by Peter Plate
The clerk was a large fifty-year-old Salvadoreño man in a mint green golf shirt and polyester slacks. His complexion was dark brown. A tonsured fringe of hennaed hair topped his elfin ears. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and had a clipboard in his hand. He wrinkled his nose. “What’s her name?”
“Athena Diggs.”
“And you are?”
“Grogan. Robert Grogan.”
“Grogan?”
“That’s right.”
“Wait here. She’ll be right out.”
Thank Christ his parole officer was a broad. Robert grinned to himself. That was great. It sure as hell was. With his charm, he’d wrap her around his little finger. Chicks were easy to handle. A whole lot more than the dudes were. The punks threw their weight around. Talked tough. Thought they were streetwise.
Athena Diggs buffaloed into the waiting area. She had on a white denim miniskirt, white tights, red high heels, and a low-cut peach silk jersey. A filigreed gold crucifix dangled from a chain around her neck. A halo of impatience crowned her unsmiling face. “Mr. Grogan?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Come this way.”
The agent and Robert legged it into the corridor. Athena’s backside rotated clockwise as she walked, the skirt’s hem riding her thighs. Robert was spellbound. Nice ass, he observed. Athletic. Tasty. Well toned. Too bad she was a cop. He craned his head and checked out the unit. There were cubicles in every direction he looked.
In her office Athena slid in behind the desk and told him to grab a chair. “Sit down.” The room was bare, save for the steel desk and two folding chairs. Last year’s calendar hung from a tundra-white Sheetrock wall. The window had bars on it. A naked lightbulb sizzled overhead. It was nuthouse decor.
Robert did as he was told. He would’ve jumped off a twenty-story building if she’d asked him to. Whatever it took to keep her off his fucking case. Unseen voices burrowed through the walls, other parole officers and their clientele. It calmed him, knowing he wasn’t alone in hell.
The black woman crossed her arms. “Your record is shit.”
It was a fact. Robert’s first bust had been on his seventeenth birthday for being a runaway with no money or identification. The cops took him to the substation on Fillmore Street and locked him in solitary confinement to keep the chicken hawks from molesting him. Everything went downhill from there. He was smart enough to agree with Athena. “You’re right, it is.”
“What do you intend to do about it?”
“Huh?”
“You need a job. Do you have one?”
“No, not yet.”
“How come?”
“I just got out.”
“Where are you living?”
“The Trinity Plaza Apartments.”
She recognized the address. The other white boy, that Slatts Calhoun, he also dwelled there. This was not good. Convicted felons weren’t allowed to fraternize. She put her manicured hands flat on the desktop. “Here’s the deal. Inmates released from the pen in California face a 70 percent chance of returning to the joint. You need help to avoid that. Medication is necessary.”
His sphincter tightened. “I ain’t sick.”
“Your jacket indicates otherwise. You have anger management issues. I recommend Prolixin.”
“That shit is too extreme. I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do.”
The conversation had taken a treacherous turn. Robert remained steady by employing the breathing exercises he’d learned from doing yoga in San Quentin. “No, I don’t.”
The parole officer X-rayed him from head to toe with her coral black eyes and saw little that she liked. “I want you to take a pee test.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“No fucking way.”
“Then you’re going to lockup.”
Robert immediately changed his mind. “All right, all right, I’ll take it.”
Maybe he was dead. This was how parolees died. Sticking their dicks in glass jars. Forget about drinking beer and smoking pot. His days of getting loaded were over. Might as well join a convent and become a nun. Funny thing was, he was able to get high in prison. It made him question the price of freedom.
Diggs assembled a piss-test kit: a glass jar, a pair of latex gloves and a brown paper bag. “Let’s hit it.” The parole agent led him out of the cubicle and into a corridor to the men’s room.
She trained a finger at the restroom’s doorway. “In here.”
Maintaining his composure, Robert swaggered into the john. Acting like he was going to a night at the opera. A good attitude was necessary. How things were going, this was eternity. He asked Athena, “Do you got to be in here with me?”
