finish line, with the first horse to cross that line the winner and everyone else a loser. And, yes, sometimes there are jockeys’ objections, but soon enough it’s true that a winner is declared official. And once things are official there’s an official reward for the second-place finisher, too, and there’s even recognition of the mediocrity of taking third, and it goes on like that, all orderly and numerical and charted out for posterity to read in the Form.

  And it was in that stone church in Saratoga Springs that it grew undeniable to me that there’s this whole community of people who live for such certainty, such unchallengeable declarations about the results of races that are as heated and full of surprises as love.

  My mother wasn’t one of those people, maybe because the results of the love she shared with my father had ended as officially as you could imagine.

  But Tom was one of those people, as are most grandstanders.

  And I will always understand such people, always hope that, despite the infinite number of ways they choose to risk their time and money, they could all—somehow—win big.

  51

  DEESH

  “LET’S GO,” A TROOPER SAYS, as I sit on a guardrail alongside I-80 with my hands cuffed behind me. “Up.”

  I stand as four or five hands keep me balanced.

  “You read him his rights?” one trooper asks another. All but one of them—and there are dozens—are white.

  “Yes, sir,” I hear.

  “Straight off the yellow card?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Did you hear your rights, sir?” the first one asks me.

  And to spite him, I don’t answer. Maybe there’s wisdom to this: If I didn’t hear my rights, I wasn’t truly told them?

  “Sir?” I hear.

  Again I don’t answer. At least twenty marked and unmarked cars and SUVs have gathered here, on this stretch of I-80, traffic funneled into one lane by orange cones.

  “Do you hear me, sir.”

  Traffic beside me has stopped, more staid white folks staring.

  “Then I’m going to read your rights again,” I hear. “With these three—Tierney, get over here. I’m going to read your rights again, Mr. Sharp, with these four officers present to witness.”

  And again come my rights, this time shouted distinctly. A bus in traffic rolls ahead, followed by a parade of semis and pickups and cars. Three older guys huddle near an unmarked SUV, one of them, in a suit, on a skinny cell he snaps shut as he heads toward me. There is shouting, between him and Tierney, between Tierney and the trooper who arrested me, between the guy in the suit and the latest caller on his cell.

  Then the guy in the suit approaches me. He says, “You took him down, you take him in,” and I’m confused—until it hits me that he’s talking to the white guy who first cuffed me.

  “Yes, sir,” that guy says.

  “Do you have an attorney, Mr. Sharp?” the guy in the suit asks calmly.

  I shrug.

  “Do you want one?” he asks, and here I understand why people confess even after they’ve heard their rights: There are things you want to say, need to say—and here someone is, a person the world has deemed important, paying you attention, waiting somewhat kindly for any word from you.

  And maybe it’s because of this kindness that I say, “Possibly.”

  “Then I’ll get the folks in the Bronx started on that,” he says. “Okay?”

  Again, I shrug. I don’t want an appointed attorney, since the street taught me Legal Aid does little but hold your hand as it walks you into prison—because no Legal Aid lawyer wants to lose at trial. But I can’t afford my own lawyer, certainly not for this mess. And now two troopers, one a woman, guide my shoulders toward a squad car’s backseat, and now I’m put there and the woman closes the door. I’m inside the stink of hot vinyl.

  There is silence, then radioed static. For a long time, I watch armed men chat while my guts and lungs rise toward my throat.

  And now here’s the guy who tackled me headed my way, and now he’s here, with me. He closes the door, adjusts his rearview to check me out; I’m dizzy and blinking and, yeah, taking slow breaths like Gabe did to calm my own heart, because we are rolling ahead into traffic, back toward the Bronx, merging with people free to flee their troubles, squad cars behind and in front.

  “You have any idea how much this all costs?” the trooper asks, and his rearview image makes eye contact.

  And I won’t answer, of course. But I wish I would. I wish I would speak up right now to say, Yes, I know. I know this costs a lot. And I know that some of its cost is to pay your salary, probably also to pay you for as much sweet overtime as you want. And I know that, because this money ends up in your pocket, you can afford to sustain any lover who loves you.

  Then I tell myself to chill.

  I will not speak to this jerk.

  I will let him avoid the question Gabe and I never discussed: How long can my lover’s love stay real?

  And to face this question myself, I look pointedly away, at the green blur made by the thousands of trees we rush past.

  Because, man, are we moving.

  We will not be stopped.

  We are flying down a long, steep straightaway.

