Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  The Bird has an avian-like ability to crane her neck around 270 degrees and keep a watch on all the other students under her tutelage without losing focus on the handful she is helping at any given time.

  “Ms. Cindy, can I take a smoke break?”

  “I know a smoke break takes seven minutes. But I’m nice. I’ma give you nine.”

  “You cool, Ms. Cindy.”

  “I’m cooler than cool. I’m cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.” Lines from an OutKast song. She memorizes a popular rap song or two at the beginning of every school year to keep in her back pocket and deploy as necessary.

  “Smoke a Kool 100 for me. Or a Black and Mild.”

  She’s at her best when students think they’re in trouble—a common offense being looking up something inappropriate on the internet. The Bird can spot the offender even while spitting out quadratic equations, blessing smoke breaks, and letting brothers know they won’t be rich if they can’t remember that the r in prt stands for “rate.” Wichita Unified School District 259 has wisely blocked access to all porn sites, but the Victoria’s Secret website managed to squeak through the firewall. The Bird sauntered up to Marcus, a frequent offender, and sat down next to him. He tried to close the window on the sly, but the Bird made him open it back up.

  “What part of the curriculum is this?”

  Marcus said that he tried to look up “Christmas” and this is what happened.

  The Bird asked him if he knew what “festive” and “garland” meant. She asked him if he knew what Feliz Navidad meant.

  Marcus didn’t know. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay, I know it didn’t have anything to do with those gorgeous women on the screen, because you don’t care about that. You only care about the holidays and Christmas.”

  Students trickle in throughout the day at irregular intervals, some wearing ankle bracelets. She greets all of them individually and gets them clocked in and going on the computer. If a brother is wearing a pair of brand-new size 14 Jordans, she lets him know that she notices: the Bird will walk up to him, put her little size 5½ next to his skis, and ask, “Can I borrow those shoes this weekend?” One such brother told her “Ms. C-Mac, you blacker than black.” His friend pointed to a picture of Terry on her desk and said, “Shit, she’s black by injection.”

  She keeps a cache of personal hygiene products in her closet and doles them out as necessary. Her strategy there is to pull aside the friend of the student in need of soap or toothpaste or deodorant and hand them a goody bag. “Coley Cole, my friend works at Walgreens and I got all these free samples. Take ’em if you want, just share them, okay?” She doesn’t take a lunch break, but she packs a lunch big enough to feed three men and complains of being too full. If she wants to make sure that some food makes its way to a mother she knows is having trouble feeding her kids, she hands them a sack of leftovers and says, “Can you take this home? I hate for it to go to waste. I don’t have anyone at home to give it to.” If they’re really hard up, she gives them a Dillon’s gift card wrapped in a note.

  When young men walk in with hats on, she says, “Why are you doing that to me?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you denying me the opportunity to see your beautiful head?” If they have a good relationship, she changes it to “We know you have a big head. You can’t hide it under that hat.” Likewise, if a student she knows well summons her from across the room, she says, “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry both of your legs are broken. Let me walk over there to you with my two perfectly good legs,” then acts like she is too old to make it across the room while she drags one leg behind her. “I’m coming. Stay there.” If she suspects a student won’t return the next day, she says, “If you hear a loud explosion tomorrow morning, it’s my heart breaking from across town.”

  There are two other facilities in Wichita that provide similar services—both have more teachers, more money, and more resources—and she logs more credit hours per year than both combined. She writes grants to get funding for bus fare. She brings in guest speakers—nurses, firefighters, pastors, a cop nicknamed “the white cop” by a seventy-year-old African American grandmother who is a few credits shy of graduating. The white cop is a popular speaker; he talks about community policing and tensions between law enforcement and black communities and doesn’t shy away from questions.

  It’s been alleged that from time to time she’s allowed a student to write a letter to an incarcerated family member instead of analyzing Mark Twain’s Last Words of Great Men. “I don’t love Mark Twain either,” she’s been accused of saying. “Make sure to tell your cousin that you are in school and doing well and that you’re going to graduate.”

  At the end of the day she says, “Come back tomorrow. We open at eight, but I’ll be here at seven. You can call me after five a.m. and before ten p.m. I hope I have convinced you that hanging out with me is more fun than sitting on the couch and waiting for your probation officer to come by. If it was hard, congratulate yourself on doing something brave today.” And she always singles out the most frustrated student leaving the classroom at the end of the day. “You better watch out, Deshawn. You’re going to graduate if you keep hangin’ out with me.”

  “You a G, Ms. Cindy.”

  “I put the O in OG.”

  Chapter 20

  I was back in New York ten days after my discharge from Osawatomie. I just couldn’t stomach a prolonged stay in Wichita and thought that, if I kept moving and dove back into my healthy pre-cornfield routine, I’d be able to move on from this experience more quickly. Take the punch and get up, go back to work, check in with Singh regularly—it seemed like a better recovery plan than the garage. There was rebuilding to be done for sure and depression felt imminent, but at least I hadn’t lost my apartment this time; the Bird had made sure to get a rent check over to my roommates, kept me current on my bills, and stayed in touch with my supervisors at work.