“You know the rules.” She handed him the glass jar and the paper bag, then donned the latex gloves. “You piss in the container and stick it in the bag.”
“This ain’t right.”
The agent was perplexed. “What are you bitching about?”
“Why do you have to watch me do it?”
“It’s the law.”
“Well, fuck, I think that’s uncool.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be looking at me.”
“Too bad.”
“I seriously ain’t into it.”
“Grogan?”
“What?”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“No, all I’m trying to say is, like, I need some space or whatever, you know?”
“You are full of shit.”
“Aw, girlfriend, mellow out or something. I have to be by myself when I take a leak.”
“Shut up, asshole. You pee in that jar.” Athena Diggs produced a pair of nickel-plated handcuffs and jangled them in front of him. “Or you’re going back to the joint.”
There are two kinds of people in the universe, the cops and everybody else. Being an asshole was normal. It was human nature. Robert stirred in his sleep and cried out to god. To stop the voices in his head and to send his grandmother and the parole officer back to hell. No one heard his frantic pleas. He called out again. Nobody listened. There was no reply. He begged a third and final time.
His prayers were answered. The knot in Robert’s soul dissolved into nothingness. He was no longer in pain. There were no prison guards. No barbed-wire fences. No parole offices. He groaned, turned onto his left side, adjusted the blankets in the bed, and eased an arm over the cheeks of his wife’s heart-shaped ass. The rest of the night boated away on a dreamless ocean.
SIXTEEN
In 1910 the black heavyweight prizefighter Jack Johnson was in San Francisco training for a match with Jim Jeffries. The boxers were vying for the world championship. Johnson’s manager was a former brothel keeper. There was a falling out between him and Johnson, and he was fired. The fellow was later seen on Market Street with a loaded gun looking for the fighter, who rehired and fired him again.
The morning of Robert’s fourth day out of prison was proceeding quietly when the mailman slipped a letter under the apartment door. The ex-con was in the living room cleaning his rifles with oil and solvent. His wife was at her friend’s house—that dyke Simone. The kid was in the bedroom reading a science fiction novel.
He padded over to the door and picked up the missive, opening it. The return address on the manila envelope was from a Gough Street law firm. Perusing the one-page document, Robert turned whiter than white. It was a bill from his lawyer. Demanding the immediate payment of six thousand dollars or the matter would be turned over to the authorities. This is total shit, he thought, remembering his trial three years earlier.
After weeks in the felony wing at 850 Bryant, he was removed from his tank, handcuffed and shackled to a long chain, then bundled into a rusted service elevator going to the courts on the second floor. There were bloodstains on the lift’s walls. A piss stain besmirched the floor. Two burly, gum-chewing sheriffs stood at his side.
Downstairs a bailiff took off Robert’s manacles and manha
ndled him into a courtroom. The chamber was air conditioned, paneled in blond wood. The overhead fluorescent lights were melanoma bright. The spectators’ pews were deserted. The lawyer Harriet had found was installed at the defendant’s table.
The shyster was in his early thirties, five and a half feet tall, pudgy, and balding, with a hideous comb-over. He had on a stained ice cream suit offset by a psychedelic green silk tie. He introduced himself to Robert with a smirk. “I’m Roy Wonder.”
The judge was another saga. He wore bifocals and had a shiny, diabetic forehead. The black robes of his office were demon’s wings. He read the arrest report, the dirt the cops had on Robert. “How does the defendant plead?”
“Not guilty, your honor.”
As he was a first-time adult offender, Robert was granted bail in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. Harriet sold all her jewelry in a pawnshop on Sixth and Mission to get the money. Then she went to Atlas Bail Bonds on Bryant Street—“don’t perish in jail, call us for bail”—and brokered her husband’s release. A day later Robert Grogan flew out of the Hall of Justice, free as a bird with no wings.
Robert had no money, so being out on bail wasn’t great. Two things happened, one good, one bad. He got a free prescription for fifty ten-milligram tabs of Valium. Then Roy Wonder wanted a three thousand dollar retainer fee. Robert wrote him a check, but it bounced. The morning he returned to court, the shyster met him at the chamber’s entrance and blithered, “Where’s my dough?”
