With Death Laughing

by Peter Plate

  I read the notice two times. I drop my head, blinking back tears. I’ve been drummed out of the priesthood. And defrocked. Those assholes. Those rotten bastards. How could they do this to me? After all I’ve been through? Fuck that noise. A sole question repeats itself over and over in my mind: are you going to let them get away with this shit?

  For real: I have anger management issues. I have impulse control problems. I suffer from conduct disorder. But the answer is no, I’m not going to let them get away with it.

  I have been called epithets. Leech. Faggot. Fuckhead. I’ve been spat on, punched, and kicked. I have been chokeholded.

  It’s my uniform, not theirs.

  I’ve earned those colors.

  Like the Hells Angels earn theirs.

  I keep circling back to that conclusion because I don’t know what else to think. Naturally, I’ll take my post on E Street tomorrow—my station is as important to me as the uniform is.

  But what if the administrators at Blessed World engage in legal action against me? What if they have me arrested for not returning the uniform? Legally speaking, I don’t have a leg to stand on. I touch my neck—it’s hot and swollen. Dalton can screw himself.

  □ □ □

  The Devil Canyon fire is climbing the mountainside tonight. Jags of heat lightning boomerang off the valley floor, bleaching the sky from Rialto to Mount San Gorgonio. The answering machine unexpectedly lights up after midnight. I listen to the incoming message:

  “Pick up the phone, cabrón. It’s me, Alonzo. I want to talk to you. And tell you the things I didn’t say the other day. I used to respect you. But you’ve changed. And I don’t dig it. Begging money for Blessed World? That shit doesn’t wash with me. You’ve become a sellout. And you know what? I saw you today on E Street. You sad little pendejo. Banging on that pinche tambourine. Rudy from Muscoy was with me. He said you’re a goddamn chump. Don’t you know nothing? Look at the people in the street. Just a bunch of hoodlums and ghosts. Who among them is gonna give you a penny? Nobody, that’s who. That’s basic economics. And besides—”

  Exercising its own quirky logic, the machine cuts him off.

  THIRTEEN

  At sunrise the street cleaners go by my open window. After they pass I crash out on the floor. I awake fifteen minutes later, my neck stiff from Dalton’s chokehold. Thanks to the Devil Canyon fire, airborne debris—gray particulate matter—coats everything in the room, including myself.

  I stagger to my feet and mope into the kitchenette. I shoo a passel of cockroaches from the stovetop. In turn, they make an orderly retreat into the mini-oven. I fill the coffee pot with water, only to discover I have no coffee, so I drink the water in the pot. Then I brush my teeth with a wedge of bar soap—I don’t remember last when I used toothpaste. I can’t afford it.

  There’s no sense in acting like everything is all right today. Because it isn’t. With this as my mantra, I load up my pockets with quarters for the bus. I grab my travel permit card—never leave home without it. I gather the donations bucket and tambourine. I’m off to work.

  On a smog-free day you can see San Jacinto Peak near

  Palm Springs. Similar to an alcoholic, the smog has good days and bad days. This isn’t a good day—a flat red haze blankets the desert. The foothills behind Patton State are bald and brown. The sun is shadowless.

  I bump into four SWAT cops on the sidewalk. Hoarse screams echo from inside the halfway house—five more cops wrestle a middle-aged blonde female in a polo shirt and Calvin Klein jeans out the front door. Tightly handcuffed behind her back, she jerks from side to side, her white face unfocused in the hostile sunlight.

  The cops prod the manacled woman toward a Department of Public Security ambulance idling by the curb. Two medics open the ambulance’s doors. The cops push her onto a gurney, the medics strap her down. As the restraints clench around her waist, she screams again, louder than before.

  She bares her teeth, save for one missing incisor.

  And looks straight at me.

  I look back at her.

