Falling Room (American Lives)

falling room

American Lives

Series editor: Tobias Wolff

Falling Room Eli Hastings

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

© 2006 by N. Eli Hastings. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America Book designed and typeset by R. Eckersley in Bram de Does’s Enschedé Trinité fonts. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hastings, Eli, 1977– Falling Room / Eli Hastings p. cm. – (American lives) isbn-13: 978-0-8032-7364-1 (pbk.: alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-7364-9 (pbk.: alkaline paper) 1. Hastings, Eli, 1977– 2. Seattle (Washington) – Biography. 3. Young adults – Washington (State) – Biography. 4. Americans – Nicaragua – Biography. 5. Americans – Panama – Biography. 6. Americans – Cuba – Biography. 7. Drug dealers – Washington (State) – Biography. 8. Nicaragua – Description and travel. 9. Panama – Description and travel. 10. Cuba – Description and travel. i. Title. ii. Series. ct275.h28725a3 2006 979.7'772043092–dc22 2006000846

Para Papa—que descanses en paz.

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Burlington Northern

1

Gettin’ Up

7

Mulching

18

Moonfaced Man

23

The Professor

30

Intersection

34

Falling Room

39

Wake

48

Grant County Jail

68

Good, Alright, Fine

86

In the Mouth of the Bull

102

Sky

117

Coming Away

125

Dispatches from a Prohibited World

131

Out in Front

152

My Father’s House

160

Over the Pass

164

viii

Acknowledgments It would be impossible here to thank everyone who supported me, inspired me, listened to me, or drank with me. The following is intended as a special thanks to those people who toiled directly with these pages. Sarah Messer, who can only be called the quarterback and coach —this wouldn’t even have begun without her. Philip Gerard for his red ink, his faith, and his unflagging encouragement. David Gessner for his wild Thoreauvian second winds in the stuffy academy—and for giving me my one awp schmooze that paid off so much. Jessica Smith for everything—for being the best editor and the best friend I had in North Carolina. Sebastian Matthews for all his favors and for jumpstarting me—from the bars and coffeehouses of Claremont clear through Dixie—and for understanding the void a father leaves. Brad Land for his example—not just of success but also of grace and generosity. Ladette Randolph for her taste, her kindness, and her faith in the essay. Anne Depue for the eleventh-hour aid. Stephen Barnett for his sharp eye. Loads of thanks to Kimi Faxon (rock star), (Daddy) Daren Dean, Trav, Jeff, and KC (the fabulous brothers), Tom Kunz (the sloshy lover), Marc Johnston (and The Shnake), Kim “so serious” Shable, Andrea Quarraccino (moving and shaking), Dave Smith Winery, Douglas “pretty boy” Cutting, and Isaac “strawberry” Lane. Lastly, the late Tom Hastings and my Jersey Girl, who were both full of too much love for this world. R.I.P. (Finally) The author gratefully acknowledge the editors of the following publications in which portions of this book first appeared: The Pedestal Magazine The Political Anthology (2004) for “Coming Away”; Alligator Juniper (2005) for “Falling Room”; Cimarron Review 145 (Fall ix

2003) for “In the Mouth of the Bull”; Tulane Review (Fall 2003) for “Moonfaced Man”; Third Coast 16 (Spring 2003) for “Sky”; Rivendell 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000) for an excerpt from “Wake”; Seattle Review 28, no. 2 (June 2006) for “Gettin’ Up.”

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falling room

xi

Burlington Northern I used to pull my clock under the blankets with me. I slept with my head covered, so I was sure to hear the alarm as one a.m. arrived. Instantly awake, I slipped from my bed and dressed. My mother and stepfather slumbered just above, so stealth was important. With recollected adrenaline burning in my chest, I entered the night tentative and slow, caressing the window’s hinge closed. In the Buick, I lit a Marlboro as 1:30 crawled onto the dashboard clock. The overpass at 145th dropped shadow across my hood like a gateway—Seattle officially ended here, and I began stretching the car out, slicing into the heart of what I thought of as “the sinister suburbs.” This was ironic, of course, because the era of grunge, heroin, and the fetishes of self-loathing and psychic pain were in full swing in Seattle. I lived, in fact, a short five blocks from Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (and his suicide), but among my crowd the darkest we got was some of Led Zeppelin’s weirder tunes. The “Seattle Scene” was unrolling all around us, but it held sway, mainly, among twentyand thirty-somethings—and many were transplants from other places. We remained, mainly, happily oblivious with our classic rock and hip-hop, sucking down malt liquor in city parks. You were more likely to find adherents to this subculture of the city among the suburbs’ spoiled or angry adolescents—some of them the “victims” of their parents’ white flight, but more often lifelong residents. The social contrast between the concrete grids of the city and tree-lined, quiet avenues caused many of these kids to feel soft, and thus they had much more to prove—and, usually, more resources to prove it with. Out in this warped periphery there was violence and drugs—but rarely for money. These kids were into darkness for the sake of darkness. As fathers sat around country club tables, clutching cocktails and congratulating themselves on their promotions, their teens ventured off into sub-urbanity, car1

rying with them dangerous things: complexes and boredom. They attended family suppers raging high on lsd, they bumped lines before math tests, and like teens almost anywhere, they forged alliances and feuds sometimes with blood. My best friend, Dean, was now among these kids. I swung off the interstate and slipped into the pack of luxury vehicles and family wagons moving leisurely up the hills. I caught the end of a yellow light and flew across Route 99, the long strip of sleaze that finally, decisively, marked the border to better living. A moment later I wound down Dean’s woodsy avenue, weaving between yellow lane markers. His hillside home pulled itself around a bend, nearly indistinguishable from the other massive cedar houses. Except for the occupants. On the top and third floor, I could see the purple throb of his younger sister’s black light, under the glare of which there was no telling what might be transpiring. His mother’s bedside lamp winked meekly a floor below, as I knew it would until her daughter’s activity ceased and Dean returned home with a whisper of sliding glass. Dean and I figured his mother’s hope was that the move to this neighborhood would wean him off mischief, steer him into football, science, and college. That it would purge his mind of the strange ideas and voices—the functional schizophrenia—that everyone quietly knew cursed his father. In the end, it did not. Recently we had endured an afternoon that was to change everything. That vile Tuesday in the middle of winter had broken me down and just plain broken my best friend—though he’d already been bound for it. To recap: At eleven a.m. I split my city high school and drive fast to the suburbs, where I join Dean and eat three hits of acid on a cold, windy beach. At first there is merely the occasional hallucination—a figure in a rocking chair that, upon scrutiny, turns out to be empty 2

and moved by gusts. But then it gets weird. Dean, sucking on his cigarettes in the hungry way he has, tells me of a kid at school who unnerves him, deeply, though he cannot say why. We’re wandering a slippery stretch of stones under a bridge. Spray painted on a concrete pillar: tool. Who writes that? I ask, to which Dean says Chris Woolman—the dude I was just telling you about. That’s odd. We move on through the nightmare colors of the day, dodging humanity, smoking and chopping up our theories of God. Driving back to his house, we come upon two kids walking the center of the road. They wave us over. Dean knows them and curses. They climb into my back seat, uninvited. They say Hey man this cd is the shit, gotta hear it man. At Dean’s house they play the music. It is the metronome of a gun being cocked and unintelligible commands. It is horrible. Dean asks who it is. It’s Tool, they tell us, grooving heads to the nonmusic. Dean and I look at each other, beg each other, simultaneously, to ask and not to ask: Where’d you get it? One of the kids looks up. It’s Chris’s man, you know, Chris Woolman’s. Dean pushes stop. The music does not stop. Dean unplugs the stereo and is shocked, painfully, by the cord. He holds his wrist and I watch a certain cloud cross his gaze. The events of that day, however, made our present escapade—and all those to come after it—feel so much more appealing, so much more important. I slipped in, negotiated the black room by rote, and shook Dean from his nest of porn, pillows, and ash. He rose, already dressed, and moonshine bloomed on his grin. We wasted no time slipping back out into the night. There was more smoke than talk as I whipped the car through the rain. The moon spiked off the road and multiplied itself in each bead of water sliding across the windshield. The Pacific suddenly flattened the horizon into a line and we parked in a cul-de-sac. We 3

crossed the road and hopped the guardrail, over boulders and onto the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the water. We checked the oil silos a quarter mile down the beach for security patrols. But there was no one. We walked the shoreline, the tide working constantly to suck out evidence of our footprints. We toked on a joint and talked fast, constructing flawed philosophies, getting tangled up in each other’s words, losing track, we were sure, of invaluable revelations every few minutes. Then a small tremor came through the air. We perceived it at the same instant and stopped, turning north. A half-mile away, a yellow light splashed and began to spread across the bulging white flank of the oil silo. Our eyes met briefly, we dropped our smokes in the surf and sprinted across loose sand, scrambled up the gravel embankment and onto the tracks. The Burlington Northern materialized and as it lumbered around the bend its one headlight swung into our eyes. It charged a few dozen yards before the conductor saw us. That deep bleat, impossibly loud, lifted—a horn blast against the percussion of the engine. Steel screamed once as if the conductor, suddenly convinced of our insanity, had given a futile pull on the brakes. The boxcars leaned crazily and clanked. The air smelled of coal and metal and grew suddenly hot. I swallowed and erased the sweat on my brow with a sleeve. Dean shifted his legs. The horn lifted again, higher pitched, frantic, gobbling up the distance. And then the metal grid over the headlight appeared like a crosshairs before us. Our eyes watered and the train blurred. Then Dean touched my arm. And we launched ourselves sideways and skyward, twisting away, tumbling down the gravel, coming to rest in a tangle of driftwood. We leaped up, hurling stones at the boxcars, sparks exploding where they struck. We howled in rapture and lit cigarettes to await the next one. 4

This was the era of Bush Sr. I knew things in drastically reduced ways: that thousands of people were dying for oil; that my mother wept over it; that some abstract machine of war chugged forward anyway, undeterred. Coming from a lair of left-wing activism I was, as a kid, brought to protests and introduced to the rhetoric of nonviolence, unity, to the responsibility to fight injustice that comes with privilege. It was not a coincidence that my mother had moved to what was nearly the most distant point in the continental U.S. from her home in South Carolina. She had fled the confines of thought and kin that had kept her stifled in Dixie and flew into the ranks of the antinuclear—and, then, antiwar—movement, where she eventually found my stepfather. Her white blonde hair, sunweathered skin, and the slow curl of her southern accent (I always visualized her words as cursive) may have stood out some in Seattle, but she felt less strange there regardless. Thanks to her, early on, I was plugged into indignation, as an appliance to an outlet. This era followed the committal of my first love to a hospital because her refusal to eat was eroding, day by day, her ability to live. Dozens of meals in the rising twilight, watching as she tried to bring a spoon to her thin lips, me tense and insistent and finally flinging plates against walls and storming through late-summer streets smoking furiously. Later, she dropped folded slices of notebook paper from a psychiatric window that whirled and fell to my cold hands. Please, baby, save me or kill me, I don’t care. I can’t stay here. I was stopped by linebacker orderlies at the entrance. At the risk of melodrama, I will say that in the dead chatter of those boxcars, the steel on steel, the baritone labor of the engine, the wail of the horn, mortars buckled the walls of homes half a world away, and my mother wept. I will say that the hospital pa crackled, announcing my half-drunken presence to security, that there were the veiled and unveiled pleas of salvation and mercy from a 5

girl I loved. But the freight was avoidable. It was conquerable. And it was sweet in the way that victory is as the caboose disintegrated into the south, leaving me gulping icy air and feeling alive. Dean and I both came from families divorced from and cynical of religion. As a requisite part of rebellion, we spun toward the occult and vague spirituality. We ingested a lot of questionable jars of chunky fungi, laced our minds with a lot of lsd, and smoked a lot of the Northwest’s strongest grass. We also stayed awake for long stretches, welcoming the hallucinations and strange streaks of inspiration that sleeplessness brings (later I would hear that sleep deprivation causes psychosis—figures). But we did these things, in major part, because we earnestly wanted to know God, wanted to image Him against the falsity of the rest our lives. I wouldn’t claim that we glimpsed the thinnest sliver of Him in the shuddering seconds in front of those trains, but I will claim this: it was a taste of faith. We did not wish for death. We loved life—we were thrilled and fascinated by it, irrespective of its pains. As the freight thundered headlong toward us, as we trembled and touched one another’s elbows lightly, shifting on our legs, as tears were pushed from our eyes by the fury of what was coming, we believed as deeply as I’ve believed anything since that we would live. We were teaching the spectators in ourselves, the parts of us that needed to watch and have everything proven. We were teaching ourselves to be as courageous as we would ever need to be—more than we’d ever need to be. We were reinventing ourselves as strong so that we could walk forward into a life that was getting brasher by the day. I always felt ease as I passed back across 145th, the clouds rosecolored, the trees and mini malls giving way to more concrete and more cars. And when I inched back through that window, dropped muddied jeans and placed myself in the fold of sheets for an hour 6

before the alarm sounded again, I knew I’d rise more vital and refreshed than anyone I knew—except for maybe Dean. Perhaps it was all just catharsis. And later that day, as I slouched in the back of a musty classroom, I’d play those early-morning hours on a loop in the back of my head. Our teachers postured half-heartedly before the chalkboard. My peers slept, gambled, gazed out streaky windows, passed bottles back and forth under the desks. In the midst of this, I could even conjure a little thrill, a tingle, recalling—enough to ride through three p.m.

Gettin’ Up “Do you write?” From under a ball cap twisted to the side, through an exhalation of smoke, from a face fashionably obscured, the question was asked time and again, the mode of introduction between glassy-eyed, beer-clutching kids knocked into a lean by the invisible heft of hip-hop style. It was part challenge, part greeting, part aggression, part attempted camaraderie. It might not come until one of you noticed a crust of paint or the stray streak of marker on a knuckle. For me, at the time when fat pens and cans of Krylon began to bulge and rattle in folds of clothing, I was almost completely ignorant of the hip-hop roots of graffiti. For me, it arrived with the allure of another card of mischief to play in the game of getting through high school. Garfield High School slouches along the block between 22nd and 23rd Avenues in the Central District of Seattle. It has quite a history. Was a time—the older folks who sell you barbecue or catfish out of faded storefronts might say—that Garfield was proud. 7

Quincy Jones went there, goddamit. So did Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee. Then again, others will tell you, was a time that Garfield was so dangerous some kids came, got their assignments, and retreated. A time when knives flashed like jewelry in the halls. There was a time when the Black Panthers made a stand and tear gas wafted through hallways like weed smoke did in my day. It was a place forever associated with “Blackness” and, as a result, inevitably under the thumb of hip-hop culture. No matter that in my day the social segregation was near-absolute, that with the exceptions of sports, the jazz band, drug deals, and a handful of parties, racial lines weren’t much crossed outside the classroom. Hip-hop influence was insidious even on us interlopers from Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, or the University District. Garfield was a word, which, if dropped in the company of suburbanite kids, would elicit respect, fear, and envy. Actually, Garfield wasn’t any more dangerous or tense than any other school—and, judging by statistics, was in fact a good measure safer than some “white” schools. What was true is that it suffered more than others from the bureaucratic neglect that plagued the Seattle School District: the insufficient funds, tenured and listless teachers, and outdated and minimal resources. With the exception of the Advanced Placement classes and a handful of inspired younger instructors, the twelve hundred students were hurried through the factory and out into the streets of their lives. As the indolent security force realized that a great deal went on beneath their unwatchful eyes, they made a decision to avert them—at least until the class of 1995 was gone forever. At any rate, we didn’t mind the blind eyes that greeted us on the stoops of that old building every morning. The license to idle the days away in the city parks, to clown around in classes, was fine by us. I hesitate to say, therefore, that tagging was anything more than just another form of mischief. But because of the political 8

root of graffiti, I suspect there was some anger or disillusionment in it, however unconscious. In my fuzzy recollection, it happened all at once, though that’s surely inaccurate. It just became visible to me all at once. Bubble letters and flat black quadrangulars, the most honed and most amateur, the most traditional and most new school, in glossy paint pens and traditional Marks-A-Lot, the tags piled up. They ballooned and crashed over lockers and doors, across desks and windows, on the bumpy cinderblock of rotting bathrooms. Liveevil!, Def, Chaos, scm, enigma 1, until a tsunami of letters covered much of the lead paint. The janitors buffed the walls futilely. It was terminal. I buffed the walls myself, in fact. One winter morning I knocked into school an hour late, figuring I’d make a nominal appearance in Spanish class. I stopped at a water fountain. As I wiped my mouth, the unblemished wall in front of me proved too tempting. I was circling the A of my ugly, huge “Chaos” when I heard an outraged yelp. I cursed and turned from the “Ch@” to Mr. Ball, the polyester-clad shop teacher. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, already lurching toward me. With pretended befuddlement and incredible arrogance, I pocketed the pen. “What? I was just trying to get this ugly tag off the wall, Ball. Chill out—yo!” The quiet man must have had some athletic or military training because he twisted my arm back with efficiency, extracted the pen, and marched me to the security office with barely restrained rage, ignoring my threats to sue him. He left me with the graying head officer, Gus, who leisurely finished a donut, shaking his head at me with each bite. For the better part of an hour after school Gus marched me around the building, every few seconds pointing at a tag. “Who write that?” He’d fire at me, popping corn nuts in his mouth. I’d shrug. He let it slip that if I ratted out a big-deal writer, I’d be 9

free to join my friends in the park. That was the first time that I was asked to bust Karl Coulton; I chose not to. Gus left me alone with a rag and a bottle of sharp-smelling chemical. I scrubbed away a handful of wack tags. The first time that I dashed and climbed through the narrow alleys and deserted streets of downtown and put my mark on warehouses and buses and offices, I felt reborn. Tagging—or, more exactly, the process of “getting up”—was irresistible: fun, exhilarating, cathartic, and addictive. It was Us against Them. That “They” were amorphous, poorly defined—Cops? Business owners? Metro transit? Corporations? The school system?—didn’t much matter. They weren’t Us. There was something else in the circus cage of high school: the need for respect. Sports, academics, music, and other traditional sources were not so valuable in my little corner of Garfield as was delinquent feat. As I followed Karl or Ike or Zinn across a four-lane freeway and shimmied up a thirty-foot pole to slash my tag across an exit sign, all of this brewed in me, temporarily lifting off burdens that I couldn’t even identify. It didn’t matter that I was an atrocious artist (actual graffiti art was something I dared to try my hand at only once) and a pathetically small-potatoes writer—in short, a total phony. I was running silent and fast through my mutating city, my mutating life, alongside people I considered mine, putting down scrolls of evidence that I existed and was not afraid. Inevitably a crew formed. We called ourselves cdw: Criminally Disposed Writers. Somehow we invited an offensive. Our scarcely dried tags wound up sliced through with Xs and taunts of toy!— wack writer—above and below them. We retaliated. This was about the time that Karl Coulton broke out and cleared a space for himself as a serious graffiti artist—in fact began the rise 10

toward the legendary. Part of this was the cultivation of “pieces”— the large, elaborate murals that graffiti is fortunately still associated with. But Karl also had to establish an inviolable rep as a writer—and as a member of a crew. There were a couple of nights when I nearly called it quits, when a duo or trio of silent figures shouldered past, smoke floating up from cigarettes in their facelessness. Karl was legitimate to my phony; he was decidedly in this game and I knew from sharing a soccer field with him he did not play games solely for fun. When rivalry came up, so did his Irish: his broad face hardened and a grayness that was not mere theater backed up his gaze. One night I was with Karl and a couple cdws at a “legal wall” (a space allotted for graffiti art)—the west side of the Greyhound bus station. Karl was twisting flourishes onto a piece. A couple of joints or smokes, tiny red circles that smeared the dark, had been dancing in a fifth story window and now a call floated down to us. “Ey, yo! You guys cdw?” The speaker dragged on whatever he was smoking. His tone unnerved us. Everyone, I realized then, deferred to Karl. “Who, man?” He asked, his back to the speaker, eyes on his work. “cdw, yo. Are . . . you . . . guys . . . c . . . d . . . w?” The stranger spoke slowly, with mock mental retardation. By now we were looking over our shoulders at the ample shadows around the bus barn, less sure about the neutrality of the place. Karl stalled with a grin. “Naw, man, we’re not cdw. Those dudes are fucking toys. I see their shit all over town and it makes me sick. We’re just up from Ballard. Not really a crew.” Disarmed, the two heads in the window chattered about this and that, mixing in invective about the cdw toys. When we gathered our cans to split, Karl issued a glance that said pay attention. “Hey yo, we’re about to go,” he called up to the pair who were now distracted, chatting. “But I got something for you real quick.” 11

He stepped to the front of their apartment building, snapped his fattest cap on a can of black, and carefully applied a five-foot cdw onto the brick. “Fuck man, what’s up with that? This is our pad, dude,” they protested—but they couldn’t lean out far enough to see. Buzzing with pride and adrenaline, we ran off into the night, toward the illicit side of writing. But it wasn’t to last for me; as I knew in my heart was the case, it would only take one decisive scare to knock the paint out of my hands for good. I turned a sweatshirt inside out and laced high-top Nikes. I pulled the hood on and slipped two cans of Krylon—red and flat black— into the pouch pocket and pushed a felt pen into my back pocket. I killed the light and climbed through the window. Zinn was visible a half block away. He drove a white Ford Escort coupe that fairly screamed teenager. The cherry of his Marlboro floated back and forth as his nervous hand compulsively ashed it. We cut across the sleeping city, Zinn chattering nervously as was his way, me watching the vapor lights coat buildings. Zinn drove erratically, aggressively, clutch-lurching, impatient. This unsettled me so I lit the joint—to get rid of it and to dull my nerves. “Fuck, dude, keep that low, bro,” Zinn chided. He drove more conservatively to Karl’s block, doused the headlights. Karl thudded against the driver’s window, startling the smoke out of Zinn’s hand. Karl opened the door and crammed himself into the back. He was laughing to himself and the glassy, half-cracked burn of mischief lit his face. “Shit, dude, you been bombing already, man?” Zinn asked, clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “I been gettin’ up for an hour, bro,” Karl replied, suddenly seri12

ous, “since you freaks are so paranoid. I’m telling you, this town is in bed by midnight.” “Dude, it doesn’t hurt to be careful, bro. I can’t take the chance—you know, I’ve been—” “Let me hit that, E,” Karl interrupted, reaching for the joint, his way of ending an argument. I agreed with Zinn; there was no reason to risk being out earlier, but I preferred not to bicker with Karl. I handed him the roach. “Kill it.” We drove along the bay. The skyline built itself over the black water, hugged on one side by the yellow streak of interstate. A patchwork of lights lit the Columbia Tower and the Space Needle’s tip blinked its red beacon slowly, one drop of blood blooming on the end of a syringe. We parked and strolled onto the University Bridge, which trundled with intermittent traffic, giving lie to Karl’s claim that this was a sleepy city. We all knew otherwise; Seattle was making its awkward lurch forward. Though the rest of the world would associate our home with coffee, technology, and so-called grunge music, all the other trappings of a major metropolis applied. If this change had anything to do with our infatuation with marking up the place, we were unselfconscious enough not to realize it. Karl knelt at midsection of the drawbridge and put his tag down as large as the sidewalk would allow. I had to admit it was brilliant—when the bridge rose, hab 1 (Habitual) would be hauled up into the brightening sky. As Karl finished, the blue van passed us for the first time, rather slowly. But it continued several blocks and made a leisurely left. Just on the south side of the bridge was a nondescript beige building. It promised visibility. But it was too exposed. Karl scoped it once and walked briskly and casually to it and hit it with a huge 13

tag. As he turned away, the blue van turned a corner a half block north; he saw it but didn’t acknowledge it. When he reached us we dashed up a staircase. We emerged, panting, on a residential street with an expensive view. Zinn was hacking and spitting; Karl laughed his sharp cackle. “You need a smoke, man?” He slapped Zinn’s spine. I felt the not-unpleasant flight juice settling back down in me. Zinn cursed and stood. They faced me. Then my labored breath cut out because over their shoulders the blue van, lights out, cruised toward us. I didn’t have to say anything. “Same van?” Karl asked, every muscle in his body spring-loading. Zinn registered terror. I nodded. “Don’t run,” Karl said. “Don’t run.” At that, halogens devoured the night, the van’s engine raced and four figures in black windbreakers spilled out screaming orders to freeze. “Fuck it. Run!” Karl hit full stride on his second step. Zinn didn’t move, his eyes already resigned. I turned and followed Karl. An effect of adrenaline is that it increases all of your senses: your vision sharpens, your range of hearing expands, your nostrils flare to better admit odor. As I sprinted I recall smelling rhododendrons and noting the brightness of the skyline, the absence of stars. And I could hear the intakes of air from the cops yards behind. I crossed a yard, thrashing through a wall of shrubs. And then I was airborne, twisting around to see the terraced garden and hole through which I had just come, the sidewalk racing up. I landed and tumbled twice, losing little tatters of my flesh, but only mildly bashing my head. I vaulted a chain link fence and, in a lot full of rental vans, dove underneath one and clung to the axle and sucked in the cold night. It was there, as I heard rock n’ roll blaring from a car at the red light, and the lowing of boats in the bay, and felt my pager buzz with a call from my girl, that I allowed myself to relax, to enjoy the 14

high. I figured the worst was done and started sketching plans for the next leg of escape. In the most adventurous version, I would climb back over to the University District on the bridge’s gargantuan underbelly. But I didn’t have much time for such plotting because blue and red lights spun across the pavement, doors opened, and radios crackled. On the other side of the back fence of the lot was a greenbelt— thick forest and brambles. I chanced the fence. Halfway up it, I could see three cops consulting and Zinn’s chagrinned face through the back window of a cruiser. I dropped down, turned, jumped, grabbed a branch and swung out over the greenbelt. I released and fell, deep into the embrace of blackberry bushes. I bore the tiny stabs and lacerations in silence but my crashing was pretty loud. I worked my way deeper. I could see, through the arc and loop of the bushes’ thin wrists, the skyline. I watched my city pulse and blink. I saw a satellite cruise over Ballard and vanish languidly over my head. A barge chugged through the water and disappeared past the moorings on Elliott Bay. I even grew a little sleepy. And then I heard the German Shepherd bark. “He’s going to rip you to fucking pieces, kid!” “This is one hungry pooch, homeboy.” “Shit, I can smell you, I know he can!” Surely they were bluffing. They’d brought the dog, but they wouldn’t release it. Would they? I’d feel real foolish if it were a bluff—it didn’t occur to me how foolish I’d feel if it weren’t. But then the bushes cracked and parted above me. A spotlight hit the back of my head. I must’ve thought I was invisible. “Stand up, put your hands on your head, back up the hill asshole.” This was not easy. The hill was very steep, but the second time I tried to use my hands to steady myself, a pistol cocked above me. As my arms were twisted back and the dog’s master let it lurch 15

and snap a foot from my crotch, I told the police I was very impressed with their thoroughness. Zinn was near tears because he was nineteen and had priors. I tried to console him. He just shook his head. “They have no evidence,” I argued, “this is all bullshit. I didn’t do a goddam thing.” Zinn told me to shut up, but it was the glare from the stocky black cop behind the wheel that did the trick. He turned up the crackling dispatch radio; we could make out the report of a woman who had taken a knife to her boyfriend. “I should be dealing with real shit like this,” the cop said, earnestly trying to restrain himself, “but I’m out here wasting time with you little pricks.” Droplets of saliva struck us as he spoke. In the cell next to ours, just beyond what seemed the thinnest wall ever built, they placed the woman who’d cut up her lover. We glimpsed her briefly, a contortion of mad joy and rage, screaming obscenities and wracked by the hilarity of the whole thing at once, blood crusting her skin and blouse. As she continued her tirade, ramming the walls and screeching, the sergeant who’d directed our capture visited us. He entered, smiled sagely, and sat down with a sigh. “What do you write?” he asked casually, like he’d just been introduced at a party. We remained silent. He let us know we had a chance to walk. “You know, there’s a few writers out there that we’re concerned with. We don’t give a shit about you two twerps. There’s a few names you could give me of people that were with you tonight. You could go home and shower, be up in time for work—or,” he said looking at me, “school.” Just to say a handful of words, maybe sign a piece of paper and walk home, wash my face, smoke a cigarette and still catch an hour of rest before the alarm sounded, my father awakened by a sunray instead of this sergeant’s call. 16

In the end, of course, it was the phone call. Dad collected me in a very tense silence. I left Zinn with his head resting against the thin partition, awaiting his transfer to county. I did get an hour of sleep before I rose for school—where I rejoined a giddy Karl who’d simply run farther and hid longer than I had. “Do you write?” From the attentive face of a sharply dressed girl, sipping a glass of Merlot, through the crisscross and collision of a dozen bookish conversations, the question comes, time and again. It is part challenge, part greeting, part aggression, part attempted camaraderie. It might not come until you overhear a statement about the “parameters of nonfiction” or notice a chewed pen riding a shirt pocket or something familiar behind another’s gaze. It’s been years since I darted around the dark streets, feeling halfway important. But I’ve come to suspect that as time moves on, I will see more and more of how unchanged I am, how similar the games of “writing” and writing really are. Which of my motivations, after all, for tagging were different than my motivations for trying to record my truths? Not catharsis, not rebellion, not the need to somehow—however imperceptibly—change the world around me. Not the need to mark the Seattle of my youth as my own. Not addiction. Maybe if I’d had the right chance—God, how precious, the fleeting opportunity to reform my younger self, the reckless moron!— I’d have spent the small hours of weeknights under a desk lamp, unloading my words onto paper instead of walls, earning respect —albeit from different people—and creating something more enduring and complex than a few lines of paint. In fact, I did begin to pour out those first lines of prose soon after that night. But I have a hard time confessing to absolute folly—and a hard time 17

blaming all of my mischief on frustration with sorry schooling, screwed-up home life, or anything else. The narcotic high of those wild nights when your senses multiply, the city looms, and you move through it invisible, making your mark, made me perhaps less of a citizen but, in small part, made me. “Yeah,” I say, feeling the buzz of putting it out there, “I write a little.”

Mulching My parents, new arrivals to the Northwest, where they plan to invent a new plot for their lives in brand new, wide-open Seattle, leave me with a sitter and take a weekend to escape to the Cascades. They coax the orange van that carried us all the way from South Carolina up and over icy Steven’s Pass. After some hours of skiing backcountry gullies, they stop in a strange Bavarian-themed town where they negotiate the throngs of tourists to find a bathroom. A note pinned to a telephone pole announces property for sale ten miles west. They cannot resist calling, because they’re moving forward in love, because their three-year-old son and newly conceived son make them think of the future and not the past, which is haunted by the son who is dead. The Cascades are looming backlit over them, and things are possible again. Weeks later, with a realtor, on malfunctioning snowmobiles, they roar onto the property, not listening to the man’s selling points so much as inventing their own in order to sell the idea to themselves and each other. I sleep on the back of one of the snowmobiles despite the noise and chill. In my imagination, I see them telling the realtor they need a few moments alone. My parents pass 18

me back and forth, trudging through the snow, witnessing Bald Mountain cutting the north, inhaling the clean cold, hearing the pleasant whoomph of boughs releasing their burden of snow to the sun, adjusting my heft on their shoulders. With few words, they commit—not just to the sale, but also to the rugged steadiness that this place contains. In the end, though, it doesn’t save them. It’s not enough to brace against the slide away from one another. But the land remains the closest thing to home and the closest thing to holy that I possess, and over the years I pay visits, watch the seasons roll through their work. But the dream my mother once shared with my father of actually living on that magic land does not evaporate in her heart as her marriage does; it just takes a seat in the back of her mind as she moves through years of activism and a short career as a special education teacher. And eventually, in 1998, she and my stepfather transfer their lives to those acres. The day has started scowling. I rose with the energy that a June cobalt blue sky over the Cascades offers. But by the time I’ve downed coffee and toast, and step out toward the garden, the canvas above me is gray as a smudge of newsprint. Crazy, strong little gusts push at me from all sides as if I’m in a concert crowd and a fight has broken out nearby. So here I stand, staring down the ruddy garden, with my load of old newspapers. The directions are simple enough: wet the newspaper, cover the entire garden in two layers of it, then add a layer of hay. And don’t step on the asparagus. The barren ribbon of earth looks like a wound on the meadow’s breast. I have a hard time believing that any amount of work is going to drag the asparagus forth from the tentative shoots. It seems it’s going to require more than the insulation of mulching to coax 19

the crop into surviving the autumn. But I haven’t done much for my mother and stepfather this season, so I take such tasks without comment. I drop the stack of papers with a thud and a flutter onto the hay cart and then haul the hose out of the barn. I join it with the pump faucet and spray arcs of water, still warm from the now-missing sun, across the dry expanse. The high desert bore of the sun has long since burned all moisture from the soil, and the falling water is absorbed instantly. I move around the edges, using my thumb to raise the pressure of the water. A gust rides down the side of Bald Mountain to the north, and before I can react it has gotten beneath my stash of papers and tossed them into the chilling air. Colorful advertisements flap and arc against the glooming afternoon. After I have pulled the unruly journals, post-intelligencers, weeklies, and times down from their erratic heights (a few escaping to the boughs of pine trees), I turn the hose on them to prevent a repeat. I roll up my pants and begin to paste them down. I wet my palm and push a month-old sports page into the far corner. I repeat the process: reach, wet, slap to the ground, and smooth to the land’s contours. For a while the labor consumes me. I’m content to work up some sweat in defiance of the chilly summer day. But after the first third of the garden is covered, and my knees and lower back are starting to ache, I begin to slow, dally, and read snatches of articles. Our president is pushing a new missile “shield,” though it may spark a new arms race. I pull forth an editorial page with one reader opining that a war would be just what our slowing economy needs. I cover that thought with a financial section, which confirms the threat of depression. The new administration, working in tandem with a bipartisan 20

legislative team, will continue to enforce sanctions against Cuba; a wrinkled image of Castro falls and thins against the damp ground, his eyes turned up as if observing the growth of the asparagus stalk above him. I tuck El Comandante in with a photo of the Caribbean over a headline proclaiming “St. Martinique is the Spot for Mid Winter Peace.” The stack has toppled and the breezes are again trying to make off with my supplies. They lift and stir my would-be mulch, putting New York Times sports pages down across the High Country Journal’s classifieds. Another ball player has been accused of rape, I notice as I dash over, snatch the papers back down. And just up the road, an antique thresher will be auctioned off Saturday. A bucketful of water puts an end to any more flight and I stomp back to finish the job. The ap wire is sure that “A Middle Eastern Peace is Promising After Marathon Talks,” but the New York Times disagrees, detailing the “21 Injured in Raid on Gaza Stronghold.” I lay the opposing stories to rest together and the raw, ragged mounds of earth, the only land that is holy to me, grinds its way through the strife of Palestine, tearing the soft flesh of words that repeat themselves in at least half a dozen articles. Two more schools have been rocked by gunfire; a dozen prisons across the Northwest are in varying stages of completion; Pakistan and India continue to watch their young men slip away in the icy peaks of Kashmir; AIDS has reached unforeseen proportions in sub-Saharan Africa. I smooth and fold, tear and bend, peel and readjust this menagerie of tragedy, feeling increasingly like I am doing something morally perverse. And I’m reminded why my mom and David fled to this place; they fought for years and years against war, against nuclear arms, against avaricious foreign policy. They’ve now withdrawn, decamped to a place where newspapers and all 21

the blues they report are only for mulch. The papers now cover almost three-quarters of the garden, a cancer of words. I am tired, rushing to finish. I pull a bucket near, simply dunking the pages into the murky water. I jerk mushy handfuls out and nearly hurl them to the ground now; I halfheartedly smooth them out. The papers begin to tear in the journey from the bucket to the ground. Suddenly though, a phrase halts me, my arm raised above the soggy mess. A headline that was “Sri Lankan government Says 30 Rebels Killed” has been transformed, by virtue of another, slapped on top, to now read: “Sri Lankan Government Says There Will Be Change.” I reread the line a couple of times. I retrieve more half-dry editions from the hay cart and begin to create my montage of good news. “New Administration Set to Begin Testing For Happiness’ Sake” “gao Says Government is In the Money” “Cancer Patients Increasingly Smile” “Pentagon Calls For a Bake Sale” “American Children Seek Peace and Justice” “Israel Demands Festival With Palestinians” “Television Baffles High Schoolers” “No Need For Environmental Concern”

And my last one, a long line cobbled from several sources, bordering the back edge of the now black and white garden: “Researchers Find Cure For Depression and Promise of Growth: “Garden Work”

Finished. The green stalks look almost triumphant, standing forth against that rug of text. The sky still grumbles and sighs, spinning clouds low, but a corner of blue is showing in the east. I think about how maybe my headlines will be sowed as they disintegrate and merge, through the rising heat, with the soil they 22

cover. I make one last pass with a load of hay, covering forever the contradiction, the tragedy, the irony, the bizarre, the mundane, the wild prayer that has been my morning, and is, distinctly and unavoidably, our lives.

