Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  One hot day in late July, with temperatures soaring to well over 100, Michael’s efforts bore fruit. He was invited in for interviews at Sears and an airport food service company. This was the moment we had been waiting for, but it was, for me, the most terrifying. I don’t know if the moment was as fraught for Michael, but I was very anxious about how he could make the case that he ought to be hired—despite having been imprisoned for eleven years since age fifteen for attempted carjacking.

  Michael was going to have to tell his story. In full. He had been in prison too long to try to hide that he’d been convicted, not merely of a serious crime but of the kind of crime that had sent Los Angeles in the early 1990s into paroxysms of fear. He would have to explain why he believed he was ready to put his life on a new footing. We practiced bits and pieces of his story, but never the whole thing. I never once heard Michael recount his own tale from start to finish, in any version. In hindsight, I think this was because the necessarily abbreviated versions that he was practicing telling his new world would have led me to ask questions. These Michael did not want to deal with.

  Only much later would I learn that not even his sister Roslyn, whom we all took to be his truest confidante, was privy to his secrets. Michael had so much constantly to give—stories, reflection, and engagement—that somehow none of us ever noticed just how much he was also withholding, especially by the end. He was a compulsive talker. When he was young, he was a motormouth but with a stammer. We never noticed what the floods of words were obscuring. He could love everybody on the terms on which they needed to be loved; give everybody what they needed to receive, and so, in the end, none of us knew him and, only now, I realize that neither did he know himself.

  Michael and I practiced parts of the story. We talked especially about his success as a firefighter and his love of that work. He donned his new khaki trousers and a button-down shirt, and we headed to Hollywood, to Santa Monica and Western, to a Sears. If you folded a map of L.A. in half, north to south, using the 10 Freeway for the crease, Michael’s mother’s house in South Central and that Sears, now long since shuttered, would have squarely kissed. It felt like the perfect chance.

  5.

  JOB, July 2006

  Upstairs in the Sears personnel department, everything was beige but brightly lit; the baseboards and linoleum floor tiles were well scuffed. The people who greeted us were kind. I sat on one of a row of metal chairs against the wall and waited while Michael, dressed in his khakis, had his interview down the hall in a closed office. I did a lot of waiting during these days. I had a lot of time to think, but I never thought about why I was there. That was never a question. This was my baby cousin, my almost age mate, the youngest of five of us, my brother and I, and our three cousins, staggered like porch steps, each about eighteen months younger than the previous one. We enjoyed being a subset of close cousins within an extended family of cousins who numbered in the dozens. For the five of us, I was the oldest, always the one in charge. I’d been there a few years earlier, too, dragging Michael’s older brother, Nicholas, dark-skinned, often somber, through community college. And when I waited, I usually spent my time thinking about my task lists, about what had to be done next. Forty-five long minutes after this particular wait, the door opened and I learned that the managers had offered Michael a job as an inventory clerk.

  Relief does not begin to describe it. Time started. That’s just what it was like. Now there was a future with stories, possibly even happy endings, suddenly flooding my imagination. Immediately, it seemed okay to think about a day further out than tomorrow. I restrained myself from any actual fantasies, but I now relished the teasing tickle at the edges of my mind from a new dawn. This, I believe, is the most dangerous turn in a journey of this kind, the moment where you begin to hope for real. There is never a reason to let down one’s guard. Never. And maintaining such a heightened level of self-discipline, warding off all expectation that something might get easier, is beyond the capacity of most of us. I am speaking for myself here, but I think it was true for Michael, too.

  Despite the good news, we stuck to our plan and headed out to LAX so that Michael could have his second interview. We were a team, a duo—Wonder Twin Powers, activate! That we were a team was partly because we were cousins, inextricably close from growing up together, but also because I was the closest family member (in the family-tree sense of “close”) with the flexibility and means required to be a steady and consistent presence. There was no one else. Someone’s always gotta be the safety net, and it was my at bat.