  The SWAT cops twirl their batons like they’re drum majorettes practicing for the big Friday night dance. I turn away, older than I’ve ever been. I flick my tongue over my teeth. Bar soap is caked on my gums—the flesh fails, and the spirit falters. I slouch up the street to the bus stop, one tired footstep at a time.

  The Base Line checkpoint is temporarily closed. I’m rerouted to three emergency checkpoints for vetting. At the first checkpoint the line is long, everybody is quiet. Some folks possess no documents. They can’t get to work or home. You get stopped in the streets without papers: bingo. You win the lottery. Three years in county jail. At the second checkpoint a man is handcuffed. I’m patted down by a SWAT inspector in black overalls.

  At the third checkpoint SWAT guards ask me for my travel permit again. They look at the card, then at me. My permit is taken to a table where a SWAT tech processes it. The card is returned to me. I notice it has new coding. I ask a cop what it means. He quips, “Top secret.” And that’s it. I’m free to go.

  □ □ □

  When my uncle returned from the Vietnam War—after two tours of combat duty—he resided in a garage at his father’s house on Sierra Way. For income, he did what everybody in the neighborhood did. He sold pounds of ammoniated Mexican pot. One hundred and ten bucks per pound. The worst weed in the world. My uncle never smiled. None of us did then. Most of us don’t now. You don’t ever smile at a SWAT checkpoint. Not if you want to get through it in one piece.

  PART TWO

  THE RETURN OF THE

  REPRESSED

  FOURTEEN

  They call me Sugar Child.

  I was three years old when my mother took me to a campaign rally in Pioneer Park to see Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was late May 1968. He showed up in a hurry, just himself and some harried aides. The crowd was a mix of black folks, Mexicans, poor whites like us. The wind was still, the air warm.

  Senator Kennedy talked about how everyone was going to get a piece of the pie. Not in heaven. But here on earth. One day our hunger would abate. He reached for people’s hands to shake. My mom squirmed to his side. She held me up to him. I was inches away from his tanned face, the auburn hair barricading his forehead. I looked into his resolute and weary blue eyes, his sinewy forearms in rolled-up shirtsleeves. I was colicky, miserable. A fussy little child with food allergies. Days later Senator Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It was another year before I could eat solid food without throwing up.

  SWAT carted me from the halfway house to General Hospital. I was handcuffed to a gurney while a doctor put fourteen stitches in my chin with no anesthetic. Then away I went, down a hallway, through a long white tunnel into hell. In the lockdown unit a shrink asked: “Sugar Child? Are you hearing voices? Are you hallucinating?”

  “No,” I told her. “But I’ve got this other problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m in a bad relationship. It’s fucking me up.”

  “Who is this person?”

  “A cop.”

  “Really? Does he reside here in town?”

  “No.”

  “Colton?”

  “No.”

  “Redlands?”

  “Nah.”

  “Then where?”

  “He lives inside me.”

  “Inside you? A policeman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Sure does. It’s Don.”

  “Don the policeman?”

  “You got it.”

  “I see. What does he look like?”

  “He’s a white guy with a razor-thin mustache.”

  “Do you talk to Don?”

  “Night and day. He never shuts up.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Don? He thinks I’m an assbite. But why should I tell you?”

  “Sugar Child . . . this is delusional.”

  “Not at all. Don is real. Too real.
The shit he says is just sick.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “My relationship with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “We just had our tenth anniversary.”

  That’s when they hit me with Prolixin. A triple dose.

  Now I’m doing the Prolixin shuffle in Pioneer Park. Doing the tango of the damned. I’ve got legs that don’t work. Arms that won’t move. A mind that can’t think. Prolixin reduces everything to static. The only thing I remember about the halfway house—other than meeting daddy—is losing my wig to the SWAT cops.

  I’m not proud of that.

  The lockdown unit shrink said: “When you feel unsafe, point a finger at the sky. Point a finger at the ground. Point a finger at yourself. Now you’re centered. You feel safe.”

  I don’t feel anything, courtesy of Prolixin.

