This River

by James Brown

  “Dream on.”

  “Twenty bucks says I’m right.”

  “I hate to take your money,” he says, “but if you insist.”

  We step up in line. The guard at the door is just a kid, eighteen or so, wearing nothing more official than a T-shirt that reads “Security” across the chest. He looks through the plastic basket Orlando passes him and plucks out a silver penknife.

  “You can’t go in with this.”

  “It’s a just a penknife.”

  “A knife is a knife,” the kid says. “No knives allowed.”

  The blade can’t be more than a couple of inches, and it really isn’t good for much other than splitting envelopes or paring fingernails. That Orlando does not in any way, shape, or form fit the profile of a man prone to stab another, even in self-defense, apparently makes no difference to this kid. A Yale graduate dressed in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, khaki pants, and loafers, Orlando resembles an average yuppie.

  “Make up your mind,” the guard says, “or get out of line. You’re holding everybody up.”

  There’s a cardboard box at the kid’s feet, and in it are a dozen or so other knives, mostly small ones, some looking expensive. Orlando stares down at them and shakes his head. I can tell he’s having second thoughts, and I can understand, because this knife once belonged to his father, who has since passed on. Parting with it is not a good idea.

  “We could walk back to the car,” I say, “drop it off and get in line again.”

  Orlando glances behind him. The column of people stretches down a long set of stairs to the sidewalk and all the way around the block. He turns and looks at the kid again.

  “I get it back, right? You’ll be here when the fight’s over?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he says. “That’s my job.”

  His tone of voice does little to inspire our confidence, but Orlando nonetheless relinquishes the knife, and we step through the metal detector. There another guard frisks us, for what I’m not sure, alcohol or drugs maybe, or some other sort of weapon. This is after all Riverside, California, the good neighbor of San Bernardino with the seventeenth highest violent crime rate in the nation. Both are desert communities residing outside the Los Angeles County line, more suburban sprawl than actual city, and each has its own vibrant, thriving nightlife of prostitutes, addicts, and homeless.

  The auditorium was built in an earlier, more prosperous era that placed greater value on intricate designs, cornices and sweeping archways, pillars and stained glass. Inside, it holds twothousand, and with fold-out chairs set up in the aisles they can squeeze in another couple of hundred or so. It’s a sold-out crowd, and already the place is filling up, but we’ve arrived early enough to secure decent seats about a dozen rows back from the big screen. The audience is nearly all men, many heavily tattooed and sporting shaved heads, while others for the most part wear cowboy hats and cowboy boots, blue jeans and silver belt buckles. The heavy smells of various colognes and aftershave fill the air. Combined, they’re enough to turn my stomach.

  We settle into our seats. For a while neither of us speaks. I’m busy taking in the surroundings, but Orlando, he’s simply depressed.

  “Hey,” I say, “cheer up.”

  “What for?”

  “Because he’s not worth it.”

  “We were together six years. It’s not like I can just forget him overnight.”

  They may have been seeing each other for six years, but they never took that next step of living together, which always struck me as odd, given that they loved each other. I know Orlando loved him. Still, they called each other every day, and two or three times a month, Orlando, who lives in Riverside, drove the eighty miles into Hollywood to visit him, have dinner and hit a movie, stay the night or two. Then just last week he drops by unexpectedly and finds a realtor’s “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. This man he loves is getting ready to move back to New York and doesn’t even bother to tell him. And it angers me. By attempting to avoid a painful confrontation, David is inadvertently choosing to inflict greater injury on my friend.

  “Fuck him,” I say. “It’s his loss.”

  Orlando’s employs a typical diversion tactic.

  “Last chance,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “To change your mind about the fight. I really don’t want to set you back.”

  The auditorium lights dim. Cheers go up. People shout. People clap and yell and whistle. Boxing fans are generally a rowdy group, and the rowdiness grows in direct proportion to the caliber of the fight and the fighters. The stakes are high for Chavez, El Gran Campeón Mexicano, considered the greatest boxer in the history of his country, putting his world welterweight title on the line against Oscar De La Hoya, the rising young star and Olympic gold medalist, one of the best of his generation, and at twenty-three already at the top of his game.