  52

  JAN

  PROBABLY, I TOLD MYSELF, you’re thinking about marriage to him to avoid thoughts about his father and yours, and then my mother nodded at the cross behind the altar and stood and sidestepped toward Tug and me, appearing so childishly in need of the nod Tug gave her, I about bawled. I mean, it hit me right then that her struggle to handle what horseracing had done to her had led her to pray on her knees, and I hadn’t as much as sat beside her, and my standing out there, in the aisle with Tug and Colleen, was killing her. So right then and there, I actually tried. No, I didn’t use my actual voice, not even a whisper, but I allowed myself to think thoughts that might have been prayers, asking only one thing—that we would again see Tom Corcoran—but almost as soon I doubted this prayer since, first of all, it was kind of selfish, and, two, the sight of Tom Corcoran could never by itself guarantee happiness. And then, whether praying or not, I thought hard about happiness, about what it really was and how it truly felt, and I couldn’t stop remembering how it felt to ride Equis Mini, that electric sense of joy and freedom he and I shared, and I also remembered how, even after he’d crossed the finish line and we both had won, he would have kept running if I’d let him.

  And gratitude for that experience welled up in me in that church, and I wondered if welling up meant I was indeed praying, but I also felt very alone right then, with no sense inside of anything God-sent. All I felt was an accumulation of logical thoughts, earthly, selfish thoughts that urged me to never let anyone know what I wanted—because it was clear to me now that, in horseracing at least, there would always be people who’d use their knowledge of what you wanted to take advantage of you. Why people like Arnie DeShields enjoyed treating jockeys like meat was something I still didn’t understand entirely, but what mattered right then and there, in that church aisle near my mother, was that I finally accepted the truth about what had happened t
wenty-some years ago in the Corcorans’ shallows: My father had committed suicide.

  And the reason I could accept this was that, thanks to my stay in the Corcorans’ house, I now knew how it felt to ride racehorses for money, and generally it was a feeling of being used, a feeling you wanted but then also despised. In my case I’d wanted Tom Corcoran to bet on me when I’d jocked Equis Mini in that secret sprint—but then came Tom’s using me to get that tip from Arnie DeShields, and then came Arnie trying to use me for sex, a sleazy intent on Arnie’s part that still appeared to have no end to it. And, yes, it was probably true that women who jock feel used more than men, but even if you were a man—even if you’d been my father, the Great Jock Jamie Price—it was all still use—of your body but also your mind and the best of your spirit.

  And, sure, winning felt good, very, very good, but a victory in a horse race takes very little time, a very small fraction of your life. And then there ends up being the whole rest of your life, where you feel caught in this tangle of beauty and ugliness.

  53

  DEESH

  FROM THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE on in, my mind jumps as quickly as it did when I first saw Gabe’s house, this time from thought to thought about Bark’s selfishness and the Belmont trifecta and James’s wisdom in bailing on us in Queens, then about Gabe and Madalynn and Jasir. I try to focus on Jasir, but now there’s Bark’s chat with Madalynn on that sidewalk in Brooklyn where I faced Jasir, and then there’s me in those days when I made careless love with Madalynn, then James telling me that Bark proposed to Madalynn but Madalynn said no, and then there’s Gabe rowing that blue-floored boat and, now, there’s Gabe’s body lying on that water, after his last attempt to connect and do good.

  And then there’s Gabe’s ex-wife and her gutless love, and Gabe’s ex-boss The Man Hater, and the mother and father who gave me a life but never quite got into it.

  And under all these thoughts is the realization that, now that I’m back in the Bronx, I’m also in the world of law, and law, I should have learned long ago, never lets go of you.

  And where law takes me now, in a motorcade led by NYPD, is to the precinct building on 230th Street. I’ve walked past this building countless times, been inside it one Halloween long ago, when word was cops gave candy bars to any kid who stepped inside, and now, just outside it, well-dressed folks, not all white, wait with cameras and mikes. As I’m taken inside I neither shy from these people nor face them, just pass them with the pride I have left. Inside, all eyes welcome me in their casual but intense way, and I keep silent. They want fingerprints, which they uncuff me to get. They want name, address, and digits, and for these they make do with what’s in my wallet. They say they’ll take me to be arraigned, ask if I know what an arraignment is, and, for that, they get a nod. And then, after they cuff me again, this time with my hands in front of me, one of them says, “Good luck, Deesh,” and they take me back outside, where a livelier crowd gets as much of me as their cameras can. And then I’m in another squad car, again NYPD, again alone in the back, cuffed hands on my lap, no escorting vehicles in front or behind, though the two cops in the front seat obviously wish they could kill me, and, shit, this squad car ain’t stopping. I have never fainted in my life, but now, on and off without warning, comes this sense of sinking into myself, as if, you know, my mind is sort of a black hole quickly devouring the rest of me, maybe because I know, from my time in school and on the streets, that I’m up against official City of New York rancor.

  Will it really help Jasir to see you back here like this? I think.

  Won’t it just make his matters worse?

  And what about Madalynn?

  Can any love, real or not, withstand arrest and incarceration and the lust of millions for conviction?

  Then we’re near 161st, approaching the beige, soot-tinged building etched with the words CRIMINAL COURT and flanked by more media, and we turn twice and roll into an underground parking garage full of cop cars and trucks. I remember Gabe and I watching the stream swirl and glisten, but here, trapped as I am by concrete, Pennsylvania seems like it never existed: no birdsong, no bass, certainly no friendship with a washed-up wannabe lit professor.