  I’m not worried—I have a secret weapon nobody knows about. Not the shrinks, the cops, not Don the policeman, not even the Prolixin knows I command an invisible force field that automatically repels assholes—they just bounce off me.

  And look at daddy. Better yet, don’t. He’s over there on E Street, playing his tambourine for Christmas shoppers.

  But they don’t care about him—there’s no money in his bucket. Daddy is having a bad time today. That makes two of us.

  FIFTEEN

  I just caught a glimpse of Sugar Child in Pioneer Park—she’s the highlight of my day. It’s mid-afternoon. I’ve been hustling for three hours. And I have one paltry dollar in the donations bucket. The bucket is dismayed. It taunts me: you creep. I despise you. Fucking loser.

  E Street is a chessboard. I make two moves to my right, I might run into Cassidy and Dalton. I move forward, I’ll have a collision with a tech employee. I step in any other direction, I will trample a pigeon.

  When you’re nervous, everything goes wrong.

  I’ve been nervous since I paroled out of Muscupiabe. Rhonda said it damaged our relationship. But she said that before I got shipped off to the penitentiary. Nowadays? I reckon with nervousness’s stepchildren—I wash my hands fifty times a day.

  I do it so often, my fingers bleed.

  I’ll tell you a secret. A terrible one. The letter from Blessed World hurt me. Fuck those unctuous assholes.

  They can go to hell. On another level, I have to be honest. I can’t keep the uniform. It’s a rental. I even have a receipt to prove it. They can reclaim it from me whenever they want. Over my dead body.

  In the middle of everything I get wind of a guy with a suitcase at the stoplight. Christ help me. It’s him again. The nut job with the .45. Will you look at his fucking eyes? They’re just like the eyes of the woman that got handcuffed at the halfway house. Eyes bright from journeying great distances in his mind, to places that don’t exist on any map known to humankind. I don’t need this shit. But that won’t save me from him. He totters to the donations bucket, glances at it. Now he’s fastening those nut job eyes on me. “Pastor?”

  I swing into action. “What is it, little angel?”

  “I’m frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Do your travails weigh upon your immortal soul?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should we get on our knees and pray for your salvation?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  He grins, showcasing two rows of irregular sepia-tinted teeth. Just my luck. I have said what he wants to hear. He points at his grubby suitcase, the thing bound together with fraying rope.

  “This is for you.”

  What is he talking about? And who wants his fuckedup suitcase? It’s probably stuffed with body parts from a murder. Or maybe a hundred years of yellowed newspapers.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Please. You’ve got to take it.”

  Before I can run for the hills, he pulls a scrap of crumpled paper from his soiled pants. “Read this, Pastor. It’s important.”

  No way. It has to be a message from another solar system where he is the only inhabitant. Why won’t he leave me alone? Why can’t I just play the tambourine and beg for money?

  He sticks the paper in my hand. Then he sets the suitcase in front of me. Without uttering another word, he zips up the street toward the mall.

  I pipe: “Wait a second, motherfucker!”

  He doesn’t look back.

  Left to my own devices, I read the note:

  pastor. i’m in big trouble. i have done evil things. some make me proud. some don’t. because of this, god is not with me. but you are a christian. you are clergy. you make everybody happy for christmas. please take this suitcase and give it to jesus christ.

  I snort in anger. What total shit. The damn fruitcake. He needs to be in Patton State. I ball up the paper and throw it in the gutter. I glance at the cruddy suitcase. What am I going to do with it? I can toss the thing in the trash, or take it home with me.

  A half hour later I pack up my things and catch the bus. The suitcase is bulky, but I manage to get it on board. Fortunately, it’s not rush hour. I’m able to nab a seat.

  Another donations solicitor sits across the aisle from me. He’s tricked out in a sensational uniform. A robe made from flocked black velvet, a cap trimmed with real fur. Boots of kid leather and a silk cleric’s collar. His donations bucket is an antique Tiffany bowl.