  In the pre-fight images flashed onto the screen, De La Hoya assumes the classic stance, one fist to his chin, the other cocked at his side. The American flag waves in the background, rippling as it would in a strong wind, and I’m suddenly caught off guard. Two thousand voices boo and curse, drowning out the opening chords of our National Anthem, and moments later, when Chavez appears with the Mexican flag, the same crowd explodes into cheers.

  I lean toward Orlando.

  “The bet’s off,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been reborn. As of this moment I’m officially a De La Hoya fan.”

  Orlando gives me his trademark chuckle, the kind that suggests he understands something I don’t.

  “C’mon,” he says, “what do you expect? They’re Mexicans. Mexican-Mexicans from Mexico. It’s not like they feel wanted here. Besides, who’s going to do your dirty work? Mow your lawn? Bus your dishes? Give them a break. They just want a little piece of the American Pie.”

  He’s right, I think, though I’m not about to admit it. As friends, it’s best to keep the banter alive, especially on a night when Orlando is hurting. After all, we’re here to enjoy ourselves, if only for so long as it takes two talented, highly skilled men to beat the living hell out of each other. The odds favor Chavez.

  In over ninety bouts he’s only lost once, but at thirty-five he is also at the ebb of his prime. De La Hoya, on the other hand, has just come into his own, so far undefeated with twenty-one wins, most of those knockouts. In one corner stands Chavez, representing the school of hard knocks with a nose made flat from being broken so many times, and eyes, like a pit bull’s, set wide across the skull. In the other corner stands De La Hoya, symbolizing a comparatively easier, softer life with the handsome, unmarked face of youth and privilege. For the overwhelming majority here, the measure of a man’s character will be judged by his scars and bruises. They want blood tonight. They want broken bones. They want to see that pretty boy’s face all messed up.

  Chavez is the man to do it, and when he steps into the ring wearing a headband with the green, white, and red stripes of the Mexican flag, the audience breaks into cheers again. De La Hoya makes his grand entrance to boos and jeers.

  For the first few seconds, they circle the ring, each feeling the other out, their eyes locked. The Golden Boy is keenly aware of Chavez’s power, particularly his left hook, probably the most devastating punch in his arsenal, one that’s dropped many men, and initially De La Hoya keeps a safe distance between them. It even seems as if he might be a little scared, but that isn’t the case, not at all, and while still in the early seconds of the fight, as the audience chants for its countryman, the Golden Boy lands a tremendous blow in the form of a straight jab. It splits Chavez’s forehead, opening a deep cut just above the left eyebrow, and I can feel it, actually feel it, all the hope and excitement draining from the crowd. The entire auditorium falls silent. It’s as if everyone is in a state of shock, unable to process what they’ve just witnessed. That it could possibly end this way. So soon, so suddenly, with a single punch.

  This is not how a legend should go out, a bl
oody mess, but it doesn’t get any better. De La Hoya, with his longer reach, continues to jab and move, and over the course of the next few rounds, he has Chavez bleeding from the nose and mouth. Finally, in the fourth, nearing the bell, the referee steps between them and wisely calls the fight. Slowly at first, and then more loudly, a rumbling passes through the crowd. Again I feel it, the energy around me, only this time, instead of shock and despair, it’s all about anger. Someone behind us throws an empty pint bottle at the screen. Another in the front rows jumps up on his seat and starts screaming in Spanish. Hundreds of others soon join him, shouting and waving their fists in the air.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Orlando says, and we do, pushing through the crowd, working our way toward the lobby doors. The closer we get the more people press up against us. We’re barely moving, and it’s hard to breathe, squeezed in by all the bodies, their heat and odors, cologne and aftershave. For us to stay together through this mess is a real struggle, but eventually we make it past the front doors and into the cool night air. Unfortunately the guard, the one who confiscated Orlando’s knife, is nowhere to be found.