  The drive to LAX is blissful. You can feel the air change as you get closer to the beach. Leaving South Central and riding the bus down Venice Boulevard from just north of the 10, through Mid-City and Culver City, would become one of Michael’s favorite things to do in just a few months’ time. We’d all loved bodysurfing in the frigid Pacific when we were kids—always best when the surf from some storm at sea brought in bigger waves. Inevitably, we’d defrost by burying each other in the hot sand before snacking on Oreos, grapes, and potato chips, and then throwing Nerf footballs around. We’d get so hot again that we’d have to plunge back into the ocean. I think this ride out to LAX was Michael’s first beachward trip since he’d come home. Even with the visual field distortions and fumes of jet-fueled liftoffs, you can still sense the sea as you get close to the airport, cross the 405, and the air dampens. This time we drove into the back side of the airport, where the hangars and offices and support services are, and Michael interviewed for a second job, preparing food for airplanes at LAX.

  He got that one, too. The hiring manager told him, “I want to hire you. I like your smile.” Yes, Michael’s beautiful smile. Always the first thing everyone noticed. Not that they immediately noticed that with his high cheekbones, teak skin, wide grin, and lithe frame, he was beautiful, which he was; but they were instantly drawn to him as to the sun. He was a source of vitality and warmth.

  6.

  INVESTIGATION, July 2009

  The Saturday morning after Michael’s body was discovered, and just after Karen herself had gotten the call about Michael’s body from the police, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s car was parked outside her house. It was still the early dawn. A dread-filled Roslyn, having grabbed whatever sweats and hoodie were to hand and rushed out of her own house at her mother’s vague call, spotted the car and knew that her baby brother was dead. Her mother was relieved that she had come. She didn’t have any information that she could give the police, but she thought that Roslyn, who was so close to Michael, might provide more help.

  My aunt had expected Michael home Thursday night, two days before, and so was consumed with anxiety all day Friday and into the night. Over the course of the week, the normally warm July temperatures had slumped below average. Her dread had only increased alongside the chill. Roslyn, too, had been consumed with worry. On Monday, she dreamed that someone had told her Michael was dead. She woke in tears. When she told Michael about the dream, he said, “My life ain’t like that to where I’ll be dead.”

  But he also said, “Sis, if anything happens to me, tell the police it was Bree.” Bree was Michael’s girlfriend.

  Roslyn and Michael spoke by cell phone almost every day. That week, increasingly anxious, Roslyn redoubled her efforts to stay in touch. On Friday, Michael didn’t pick up for her all day. When he didn’t pick up, she could sometimes tell from the sound of the ring that he was traveling, or had turned his phone off. His phone had rung funny like that on Friday.

  Like her mother, Roslyn didn’t have much to tell the police, beyond the story about her dream and her brother’s warning, but the detectives had things to tell them.

  To them Michael was not Michael but “Big Mike.” He was someone not to be messed with on the street. This was news, and shocking.

  I myself would learn this only much later on. The day before Michael died, evening UK time, while I was conversing with my philosopher husband and catching up on some pleasure reading, I got a
rare message from Michael. It would have been Thursday, midmorning, L.A. time, when he’d sent it. Just a few weeks earlier, he’d been at our wedding in New Jersey, where I had an appointment at a distinguished research institute, famous for being Einstein’s place of abode. The trip to our wedding was Michael’s first airplane flight since his release.

  THE AUTHOR AND HER COUSIN, MICHAEL, AT HER WEDDING

  That June wedding in New Jersey was my second one. I hadn’t invited anyone but my parents and one friend to the first. To my eternal shame, I hadn’t even invited my brother. This time I wanted all my family standing by me, joining in the bond I was about to form. Despite having been close to Bob, my first husband, Michael was the usher, greeting every guest at the door with joy.

  After that celebratory day, I’d sent Michael a photo of the two of us, me in my splurge Armani dress, he, typically handsome in a beige jacket and crimson shirt. His matching crimson alligator-skin shoes, which made us smile, were, sadly, not visible in the frame.

  After he got the photo, he’d written me to say thank you:

  7/16/09

  MICHAEL ALLEN 6:47 P.M.