  His belly swells over a gold-trimmed sacramental sash. His cheeks are plump. Plus, there’s a humorous twinkle in his green eyes. The bastard—he obviously works the fashionable department stores near the Valencia Avenue checkpoint. Places where people flaunt money. I’m not surprised when he starts needling me.

  “Not having any success today, are you, Pastor?”

  I flare up, my anger management techniques out the window. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re broke.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Your donations bucket is empty. That’s sad. Maybe you don’t know what you’re doing. You want a tip?”

  He’s laid the bait and set the trap. I walk straight into it. “Yeah, pal, tell me what you think.”

  “Your uniform is shit. You need a better one. Who do you work for?”

  “Blessed World.”

  “That explains everything. You work for poverty pimps. You paid well?”

  “Minimum wage.”

  “Any health benefits?”

  “No.”

  “You’re completely fucked. This is a tough business. If I were you, I’d change professions. Find something easier.”

  “Easier?”

  “Not everyone has the grit to do this job.”

  He stands up and waddles to the exit, saying over his shoulder: “I’ve got a party at City Hall. The mayor personally requested me. I’ll see you around, Pastor. Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

  The bus drops him off at the corner of Fourth Street. I stare at the suitcase. What am I doing with it?

  SIXTEEN

  How I got past the Base Line checkpoint was a minor miracle. SWAT removed one passenger from the bus. They were about to ask everybody else for their residential permit cards, but didn’t have the time. Which was copacetic, because I’ve lost mine.

  I’m in the hotel lobby strategizing how to evade the desk clerk when Rudy from Muscoy invades my life. Alonzo’s cherished half-brother is shirtless and covered in sweat. Par for the course, he’s frowning. Rudy detests me. Enough for Rhonda to say he once made a serious pass at her.

  “Pastor, I need a word with you. It’s crucial.”

  If Rudy wants to confess his sins, I’ll refer him to another member of the clergy—I have no stomach for his woes. Hesitantly, I put down the suitcase. For insurance, I genuflect.

  “What is it, my son? Do you need my holy consultation?”

  “You know me, Pastor. I’m cool. But somebody else does.”

  “Do you want to tell me about this person?”

>   “Yeah, I do. Let me get to the meat of it. You had the fucking nerve to tell Alonzo he has issues. Short eyes have issues. Rapists have issues. Murderers have issues. My brother does not have issues. He is ill. Do you understand?”

  “Alonzo isn’t dead yet.”

  “He talks like it. The asshole. He’s still drinking. I tell him to cut it out and he gives me some insanity about the air, how bad it is. Like I’m stupid? I don’t let my kids breathe the damn air. Do you know how many rehab places Alonzo’s been in? That crap costs money.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  Rudy’s sad eyes belong in the frozen vegetable section at the supermarket. “How do I know? Alonzo’s so messed up and paranoid, he talks on the phone at home with a loaded pistol in his hand. But why am I telling you this shit? You ain’t nobody. You’re a fucking charlatan. I don’t trust you. And you know what, Pastor? I didn’t make a pass at your wife. She made one at me. So fuck you.”

  Due to Rudy, my vocabulary has a new word. Trust. I swish it around in my mouth, like a fine wine. Nobody ever talks about trust. Rhonda certainly didn’t. The philosopher Habermas has written we’re living in an age of exhausted utopian energies. I never understood what he meant until just now.

  After Rudy and I part company, I venture upstairs to my rooms. A new message is waiting on the answering machine. It’s from my parole officer. Telling me he informed Blessed World of my felon status. He’s angry I didn’t mention it to them. And he wants me to report to his office on the double. If I’m not there by five o’clock, he’ll revoke my parole. I press the delete button.

  I heave the suitcase onto the coffee table. I settle down in the wingback chair to meditate on it. What if there’s a bomb in the fucking thing? There’s only one way to find out. I get up and trundle into the kitchenette and rummage around in a drawer for a pair of scissors. Finding them, I return to the coffee table.