Home sick and I heard the first sirens around one in the afternoon. This was a Tuesday in March, some months back. Although my neighborhood in North Portland is changing, caught up in the tidal shift of gentrification, its soundtrack still includes the high whine and squeal of emergency vehicles, the call and response of crisis. But a strange thing had happened to me in the three-plus years I’d lived here: the sirens had stopped registering with the urgency of alarms. Instead, when I heard them, I’d started to feel weirdly secure. On a handful of occasions, in fact, beset by a low-level suspicion or frustration or fear, I’d summoned the sirens myself. I know now that not everyone in my community feels the same way, shares this faith in how justice is meted out and by whom, and that I didn’t question this faith then was thanks to embarrassing historical ignorance of nearly epic proportions. Among the many examples? I didn’t know that my neighborhood had been redlined, and not all that long ago. But see, here I am, already impeding the action, contextualizing, betraying the way the event was lived.
I was lying on the love seat that looks out my house’s old picture window, reading, and noticed that the sirens didn’t pass by as they typically did, on their way to other, presumably less rehabilitated parts of the neighborhood. Their sound waves didn’t elongate with Doppler predictability, but beat a steady and strident pulse. I pulled on some shoes and walked outside and found a fire truck, an ambulance, and several police cars gathered in front of Peter’s house—he’s three doors down and across the street. This wasn’t itself surprising either, not really. For the months foregoing, Peter’d been spending more nights on his unlit porch, hanging out with shadowy characters, guys whose faces I could never quite make out in the darkness, staying up later and playing his music even louder than usual. His wife, Linda, had at some point moved out and was off living elsewhere with their two silken windhounds. Our walks to Peninsula Park had long since dropped off and though I’d given him an old racket of mine, I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d seen him on a tennis court, let alone hit with him. His howls, what he’d probably call “yawps,” had gone from being an occasional and endearing nuisance to a near nightly production, an unholy evensong, and they’d acquired a certain edge, too, were serrated with something like desperation or anguish or dread. They unsettled Alexis and me. And we couldn’t have been the only neighbors who took all this as evidence that Peter was courting a minor disaster.
I made it to the corner, where a woman wearing a TriMet uniform was talking to a police officer. I’d never seen her before—was she my neighbor, too?
“I was walking by and saw the dog run off,” she kept repeating. She must’ve meant Boo, the white pit bull Peter adopted after Linda left. “Just wanted to make sure the dog was okay.”
Somehow I knew that what she was giving was a statement, that what she was was a witness.
Ernie, who lives across the alley behind me, emerged from Peter’s house, and I waved him over. He’s a light-skinned black man of around sixty, with a high forehead and a long braided ponytail. Soap-opera handsome and affably chatty, he’s the type of guy who’ll tell you his life story if you give him the time.
I asked him what was going on, was everything okay.
“Someone’s been stabbed,” he said. Just like that. Eerily vague and passive. Flat and far-off.
And Peter? What about Peter?
“Peter’s dead.” The words had a tried-on feeling to them, lacked the conviction of the fact they conveyed, and I almost didn’t believe him. He said them the way an actor might deliver new lines, lines from the script of a cheap melodrama, something straight to streaming. “I tried to give him CPR. It was a deep gash, though. Nothing we could do.”
His face went into a distant stare and I didn’t know what to do or say and had already begun to calculate all the ways I was failing to live up to this moment when, without realizing it, I had taken Ernie into my arms and was hugging him tight. He was quivering, his body a kind of tuning fork, vibrating like it was trying to find life’s frequency again. I raised my hand and held it to the back of his head, cupped the nidus where the ropy tether of his braid roots, and, to be honest, I don’t know whether I made this gesture out of genuine human sympathy and solicitude or because making the gesture created an image, better yet a tableau, that would fit the story I already knew, someplace deep down, I’d tell about this experience later.
We broke and I held Ernie by the shoulders. He was still fuzzy and uncertain about the eyes. I asked what I could do to help. He told me to go into his house, into his kitchen, and see if he’d left the oven on. If he had, he said, I could turn it off.