  Thank you for my picture. I’m sorry to say that I don’t check my e mail often and haven’t since I printed the plane tickets. I love you so much and I am happy that you are happy and enjoying yourself. I will call you Saturday but I don’t know what time is good so be sure to let me know. I love you and I miss you.

  Love Always,

  Michael

  These were the kinds of small scraps that we could share about his final twenty-four hours: that on Thursday at 10:47 A.M. he’d used a computer. I am lucky, I suppose, that those words were my final contact.

  The police put out a request for help:

  Anyone with information about the incident is encouraged to contact Criminal Gang/Homicide Group, 77th Homicide Squad Detectives R. Guzman and K. White at 213-485-1383. During off-hours, calls may be directed to a 24-hour, toll-free number at 1-877-LAPD-24-7 (527-3247). Callers may also text “Crimes” with a cell phone or log on to www.lapdonline.org and click on Web tips. When using a cell phone, all messages should begin with “LAPD.” Tipsters may remain anonymous.

  Beyond this, all we knew was that the police were looking for a woman, and that Bree, Michael’s good-looking hair-stylist girlfriend, was nowhere to be found. Nor, presumably, was her gold Mercedes.

  7.

  SCHOOL, August 2006

  Michael chose the Sears job. It was obviously the better option—far easier to get to than the job at LAX, and more reliable and promising, too. It was also a bigger operation, so it offered more opportunities generally, social and otherwise.

  Having secured a job, our attention turned to school and housing. We had a checklist, a mission, and expected teamwork to get us through. The goal was for Michael to work full-time and to enroll in one of California’s famed community colleges. About half a century earlier, these junior colleges had been a remarkable pathway to opportunity, a true engine of mobility for the Golden State. By 2006, they were no longer free, but they were still a good deal.

  Now I was in my element. After all, I was the one who knew about schools. Michael’s mother Karen hadn’t completed college. His brother Nicholas, an on-again, off-again security guard, had tried but not made it through Los Angeles Community College in Culver City. His sister Roslyn had never started. As for me, pretty much my deepest expertise was in going to school. That summer I had reenrolled, only this time with Michael.

  Los Angeles Valley College, in Valley Glen, was the obvious target, a decent school with good general education courses and a fire technology program. Its alumni included Tom Selleck and Kevin Spacey, and the subway’s Red Line had stops at Santa Monica and Vermont, about a mile from the Sears, and in North Hollywood, not too far from the campus.

  During his first year in prison, Michael, a compulsively good and imaginative writer, had completed his GED at lightning speed and over the eleven ensuing years had completed a handful of liberal arts correspondence college courses from the University of Indiana. We reviewed the L.A. Valley College courses with an eye to laying the path toward the school’s fire technology program. That was the goal. We battled our way through the thicket of federal financial aid forms, which also required that Michael register for the Selective Service, which he hadn’t yet had occasion to do, because of having been in prison. But as we hurdled one after another bureaucratic obstacle, we also found the peaceful quiet of the campus—nearly empty during those dog days of August—to be the balm of Gilead. We found an especially quiet spot, a single maroon picnic table boldly placed amid tumbling boulders and desert plants. Relieved that the July heatwave had broken, the most intense and deadly in over half a century, we sunned ourselves there without talking. After we rested, we would tackle the next event. We visited the tutoring center and library and hungrily collected and studied the various flyers posting internships, jobs, and apartments for rent.

  HERE WERE THE GATES of opportunity. In Homer’s ancient Greek poem the Odyssey, dreams that tell you the truth are said to have come through the gates of horn; the ones that deceive you, through gates of ivory. We believed that the entrance portico to Los Angeles Valley College was the poet’s fabled gates of horn. And Michael was poised to pass through.

  THE ENTRANCE TO LOS ANGELES VALLEY COMMUNITY

  COLLEGE—THE POET’S “GATES OF HORN”

  8.

  FUNERAL, July 27, 2009

  The day of Michael’s funeral was strenuous. It was a full day of churchgoing and family meals, all on strained emotions.