Moonfaced Man Steam. From milk wands, screaming. Outside steam rose from mouths—not screaming. These were my thoughts—from cold and fatigue. No sleep, much booze, blurry dawn sex and now behind a hot espresso machine watching drinks get born by my hands. This is the way that I thought. Spoke. In this era. Staggered—fast, then slow. Like, this. Peddling Sumatra and French Roast and Kona blend. The drugs of the morning. You get concentrated espresso by saving the bottom goop from the shots you pull for customers, collect the lumpy black quarter inch until you have a half cup and that, I tell you, will get you through a Northwest winter day of anything. Match this with some grass and you might get a smile rubbed cross you by noon. And I had. But now it was late, cold as shit. Pike Place Market: brass piggybank the size of a Yugo. Commie bookstores. Farm produce collecting the city’s pollutants. The fish market: men with rubber orange overalls and baritone barks instead of voices, salmon and snapper hurtling with a violence that fish don’t know in life. Kids love it. Except one time I saw them misjudge, send a steelhead walloping against a Japanese toddler about half its size. Into the gutter. Fish tossers quiet for the first time. Mother waving it off, hauling him up, embarrassed, turning away. And then there’s magic shops, little cafés, imports from wartorn countries, notorious public restrooms, candy stores, kindly bums with guitars and raspy voices and sweet blind old black labs, 23

the Andean flute and guitar ensemble that seems to appear everywhere Kodak’s sold, exotic cheap foods, and coffee coffee coffee because heroin and grunge meant big bucks but not for the right people. I was part of the coffee. I was the denim-shirted smiler who gave you that. Americano. Tourists moon around the shop and thank and tip; yuppies hurry and don’t and don’t. That’s who drinks coffee in the black heart of a 90s Seattle winter day near the water. And a lot of them. Blistered hands and damn sore feet took me to the street. Emptied. Hotels winking like dumb animals, warm against the Sound. Full. The sight of full, fancy hotels made me empty and cold at ten o’clock. I locked the shop with the cheerful manager inside counting twenties, twisted through a drunken alley to get to where I waited for my friend Hal. Fourth Avenue to Pike Place; Virginia Ave to Union Street—grid of sociological nightmare, public policy Bermuda Triangle, inalterable contrast. That is to say this: daylight, junkies, drunks, hookers, and hustlers lurk and slink; tourists and other bustlers with sexy sheaths of debit cards stride and laugh and rule the streets. There’s a moment in the evening, night’s coup de grace, that you only notice if you are still. It’s when everything gets deeper and less sure, shadows race through the veins of the city, skyscrapers shoot up higher, like waiters holding trays above the bump and grind of drunken revelers. In this zone, at this moment, piss hits a dumpster. A mad laugh rises and breaks. Boom boxes scratch at the twilight. Men roll out of doorways and blink. Buses and taxis fill and jam the dusk. Shoppers push eyes against plexiglas windows, relieved they did not take the next bus. The market, too, is abandoned. And I was but another cold phantom drifting through, although moments before I’d been hot, sweating in fact, stacking boxes of Equal sweetener. 24

Now with my sweatshirt hood up, I was protected. Or so I thought and had to think to get me moving out onto the icy cobblestones with dark figures blowing around me. Would say I believed it even. I was a fan of the hooded sweatshirt. Or, more precise, this: a kid. Graduated two years before me. Had a senior quote, there, under his confident Nordic face in the yearbook, his motto maybe. Said: Be an Invisible Eyeball: Be Nothing; See All. Had on thin pants that belonged to my girl. The lights of the north and west spilled kind of pleasant and some insane little boats cut through the water. Stopped here also because a Turkish bakery still throbbed heat, though closed and battened down. Put my spine against a parking meter, ass on the curb, smoke to lips, hands in pockets, hood up, and eyes five miles away—safe. This was how one waited for Hal in Pike Place after ten o’clock on a winter night in those days. Hal—would likely go on to be late for his wedding. Large figures clomped and crunched behind. Didn’t worry because I had my hood up and because they kept moving. I liked the static-shot drag and flutter, how words tangled with the gusts and flew away. The filter burned my lip a bit. Was digging for another smoke, distracted. Had heard a certain walk, a slower, scraping one, just a few minutes before (collecting identities by the sound of paces) and now, again. Stopped. Behind me. Late enough, cold enough, dark enough, deep enough in the market that I came off that curb with my arms up. Moonfaced man, round and white, hovering there. Was curious. Wearing some kind of half smile. Anyone would wonder: what does one smile about here, now? Older guy, kind of sagging and soft. I put more distance between us. Lit a cigarette. Stared back. No smile. He asked Are you working 25

Shifted his weight. Put his arm on the meter like a little friend. This is what trundled through my half frozen head: Foreign. Confused. Drunk. Lost. How’d he see me? Said: Just got off work. Man. Smoked some drags of my cigarette. He said: No more a-working tonight, then. Blue curtain of smoke waved between us. Wind got in under my thin pants. Shivered, watched him, unclear before me. Wind took the smoke down the alley. Now he was cold and clear, something earnest, something desperate. Something weird. I said No. Big gust gathered up then. Pulled plastic sacks like ghost heads past us, turned my smoke sideways. He watched my eyes for a few more seconds. His were black and moist. Half grin gone with the wind. He crossed his arms and the shadows ate him. The crunch of his boots was quick. Got quicker. I sat back down. What characters ruled this place at night. I smoked more and laid it out across the cold. I thought: I love the way cold makes smoke bigger. I watched it blur the pretty blinking spill of water and land. And then I thought: Holyshit. Motherfucker. Wanted. To. Buy. Me. In my head: driving off an unfinished stretch of freeway hundreds of feet above the ground; a bungee cord that lashes gear to the car roof snapping. I moved cursing searching for the moonfaced man fingernails making a row of crescents in the heels of my hands. Turning corners and brushing by figures I might otherwise cross the street for. Jaw aching. Smoke jarring loose from my mouth. From a manhole cover. Another corner and yellow vapor light soiling cobblestones. Security guard leaning against it blowing his warmth out against December. Must’ve thought I was wild. Fingers teased his nightstick. I was huffing spinning pointing yelling 26

Thissickmotherfuckingmotherfuckthatwantstobuyboysoffathestreetsof my townandshit And the guard wrinkled his brow and caught on and began to smile and laugh a deep rolling thing that brought a sheen to his eyes but assured me the moonfaced man would get a nightstick stuck somewheres if he came across him. And I was back to my violent marching to the curb to wait for Hal. Then Hal was there rolling down the window of the old Audi that slid a bit when he braked saying hey man sorry you know these girls they just get so and then I’m in the car and with the way I’m sucking on another Marlboro and scowling at the night he has to ask what and so I tell him. And he’s real quiet. And we watch some hookers in a doorway laughing. And then his head starts shaking and his grip gets hard on the wheel and his other fist starts in on the dash in metronome fuck that, dude. Fuck. That. Fuck. That. And he’s pushing the car with its thick black feather of exhaust around the blocks sliding more and more on ice-sheathed cobblestone and I’m running my gaze all over but starting to wonder if I really want to find the moonfaced man now so I smoke harder on the Marlboro and clench my stomach. But then he’s there walking fast alongside us eyes on the ground and arms still folded like he’s racing away from the market lips moving a little and he steps off a curb and gets hit with a streetlight and I can see that he’s cold and hurried and maybe older than I thought even sixty-five and I think about not saying anything but then I feel the wind again and I tell Hal to stop and I’m out of the car. Hal’s behind me but I give him a backwards hand to back off this is my thing. I find that I have my shoe in my hand. I see that on the other side of the moonfaced man there’s a little group of thugs blowing blunt smoke and leaning on a wall. They’re watching me and their dark 27

faces are mixed with surprise and eager-amusement. He’s looking at me different now. My voice has skipped my mind and my throat and is high in my ears and I’m telling him he can’t get away with sick shit in myfuckingtown and made a mistake coming at me. I’m telling the thugs the story of the moonfaced man while I aim a loafer at his face like a gun and he’s sort of shriveling and in his throaty Baltic speech denying it and saying I’m crazy. And then for just a second I’m above him. He has shrunken and I have grown. We are sculpted there our sizes reversed all of the noise gone out of the world my shoe cocked and his moonface resigned to what comes. And then I hear Yo. Chill out. It comes from the thugs a few yards away. It’s quiet but final like a shot fired in the air. And then it’s like I’m looking through a windshield that’s been frozen and the defrost is taking effect, big pieces of sludgy ice separating and moving like glaciers down the glass leaving streaky magnifications. I look at the moonfaced man and it’s like I already hit him. I glance back at Hal and he’s on the other side of the car with his arms on the roof and looks like he’s ready to go flipping eyes between me and the group of thugs and the moonfaced man. A fast elevator is in my chest taking me down. And I have my shoe back on. And I’m backing away saying something I can’t understand. The moonfaced man is scrambling away too casting his moonface back two times before disappearing. I’m in the car and the heater feels sick on my cheeks and we’re rumbling and sliding along and Hal says Hell yeah dude. Fuck yeah. Stories get told and retold. The first time was later that night, after we slid up and over all the hills through the eerie absence of traffic. The Audi was like a 28

hooked fish being reeled in by our house, fighting and thrashing, and we almost collided with telephone poles, bus shelters, buses, and a little gaggle of wild-eyed kids doing late-night sledding under streetlights. Back at the pad the lights were low and everybody had a fortyounce. There wasn’t much talk going on and the few words of greeting hung in the air like the smoke that was always high up in the room, like the house had its own stratosphere. So I broke the dull quiet with my story of the moonfaced man. Eyes landing on me felt like microphones shoved at me and so I grabbed at the closest bottle and pulled on that awhile, stayed quiet out of some kind of humility. And five of the six guys slouching in the room grinned and slugged brew faster and said Hell yeah, dude. Fuck yeah and one of them said nothing, but said with his eyes Asshole and finished his bottle and went home. I kept a tally of how many times that story was used to patch a hole in a night. And the people that said Hell yeah, dude. The people that said nothing, but said with their eyes Asshole. My grin began faltering, stalling, like trying to take an old car over a steep hill and I would wish that we would all just shut up. Two years later I was drunk with my father, old enough to haul out old tales for kicks. And that story came out and all the headshaking laughter went out of the room. His eyes fell and then rose again and he saw me with disappointment and sadness he’d never aimed my way. And then I tried entirely to forget it. And then sometime later I dreamed of the moonfaced man as the moon itself watching me make love to a girl who turned into a boy. And then I dreamed of curling fetal on a dark street under a rain 29

of shoes clutched by looming thugs, the thwacks of the blows hurting not like blows but like it does when someone looks you in the eye and says I don’t love you anymore. Each one. And now I wish I could find that man and beg him to forgive me for that long-ago night that comes back at me every time I walk a late, dark city street with the moon cold and far above me.

The Professor Eventually I learned to expect him. I’d look up from my labor behind the coffee bar and catch sight of his slumped shuffle through plumes of steam, the throng of harried businesspeople, and the icy window of the café. Often, I wouldn’t even really see him, just the peak of that battered old cap he wore, moving along the sidewalk of the financial district like a worn-out station wagon might putter down Rodeo Drive. Sometimes he would hang out beneath the eaves of the library. Perhaps it was the tomb of thousands of books that he related to: genius trapped. He would fold his hunchback, matchstick form onto one of the worn concrete benches with those other “crazies” who haunted the corporate sector. There was no shortage of these as Seattle made the transition into a bastion of the “new economy,” an outpost of trade- and technology-related glamour. Sometimes it seemed to me that their numbers swelled in proportion to fancy houses, gourmet restaurants, and corporate retailers. He wore a suit, vaguely academic in style, that had been dapper at one point in time, but seemed to have not left his frame for as long as he had wandered the cold streets. It was as if he’d just walked one day from his life into the absence of a life without even changing his clothes. I would fantasize that somewhere waited a classroom full of loyal students. That they sat and leaned in creak30

ing chairs, cobwebbed and dusty, the ink in their pens dry, perpetually prepared for him to breeze back through the door just as he had abandoned them, approach the podium, and conclude his brilliant lecture. But then some investment banker would interrupt my imaginings, complain about his mocha’s temperature or ask for an extra cup, and I would see the man again in the light of day, see the sandbagged tunnels of his eyes. See that his clothes hung from his frame with the weight of their grime. I wasn’t the only one struck by his apparel: at some point—long before I met him—he became known as “the Professor.” The Professor carried a broom. I began to really notice the intensity of his sweeping in February. At this time of year Arctic gusts throw handfuls of trash and pieces of trees against windows in the Northwest. The gusts can bite through layers like trained K-9s. But through the season, I watched over mochas as he tackled the sidewalks and gutters of Fourth Avenue with a focus and drive unparalleled by any corporate executive in the skyscrapers looming over him. He swept. That little man worked miracles with that bedraggled broom, dancing with it like it was a young love on a summer night, even as icy downpours whipped the streets. He worked until the corner where the artificially cheery little shop squatted was as clean as an office. He transformed himself into a corporate folk hero of sorts because, after all, people like cleanliness, order. His furtive service counterbalanced, I suppose, the disorder that he represented. If it didn’t earn him humane treatment, it did earn him a dollar pushed into his frayed pocket or a clap on his malnourished back from businessmen, giddy on Friday afternoon. I observed the establishment of the peculiar bond between the Professor and his environment through an angst-ridden, infantile leftist lens. If I hoped anything for the man it was that he might suddenly break into the erudition that his title suggested, climb atop a newspaper machine, and lash these people with scathing 31

critiques of their souls, just as I often wanted to throw scalding coffee in the face of a haughty ceo. Maybe I cast him in such fantasy because of the handful of “teachers” I’d recently left behind in the peeling, asbestos-laced hallways of high school. But not so much as a scowl or curse ever slipped from the Professor. He didn’t speak, didn’t react to a thing besides the trash that leaped up twenty feet with gusty pirouettes and raced the cabs down the avenues. He chased down potato chip bags like they were currency; he beat dust and leaves from the storefront. Even when my bosses began to see his charm and value, and I was instructed to give him a thermos of coffee and old pastries at the day’s end, he knew me only with grunts and glances. I do know that he began to appreciate that coffee, though, waiting stained and loosely shifting for his fill-up and half-stale scones as the day slid away over the Puget Sound. We developed an exchange of sorts and I may have even heard a muddled thanks sometime in March. It wasn’t often that he was idle, usually whisking and ambling nervously. But now and then after he got his provisions from me or one of my coworkers, he would sit at the plastic table curbside. Watch the masses descend and flee from offices, weaving and honking in mighty hordes up the hill toward dogs and spouses, suppers and movies and children—toward identity itself—as if it sufficed for him to observe it. To me, he did not seem sorrowful at these times. Soon, his neighborhood was his again, relatively free of the human chaos, which was the cause, after all, of such litter. Until one damp Tuesday when a woman in a sleek trench coat complained. She didn’t even detach the cell phone from her ear. Just sniffed and scowled, slid over to my manager, and made a breathy comment about stench, decency, which had the Professor 86 'd by Wednesday. 32

It was about the same time that I signed off, snatched a last measly paycheck, and injected myself into the American road. I went off in a van with vague ideas, a good friend, and a load of disdain at how my city was changing. A few months separated me from my entrance to college, a prospect that brought me a swarm of anxieties. On the one hand, my memories of teachers and “learning” were warped and spoiled by the inadequacy of high school. On the other hand, I feared the archetype of college professors, demanding answers to questions about difficult readings. At any rate, I left the coffee shop with little regret and still under the eyes of the devout Professor, who simply didn’t enter the shop any longer. Four years later, in greater Los Angeles, I sat in a dimly lit bedroom, the California sun beginning its sick rise. I was nearing the end of my undergraduate days and I had gathered much from well-known, accredited figures behind podiums, from the collection, assemblage, and redispensation of knowledge. But still I wasn’t sure that real lessons lay any more in lecture halls than they did on the streets. I slapped closed a book and placed it atop a mountain of others, pushed aside memos and syllabi accumulated from broomless professors over the year. As I did so, a small envelope, forgotten for weeks, flapped down from the shelf. In it, I found a note from my mother and a yellowing obituary: Friends Remember the Anonymous “Professor”: Downtown Service a Tribute to Mystery Sidewalk Sweeper.

Twenty-five well-dressed people with “homes and identities” took the time to attend the service, the short article informed me, and all spoke highly and warmly of the man, even if they had never spoken to him. As far as the idea of a memorial for a person who cherished his anonymity, the irony didn’t escape everyone. One Mr. Jennings—a self-proclaimed “intellectual soulmate” of the 33

Professor—told Neil Modie of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that “He hated this stuff . . . He’s a man who tried to be anonymous for so long and he deserves that right.” A highly visible anonymity the Professor achieved, it seems. Although he may have had two dozen grateful businesspeople at his memorial and inspired a journalist to cast him as cute, harmless, and fond of coffee and sweeping, three weeks of investigation by the King County Medical Examiner turned up no clues on his discarded identity. But he never quit whipping that broom about, never faltered in his decision to scour the wake of humanity, giving a lesson as surely as he ever might have before a podium.

Intersection Driving our van with the flat tire was like making a wounded comrade who’s too heavy to lift walk off a battlefield. With each rut and bump in the L.A. pavement, little shudders traveled through the chassis, and Jeff and I winced. We rolled to a stop at Century and La Brea. Lowered, tinted-windowed Honda coupes buzzed with techno and raced their engines like hyperactive kids awaiting the recess bell. An Impala rumbled thuggish hip hop; the driver’s arm drummed against his door, severely muscled, tattooed in the imprecise green of jail. A businessman, probably just back from an overseas venture, sat aside us in his teal Acura, windows up, doors locked, eyes fixed on the bumper in front of him. In the back sat three girls: Becca, Reba, and Elishia. We’d picked up Becca and Reba moments before at lax—they’d come to visit from home. Elishia was a freshman-year addition to our world. The trio bonded over the absurdity of Jeff and I as we rubbed the 34

dashboard and apologized to our beloved chariot for not having a spare. The traffic on Century lurched, horns fired, rubber burned as everyone tried to gain a few inches, twisting in and out of lanes in a half-chaotic, half-choreographed stagger, curses in several languages mixing above it all. On both corners ahead, two-story strip malls choked with nail salons, burger joints, pawn shops, mini marts, record stores—and, on the northeast corner, a Chief Auto. We rolled through a chorus of horn bleats, diagonally across the intersection. I could feel our visitors’ tension at our surroundings and sort of enjoyed it—though I was not entirely at ease in this particular neighborhood either. We parked the van carefully in a too-small slot in front of the store. Inside, the air conditioning was almost frosty. I turned down the first aisle and came face to face with a skinny clerk. He looked down at me from a lanky height; he wore a thin mustache and his olive skin suggested more Spaniard than Indian. His black eyes said nothing concrete but hinted at amusement. He half-smiled. “Buenas tardes.” My blood pressure spiked as I realized it was possible he didn’t speak English and I tried to assemble a phrase from my dusty memory. But before I could embarrass myself, he asked what I needed in English and I told him. His stride was easy, like he was at a party, cruising to the fridge for another drink, not stuck at work on a Friday evening. He asked what size we needed; of course I didn’t know. I indicated the leaning behemoth in the lot and he selected a big hydraulic jack. “You have a spare, right?” I said, sheepishly, that we did not. “But where you going to get a tire tonight, amigo?” I shrugged and cast a glance at Jeff, who shrugged also. The clerk 35

cackled in a melodious way and said he’d try to think of something. The jack lifted the van like magic. It sat there, unnaturally arched against the poisoned sunset. It was September. It was Friday. It was already eight o’clock. We were due thirty miles east in an hour for the beginning of the weekend debauchery. The hole in the tire proved beyond mending. As more shadowy figures began to appear, it became certain that we were stuck. The vapor lights of the strip mall buzzed alive. The store deposited customers out into the parking lot for a few minutes, until just the clerks were left. We could see them glance at us through the window’s stencils advertising sale items. The three girls sat on the curb, a bit dejected now, Elishia explaining sorrowfully into her cell phone that the party would have to go on without us. “Shall we stroll the barrio and beg for a tire?” Jeff asked me. I was on the verge of agreeing to it, blindly, for lack of a real plan when the lanky clerk reemerged. I remembered to ask his name, which was Consuelo. He shook my hand and told us we would have to wait for a friend of his. In the meantime we ought to go ahead and remove the worthless tire—he guessed we’d need a tire iron and, of course, we did. He called through the open door. A short man, rounder and darker-skinned than Consuelo, appeared a moment later. He wore a somewhat sly grin. He introduced himself as Javier. I tried to take the iron from him but he waved me off and sat down to the task. The shop was empty. Javier smoked, whistled, spun the iron. The lurch and anger of late afternoon traffic had been replaced by an easy Friday night flow, melodies of salsa and hip hop rising like freed birds from open windows, strands of laughter trailing cars like beer cans on a newlywed getaway. Consuelo peered through the windows of our van and gave Jeff and me the occasion to brag about how many months we’d lived inside of it, turning massive 36

donuts in America. On the window was a red Rage Against the Machine sticker with Che Guevara’s (appropriated) image. A jagged grin broke on Consuelo. He slapped at Javier’s shoulder, poured out Spanish and the two talked excitedly. Jeff and I, while not wholly ignorant about who Che Guevara was and what he represented, were aware that it was problematic to have his image ride along with us like a Grateful Dead skull. “You like el Che, eh?” Javier asked us finally. We told him sure, yeah, he like, uh, represented justice to a lot of people, you know or something along these nervous lines. Consuelo, lit up by something that caused him to stumble over his English, began to tell us of his years as a Sandinista rebel in Nicaragua and how “El Che” was one of the spiritual fathers of that struggle—the struggle that cost him his family, his home, and nearly his life. Javier, who was working hard at the last of the five bolts on the tire, admitted with pride that his home was El Salvador where he, too, had spent years in the jungle fighting his countrymen and the U.S.-funded death squads. He’d also lost family to the tide of blood that was pulled, by the moon of international politics, from the very base of Latin America up over the isthmus. At that moment, a world away, back in Claremont, probably no fewer than five texts detailing the histories of El Salvador and Nicaragua lay splayed on both my and Jeff’s desks. But if I had simply paid more attention to my mother’s dinnertime lectures on our bloody and cruel foreign policy, I would be far more prepared for this chat, I realized with a wince. “Coño, no sirve!” Javier suddenly cursed and threw the tire iron to the ground. The last bolt holding the wheel fast was becoming stripped. Consuelo tried his hand, briefly, at brute force to take it off. Then it was truly stripped. A gray-haired black man, ball cap a-kilter and work shirt opened, stopped in our midst and took a sip of his soda. He laughed once and told us, “That motherfucker’s German—fifth bolt come off 37

clockwise,” and walked off down Century. Javier, as I’ve said, had a dark complexion, much indigenous blood. Nonetheless, his blushing was obvious as he cursed once more, like a muffled gunshot, and marched off to fetch a chisel. Just about then, a Buick coupe swung to the curb, spitting static each time the baseline dropped. The tinted window unveiled a shaved-head Chicano. He climbed out and shook Consuelo’s hand, gold rings throwing a sparkle. He popped his trunk to reveal a dozen tires. There was some rapid-fire Spanish and the kid was shrugging—no fit. He apologized and sailed away. Stuck. The shop was supposed to close at nine p.m. But they showed no concern for the time. In the strip mall across La Brea I managed to come up with a pizza and two six packs of Dos Equis. Halfway through the pizza one jagged spark shot out from the chisel and the tire fell like a corpse to the pavement. At one point, an lapd cruiser stopped at the light and the cop turned his eyes at our little crowd, partly obscured by the van. This whipped my pulse and I shoved all the Dos Equis I could reach behind me, but Consuelo let his gaze meet the officer’s briefly, then turned calmly back to the dance of bugs in the lamplight. The cop wheeled away. I guessed that even the lapd lacked the reputation to intimidate two men who’d survived so much. It was past ten o’clock, the food and beer had run out, and L.A. was gearing up around us. Jumbo jets lumbered in and out of the sky close enough to momentarily deafen us, people escaping, people arriving. Consuelo told us where we could get a tire first thing in the morning, some quarter mile down the road, pointed out a motel across the street, and insisted on refunding our money for the jack—even though we assured him we were not lacking. They became embarrassed at our thanks and started to hurry to 38

close up. Just before we dashed across the avenue to check into the dingy motor lodge, Consuelo said, “Just be good to strangers, companeros. If you find someone in trouble in a place they don’t know, give them a hand.” All this was before: before Jeff went to live in Nicaragua; before I flew, somewhat randomly, down the throat of Venezuela and learned something tangible about political struggle; before I wandered the haunted, sun-cooked avenues of Nicaragua myself and saw the way people carried the wake of war in their faces; before protests against a corrupt police force in Claremont; before the fight to help organize mistreated workers in our college dining halls; before standing with seventy thousand others against the World Trade Organization; before the things that would make us real to ourselves occurred. Consuelo and Javier of Englewood were like specters in a dream, somewhere ahead, beckoning but patient, when the books and discourses that crowded our desks and our minds failed to contain the promise we needed to hear—and to make.

Falling Room It is spring break of my freshman year and I am volunteering in Keene, California, lodged in a shoddy trailer that belongs to the United Farm Workers, when the call comes. My father split for Central America, nominally to go thrashing through national parks, actually to try and shed what had become a dark and stale view of life. On his third day, trying to find a path down to a river coursing through the base of a valley, he leaned against a dead tree and fell eighty feet from a cliff. 39

I leave southern California by way of a surreal chain of airplanes, buses, and cars from which I recall only constant rain against windows. I arrive in Seattle, hours ahead of my father, who comes off a medevac flight deep in the night. Blankets cover him and he is strapped down; stony-eyed emts wheel him into and out of my world before I have once exhaled fully. During the night, while I wait in the emergency room for news, two junkies battle each other with ivs fashioned into weapons and an ogre-like thug mugs me for the bag of Goldfish crackers I can’t choke down anyway. When dawn finally creeps into the stale blue waiting room, I am informed that my father is suffering from a compound spinal fracture, a skull fracture, two broken shoulders, two shattered ankles, seven broken ribs, a punctured lung, and several serious lacerations. The first of innumerable doctors I will meet likens his injuries to being struck by a train traveling at seventy miles per hour, though it seems to me the truth—plummeting eight stories onto rocks—is sufficiently dramatic. He is placed in intensive care. The next week, my younger brother, KC, and I exist only to haunt the hospital, to watch over our supine and usually unconscious father, to guard him against the professional indifference of the crowded ward. Travis, who recently lost his older brother, his best friend, was forged rather than weakened by grief, and frequently joins us. I consider him a brother, too. We take turns sleeping on the cold linoleum floor, crumpled, half-sitting in the corner of the room, or sometimes in a chair, leaning forward, folded over the foot of the bed, careful not to bump his destroyed ankles. My slumbering brothers’ bodies appear dropped from a great height, contorted and limp. When I do leave, I find only an acute lonesomeness that none of my friends can allay, even those altered by the flames of their own tragedies. The first night, a girl I think I still love comes to me and holds me. But when I call her again, she makes a hollow excuse and I know that my pain and fear have cast 40

her off, that the remnant high-school tenderness has now fallen completely away. For the next month, I leave the sterile room that pumps temporal life into my father only to sleep or smoke. On the west side of the hospital a small plaza is shelved in above the freeway. It overlooks the entire harbor: the loading docks with their red cranes, dipping and arching to lift boxcars from huffing freighters; picturesque ferries toting commuters and tourists across to the islands of the Puget Sound; small fishing trawlers entering and exiting anonymous crowds of moored vessels. The shoreline stretches from the expansive, dull acres of the industrial district, replete with belching smokestacks and forlorn warehouses, to the south end of downtown, that black, icy grove of towering steel and glass. A beige jail and courthouse stand out like a midwestern couple at a cosmopolitan cocktail party. Just a handful of blocks to the southwest an old brick apartment complex sits just clear of the projects—it is where the girl who has abandoned me lives; with binoculars I could probably watch her. But the high whine and dull thunder of Interstate 5 separates me, stitched to the city with overpasses and interchanges. Over this I spend many hours dangling my legs and blowing plumes of smoke out, as if to blur the entire world before me. Contrary to what my friends and family imagine, I do not come here to think, but to try hard and futilely not to. Not of the first year of college I left hanging, not of the frightened girl I have lost, not of who I fear I will become if my father is ripped from my life in this way, and most of all not of the unfathomable agony that possesses him, ten stories up and a few dozen yards behind me. I know if he could rise and walk to the window of the icu, he would see me sitting here on the damp concrete watching as the city swarms and flows below. My mother, thirteen years after a bitter divorce, five years into a second marriage, is often present nonetheless to sit vigilantly be41

side her first love. The last time they spent a long stretch together in a hospital, they were watching their firstborn son wither and die. I imagine this occasion is more bearable or that she can at least bend easily to the role of guardian, can hope, this time, to succeed in her vigil. So, one day, when the sun burns away the gunmetal gray of the season, she suggests that it might be good to go get some rays. I head out to the harbor view with KC and Travis. I am sitting along the ledge watching silently as the tractor trailers grind by. I become aware of someone approaching and swivel around. A gown-clad kid with one of those irremovable plastic bracelets is descending the stairs. She pulls out a cigarette from a pack that flashes silver in the sun. I recognize her immediately as a crazy; mostly that’s who I see out here—crazy people like to smoke. The west wing houses the psych ward a couple of floors up. A moment later I feel the pressure of a palm on my shoulder, and with reluctance, I turn. She is a bulky girl, perhaps seventeen. She smokes with no hands, the billows of Newport sliding up over her wide brow. She dances slowly, shuffling and swinging her arms; her bright, amused eyes are raised to my puffy, tired ones. Such an approach might normally garner her at least a moment of polite indulgence. But the fight of the last weeks has hardened me; I automatically associate foolishness with this girl—something I have no time for. So I raise my eyebrows at her and take a drag. She stops moving and takes the cigarette from her mouth. My name is Jamila. Her voice is surprisingly sweet—a smoky falsetto where I was expecting some kind of obnoxious pitch. I’m crazy as hell she tells me in a rather bored tone. She pulls the pack of cigarettes from beneath a headband—which looks to be the elastic cuff of a pair of sweatpants—and lights a fresh menthol off the embers of the last. I maintain my bland expression. Jamila begins her dance again— she shuffles down to KC and points her cigarette at his chest, brings her face close in to his, scrutinizing. He blushes a bit. After a 42

moment she says to him: You the little runt of the crew, you just glad to be runnin’ around with these other two, but the thing is they really love you a whole lot even if they don’t show it. I could relate to you—you the one I’d share stuff with, drink coffee and shit. She takes an immense drag, exhales loudly, and shuffles down to Travis, repeats her examination. You the one I’d smoke weed and party with—you’d be my homie. At this Trav’s poker countenance crumbles and he laughs. She smiles at him and, pulling on the cigarette while in motion, slides down to me. She inches forward, closing the distance between us, until she literally stands between my knees. She’s actually quite pretty in a broad, boyish way, but that’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about how I feel kind of wild and alive, a feeling that only anger has brought any semblance of recently. But this isn’t anger—it is different. Finally she says You the one that’d be my boyfriend. As my brothers’ chuckles rise and break over the whoosh of traffic that now sounds impossibly distant, she lets her lips linger close to my face and I realize that my heart has raised its tempo. When she steps back and I take the last pull of smoke, there is a small tremor in my hand. My amused brothers drop down from the wall and amble away, making openhanded gestures as if they don’t want to obstruct an amorous moment. I ask her why she’s here, to which she gives me a vague response about not having anywhere else to be. I realize she still hasn’t asked me any questions. But now she is looking at me again like she doesn’t have to ask. I start to offer something, but she stops me, pointing north. My brothers are beginning to clamber up some scaffolding that brackets a corner of the hospital under repair. There they go she says and now you gon’ start worrying, huh? I do wince as KC hooks his leg over the first steel bar, pulling himself skyward with pale, sinewy arms. But I say Naw, those fools can climb fine while trying to turn my gaze away. Trav stretches for a grip on his next hold. 43