* * *
Mine’s not a memory that regularly date-stamps what it stores away so I can’t remember exactly when I met Peter. Seven, eight years ago now? Looking back, he begins for me as a vague presence, ghostly and out of focus. The setting would’ve been the tennis courts at Irving Park, which is in one of the bougiest neighborhoods in Portland, a neighborhood much farther out on the gentrification spectrum than our own. He would’ve ridden up on his bike, his ashy hair emerging out from under his black, brimmed hat that was straight out of Crocodile Dundee. The Beatles or the Grateful Dead or the Doors would’ve been blaring from the boom box he always kept in his handlebar basket. After riding in circles on the blacktop outside the fence, he may have parked his ride and begun to blow soap bubbles. He had a largish plastic wand that he’d slip into a scabbard of bubble juice and then he’d arc it through the air as though part of an interpretive dance—he often looked like he was trying to catch imaginary butterflies. I would’ve noted his height (news stories after his death listed him as six-seven and one neighbor he hadn’t alienated described him as a “gentle giant”) and chances are he was barefoot. But really I’m just speculating here. Truth is I probably wrote him off as another of this city’s many hippie holdovers, another Elder Dreamer, an archetype my generation tends to look on with a strange mix of respect and pity. What I’m sure of is that Peter didn’t come out onto the courts and play—that wasn’t until some time later.
Another reason he might not jump out in my memory is that he was but one of a whole crew of characters who hung out at Irving then. I was in my midtwenties, renting a house with Alexis a few blocks away, and whenever I passed by I’d find that they’d colonized a court or two. And they always appeared to be having so much fun, laughing and hooting during points, ribbing one another jocosely after. Their interactions were unscripted and unedited, governed above all else by spontaneity and wit. They seemed so free with themselves, with one another. It’s worth noting that most of these guys were black and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this was a large part of what appealed to me, why I wanted in. I’d rather lie, to be honest. Play it like it wasn’t a thing. Because while it’s true what they say about this city and its appalling lack of diversity, it’s not entirely uncomplicated, either, is it? addressing the lack of diversity in one’s life? There’s the squirmy notion of tokenism—you know, “Some of my best friends. . .”—and the icky tendency to romanticize difference, to apply a filmy whitewash to an entire group of people. It’s a real question, though: How can we honor the desire to expand the range and timbre of our experience without turning that desire into a microaggression? some iffy form of social cred? Without all the smug self-satisfaction? How can we acknowledge, accept, and celebrate difference, but not too much? Is there an alternative path to the patronizing PC bullshit that proliferates online? These are knotty questions that occurred to me only later, ones for which I still don’t have satisfying answers. At the time I wanted no more than to pledge this fraternity of tennis players, a group of dudes who yucked it up—communed—in a way that appealed directly to my herniated soul.
There was John, he of the scoriated voice and shimmery metallic grille, who liked to get a little stoned (“take his medicine”) before playing. He’d worked tanks in Vietnam and loved storying, shooting the shit, and he sat around watching other folks play, calling foot f
aults from two courts over and laughing at his joke, just as often as he played himself. And look, I know how this might sound, but Fred really did look a touch like Michael Jordan, and he greeted you with a chill upright–hand clap–chest bump production that I found thrilling and even vaguely exculpatory, and he was basketball tall with a wingspan that made him a nightmare at net. Ronnie’s wardrobe was generously stocked with argyle sweaters and those that weren’t vests he often wore in the French way, tied over his shoulders. He had an air of hardness about him, though, that broadcast the message loud and clear: Fuck not with Ronnie. Tony, who grew up in a town house across from the courts, had some form of martial arts under his belt and practiced an obscure sciamachy between points, fending off imaginary assailants by chopping and punching the air in front of him.