  I hadn’t spoken to Jonas since the cornfield. I was afraid that our relationship had been irrevocably altered. I hoped it wasn’t, but I needed to know for sure. In his circle, I had always been the stand-up with the screw loose. He was there when I dealt with a heckler by stripping down to my skimpy briefs, and when I did an entire set as an Olde Tyme baseball player riffing on my good friend Mark Twain, staying in character hours after getting offstage. Jonas knew I was crazy in the crazy-son-of-a-bitch sense, and he liked being friends with that crazy guy. But now he also knew I was just flat-out, literally crazy—the kind most people want to avoid.

  I texted him the second night I was back in the city.

  Pint tonight?

  I’d eat.

  K. San Marzano in an hour?

  Sounds good.

  I spotted his slow, wide-legged strut from a block away as I waited outside the restaurant and smoked a cigarette. He was wearing a beanie and his thick-heeled black boots that turn his five feet nine inches into five feet ten inches. We hugged when he got there and he held it a little longer than usual. “What’s up, man? Good to see you! You look good!”

  The waiter asked us if we wanted a drink. I thought I saw Jonas raise an eyebrow as I ordered.

  “Yeah, fuck it. Me too.” Jonas ordered a beer. “Fuck it, you can drink, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s good to see you, man.”

  “You too.”

  Perfectly cordial but definitely a bit stilted. I didn’t know how we were going to kick this chat off, but luckily Jonas cut right to it. “So I got some shit to tell you. I just want to talk and I want you to listen. I just want to get this off my chest.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was pretty conflicted about what to do after all that shit went down. And I decided I have three options: One, I could have nothing to do with you at all. Quit hanging out with you. Cut you out of my life. Two, I could just go business as usual—keep hanging out with you, let you do whatever the fuck you want, smoke weed, get fucked-up, run around with yo
u and chase women, all the same shit. Or, three, I could stay friends with you but alter my behavior around you and the way I handle you. And I decided, ultimately, on three.”

  “Huh. Okay,” I said. The way you handle me?

  “I was going to cut you off. When I came back from Wichita, I told my brother that I’m done. I’m done with that kid. I’m never fucking hanging out with him again.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just let me finish.”

  I waved both hands in a circular Proceed motion.

  “Thank you. So I think I would have been well within my rights to cut you off. But I have some distance now, and I’m going to keep you in my life…”

  I couldn’t fully stifle an audible breath through the nose, inflating my chest a bit—the full-body version of an eye roll.

  “But I’m not going to be an enabler anymore. I decided I will no longer enable you. I am not going to blow trees with you. I am not going to party late as fuck with you. I will never, never smoke weed with you again.”

  “Okay. Not a problem because I don’t plan on smoking weed again.”

  “You don’t know. You can’t know that. You don’t know what’s wrong with you. You might be schizophrenic.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Your uncle was.”

  Pain was turning to anger. I was hearing Congratulations. I am still going to be your friend.

  “You put me through a very fucked-up situation. You got us lost in a cornfield. It was cold as fuck. You were running around naked. You were…”

  I got that few people want to chase their psychotic naked friend through permafrost in a cornfield in the dead of a Kansas winter. I got that it was scary. I got that it was an inconvenience. I even got that it might be a friendship deal breaker. But man did it hurt.

  “And so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to remain friends with you, but I don’t want to travel with you. I don’t want to take a road trip with you. My buddy and I are driving to the Outer Banks this weekend, and we’re going to be blowing trees, and it’s just something I would never invite you to anymore. I won’t enable…I’m ready to hear what you have to say.”

  I couldn’t look up. “Well, I don’t really know what there is to say…”

  “Come on. You always have something to say.”

  It was tempting to just leave. I’d never been read Terms and Conditions by a friend before. “Well,” I started, “I guess if you want full, raw honesty…”

  “When do we give each other anything else?”

  “Right. So truth being—what you’re saying fucking hurts. It hurts bad. I could cry if I let myself. And, honestly, I think it’s fucked-up.”

  “Oh, come on, dude. You’d have done the exact same shit.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Not with you, not with any of my good friends.”

  “You don’t know that. You weren’t in my position.”

  “I do know. I wouldn’t bail on you because you were sick. If you were sick, I’d visit you in the hospital.”

  “You can’t know.”

  “I can fucking know and I do fucking know.” The tears were just behind my eyeballs. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t really see you as such a huge victim in all of this. What did you go through, really? You had a crazy fucking night—you were scared? You had to drive me to a fire station? You think that’s how I wanted to spend my January? In a psych ward?”

  “I was in Wichita, Kansas, by myself, for a fucking week. Didn’t have shit to do but go to the Y and eat at the Hometown Buffet.”

  “That sounds like a pretty boring, shitty week, man. Sorry you had to go through that.” We finished eating in silence. I was fighting the impulse to just throw down a twenty and say “See you at work. I don’t need this.”

  But I did need him. I needed all the help I could get. His friendship had been huge in getting me through the last bout of depression. Now I was staring down that same dragon, wondering if it was even slayable.

  We paid and left, the silence between us still dense. “Quick walk?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we can do that.”