The second floor in the Hall of Justice was a river of attorneys, cops in combat overalls, meter maids. Roy Wonder was wearing his ice cream suit like he’d been sleeping in it for two weeks. Robert had just taken the last Valium. It wasn’t kicking in yet, and he was jittery and didn’t want to talk about the cash. “It’s up your ass, Roy.”
In the courtroom Robert and the lawyer huddled at the defendant’s table. A bailiff was stiff at attention by the door. The stenographer was at her machine. The presiding judge was now a distinguished septuagenarian Chinese gentleman with wispy black hair.
The magistrate rifled through Robert’s file with a sour mien. Robert knew what was coming down the pike. It didn’t surprise him when the judge upped his bail to seventy-five thousand dollars. Even a retard could see that shit was going to hit the fan. Another date was set. Exiting the courtroom, Roy Wonder whispered evil tidings in Robert’s ear. “You owe me three grand, you fucking asshole.”
Hard luck is a thief ’s best friend. Harriet appealed to her mother for the extra bail money in a last-ditch effort to keep Robert out of the hoosegow. The old woman coughed up the cash. Robert celebrated by going to Uptown, the bar at Seventeenth and Capp in the Mission. He got drunk out of his gourd and was beaten up by a jock in the bathroom.
A week later, the judge found Robert guilty on account of the overwhelming evidence and set a new date for sentencing. They were in and out of the courtroom in no time.
On the morning Robert was to be sentenced to prison, he ingested three tabs of blue double-dome acid to prepare for the ordeal. The previous judge, the old Chinese man, had kicked the bucket. His replacement was a black dude with jade green eyes and terrific acne. The court remanded Robert into the state’s custody for a period of no less than thirty-six months.
The bailiffs escorted him upstairs to the felony tanks. The same evening he boarded the bus to San Quentin. He was chained to a seat next to a teenager sentenced to death for slaughtering his mother with a pickaxe. Printed across the vehicle’s rear windshield was an advertisement: “The Department of Corrections. An equal opportunity employer.”
The drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to the pen was boxed in fog. The bus was alone on the slippery road. Robert’s seatmate was talkative, describing how he’d slain his mom. Wouldn’t stop yammering about it. The acid made Robert hallucinate colors and patterns. He saw whirligigs of fire every time the kid opened his mouth. It was a relief when they wheeled up to San Quentin’s front gates.
Waves crashed into the black rocks under the penitentiary’s yellowed walls. Spotlights moved back and forth over the gun towers. The barbed-wire fences were luminescent white. A squad of guards equipped with truncheons, riot helmets, flak vests, and gas masks milled at the Adjustment Center’s entrance.
Robert was dragged off the motorbus under a sign that said: “Receiving and Release.” He was stripped naked inside the induction room. Prisoners catcalled at him, whooping how they were going to pull a train on his ass. A guard told Robert to bend over from the waist and spread his butt cheeks. The screw squirted crystallized delousing powder up his rectum.
He was assigned to a cell with a forty-year-old Mexican from Riverside. The vato had stage-two lymphoma. He’d received chemotherapy, but the illness was aggressive. A tracheotomy had been punched in his throat. The guy had a penchant for hand-rolled fags and puffed them like a chimney. He exhaled the tobacco smoke through the hole in his neck. He died a month later, and Slatts moved in.
SEVENTEEN
That afternoon Robert Grogan spurred the Hillman down Illinois Street toward India Basin, the bayside neighborhood of rotting wharves and piers, marshes, dry docks, textile factories, and live-work lofts east of Potrero Hill and Highway 101. Because it was Christmas, the downtown merchants had pressured the cops to relocate hundreds of the homeless from Market Street into the area.
A homeless convoy of vans, school buses, and pickup trucks with camper shells had dropped anchor in the parking lot of a beach at the end of Illinois Street. Datura grew in the picnic area. Bumblebees zigzagged through patches of orange poppies. Dragonflies hummed. Flies chirred. Mosquitoes sang. Chiggers and mites said nothing. A portrait of Malcolm X was stenciled on a footpath leading to the waterline. The smells of low tide hung above the shore.