I’m afraid I will panic and scream at them to get down, proving her claim. But then she seizes my arm and aims her index finger into a back-lit cloud bank. Don’t worry she says, still pointing, here you come. A seagull wheels down, its high cry breaking over us. It glides northward. You gonna make sure they alright—that’s what you do she tells me in a whisper as the bird closes in on my brothers who are nearing the halfway mark of their upward journey. I watch, frozen, as the bird begins to circle over them, taking altitude and then releasing it in slow spirals as they continue pulling, raising their torsos, pushing with legs. They reach the top and seat themselves on an old plank, giving each other a fatigued high five. The gull does one last, close circle and veers off over the old eave of the hospital, vanishing. See she says, turning to me again with what feels now like a very soft gaze against my face, you took them all the way there. When I pull my eyes down from that scaffolding and turn back, she is dancing up the stairs, singing something melodious and low that I can’t quite make out. The normally Buddha-faced doctor looks shattered. He is red and sweating and keeps clearing his throat. I fix him with a stone glare until he says Well uh you might want to consider maybe thinking about saying some kind of goodbye to your dad before leaving tonight because um he might not be here when . . . I stride into that darkened ward where people hang in the balance. I brush by medical personnel who, having come to know me, avert their eyes. The doctor’s suggestion ricochets around my skull like a bullet. I stop at the foot of my father’s bed and listen to my heart add a baseline to the symphony of pumping and whirring contraptions. He reminds me of a bad science fiction film I once saw in which a man is gradually converted into a machine. I move closer. The fracture lines on his shoulders and skull are drawn on with permanent marker to alert nurses. His eyes are pasted shut 44

with some substance that I can’t imagine the reason for. iv poles stand around the bed like ugly coat racks. Bags of amber liquid hang like excised bladders, tubes snake under sheets. One plastic tube the size of an infant’s forearm is lodged down his throat. An accordion respires calmly on the other end of it, clamped like a small creature to the bed. There is a bay window that affords the view of where I sit and smoke, but the obsidian night outside and the halogen bulbs inside have turned it into mirror. Only the crimson light of a helicopter veering in across my chest burns through and betrays the world on the other side. Watching the reflection, I take his hand. And then he gives me a bone-crushing squeeze and his eyes bulge and scan beneath their lids. Some moments later I turn and walk past the befuddled doctor and out into the night. My father and I are not ready to say goodbye, not ready to dignify death. While I am out on the ledge, I find myself looking back toward the hospital more often than I mean to. With a mixture of hope and dread that she will appear, I watch for Jamila. One afternoon the next week, she does—I see her over my shoulder giving the hospital’s double door an animated shove and skipping out. Quickly, I turn back to the foggy harbor, trying not to show how acutely I anticipate her. When she arrives at my back, humming, I turn and invite her up onto the wall with me. She swings one gowned leg over so she straddles it, facing me. I start to say something about the weather —not that I would utter something as mundane as Gee, crummy day but maybe something sardonic that equates the drear to the world. But she’s not looking at the weather; she’s looking at me and so I say They think that my dad’s gonna die. Still speechless, still humming, Jamila slides toward me, leans in close and asks for a 45

smoke. I give her one and light it. She blows a couple of measured streams that camouflage away into the gray. She hoists herself up and balances on the thin wall, starts stepping back and forth in laceless, oversized Reeboks. On the harbor side of the wall is a drop-off of maybe ten feet, then a grassy, impossibly steep, garbage-strewn bank, then, twenty feet below, the interstate. I look up, sort of sideways at her, and she lets me shift and twitch nervously—her return gaze detached, but calm and kind. She moves lithely on the wall, like a gymnast on a beam. She pirouettes once on the six-inch-wide surface in the bulky shoes, whipping a thin trail of smoke around her like a cocoon. Then her humming morphs without breaking melody into raspy song, I believe I can fly . . . she steps backward a couple of paces, gives a three-quarter spin and stops on a dime, arms outspread and flat footed, facing the harbor. Her eyes are closed . . . I believe I can touch the sky . . . As she finishes her cigarette, blindly like that, the song slips back into a hum and I realize that I have begun to weep. I stab my sleeve against my face and force my eyes back down at the loading docks as she lowers herself beside me. We both are silent for some time; the freeway quiets and then picks up as if all the vehicles travel in packs. A helicopter lands on the roof of the hospital, ferrying in some trauma, but I don’t turn to watch. Then she leans in close again and asks me in a whisper if I like her goofy headband. I laugh but all of the little hairs on my arms and neck stand up. She asks me if I want to kiss her and I do. Her tongue and lips are soft and sweet and I kiss her for a long time, with a slow, calculated desperation, as if I am under water, breathing through a small reed. Later, I accompany Jamila into the unpleasant sterility of the hospital, up two flights of stairs, back to the psych ward. There are a number of linebacker orderlies with arms crossed on massive chests, angular nurses, and zombie patients drooping over board 46

games. No one so much as glances at Jamila as she hugs me goodbye and disappears with her low song down a white hallway. Even though it has been four days, I cannot accustom myself to the sight of my father sitting upright in bed. Such a stab of glee hits me every time I walk into the room and see him like that, I literally have to stop and question it—after all, the trauma and the sleep deprivation have done strange things to my head. He smiles at me and reaches out for my hand—he is reviewing his newest, quirky “back from the dead” voice mail greeting on his cell phone. I can hear it slipping out from between the black plastic and his ear. I roll my eyes as he puts the phone down on his empty lunch tray. Lately there are some long silences; words between us still seem precious and no one wants to corrupt them by saying anything mundane. Finally I say So did I tell you I was hanging out with a girl from the psych ward? He rolls his eyes at me like it’s standard. No, but seriously Dad, I think I met an angel. At this he just grins broadly, without a trace of disbelief. After I push my father in his new wheelchair down to a van that will take him home, I stroll around the hospital to the harbor view for the last time. A late-afternoon mid-spring sun is peeling at a western flap of sky. With the warp of distance, the harbor looks to be both sleepy and bustling. Traffic is sparse on the freeway and several flocks of birds rise and swarm on different parts of the horizon. I lean out over the ledge for some time, but I don’t look over my shoulder. I know that I will not see her again.

47

Wake In Managua, cats form gangs. You scarcely see single cats during the scalding day, unless they are moving paranoid and quick between shadows. On any street or sidewalk they would be kicked by pedestrians or flattened by whizzing Ladas. So, they remain hidden, roaming alleys of metal scraps, charred garbage, and the carcasses of other even less fortunate creatures. The week that I lay prone on a mattress in the heart of that capital, trying for slumber, they gathered every night. The roofs are made of corrugated tin and often sag down over the walls and floor as if the sky had a paunch. At first, I would hear only the soft throb of a club a few blocks away or the infrequent puncture of gunfire through the song of insects. But then the gangs arrived above with a spattering of steps like a passing rain. The mewling lifted, a tortured chorus of yowls and shrieks, and then they flew into each other with a thunderous stampede—like evil trapped in a stovepipe. There was a little dog who, maddened by the scent and sound of his prey warring overhead, ran the short length of the house and back, barking frantically. The Nicaraguan family, my hosts, slept soundly through all of this. When the jumbo jet came to a bumpy halt in Managua, Lew was asleep next to me. We had a bizarre and spare history. When we’d arrived at college in greater Los Angeles, we began our friendship with a few jaunts out to the football field where we’d enjoy some bad grass and he’d expound some well-developed—if off-kilter— philosophical beliefs. He was possessed of the easy, warm, leisure of Texans (also that disproportionate pride in being one). His mind was woven of some mongrel combination of monk and rock star. He quit school and we’d more or less lost touch. So when the phone rang in October and he told me he was coming with me, I was half48

surprised, half-not, and definitely pleased. We’d had a week in his south Texas home on a predeparture high that was, for me, mitigated by anxiety about what lay ahead—particularly in Managua. I’d never witnessed real fear in my friend, but by the time we reached the San Antonio airport, his narrow cheeks were pallid with nerves. If anything, I’d thought Lew too flippant and naïve about the nature of our coming months, so it was difficult to take on a reassuring role and I likely did a rotten job. Once inside Managua International, Lew pointed out an overdressed gaggle of loud gringos. They laughed too loud, striking up chats in indecipherable Spanish with the wealthy Nicos from our flight, waiting to flash documents and reenter their troubled home. We were comforted; we were less obvious and oblivious. Soon, however, men in pressed shirts arrived to usher them through customs and away into new taxis. We shifted and sniffed nervously. But, as promised, they were there: the Betetas. Stout, balding Antonio with his young man’s mustache, holding Axel, the youngest, all cowlicks and grins. And Jorge, who had been my younger brother’s closest friend here. In his first year of study, Jorge already looked the quintessential student: spectacles, khakis, a shy but confident countenance. Three-fifths of the legendarily hospitable family that sheltered and cared for members of my own. My mother and stepfather, fiery leftists during the reign of Reagan, had spent much time in the then-socialist nation, watching literacy and agrarian reform movements take root. And then my younger brother spent six months turning circles in the little country and fell in love with the Betetas. Slouching off to the left, a tall, cigarette smoking, pony-tailed sore thumb, was my high school buddy, Ike. His two months alone on this isthmus showed in his eyes. He’d been waiting right next to the Betetas without knowing how to identify them. We all 49

shook hands vigorously and strained our faces, grinning hugely at each other. We piled ourselves into their abused Lada and wheeled toward the exit of the airport. Three small figures scampered by my window. They were three boys, somewhere between the ages of five and nine. It was difficult to say; their faces were obscured by gluesoaked rags they snuffed on, even as they drew distance between themselves and the security officer who lobbed stones and curses at them half-heartedly. I’d heard stories of these huelepegas (glue sniffers) from my brother, who cast them as harmless orphans that would settle for a few cordobas or a piece of candy. I would later hear of roving gangs that combed through crowds fast and merciless, ripping earrings from the lobes of little girls. Antonio drove us through the avenues of the capital. Every few hundred yards, the yellow glare of headlights washed softly over prostitutes dressed in purple, blue, red. As we drew nearer to the center of the city, blasts of salsa invaded the vehicle from bars rendered in neon lights. Motley groups roiled outside. They all seemed to be fighting or dancing or both. Antonio leveled his Indian eyes at me in the rearview mirror and asked if we’d like to see some things before we turned in. The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and remained there through the early 1930s, perpetually battling the nationalist Augusto Sandino and his ragtag army. The Marines created the Nicaraguan National Guard and placed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. When Sandino signed a truce and laid down his arms, he was immediately murdered by the government. After a couple of decades of the torture and murder of dissidents, Somoza was assassinated by revolutionary poet Rigoberto Perez in 1956. Somoza’s son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, took over. 50

The Somozas remained the lapdogs and good friends of the United States government throughout their tenure as tyrants and murderers. U.S. administrations poured millions into their overloaded military coffers (to battle the nascent “communist” insurgencies), throwing money at a regime that guaranteed, in return, lucrative investments for U.S. interests in the form of cheap labor and exports. But this environment had to be crafted and maintained by the tools of state repression and terror. In turn, this created an underground popular resistance, born from student activism and carried to the impoverished reaches of the nation. After more than a decade of civil war, after Somoza bombed his own capital in an attempt to snuff out an unrest rolling toward revolution, after massacres of tens of thousands of peasants for “cooperating with the communists,” the rebels, now called the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (fsln, or “Sandinistas”), overthrew the Somoza government in 1979. For his part, the “presidente” simply drained the treasury and hopped a flight to dictators’ haven—Miami. (He was later assassinated in Paraguay by a young Nicaraguan with a bazooka.) After the revolution, the Reagan administration ended all financial aid and severed diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. The cia evacuated a large contingent of Somoza’s national guard, recruited other “anticommunists,” and began clandestine training of the “Contra” army in Honduras (Reagan called these men “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers”). An illegal, U.S.-funded war of terror was waged on the tiny country. This, combined with the U.S. economic blockade, the bankrupt state of the economy, and, perhaps most devastatingly, corruption on the part of the Sandinista leadership, eventually proved politically fatal for the revolution. So, despite massive labor and agrarian reforms, dramatic improvements in health care, and an unprecedented literacy campaign, the 51

Sandinistas and their candidate, Daniel Ortega, lost the elections to the National Opposition Union Party in 1990. As the little car lurched along, I watched the capital spin by. Axel was growing tired and buried his head in his big brother’s shoulder as we rolled to a stop. Above us towered a statue, Antonio explained, that was built upon the triumph of the revolution. It was an enormous rendition of a worker-soldier with an assault rifle pointed and his face tilted skyward. From his other hand dangled—rather limply as if only half-remembered—a tool of some sort. Some years before, when the current president of Nicaragua was governor of Managua, he attempted to have the statue torn down, as it offended his political sensibilities. When that failed, he opted to contract his own statue across the avenue from the Sandinistas. It depicts a worker as well, but this man’s face is directed downward to his labor and he clutches in both hands only a jackhammer. Although smaller than the triumphant statue, it stands out in its alabaster newness and is bathed in lights twenty-four hours a day. The glaze that fell across Jorge’s vision as the night whispered over the border into morning was his proud resignation, his willingness to allow his father the space to face all this again. Axel, a child born of peacetime, dozed—oblivious and whole. After a night of warring cats, I awoke to the sweet stench of burning garbage. It is a morning ritual, and the wicked plumes of smoke vie with the scent of rice and beans for domination of your nostrils. There is always someone hammering, tossing pieces of sheet metal, welding, or otherwise raising a ruckus. In the kitchen, Yvonne, with the help of two teenage girls and the teenage daughter, Cyntia, flipped big pans of beans and rice on 52

a dilapidated barbecue. This was a highly functional kitchen in Managua, and Yvonne took advantage of it to run her business: selling lunch to neighbors and people who worked nearby. Yvonne swept us to a corner and laid huge steaming plates on our laps. It was a challenge to eat such volume upon first waking—in ninety percent humidity—but the irony of being fed like that in a malnourished nation forced us to clean our plates. As all Sandinistas did, she pulled up just short of mourning the revolution—for to do so would be to acknowledge its unraveling. The edge of anger left her voice and her jaw went slack when she told me of her desire to work in the U.S. But these moments were fleeting. As customers approached, all these hard considerations fell away and she patted my shoulder, smiled warmly at the arrivals, and slid back to the grill. In Nicaragua, you generally ride either in a small minivan or an ancient U.S. school bus crammed against a dozen or more strangers. Early on, so many bodies had been shoved into the van by the zealous ticket man in Managua that everyone was stuck in whatever contorted stance they’d been in when the door slammed. But as the miles cooked by we lost passengers: an old farmer at the base of a monstrous Coca Cola billboard; a pregnant girl and her baby goat in front of a shack filled with mean-eyed boys. At any rate, I was seated backward, so what I saw was a retreat from Managua rather than a trip toward Leon. The only unpleasant aspect of the ride was that my face was maybe eleven inches from a couple of toothless old men who, as was typical, had no problem with gringo watching. At one point, a large bee began darting about, raising mild aggravation in the Nicos and near panic in Lew, who had his arms pinned between his dozing neighbors. It landed on the window next to me—which, of course, didn’t open. I coaxed a cordoba 53

out of my pocket. Freeing my arm, I used the coin to kill the bee against the glass with a crunch and a click. The old men nodded, smiled, and began staring out the window instead of at me. Ike rested peacefully. His tenure as a gringo traveler in Guatemala, El Salvador, and now Nicaragua was evident in the way he could snatch stretches of sleep, politely but firmly turn down a hustle, or find the ticket salesman in the roiling chaos of an urban bus station. His Spanish left something to be desired, but language has its limits. Ike was sensitive, artistic, moody, passionate. He and I had known each other through high school and weathered hard times together. He was talented at everything he put his mind and his hands to: poetry, photography, graphic art, sundry athletics, journalism. But his ambitions tripped one another; he was easily distracted by the allure of a fresh vision, the time and energy he’d put into one pursuit suddenly stale in light of something new. But in the last days I’d sensed an evolution in him. There was a solidity in the way he observed sweltering, jam-packed Managua, as if he were watching a river flow, rather than the dense waves of hurrying poor. There was something more enduring in the way he talked about photojournalism and I was very glad to be with him. When we stepped down from the van, we found ourselves in a muddy terminal, hemmed in by hanging corpses of swine, determined vendors, and squadrons of flies. We began walking to find a safe place to dig out a map. We moved onward, offering smiles as a compromise to the consistent calls of Ven aca, gringo! (Come here, gringo!). We were a stumbling train of amusement to the people bartering away the afternoon or rolling past in the detached beds of Toyota trucks drawn by horses. Ike wrestled the guidebook from his pack. He assured us we were just a couple of blocks from the central plaza. We banked a couple of turns, but then there appeared yet another market, the 54

mouth of a tunnel, and it was too late to turn back. The late-afternoon throngs, toting impossible loads on their shoulders, pushed us in and it was all we could do to stay near one another. “Watch your ass here,” Ike hissed and our palms slapped down on our passports, the folds of bills sewn in below crotches. Lew claimed a snaky hand kissed his hip pocket once, but otherwise we emerged whole onto patchy concrete. We found a dingy opening in a wall that proved to be a café of sorts. The proprietor slept soundly under the brim of a mesh cap and a dozen blindly drunk Nicos sang political hymns in the shadows. After several minutes, we realized we would have to wake the owner. He looked grumpily at us and said there was bistec y cebollas. Moments later, he dropped plates with charred meat and fried onions in front of us, set down beers we hadn’t ordered, and went back to his nap. It wasn’t long before the drunks were upon us, asking long, slurry questions in that rapid imprecise Spanish of Nicaragua. I gathered enough to realize that they were saying how grand it was for us to be here, not only in their nation, but in their watering hole. They poured the dark, rich Flor de Caña rum down our throats, and showered us with spittle and proclamations of love. One tried to kiss Ike before we jolted our way, apologetically, out into the twilight. Without finding the central plaza, we spent that night in a shanty motel on an unlit street. The tangled, gruff sounds of nearviolence swam in from the streets. In the savage heat of midmorning we decided to strike out. If we found reasons to stick around, we would. If not, we’d be on the next bus, jouncing blindly elsewhere. We marched west. The streets widened. Signs began to appear above doorways, 55

some even newly painted. An ice cream shop blew its cool straight out onto us. A tiny, crowded internet café buzzed on a corner. Murals appeared: a twenty-foot-tall Sandinista soldier, his boot grinding an enormous serpent, cia painted in red along its swollen belly. A palm tree waved over some traffic and Ike picked up the pace. In a moment we stumbled onto a sprawling, tree-lined plaza, surrounded by restored structures of adobe and tile, replete with a little gazebo and shuffling pairs of ancient nuns. And in front of it all, La Basilica Catedral de Leon, a humbling monstrosity of cold stone, two brass lions standing watch, snarls curling their huge jowls. At the top of the cathedral, standing vigilant, was an alabaster rendition of La Virgen, looking with mercy down on her devotees. Stronger gusts carried plastic bags dancing as high as her feet. Three heroes of socialism (Jose Marti, Carlos Fonseca, and Che Guevara) looked down at me. I was scratching something about this in my journal when he crossed my vision. He planted his crutches with great energy and swung several feet with each move. One leg was gone at the knee, phantom blue jean flapping below it. He clutched a bag of imitation Cheetos, his lips dusted the chemical orange of a Southern California sunset. He looked to be nearing fifty, but his eyes were something like power lines downed in a storm: thrashing about, madly alive, looking for something to fry. He caught me watching him. He hopped and swung to my side, folded onto the bench, rubbed his Cheeto fingers on his pants, and shook my hand painfully. I was about halfway through Fire from the Mountain, a memoir of revolution by Omar Cabezas, a Sandinista soldier and statesman. He saw the battered book before he had a chance to introduce himself. He flipped the pages, muttering to himself in a throaty urgency. Lew had his dictionary open on a nearby bench, was mouthing vocabulary to himself. Ike snapped photos of me and my 56

energetic companion, as if we were celebrities. After a minute, the man spread the yellowed pages and rammed an index finger into a passage. “Ah! Here it is—where Omar speaks of the student center. This is where it began; this is where I first knew him.” He raised a crutch and aimed it at a bullet-pocked building just behind us. I hadn’t realized: I was sitting a few feet from where much of the last chapter took place, from the very room where teenage revolutionaries plotted the death of a regime. The building still sat wrapped in the red and black of the fsln. The man had been transported by the coincidence of the afternoon. His gaze retreated and softened, and he considered the distance as if a familiar ghost was standing there. Then he righted a crutch and stood, his other hand snaking through the buttons of his shirt. He spun to me and let the fabric fall away, revealing a sunken hole in his torso. It was almost six inches in diameter; it was as if a massive fist had reformed his entire body. It didn’t seem possible to survive such a wound. Yet, there he was: that crazy grin and the wild buzz back in his eyes. He told me: “It doesn’t matter; it’s not important. They can take your leg, any other part they like, they can put a rocket through your chest. But they will never have taken your heart or your balls.” Before I could ask him who “they” were, if they even existed, he’d buttoned up, saluted, and begun his hop-swing away into the bare afternoon of Leon. We’d received contradictory info about the museum—but we were learning to weave dialectics from everything. From the tempest of gestures and quick-spoken directions, we figured ourselves to be within two blocks. And, just as sunstroke was about to hack us down into the dust, we found it, marked by a hand-carved wooden sign. Inside, an antique fan blew raspy air through the front room. It 57

was so quiet that at first we moved sheepishly, wondering if the sign was perhaps not a carryover from another era, and indeed—as a drunken old man had insisted—the museum no longer existed. But then a distinctive creak sounded, one that could only describe someone old rising from a chair. An elderly woman shuffled into the frame of the doorway, caught the tail end of her surprise at seeing three gringos, and smiled. “Buenas tardes,” she said. “Buenas tardes,” we said in unison. Her skin was the brown of healthy soil. Wrapped in a green sweater despite the pressing heat, she appeared very composed. Her eyes moved over us leisurely from behind huge glasses. “You’re here to visit our museum?” We told her we were, perhaps too fervently. She led us in. The room was filled with photos. Some hung on the yellowish walls; others were set against black poster board in rows or displayed like open greeting cards on tables. Beneath each photo was a caption. The eyes of several hundred dead teenagers looked at us through layers of dust, across the interminable distance between this world and theirs. In the middle of the room the woman spread her arms. “Here are the young ones. Take your time. I’ll be just outside if you have any questions.” She shuffled out. My silhouette reflected in the gloss of some of the photos. It was strange to look into eyes younger than my own, into faces that resembled mine just a few years ago: smooth, scarcely fuzzy cheeks, cocky amusement hinting at a grin. A security in their gaze that hadn’t yet eroded—and for them, never did. To think that this was just before their end, that at the time these pictures were taken, they had most likely already committed to their fate. While I, at twenty-three, could think of nothing to do with my life but wander around their country, pursuing imagery and narrative, digging their conviction in an attempt to conjure my own. 58

Sonia Angela Valdez, 19, killed when the Guardia mined a clandestine meeting of students, Managua, April 12, 1977. Arturo Ortiz Hernandez, 15, murdered by the regime while bringing a message to his comrades, Leon, January 8, 1978. Jorge Camera Diaz, 20, kidnapped and tortured to death by the Guardia, October 1976.

Why was I there? Did I feel it was my right or my duty? If it was my right, then I was there with a certain agenda: look for an alternative to the soulless capitalism of home. Although the revolution had been undermined, it had at first succeeded and I was in awe of that. Throughout my college years (when the relatively small skirmishes for justice that I’d been a part of took place) I studied the Nicaraguan legend of refusal and resistance in the face of tyrannical force. I deserved—or had thought I did—the view of an egalitarian experiment that had worked, at least for a while. On the other hand, if I had come because it was my duty, then my agenda was different. In that case I was there to bear witness to the meddlesome terror of my government. I was there not to merely process my liberal guilt, but to bear witness, to apologize with my very presence for the crimes of my leaders. The old woman rocked in her wicker chair. She was reading a sheaf of papers, frowning at something. She set the pages aside when I entered, humility and haunt mixing in me. I hadn’t actually meant to approach her; I just had to depart the other room. She invited me to sit across from her. Her gaze restored me, perhaps because I felt horror and shame, and she looked on me with tenderness. There was a mild, patient curiosity in her face. She didn’t ask anything. I carefully arranged words in my head and asked her if she had lost children in the revolution. “Yes, of course. Five.” She spread her fingers like she was exercis59

ing them and closed the fist. Her chin lifted and I understood: she would show me her pride—that was the deal. Her grief was hers, not for display at a museum. I pulled myself upright, shook off my own sentimentalism, tried to come up with a question that would honor that army of eyes in the other room. Lew and Ike emerged, blinking, shaking their heads, like they’d just seen a long, sad film. Lew had been, perhaps, the least prepared for facing scenes like this; Ike had enough leftist education to anticipate the awful background he would be moving against. Lew was a tenderhearted kid to an extent that I’d not fully realized, and this was one of many times when I could see tears threaten him. The woman settled in the chair, wrapped her sweater more tightly around her body, and began to tell us the tales of her children. The daughter who apprenticed in a shoe store and ran guns to the insurrectionists out the back, until one day when the national guard knocked on their front door, smiled and greeted this woman, seized her daughter, and put her in a truck that drove her to her death. The son whose love for sport pulled him up and down soccer fields until he realized that the real competition was in the mountains, fighting against the dictator. He died there in an ambush. The other three who fell fighting the Contras in the early eighties, after the triumph of the revolution. We made donations and she kissed our sunburned cheeks. When she did so, she gripped my upper arm with strong fingers to steady herself. As she pulled away, she put her hard, gray eyes against mine for several seconds, with absolutely no expression. We left her pulling cobwebs from the doorway. When Jorge drank, age crept into his face. He poured rum absentmindedly and threw it into the back of his throat. When I say “age,” I think I mean “sadness.” It was our last night in the capital—Granada, Ometepe, San Juan, and then Costa Rica had begun to tug us. These were to be, 60

we knew, easier places, places where the hard knocks of poverty were cushioned by Europeans and gringos and their cash. And we wanted this ease. But Jorge was going to drop some things on me that he’d been saving up behind his smile. “You can take that liquor, man,” Ike told him. Jorge smiled grimly. There was a time, he told us, when he had a bottle a day. “You all like my father very much, right?” We declared it an understatement; we told Jorge that we held Antonio in the highest regard as a man, a father, and a revolutionary. Antonio’s work, at which he toiled sometimes twenty-hour days, was in networking grassroots organizations across Central America for causes from domestic violence prevention to potable water systems. Axel turned into a cliché of adoration when Antonio came home in the evening; he clung to his pant leg. Antonio had trekked the jungles of his nation, fighting against the terror of Somoza; he’d lost his friends to hails of bullets; he’d gone on to fight against the Contras and their seditious butchery. And this is all not to mention the heights of hospitality he’d showed us. In our leftist traveler visions, he was nearly mythical. Jorge nodded to acknowledge the flattery for his old man. He smiled and drank again, no irony in his manner. “Yes,” he said, “yes, my father is a great man.” We all drank and nodded conclusively, Lew and Ike thumping their wallets down on the table before heading out to the sketchy streets for a pay phone to call home. The skyline of Managua—such as it is—burned sickly behind Jorge, and the Intercontinental Hotel squared itself against it, absurdly white and modern. The foothills that rolled around the city were like swells in a dark sea; small fires winked and leaped, crawling down them like armies. It had been a dry season. Jorge was looking at his rum. He said, “There’s just one thing—about my dad.” He leveled his black eyes at me. “He likes women.” 61

Before I interpreted his tone, I replied that I did too. Jorge gave that grim smile again and I stopped with mine. I shut up and sat back. He told me of last winter when Antonio vanished for weeks, and only static-ripped phone calls let his family know he was alive. He was away on “business.” He was in Tegucigalpa; he was in Masaya; he was in Salvador; he was everywhere but home and it wasn’t long before the sharp minds of his family peeled away the lies. It was Christmas when the pretense broke. Without their father, Axel and Cyntia were not able to feign holiday spirit, and his mom, worn down by the betrayals, buckled under sobs. Jorge twisted open the next bottle of Flor and splashed his ice once, then again. There was nothing to do, he told me, besides let everyone break and then reconstruct them. So he held his mother and shared the truth with his sister so she didn’t have merely the shape and the shadow of it to madden her. He comforted Axel with games and he took breaks to recharge his spirit with liquor. It was Christmas night before he achieved it, but he had them all dancing and laughing, gliding on tradition through the howling absence. And because of this, when his father returned, there was never a word, never an explosion, and the fractures of the family remained only in the minds of its members. I looked at the embattled city and listened to ice tinkle. Soon Ike and Lew wove back. Goofiness and lewd chatter was born again in our group space; Jorge lit again from within, having transferred, I hoped, some weight out into the world. What Jorge meant, and what I hoped he knew I understood, was this: that we had two out of three right. Antonio was a great father, he was a great revolutionary both in times of war and after, but he was a flawed man. Through the cruel touches of poverty, war, revolution, (and here I saw it, clearly, finally) the betrayal of corruption, Antonio had become and remained such a father and such a revo62

lutionary. He’d adapted through violent tumult, he’d guarded the ideals of Sandinismo as he had his family, even as his ideological brothers, mere boys in charge of a nation, acted as such and lost track. He hadn’t clung to visions of Nicaragua that lost relevance, but he safeguarded all the convictions that comprised them. He did cling to one sweet shred of the past, of youth, of rebellion: sex—and all the heady power and promise of it. Later, when Antonio collected us (cabs were forbidden in the name of hospitality), he gauged our drunkenness and drove along a strange route. We turned down a street where hookers cranked skirts upward at our lowered windows, blue smoke and broken songs of offering rising. Antonio drove past a gate and into parking lot set back in the heart of a city block. Above us, in tall red neon letters, El Club de Playboy blazed wildly. It was as if some deity of T & A had adorned this random building with the buzzing, bright crown of Hefner. Jorge sat tense and quiet. Antonio made us promise that under no circumstances would we give so much as one cordoba to anyone inside. Inside, the currency of sex, like a redeeming flood, had washed away all memory of the squalor outside. The red bulbs and brass molding gave surreal hues to everything. We were the only customers and were soon flocked upon by “dancers.” They bounced on our laps, pushed our hands between their thighs, blew taunts and promises into our ears. But we declined it all politely. As the beers (“Bood-wyzer,” the shifty waiter assured us with a wink) emptied and the girls rose, petulant, I looked over at Antonio. He seemed pleased. His eyes were on the girls as they retreated and he smiled. He looked younger. When the waiter dropped a scribbled bill on the table, both Ike and I tried to pull out our roll of cordobas, but Antonio waved us off severely and produced a crisp U.S. ten from a shirt pocket. Jorge cut 63

his eyes at me, shook his head, and smiled wryly, as if to say don’t be silly—of course he has to pay. We stood awkwardly in a Managua parking lot trying to articulate our gratitude. I heard our transportation rumble to life and the driver begin his last-minute hollering. We summarized our thanks and hugged the two men. The bus was already moving when we jumped aboard and wedged ourselves into a small sea of Nico faces, some amused at our drawn-out farewell, some annoyed. I fell into a hot, unsettled, upright doze. Ike tapped his boot against my shin and slumber hissed out of me, quick as a snowball on a stove. “Wake up brother; it’s another city.” I was short of thrilled to be in a new place; I expected all the requisite flailing and renewed danger, though I didn’t know what to expect specifically of Granada. There had been talk about the city over pico de gallo in the morning, but I’d been struggling with the weight of leaving the Betetas, leaving Nicaragua soon, and wondering what it was I had culled from witnessing the wake of war. I stepped down onto the griddle of pavement between my friends. In front of us the central plaza yawned. People chatted under the fractured shadows of palms. Young Euro kids sat crosslegged and blew smoke through pierced nostrils, rearranging the bone and stone jewelry they were selling. Businessmen made that nonchalant, lunch hour businessman stroll, one hand in the pocket, the other gesturing something out to a companion. Flocks of Nicos lounged at tables around kiosks and sucked on Cokes. Teens with baggy pants and long hair grouped loosely, and one of them picked the chords of a Pearl Jam tune out of a guitar. The warm gusts of afternoon came rolling up from Lake Nicaragua and played the bells of ice cream vendors. Well-restored buildings loomed on all sides, done in bold pastels. 64