The list could go on but no matter how long it got, it’d have to end with Lawrence. Lawrence acted as the unofficial (and unelected) president of the Irving Park Crew, strutted around all cock-of-the-walkish. Come fall, it was Lawrence who brought a leaf blower and push broom to clear debris from the courts, but he had a way of turning this courtesy into an assertion of power and ownership so that you actually ended up resenting him for it. He had long dreads and always played in sagging warm-up pants and what you’d probably call an athletic sunhat. Rumor had it that he’d been a star fullback in college, but rumor it was doomed to remain because it was nigh on impossible to get anything in the way of personal info out of Lawrence. If he was there as much to socialize as to play, like the rest of us, he had a strange way of showing it. He must’ve thought that because he had some of the better strokes out there he was justified in going around telling everyone else what was wrong with theirs. But such gratis instruction was almost always unwelcome and tended only to piss folks off. A few times during sets of doubles against him, after hitting a winner, he clutched his crotch and waggled that fisted gnarl at me. That so many years passed without a serious incident is, in hindsight, miraculous.
The story’s still told in the hushed tones reserved for major family fallouts. And like those stories, it’s come to be told mostly in shorthand: the time Lawrence and Tony fought. I wasn’t there when it happened and there are conflicting reports about what started it, but all the tributaries converge in the mighty ancient river of human violence. After a kerfuffle over a line call or a score escalated, all that pent-up ill will and frustration was released. Lawrence, so it goes, left the courts only to promptly return with a knife, intending harm of a Renaissance drama sort. He approached Tony, blade dancing ready at his side, talking his brand of incendiary and instigative shit. I imagine there was a tense pause before Lawrence made his play, at which point Tony proved the usefulness of his kung fu shadowboxing, disarming and dispatching him with frightening ease. Embarrassing ease. As though all along he’d been practicing for this very moment. And when Lawrence left the courts for the second time that day, he appeared to do so for good.
Point is, memory-wise, this is what Peter was competing with. He only begins to shore up in my mind, to emerge and materialize as Peter, when he steps onto the court, which he does like something out of Field of Dreams. You see, the quality of tennis at Irving wasn’t great and at times it was almost laughably bad. Most of these guys had picked the game up later in life, were self-schooled and choked up on their grips and hit everything way short and with a maddening amount of back- or sidespin. They played a devious and wily Old Man game. Now, as something of an aesthete when it comes to tennis, I’ll sometimes claim to value hitting pretty shots more than the end result, than winning. But still there were times I left the park so frustrated, having lost, that I swore I’d never come back. So then I invite you to imagine my surprise when one afternoon, after months of going to Irving, I watched Peter trade his bubble wand for a racket and step on the court and start hitting with long and fluid strokes, strokes as graceful as they were anachronistic. They might as well have been taken from a time capsule, come down from when courts were predominantly grass and rackets were wood and players wore pants and spikes and drank cocktails on changeovers. Sometimes, when he was so moved and wanted to goof off a little, he’d hit a lob fifty, sixty feet in the air, so high you nearly lost sight of the ball, and it’d make its meteoric return to earth and land six inches or a foot inside the baseline, throwing the opposing team into a tizzy, a wry half smile on his face. That he could exercise such control, that he was capable of producing such beauty, given how large and tall he was, how very barefoot—it didn’t add up. Turns out he’d played in college, that he had a PhD in history and used to be a professor, that he’d written a book about Wittgenstein. Turns out he had all kinds of stories to tell.
* * *
After seeing to Ernie’s oven, I wandered back out into the midday sun of March 4, 2014, the day Peter died, was killed, murdered. What had started as just another Tuesday in March was now a point on a timeline, part of a plot. A false spring was on—local knowledge has it that you can expect rain here until July 4—and the light and the warmth made it seem like time itself was somehow out of joint, like God was scratching on the ones and twos. Before that week we hadn’t seen the denuded sun since I couldn’t remember when and it seemed that even the weather was contributing to the afternoon’s irreality.