  After his release, Michael had been attending a church we’ll call Pillar of Fire, a single-story church with a blaze of lettering to call in wayward souls. Pillar of Fire had also been the family’s church years earlier when Michael was arrested and went to prison. His mother, Karen, had since that time fallen out completely with the pastor, Andrew Rinehart, a tall, slender man, his all-gray hairline well receded, who wore spectacles and regal biblical robes of red with gold thread, as he preached under fluorescent lights.

  See that band all dressed in red;

  God’s a-going to trouble the water;

  Looks like the band that Moses led;

  God’s a-going to trouble the water.

  Now Karen and Pastor Rinehart were not on speaking terms. She had come to consider her pastor’s morality a matter mainly of show. His friends included shady characters, among them one particularly notorious pimp, whose eulogy he had delivered. She had learned from him how to serve him—cleaning the church, running errands, getting the doors to open on time. But she had also learned that she wanted instead to serve God.

  For Michael, though, Andrew Rinehart had been a steady, adult presence, and a male one, during a troubled adolescence. After he was released from prison, Michael went back to Pillar of Fire. In the last weeks of his life, during L.A.’s famously misty June days, he spent time at the church, sitting on its rooftop, just being by himself. Since childhood, rooftops had always been the places he sought out to escape his inner conflict.

  His mother came only gradually to realize that he never knew himself. He was so good at mirroring what people wanted to see in him that he never had the chance to clarify to himself who he really was. And so, she says, he sought out rooftops to try to get a focus on himself.

  Temptations, hidden snares, often take us unawares.

  And our hearts are made to bleed for a thoughtless word or deed.

  And we wonder why the test when we try to do our best.

  But we’ll understand it by and by.

  Pastor Rinehart would have to do the funeral. Michael was his parishioner, after all. But Karen believed that nothing Pastor Rinehart could do would be godly, so she wanted another service at her own church, Bethlehem Temple, at Bethlehem where a child was born. To get in two services for one funeral, we had to start early in the day. And so we did.

  Bethlehem Temple mounted a service like tho
se from my childhood when I visited my Baptist grandfather preacher in southern Georgia. Here, too, there were soul-busting songs and unpainted, tee-totaling women; women in hats, with fans, on the verge of fainting. I don’t know what I wore, what I looked like, except that it must have been, basically, a “yuppie” look, though in black because it was a funeral. Karen had to be held, and the preacher lifted the roof off. We wept enough to make our own riverside.

  Oh, we’ll wait till Jesus comes

  Down by the riverside;

  Oh, we’ll wait till Jesus comes

  Down by the riverside.

  I remember pews wide enough to hold twenty or more, pale blue carpet, and under a very gently sloping roof all was airiness and light.

  Trials dark on every hand, and we cannot understand.

  All the ways that God could lead us to that blessed promised land.

  But He guides us with His eye, and we’ll follow till we die.

  For we’ll understand it by and by.

  The service was followed by a brief lunch back at Karen’s house, and then it was onward to Pillar of Fire. Here the scene was different. The street had turned out for this service, bringing its jive step. The place was full, but with so many people we didn’t recognize. The detectives were here, too, working. They hadn’t solved the murder yet. They were watching to see who showed up. Here, on each side of the aisle, the pews held no more than eight people. Even with its fluorescent lights the space felt dark under a low, flat ceiling. The wall-to-wall blue carpet was matched by velour blue upholstery on the chairs and on the carpeted platform that served as chancel. Self-involved and self-pitying, Pastor Rinehart used his eulogy to wrap himself in the accomplishments of the other men in the chapel. I, dearly beloved, he thundered and I paraphrase, am the reason that so-and-so sitting just there was a business success, that thus-and-such on the other side of the chapel had held high office, and yet nobody did any more give credit where credit was due. Then he descended into an anti-Semitic rant about money-lenders and lawyers and the difficulty they brought to those just trying to get by. Between this rant and the lurking presence of the police, a situation reminiscent of the opening of The Godfather, my British husband of scarcely a month was slack-jawed.