An outpost of first world hipness. As such, the blemish of destitution had been scoured at least from the center of the city. As I looked upon it, I knew that the benefits of being the sore thumb foreigner would be replaced by the comfort of being just another. We could see the spread of night, swirling and blinking, three stories directly above us through the open courtyard. The bar was called La Fabrica—“The Factory.” We began slugging beers, leaning against the wall. Ike had met a lanky, lovely Spaniard and soon they left us. In the center of the floor there was a trio of young Nicos getting louder and louder. Empty bottles of Flor lined the edge of their table. They flailed and gestured and boomed their laughter. I was curious about the shreds of their talk that I caught: Sandinistas, mierda, los cambios, Aleman (the Sandinistas, shit, changes, Aleman —the current president). The largest of the three caught my gaze and nodded. I nodded back. He waved us over. The youngest and smallest of the trio had shifty eyes and a ponytail; he threw his gaze around as if looking for someone. The other two were beefier and cleaner cut; they stood to welcome us. We introduced ourselves. The biggest guy poured shots all around. We knocked them back and the guy beside me, Carlos, pulled his hair from his brow and said, “You’re Americans.” We admitted we were. He folded his hands on the table and leaned forward, earnestly. “And what do you see in our country that you like, my friend?” There seemed something in his tone that I couldn’t quite discern. Lew was already slapping out sloppy Spanish with the shiftyeyed kid. I told Carlos and his friend that Nicaragua had many treasures; I wouldn’t really know where to begin. Carlos nodded as if he expected this. He asked me where we’d been. I told him and he wanted to know how Granada compared. I played it safe and told 65

him Granada seemed a little mas tranquilo. The pair of them nodded in unison; Carlos poured me more rum. “Yes,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about huelepegas and malandros (thugs) here. Here, you’re safe. We don’t have that kind of shit going on.” They were both shaking their heads now, emphasizing their point, none of that shit. I didn’t know how to respond so I drank my Flor. The bottle glinted as it went back and forth over the candle. Everything was soupy and slow. More of the sweet amber poison of that nation burned its way down my throat. Somehow the topic of the United States rolled to the surface. I’d fancied myself crafty and courageous an hour earlier, slinking over with half-pretended camaraderie and the intention of combing through these men’s politics. But I suddenly found my slurry Spanish rising and falling over the table, spilling my own convictions carelessly, along with a glass of rum. It was the coincidence of hearing my voice at a lull between songs and catching Lew’s eyes on me that wound me back down in the midst of a rant that had something to do with the avarice of my government. My words dropped off into an English mutter. When I looked up at the distorted Nico faces, though, they wore blurry grins. Clearly whatever I’d said had been good for entertainment. We were the only customers left in La Fabrica; the lights came on and the music died. Blinking and fending off nausea, I declined the end of the last bottle and ignored Carlos’s pressure to take it for Nicaragua! In the carnival streets of Granada, palms impossibly tall, warm currents of air rubbing us down, we said our goodbyes. Just before Carlos climbed into the driver’s seat of a new Isuzu pickup, he put my face roughly between his large hands. “We don’t mind if you come looking for your heroes here, gringo.” 66

And with a sharp laugh like a gunshot, he raced them off into four a.m., leaving Lew and me to wander in search of our beds. From the pitching deck of the rickety ferry that pulled us into Lake Nicaragua, into the south toward Costa Rica and other nations, this is what we could see: a brooding volcano veiled by a dirty cloud; a chorus line of monster palms waving; vague stretches of green in the distance that suggested jungle; brown waves that reached to the end of sight; a gang of white carapaces on the shoreline that truly, surreally, were rvs, piloted by old gringos from California, Arizona, Connecticut. As the sinewy trio of boys untethered the boat from the sagging dock, I thought about how we’d met people from all points on the political spectrum. The fractures were so profound that they split families and had nearly destroyed the proud nation. But what they shared was a fatigue that I’d never witnessed in another people. You could see in the face of one old woman daydreaming on a stoop that never again would they go to war. I felt lighter as I watched the shore become hazy. But the weight hadn’t been danger or overwhelming destitution; Granada certainly wasn’t that way (nor, I knew, were the other two stops we would make before crossing the border). The weight was my inability to let myself be. The weight was wanting to be looking into someone’s eyes and listening every moment of the day. The weight was the desire to know everything that had happened, all that the gringo had done. The weight was watching still more of our exports—crack cocaine and World Bank money—filtering noxiously into their society. The weight was the impulse to be in the vicious thick of their reality each second—which was, of course, untenable. The weight was to comprehend, to put truth and faces —life itself—to the stacks of books about Nicaragua’s decades of strife. The weight was to imagine my young mother here, seven67

teen years earlier, on her own quest for alternatives, for inspiration, for her heroes, and finding them—glorious and whole, unmarred by the cancers of time and power. The weight was in the eyes of Sandinistas that still seemed to shine with the tears they’d shed as they punched the ballot for the opposition party in 1990, so betrayed, so worn-down. The part of the weight that lingers is knowing I must return.

Grant County Jail “Open bottom!” And my eyes open and every muscle snaps tense. Sometimes when I awake, it takes me a moment to recall where I am. This is not one of those mornings. Fuck. The reality corkscrews into my skull as the master lock cylinder bites and the doors fall open with a hollow screech. Hollow. Hollow was how I described this place to myself until only two hours ago when unconsciousness finally descended. My cellmate’s pale legs drop off the top bunk, dangle in front of me. He coughs and it sounds like he brings a piece of gravel up. He curses the day and leaps down, acknowledging me by way of a knife-edge glance. I was ushered in here after lights-out, and all he knows is that the by-the-book guard rousted him to take one of the thin mattress pads and give it to me. Outside, beneath the buzzing wash of halogens, prisoners line up. Curses are shot around, some at particular recipients, some general. Someone is laughing in an unsettling cackle. Someone is busting a rhyme. I trudge out, contriving indifference—that difficult blend of fearlessness and deference—to get my first taste of institutional scraps. 68

We were late. The drive to the Gorge—the breathtaking natural amphitheater on the banks of the Columbia River—looked, from the atlas, to be two or three hours. The show was slated to begin at five and we needed a solid hour of tailgate time. We left my mom’s home at one forty-five, Will pushing the Jeep with his customary zeal along Highway 2, the Wenatchee River exploding with the last of summer’s charge beside us. Because we hurried, I did something I otherwise never would: I put the drugs in my pocket. But now we were en route to see Manna, Ozomotley, and Santana, I had one week before the beginning of senior year of college, and I refused to be burdened by anything. Me, Trav, Will. Trav (sitting shotgun, hair and mountain-man beard chaotic with the wind, sucking on an Old Gold, forearm flexing with each drag): “Awwooooooo! (howling at the sun) . . . Awwoooo!” Will (smiling politely through his boyish features, black curls boogying, splitting his gaze between the highway and the halfrolled joint in his lap, Dixie-drawling): “Hale yaeh, man. Oh, hale yeh.” Me (slouched in the back seat, pretending to read Tuesdays with Morrie, but really just basking in the success of having introduced these two friends): “I swear. You guys are fucking dorks.” We pulled into the pasture/parking lot and waited for a trooper to wave us along. When I saw him, I folded the small bag of pot into my book and nodded. He nodded back. But the exchange reminded me of the powdery mushrooms riding my hip. “Yo, Trav, we need to eat these things before we go in, ok? I’m not trying to carry them past security.” Trav nodded absently and opened a beer. We jounced past row upon row of surreptitiously sipping Mexicans mixed with clumps of hippies. We settled in and Will rolled 69

the window half-down—and blew the ashes from his pipe directly in front of a rent-a-cop strolling by. I choked on my beer. The renta-cop confiscated the pipe and ordered his hulking partner to the other side of the car. Will’s fast thought and blitz of southern charm were valiant. “Well, oh, hey there, sir—I’m terribly sorry ’bout that. Good thing that there was the last of it . . . heh-heh.” I sized up the security agent: Five-seven or so, slightly balding, a little pudgy. Creased uniform and shined shoes; sunglasses. Maybe twenty-seven or eight at the most. Thin hair disciplined with gel. Not good. “You sure about that, boy?” The “cop” asked, snapping off his sunglasses with the clichéd motion of scrutiny. Will said Yes but the routine began anyway: Was everyone twenty-one? (Will was not—but clutched an open beer). Were there any more drugs in the car? Absolutely not, sir! (a joint, a bag of weed, and two containers of mushrooms as it turned out, were still in the Jeep). Get out of the vehicle. Empty all your beers. Etc. A loose group of red-eyed Mexicans milled around us, shaking heads in sympathy. Despite all this, I began to relax as I watched the red ale gurgle into the grass. They were just rent-a-cops; surely they’d back off now. Trav arranged the empty bottles nicely. I tried to smile at the monstrous, silent one. “We-ell, you guys, let’s see . . . what should we do here?” the in-charge “cop” was saying, relishing our anxiety. “I might just let you go if I can believe we’ve taken care of everything. Have we now?” He put his eyes on each of us and we nodded eagerly. “Well,” he said, taking in a breath and pretending to consider this, “why don’t I just have you guys empty your pockets for me before we say goodbye, then.” I thought: I can run. As if he’d read my mind, the idiot savant “cop” stepped closer. His partner turned to me. 70

I tried to look him steadily in the eyes. “What if I refuse to empty my pockets—sir?” His face fell, like he was hurt. “Well then you can empty ’em for the goddam sheriff,” he replied sharply. I looked around. I could still break. I looked at the cop. He was younger than I’d thought at first. He seemed reasonable suddenly; he counseled me with his eyes: C’mon kid. Me or the sheriff? And just like that I handed him the bag, down low, casually, like we were making a deal. He asked me what it was. I told him it looked to me like some kind of fungi. And then he detained me for felony possession of drugs and handcuffed me with zeal. Trav and Will made varied appeals to the rent-a-cops even as they radioed the sheriffs in. I thought that one sheriff looked like a decent guy. He was bald with kind eyes, like someone you’d like to have as an uncle. As they donned gloves and prepared to search the Jeep, I decided to put down all the cards of cooperation. “Hey, sir, whatever else you find in that car is mine, too,” I told the nice looking sheriff. He looked amused at this. Trav was kneeling beside me, near tears. He kept pouring shots of Gatorade down my throat like I was a dying comrade. I tried to console him, so mad was he with guilt. “I’ll tell ’em, E, I’ll tell ’em they were both of ours, man. It’s not right.” I convinced him this was a bad idea. Soon, though, the second sheriff—a chain-smoking, rotund man—wrenched his torso free of the back seat. In his hand was a small glass bead with a silver screw top. Inside was a grayish-white powder. Wicked triumph flashed in his face. In Trav’s, danger rose, like a wick being turned slowly up in an oil lamp, a rage I’d only seen a couple of times. He dropped the Gatorade. “Whose is this?” The big lawman demanded, shaking the powder around. Trav didn’t speak. He put his glare against the ground and began uprooting clumps of grass. “This yours?” The cop was 71

speaking to Trav. Trav did not respond. I tried to intervene, but the cop told me very severely to shut up. “This is yours, huh?” He pushed the glass bottle down in front of Trav’s eyes, waggling it back forth. “Gonna tell me what this is? That’d be best.” Now Trav met the cop’s eyes. His arms flexed. I was about to risk a boot in the head by interfering again but then, with a trembling hand, Trav produced and lit a cigarette. As light and frail as the small pieces of ash lifting off the end of the smoke, Trav’s voice: “It’s my brother.” “What’s that boy?” The cop had unscrewed one thread of the lid. “It’s. My. Brother.” Trav said this louder and now it was not necessary to have a long history with him to recognize the danger in his eyes. I assumed I’d be forgiven for my translation. “It’s his brother’s ashes, sir,” I said quickly, “his brother’s remains.” The fat sheriff froze like he’d just tripped a landmine. After a long moment, he nodded, tightened the lid and handed it to Trav. Trav pocketed the ashes and turned wet eyes against the side of the car. The offending sheriff shook a cigarette out for him, extending the pack, though Trav still had half of one burning. Trav considered him in silence. Then he said, “I’ll take one for my buddy.” He put it between my lips and lit it with a steady hand. I’ve never seen two more forlorn faces than my friends’ through the squad car window. I felt awful that they felt so awful. I knew a smile would be silly, but I tried to share my false stoicism with a wink. The fat sheriff transported me. The partition allowed him to lower his own window while rolling mine up, trapping the stifling desert heat of August in with me. On the radio, “One Toke Over the 72

Line,” crackled. He turned it up, grinned cruelly in the rearview, and drove me across the desolation of central Washington to jail. I get in line for breakfast. I can’t position myself in a way that feels right. If I cross my arms, I feel confrontational—crossing your arms over your chest causes your spine to straighten, your arms and chest to bulge a little. Also it could suggest boredom or impatience—which I have not earned yet, having arrived only hours before. I uncross my arms and feel vulnerable. At my sides, my hands seem yards away, useless should I have to defend myself. Besides, it must look too naïve, too presumptuous—who wouldn’t guard their grill upon arriving in jail, right? By the time I shuffle up to the bars, I’m standing in an absurd compromise, arms halfway up like I’m practicing some martial art. A sun-glassed, hair-netted Mexican ladles dripping eggs onto a plate, spoons milk powder into my cup, and looks at me like he would rather disembowel me. When I turn from the door, I take in Tank A1. On the bottom floor are five cell doors. At the end, a dark opening drools, suggesting a shower. Two metal tables with four stools rooted in the concrete. Two blue pay phones hung low on the back wall. Two metalgrate staircases lead up to the second story, where a skinny balcony fronts five more steel doors. The tank feels insanely crowded; I do the math. At two people a cell, we’d be twenty. Older men shuffle into their cells with breakfast; a couple black dudes climb up to the balcony and sit on the edge, poking their legs out over the scene. Mexicans have filled the tables—save for one very beefy, very Anglo anomaly. He dwarfs the Mexican kids, who, by and large, are younger than me. He’s saying something in gaudy, loud Spanglish. They all laugh with him. He spoons a huge load of eggs into his mouth. I go stiffly to the back wall—from 73

where I can see the whole tank. As I pass by, the big white man at the table watches me. After a minute, he stops eating and turns around on his stool. He’s about five feet from me. I keep my eyes on my eggs, but the buzz of fight juice circulates in me and I adjust my legs so I can rise more quickly. In my peripheral vision, he is a hulking blur. “Hey.” I don’t respond; it is not yet time to look up. “Hey, kid.” “Kid” describes twelve of us in here. He’s not talking to me. Why would he be talking to me? “Hey. Yo. Kid.” I have no idea how to look at him, so I just do. He gets up, his plate in his right hand. He’s broad-chested, bow-legged, shavedheaded, and cigarette handsome. “Have a seat.” He strides toward me and waits for me to take his stool. Then he slides down into my spot on the floor. I mutter thanks and jerk myself down to the table. The Mexicans are silent and have stopped eating. One of them looks over at the white man with a furrowed brow. My stomach seizes. Then, as if someone has raised a cue card behind me, they all start chattering again, shoveling in breakfast, entirely ignoring me. “I’ve got a horse,” DJ is saying. This topic seems to make him more serious, but also dreamy. His eyes go to the middle distance where late afternoon sunlight is a suggestion, filtering down from an unseen source in the “outdoor” area. He slouches further down against the wall, leans closer to me. “That horse and my woman are all that I’m going to think about for the next few minutes.” And he’s silent and his eyes glaze over. DJ is awaiting trial for possession of cocaine—at least. Thing is, he doesn’t know for sure. The crew of people he’d been busted with 74

were scattered at booking. He knows that there was a lot in the car. Couple kilos of H and a few sheets of ’cid besides, he muttered ruefully a few minutes earlier. Not only that junk but fucker had a two thousand dollar laser scale and at least a few grand cash. It wasn’t DJ’s car. He’d just been catching a ride while out partying, celebrating the conception of his child. Only problem was he’d lost track of his true friends and wound up with these other characters. They’d gotten pulled and as the discoveries in the trunk were made, DJ had managed to take a deputy aside and assure him of his lack of culpability. It had gone off well, but when the deputy un-cuffed him, he handed DJ his baseball cap and a quarter gram of coke dropped out. Just a fuckin’ toot I was savin’ for a special occasion. That was enough to peeve the cops and they ran the whole carload of men in, claiming they’d divvy up the charges since the driver was remaining silent. DJ has two strikes for meth possession and distribution already— but he swears he cleaned up nearly a year ago, hauled himself into the straight life of trailer sales, relative sobriety, marriage, and, soon, family. This could ruin that picture for about twenty-five years. I look at this likely condemned daydreaming man beside me. Out of blind kindness, he’d taken me under his wing. I’ve already watched him defuse an escalation between a gunslinger farm boy and one of the more frightening Mexican gangsters. I’ve also overheard him begin the diplomacy to talk down a couple of stickup kids conspiring to rob a meth lab that DJ knows is operated by a man with a young daughter. I realize DJ’s son might be five years older than I am now before his father hugs him. “You know, the county’ll likely make . . .” He’s evidently been distracted from his woman-and-horse reveries, and is now making bitter calculations, “I mean, when you add up the brand new Taurus, that damn fancy scale, all the cash, and the fines every sorry fucker in that car’ll pay . . . twenty grand.” He shakes his head. “Goddam. I wish that was enough.” 75

The old man stays in his cell most of the time. But every couple of hours he wanders out to the balcony, nodding to himself in the manner of old men everywhere. He surveys the tank with calm suspicion. One time, he stands there, his greasy white hair half covering his face and square, thick glasses reflecting the lights, and raises his hand as if to silence an adoring crowd below. Then he makes some semicoherent announcement about stuffing his drawers down the toilet. “Unless somebody gets me a blanket. Or that lawyer. And the rest of his brood. I’ll do it. Redeeming flood—water, water is holy water . . .” A collective groan goes up: from the Mexican clique, the lone Nazi, the old stick-up men, the veteran junkies, the mean-eyed farm boys, and the agitated black men alike. C’mon, Pops. Don’t be a fuckin’ drag. You don’t wanna flood the joint. I’m standing by the top dog Mexican who tosses cards with a man who looks like he could be his father. The top dog Mexican grudgingly accepts my presence and my occasional questions because DJ has befriended me and because he’s realized I speak Spanish. Whether the latter endears me to him or simply causes him to want to keep me close, I don’t know. “What’s the deal with ‘Pops’?” I ask, after waiting for the top dog’s turn to pass. He doesn’t respond, so I try to clarify. “I mean, what’s an old cat like that in here for?” I know better, in general, than to ask what someone has done straight out, but I figure such a character should be an exemption. “Fucker is the most loco in here, ese,” top dog tells me, taking a card. “His lady and his kid had kicked him out like real long ago and shit.” He tosses a couple of cards toward the older Mexican. “Pops fuckin’ shows up with two nice pine coffins, puts a gun on 76

’em, tapes their mouths, nails ’em in and starts driving for Montana. I think they got him in Idaho. Says he just wanted to start a new life with ’em out there. His bail’s like two million and shit.” He gathers the cards with a sweep of a tattooed arm. Up on the balcony, Pops has retired to his cell. My cellmate is a tweeker from Ritzville. Though angry and incoherent upon rising, he proves to be somewhat charming in that shifty-eyed, keep-everyone-guessing sort of way. He boasts a white man’s jerry-curl that also achieves the form of a mullet. He cackles and talks a lot of shit to anyone who will listen—and about anyone he thinks he can get away with insulting. Every evening two guards enter the tank—which they otherwise do only to stop a fight, search a cell, or when otherwise compelled—and unlock the doors to the “outside.” “Outside” is a fifteen-by-twenty-foot square column at the top of which, some thirty feet up, metal mesh screens off the sky. My cellie puts on high-top Reeboks and strides frenetically around the edges, trying to get some exercise—though it seems more like a physiological necessity than recreation, like he has to burn off energy the same way we have to breathe or void our bladders. While others splay themselves on the floor, content to stare dreamily up at the incarcerated clouds, Kenny stomps around, between limbs, over torsos, deftly. “So I’m doing like eighty on Halloween and I’m taking this huge rip off the bong—some excellent hash mixed with just a touch of base, man, a beautiful blend—and I look over and I’m eye to eye with a fucking pig.” He’s just barely getting his pulse up now, so his words are staggered. Despite themselves, the other inmates are listening. “So I say fuck it, I tap the brakes hard”—Kenny illustrates this by halting his walk, sneakers squeaking—“and fucking toss that bong out. It was glass and I see it just fucking vanish in 77

the mirror when it hits the ground.” He gets going again, shaking his head, “Pretty soon pig’s bumping me so I stop ’cause I know I can’t lose him in that fucking Oldsmobile. Couldn’t get me for the bong or nothin’ and that pissed him off. He was real glad when the warrant came up. Fuckers.” Kenny is doing three months here for some old probation violation after which he’ll be transferred to Ritzville—or maybe Moses Lake—to serve a sentence for something else. All told, he’ll be passed around to five counties before he gets to take another toke of anything. But he’s not really bitter; he seems to be having a ball and to take his lumps, more or less, with grace. He certainly isn’t yelling foul at the system—though he’s got plenty of invective for the prim young guards who pass back and forth outside the tank. Many of the prisoners were acquainted with these guards, I’m learning, as far back as high school. It’s a small state. There is one man out of the half-dozen “outside” who is expressly not enjoying Kenny’s banter, his magnetism of the limelight. He’s an older guy with a handlebar mustache and two teeth remaining in the smooth gloss of gums—his canines. He’s wiry and looks like some power remains in him. He frowns and shifts his position against the wall every thirty seconds. Finally he tells Kenny to stop whining. “What, grandpa? I’m not fucking telling the story for your benefit. Why don’t you go suck some cock with that nice soft mouth of yours.” There are a couple of anticipatory laughs. “Fuckin’ Pepsi generation,” the old man mutters. It’s later explained to me that the old man is disdainful of young dealers—a group to which Kenny belongs—because they are responsible for his residency at Grant County Jail, Tank A1. He’s an old-school stickup artiste, has made a life out of cleaning out meth labs, crackhouses, and opiate dens. He’s got a lot of nasty scars on 78

his neck and head and he claims to have spent thirty-five years of his life incarcerated—and the rest robbin’ and screwin.’ Most recent caper, though, it seems that the dealers heard he was coming, hid their product, and called the cops on an “armed robber” prowling their street. The old man does not respect this; in his schema they should have been waiting for him with either firepower or cash and drugs at the ready. That was the code. “Fuckin’ Pepsi generation. Pathetic fuckin’ cowards. Brave enough to sell your shit to little kids but scared of an old man. Gotta have the pigs take care of you. Damn lucky mine don’t outnumber you in here.” He’s addressing Kenny directly now and Kenny’s braggadocio falters. He continues his pacing with a mere whatever to his indignant elder. Victor is screeching. This is what Victor does: he screeches. He looks like adolescence has passed him by; if it weren’t for the circumstances in which I met him, I’d have assumed he was in his early teens, an obnoxious middle-schooler. He wears braces and shoots spitballs from his orange stool. I’ve been watching for a day and a half, and I still do not comprehend why the top dog Mexican puts up with him. If he didn’t feel like it, Victor would be thrown to the wolves. “Coño de la madre cabron, I’d have fucking waxed that bitch that night if that motherfucker hadn’t metido la pata, oíste?” The top dog Mexican, Carlos, is nodding absently and tossing cards. Even DJ bristles at the high-pitched tone of Victor. “I’m going to run that puta through when I come back, sabes? And if that maricon gets in the way then it’s on.” Victor is smiling insanely at this fantasy, jabbing bony fists in the air to punctuate his imagined conquest of the puta and her maricon friend. He says the last word —“on”—very loud. Carlos turns to him. He has very smooth skin, 79

a light mustache, carefully done hair. He could be a scholar or business student if it weren’t for the scrolls of tattoo, the thick leather crucifix, the orange jumpsuit. “Mira, Victor,” Carlos says, folding his hands on the table in feigned patience, “why are you more concerned with everyone thinking you’re duro than just keeping cool? Why don’t you relax, try to lay low, find another puta to talk to. Do it different for a change.” I put down my Louis L’Amour novel on the stair. It sounds like solid fatherly advice coming from the mouth of the man who appears to be the leader of a scary and thuggish group. But Victor is embarrassed by the lecture. “Fuck that; what, do you think I’m soft or something Carlos? Tengo que hacer esto. It’s quien soy. I don’t understand you, ese.” Victor shakes his head hard and snatches a card off the table. Carlos leans back, fanning out his own cards again. “You’re going to have to make that long walk many times, mano, with that mentality. I hate to see that, hombre, you’re a skin and I’m trying to help you see some shit, that’s all.” Carlos shrugs and puts his end of the conversation to rest. “I don’t give a fuck,” Victor repeats, his beady eyes burning into his cards, his stringy arms tense in front of him, “I can do that walk as many times as you want. They keep mandándome and I keep volviendo.” The wicked half-grin returns with this. “That walk,” it turns out, refers to the hundred and twenty miles or so that Victor will have to trudge across the desert to get back to the U.S.—and eventually to Washington—after he is deported again. The ins has no room, so Grant County allowed him to lounge here while he awaits the beginning of another cycle. DJ later tells me that Victor’s craze is not an act. He’s spent too much time on the violent, compromising streets of Tijuana, passed too many corpses in the border zone, endured too much savagery on both sides of that arbitrary line that bisects his youth. 80

After my first day in this place, most of my fear is abolished. There are several characters who I would vote to never, ever allow onto the streets again. But in general I’m not of great interest to them and wear the tacit endorsement of the great diplomat DJ anyway. Besides, pretty much everyone is consumed by the entertainment of poker and tale-telling or by pooling knowledge and resources: stickup kids are hooking up with other stickup kids; the Mexicans are finding possible leads for large-scale deals; the tweekers are collecting names and numbers; thugs are getting tips on the alteration of firearms from dead-eyed old cons. The place is a like a whetstone to the circular blade of crime. But there is one dude who constricts my throat every time I allow myself a glance. He is bearlike: maybe only six feet tall, but thick and hairy and curled around the power of his chest and forearms. His face is huge and covered by a grizzled mat of hair—it climbs almost all the way to his eyes. And his eyes are broken blue—like two bullet holes in the surface of a frozen pond. He lumbers around with a disconcerting grin, twisting big fleshy lips back from square yellow teeth, and he laughs silently. Everyone avoids his gaze and moves carefully around his space. The only thing I overhear him say in the first two days is: “When I get out I’m going straight to the man buy me big bag get me motel sit and slam for three goddam days.” This is accompanied by the miming of jabbing a syringe over and over into his huge, tracked arm. And that grin. Between sessions of lounging with DJ or being a good little anthropologist and observing the dynamics, I sequester myself in the middle of one of the stairwells to read. It’s a good spot because I have a view of the whole tank as well as the door—should some miracle spring me before the predicted arraignment of Monday night. I’m deeply involved in the last chapters of my third Louis L’Amour novel when I lift my eyes to find the monster climbing up the staircase toward me. Now this is a very skinny space; there is no 81

way two people can pass each other without contact. He comes slowly, his eyes trained on me, and all the predictable physiological reactions occur: my mouth goes dry, my pulse is whipped into a frenzy, a cold sweat swamps my brow and armpits. But there is nothing for me to do. DJ slouches in the far corner of the tank, making his case into one of the pay phones—no doubt begging his wife to not leave him, as he does many times a day. I cram myself as far as I can against the wall. The monster keeps coming, fractured eyes still on my face. His breathing is husky and rattled, and he uses the banister, his wrecked arm flexing with each step. He stops at the step just below me. His mouth is half open, ragged blasts of foul breath, his eyes definitely on me. I look past him and downward, not wanting to meet them—that most basic element of deference. He puts his foot on my stair. Our legs touch. I brace myself. “Excuse me, bud,” he wheezes. And squeezes past me, turning sideways so as to not invade too much of my space. I stand “outside,” alone. It is nearing eight p.m., and I can detect a faint peach hue passing over the top of the mesh grid above. Everyone else has reentered the tank because the guards called out a fiveminute warning and, moreover, because there is a sinewy man who claims electrician skills trying to repair the television with a toothbrush. Suddenly feeling melodramatic at my need for the sunset, remembering that I’ve only been incarcerated for two days, I turn to go find my dime-store novel. But then Pops shuffles out. He puts his head down and comes toward me. I bring my arms up across my chest—though despite the background on Pops, I can’t really fear such a crumpled old man. In the description of his crime there had been some thin overtone of sadness and love; I somehow half-believe the man’s offense was one of passion and in the end he would never have harmed his family. He looks up at me, blinking gray eyes behind the big lenses. 82

“The boys, the boys, say talk to you—to you about the mushroooms, that grow ’round here.” This is a statement. I shift my legs and wait for a question. This part is difficult for him; I can see a simultaneous struggle to be coherent and reign in his pride. “I, I want to know because . . .” He does some calculations on his fingers, mouthing words and frowning up at the mesh, “I’m interested, want to know, are there some that make you free—in your mind? Other things are good to see like trees and roads and sun, gonna get that lawyer on but wondering now, wondering ’bout being free . . .” Pops gestures with his bony hands but the gestures do not correspond to his words. He moves his gaze like a stethoscope, pushing it around the wall, frowning, pulling back, applying it elsewhere. I try to respond. “Well, I don’t know Pops. I’m not sure what they told you but I’m no expert on mushrooms.” He looks part crestfallen, part confused about why I am speaking to him, and part angry. I talk faster, trying to offer more. “I mean, uh, there’s lots of kinds of mushrooms, especially around the Northwest. They do all different kinds of things —some make you see things, you know, some more than others. They all do pretty strange things to your head, kind of make you think a lot. Make you reconsider reality, I guess.” His brow is deeply furrowed and greasy bangs have swung over most of one lens. The visible gray eye is sharp, the haze burned off. Two guards appear at the door and motion for us to bring our asses in. Pops has his back to them and so I move gently around him and he follows me. He tells me he is going to go get a pencil and have me draw some pictures for him—presumably of the fungi—and before I can tell him I’m no artist, he’s climbing the stairs, mumbling. “Ramirez, O’Connell, Zamora, Smith, Litchfield, Isturiz, Hastings—arraignment! Let’s go!” I fly from my spot on the stairs, the Louis L’Amour falling open 83

like a shot bird on the floor. As we line up and a hulking black guard named Hunter twists deadbolts severely, backed up by a trio of scrawnier coworkers clutching shackles, all eyes are on us. Some are narrowed into the blade of envy. Some are interested because there is nothing else to look at. DJ winks and nods at me from the middle of another round on the phone. As we line up and are roughly shackled by Hunter, I notice two things: One, that the three other guards stand safely back with palms on their batons and eyes scanning our column. Two, that all seven of us wear felony orange. Hunter takes the end of the shackles like a leash and goosesteps us down the hall to superior court. Shuffling in shackles in front of your mother is not cool. She and my stepfather wince and smile weakly when we enter. I acknowledge them with a glance and am pulled down onto a bench by the others as they sit. We are immediately ordered to rise again as a judge lumbers in, bald head convex and smooth like an old river stone. His voice brims with gravelly impatience and I can see either his job or his day is not going well. Two public defenders attend to four of us. The two attorneys assigned to the remaining three on our line are not present. As this trio takes their turns being unhooked to stand before him, the judge becomes infuriated with the grinding of the whole theater and shoots questions like buckshot out into the room. “Where the hell are these boys’ pds?” Shrugs all around—from the prosecutors, the inmates, the bailiffs. “How we gonna run a goddam court without lawyers?” None bother to shrug at this. “You want to plead and have me decide on bail without a lawyer, son?” In turn, each of the three guesses he doesn’t—clearly they don’t like their odds. The judge enters not guilty pleas for them, glances at their list of priors and announces to his desk that they’ll try 84

again for arraignment in a few days. As each one of the three are rehooked, I notice the fierce blankness of their faces, the exhaustion of making indifference appear there. Whether they are truly shrugging it off or imploding is impossible to say. The facades are airtight. I feel a jagged guilt (despite my plea) because I’m a privileged college student sure to make bail—and sure to have it paid once I do. All these men: in the eyes of society somewhere along the range from loser to predator; in their own self-perception simply survivors—ferociously solitary, absolutely alone. And suddenly I feel terribly lonely, connected only by chains to these men who are anchored in the other end of the field by circumstance. But loneliness is what it’s all about. It’s the plasticity that colors every chuckle; it’s the faint desperation that laces every boast. Inside or out. I lay on my bunk. I am waiting to be released. I draft a succinct, manly farewell to DJ in my mind, wonder about leaving him a number. I consider whether or not anyone else warrants a goodbye. I listen to the plumbing screech and howl in the walls. A poker game heats up outside, curses in Spanish and Kenny’s complaint about a cheat braiding in the hot air. My stomach rumbles and seizes around the chalky peanut butter from lunch. On the bottom of the upper bunk, pieces of graffiti and crude phrases step on each other: the graceful loop of Mexican gang cursive across swastikas; erupting cocks aimed toward names and dates of past prisoners. In the corner a snake and sword twine together. Just beneath this is a phrase, lightly done in pencil and small, neat lettering. I sit up to look closer. It reads like a command: Try to love myself