  We headed north to the East Village and by force of habit both stopped in front of one of our haunts. Inside he bought us two beers and we sipped in silence, until Jonas finally piped up. “Listen, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; I don’t want to fight with you. I love you, man.”

  “I love you too.”

  I felt like I understood all the stories I’d heard about prison inmates having trouble adjusting after their release. The rhythms of Osawatomie followed me back to New York: I’d spend the first two hours of each day pacing the apartment, mimicking my daily routine at the hospital. I was used to watching my back, waiting for the next fight to break out, the next screaming maniac forced into isolation. Eyes up, back against the wall, know your exits. I’d pace without knowing it and then coach myself into embracing normal life: You don’t have to do this. You are allowed to sit down. You don’t have to ask permission to watch TV. You can eat whatever you want for lunch. You can take a shower. But I had developed a muscle memory for the aimless pacing and felt lost without someone telling me when to eat, when to shower, when to go to bed.

  I’d also read enough about soldiers returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder to know that I had some form of it. My apartment left me feeling boxed in. I’d try to build up the courage to step outside, but the world out there seemed too chaotic to brave. I’d get excited that I was allowed to walk around my neighborhood, go wherever I wanted to go, but I felt tethered to my apartment as if I were attached by a cord that stretched only three blocks. Any farther and I felt like I had swum too far out to sea. My instinct said, RUN! YOU’RE FREE! but I was afraid to cross the street. The fear of catching a beatdown from a psychotic Gregory was replaced by the risk of getting hit by a car; the cacophony of the ward, by Manhattan’s almost visible soundtrack.

  Returning to work after my second psychotic break was in some ways harder than the first. I was embarrassed the first time. Now it felt like I’d been given a mulligan and wasted it. One psych ward, fine—we’ve all been there. But two? Two felt like a permanent rubber stamp that I was a certified fuckup. A pattern had been established: Every year, between the fall and winter, McDermott goes a little crazy and we have to lock him away for a while. Then he takes a big ol’ long vacation and we see him again and he acts like nothing is wrong. Then he represents our crazy people—all the while, we know it’s only a matter of time before he is off the rails again and we’re here to clean up his mess.

  I tried to do the same thing I’d done after my first leave: be on time, look professional, and cover cases when asked. The surest way to minimize embarrassment at the office and avoid sliding into another crippling depression seemed to be to throw myself back into work. Which is how I ended up conducting a cross-examination of the queen of France.

  Debrah Turley was arrested for assault and she couldn’t make the $500 bail. The tax on those too poor to make bail is paid in jail time. Two defendants, separated by $500 in net worth, charged with the same crime and with similar criminal records, could easily end up serving widely disparate jail sentences. If only she could have made bail, we’d have gotten her a non-jail sentence.

  This situation plays out hundreds of times each day. But what made Ms. Turley’s case memorable was that the alleged victim, her ex-girlfriend, was batshit, in the throes of psychosis, crazy.

  In New York, it’s legal to record any conversation as long as one party consents. That means, if I want to call a hostile witness and tape it, I can. This can be incredibly useful come cross-examination time, so I called Ms. Turley’s ex, and for forty-five minutes she unwound her fantastic autobiography for me. She hailed from a long line of both French and English royalty—her grandfather was the king of France, and she was in line to become the queen—so her family was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the CIA was following her per Obama’s orders. Of course she was a Maso
n too, and she knew that I was one as well because she’d seen me “do some of the signs and signals in court. You adjusted your glasses, you were rubbing your eyes, running your hands through your hair, messing with your tie.”

  I usually felt nothing but contempt for adverse witnesses—a convenient attitude since the only purpose of our conversations was to gather ammunition to crucify them on the stand. But I was overwhelmed with compassion for Debrah’s girlfriend, my opponent. She reminded me of so many lost souls I’d met at Bellevue. Who was going to help her put reality back together? How was she even going to feed herself? Here I was preparing to humiliate this woman, who had no idea I was her adversary, based on information I had gathered without her knowledge and at her most vulnerable point. If it weren’t for the Bird, it could have been me on the other end of the line, claiming to be the duke of Wichita or, perhaps, a famous comedian.

  But what could I do for her, or others like her? I could barely even help my client. I was way behind the curve as an attorney. I’d had two trials and won them both and felt confident in the courtroom, but I knew I was ignorant far too often on case law and criminal procedure. I wanted to start all over, go back to day one of misdemeanor training and pay attention this time. Instead of being cocky and acting like I got this all the time, admit that I knew nothing and soak it all in. But there was no time to reset. The NYPD kept beating and arresting the homeless, the helpless, the sick, and the poor. My phone didn’t quit ringing off the hook. My only choice was to be confident in what I did know while trying to play catch-up where I could. But I wished I could do more.

  Chapter 21

  Chico Borja was the only reason I’d come in to the office that day. I tossed Shaqon Barnett, Tamir Gray, and Abayomi Osu on the floor and opened Chico’s file. On its merits, his case was not that serious: a simple assault charge stemming from an incident with his boyfriend. He had a good self-defense case and neither party suffered any physical injuries. But the top of his file was stamped ICE HOLD—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a big problem.