  For five, maybe ten minutes we stand to the side, watching people push and shove their way out the doors, and when the procession begins to dwindle, we walk around the building. We’re hoping to find another box office, maybe, or a security booth, something or someone who can help us out, but we come up empty-handed. Even the side exits are chained, and you can hear them, the people still inside, shouting and pushing against the doors. “Hell with it,” Orlando says. “I’ll never see that knife again.” On our way to the parking lot we hear sirens, at first faint but quickly growing louder, and sure enough, as we’re pulling out in Orlando’s car, heading up the street, the police cruisers begin pulling in.

  On the 91, traveling in the fast lane, I look over at Orlando. He’s staring straight ahead. His lips are pursed, and I sense that his anger has given way again to depression.

  I tell him he’s better off without this guy.

  I tell him it’ll take some time, yes, but he’ll pull through. He managed just fine before on his own and he’ll manage just fine again.

  “You’re a wonderful man,” I say, “and someday somebody will come along and realize just how much you have to offer.”

  At Orlando’s house, I retrieve my car parked in the driveway. We hug before I slip behind the wheel. “Call me, okay,” I say. “I don’t care what time it is, just call.” But I know he won’t. He tends to isolate when he’s troubled, and I worry these next few months will be his toughest.

  In the paper the next morning, I read that a riot broke out after we left the auditorium and that a couple of men were stabbed. I have no idea how anyone snuck in a knife, but when we watch De La Hoya fight again, around this same time the following year, it’s in the comfort of Orlando’s living room on pay-per-view TV. This fight is against a black guy, and we watch him head down the aisle toward the ring, the crowd booing and jeering while James Brown’s “Living in America” blasts in the background. De La Hoya comes next. The fans cheer and whistle as he climbs into the ring wearing a sombrero and a silk robe with the green, white, and red stripes of the Mexican flag. He’s accompanied by a troop of mariachis blowing on big brass trumpets and strumming acoustical guitars. Orlando smiles at me, and I return it.

  “Who do you want?” I say.

  “The Chicano, of course.”

  “Because he’s Chicano?”

  “Yeah, because he’s Chicano. Somewhere in-between, like me, not totally Mexican-Mexican and not totally American, either.”

  “You’re as American-American as they come,” I say, “and so am I.” And because I’m less forgiving of De La Hoya’s opportunism, I defect for the occasion from Orlando’s camp of ethnic loyalties. “I’m going with the black dude,” I say. Orlando just shrugs, and I wonder, if his skin was white and mine was brown, if I’d define myself as he does now.

  At this point in time, he has made something of a recovery from David, but now and then I still ask about him. A few months earlier, on Orlando’s 50th birthday, David sent a card and instead of “love” at the end, before signing his name, he wrote “fondly.” We laughed about it, but I could see it in his eyes, that it still hurt. That he hadn’t quit caring.

  “Hear any more from David?”

  “David who?” he says, smiling. Then he adds, “Yeah, he called from New York a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t answer it. It’s over, man. It was over a year before he left and I just couldn’t see it.”

  I look back at the TV. De La Hoya sheds his robe. Seconds later the bell sounds, and they come out of their corners. They circle each other in the middle of the ring, and we watch. We watch and we joke and we talk, if only for so long as it takes two talented, highly skilled men to beat the living hell out of each other. Orlando and I, both the sons of carpenters, we are like brothers, and though we may disagree, for me there is no clash of cultures in this age-old fight tonight, no great divide. Nothing, really, so genuine as the cold hard cash that flows from the masquerade.

  OUR JAPAN

  It’s Yukio’s day to appear before the University Grade Grievance Committee. Just a few units shy of graduating, and planning to walk in June, he’s failed the third and last class in a series of American Literature courses required of all English majors. The odds of a student prevailing in a grade dispute are slim at best, and most of them know better than to challenge their professors. But Yukio’s in a fix. Under ordinary circumstances, he could simply retake the failed class, but this particular one is only offered once a year and that’s where he runs into trouble. With his visa about to expire, and having already requested and received an earlier extension from the INS, we represent Yukio’s last hope of graduating before he’s expelled from the country.