An old Crown Vic pulled up as I came to the corner. A woman in the passenger seat hailed me over. She was unhealthily thin and her blondish hair was on the last legs of an already shitty dye job. The driver leaned way over and, state I was in, it looked a little like he’d emerged from her chest.
“You know what’s going on here?” he asked, and nodded to the cop cars. His body was electrically restless in a way that suggested doings unsavory. There was a compact video camera in the woman’s lap, a small screen open at its side, and between them a police scanner crackled with staticky voices.
“No clue,” I said. “Was just out to see for myself.”
“Cool, thanks,” he said, and pulled off, the words hanging momentarily behind the vanished car like this was a cartoon.
I looked around, confused, and spotted my across-the-street neighbor standing in the road. He’s a youngish Latino hipster-looking guy who can often be found in his front yard with his cat on a leash. Alexis and I met him and his girlfriend/wife/partner back when we moved in, but hadn’t acted on any of that new-neighborly goodwill, and very soon after found we’d forgotten their names. Consensus was we’d passed the point that it’d be cool to admit this, so now we waved to them and exchanged the occasional, rudderless small talk, content to live in this bizarre social penumbra between knowing them and not. We talked often about how convenient it would be for one of their monthly bills to show up in our mailbox, then at least, at last, we’d have one of their names. As I approached Luis or Juan or John or Louis or Brad, a realization came over me with a shameful terror: I didn’t know Peter’s last name.
“Peter was murdered,” I said. “It’s crazy.”
I felt cheap, relating it like this, like it was no more than some dirty laundry I’d spotted, a gripping piece of gossip I hadn’t been told directly but picked up while eavesdropping, and I immediately regretted it. Can an event like this be told in such a way that the words don’t so apparently and so thoroughly fail the story? That doesn’t level it into the voluptuous sensationalism of local news? Or is it that something essential about an experience is always lost when it’s compressed into a story, like what happens to music when you convert it into a shareable audio file? In any case, the little info I’d related seemed to fully satisfy ______________’s curiosity, and he headed back into his house without asking anything further. Had he, like me, watched Peter walk by every morning, to and from the store on the corner, one of the many convenience stores around here that, owing to crimes past, is sometimes referred to as a “murder mart,” to pick up the day’s domestic tallboys, one by one? Had he also measured his morning’s progress by these walks? Were they now forever lost from his daily routine, too?
There w
as a separate hub of police cruisers down the block and I couldn’t make out whether they were working this same incident or whether something else had gone down yonder, some unfortunate coincidence of misfortune. Ernie was talking to a pair of uniformed officers near where I’d left him. Caprice, his wife, a short white woman with curly, astonished blond hair, had joined him. She’d been Peter’s closest friend, at times what you could maybe call his ally. Other uniformed officers had started to square off the intersection with yellow police tape, turning this part of my neighborhood into a crime scene. These cops, they appeared to be almost giddy with purpose—one was literally whistling while he worked.
Maybe it was shock that had caused the oversight, but it hadn’t yet occurred to me to wonder who’d done it, who’d committed murder. And did the police have the perp in custody? Downtown? Or was the suspect still out there, still on the loose? All these clichéd words and phrases, bearers of cheap tension, it was a relief, electrifying even, to have reason to resort to them. This was the language of action, of story, was it not? And though I tried, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining a chase, a frenzied search through my neighbors’ backyards, the K-9 unit nosing shrubbery, hot on the trail, maybe a Cool Hand Luke–ish captain looming large somewhere in the background.
I walked up to the officer working the tape who wasn’t whistling. I’d intended to have a simple conversation, see if I could get a handle on where things stood with the investigation and whether we had to worry about a criminal being at large in the neighborhood, but realized at once that we were working at cross-purposes. I, a civilian, was simply talking, chatting, but he, an officer of the city, was “communicating,” abiding by some preordained set of rules for dealing with the public that he’d probably picked up in a Saturday seminar on crisis management. He could traffic only in facts, couldn’t tolerate or indulge any uncertainty or speculation. This made any vagueness seem excessively, almost preposterously, vague.
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