Egrets, falcons, geese, and herons cavorted on the shoreline. Cormorants hunted for crabs in the shallows. Seals sunbathed on the rocks. Truck tires and shopping carts, mattresses, children’s toys, shoes, and spray paint cans bobbed in the water. Herring and salmon were abundant in nearby Islais Creek. In the distance were the blue gray lines of Oakland’s hills.
A corona of flies attacked the sedan, forcing Robert to roll up the windows. The dog was raising hell in the backseat. Robert stopped the car to let the mutt out. Then he and his daughter got out.
Selecting a gun from the trunk, Robert hefted the Browning semiautomatic and then gave it to Diana. He mashed a spider into the dirt under his boot heel and addressed the girl. “Now you know who Slatts is. Your mom can’t stand him.”
Diana didn’t want to hear it. Robert and Harriet were idiots. They were children, no smarter than a pair of five-year-olds. “Does Slatts love you?”
“Uh, yeah. More than your mother does.”
The beach’s sands were mined with beer cans, glass shards, bullet casings, centerfold pages from gay porno magazines, newspapers, stereo speakers, and the charred remains of a campfire. A snowy white heron sat on a finger of sandbar. A black-winged falcon jetted over a shipwrecked dinghy. The breeze, flavored with brine and sewage, changed direction.
“Over here.” Robert pointed at a spit of mud. “This is where you can shoot. I’ll get a bunch of targets for you to work with.”
He found a few tin cans and set them up on an algae-colored rock. Then he trotted back to his kid. Putting an arm around her shoulders, he said, “The savvy hunter empties her mind. She sees nothing but the target. She meditates. She is one with her gun. The best technique is to make believe the target is someone you hate.”
That was easy. Diana pictured her mother, her father, and the dog, in quick succession. Harriet had her hair in a ponytail. Robert had a bad hand. The dog had fleas. Harriet was self-centered. Robert couldn’t tie his own shoelaces. The German shepherd didn’t care for kids. Neither did her parents. They all deserved to die.
Raising the rifle, she squeezed the trigger. Bullets flowered out of the muzzle in all directions. They pulverized weeds, rocks, and bushes to smithereens.
A raven was nicked by an errant bullet and crash-landed in the shoals.
He snatched the Browning from her grip. “What are you doing?” Robert’s black eye was brown with self-pity. The cops hated him. Harriet didn’t trust him. Slatts thought he was a flake. The kid was against him. It was enough to drive him bananas. He threw the rifle on the ground.
Diana hung her head in the dazzling light, her shorn scalp gleaming like a hubcap. Sweet hatred roared in her ears. “I don’t like you.”
“Why?”
“You were in prison.”
“I was only away for three years.”
She did the arithmetic. Three years was thirty-six months. Thirty-six months was 1,080 days. Gone as if they’d never existed.
“I mean, come on,” he begged. “A lot of, uh, kids have dads inside the joint for longer than that. You were lucky. So was I. We should count our blessings.”
His daughter contradicted him. “They don’t have Slatts to deal with.”
Robert hemmed and hawed. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“You love him more than you care about me.”
“I don’t, baby.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Hold your horses.” Robert wasn’t going to lie. Nor was he was going to tell the truth. He preferred the middle ground. Hoops had to be jumped through. Tensions needed to be worked out. “Slatts is my wife. You’re my daughter. Which makes him your stepmother.”
“What about Mommy?”
“If she’s smart, she’ll get with the program. But I really doubt Harriet is gonna do that.”
He shaded his eyes and watched two geese bobble toward Islais Creek. All the pieces of his life were in place. Each piece had a destination. Every piece had a shape. He was on a roller-coaster ride to an uncertain fate.
The heat had the day moving slower than molasses. After visiting with Simone, Harriet came home. She stripped down to a pair of short-shorts, a gingham blouse, and rubber sandals. Puttering in the hall she tripped over the sleeping bag that Slatts had been using. It was on the floor by the linen closet and had dog hair matted all over it.