  For Yukio, it’s a formal affair, and he brings to the meeting a certain air of deference for the committee. But he is poor and the sleeves of his dress coat fall noticeably short of his wrists. His slacks pinch at the knees and the cuffs are slightly frayed and worn. It’s an old suit, maybe one picked from the racks of a thrift store, but the bright red tie is new, and it’s carefully knotted. His English is at times broken. It would be a disservice to Yukio if I were to try and replicate it here.

  “I can’t go back to Japan,” he tells us, “without my degree.”

  We’re gathered in a cluster at the conference table with Yukio seated alone at the opposite end. There are six of us on the committee, all tenured professors from various disciplines of the school, secure in our jobs and relaxed about it. For the occasion we wear our usual, most of us choosing Levis over slacks, Nikes over dress shoes, with our button-down shirts loose and open at the throat. I can see that Yukio doesn’t appreciate our informality, but we’ve been through so many of these meetings. We’ve heard it all. Every excuse. Every rationale. In this case, Yukio is asking for one of two things: either the professor of the class he flunked allows him to retake the written final for the chance of a passing grade or we, the committee, could approve a substitute course roughly equivalent in content to the one in question. He could repeat the class next quarter. He promises to work harder.

  “All I need,” he tells us, “is another chance.”

  When he’s finished pleading his case, we ask him to leave the room so we can talk freely among ourselves, and it isn’t long afterward that we reach our decision: allowing Yukio to retake the final exam would be unfair to those better prepared, more responsible students who passed it. And in regard to the second alternative, we decide that in waiving the course requirements for one student, we risk setting a precedent that may later come to haunt us.

  We call him back into the room.

  Arms to his sides, carriage erect, Yukio assumes the formal stance of a soldier at attention.

  “We empathize with your situation,” the chair of the committee tells him, “but had you planned your schedule more carefully, or taken your studies a little more seriously, you would
n’t be in this predicament. The committee hopes that you’ll reapply and receive an additional extension on your visa.”

  Yukio takes the committee’s decision surprisingly well, on the surface, anyway, thanking each of us individually for the time and attention we paid his concerns, then shaking our hands before he departs, quietly shutting the door behind him. Our next pressing order of business is whether to go Thai or Mexican for lunch and we spend about as much time making up our minds as we do in determining Yukio’s fate. I’m not proud of it, either, and I have since come to see matters differently: how the cruelty of our disregard that afternoon wounded an already dangerously weakened man.

  It’s the week before Easter and the end of the academic term, and later that evening, after I’ve turned in my grade rosters for the quarter, I drive to the parking lot of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s station. My wife and I are in the process of divorcing, and this is our mutually agreed upon neutral pickup and drop-off site for the children, halfway between my old house and the cramped cottage I’ve been renting for the last nine months with my fiancée Paula, a former student with whom I’d had an affair and fallen in love.

  As usual, my wife is late. She is late often, too often for it not to be deliberate, but I know better than to complain. Anything I say that might even remotely be construed as critical will spark a confrontation, and I just don’t have the heart for it anymore, the fighting, the arguing. So I light a cigarette. I settle in for the wait, and ten or fifteen minutes later she pulls into the parking lot in her SUV.

  Andy sits in the front passenger seat. He’s wearing headphones, probably listening to rap. At fourteen he’s full of rage and anguish and he’d rather drown it out with music than confront his pain. So he pulls away, safe, if only momentarily, from the adult world of deceit and failure. In the back Nate is strapped into one of those ridiculously bulky safety seats with enough buckles and latches and snaps to restrain a full-grown psychotic. He’s just turned three, and beside him is our middle son, Logan, going on eight. I’m glad to see them. I’m glad to have them every weekend of the month.