  And now we’ve stopped. I’m taken out and passed to four armed courthouse guards, who take me up an elevator to a floor where people wearing dark blue uniforms take more fingerprints, these digital and probably instantly online. And after a young white woman brings me a worn chair, here, across this large but stuffy office, stand two guards, brothers I’d bet were once Marines, taking turns glancing at me as one reads a computer printout. And as they stroll back toward me, the other lifts his chin at me and says, “Just so you know? You’re a forty-one.”

  I play this off, and the other brother says, “He don’t know what that means.”

  “Know what it means, being a forty-one?” the first asks.

  And here my eyes answer: Just tell me.

  “Means you’re a badass.”

  “Means you’ll need more than Legal Aid,” a sister behind me calls.

  But I can’t afford more, we all know, and now three other guards, these white, take me via elevator to a higher floor, which is simply an open area, no hallways or rows of doors, just a worn-shiny concrete floor under four holding pens constructed of gray bars, the largest pen with twice the floor space of the others, maybe a third of a basketball court. In this large pen stand five cuffed-silent suspects of maybe forever-untold crimes, one tall and Asian and the four others black, and I’m being escorted toward them when a guard shouts to an old Hispanic guy at a desk against a wall: “Should we put this forty-one alone?”—and the old guy nods.

  So I’m walked and locked into the small pen farthest from the five suspects. The first words I think inside are This is it, because avoiding the inside of a cell has motivated me for practically my whole life, and I wonder if maybe avoidance of anything for so long somehow finally becomes attraction.

  The four brothers in the big cell are staring me down. Instinct says stare at the wall opposite them, which I do, but that makes me remember Gabe gazing off into Pennsylvania’s woods. Then I get why people behind bars off themselves: If I didn’t have Madalynn and Jasir to pin my shoulders back for, what would be the point?

  “You the cop shooter,” shouts someone.

  I don’t answer, don’t even breathe. Then I inhale motionlessly.

  And then all of us waste more of our lives in silence.

  Then I hear, “Hello?”

  A short white dude with cut-to-the-nubs gray hair stands just outside the bars, one finger readied inside a closed manila file.

  “Douglas Sharp?” he says. He wears a green suit, three piece but discount, the skin on his face, just above and beneath his eyes, chapped to bright pink. “I’m Larry Gerelli, your attorney.”

  “How do I know that?” I say.

  He looks me up and down and says, “You don’t.”

  And he walks off, then out a side door.

  And I feel like I did in that manhole years ago. Yes, smarter than some, but alone.

  54

  JAN

  AS TUG AND I AND OUR MOTHERS left the church, my mother asked me if I preferred to leave for Pine Bluff that week or the next, as if our return to Arkansas were something we��d discussed of late, and even though we hadn’t talked about going back there, I got all petty on Tug and answered casually, as if I’d never cared about him in the first place, and what I said was “As soon as you want.”

  Then I glanced toward Tug, to see if I’d gotten his goat.

  But all he did was glance away, with this put-off look on his face, and accelerate on ahead. Like he was thinking, This is what happens when you hang out with three women, like he was determined to never again step foot inside that church.

  And I knew he knew what the popular songs said, that if you cared about someone,
really cared, you’d fight against all odds to keep that person close. But I was also sure he knew, from having watched his parents try to coexist after their arguments, that if you pursued love from your lover when pride was at stake, you could lose respect and maybe love itself.

  So there I was, on that sidewalk between the church and the Galaxie, walking well behind Tug even though I cared about his thoughts as much as I did mine, feeling abandoned despite being squeezed in between our mothers, trusting the sudden headwind we faced was full of my father’s spirit, then asking it:

  Daddy, why did you let us live here?

  55

  DEESH

  WHEN I’M FINALLY LET OUT, I’m taken by three guards down an elevator and through narrow white hallways, then out through a blue metal door to a courtroom, where the blond-wood onlookers’ benches, set in rows like church pews, are about full, most everyone seated on them dark haired and dark skinned and dressed in dark clothes, the few whites there restless—reporters, I figure. Front and center, up behind the judge’s bench, waits a robed white guy not much older than I, the guard beside him a freckled brother in a white long-sleeved shirt who calls, “Douglas Sharp, docket number ending 6374—charge number 125.00.”

  Guards’ hands urge me toward a chipped Formica defendant’s table, where, to make matters worse, I’m forced to stand beside the short guy with the cut-to-the-nubs gray hair.

  Damn, I think. Then a sister in nice clothes, standing at the worn table to our left—for the prosecution—all but shouts facts from a manila file folder of her own. Facts like the name of the shot cop, the time he was pronounced dead, and the address on 216th where the shooting of him happened. Facts like the willingness of Bark to come forward as an eyewitness, like the cop’s and Gabe’s names as well as their mailing addresses, so now there’s no question that, yes, there are two homicide charges against me, one for Gabe’s death, the other for the most recent shooting of a member of the NYPD.