Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  Lay Your Sleeping Head

  A Henry Rios Mystery

  Michael Nava

  Foreword by Michael Hames-García, Ph.D.

  Copyright © 2016 Michael Nava

  All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced, performed, recorded, copied or otherwise transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author or publisher except for small excerpts for educational or journalistic purposes.

  The poems quoted in this novel are used with the permission of Joan Larkin. My deepest thanks to her. They are: “The Offering,” “My Body,” and “Breathing You In” from the collection My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007).

  The quotations attributed to Grover Linden’s memoirs are taken from Andrew Carnegie’s book, The Gospel of Wealth, now out of copyright.

  Author photograph: David Quintanilla

  Cover Design: Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano

  Ebook Layout: Dino Foxx

  Published by Kórima Press

  San Francisco, CA

  www.korimapress.com

  A version of this novel was previously published as

  The Little Death

  for Bill

  Contents

  Foreword

  Lay Your Sleeping Head

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About Michael Nava

  Foreword

  Lay Your Sleeping Head is not The Little Death. The Little Death is a good read and a promising first novel. Lay Your Sleeping Head is something most novelists spend a lifetime trying to produce. Selfishly, I’m glad that Michael Nava waited to revisit and rewrite his first novel, because it means I get to read Lay Your Sleeping Head for the first time now. I was in my early twenties when I first heard about Nava’s work. I’m now in middle age, partially disabled, more familiar with addiction and illness than anyone should be, and far better prepared to appreciate the imperfect humanness of Nava’s characters. I’m tempted to read Lay Your Sleeping Head in the ways that I approached Nava’s work ten or twenty years ago: as a novel about identity, about race, gender, class, disability, and sexuality. As I read the manuscript, though, I begin to see that its core is concerned with something else. Fundamentally, what Nava has gives us in these pages is a forceful meditation on inequality and the value of those lives society considers disposable. It doesn’t seem right to call Lay Your Sleeping Head “gay fiction” (despite some excellent sex scenes that weren’t in the original) or even “detective fiction” (despite a thrilling legal mystery). As a contribution to American letters, this new novel puts me in mind of books like Ann Petry’s The Street, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

  In some ways, it remains a novel of the 1980s. In other, more important, ways, it is a novel of now, with much to say about the meth epidemic in the gay community, and more unexpectedly perhaps, about the police state that the United States has become in the decades since Reagan’s presidency. The spirit of justice that motivates protagonist Henry Rios to take on the system like a queer, brown Bernie Sanders is the spirit that understands how this system is rigged against his clients, especially those whom Chicana feminist Gloria Anzladúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza calls “los atrevesados”: “the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the halfdead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal.’” Nava’s protagonist, Henry Rios, more prosaic than Anzaldúa, might simply call them the marginalized or the downtrodden.

  As I write this foreword, the U.S. political establishment is touting the fact that unemployment rate is around five percent, roughly the same as in Britain and down significantly from its peak of 10% in 2010. Yet, the Bureau of Labor Statistics website tells us that the percentage of those between the ages of 16 and 64 in the United States who are “not in the labor force” is 30%, which is twice that of Britain. These are not people who are underemployed, retired, working part time, or looking for work. They are jobless and not seeking jobs. If you add the unemployed to this number, you have just over a third of the nation’s labor force not working. Yet the economy is growing, and those of us who benefit enjoy organic donuts that practically melt on one’s tongue. We wash them down with seasonal craft beers on tap. We “share” the experience with friends across the globe using a cellphone app whose algorithms give it all more critical analysis than we do. But there are shantytowns everywhere today. Our city planners keep them just out of sight so that we don’t get indigestion after our donuts and beer. But we know they are there, waiting for us if we fall through the cracks. In addition to the fear, there is anger in the air today. Confrontations between far left and far right youth turn bloody on the streets of Chicago and Sacramento. The police reveal Klan robes under their body armor in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Oakland. So-called “mass shootings” take place on a daily basis across the nation, taking the lives of school children, dancers, and moviegoers.

  It is often at moments of extreme inequality and urgent crisis that the noir genre gains in popularity. Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon in 1929 at the dawn of The Great Depression, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown premiered in 1974 at the height of a global recession. I thus find now an appropriate time to revisit Nava’s Henry Rios novels. Noir protagonists often operate outside of and antagonistically toward the official array of police, courts, and prisons. This positioning helps them see that “the system” is mostly set up to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful. So our noir heroes and heroines do what the police won’t: they confront the criminal cartels, the vast conspiracies, and the unofficial networks that hold the lives of the powerless to be without value. By the very nature of this confrontation, they rarely succeed in bringing the system to its knees. They and their fans must find solace in what partial justice their perseverance enables them to achieve.