85

Good, Alright, Fine i It’s a winter Tuesday night. I’ve skipped school to drive north and trip on acid with my best friend, Dean. The day has been more than unnerving; it has suggested something occult and sinister is happening in our lives, and the chill that laces my spine doesn’t feel like a mere effect of chemicals—it feels scary. So I get home and nerves are whirring in me, to say nothing of the cold blades of the acid. What I know is my best friend has changed; what I don’t know is if I have, too. I’ve missed dinner; I’ve not called. My brother is out of town. Only my dad and our dog, Sky, are home and the kitchen is black. The blue of the television swims faintly around in the living room. I’m wondering if school called, if my eyes are still monstrously dilated, if he’s pissed I missed dinner. I turn the key, with difficulty, in the dark lock. I get a soda and the refrigerator nearly blinds me—the slices of beef and browning vegetables are grotesque—and mock my pretended sobriety and calm. I have cold sweat on me as I stand in the doorway of the living room. Sky rises and stretches, ambles over for a scratch. I’m grateful that she occupies me—but I don’t show her my eyes, because she would know. “Hey dad—sorry I’m late, I got stuck with Diane helping her with that research paper she’s doing, not sure if I told you about it, it’s on domestic violence and anyway there’s like sources to cite and—” “Eli, have a seat.” Shit. I’ve only recently been officially allowed to see Dean again; if Dad discovers I’ve been skipping school—to say nothing of tripping—with him, I’m screwed. I fold awkwardly down on the little sofa next to his chair. He pauses the film he’s watching. The tv is the only light in the room and, in the film, something vague is 86

happening in a bedroom, so there is not enough illumination for him to really see my face. He sighs. “Missed you for dinner.” “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry; I should’ve called.” I marvel over how good and simple the truth sounds. I drink my Pepsi. “Oh, it’s alright.” He spins the remote around a couple times on the coffee table. “So how was your day?” The words good, alright, fine line up like divers, ready to plunge into the room. But there’s a blockage. And I realize that I want, very badly, to tell him the truth about “how my day was.” I’m burning to talk. I allow myself a few seconds of heavy quiet to cobble together something safe but honest. “I don’t know. I guess kind of weird. I mean, I was talking to Dean earlier and he was telling me about some things that happened lately that are kind of strange.” I gauge his reaction to this, trying to see if the word “Dean” has tripped the usual series of alarms. But there’s no sigh, no eye-roll. He nods at the stilled screen, two gray lovers scowling in bed. “I mean, he’s just noticed a lot of coincidences lately. In one way he seems kind of stuck on finding them but there’s also been, like, a lot lately.” “Give me an example.” The screen winks once, brightly, on his lenses as he punches the power button. Then it is black and I hear his glasses clink down on the table. And I tell my dad all of it, cutting myself and lsd from the tale carefully as I go. “It’s just, like, because of the kind of things that are happening he feels like there’s something sinister going on—like there’s somebody controlling things that happen to him, trying to fuck with him.” I say this, I realize, breathlessly, trying to hustle it out. My father sighs again. “Well, you know, listening to you brings up a number of things for me. First of all, it makes me feel a little bad for the way I’ve always thought of Dean. He’s probably dealing with a lot more than 87

I imagined. But this stuff also makes me sorry all over again that your mother and I didn’t introduce you and KC to any kind of spirituality.” He turns to me in the dark to which our eyes have somewhat adapted. He’s trying to see if I’m with him. I nod. “I don’t mean that you and Dean aren’t onto anything. I don’t doubt that coincidences are much more than that. I believe that there is a higher power manipulating things in a strange way—and even if I sometimes don’t like it, I don’t think it’s anything sinister. But I can imagine what you’ve described is fucking unnerving.” That night my father allowed me to unload the tension that had been spun through me. Things weren’t all resolved, of course— there was still Dean’s disintegration to endure. But that night he listened and eased me like only a father can so I could get to rest. And before I did, in the light of the film restarting, I looked him in the eyes and there was nothing left to hide and we both smiled. ii I might have not even noticed the arrival of “Smart Drugs” in my home were it not for the brass monkey. I was, at the time, deeply embedded in the world of not-sosmart drugs, my friend Dean’s second slide into lunacy, and a relationship with a girl that can only be described as violent—though there were very few actual blows thrown (and, for the record, none by me). But one Christmas I’d been scrambling for gifts, very late in the season, and I found myself in a mall searching for something worthy of my dad. It could have been my teenaged poor judgment, just an inexplicable whim, or my affinity for the Beastie Boys, but when I found the business card holder, I barely deliberated. It was a brass monkey standing, his arms lifted above his head, holding a tray cut to the right size for business cards. I was pleased to see my dad put the gift to use, but it was more the content of the cards that intrigued me. They were homemade, 88

computer-fashioned and they looked it. They read: “Smart Drugs + My Experience = Your Goals Defined & Realized.” It was only then that I started to take note of the vials of opaque liquid, the bulky pill bottles—the instructions in a strange alphabet—that lined the bathroom cupboards. Dad believed that medical research had progressed beyond what the narrow-minded fda would approve—which explained the small parcels arriving on our doorstep with postage marks from Sweden, Canada, and other liberal nations. I began to read snatches of a newsletter called Smart Drug News: The Newsletter of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute, most of which made me glaze over. The community of people experimenting with smart drugs seemed a different species (“Could tryptophan or 5-hydroxyttryptophan function as ssris?”). But here and there I did come across words for the first time that I would hear constantly later: attention deficit, Prozac, Ritalin. My father claimed at one point that he had cured his own biochemical depression with smart drugs, though I can’t remember any elaboration. Knowing my dad, he must have explained this new dimension to his life—successful or not. He’d always been gleeful to drop his get-rich schemes and strange hobbies on us. But knowing myself, I’m sure I barely listened; knowing my brother, I’m not surprised that he did. The drug that KC recalls first seeing my father inject (though he admits he can’t remember if it was “skin-popped” or “intramuscular”) was called hgh (human growth hormone). Allegedly, hgh is a naturally occurring chemical that aids stiff joints, skin elasticity, and muscle formation. But, the human body being the flawed work that it is, folks run dry of hgh by their late twenties. Dad claimed that experiments with hgh had geriatric patients starting workout routines and enjoying surging libidos. This always reminds me of the film Cocoon, in which alien pods accidentally wind up in a senior center swimming pool and the residents find 89

themselves possessed by teenage urges. But hgh is no alien pod— although it is rumored to be derived, in part, from human brains. Creepy or not, dad insisted that eight months of plunging that hormone into his arm was the main reason he recovered from the damned Costa Rican cliff. The other specific drug that KC recalls was supposed to enhance memory and focus. Dad insisted that it was nothing short of a great medical breakthrough and, of course, only natural that he should be one of the first to learn of it. He told KC to use it “if he needed to study or something,” but KC steered clear, as much out of disgust at sharing a nasal gun with our father, as real trepidation. For a long time these substances sat in a kitchen cabinet beside the aspirin, coffee, sugar, and mugs. But eventually they petered out, like so many other revolutions of the mid-90s. In their place appeared a sledgehammer narcotic, one that surely undid any good work on my father’s mood or cognition. iii I’d been very self-conscious. Not only was my father’s disability (from the eighty-foot fall from a cliff) obvious in the uneven lurch of his walk, but he was wearing an actual fanny pack, that moronic invention that acts as identification and invitation: as a tourist, to be robbed. So when Miguel sauntered up just clear of the razor wire on Mexico’s side, and my father immediately told him in horrid Spanglish that he was looking for drugs, I told him in Spanish that my father was looking for drugs, and I was going to Chiapas to join the revolution. But Miguel wasn’t impressed by my Spanish or amused by my joke. He turned back to talk with my father and navigated us deftly through drug stores and to their back doors. My dad was delighted with the negotiations and transactions. Not only was he saving 90

considerable cash, but he was circumventing all the red tape the U.S. doctors now put between him and painkillers—to say nothing of the anxiety at not knowing where his next doses would come from. Stateside the haul of pills he lined his pockets with would’ve cost him weeks of wrangling with physicians and thousands of dollars. Peeling off fives and tens for the little pink and blue caplets was more like turning water to wine than buying anything. As I watched my father’s pleasure increase, I began to like Miguel. From time to time, when my father stumbled, Miguel steadied him; I imagine Miguel thought of finding Dad relief from his wrecked body, his chronic agony, as his duty. After a couple of hours I could feel my dad’s elation wearing off. His steps became more precarious and pallor showed on his cheeks. Miguel guided us toward the border. We passed two gringo kids my age, all tattoos, piercings, and shades, undergoing a rough interrogation by military cops in a dark doorway. My nerves wound up as the pedestrian bridge arched over the waiting line of cars. We said goodbye to Miguel on a grimy side street, exchanging addresses and laying forty bucks on him. I was about to suggest we cross separately but my father was still chatting with me when we got in line. He was calculating his savings, praising Miguel, damning the tight-fisted pharmacists of El Norte, and generally at ease. I held my breath as we were waved into our country without so much as flipping our ids. We collected the dingy rental car and hit the freeway that would take us to my LA County home—or, if one were to keep driving, eventually to within a mile of our doorstep in Seattle. I drove and my dad unloaded his cache into the glove box, reclining in the seat. And then the border checkpoint pulled itself around the corner: a phalanx of uniforms and rifles standing between flashing lights in the center of the freeway. My heart tried to break free of my chest, head back to Mexico. 91

“Hmmm,” Dad muttered. The agent leaned down to the window. “Y’all coming from Mexico?” He was a Texan; irrationally this alarmed me more. My dad affirmed we were. “How long this car been rented?” I was stuck on How the fuck did he know this was a rental? to say nothing of Why would he ask that? But my father didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, about a week—I got it at lax to visit my son here at his college, sir.” He smiled and placed a hand lightly on my shoulder. “Not bringing any drugs or anything back from Mexico are y’all?” I managed a too-quick shake of the head. My father’s voice was a precise blend of indignation, cooperation, and friendliness. “Nope. No drugs.” As we drove into the poisoned sunset and I practiced deep breathing, my father unwrapped and ate a trio of oxycontin. iv The phone rings in the corner of the cookie-cutter apartment and interrupts my and Rudi’s twentieth yelling match of the day. As I lift the receiver to my ear, I’m keeping my evil gaze against her evil gaze, both of us letting the other know nothing is forgiven simply because of the intervention. But when I say Hey, dad! she uncrosses her arms, walks away, and I know the tiff is over. “Hey, Eli—I think I’m actually right outside but unfortunately I’ve been pulled over.” He chuckles nervously. “I know I’m on your street; I think I just passed your place and, I guess, blew a red light in the process.” Another little laugh. I tell him I’m on my way. On my cheap bicycle, the curbs and driveways of Route 66 are rough drops and jolts to negotiate. I can see the spinning blues and reds a quarter mile ahead. I’m trying not to get run over, but also to hurry, not knowing for sure what sort of situation my dad is confronting. But as I cut across the wake of an eighteen-wheeler, I see 92

through the thick breath of exhaust that the cop is smiling. Turns out he’s trying to help get my father get oriented, suggesting which apartment complex may be mine, to say nothing of having waived the citation for the red light. My dad hugs me through the window and I have to question the professionalism of the cop; I immediately recognize the slur on the edges of his greeting, the sleepy tilt of his gaze. I curse myself for allowing him to rent a car. We both thank the deputy and I lead dad back to the pad, hoping he’s not going to rear end me on the way. At dinner in a New Orleans–themed restaurant somewhere in the sprawling grid of greater LA, the booths are high, affording great privacy but making us feel a bit dwarfed. Rudi and I sit together across from him; she’s clutching my hand under the table, assuming, mistakenly, his state is more upsetting than expected. My dad has a mangled corn muffin and some kind of chowder in front of him; half a pilsner winks amber through a greasy glass. He is slumped both back and sideways, but slightly. The anemia that’s cursed him intermittently has been beaten back by the sun, and an almost healthy pink hue is spread on his brow and cheeks. His glasses are sliding off, though, and in the way he’s sitting there is a suggestion of a double chin. He’s talking with a kind of languid excitement about his plans for the next weeks, which include a trip to Mexico and a fully “comped” stop in Vegas. It’s basically a monologue; he’s not talking much or fast but each time one of us begins to interject he starts again. He produces another pink pill and navigates it to his mouth. Rudi squeezes my hand—in alarm or an attempt to soothe me, I don’t know. “So . . . maybe Guadalajara is a place for that. I’d like to spend time in the mountains—but not far from the sea. Of course, my desire for amenities, as my son keeps reminding me, limits . . .” He trails off here and his half-lidded eyes have left us and found something apparently on the floor. There is a mole on my father’s 93

right eyelid. When I can see that mole, I know we have crossed a certain threshold. “You won’t like that stuff, Sky. It’s all veggie. I got something for you in the fridge, so later on . . .” His eyes are nearly closed now; now, Rudi no longer looks alarmed but, instead, embarrassed. She squeezes my hand again, but studies the decorations across the room. Our dog Sky is no doubt snoozing fitfully, readjusting her arthritic three legs back in Seattle, a thousand miles from here. “Dad.” His eyes snap open for a moment, then retreat to half-lidded. He licks his lips and sits upright with a grunt. A sheepish smile wavers on him. “What?” By the way I’m looking at him he sort of gets it. “Did I, uh, slip over a little?” I nod. “Wow. Yeah, that happens sometimes when I’m this tired.” It would be a lie to say that I am embarrassed. I’m not; I know too much about the pain my father’s broken body brings to begrudge him this vice. It would be a lie to say I’m not amused. I am; he’s funny when he’s this muddled, if also somewhat incoherent. But I’m also frightened: of how unpleasant I suspect he’d be if the pink pills ran out; for his safety as he drives around the trafficclogged city; of whether he would have the ability to make any plans were it not for the balm of narcotics; of whether he would choose to live without them at all. As we leave the restaurant I tell him I think his rented Taurus is an eight-cylinder and how I’d sure like to drive it. This allows him to pass me the keys without shame. v The pills were stored where the smart drugs used to be—with the sugar, mugs, coffee, and aspirin in the glass cupboard above the kitchen counter. On a summer night I remove one, slip it into 94

my wallet on a whim. Later that night in a downtown apartment, the hours have become small, the energy has leaked out of the room, and I’m slouched on a sofa with Ike. I pull out the pill and he snaps it in two with his blade. We each take half. An hour later we are in a pub down the block, watching one another, blurry, across a sticky table. We can’t put together sentences too well and the stumble home relies heavily on walls and friends. At this point, my father is eating eight or nine of these pills per day. vi The sun spikes off the blacktop, the morning dew magnifying the brilliance. Sun in the Northwest feels like an anomaly somehow; even in the midst of summer when it’s been the rule for several weeks, it’s hard to get used to—and sweet all over again each day you wake to it. I flip the visor down and suddenly see the wall of stopped vehicles. The tires give a tearing sound and my dad is jolted mildly forward, his broad brow dipping like a quick prayer. “Shit. Sorry ’bout that.” He dismisses it with a grunt. He’s uncharacteristically pensive, sunglassed eyes playing the Everett skyline. We’re headed for a detox hospital in this small city north of Seattle. I can’t remember now what it was that finally compelled my father to check in, but I doubt it was pressure from alarmed others. More likely it was reaching a personal zenith of frustration: wanting desperately to read a certain book; angered by his inability to sit through dinner and a movie without dozing; wanting seriously, earnestly, to begin to write stories again, which I knew would do more for him than any quantity of narcotic, meditation, or prayer. “Take this exit, Eli.” We find the correct avenue after some haggle and he tries to make light of the coming week, but his reservations still shoulder through. 95

“I really don’t know what to expect, you know? They won’t tell you shit; I guess it’s some kind of security thing. I just hope that it’s not a bunch of goddam group therapy with zombies—though maybe I’ll get some great material for stories.” He’s trying to be social, to bring me in by way of subject matter here. I nod my agreement, feeling nervous myself. I don’t know whether to be serious, try to give him a pep talk, or to take a swing at the weight of it all with humor. “When I get back maybe we can plan a camping trip with your brother.” I say I’d like that, and I would—though I’m concerned by how frustrated my father gets with his disabilities out in the woods. After a couple of false passes, we find the hospital. The lot is full so I drop him off and go find parking. When I finally locate the tiny intake room, he’s already finishing his paperwork and a portly male nurse is standing like a bailiff in wait. I hug him quick and hard, one of those embraces that says, simultaneously: No big deal, see you soon and it’s so heavy, a hug is so absurd. At the door, backlit by the bright interior of detox, he turns and gives me a look of nervousness, embarrassment, guilt, and amusement, a look you might, at age ten, give your best friend as your mother hauls you away from your mischief. I leave with stifled, vague emotions and his confiscated mouthwash, chocolate, and aspirin folded in a sack under my arm. My brother thinks that having “Dad in detox” programmed into his cell phone is about the coolest thing ever. We both find it cool, after my brother makes the drive to Everett to collect him, that my dad has riveting stories about his time in there: elderly junkies and their hand-wringing wait for phenobarbitol; the nurses cloned directly from One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest; the seventeen-year-old tweeker who refused to participate because they wouldn’t let her smoke. Neither of us know exactly what to think as dad half-heartedly claims he’s learned what he needed to and consumes more narcotic. 96

vii In January 2000, nearly three years since he plummeted from that Costa Rican cliff, my father returns to the hospital for the final major spinal surgery. This time it is to remove the considerable hardware clamped around his backbone that could, with time, cause fatal infection. I’ve spent a strange New Year’s Eve at my mother’s mountain home with a gaggle of friends. On the day Dad’s surgery is scheduled, I drive over a hundred icy miles to plead guilty to felony possession of magic mushrooms in a desolate little county in the center of the state. Luckily, the judge opts to send me back to college instead of back to jail. Luckily, dad’s surgery goes as planned. I creep precariously through a blizzard, the two hours back to the city morphing into six. When I arrive at the hospital, my father is recovering on the ninth floor. I can hear him before I see him. “Right, right, I understand that is the situation. What I’m asking you is to explain why.” Dad is using his tough business tone; it only surfaces when he really feels he’s being jerked around. I stand in the doorframe, snowflakes in my bangs transforming into cold beads on my brow. My father’s glasses are crooked; his face is beet red. But his arms and lower legs, where they stick out from the gown, are anemically white. He sees me and smiles with relief. He waves in greeting and a couple of iv tubes wave with him. The doctor is a forbidding man, bald and huge and a face redder than my dad’s. He swivels toward me and realizes who I am. As he does, I see some relief in his expression as well. He takes me out in the hall as dad curses under his breath and punches the morphine button with a dull violence. I get very angry when doctors act as if my father is irrational; it’s almost invariably the case that he is simply challenging their dismissive explanations. They are accustomed to passive patients who take orders and news at face value; it’s far easier to ascribe “irratio97

nal” or “problematic” to them. The doctors do not appreciate my father’s pointed inquiries and insatiable need for information. I learned the hard lessons of medical hubris and negligence many times after my father’s fall in 1997. But I also learned, slowly, how to keep my temper in the face of it. “Your father is in quite a bit of pain, so he is very concerned about his medication,” the doctor says, avoiding my gaze by rubbing his lenses clean. I know what this means is your father is an addict. He will not say this, of course, because he is one of those responsible for said addiction. “You’re going to be taking care of him this week, yes?” I nod. “Well, I’m going to give you the prescription—you need to be responsible for his medication, make sure he doesn’t take too much.” I hold the post of narcotic dispenser for approximately thirty hours before handing the pills over. Dad has plenty squirreled away anyhow—combined with what the doctor prescribed, enough for weeks—but he paces the apartment cursing and raving behind his walker because there is a problem with conflicting prescriptions and he doesn’t yet know how he is going to get more. We do the math several times, count the pills again, and he spends hours haggling with a slew of medical personnel on the telephone. I remain in noncommittal solidarity with his rants against the paranoid, meddling doctors and pharmacists and the cheap-ass insurance bastards. But I realize that my silence is wearing on me and that the alarm I feel is, by way of repression, slipping toward anger. Because he is wound so tight, stressed, and in pain, when I make some smart-ass remark because I can’t get any of his six remote controls to turn on the tv, he snaps. We have it out right there, me pouring out all the nasty alterations in his personality, how “everyone is alarmed,” him fighting back with all the defensiveness and denial he’s not yet had reason to use against me. I unload the details of his addiction: the nod98

ding off in restaurants, the slips in out of reality, the weaving into the opposite lane driving, the stack of books that he’s “reading” but hasn’t yet started. He perches on the edge of the sofa, fitfully rearranging his agonized body, firing back with everything he has: I don’t understand a goddam thing about it, I’m selfish, I’m trying to love him conditionally just like everyone else, I don’t respect him, if I really knew how hard it was I’d be impressed that there was still a full clip in grandpa’s service revolver. It doesn’t end in a long, firm, father-son embrace, sobbing and pledging to fight through to some solution. He doesn’t promise to quit and I don’t promise to stand by his side. It doesn’t end that way at all. I leave him there, curled on his bed, the pills and gun in reach, an impossible distance in his eyes. I leave him there alone and partially helpless; in pain, depressed and crippled and addicted. I leave him there in unspeakable shame. I leave him there to go get drunk carrying the same in me. viii In 2000 my father packs his bags and flies to London, where my brother KC is in his first year of college. After three or four days amid the perpetual drear of the city, they rent a car and split for Hastings, the 1066 battlefield to which some scholar has traced our surname. In the course of conversation, my brother lets it slip that Amsterdam is a mere six hours’ drive, and in a vague, twisted manner, sort of on the way back to London. My father decides they will leave the next morning for the fabled city, which he hasn’t visited in more than two decades. My brother, still young enough to feel nervous when it comes to an intersection of drugs and parent, is shy about procuring grass in the first coffee shop they visit, but my father encourages him and soon they are giggling at a counter, sipping from hot tea and hash joints, watching the carnival city unroll through a misty rain. 99

My father, however, in the vernacular of my brother, is far more “stoked about the smart shops.” The first one they enter sends my father into wide-eyed shock and glee, which he overcomes in order to grill the clerk on every product. He says he’ll pay top dollar for the peyote on display high on a shelf, but they’re not selling. Eventually they leave the smiling merchant and make their way through the twilight back to the boat hotel, rocking softly along one of the canals, with an assortment of magic mushrooms. My brother makes the decision to play the role of caretaker, not being entirely sure how my overly-analytical father might respond to being hurled into a mystical and chaotic experience in a strange city on a “botel.” My father settles on the bed and throws back the first trio of slimy, fresh fungi. But after a mere half-hour has passed, he becomes impatient, claims he isn’t feeling a thing and wants to take more. My brother’s cautions manage to hold dad off for ten minutes before he reaches for the next (different) dosage and gobbles those. He’s accustomed to only a momentary wait before he reels into the comfort of his painkillers. Again, a small chapter of time passes, during which my brother smokes Dutch grass and loses track of exactly how much time, and my father wants more. Despite KC’s protestations, Dad eats a third and final dose, of yet another type. All told, he has eaten between two and a half and three and a half doses of strong psylocibin (six months later, I eat a half dose, which my father thoughtfully smuggled back across the Atlantic for me, and damn near lose my mind in the Cascade mountains). My brother shakes off his own high and watches our father carefully as the night thins over the red light district. It is hilarious when the toxins really began to twirl in his bloodstream, KC tells me. He invites Dad to the porthole to check out the night sky. Dad reportedly withdraws with a gasp, then recovers and claims he’s “never seen a real star before.” They spend some 100

time at that tiny window, their two heads crammed side by side, my father aghast at the wonder of it all, my brother laughing himself to fatigue. When they settle back onto the twin beds, my dad’s gaze finds the bedside table which holds the customary alarm clock, jewelry, drugs, rolling papers, passports, and cartoonish currency of Holland. He proclaims it an incredible work of art and can’t take his eyes off it. Trying to get Dad more active in his trip, KC moves the articles around on the table, rearranging them, but dad shrieks in horror that KC is ruining the masterpiece. They laugh about the severity of Dad’s response for a bit, but some hour later, Dad still glances painfully back at the table. “Jesus, KC, you really did fuck it up,” he complains, shaking his head. As the night winds down, my brother turns his attention to the television and begins a search for an English channel. When he curses his lack of luck, my dad seems baffled. “Hey, what’s the matter—that’s a good movie!” When KC explains slowly that there is nothing on in their language, my dad turns incredulous. He insists that every program is in English. “Ok, pops, what did that dude just say?” KC tests him. “Oh, shit, I missed that. That actor just mumbles,” Dad shoots back, still convinced. Dad finally wanders into the tiny bathroom where he remains in the shower for over forty-five minutes. When he finally emerges, KC is dozing off. The last thing he remembers is Dad sitting on the bed in silence a moment. Then he turns to my brother and announces, deadpan, “I think I just had an identity crisis.” He is snoring earnestly at his ordinary volume within minutes.

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In the Mouth of the Bull In Bocas del Toro, Panama, I mistook a kid for a dwarf. The motorboat dumped us at the end of a crowded dock. He sauntered coolly along the shore. I thought he was a grown man because of his eyes and the way he slumped around. It was only later that I learned the truth. The main island stretched before us, its beachhead of palms bowing like dignified drunks, welcoming, watched over by toothless Victorian houses. The hustlers chewed the stems of flowers and grinned and helped us with backpacks as if they were mere employees of the houses and palms. Hustlers come at you in packs, but on this island, they moved slowly. They leaned easily against trees, competed politely, gave you a smile—like a beautiful but common seashell—before they secured a dollar. Bocas del Toro (Mouths of the Bull) seemed a strangely forbidding name for such a place. When we’d asked the captain of the water taxi about the origin, he just shrugged and opened the throttle wider. There is this game to play upon arrival: look past the faces of the loud men who throng around you, as if you are expecting someone. Clench your teeth together and plunge into the appeals and pleas. Forget, determinedly, that you have more in your pocket than they ever will in theirs. Hitch up your pack and turn sideways, move through the wall of bodies. Slow down when you are a few yards away, hesitate, and you will be approached by the person you want. One who can see that your gringo folly has been mitigated by gritty times. He will modify his speech, eyes, prices. He will come at you with strategic respect. There wasn’t much need for this on the island. But I fell into it anyway, instinctively, like frequently touching the passport sewed next to my crotch. And the boy I thought was a dwarf padded up. ¿Que va mis compas? Quieren hotel? 102

He didn’t try any mangled English phrases, and that I appreciated. And he was right when he said that we wanted a hotel. Sleep had become a sweet and vague thing to us. Sí, pero cuanto nos cobra pues? I spit the sentence at him, Yeah, but how much will you charge us? trying to feign native speech. He grinned, lips stripping back from teeth whiter than anything I’d seen in days. He knocked bangs from his brow in adolescent timidity and flirtation. His eyes were black and shining and his face round. Indian. El comision que me dan. He shrugged. Un comision descalzado. The commission they give, a barefoot commission. He nodded at his feet and grinned big again. I looked to Lew and Ike and they nodded our contract. He told us his name was Claudio. His strides stretched a little to keep up, but it was a leisurely pace for us. He gestured at holes in the trees that led to waterfront bars, he said, and then at a duo of macaws screaming overhead. He was not disposed to give us free info, but his words kept spilling. He led us through an alley of birds and mouse-sized insects that shuddered banana leaves; we emerged on sun-bleached concrete. Stilted houses slouched haphazardly, provoked by years of floods into an abusive relationship with the ground. Claudio called up to a black girl leaning on a peeling banister. Creole. Sounded like: Eyamaja, yagwineagottaplazaclientes, ha? Her response was universal: No. He waved and kicked a stone with his bare foot. The girl lit a cigarillo and her smile drifted down to us like petals from a flower. We moved on down a broad avenue. The street was a torrid mix of Old West, early, almost-still-Arab Spanish Colonial, and pure Caribbean: Wild colors so common they become mundane. A plaza squared up under huge trees dangling Spanish moss, domino players and old smokers in the shade, a soldier watching and tickling the trigger of his assault rifle beneath a cold marble Columbus. 103

Bodegas and pseudotourist shops elbowed each other along the other side of the street. Fat old men stood outside some of them, beckoning. A couple of lanky Europeans with a guide bigger and louder than ours vanished down a side street, competing with us for limited vacancies. Claudio made note with a scowl, picked up the pace. We cut through another alley and arrived half a block ahead of the Euros beneath a motel from which dribbled staticshot reggae. A motley crowd of foreigners swayed, as if in a group dance, on the balcony. The competing guide cursed Claudio and he shot one back, half-playful, half not. But there was no room anyway and we moved on. My friends were lagging, fatigue and thirst increasingly irrelevant because of the beauty of the women who leaned on balconies and passed on motorbikes and stood on corners. Women whose beauty is like something separate that lives inside them. Beauty that has less to do with figure, the sculpture of a face, than it does with the flash of eyes and the shift of hips. Wise beauty crafted by a hard-knock journey through life. Beauty great enough to make you hurt, deeply, with a glance. But Claudio had my attention. On this island that seemed composed of Africans, a dash of Europeans, and some fairly straightforward if tall mestizos, his size and features were as foreign as we were. The way he moved, though, was instinctive and familiar, and each passerby acknowledged him with a respect I thought odd. It was then that I asked his age. When he told me twelve I secondguessed him—he had, after all, the flutter of mischief in his eyes. But when he turned them on me again and repeated it, I realized that his mischief was a child’s. He picked a purple flower from a hedge and twisted the stem in his mouth, flipped the bangs back from his eyes. Knowing it was perfectly logical to ask because he appeared so different, and also knowing it was illogical because he knew these streets like his hands, I asked: 104

¿Eres de aca? He pulled the flower from his mouth. No. No. He shook his head twice. Definitely not from here. He stayed quiet for a few paces and I felt a bit foolish. Perhaps he just wanted his comision descalzado and to be left in peace. Then, lifting his chin, he affirmed, Soy de Colombia. Colombian. On a long and empty stretch of dirt road and mudsplashed palms, one dilapidated ranch house lay ahead of us. I continued. ¿Y cuanto llevas aqui en Bocas? He shrugged, tossed the flower onto the red soil. His right foot, flat like a stone—from so much walking, I assumed—crushed one of its petals. He didn’t want to talk about the past, about how long he’d been here. Llevo anos. Years, he said vaguely. A hint of marijuana rode a gust past us. I was going to ask him where to get some by way of changing the subject when he said, quickly, La violencia me llevó aqui, vine como desesperado. Books and articles flapped in my head. The violence, a refugee. I started to ask about his family, then grabbed the thin skin of tact and rephrased: ¿Viniste solo? In the way he fixed the distance with his black eyes, in the way he swung his arms and slapped his hands together too casually, in the roar of the silence that settled like the dust of that island between us, I imagined the death of his family beneath the machetes of the right or the bullets of the left. My meager curiosity shamed me. I wore the entire academy on my face. ¿Y como llegaste aqui? How did you arrive here? He shrugged again. 105

Caminé. Nadé. Me oculté. Llega como llega. Walked. Swam. Hid. You arrive how you arrive. He found us a clean second-story room with two fans near the blue water for six dollars a night. He walked away turning a fifty-cent piece in his hand, JFK’s face vanishing and reappearing between his knuckles. My pen was poised on my lip; I sat above a swath of jungle that ended in the surf of the Caribbean. I was ready, I swear, to capture it all. Someone cut metal while someone else, closer to the blue water, tickled a reggae rhythm. A creole tirade rose and broke rough over the slower sounds of Spanish. The strangeness of hearing a hint of my native tongue in this mix created a silence in me. We must have cerveza, Eli. Lew and Ike, my companions, my friends, my Fellow Travelers, stood at the doorway, arms limp and faces blank. And they were right: time for beer. We went to the dusty street where black men with muscles and machetes and ragged cigarettes slumped toward home as twilight closed in for the kill. We walked aimlessly. If we asked for directions in this part of town we invited an avalanche of creole that would sweep us away from our objective. At last we found the hole in the foliage that Claudio had pointed out, and we bent in. The bar materialized, pulsing life and light, in front of us. A gazebo and a dock and an oak shelf lined with amber spirits. A trio of women dancing to calypso. A row of hunched men watching and drinking sweating bottles of ale. A gaggle of foreigners smoking and dangling their feet in the blue. A pair of black men at the end of the dock firing that hard-knock melody to and fro, holding their lanchas to the edge. 106