  The best noir endings thus nearly always leave me feeling melancholy. When grinding inequality and conspiracies of the powerful seem insurmountable, however, witnessing the integrity and commitment to justice of a man like Henry Rios reminds me that I am not alone. I take comfort in knowing that he starts out as a drunk who has never had a romantic relationship. I couldn’t stand to have Superman rescue me. He’s too good, too clean, too perfect. I need a hero as fucked up as I am. I know Henry wouldn’t judge me or pity me. Maybe he could even love me. And it’s inspiring to think that even someone as broken and fucked up as Henry can consistently stand up for what he knows is right. To hint at a moment of poignancy in Lay Your Sleeping Head, sometimes all we have is footnote four of United States v. Carolene Products. In other words, sometimes, when winning seems out of reach, all we have is our ability to resist injustice and the conviction that we do not struggle alone.

  Michael Hames-García, Ph.D.

  Eugene, Oregon

  Lay

  Your

  Sleeping

  Head

  Lay your sleeping head, my love,

  Human on my faithless arm;

  Time and fevers burn away

  Individual beauty from

  Thoughtful children, and the grave

  Proves the child ephemeral:

  But in my arms till break of day

  Let the living creature lie,

  Mortal, guilty, but to me

  The entirely beautiful.

  W.H. Auden

  Lullaby

  The man who dies rich dies disgraced.

  Andrew Carnegie

  ONE

  I stood in the sally port until the steel door lurched back with a clang and then stepped into the jail. A sign ordered prisoners to proceed no further; an emphatic
STOP was scrawled beneath the printed message. I looked up at the mirror above the sign where I saw a slender, olive-skinned, dark-haired man in a wrinkled seersucker suit. I adjusted the knot in my tie. A television camera recorded the gesture in the booking room where a bank of screens monitored every quarter of the jail.

  It was six-thirty a.m., but in the windowless labyrinth of cells and offices in the basement of Linden’s City Hall, perpetually lit with buzzing fluorescent lights, it could have been midnight. Only mealtimes and the change of guards communicated the passage of time to the inmates. I had often thought the hardest part of doing time was that time stood still; serving a sentence must feel like scaling a mountain made of glass.

  I stepped out of the way of a trustie who raced by carrying trays of food. Breakfast that morning, the first Monday of June, 1982, was oatmeal, canned fruit cocktail, toast, milk, and Sanka—inmates were not allowed caffeine because it was a stimulant. Ironic considering the other stimulants that made their way into the jail; you could get almost any drug here. Jones stepped into the hall from the kitchen and acknowledged me with an abrupt nod. He had done his hair up in cornrows and his apron was splattered with oatmeal. On the outside, Jones was a short-order cook and a low level drug dealer. I’d represented him after his last bust. In exchange for snitching on some higher ups, I got him a plea, a reduced sentence, and a guarantee he could serve it in county jail instead of state prison where his life expectancy would have been about that of a soap bubble. Unlike the prisons, the jail population was either transient or made up of inmates serving short sentences for relatively minor offenses. The deputy sheriffs who ran the place weren’t as tightly wound as prison guards and you didn’t see inmates sleeping in the halls or six to a cell because of overcrowding. Jail was easy time compared to the hard time at places like Folsom or San Quentin and a lot safer for a snitch like Jones. Still, county had the familiar institutional stink of all places of incarceration, a complex odor of ammonia, unwashed bodies, latrines, dirty linen, and cigarette smoke compounded by bad ventilation and mingled with a sexual musk, a distinctive genital smell. The walls were painted in listless pastels, faded greens, and washed-out blues like a depressed child’s coloring book, and were grimy and scuffed. The linoleum floor, however, was spotless. The trusties mopped it at all hours of the day and night. Busy work, I suppose.

  Everyone in the Public Defender’s office had to take the jail rotation. Unlike my colleagues, I didn’t mind it. If, as my law school teachers had insisted, the law was a temple, it was a temple built on human misery and jails were the cornerstones. It was salutary to have to encounter the misery on a regular basis because otherwise it became too easy to believe that trials were a contest between lawyers to see who was the craftiest. It was good to be reminded that when I lost a case someone paid a price beyond my wounded pride. Not that I was in particular need of that memo at the moment.

  A few months earlier, I’d lost a death penalty case where, rara avis, my client was innocent. Not generally innocent, of course—he had been in an out of juvie hall, jails, and prison since he was 15—but innocent of the murder charge. After the jury returned its guilty verdict, I snapped. When the judge asked the usual, “Would you like to have the jury polled, Mr. Rios?” I jumped to my feet and shouted, “This isn’t a jury, it’s a lynch mob.” He warned me, “Sit down, counsel, or I’ll find you in contempt.” I unloaded on him. “You could never hold me in more contempt than I hold you, you reactionary hack. You’ve been biased against my client from day one . . .” I continued in that vein until the bailiff dragged me out of the courtroom and into the holding cell. Eventually, I was released, lectured, held in contempt, fined a thousand dollars, and relieved as my client’s lawyer. When word got around the criminal defense bar about my rampage, I received congratulatory calls but not from my boss, the Public Defender himself.

  A death penalty trial is really two trials, the guilt phase where the jury decides whether the defendant committed the charged murder, and the penalty phase where the same jury decides whether to sentence him to death or life without parole. My outburst came at the end of the guilt phase. This meant another deputy public defender would have to be appointed to the case, get up to speed, and argue for my client’s life in front of the same jury I’d called a lynch mob.