Everything goes fast in Panama, though it seems measured, syrupy. The bottles emptied fast. We had time to watch a fish fly like a whiskered arrow around the pilings beneath us. Soon we grew sentimental and confident, raising toasts to the locals who moved dimly around us. One of the men looped his lancha to the dock, put his wide eyes on us, and ambled over. I calculated that he was partly bound for our money and partly bound to be a friend. We weren’t the biggest suckers there. So maybe he was curious, maybe kind. ’Ello my friends, watcha like a Bocas, ah? He squatted, wiping his forehead with a rag. I am Humberto. Lew and Ike started pouring it out for him, inviting him to sit, digging him thoroughly—always over-social and under-cautious, though they had reason to think the inverse of me. But as the bottles gathered on the dock, Humberto worked against my suspicions. He wore cutoffs and rope sandals over sea-ashy weathered skin. He had only a tiny outboard motor and homemade lancha to his name, and it became clear that he was a hard-drinking and loud-laughing fisherman first, a pseudoguide and hustler second. His laugh was salty, deep, and blue. In the midst of conversation, Humberto pulled us up and ushered us, wobbling, to his lancha. Before any protest or worry could be voiced, we were white-knuckled and howling with terrified laughter, slicing through the night. Phosphors threw a party in our wake and the Panamanian moon pulsed yellow. The bar became an ember behind and another began to glow in front. A smaller island. Humberto pulled us in like three prized fish, pointing at friends and then at us, firing volleys of his language over a seven-piece calypso band beating their beauty into the world. The place seemed entirely devoid of foreigners. Three dozen old black men and women rode the rhythm on the dance floor or caressed rums at card 107

tables. They ignored us or offered apologetic smiles, as if Humberto were embarrassing them. We huddled into a corner and started in on some serious drinking, cobbling our three languages together over the commands of the brassy band. Drunken affection between strangers was not uncommon. Making plans for an expedition into the sea was. I drank something thick, pulpy, from a jar. I cried over my past, everything I had lost. I saw tears in Humberto’s eyes. Lew and Ike and I put arms around each other. The rest, the way back, is darkness. At seven a.m. Humberto’s song rose like dust from the road. He was pacing outside, not sure where we were lodged, calling us to the water. Half-surprised at his appearance, we tumbled down. In a few minutes we were cutting the placid top of the Caribbean, headed for islands that looked like jagged edges of surf on the horizon. We slid up to a raised dock that teetered from side to side. Three wooden pens were tacked as afterthoughts on platforms that hung on the sides; the snouts of hogs poked through the slats and wriggled obscenely. Humberto led us among once-opulent homes that were now flaking, falling, and fissured, filled with the hungry poor. They watched us and nodded slowly, ships riding the swells of the sea. Humberto hurled nonstop creole and gestured wildly, made faces of disappointment at what had to be the fattest woman on the archipelago. She chewed the butt of a cigar and swatted at him, turned her back in dismissal several times. He indicated us with supplicating gestures. At last he secured the loan of four masks and snorkels. We shot away again into white heat and blue cool. I had my head under a towel, dreaming in the throb of the heat, hungover, homesickness, when the lancha crunched onto a beach. It was empty except for the palms cordoning it off from the jungle 108

and the coconuts dotting the sand. Before I could plant my feet on solid ground, the boat was upside down under a tree and Ike and Lew were kicking around in the surf, transfixed by fish and coral. Humberto jogged away into the jungle. A mangy white dog flipflopped up the beach to me. When I gave him the most noncommittal of pats, he buried himself between my legs, intent on reparations for all the love he’d been denied. I wandered out to my waist. Humberto dashed past me, gripped a stick with a loop of rope on the end, and, without slowing down, pulled a mask over his eyes and made a surface dive. After almost two minutes, my own lungs starting to ache, he exploded up fifty yards away. Lassoed in the loop, a large red lobster snapped and flailed. He came forward, water beading off his limbs, smiling his huge smile. Pride existed shamelessly in his stride, in the way he held the creature expertly away from his body, in his dark eyes. Watcha think a lunch now ah? I followed him into the dense jungle where insects laid down a thrumming chorus and snakes moved out of the corner of my eye. A few dozen yards in, a stilted hut appeared and a fat old man emerged, flinging some ancient words at Humberto. Outside, a black kettle hung over some coals. The fat man stabbed the coals with a stick and peered into the kettle. He yelled something at me, and Humberto translated: Go get some seawater. I obeyed and soon the fat man had boiling, in a briny hiss, golden fillets of fish, breadfruit that he knocked from a tree, and the red lobster. I called Ike and Lew by throwing coconuts at them and we settled on the jungle floor. The lobster tasted like the Caribbean. Humberto crouched a few feet away next to the fat man, who popped little balls of breadfruit and fish into his mouth; Humberto ate nothing. I tried to force some lobster on him, but he refused with a stiff hand. Then I tried fish, but with no more success. He sucked 109

on a warm can of beer as his gaze dueled the vines and leaves. After each swig his jaw set and he did not blink. A battle raged behind those eyes. Later, heading back, I sat close to Humberto. Morose since lunch, he seemed darkly entranced, though he swung his lancha deftly around larger fishing boats. The day was going, alcohol danced in my head, and I chanced the question over the outboard. Are you sad, man? He gazed into the distance. I wasn’t sure he was going to respond. But then he answered: No. I’m just . . . how do you say? . . . trapped here. See? I’m never going to leave these islands. I flipped this over in my head for a minute and tried some mongrel mix of humor and cheer. But you have your lancha, man. He shook his head. Like shooting an arrow at the sea, man. Humberto returned us to the bar’s dock. We clambered off, gringos red as a lobster, half-drunk, topsy-turvy on sea legs. Ike went for a round of cold beer and Lew met a pair of Australians. They wanted to know what to do in Bocas. Ike pushed an icy bottle and fifteen dollars for the day into Humberto’s hand and we ushered him over to the Aussies. With a bit of eloquent salesmanship, Lew convinced them that Humberto was the best sea guide they would find. We left him with arms draped over his new charges, laughing his big, blue, rolling laugh, seizing his slice of purpose and peace and pride—at least for tomorrow. In the rich blindness peculiar to the Caribbean night, we stumbled around in the mouth of the bull, exploring paths foolishly, lured by scents of meat becoming meals, people becoming drunk, guitar licks becoming wind. Smells and sounds yielded treasures: shacks 110

with fresh milk and fried chicken served by big-boned women with motherly eyes; red houses like barns where wild Germans danced to techno-calypso; a restaurant on a rickety dock where the waitress spoke Spanish, creole, and Brooklyn English just to see our laughs erupt over shrimp, beans, and ale. When a passing face was obscured by a swinging curtain of white blonde hair and blue smoke leaking from parted lips, I turned and she turned and the moon kissed her cheek and I wanted to follow her. She led me to a mirage-bar that was announced by small bulbs woven into the foliage: Barco Hundido. I sketched a rendezvous with my friends and they disappeared into the night. The bar was full, wild, twisting like a creature captured by the light. Bodies everywhere—stumbling at the periphery, falling into the sea, lying on the wood, dancing whirls of mamba and calypso, rich with sex and prowess, watching each other living the sweet lie all this conjured. I wondered whether I could remain in this intermediate stage between ecstasy and unconsciousness, snapping pictures of a rumbling, full-throttle night, or if I would join the dancers and then fall to the side like the others. In the madness, I didn’t glimpse the vision I’d chased. I got a bottle and went to a spot on the dock and sat down just as a troop of Policia Nacional stormed the place, olive-green uniforms and cheap smokes blurring their adolescent awkwardness. The music stopped. They rousted a burly man who was hiding by ponderously facing the Caribbean while everyone else had their eyes on the guns. The Policia departed with pomp, their prisoner in tow. I shook myself from the freeze induced by the haphazard muzzles of their assault rifles and drank. Then I looked down at the water and understood the name of the place: Sunken Ship. At a depth of ten feet was an angular tussle of pipes, rust, and strange sea growths, home to many darting creatures. I took out my dog-eared journal. 111

On cue she appeared, blew out a dramatic, staggered sigh, and slipped down beside me in the shadow, sandals hooked in her fingers, toes stirring the water, her smoke aiming for the moon from behind that curtain of hair. My heart raced. I played it cool. Scratched a few more lines in my journal. I took a swig and sneaked a glance. She was giving signals— or, rather, allowing signals to escape her: pointing toes, stirring the Caribbean, cocking her head at the moon, leaning toward me instead of away. Not even knowing what language to attempt, I leaned over and asked for a cigarette, chancing Spanish. She parted her platinum curtain and bared her white face to me. The moon lit her like a spotlight. I couldn’t see her eyes in the purple sandbags of their sockets but I could see that her hair was blonde to the roots. Smudged mascara concealed I knew not what. She sucked thirstily on her smoke like a straw. ¿De veras hablas español o me quieres engañar con una solita línea? Do you really speak Spanish or do you just want to trick me with one little line? I recoiled. Sí, lo hablo. No sabía si tu lo hablaras. Yeah, I speak it. I didn’t know if you did. She shot her eyes at the moon and the wispy clouds circling it with the winds. Oh, cut the bullshit. You can tell I’m American. I shrugged. She snorted and was silent but handed me a Marlboro light and pushed matches across the sticky dock. Why do you smoke lights? It was a lame question, and in the phosphorus flash, I saw the sarcasm crease her chalky face. Because life’s so fucking great! I want to live forever. But I have to smoke. It was pathetic to try to save this conversation. I shrugged again, reopened my journal. When the cigarette had burned down she spoke. You’re sad. 112

She said it soft and sweet, sad like triste, not sad like pathetic. I was, a little, too. How old are you? Twenty-three. And already sad. What’s so fucking sad at twenty-three? Nerves buzzed and rose in me; I didn’t like the way she was trying to take control. But I did like her lack of bullshit. Look, I don’t want to pin my blues on you. How’d you end up here? She lit another smoke, reclined on her palms. Bocas? Panama, I guess. I live here. Grew up here. Thought you were American. Got a passport. My folks were. So where’d you grow up? As soon as I asked, I was sure of the response. There was no place in Panama that bespoke such Americana, such platinum blonde attitude, such Anglo angst as the Canal Zone. And, realizing this, she deflated in my head. The Canal Zone was a manicured world, a symbol of everything I’d fled to be where I now found myself with calypso banging at the air. The Zone was, if anything, simply boring and sad. I cast my eyes out to sea. Colón. I choked a little and scoured her moonlit face for a smirk. A stumbling mass of a man obstructed her moonlight, said something low and no doubt lewd that I couldn’t have understood. She slapped him back with creole, pushed him aside. He wobbled off. Colón. An Atlantic port, an hour’s drive from the capital. The only city in four countries that the shoe-stringer guidebook warned us to not even approach, assuring that we would be robbed violently in broad daylight as soon as the bus stopped. A city that the national government had more or less abandoned to the desperate 113

and enraged poor, scaling back all attempts at governance and control. The place where a lanky Irishman we’d met had accidentally found himself—he made a dash for a bus pulling out of town, managing to be attacked only once. I was intrigued, if also incredulous. She realized I was studying her with entirely new eyes. ¿Que me ves? What are you looking at? The way those words came out, defensive, rushed, riding warm currents of rum breath, told me that she had told the truth. She didn’t even realize that I knew where Colón was. She didn’t understand my look, and that unnerved her. Because of how I now imagined her life, I figured that if I had looked at her with lechery or revulsion or innocence she would have had something on hand. She rose, slapped at the back of her jeans, and told me she’d buy me a drink. We stepped to the crowded bar where she wedged herself in and negotiated a seat for me at her side. The bartender brought two green bottles of ale. The brutal light revealed her smoky edges, deepening her eyes, dusting her face with chalk, glinting from her concealing curtain of hair. She was not beautiful, nor even pretty. I could say I was attracted to the kernel of purity that defended itself within her, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. I was simply intrigued by the survival she embodied. I fucking hate all these phony Canadians and gringos with their fake fucking Spanish and romantic ideas. She pulled hard on her bottle so I did too. This is their “Third World” gritty experience that they’ll go home to brag about. Indeed, some of these five-star Third World types were now haunting the edges of the scene. And I agreed with her judgments. But her rage scared me so I just nodded and said, You live here now? 114

Yeah. That’s what I do. I live. Here. Now. She tossed her hair and rammed her bottle into mine. Here’s to livin’ in Bocas. We drank. As my bottle came down on the counter and my head swam, I knew we were at a juncture. I was going to have to leave now, alone, or leave quite soon, with her—and I didn’t want to go with her. Then a mestizo dressed like a pimp slid up, put his jeweled fingers on her shoulder and his lips close to her ear. She removed his hand. He put it up in the air, open-palmed, apologetic. A techno strain of calypso started up. She spoke with him, screwing up her face, shaking her head, saying no. He looked at the roof of the gazebo, breathed in exasperation. She looked at me but not for help. I found myself rising then weaving through the syrupy air. I suddenly felt threatened. And I had to flee. As simple and clear as that, without reason or pause. From the edge of the bar floor, before the jungle consumed me, I turned. The mestizo was still in her ear, making his case. Her eyes were trained on me. The hate in them was so immense that I stepped backward, as if struck, stumbling. I raised a hand in farewell. Slowly and sensually she gave me the finger. Half an hour later, I stood on my cement square of balcony, from where I could still hear the trills of pleasure and the bleat and thump of the bar, still see the light punching at the night. I thought about how it was too perfect that our encounter took place ten feet above a wrecked ship—one that must have carried something of value to these shores. I awoke one morning with a strange feeling in my chest. It was an emotion that defied words because of the contrary nature of what composed it: anxiety and comfort, familiarity and strangeness, fear and ease. Our departure loomed and I was both grateful and 115

regretful. A part of me wanted to remain, to wander and drink, lurk on the end of docks with old fisherman and say nothing, watch the tense mingling of military police and tired laborers, contemplate the mishmash of poverty and paradise, watch the simmering yellow moon cook up and away. I felt this despite the several nations that still beckoned to us, the thousands of miles of adventure waiting to be tread by our boots. It would stand to reason that I was simply tired out, drained down by constantly being strange, dirty, in motion, by accumulating pieces of this sadly beautiful isthmus. But that wasn’t true. I had a lot of going left in me, several more winds to catch before any notion of settling could win out. But there was gravity in this land: the red soil, white sand, green jungle, and blue water possessed a quiet magnetism. As if you might blink and become forever trapped without ever knowing that the mouth had closed. Then again, maybe poverty, violence, loss, and betrayal were what tethered people here. Maybe notions of some occult entrapment are only an illusion. With our credit cards, passports, and bulky rolls of traveler’s checks, we could make it anywhere with a little will and caution. Maybe it was only the circumstance of struggle and escape that called Claudio, Humberto, and that razoreyed girl into the mouth of the bull. Our last night in Bocas, before we climbed aboard a water taxi that dragged us away from the crystalline blue and into the shit-black of urban waters, before we crammed into a minivan with some Indians and rolled to the capital, where we would eventually board a plane and fly thousands of miles to yet another place, we got good and drunk. Full of beans, shrimp, and rum, we felt our way over ruts, moving generally toward our hostel. On a stretch of road we hadn’t yet discovered, a square beige building squatted, as if pushing back against the crush of night. The vapor of security lights 116

soiled the black around it and razor wire winked a cruel halo. A soldier slouched against the front door, smoking. From inside came many-pitched knots of voices, many languages, all rising in one chaotic strand and beating against the muffle of the concrete walls. The meticulously hand-painted sign told us this was a jail. We stopped and stared a moment, weirdly mesmerized, as soft hues and shadows traded places on a plastic window. Outside the fence and concertina wire lay a half dozen bony, ghost-faced dogs. Every few seconds an individual voice in the jail would rise above the rest and one of the dogs would prick up his ears and turn expectantly to the guarded door. When the voice died and the door didn’t open, he’d drop his ears and then his head to the ground, huffing, like he knew that his master wasn’t coming anytime soon. Those islands seized a part of me and will never let it go.

Sky 7 The morning swung in knotted and gray. The blanket was twisted, binding my legs, suggesting a thrash and fight against something in sleep. The dog lay a few feet from me, front legs splayed out as if bracing against the day. Her grayed snout was open a bit, her breath ragged. I crawled to her and she aimed her cataracts at me— autumn sun through seawater—and licked my chin. I didn’t even mind her rotting breath. I washed up and scribbled a few lines while my brother, KC, grilled meat, its sweet hiss riding an invisible current. I watched him for a moment. He took the task seriously, his sinewy body tense and still with focus, except for when he tossed his blond mop of hair out of his eyes or adjusted the meat with a fork. Then he called me over. The sirloin had curled itself into the shape of a heart. She ate it not with the desperate glee of 117

the past, but with a gruff, full pleasure still. After, we carried her outside. She shit and ambled shaky inch by inch toward the park, the vague duty of play still rolling in her mind. Or perhaps she didn’t want to waste the immense effort it took to hoist herself up, commit to motion. Inside, we lit candles and arranged her under a thick blanket, adjusting the one back leg several times so she could pay attention to more than the pain. My father settled his own pained body as best he could and read a letter of farewell. I read some elegiac scribbles, and KC simply thanked her and stroked her ear, his narrow face cast downward, blue eyes never lifting from her. As if on cue, the vet arrived. She was quiet and her grip was cool and firm. The first shot let ease into the dog, like a long swallow of whisky, and eventually she forgot about the sterile stranger at her back, the strange arrangement of her masters around her, the chemical scents, and the pain in her spine, her joints, her back leg, and she put her head down between her paws in a way I hadn’t seen for years. The poison was blue—as blue as the skies I flew through to get there, a glorious, aqua blue, the blue of vacations, of summer. The vet missed the vein twice. The third time, crimson flew into the cartridge and the sharp hues spun round and round, like two dogs meeting in the park. The vet said something rote but sweet. The dog sighed. 6a The dog had been limping since Minnesota. Since the first day in Minnesota, actually, which was the beginning of a ten-day, fourteen-island camping odyssey in the borderlands, that pockmarked wilderness that separates two nations with a vast wildness. The vet in Duluth said to X-ray her when we got home. At home, the veteran veterinarian with the soft voice and sad eyes said the leg was 118

broken. It was broken because of cancer. Because it was cancer, it had to be amputated. Because it was cancer, she would probably die. My girlfriend, Rudi, sat awkwardly in the kitchen with my father, twisting her dreadlocks nervously in the August twilight. In the next room, I held the dog and rubbed my sobs into her neck. 6b The dog hauled eyelids up. One, two, three, tries and they stayed open. Then she lifted her head, shook grog from it like she was wet. The tail began its metronome wack! wack! on the carpet. She turned between us, greeting us with dull pleasure as if we had just walked through the door. After a moment she turned to the stump. They had taken off the right back leg high up, on the haunch. The tail fell to the floor like a shot bird. Her snout circled, nudged and nuzzled. Confusion dropped her ears flat. We waited as in the clichéd hospital scene when the patient’s face is unwrapped, slowly, revealing his or her new identity. Then, after a couple of moments, this is what happened: she let out a huff. She stood, pushing hard with the front legs. She tested the remaining back leg. Hopped in a circle looking over her shoulder at it, like a cyclist checking a tire. As she sniffed at the absence, she spotted her ball. She went to it, deftly. She plucked it off the black carpet and moved to the door, the tail back in action, flashing pleas at us with her bright eyes. 5 I met her at a dark party on the water. A long afternoon of drama and drugs was just closing—long miles of trudging in the rain, ducking squad cars and hiding out in the corners of cafés; I was feeling easy, sucking on a cheap brew. I’d seen her a handful of times before but she had been but a promising smile, a hope of sometime, and nothing more. That night, though, she slid up to my side and asked in my ear where I’d been her whole life. It was 119

just strange enough for me to reply, looking for you, and it seemed true. She kissed me and there it began. We heaved ourselves through the teenage world of addictions, violence, incarcerations, and even the loss of an undetected child. The night that it imploded and she left me, I pushed my car over slick roads, through curtains of rain, wanting halfway to wrap it around something solid. But I made it home. The dog stirred when I entered, tail beating against the sofa but my one-handed pass over her told her I would be distant. I stood watching the world distort through the sliding rain on the pane. I lingered in that place where all the clichés about hard love are true and none carries any solace and felt the hollow begin to fester and swell. I was not loved. It had been over for a long time. And my tears began. The dog was black and I watched her form slowly out of the dark. She approached tentatively, head down, eyes up. Through my weeping she was distorted, just a shimmer inching near. It took her a couple of minutes to reach me and when she did she lay by my side, quiet. When my sobs finished, more from fatigue than real release, she licked at my stained face, and even though I pushed her away, she persisted until a dry, cracked laugh shook me, and tomorrow began, cold and pink, through the glass. 4 The little square of paper tasted like metal. I chewed it and sucked on it, terrified but committed to do this fully if I was going to do it at all. Dean had told me not to bring the dog. No way man, bad call he’d said as I let her tromp ahead of us down into my room, dogs can be scary. I told him we didn’t have any choice; she always slept with me. To abandon her to the kitchen would cause suspicion from my otherwise fatigued (if not totally unsuspicious) father. 120

It all began as a dull tingling, a lightening of the limbs. The “USA Up All Night” movie became ridiculously funny. Then I couldn’t follow what was going on anymore. Then Gilbert Godfried became terrifying and I turned it off. This was when the dog retreated to the sagging sofa and began to watch. Dean had turned on the stereo low. He danced weird contortions to the Doors—he fancied himself some sort of acid guru, almost a full three decades after such a thing had been chic. Some hours crept by, others rushed. My body traveled between a frightening numbness, as if it were some container I had been poured into, and acute responsiveness where the slightest brush with a bookcase or wall sent the suggestions of great pain through me. The dog watched. She did not move. Dean did not acknowledge her, but he stayed on the other side of the room. I talked to her from a distance, trying to coax her out from the cloak of shadow she’d chosen, but I felt somehow ashamed. When I scooted close enough to see her eyes, they were disappointed, scolding. There was a finger wagging, a head shaking behind her steady gaze. The dark became inky outside the window; everything but the room and the giddy fear ceased. Then the dawn rose and spread its bleary light, too soon. The dog did not move from her spot. Dean became incoherent, he spoke in a tongue I didn’t understand and when I told him to stop, he laughed in my face. At this, the dog lifted her head and, from across the room, aimed her snout at him. That was all. He folded himself into the closet, closed it, and soon was sleeping—or something like it. Edges and colors melted into a stream. I covered the window with a pillow. My spine ached. As I heard my father’s footfalls that suggested only a few hours till I would be roused to work, I crawled to the dog. I placed my head on her front legs. For a moment she sat stiffly. Then she made room for me on the sofa. I slept the sleep of the dead for two hours. 121

3 My father and stepmother’s fights ordinarily began as dull thunder; they paced and stomped above us, their voices nothing more than a wicked muffle but the motion of their conflict like a circling storm. Almost invariably, though, they wound up in the kitchen. An air vent carried their twisted affair down to us in the basement. I would crouch with KC sometimes, with the dog always, and cheer silently for our father, half hoping that he would floor the raving bitch who had waltzed into our lives and was eroding and destroying us in what seemed a calculated manner. This never happened. The crests and breaks of rage and curses would usually morph into a tense armistice, often with my father apologizing. The dog’s ears pricked up and then flattened and she moped guiltily when she heard the loud, ragged edge to his words; then, when his voice softened, they would lift to rigid, cautiously optimistic. The conclusion to these exchanges left the dog and I restless in the basement; KC would recline in the shift and flip of the big screen, thin arms crossed over his chest, eyes glazed over, determinedly oblivious. Sometimes, I would steal up the stairs and into the kitchen where the ghosts of their anger still stirred, open the fridge and remove —as if it were a booby-trapped jewel—a sea green bottle of her good Chardonnay. Tipping a few mouthfuls into a cup, I would replace the bottle and retreat to my depths where the dog would be waiting with bright eyes and cocked head. Soon we would be out in the night, sitting together in the cold gold of a streetlight, at the top of a tree-enclosed staircase, watching the moon. Sometimes the dog would see an insomniac squirrel but she wouldn’t chase it. Usually she lay on the cold stair beside me and watched over the vigil I was holding for my family.

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2 My father joked: the dog can run like a mare, leap like a kangaroo, swim like a seal—she can’t possibly dig, too. He said this the night before the first day we left her alone in the yard of a new house. I was nervous about her escaping. It was a decent yard, skinny but long. Also, there were slits between the flaking blue fence posts, wide enough for her to watch the neighborhood action. When we converged back on the house that next evening we found that she had tunneled like a desperate lifer under the fence and joined in no small part of the neighborhood action. Next, she was sequestered in the garage—spacious enough, littered with her toys, her chow, a bucket of water, and my father’s vehicular compromise between youth and practicality: a two-door Subaru xlt, a runty, angular little number, a slider pitched at my father’s strata: single, middle-aged dads. We all hurried home the next day. The dog was still there. Her food was untouched, her toys all where they had been in the morning. The garage floor, though, was littered with a tempest of debris, as if a large public gathering had taken place. Proud, the dog plucked a chunk of plastic from the ground and tossed it skyward, skittering after it like it had come to life. And during the arc and fall of that little object, my father realized. He bent to his car, disbelief deposing confusion on his face. The Subaru was missing a bumper. Actually, it was still attached, clinging by a few rubbery tendons at one end, but for the most part it had been pulled off and methodically destroyed. Just as he began to kick at the car and fire off those little curses like muffled gunshots that we knew meant trouble, one of us (either me or my brother, I don’t recall) stopped him. We pointed out something that made the punishment of the dog and the integrity of Subaru questionable: there was a hell of a lot of styrofoam mixed into the shards of plastic. It coated the floor in places like a light dusting of snow; larger pieces sat about like albino rocks. Taken altogether it 123

must have accounted for a significant portion of the inside of the bumper. The dog circled us, wagging wildly, one of those inexplicable canine smiles curling around the jagged piece of her prize that she held in her jaws. My father got a great deal on a trade-in. 1 Midday. We drove into the pure blue heart of early June in a rattling minivan. Several days lay before us, blazing with the promise of ease, with everything the majestic Cascades, their alpine lakes and rivers, their sweet winds, carried. When we escaped the city and its crush, took to the stage of nature and her riotous freedom, there was very little beyond this that we needed. But we did need groceries so we swung toward Safeway in a country highway town. We pulled ourselves across the hot asphalt at a good clip; shoeless and, besides, the errand was an obstacle to the wonders of nature. Mud-splattered pickups angled together like linebackers at halftime. From the cabs, guitar riffs licked up at the cobalt slate and splintered golden light above. Just as we were about to be consumed by the quiet whoosh and bite of the automatic doors and ac, we all stopped next to the soda machines and firewood, our hurry erased in an instant. A girl sat against the wall with a battered box at her side. She angled her eyes up at us, but I don’t think she said anything. There was a sign so she wouldn’t have to: Free Puppies. The box shuddered. It seemed only one dog at a time could manage its hind legs enough to peer out into the huge, weird world before toppling back into the pack. As we watched, a black, fist-sized face with a sporty white stripe and hazel eyes hung itself over the edge. Leaflike ears gave a little flutter and the head cocked to the side before vanishing with a thud back into the mess of its kin. My brother and I looked to each other, sliding silent pledges of teamwork back and forth. Then we turned to my father, 124

framed against the massive glow of summer sky. But his eyes were already on us, flashing, asking, needlessly, What do you think?

Coming Away My cell phone rings. It seems so absurd that I actually hear it, I decide to answer. “Hi! Whoever this is, I can’t talk to you right now because I’m running from the police.” Since I can’t make anything out over the screams, chants, and intermittent concussion grenades, I look at the display on the phone. It’s a jumble of numbers and symbols, so I know the call is foreign. I twist a frozen finger into my other ear. “Who is this?” “Eli? ¿Que esta pasando?” My brother’s voice swims through thousands of fiber-optic miles, shredded by the shoddiness of the Nicaraguan phone utility. I can barely make him out. “I’m in the middle of the wto protest, bro,” I tell him and hold out the phone to the cacophony of violence around me. “I’ll have to call you back.” I hang up as the crowd picks up speed, streaming around the commuter traffic like a river around boulders. I dare a glance back over my shoulder. Cops are behind us, some of them leaning on the roofs of the commuters’ cars as they aim and fire gas and concussion grenades. They are pacing us a block uphill to the east, too, sprinting in small groups, trying to head us off. Kids around me are holding vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces with one hand, banging on drivers’ windows with the other, warning them to close the air vents. The drivers, of course, are terrified by masked kids, bleeding and crying and chanting, and for the most part they stare straight ahead, white-knuckles on the wheel. 125

On a long block in the northwest corner of downtown they cut us off. The winded contingent of cops behind ushers us into the arms of the smaller group coming down from the east. We are about 150 strong as we back against the wall of a condominium. Someone asks if we can “please disperse” (as we’ve tried to do for some time). After a pause full of hacking coughs, weeping, and curses, an order comes through a bullhorn to move in an orderly fashion around the northwest corner toward the water. I am near the front of the group as we do so—and confront yet another fractured squad. They launch their tear gas and shock grenades directly into us from a distance of ten yards. They charge us with batons, yelling, corralling us right back up against the wall of the condominium where we are ordered to our knees under helicopter searchlights. Within two hours, they haul us aboard commandeered city buses in cuffs. I remember, above and beyond all the images, heroic and horrific, beautiful and atrocious in those ways that violence is, one in particular: an aged veteran. In the midst of the violence and chaos, I glimpse him, rolling aimlessly south in his wheelchair, head down and arms weakly trying to control his wheels, half-unconscious. CS gas, first used in the Vietnam War, shrouds his figure in pale yellow. A limp American flag hangs off the chair. My family arrived in Seattle in 1980; I was three. At that time it was primarily a working- and middle-class town with an unfriendly climate but full of lakes, parks, and, most importantly for my parents, a progressive and tolerant mentality. My father conjured video stores on a couple of busy corners and my mother went to graduate school to get her master’s in social work. Like the fortunate offspring of many 60s types, I was shuttled to a Montessori 126

school, then to a private elementary before making the severe transition into the public school district. It was sometime in my early years when Seattle started winding its socioeconomic cocoon. Coffee struck. By the time I entered high school, Microsoft had wrapped its tendrils around the technology industry and the very demographic of Seattle. “Grunge” was born. By the time I was eighteen, the vacant lots and shabby Thriftways that marked intersections around my high school had yielded to Walgreen’s and Starbucks; residential blocks that used to be littered with children’s toys and lined with American sedans were trimmed and repainted; Saabs sunned themselves in swept drives. The commercial complex that had housed a dingy drugstore and a dank old bowling alley was wrenched inside out with high-fashion boutiques, a four-star Italian café, gourmet grocery store, and an organic nursery. I struggled to understand whether these were the same places I’d known for so many years, only now exalted by the prosperity flowing from espresso, technology, and the construction industry. I slowly realized they were not. Working-class people and small businesses weren’t being transformed as much as they were vanishing. In college in LA County, immigrants scurried through twelvehour days in our dining halls and were threatened with document checks when talk of student-led unionization leaked out. As students, we worked our way through tomes about political strife in Central America, the increasing wage gap in the U.S., and, ultimately, theories of corporate globalization—which I realized was at least connected to the changes in Seattle that I had been troubled by. This was what, in my final year of study, led me back to the winter streets of my home to stand with tens of thousands of others in opposition to the World Trade Organization. I would find out just how much the city had changed since the days of antiwar and antinuke marches with my mother, when Seattle was a picture 127

of civil protest and the police, for the most part, a picture of restraint. When the pa system rasps my last name on the morning of December 3, 1999, I shoot upright. The air in the cell is acrid and hot. It feels different from the other time I spent a few days in jail; the irony, of course, is that the prior visit was the result of carelessness, dumb drug stuff—being “bad.” This time I find myself incarcerated because, I know, I’m doing and saying the right things— standing up for the voiceless, speaking truth to power, all that sort of stuff. But compared to how we’ve been treated in King County, that other stay seems comfortable. These jailers have spent the past couple of days blasting heat and then air conditioning, withholding food and blankets, forcing us to mop and remop the cells, turning off the prisoner phones when vigil protests gather outside. Trying to break us down, I suppose, harass us into pleading guilty to some fabricated charge. I can scarcely imagine political imprisonment in a poor country—or without half the world watching and caring. About half of the other men are on their feet or getting there, rubbing their eyes, trying to understand. In the first place, we’ve not given our names. The City of Seattle is holding some five hundred “John and Jane wtos” prisoner. Unfortunately, the police have identified many of us by pawing through backpacks. But we still haven’t seen a courtroom, still haven’t consulted a lawyer, and still don’t have any idea of charges, so the command to step forward for release is unexpected to say the least. Bewildered, we allow ourselves to be ushered to discharge. In a crammed elevator a prim guard holds his nose and scowls at us. As we wait in front of a steel mesh window, the officer who is shoving our belongings out to us pauses and slams the front page of the day’s newspaper against the mesh. 128

“Congratulations,” he grins. In the boldest font available to the Seattle Times the headline reads: “Summit Ends in Failure.” Cheers and tears explode in the tiny room and we hug one another with an electric joy, forgetting even the poisonous fumes of our tear-gassed clothes. We exit the jail into a raucous celebration of nearly a thousand supporters. Tables wobble under the weight of loaves of fresh bread, crocks of soups, and thermoses of cocoa and coffee. Wildeyed teens rush forward and offer cigarettes; nuns in rumpled habits hug us; aclu and National Lawyers Guild representatives hustle us in front of cameras and tape recorders. My mother, who had spent the night on the steps of the jail with a sleeping bag and headed home to shower only moments before, returns immediately when she hears we’re free. Her eyes have age in them these days, and a new kind of focus. As she hugs me tightly and congratulates me, as the tears push briefly at the corners of her eyes, as she runs her hands through her short blonde hair, I realize that I have made her very proud. She has stood awaiting my release from jails before; she has hugged the perpetual delinquent as well. But this is different and it sings somewhere deep in me to see her framed against the massive pressing gray of Seattle winter, all colorful, all warm. Off to the edge of the crowd I catch a glimpse of a peculiar sight: two small boys, no more than six or seven years old, standing inside a cardboard box. I finish an interview with a feisty documentarist and walk over. One of the boys is black, one white, both their faces smeared with chocolate. The mother of one of them sits on a curb and watches me read the lip of the box, which says, “I was tear gassed while I was downtown with my mom. I was so scared. I couldn’t breathe and thought I was going to die.” Suddenly I can’t breathe either. I snap a photo of the boys goofing up at me. Then I step off, pushing through the bleary cold, weeping as I have not in 129

months or even years, putting my feet and fists against those newspaper machines that haven’t been used as barricades against the onslaughts of violence. I’ve witnessed my supposedly forward-thinking hometown transformed by virtual fascism in a matter of hours. But, I soon realize, this transformation has in fact been brewing for a long time. Seattle has, like much of the world, been cooking under the pressures of the “new economy” and those forces resistant to it. The past week was simply, finally, the explosive result. The romantic notion of a city that resists the blandishments of material success, that clings to its core and its culture at the expense of glamour and fortune, has eroded. The question is whether the veritable war of those days was the death knell of what used to be or a flash point of renewed resistance, not merely in terms of Seattle, but in terms of society and its relationship to the mind-blowing pace of “progress.” Perhaps it was both. But there is another, more personal lesson lurking in the gas and rain of that week: that my youth and the carelessness of it are over. I’d only returned because of what other places had instructed me to stand against at home. And whereas all prior returns had been sweet—at least in larger part than they were bitter—this time it was violent and hard, not only because of what has happened to my hometown, but because of what has become of me by way of time and my movement through the world. It sounds melodramatic to claim that I mourned as I stomped down Fourth Avenue away from those two little boys, past the coffee shop where I’d watched the professor sweep, past the steakhouse where my father and I had spent long dinners, past the grimy alleys where I painted my mark, frantic without knowing why. But I have since learned with awful precision what grief feels like: a heaving burn in the chest, a mounting rage at the gracelessness of farewell, the slam of a door. 130

Dispatches from a Prohibited World “Not the least of the challenges of travel . . . is learning how to import—and export—dreams with tenderness . . . the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to matchmake them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.”—Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel” (havana) La Habana grew dark. I knew that throngs of Cubanos walked the beaten street and I wanted to see it all. But the frail yellow of the headlamps revealed little. We were still out on the periphery of the city when I came face to face with my first habanero, a prostitute. She appeared on the other side of my window out of nowhere, face colored in blue and red, lips pursed, hips snapping to the side. The car coughed, the driver laughed, and she waved a greeting and farewell. Ike turned around in the front seat. He smiled at me and Lew and his teeth and eyes shone, as if during the week he preceded us here, he’d caught some of the moon’s magic. After winding through the avenues of the old city, the driver pulled to a stop. Ike slipped him a twenty. The buildings leaned in over us. I could see cigar cherries burning above balconies and barely hear sleepy melodies of Cuban Spanish, the last words of the night between invisible lovers. Someone above us knocked his cigar out and embers, like a spattering of orange rain, whirled down into the dark. Ike’s new friend Guillermo ushered us into a blackened foyer. 131

Inside, I dropped my pack on the cracked linoleum, thinking of sleep. But Ike would have none of it. “Fuck that, man. I’ve been waiting for you.” I couldn’t deny my old friend—I wouldn’t even bother trying. Two weeks apart (while Lew and I dipped down to Venezuela) had felt partly wrong after many weeks together. It was a happy reunion. We hit the streets. I found myself in the central plaza, drinking communist rum and cola. All kinds of people—Germans, AfroCubans, white Cubans, Arabs, mestizo Cubans, Afro-Latino Cubans, Canadians—stopped to chat. Guillermo looked at some with suspicion, greeted others warmly. The bottle emptied and the sweetness of being so strange settled into my chest. That’s all that I remember. The central plaza was symmetrical. On one side la consulta, a daily hotheaded political debate between men, gained momentum as the temperature rose. The sitters on the other side seemed a counterpoint to participants in la consulta: men about my age but all of them black, quiet, dressed in styles that would’ve blended them well into Brooklyn: baggy jeans and polo shirts, basketball jerseys and combat boots, red, yellow, and green knit caps. A couple of them sported dreadlocks the girth of my forearm. Their gazes went to the bantering of the older men when the argument hit a wild note, but for the most part they silently brooded. Lew and Ike settled into a match of dominoes in the shade. I was irked by their complacency; I wanted to see it all, right away. But in the back of my mind I knew that was irrational—and there was no denying that the ninety-degree temperatures lessened one’s drive to do anything. I wandered the plaza. I passed the young crowd as coolly as pos132

sible, feigning focus upon an issue of Granma (the daily state newspaper). A soft voice called out to me, “Oye! May I see that newspaper a second please?” “Of course, of course!” I practically threw it at him, so eager to be communal, to meet Cubanos. I was painfully aware of my high quality boots as he slapped the marble bench next to him. “Me llamo Gandhi.” He shook my hand with a firm, cool grip. He sported a skullcap and many lines in his face; his blue jeans were clean and pressed. “Soy Eli.” Gandhi, though he looked far older, turned out to be a year my junior. He was cautious with his words; he didn’t want to denigrate the participants of the great debate across the way. It was obvious, though, despite his diplomatic efforts, that he thought they were a gaggle of old fools. There was a palpable disdain in his group—nods, exclamations of verdad and claro—when he said, “They act as if La Revolucion is life itself. They act as if everything is great and they have no desire to see differently.” He glanced around the plaza and dropped his voice before he continued. “At least for us blacks, La Revolucion isn’t going as great as Fidel would like for you to think.” “But I thought there was no racism in Cuba. I thought it had been erased by socialism?” It sounded naïve as soon as I heard it. One of the kids with dreadlocks snorted. “Mira,” Gandhi said, indicating a polished tourist hotel that loomed, out of place among the drab, disintegrating structures around it, “if you walk into that hotel, do you know where you’ll find the blacks?” I shrugged. “In the kitchen,” he said, shifting his eyes between the building and me. “Cleaning the rooms, washing the sheets. Behind closed doors, compa.” His crew nodded and made sounds of disgust and agreement. “The tourists prefer to deal 133

with whites, so when we arrive at the question of tourism, the much-touted equality of La Revolucion isn’t worth too much.” Gandhi was on a roll now, the veil of coolness slipping with the churn of emotion. “But I’ll tell you, Eli, where you can find plenty of blacks always.” He paused for effect. “In prison, compa.” The group laughed. “You can barely take a step without stepping on someone it’s so goddam crowded.” Gandhi was shaking his head sagely at something in Granma when what felt like a droplet of water ran down my arm. I looked and found that most of my left side was covered by tiny black ants. Instinctively, I slapped at them—and all at the same time, as if an ant sergeant had lifted a microscopic bullhorn and given the order, they bit. In that instant, mixed up in the rush of adrenaline and pain, it came to me why they are called fire ants: it feels like you’ve been ignited. “Goddam motherfucker!” I screamed, exposing myself as not only a foreigner, but also a vulgar American. I jumped to my feet and, stupidly, kept slapping them, also becoming the only dancing yanqui in the central plaza. One of the big dreadlocked men seized me. Through the shiver of pain and embarrassment, I watched Gandhi strike a match on the bench, roll the Granma into a cone, and set fire to it. Through the soupy tops of the flames, I saw Lew and Ike rise from their game. “Hold still,” Gandhi said quietly, as if sneaking up on prey. He brushed the torch up and down my arm, singeing me but causing the ants to blacken into death. A wicked terrain of welts rose. I felt my face aflame with embarrassment. What I wanted more than anything was to blend into the background, slide easily into Cuban conversations and settings. This was worse than shame in my face; it was the limelight I wanted so desperately to avoid. With many sets of Cubano eyes on me, I told Lew and Ike to fuck off as they trotted over, doubling with laughter. 134

After eating grayish rice and questionable slabs of pork in one of the stand-up diners common to La Habana’s back streets, we arrived at Obispo Street—the main tourist thoroughfare in La Habana Vieja, the heart of nightlife in that part of the city. Obispo is lined with cafés and bars, boutiques, peso-dollar exchange stations. Hustlers, European tourists, ordinary Cubanos, and police blended on the thin sidewalks, and the pedal carts creaked by hollering advertisements in French, Spanish, and broken English. The surplus glow from the restaurants and bars washed over us. “Eli! Compa yanqui!” Gandhi called as he caught sight of us. These kids had a somewhat obtrusive style, though by no means threatening. As a group of eight or nine we spanned the entire avenue of Obispo so that it must have appeared a solid wall of young men pushing through the night. I was half distracted by suspicious looks from Cubano proprietors lingering outside their bars. What was the danger of these kids consorting with us? Were their ways truly subversive? Was interacting with foreigners without catering to them really taboo? As soon as these queries started firing in my head I got my answer. From the shadow of the sidewalk, two stone-faced police stepped and halted us. Sighs and a subdued curse or two issued from the kids around me. One of the police, as if flipping a fly away, indicated the boom box. “Turn down the volume.” The kid with the box reached up and lowered it a fraction. Legs shifted and a charge circulated through the group. We three yanquis traded glances and, despite the rum in our veins, began to move off slightly to the sides. One of the cops was having words with one of the largest of the Rastas; from the way he moved and the tone of his voice, it was clear he was attempting to reason and assert his authority at once. The other cop seemed less concerned with rapport. He crossed his arms. 135

Suddenly the kid who was receiving the close attention took a step back. His jaw set and fists formed. His nostrils flared. From his mouth sprang a tirade from which I could only make out some fierce curses. Some of his companions swallowed and faltered. Gandhi, for his part, backed away entirely. The hollering kid concluded with a punctuation, his hand stabbing the space between him and the officer. The kid turned and walked away. They let him go. His red jersey vanished a block away. The standoff disintegrated; the stereo was extinguished. Gandhi leaned into a doorway and sighed heavily. Aware of two sets of law enforcement eyes on me, I approached him. “Mira—maybe it would be better for you if we go?” I asked him. “Sí. It seems it would be better for you and for us.” I nodded and took his hand, which he offered. “But know this, Eli: this is not all of Cuba. What you and I can share, that is Cuba. Because that is life. And life is lived here, notwithstanding this shit.” He indicated the two cops. “If you need anything, you can find me.” (trinidad) Vicente’s father turned and struck a candle. The phosphor flash revealed the room, the old man’s appearance, and the massive shrine set against the wall. In the leaping orange light, the shrine appeared to be composed of a small bush, many strands of beads, shiny black feathers, tattered pieces of currency, and the statuette of an ebony saint I couldn’t name. The old man put his hand on the base of the shrine and bowed his head, saying something quiet and impassioned. When he turned, we got the first clear image of him: a quarter inch of tight gray curls, so many lines and crevices it looked like he’d aged for five people. His frame was thin but wiry. It was the fierce pair of eyes eating at the blackness of the room 136

that held all of us—me, Lew, Ike, and Vicente’s two drunk friends —stone still. Vicente lived with his wife and father in these few rooms that shared walls with other habitations on either side. Vicente led his sleepy-eyed wife in, blinking. She wrapped her arms around herself in modesty as he presented her to us in the dark. Suddenly Vicente’s lanky friend leaned forward and spat, with a sputtering eruption, an enormous mouthful of rum onto the shrine; the pungent mist floated across the room. The candle guttered but maintained. “What the fuck?” Lew breathed, pulling back beside me. But the old man scarcely glanced at Lanky. A few seconds later, Lanky blew a lungful of smoke evenly over the shrine and mouthed something to himself. The old man turned to Vicente and said that he should show his friends out once they had “finished with their offering.” Vicente prodded them streetward. From the doorway they turned and called out slurry promises to see us again. The old man indicated that we should follow him into the kitchen. Vicente slid next to us. “In case you haven’t figured this out, my father is a babalao—a priest of Santeria.” The babalao reappeared. In his arms he carried the thickest book I’d ever seen. Then he sat, carefully, and withdrew a small pouch. Hands trembling with age, he untied the drawstring of the pouch and with one quick motion, like yanking the tablecloth from a set table, jerked all the contents out. There were some shells, some small bones, and stones rubbed smooth by age and, I assumed, this very use. He palmed all of the strange items. He said a strand of words beneath his breath. He pounded his closed fist on the wood twice and then scattered the items with a motion like releasing a flying in137

sect. He studied the pattern and opened the book with a little puff of dust. The frail, yellowing pages were handwritten in a tiny script —thousands and thousands of lines—with some kind of crossreferencing system drawn into the upper corners. An insomniac rooster broke the night with his ugly song. Then the babalao turned to me. “I have to ask you some questions now,” he said. “You have had some trouble hearing, verdad?” Increasingly, over the past months, I had. My ears felt plugged and full. I’d chalked it up to air travel and the pitch and roll of mountains we’d covered. I told him yes. “You have to attend to this,” he said, “it may be nothing at all. But if you do not attend to it, you risk your hearing.” He breathed and then said, “You have a dead brother.” A sudden shifting in my chest, like jumping in the air just as an elevator starts downward, made me cough. Ike and Lew’s eyes flew to me, each carrying something different; Ike’s blue ones empathetic, Lew’s brown ones confused, surprised. I nodded. The babalao said to me, “His saint is Saint Anthony. You must go to a Catholic church and do a mass for your brother. This will put him and you at peace and make you closer. He has looked over you long enough.” As years of recklessness, a dozen would-be deaths replayed in my mind, I realized the old man hadn’t told me anything I didn’t know yet. A blueness swirled in me, but the babalao continued— he was now staring at the middle distance. “Keep your dog very close to you. She may be more important than you know.” I saw Kaya then, snoozing in the midnight, midspring chill of the North Cascades, snout twitching even in rest. He turned more pages, flipping his eyes between the arrangement on the table and the script. After a moment he turned to Vicente’s wife. “Por favor,” he said, with a sweetness I hadn’t yet heard, “please 138

will you excuse us a moment, my darling. Just very briefly.” He smiled at her and she nodded and scurried away. “Eli—your name is Eli, verdad?” I nodded. “You have to watch out for a woman who will try to manipulate you with her sex.” He stopped to watch me receive this. I imagine I reddened. I nodded— perhaps less convincingly than before. The babalao, however, was not sheepish. He jabbed a crooked finger toward his loins. “With her papaya—you understand?” I nodded harder. It might have been a funny moment, but it wasn’t. “This woman will try to control you and she will do it without shame—and, more importantly, without love.” His eyes flashed severely as if backlit by a storm in his head. “Careful,” he said, holding my gaze, “very careful.” After Lew and Ike had received their readings—and had been as stirred as I had been—Vicente coached us to place some money or tobacco on the shrine. I dug out a Venezuelan bill and my friends put a cigar and a cigarette beneath the ebony saint, the strands of beads hanging like tiny multicolored vines from the dry arms of the bush. A feather fluttered as I pushed my bill into place and the candle winked meekly—almost gone. We shook hands with the father and son in the doorway. Ike asked for an address but Vicente made vague comments about the mail system. “You will always have a home here in Trinidad,” he told us. The door closed and the remaining stars pinwheeled low, and we turned away to cross the border into day. (cienfuegos) It was too goddam hot to walk back to the casa particular. With a bit of bartering, we clambered aboard a rickety donkey cart manned by two young men, one in a Yankees tee shirt. As we clip-clopped 139

over the rugged mix of soil and pavement on a back road, the inevitable question came from our drivers. “Somos yanquis,” Ike said, with a note of fatigue, “we’re from the United States.” Both heads twisted back at us and the donkeys guided us for a moment on their own. At last, the Yankees fan said, “Your country interests me very much. In fact, I plan to go there. I have no desire to stay here in Cuba.” His companion gave him a look that was a blend of question and warning, hit the asses lightly, and turned his gaze away. But the complainant wasn’t finished. “Here we work and work and work without a break. And never do we see anything in return, nothing belongs to us.” His voice had grown ragged and fast; he spit once and took the makeshift whip from his partner. “Look around you,” he said, with the whip indicating the street and all its loud mid-sized homes that Lew had earlier likened to suburban Miami, “here we don’t have anything.” He whipped the animals with unnecessary violence and the cart jerked. “Here everything is for La Revolucion while in the rest of the world a man is able to work—to work and enrich himself.” He said the last words slowly, savoring them. Then he hit the donkeys again. Their ears lifted and they turned confused eyes back at him. The cart picked up speed. I could see the wheel spinning behind Lew’s eyes; he wanted to engage this guy, but I nudged him. I’d begun to feel that it was hazardous to argue with people’s notions of us or our home. It was impossible to know what might happen if we were to disabuse the donkey driver of his illusions, but for some reason it felt a bit like meddling in the grand scheme. That evening I went to the rooftop of our casa. The horizon of red tile and adobe was devouring the sun. I pondered this question of cultural myths through two-thirds of a large cigar, but still 140

couldn’t quite put my finger on what the danger might be in telling it like it is to those who’ve been misinformed. From my seat, chicken wire—intended to keep birds out of the orchids—caged the moon. Then again, from my seat, an impoverished pueblo appeared content and absolutely at peace. Distortions, these could be called. Or, just perspectives. I asked our cabbie, Jaime, what he thought about La Revolucion and the course Cuba was on. The question confounded him initially; he snapped off his sunglasses and wrinkled his wide brow at me. Something seemed to click after a few seconds, though, and he breathed deeply. “Mira. Cuba is paradise. It’s obvious that you’ve been chatting with some kids who don’t know shit. You were in la Habana, verdad?” He looked to me for confirmation. I confirmed it. “And undoubtedly you met some kids who told you such and such about repression, inequality, racism, etc. Verdad?” “Sí.” “Ok. What happens, my friend, is that owing to your age, you meet kids that were not witnesses to the triumph of La Revolucion and what that signified,” he rammed his forefinger into the air repeatedly, “they don’t know how it was for Cubanos before.” This seemed relatively obvious to me and I wondered at his sudden passion. He continued, “They complain about working. So, they don’t work. They spend all day in the streets whining because they don’t have enough high fashion clothing, because they don’t have anywhere to fuck their girlfriends, because they don’t have the luxury that they think—incorrectly—that youth have in other places. And when the police approach them to ask why they don’t have anything to do, because they sit for hours in the plazas or wander the streets, they throw a tantrum, scream about repression and say that the police are harassing them because of their age or their race 141

or some such shit.” Jaime shook his head and made a sound in his throat like he wanted to spit. His speech and his manner reminded me of conservative men I’d known in the U.S., decrying the shiftlessness and complaints of minorities and the underclass; I halfexpected Jaime to start talking about pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps. But, I wondered, as a canopied military truck flew past and Jaime paused his ire to salute, was it really that similar? Jaime had conjured some cool and dropped his voice a couple notches. “Mira. Forty years ago the youth in Cuba were slaves. The parents of those kids that spend all day complaining in the streets were basically in slavery. They worked for nothing. They were mistreated, beaten, even killed by their bosses from France, Spain, and the U.S. who owned Cuba. The friends of Batista that managed Cuba as if it were a farm or resort. A playground for the rich and corrupt. And today? The youth today can spend all their lives complaining, doing nothing to support our society. And when they return home at night? They have a bed. They have food. If they need it, they get medicine. They have everything that is necessary to survive. Do you know why?” He stopped—I’d learned that he expected me to respond to his rhetorical questioning. “Why?” I asked. “Because their parents still work, still contribute to Cuba because they know how it was before. And they know that if Fidel hadn’t blessed us with his vision, his courage, his Socialist spirit, we’d still be fucking slaves.” Jaime fell silent then, apparently wedged between indignation and pride. I didn’t know how to proceed with the conversation. I glanced back but Ike and Lew were heavy-lidded behind us. I felt annoyed, abandoned for a brief moment, but after all, I was the one who had jumped in the front seat. I just nodded to myself and watched the arid shoulder of the little highway bump by. After a 142

spell, Jaime slapped my arm and aimed his finger out the window, at a rolling green mountain range. “Escambray,” he said, as if testing to see if I knew the significance. I did, but I pretended not to. “There your cia put agents to try to sabotage La Revolucion. They dropped a bunch of soldiers with weapons and big plans up there.” He let his gaze linger on the swaying wind-buffeted roll of trees for a moment. “But,” he said, now looking at me with a wicked grin, “we crushed them.” Soon the road ran along the coast again; I was grateful to have somewhere to put my eyes. Ah, the Caribe! The blue dream of it. That mess of currents and tides that dragged slaves and pirates, dictators and explorers to its shores, that built the bittersweet name of Cuba and so many other places, but that also devoured so much in the process of creation, charged such a toll—like revolutions do, I suppose. Then the Caribe is to be loved, albeit with some reservation. Perhaps as one loves a leader who feeds him, clothes him, protects him, and limits his every move. (santa clara) We hurried behind Ike’s always no-nonsense marching, inhaling diesel and ignoring the calls of Cubanos lining the sidewalks. Soon we reached the bend in the land where the hilltop statute of El Che pulled itself against the sky. It was massive and commanding in stature, with a plaza and wide marble stairs at its base. It caused us to take off our hats and approach with the patience that respect somehow warrants. His form was sculpted marching and focused, with rifle slung and an easy step, in action yet so human. I read his words, inscribed on the base, not because I hadn’t before, but because the scene made me greedy, created the desire to consume this place, this man, to stuff myself with his ideas. Ike gestured that he was entering the museum beneath the statue, and I sat on the marble stairs next to 143

Lew, who found himself suddenly threatened by tears, facing an enormous red billboard demanding that we “Be Like El Che,” with the sun sliding down our right side and a waxing moon spilling to our left. We watched a gaggle of schoolchildren sing hymns of patriotism and then scatter into games of teams, war, just like children anywhere. I considered that to kill or to die for justice are the most honorable acts that exist before us as humans. Yet El Che’s image now sells in expensive, trendy stores in imperialist nations against neon tee shirt backgrounds. The pimping of his idea and image almost prevented me from coming here. But to rescue something beautiful from prostitution, something meaningful from nonsense, something valuable from waste, is the ultimate act of rebellion. Example and sacrifice and integrity are your own to create, to hold yourself to; if you fail at this in your own heart, you will never know what might have been. As the triumphant moon silhouetted El Che’s rifle, I thought of all the coming fights and lifted my pen to write this. (havana) With beers, down at the side of the Caribe, the wind gathered itself over the horizon and rolled breakers in; they smashed on rocks and soaked us. It was Ike’s last night in Cuba—in fact, his last night in Latin America. The conclusion to four months of adventure, and he wanted one more stab of passion and madness. He started wobbling along the retaining wall. Sheets of surf framed him and he howled. He attracted the attention of four rum-dizzy teenage boys who scampered over, ascertained our nationality, and started in on rock n’ roll trivia. “Do you know the first year Led Zeppelin toured?” “Can you buy all the Beatles albums in the U.S.?” 144

“How much do guitars cost in your country?” “Are there concerts every night in your home?” They wore their hair long, stringy. Ragged jeans and bright tee shirts clothed them. They didn’t speak any English, aside from the lyrics to every Zeppelin song we could name. They said they hated Fidel because no great bands ever came to Cuba; they were deprived of their freedom to rock. Guillermo shook his head sadly and kept his distance, sipping a soda and watching the sky and sea smear together in the north. Behind us, high against the black glass façade, a fancy tourist jazz club blinked—like a distant star or coming storm. After helping a hungover and very tardy Ike out the door and saying farewells that time did not permit to be heavy, Lew and I wandered our way to the Universidad de la Habana. There we met our old college friend, Andy, on the quad. We followed him through a neighborhood that crowned the hills of Vedado and down a driveway. He knocked on a door and three wild-eyed kids bowled into us. One was a striking young woman and the other two were guys about our age, dressed in near caricature of hip-hop style— and, indeed, it turned out that along with the young woman, Inez, they formed a musical trio. They smiled around mouthfuls of bread and beans and shook our hands heartily. One guy was lanky and sported a fro; the other was stouter and moved with a kind of self-conscious cool. Inez was Andy’s girl. Her skin was the brown that Anglo tanners dream of, her face oval and large, her hair fiery crimson, her eyes ice blue. The trio roughhoused with Andy and fired off language full of slang. They urged us back to the streets, suggesting something of a tour of the neighborhood. We descended a crumbling staircase hacked precariously into the hillside. Below us, on the banks of a lazy, soiled river, were maybe a 145

hundred hovels. It was a shantytown like we hadn’t witnessed on this island of egalitarian fervor. At the base of the stairs we passed a cdr (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) building. I couldn’t see the eyes that I felt watching us. We were suddenly in a dirt alleyway and the stout kid, Jorge, was whispering through a fence. Inez and the lankier kid, Peetee, swept us forward. We emerged on a swampy flat peppered with driftwood and large chunks of garbage. We sat on a gnarled piece of driftwood and were rejoined by Jorge who, between me and Lew, teased open the little paper to reveal a couple pinches of twiggy dope. My heart set to pumping as if a gun barrel had kissed my neck. I watched in my mind as a patrol of blue shirts marched down the alleyway, led by a gloating cdr loyalist. From what I could remember, drug use, sale, and possession were capital crimes in Cuba. I looked to Lew—who never was prone to let caution obstruct a good time. His narrow, sunburned Texan face was slashed by a grin. As the kid twisted up a soggy joint, I watched Peetee who, I realized, was in turn checking in with a mestizo holding a baby a few dozen yards up the alley. This man, in turn, was pacing—as if coaxing the baby to sleep—to and from the mouth of the alley where he had an unobstructed view of the larger street and the cdr post. A chain of vigilance so that these kids could show their yanqui guests the hospitality of a smoke session. When the roach had burnt down to a useless nub, we rose and walked in a tight group out of the swamp. Andy’s friends were suddenly hurried, making plans between themselves, telling us where to look for a black market cab back to La Habana Vieja. As twilight dropped veils over us and I realized the last chance to ask was upon me, I sidled up to Jorge and Peetee. “So, what do you guys think of La Revolucion?” No response; the grass seemed to make my Spanish clunky. I tried another tact. “I’m 146

just curious about the course Cuba is on from your perspective— all we ever get in the U.S. is that it will fall apart any day, you know?” Peetee laughed vaguely. Jorge slowed down, slid a sideways look over me, and then picked up the pace again. He shrugged before he spoke. “Fidel is a genius,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong in Cuba, no racism, no repression. Socialism eliminated all of that.” He put distance between us with a couple of strides. At an intersection with heavy traffic we said our farewells and sketched a vague plan of meeting again at a public concert where they would perform. Inez and Peetee shook my hand firmly. Jorge, however, barely looked me in the eye. As they strode off, again beat-boxing and kicking lyrics into the now-dense night, Andy told me, perturbed, “You know it’s strange what Jorge said to you. He’s always the one to trash Cuba and Fidel. He speaks of life here like it’s jail.” I didn’t know what to make of it—was the modification of Jorge’s views due to the grass? To the fact that I was a stranger, possibly a threat—even a spy? Did he feel suddenly defensive of his patrimony because he suspected I, as a foreigner, was critical of it? Or was he simply playing games, trying to throw me for a loop because I’d expected a different answer? I chalked up another enigma to the Cuban night as I watched the Havana b-boys and b-girl disappear behind a Soviet bus, gone from my life forever. It was the hour of night when the doors—to factories and tourist restaurants and cigar rolling shops and museums—opened and flooded the streets. The hour when everyone marched home to a meager meal. For the first time we climbed aboard one of the pedal carts that were common in the tourist straits of La Habana Vieja. 147

Guillermo had insisted; he didn’t think we’d get any of the chicken and plantains for sale in the apartment of a señorita if we didn’t hurry. We agreed readily; the food in private homes had always proved a huge improvement over the street fare—which was usually somewhat over- or undercooked, and now and then had a strange consistency. The driver of the little cart was a small, extremely fit man of about fifty. His legs pumped the four of us without strain around the belching buses and Chevies. He chatted with Guillermo. Finally he turned to us and asked where we were from. “Somos yanquis,” I said, and quickly added, having learned this was a short cut to the heart of conversation, “I guess you haven’t met many of us, verdad?” He shook his head and stayed quiet for a few moments, apparently capable of negotiating traffic, exerting great energy, and pondering all at once. At last he asked, “Why do so many people—even children—kill each other in your country? Why is there such violence and anger?” No less than three schoolyard shootings in the States—to say nothing of the rote bloodletting that marks the whole of American society—had occurred in the last months. This was not the first time a Cubano aimed the question our way. I always had trouble with this. I did not wish to come off as defending something as yanqui as this kind of horror; defense of the U.S. was most certainly not my mission. But it felt wrong to allow such a sick phenomenon to appear as simple chaos. Lew tried to explain some of the sociocultural roots for the driver—fear, gun culture, bullying, etc.— but the man just looked more confused. “That,” the driver finally said, thoughtfully, “would never happen in Cuba.” We nodded, somewhat frustrated, but also knowing it was true. “It’s kind of complicated,” I added, lamely. 148

Guillermo gauged our expressions. After another moment, he said to the driver, “Sí. What you say is true. But you also will never get rich or travel wherever you want to, nor leave this island, compa.” The driver concurred. “Sí,” he said, “there’s mucha necesidad here, mucha falta. But,” he spread his arms as if showcasing the smiling people blending around us, “there is mucha tranquilidad, too. That’s the tradeoff.” I said goodbye to Lew in the Hotel Nueva York. After three months together, a dozen border crossings, six nations, mountains, deserts, coastal lowlands, danger, rapture, and despondence, with parasites and injuries, beneath jungle canopies crowded with monkeys and parrots under a nuclear sun, through polluted avenues, drunken philosophy in the surf of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Caribe, and through the lives of hundreds of warm people, all that was left was to shake hands. Lew had another week in Cuba, and I felt both nervous and proud for him. He’d landed in Managua at my side in January with minimal Tex-Mex slang and a mouth and a heart that were too open too often. He’d hardened in some ways, softened in others, but grown into the sunburned, live-eyed, nearfluent professional traveler who now sat on a crumbling window ledge and puffed a Cohiba. I promised him I’d call his parents with news of him and shouldered my pack. From the street, the Hotel Nueva York stood in its weary way, towering above the other pillars of old Habana, Lew’s cigar winking red in a window. Toothless five-star hotels that now housed families of five. Weird cenotaphs of capitalism. I left that old hotel in its moat of jineteros and the smattering of old drunks and foolish Canadian tourists that gave it a false air of danger. Guillermo met me a half block to the south; some unclear element of paranoia kept him from the lobby. He had secured me a ride like he had 149

secured me everything that I needed in La Habana. He walked quickly as always and banked a few turns onto unnamed blocks until we came upon the antique rounded Oldsmobile and his friend, leaning on the fender. The engine gagged and spat a ball of white smoke against a blacked-out building and we were off. Hitchhikers lined the highway out of La Habana. They thumbed at the buggy wake of the car with expressions like they didn’t really care, as if they were happy to stand on an empty shoulder in the middle of nowhere and chat. Billboards marked the miles with fervent slogans and images of Camilo Cienfuegos, El Che, and the Castros in various stages of their lives. The headlights were weak. Salsa blasted and the chassis rattled, making conversation impossible. That was alright by me; I didn’t want to show the tears to Guillermo. He would have felt responsible somehow. I showed them to the fleeting blurs of strangers and the broadsides of propaganda instead. An hour later I sat beneath the limp flags of dozens of nations, including my own. Shiny new televisions were arranged so that one was compelled to watch falsely joyous Cubanos singing and dancing in embarrassing outfits across the screen. In the corner, an enormous combat video game flashed like the gaze of a psychopath, throwing hues across a group of rich dozing chinos who, surely having had their wallets drained by the services of many eager jineteros, awaited the jet that would spirit them back to their home. I ate a ham croissant that enraged my stomach and had cost me five dollars—or one half the monthly salary of the average citizen. I searched my head for the bottom line, for some summation of this place, but failed. I didn’t understand enough yet about how I’d come here. I only understood that I’d been severely naïve—a naïvete that no number of books or documentaries or even conver150

sations with people who’d been to Cuba could amend. I’d clung to the notion that I “didn’t have any expectations” during the preparations to skip over the Caribe into this prohibited world, but mainly that was to hedge against disappointment if we didn’t get in, had to cut it short, or were forced into a mode of tourist travel. What I did expect to find was the prioritization of medical care, education, and cultural diversity; I did expect to witness these things supported and flourishing—instead of sidelined in favor of military might and special interests. I did not expect to find that all such social justice and equality would feel hollow in the absence of basic freedoms. To say it plainly: I never expected to learn a lesson as simple as the price of equality is liberty. I left my friend Guillermo standing awkwardly on the other side of the wall of bulletproof immigration, clutching a plastic sack with the dog-eared dictionary and unused antibiotics I had given him. A tear shone in his eye. But he spun around and vanished quickly, eager to leave the surreal cleanliness and order of this massive new terminal where every security agent pasted their eyes to him. He surely wasn’t going anywhere but back—back into the sticky morning, back out to the empty highway to hope for solidarity from a passing transport. Back into that crazy capital, back into mucha necesidad, as they say there, but also back into mucha tranquilidad, as they also say. He went without asking me for a thing, carrying with him memories of days in the streets with me and my astonishment at every turn; he went with the pleasure of having treated me with sincerity and respect. He went, like me, carrying the hope that one day again our worlds might overlap, destroying and creating.