  “I should just fucking fire you,” Mike Burton told me, savagely rubbing his temples. The PD was a big man, an ex-cop in fact who had his own awakening about the criminal law system after he watched his partner beat a confession out of a suspect in the days before Miranda. “The only reason I’m not is that if Eloy does get death, at least you’ve handed us grounds for appeal.” He glared at me. “Ineffective assistance of counsel.”

  I squinted at him, my head throbbing with a hangover headache. “What do you want me to say, Mike? I screwed up.”

  “You’ve been ten years on the job, Henry, and you’re a damn good lawyer. What the fuck, kid?”

  I shrugged like a surly teenager. “Eloy’s innocent. The jury didn’t care, they wanted blood. It got to me.”

  “It gets to me every fucking day of every fucking week,” he snapped. “But when I want to go off on someone, I remind myself, oh, yeah, it’s not about me. It’s about the client, first, last, and always. That’s the golden fucking rule around here and you broke it. You got some hard thinking to do, too, my friend. You can do it in Linden. I’m transferring you.”

  Linden. A sleepy suburb thirty minutes south of San Francisco that owed its existence to the great university of the same name where I’d been both an undergrad and a law student. I still lived in the town, in the same apartment I’d moved into when I was studying for the bar exam. I’d worked briefly at the PD’s Linden office while waiting for the bar results, but as soon as I passed I had transferred to the main office in San Jose where the action was. The big cases, the best lawyers. Linden was the PD’s Siberia, where errant lawyers were exiled and broken down veterans put out to pasture. Not exactly the homecoming I had had in mind when I’d set out ten years earlier to change the hard heart of the world.

  I’d been at the Linden office for ten months and, as ordered, I’d done a lot of thinking. My courtroom outburst had been the culmination of years of frustration with the criminal law system of justice but that was only part of it. The other part? That had come out of some deeper place, an empty place where my life should have been. I was a lawyer and, like Mike said, a good one. I gave a hundred and ten percent to my clients. For a long time, that was enough to keep me out of my head. At some point, though, after I turned thirty, the disturbing feelings and intrusive memories I had avoided since I’d left home for college had begun to emerge in my mind like bloated corpses rising to the surface of a lake. Flashes of anger, moments of heart-pounding anxiety, a loneliness that clawed at my chest accompanied memories of my raging father, of a childhood that felt like imprisonment and of the boy whose friendship tortured me because I wanted to be more than his friend. These things tugged at me constantly, demanding some kind of resolution. I thought I had long since resolved them when I left home and came out as a gay man. I had no other answers except to work harder and drink more but they would not be silenced by work or drowned by alcohol. I had reached a point of quiet but persistent desperation. Something in my life had to change, that much I knew, but I didn’t know what or how or where it would come from. In the meantime, I sucked it up and went about my daily routines.

  My jailhouse office was a small room with gray walls tucked away at the end of a corridor, furnished with a prison table and chairs. I picked up the arrest reports and booking sheets from the previous night. Vagrants, drunk drivers, bar fights—Linden was not Al Capone’s Chicago. The only potential felony was an auto burglary. The two suspects had been caught breaking into cars in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant on El Camino, the town’s main drag. They were Chicanos in their early twenties with just enough by way of rap sheets to appeal to a judge’s hanging instinct. I gathered the papers together an
d went into the booking office where Deputy Novack was reading the sports page from the San Francisco Chronicle.

  “Good morning, Henry,” he drawled. Novack was pale, pudgy, and baby-faced. Recently, he’d grown a wispy little moustache that floated apologetically above a mouth set in a perpetual smirk. He treated me with the same lazy contempt with which he treated all civilians, not holding the fact that I was a lawyer against me. This made us almost friends.

  “Deputy,” I replied. “What’s the good word?”

  “We had ourselves a little bit of excitement here last night,” he said, folding his paper. “Los Altos brought in a drunk—that’s what they thought he was, anyway—and it took three of us to subdue him.”

  “What was he on?”

  “Found a couple of sherms on him when we finally got him stripped and housed, so I’m guessing PCP.”

  “I didn’t see an arrest report for him.”

  “We couldn’t book him until he came down enough to talk.”

  “Where’s he at now?”

  “In the queens’ tank. Guy’s a fag.”

  I bridled but said neutrally, “Been ten years since the Legislature repealed the sodomy law.”

  “Yeah, and now the buttfuckers parade down Market Street,” he said. He handed me the arrest and booking reports. “Here’s the guy’s paperwork.”

  The suspect’s name was Hugh Paris; five-foot eight, blond hair, blue eyes, 26 years old. New York license. He declined to give a local address or answer questions about his employment or his family. No rap sheet. I studied his booking photo. His hair was like a coxcomb, his eyes were dazed, and he was ghostly white. Blond, white boys are not my usual type but Hugh Paris was beautiful. I closed the file before Novack could notice how intently I was looking at the photo.