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Out in Front In August 2002 I arrived at blazing noon in front of the antique green house on Wilmington’s Ann Street that would be my home for the next two years. My now-to-be-roommate, Dave, waved from the sloping second story porch, Spanish moss lifting with a breeze. The park across the street was a mixture of laconic old men boozing in the shade and young children playing on a worse-for-wear jungle gym and bleachers, indifferent to the hundred-degree heat. My dog, Kaya, half tugged on the leash, conflicted: thrilled to see squirrels in the dead grass but already nearly too hot to move, much less give chase. Over the phone, Dave had said in his understated Piedmont manner that “he wasn’t real sure what went on in that park after dark” and the landlady had informed me that “the house is in a ‘transitional’ neighborhood.” This somewhat explained the fantastic rental rate. Looking around me, though, as I unpacked the truck, all I saw were families laughing, kids playing, everyone easing their way through Sunday afternoon routines. A hammer put up a distant rhythm, and a whock and good-natured shit-talking announced a softball game. Curious glances were matched by waves from our neighbors. I felt good as I lugged boxes up the creaking, dusty stairs. One hundred and four years had passed since the violence. Over a century since drunken white men marched down my street in broad daylight with rifles and shotguns “hunting blackbirds.” Four generations since a newspaper editorial in a black publication was used as political cover for “upstanding” white citizens to stage the only coup in U.S. history, slapping the increasingly professional black population back down by way of random murder and general terror. And still the city bore the names of the killers and their 152

“respectable” accomplices. In the late-summer dusk, I watched students flirt on the stoops of libraries named after them, watched families at play in their parks. It is safe to say that history—more than the present fact of it—made me aware that my and Dave’s skin was the only pale pigmentation on the block. As I rocked on the porch that first night and watched shadows creep toward full-fledged darkness, a purple swell flashing its bolts in the east, a throng of idle young men mixing on the corner, the desperate hilarity of old drunks under the picnic shelter, the gospel hum of our neighbor rising and falling, the shattered glass divvying up the remaining sun all over the park, the academic knowledge of history gave way. The hot wind and shifting shadows promised a lot of haunting, a lot of lessons. i The heat is too much for Kaya. She has no interest in anything besides staying still in front of the fan. I have to pull her along the street, encourage her to pee. The night offers no relief—the afternoon’s weak breeze died with the sun. I wear shorts and flipflops and pull fistfuls of moisture from my chest and brow with a handkerchief. The man forms slowly out of the soft darkness. He walks in the middle of the street. He is tall, so lanky it seems his legs should have another joint. I nod. He eyes the dog but she doesn’t care. With two steps he’s above me. By rote, with a practiced rhythm, he begins to unwind his hustle. I try to interrupt him twice, but he raises a huge palm flat in front of me, closes his eyes, and doesn’t need to say please, let me finish. When he has, I tell him I don’t have anything on me. I ain’t no crackhead, he says, severely. I believe you, I tell him, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have any money. 153

C’mon, he says, I ain’t no crackhead, I ain’t bullshittin’. C’mon yourself, I say, my manners faltering now, I don’t even have any fucking pockets. He takes a step forward and his mouth opens again. Kaya snaps tense and her jowls twitch. She aims her snout at him. I put my hand on her head and I put my eyes into his. Look man, I say, if I had any money on me I would give it to you. If I had a few bucks, I’d be happy to help you out. I would. But I don’t. He pushes a flashing, bloodshot gaze into me, silent, with no expression. Kaya and I are both very still. Then a smile blooms and he moves backward as if on rewind. Shit, man, he says, that’s all you had to say. That’s all you had to say. And he saunters off coolly down the hot gullet of the night. ii Rocker creaking, Kaya snoozing, cigarette dribbling against the sticky night. Behind the massive oaks and screen of Spanish moss, the porch is a hidden vista onto the world. In the north, a freight train lifts a blue bleat. From the south comes the rise of a gospel hymn, one solo voice. It climbs higher and carves the silence and gives me gooseflesh. The cicadas are mute. Something about looking to the stars. The singer is on an old beach cruiser bicycle, weaving leisurely along the avenue. She wears a white blouse that calls the moonlight down to it. Kaya lifts her head and her tail beats a metronome, like a friend is arriving. The song competes against the freight’s horn for a moment and then they tangle, vanishing, the train pulling out of the world, her riding into it. iii I’m pulling Kaya back from the park, as she pulled me into it. The way the moon lights the man’s cloud of smoke is artful. He 154

shuffles under a tree and looks away from me but I greet him anyhow per my policy as Anglo interloper. He nods and grins away any surprise as soon as I do so. Then he calls for me to wait and he approaches, one lazy eye on Kaya who watches the trees for her foe, the gunmetal gray cat. It is cold and he doesn’t put much into the spiel, which I appreciate. Hey man, I’m Leo. I got a job man, a little job. But it ain’t a big job, know what I mean, man? It ain’t cuttin’ it. Can you help me out man, you think, somethin’? I have no money but I do the pocket pat and shrug routine for him. He says it’s alright and I turn to go. But then I notice my truck at the curb and I tell him to hold on, I’ll look for some change. In the bone white moonglow, his eyes lose some of their brown. He forgets about the smoke in his throat and the cigarette freezes in its trajectory away from his mouth. He looks at me and asks, Man, you’re not gonna grab a gun are ya? I chuckle before the seriousness of his question gets into my mind. He stays there, stiff as the frozen trees that groan like moored boats over us. I strip my smile away and tell him of course not. When I turn back and put nine quarters into his hand, relief blends with gratitude in his face and he talks and talks about how beautiful the dog is. iv On the porch midnight comes and goes but it seems that the temperature rises. Drops roll down my brow and my bottle; the beer will get warm in minutes. We sit and watch the cars move through the inky streets, the sky wink and swirl. Summer is dying but won’t admit it. Marc and I are quiet, descending from a drunkenness toward slumber. Two young, thick men wobble onto the 155

block, slap boxing, talking loud. Kaya, because of their commotion, stands, lets out a low warning from her belly—which calls their attention to us. The bigger one: Hey what’s happenin’ up there y’all? Not much. How you doin? Aw, you know. Say, throw me one a them cold things. What’s that? One a them cold things—throw one to me. The last beers are in the fridge on the other side of the house. The men shift with unnerving energy, leaning on the fence. Marc: These’re the last ones, man. Aw, c’mon now. No, seriously, this is it. Sorry. Yo, I don’t mean to be rude but you need to throw me one a them. Hey, what do you want? They’re gone. They are still and quiet and I can see the whites of their eyes. The talker lifts himself a little on the fence, flexing, moving his face a few inches forward and up toward us. I oughtta come up there and fuck you up, you know that shit? Our policy becomes silence. He lifts one leg, hooks it over the fence, stops, looks up at us again, like he’s cocked a gun. Man, watch me come up there and straight kill you motherfuckers. A Cadillac turns and headlights wash the sidewalk. A beat breaks from the car’s window. The cicadas compete. Sweat slides down my chest. The man pulls his leg back over to his side. The pair walk away, slurring muffled threats into the wet quilt of August Dixie that separates us. v One night I’m writing an essay. In it, I liken plastic grocery sacks, rising and traveling with the wind, to ghost heads. I take a break to walk the dog. 156

I step out with Kaya straining at the leash. Down the sidewalk a creak and a broken song come. He’s pushing the bike and under the burn of a street lamp and I see plastic sacks swinging from the handlebars. Unrested and half-drunk as I am, I think headhunter and hurry my step, not in the mood for chatter and the night is blustering besides. And Kaya is tugging. I’m a few paces ahead when he reaches the picnic shelter and calls out to me. Not far enough to pretend I’ve not heard. I keep Kaya leashed. He ambles toward me: hiking boots, thin canvas jacket, dirty jeans, stocking cap, ski gloves, gaunt, ashy face, wine breath, lack of teeth revealed by a grin. In terms of eyes: They glisten, overfull, and roll something across at me that causes me to almost curse because I’ve seen it before and I know what it suggests: power, allure, trouble, illness. He’s shaking my hand, the glove cushioning the ferocity of his grip. He’s sliding a hand over Kaya’s neck but she’s watching skinny branches dance, not caring, trying to discern squirrels. He says once he had to pull a knife on a dog. He says once he had to shoot a gangster in a Chicago alley. He says once he had to kill some gooks in a humid jungle. He says once he had to drop a cop that took his bottle. He sights down his arm like a rifle and aims it at my neighbors’ homes: Pimp (on the far corner), Dealer (on the nearer corner), Bootlegger (right next door), Crackheads (down the block). With his squinted eye and a twitch of trigger finger, he makes it clear he doesn’t approve. Kaya, eager to be free, sends up one long strand of whine that breaks between us. In my head, I thank her. I beg away and shake his hand again. 157

You won’t see me again, he tells me. My name’s Gus—but they call me ghost. In a peach-colored, warm coffee shop, I am struggling with this essay. As November booms around outside and a few icy drops tinkle against the window, as dusk runs out and night takes the reins, I sip cold coffee and cut and paste. I italicize and un-italicize; I put scene V first and scene II last. Behind the coffee bar, a plump girl who has been kind to me with refills is whirling about in closingup-shop labors. I feel something is missing from this essay, have in fact felt that for months, which is why it has remained buried. Less than satisfied, but thinking of my warm bedroom and the nodoubt antsy dog, I say good night to the barista. My bike is gone. It could be that I locked it up in a distracted manner and all one had to do was lift it from the flaccid loop of cable. It could be that a sly thief disassembled the necessary bolts and slipped away. At any rate, the lock and the cable are draped on the parking meter in mockery. I slip them in my bag and start the trek home. On Orange Street, a well-kept middle-class avenue a block over from my own, the Spanish moss hangs low and tropical leaves lean out over wrought-iron fences, as if to escape the imminent frost. On the corner, the historic Hoggard House glows with a kind of kerosene warmth, a testament to the rich but torrid history of this town. In the corner of the yard stands a For Rent sign advertising what is currently my friend Kimi’s apartment, a testament to the haunts of the house. The recessed, darker old mansion blinks meekly next door as I approach Sixth Street, where a bed and breakfast, a vacant lot, and a perpetually darkened mosque sit on the other three corners. Before I get there, though, I hear a crunch and a creak behind me and step aside for a man on a bicycle. Involuntarily, I look to the bike, but it’s not mine. 158

“Pardon me,” he says, “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He gives a melodious chuckle and I tell him to have a good evening. He coasts around the corner. At the dark intersection, seconds later, he steps from a swath of shadow and his hand closes on my left arm like a vice grip. Moonlight flashes on his eyes, which are aimed down at me from a considerable height. Pocks mark his weathered, thin face and he’s clad in an army jacket. My free arm is slung with the weight of my laptop over my shoulder. The first thing I think is: This man must be near fifty. He hisses, “Give me your shit,” a command that comes straight from the teeth. Synapses start firing and fight juice whirs through me. I try to step back, stalling, telling him Ok, man, chill out, whatever, but I say this very loudly. He jerks me closer so I can smell rancid breath and then there is something metal against my stomach. “Start hollerin’ and I’m a blast your guts right now.” When I reach back for my wallet I realize that my arm is now in a position to strike instead of comply. But I see the venom in his gaze and sense prevails. I hand him my grandfather’s wallet and swing my bag behind my back. He backs away issuing threats, climbs onto his bike and rides off over the dance of oak boughs’ shadows on the road. After an awkward conversation with zealous crewcut cops, I trudge home. In the kitchen I down two glasses of Dave’s plum wine while Kaya squeals greetings and pleas around my legs. I leash her and step back to the street, smoking hard, small tremors in my hand. On the first block, as I kick through the detritus of vice—shattered forty bottles, drug baggies, candy wrappers—two large, parka-clad black men cross the street when they see me coming with Kaya. With a steady voice, louder than I intend, I force out a greeting at them. They nod and wave after a pause. At the corner of Sixth and Orange, the wind is earnest. Kaya dis159

likes the stop, but contents herself to snuffling the bushes—just about where my assailant crouched. Down toward Castle Street I can see the spinning red and blue of the law and hear the slow, high whine of a siren, calculated desperation.

My Father’s House My father, brother and I moved to the house from a tiny, green, split-level structure just off frat row. We’d lived there with a mad professor in the basement, the sounds of idiocy at all hours in the streets, and barely enough room for two boys, one man, and a large dog to turn around in. But we’d been wildly happy there—it was our refuge, our landing zone after dad’s horrendous second marriage. That awful matrimony had sent us to our mother’s home four-fifths of the time instead of the customary fifty-fifty split. My father’s year with the crazy woman and her daughter had unraveled in a four-story monstrosity on a hill that my father had leased with sleight-of-hand financial maneuvers. So this two-story, lightfilled house, with a front porch and back yard, was a healthy compromise between our last two. It represented my father’s intention to continue raising his sons in comfort; it represented his tooth and nail fight to recoup his losses. The unassuming blue house sat, like its neighbors, up a short flight of stairs, above the sidewalk. Across the street, there was a deep ravine that the Seattle Parks Department had transformed into a lush paradise of walking trails and trickling creeks (though no shortage of freaks transformed it after sundown). Buses groaned eighteen hours a day down the main avenue, traveling out into the various arteries of Seattle. From the roof you could make out the skyline of downtown. There was a basement with a large bedroom, plus the typical creepy basement storage area, a main floor with 160

two more bedrooms, living room, den, and kitchen. Upstairs, accessed by the front porch, was a cozy, rentable mother-in-law apartment. Over the next dozen years, that house was lived in. In the basement, the large bedroom was mine for years—a decision that exhibited a great deal more trust than my father should have had in me. I danced and wept through my first acid trip there with my best friend, Dean, who was on his way to schizophrenia, and our dog, Sky, who chided me with her eyes throughout. I sneaked girls and friends in through the side door for quiet parties in the small hours of weeknights; I slipped out with ease and ran the streets with spray paint or to the suburbs with my crazy friend, dodging freight trains and discussing God. My brother, once he inherited the room as a spacey teen, accidentally set fire to a curtain and blackened a wall. Eventually dad would convert the basement into an apartment as well, and a kind bachelor video clerk would make it his home, which he still does. As my brother and I underwent the defacement of adolescence and my father the crisis of middle age, we killed many hours together in front of the entertainment center watching the new releases that studios sent my father—a video store owner—for free. The entertainment center was state of the art, with a laserdisc player, a 250-cd carousel, and surround sound (much of which came as insurance bounty after a burglary). Dad collected cds as earnestly as he once did vinyl, so that hunger for virtually any rock artist, regardless of era, could always be sated. We ate countless rounds of bachelor fare at the kitchen table, belching freely and feeding Sky from our plates, lingering and laughing as much as possible to make up for the dead seriousness of so much else. A fat man, a business partner of my father’s, and his tiny redheaded wife moved into the mother-in-law. Five years later the man, no longer fat, left, resolutely and rapidly, leaving behind his 161

aggrieved woman, who slowly moved off somewhere else, my father stuck in the role of her consoler through the process. So, at sixteen, though my brother was no more deserving of trust than I’d been, he was given a summer with the apartment to himself. Once KC left the nest entirely, my father, in order to take in more income, moved up to the apartment. But he moved back down when the stairs proved too much for old Sky. The last time we saw my father it was to gather in the living room, say our farewells, lay hands on the confused but content old lab, and send her on with a plunge of poison. Her departure preceded his by mere weeks. It was only a month and a half later that KC, my then-girlfriend, Leyla, and I rolled into Seattle and moved into the house for what remained of the spring and summer. We confronted the physical remains of our lives with him. We cooked our meals in his pots and pans, ate them off his plates, watched his films and listened to his music as we thinned out his closets. We wore his clothes and jewelry, we drank his beer on his sofa and watched hours of home movies reel past of my brother and I, young and giddy, adolescent and morose, slouching around on the same sofa, indulging my camcorder-toting father, the Beatles scratchy on the audio. And Leyla and I discovered, by way of her nausea on his birthday, that we had conceived a child in his bed. Meanwhile, a barbecue in his honor limped along among his misty-eyed friends in the backyard. The first night there, KC and I cobbled together a makeshift shrine in the corner of the cluttered house, near the one he’d recently arranged for Sky. We wept and shot rum on our knees in front of it. In the morning the radio alarm startled me awake at four-thirty a.m., the hour he’d risen for the trip he never returned from, crackling Sergeant Pepper, one of his favorite tracks of all time. Unable to return to rest, I began to sift through the treasures and ruins of a life half-lived. 162

My dad did something funny before he left: he covered most of the walls with photos. From snapshots of his childhood outside Chicago to the Polaroids of the dog’s last moments, there was little white space remaining. On his bureau, I found a pocketknife, his father’s ring, a literary magazine, and a small white legal pad, scrawled with proclamations of the love he still harbored for my mother, love not expressed in seventeen years. In his closet I discovered a file bound with string and dug into its alphabetical slices under E. Cards I made as a little kid slid out—an orange Crayola heart with a yellow arrow through it; a scrawled note in first cursive, I Love Tom. We dug through the heaps in the basement: a dozen boxes of slides; electronic gadgets that Dad was always a sucker for but often cast off in frustration; ancient stuffed animals; threadbare old rock tee shirts; pounds of frail yellow news clippings about war, protest, disaster. And we found a trove of our grandfather’s belongings that we’d long since forgotten: Nazi helmets (with a strand or two of hair still clinging), heavy brass swastikas, and Luger pistols, unfired for most of a lifetime. These were things that grandpa, the packrat, had appropriated from slain Germans on some distant victorious beach. By the end of summer, KC and I had lugged out of the house countless thirty-gallon trash bags of expired medications and experimental “smart drugs,” frayed clothing, moot paperwork, and unreeling vhs tapes. I felt at times that we should torch it all, let the haunted structure go and the endless stream of our father with it. At the very least to sell the house, something my father had planned on. But my brother, with tenacity and patience, revised my emotion and we made moves to hang onto it. We rented the main floor to friends and then filled the apartment with photos, furniture, and music. 163

There are times when I sit beneath the bulk of all that memory and feel trapped. There are times when rain lashes the windows and the baseboard heat is insufficient and I feel hollow. There are times when I sift through his files full of short story drafts, aborted novels, and yellowing journals and feel intimidated with how much I have yet to learn of him—and how hard I will drive myself for him. But there are other times. I can recall the few moments I was certain I saw my father’s youth reconjured in him, when his eyes flashed with focus and yet an incredible distance. His face slapped with the blank awe of a child. Those times were when my father—perhaps riding the inherent high of a Friday afternoon or the Herculean kick of a cup of his coffee—decidedly marched to the stereo and turned on rock n’ roll music very loud. So sometimes, when the movie has ended, or the morning is idle, and I see KC’s eyes searching the empty spaces, I turn on the Beatles and take down a picture of the four of us (Sky in the foreground) arranged around a campsite or half-drunk outside a restaurant, grip the glass bead around my neck that holds a pinch of dad’s ashes, and sit beside my brother for a beer. And feel peace instead of surging grief—right in the middle of me.

Over the Pass I’m sitting on a dark red carpet. I’m five years old. In a corner of the room, my father reclines in an oak easy chair—the first thing my parents bought as husband and wife—half-eaten by shadow. The sun plays outside the dirty windows, high in the sky, shadow line already creeping up Bald Mountain. We’re in the middle of the first 164

weekend of exploring the eighty acres of land my parents have just purchased, which boasts an old house, barn, and homestead. My mother returns from a long walk. She stands in front of me, smiling and lit from behind. “I have two surprises.” My mother does not make a big deal of small gifts; she has awesome surprises. She has her hands behind her back. “There’s this,” she brings one hand around, flipping a baseballsized crystal that bounces a sun ray into my face, “and the other one is up the road.” I’m dazzled by the crystal, dying to find out what’s up the road. Craggy, jagged boulders, tumbled down thousands of years ago. The force of the river has worn them into a spear. The current splits, most of it rushing downstream toward the whitewater nightmare of Tumwater Canyon, the rest breaking left to form a huge eddy where you can toss in a stick and it will ride the edge all the way around and back to where the currents will compete for it—to keep it cycling forever or to send it around the bend. On the river side there’s a several-foot drop to the dark water, which swirls calmly at the edge, though whirlpools gurgle and rage ten feet out. Two tenacious pine trees grip the soil between the boulders. A cable stretches from one to the other and from it hangs a rope swing. A few feet upriver someone has jammed a two-by-eight plank between the rocks to make a diving board. The way to this spot—which will forever after be known as The Swimming Hole—is “up the road,” but it’s also over a cliff and down a half-mile of steep, stumbling trails. Above, the valley yawns, widening into the cotton-striped blue where osprey nests sit atop lightning-split trees like round hats on thin men. Bald Eagles cut the air with calls and glide upward on gusts across the evergreens, riding towards peaks that will always be there. 165

I don’t remember arriving here the first time, but here’s a picture: I sit, towheaded by summer’s blaze, a Mickey Mouse fishing pole in hand, smiling so much I look crazy. Behind me my parents lean against one another, Mom’s loose curls, Dad’s shaggy beard, these marks of youth holding their grins, which are real and easy. I also can’t recall the first winter, but scenes from later ones play in my head. Off one side of the house a short, steep hill gives way onto the wide meadow. When the blustering skies have dumped enough, this becomes a sledding hill. You can climb off the side porch of the house because the snow reaches all the way up to the banister, take a little jump, pull the saucer under you, and zip off with serious momentum—once you’ve made a track. The easiest way to construct one is to ask Dad to run the snowmobile up and down the hill. But one time the cushion of snow is not what it should be, and I slice down on my saucer and slam into the ground at the bottom of the hill like I was dropped from the sky. My backbone jars, and I can hear the squish of teeth sinking into my tongue. I’m on my back and the sky is like summer, swirling clouds in the blue and blood is running down my throat and I’m shocked I’m not crying. Inside mom puts pillows under my head and bustles around, not babying because that’s not her way, but attending to me, checking the wound in my tongue, testing the strain in my back, bringing me cocoa. And dad is watching, kind of smiling. He raises his orange juice in a toast. “Here’s something you won’t be drinking for awhile.” They are happy—not that I’m hurt of course, but that that they’re both here, to shake their heads and bring me things and to feel, together, the relief that I am not fragile. 166

The road winds sharply along a cliff, then plunges again into the woods for a few hundred yards before opening onto the meadow, the house, the barn, the ancient homestead. From this cliff you can see miles of river and hundreds of miles of mountain range. A granite saddle rises from the steep slope, and with a short, cautious scramble, you can stand on top of it and feel like you’ve stepped into the sky, feel a bit like the hawks that hang motionless sometimes at eye level, running their razor eyes down to the river. I’ve been forbidden, of course, to climb “spirit rock” by myself. Mom has fed me on scary Indian myth and threats of punishment, but one afternoon when my Autobots and Decepticons are posed in battle formations in the underbrush, I hear a pop and the echoes that chase it away into nothing, and I find myself hurrying up to the cliff. I may be thinking gun or I may not; if I am, I imagine my curiosity is clashing with my underdeveloped sense. I round the bend without fear. Wavering on the thin tip of spirit rock is one man; another stumbles along the lip of the road. The man on the rock lifts a shotgun, one-handed, squeezes off a shot into the valley, and drops the gun to his side. He whips back his head to pour from a jar into his throat. His companion is trying to aim his assault rifle properly, but by closing one eye and sighting he loses his balance, curses and coughs sharply. I follow his barrel out with my eyes and see the nest, quivering side to side in the breeze at the tip of an evergreen. I must make some sound—a yell, a gasp, a word?—and the man nearest me spins around. His brow is sweaty, his glasses crooked, his eyes half-lidded. Half his mouth grins but half doesn’t. Yellow teeth. “Hey there boy!” he trips toward me, “C’mere!” And I must have the hot dust of summer in my lungs branches whipping my face and the spongy soil of the forest under my bare 167

feet and the snaps and echoes of gunfire behind me because then I’m in the meadow where I’m screaming for my mom. My mother hates four things: guns, hunting, alcohol, and nuclear weapons. She does, in fact, spend the bulk of her time actively lobbying and protesting against these things. I do not remember her raging up the road to scream at the men, but I know she must have, alone. Because, like the drunken hunters, by this time, my father’s presence would rip the peace of this place from her. Back at home, there’s a whole city for them to hurl their pain, the tatters of their marriage out into; up here there’s only some empty acres—and an echo like nowhere else. So my folks let assets fall where they may and let lawyers scramble for fees, both remote within themselves, half-destroyed by the failure of their love and, by implication, the end of their youth. But for me that land is where vague but cherished flashes of childhood rise, images of my folks holding one another against a golden afternoon, strolling out under the moon into the meadow while I pretend to sleep, their words like coins falling on carpet. My father isn’t technically an owner anymore, and though he can go to the land if he desires, he rarely does so out of pride— or perhaps the memories are just too much. For my mother’s part, she stays busy in the city and allows the mountain house to sink under the seduction of gravity, under the negligent eyes of some hard-drinking caretakers and the indifference of the sun and moon. Only I make teenage pilgrimages. I go alone and I bring friends on drug-spun hiatuses from our lives. And though we corrupt the place with our foolishness, the place, in exchange, distills some truth to make our way more clear. I always step from the car eyeing the scene like you might a friend you haven’t seen for many years: trying to ascertain not only the changes wrought by time’s work but also the voids where something is now gone. 168

We’ve taken the long way to the river, walking the road north through the woods, stalling at nice spots to smoke grass. Jeff and I are roommates, stomping toward the point where we know that our backs are covered, that if we went to the wrong party and old grudges flared up we wouldn’t be fighting alone, that we can trust each other with our girlfriends. The girlfriends are half-hearted in their camaraderie because mine is loud and wild, passionate and sometimes mean, beating at the margins of her life. Jeff’s is smart and reserved, sober, soon bound for Brown University and science. The August day is at full bore, my head is ripped by the heat and the beer and the grass and the cacophony of grasshoppers at the edges of the road and the knock knock knock of a woodpecker deep in the pines. At the river where Jeff and his girl settle into shade, my girl drops herself into the river and screams at the chill. I’m drinking some from my hands because it’s good for my head. My girl leads me fifty yards down river, water beading off her, and she falls into the center of the road, raising a cloud of red dust which gets in my mouth, gritty and sour, when I bend down to pull her swimsuit from her. Fucking raises so much dust that the others can’t see us but surely can hear as she screams, bites, curses. Love and hate so tightly woven in her she can’t make the distinction and because of the power she’s taken over me, I’m the same way. And then through the dust I see the horses heaving and hear their whinnies as the riders yank them to a stop, realizing, casting their eyes out to the river, burning in their saddles with more shame than us. We feel enough to rise, laughing, and dash into the water to let the current rock us as the riders ride on, waving our direction but with gazes down on the necks of their steeds. And that night, in the long twilight, at the tip of spirit rock, as a fingernail moon picks at the top of the ridge, I tell her I would someday like for us to marry. I can only say it because of the power 169

of the place, standing on that granite like it’s a different world. And I know that I’m abusing it, but I need it then—I have to pretend, to trick myself into believing that something might be sure and forever and she knows it and feels it too and cries with what is either joy or not. The house has been frozen for so long that we can’t make it comfortable no matter how many logs we shove into the stove. But there aren’t many complaints because there is booze to put false heat in our chests and because we are away from the damp drear of January in the city. Under a sun splintered by cold we drop years from our ages, throwing snowballs and sneaking up to tackle one another with battle whoops into the deep banks of powder, gunning the abused snowmobile on ill-advised loops through the meadow, cursing whoever was driving when all five of us have to dig it out. Down the road a quarter mile is a steep dropoff that in the summer would qualify as a little cliff, but beneath the accumulated snow has become something less. On a drunken ramble down the road Mike follows a whim and leaps from the precipice—and nearly disappears when he breaks the bank below. And we spend hours at this, running, leaping, disappearing, because we are all working at vanishing anyway: goofy, kind Mike into a gang and then jail; loyal, earnest Phil into drink and the navy; loquacious Blake into I know not what; Trav onto the American road, and me into college. Me and Trav will continue this later in the day from a promontory of rock where you don’t even have to jump but can simply lean forward and fall, because we are very literal about our pain—when his brother Chad ended his life about the time of the first snowfall, he had released control, not taken it, Trav believes. And when I saw that cloud move across my best friend Dean’s eyes and he began to talk about the people hunting him, he also had released control 170

and departed, I think. So we stand, close our eyes, and fall, explicitly, because we love and miss—but will not follow—these people who have done the same. In the solid light of a summer afternoon, just before my departure for college, my father and I are driving over the Cascades. We’re playing our way through a collection of rock and roll that we can agree upon (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Randy Newman, some of the Who and the Eagles). We’re headed for an overnight camping venture that I am half-resentful about because I will miss a party. Over the last few years my mother’s revelations about dad’s infidelities, his marriage and divorce to a dreadful woman, and his discovery of my drugs and deception have raked our relationship over the coals. As he turns the Subaru off the highway and onto the rutted road, I think how long it has been since we were here together. The house pulls itself into sight, looking battered and abandoned. I wince, wondering what Dad will feel about it, but he just keeps driving and I keep my mouth shut because he did say “camping” and because I don’t know if I want to go there with him anyway. A few miles down the road he stops at a sandy stretch on the Wenatchee River, the water bulging with the graceful violence of July. That afternoon, wheezing through Marlboro-scarred lungs, I follow my father on a hike. I’m surprised when we come across railroad tracks flashing in the sun and I realize that the trains that loose their mournful horns over the land run through here. Dad used to tell me they were ghost trains when I was a boy sitting on the deck of the house, fishing for spooky tales from my obliging parents. Now my father gives his face to the sun, breathes, and begins talking about his family, our blood. His is a story of alcoholism, war, bigotry, pride. “I wanted to see Chicago burn myself, but your grandfather wouldn’t even show houses in white neighborhoods to black peo171

ple,” he tells me, shaking his head at the recollections. The wedges that split him from his father strike me then as gigantic, enduring, and the rote brand of tension that sprouts between a father and his teenage son, which has come between us, pales in comparison. I find myself asking him about every stitch in the stories he offers, partly because I can see it pleases him to have me ask, and partly because I truly, suddenly, want to know. Most of it is new to me, and most of it I will forget, but I won’t forget this afternoon. That night as crickets and owls take up the cause of the new moon, I get my dad high. He hasn’t smoked in years, and the grass is strong, and I let him take too many tokes. He tries to maintain conversation, but mainly we laugh at the failure. When he retires unsteadily to the tattered yellow tent, I pull out my journal. I have learned a new word today: eulogy. It came up in reference to my grandmother, who died when Dad was young. What I find myself writing that night, as dad’s snores twine with song of the river, I title “A sort of pre-eulogy for Pops.” I leave for college and the land sits mainly abandoned and idle. I return in summer and sometimes complete small tasks: tacking screens shredded by hungry ravens, propping the sagging deck with stumps, and clearing fire pits, left by drunken revelers, that dot the edge of the meadow like lesions. And then in 1998, with what feels like suddenness to me, my mother and stepfather flee the city and move to the land, intending permanence. With tenacity, years, and throngs of laboring friends, they have transformed the place into home, solar electricity whirring through the repainted house, gardens bursting with red leaf lettuce, violet cabbage heads, the spicy spears of arugala. Crippled by an eighty-foot fall from a cliff years before, his children grown and gone, and my mother, his first and true love, unrecoverable, my father flies south in pursuit of change in 2002. The 172

night before he leaves, exhausted by a twelve-hour day of grad school, I rush through a phone call with him, counterbalancing all the worry and warnings he’s heard from others. I tell him to have fun, wish him well in his search for something new. Instead, a bubble rides in his blood, through his ravaged body to his lungs, and he finds death, high in the Andes, at age fifty. Weeks after our father’s passing, I go to the land with my brother. We hike the ridge around the house as we have so many times in the last three years since mom moved to this land. We push upward, through clearings full of tiger lilies, blue bells, lady slippers, mule’s ears, and Indian paintbrush. As my abused lungs complain, I remember how I was going to take my disabled father up this trail in the summer. Even though it would have taken ten or twelve times longer. I remember how I would have packed three meals, sleeping bags, pads, and cheap beer and inched up it at his pace till we sat at the summit, the fatigue in his joints, bones, face, but also the accomplishment there, flashing. When I reach the summit with my brother, we collapse into the grasses and watch snow flurries streak horizontal across the west, watch the spring sun fire away at the cold haze of the valley. I consider seasons, the cycle of life and death, because we are here, sad, tired, but vaguely determined, witnessing the flakes of ice attach themselves to green pine limbs and wildflowers. When we return to the house, we recline on the hood of my truck, listening to spring. A stubborn front moves off the sun and a sparrow rises with a chatter into the icy breeze. I consider that these clouds are my pain and that little bird my faith. Then I consider that maybe, with the cure of time, those clouds will become my faith (huge, substantial, billowing) and that bird will become my pain (small, present, but insignificant against the whole). I think also, there with my little brother, as the day bleeds away, 173

how grief is like life. The same elements are important to endure both—time, family, silence, home. And we wouldn’t be here, on this truck’s hood, digging these surroundings and sensations in body and soul, if my father were still alive. We wouldn’t be just lying here. Grieving and living. When our mother arrives, she is giddy over her return from the city and bursts in, all joy. Coming home—now that this is home —always occasions celebration for her. People had predicted she would be dissatisfied, stir-crazy, constantly sliding over the treacherous pass, creating reasons to return to Seattle as my Buddhist stepfather, David, was finding his niche in the tranquility and space. As it turned out, everyone had it wrong. David is the one leaving almost weekly for this or that. The escape that my mother enjoys by way of coming home is almost enough to make her momentarily forget the open wound of my father’s death, which has torn her far more, I know, than anyone would have suspected. My brother and I are glad to see her and glad to see her spirits high. After the last few months, the spectacle of her, light and relieved, dumping sacks of groceries and chatting, is welcome. But we can’t match her mood. The way the late-spring sun gilds the late-spring green in this place defies words. So, in silence, we march down the machete-cut path toward the river the next afternoon, wanting to hurry, to get this over with, but also wanting to do this with the patience that attends respect. We don’t speak. My mother plucks the big yellow mule’s ear wildflowers as we go. At the swimming hole where the river’s tenacious current breaks around us, into the fierce, circling eddy on one side and downstream on the other, we perch on the last rock. My brother lets us absorb sunlight and wind for a few minutes before he produces the mason jar full of the gravely ash. He and I pour handfuls for each other and cast them out, to fall through and fly with the 174

dark water. We are careful to toss them into the current breaking downstream and not the eddy, because, after all, this is a ceremony of letting go, setting free. Our mother does not handle any ashes, but she dips the mule’s ears in the jar, the lightest sediment clinging to the soft damp of the petals. In silence, she drops them in the river, one by one. They bob and turn for a hundred yards before vanishing around the sandstone bend below spirit rock.

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In the American Lives series Fault Line by Laurie Alberts Pieces from Life’s Crazy Quilt by Marvin V. Arnett Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Illness by Charles Barber Out of Joint: A Private & Public Story of Arthritis by Mary Felstiner Falling Room by Eli Hastings Hannah and the Mountain: Notes toward a Wilderness Fatherhood by Jonathan Johnson Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps by Ted Kooser Turning Bones by Lee Martin Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed by Mimi Schwartz The Fortune Teller’s Kiss by Brenda Serotte

Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard by Fan Shen Scraping By in the Big Eighties by Natalia Rachel Singer In the Shadow of Memory by Floyd Skloot Secret Frequencies: A New York Education by John Skoyles Phantom Limb by Janet Sternburg