by Mike Sager
“Drama in suburbia!” Freeman intoned, the voice of a radio announcer. Since he’d divorced his high school sweetheart and quit his job as the youngest schools superintendent in the history of Newport News, Virginia—bound for Washington and the love of a good man—Freeman had worked tirelessly to make Corcoran Street and its surrounds into an island of gay gentility: a Georgetown for Marys, as he liked to say. He was a fixture at city council meetings, a member of every local development board that would have him. The streetlights and planters? His idea. Likewise inviting Liz Taylor to the clinic fund-raiser and countless other brainstorms. A perennial member of his real estate firm’s Million Dollar Sales Club, who’d moved properties all over town, Freeman considered the thirteen hundred block of Corcoran his own personal fiefdom—over the last decade, he’d sold thirty-two of the forty houses, some of them more than once. As was befitting, Freeman’s own house was the jewel of the street—the centerpiece of an ornate Second Empire terrace that occupied the entire north side of the street, a post–Civil War take on what would be called, in more modern times, a townhouse development, built during the heyday of the neighborhood, when nearby Logan Circle was the most fashionable address in Ulysses S. Grant’s bustling capital reserve. A highlight every winter on the Logan Circle Tour of Homes, Freeman’s place still had its original carved wooden cornices, isinglass windows, and dumb waiter—large and sturdy enough to raise a man from the ground floor kitchen to the third floor master bedroom, as they’d discovered last Halloween.
Seede and Freeman continued along the sidewalk, easily outpacing the line of cars to their left. “Who gave you the idea to target the johns?” Seede asked.
“I was at this property I manage—1505 T. The tenants were GW students, the little shits—these rich kids from Bahrain, spoiled rotten. They couldn’t afford a maid? They moved out a month early without giving notice and left all this food behind. There were roaches everywhere.” He shuddered involuntarily.
“What does that have to do with the johns?”
“Well, I had the exterminator come to give me an estimate, and he was talking about roaches and how it was all a matter of the food supply—if you eliminate the food supply, the roaches go away, because they don’t want to be in a place where there’s nothing to eat. And right then, it hit me—hookers are like roaches! If you want to get them out of the neighborhood, you have to eliminate the food supply, also known as johns. I thought to myself: If we get rid of the customers, won’t the hookers go somewhere else?”
“Apparently the city council agrees with you. There’s a bill before them that would give the cops authority to impound any vehicle from which a driver or passenger is soliciting a prostitute.”
Freeman grimaced. “That’ll never get passed; those do-nothings will debate it until the Second Coming, like everything else. We’ve got the stickers. We’re taking down license numbers. We’re buying an ad in the Herald. We’re going to publish names. We’re going to make it very embarrassing for someone to be seen in this neighborhood trying to get a blow job.”
“Excluding anyone you might be dating, I presume.”
“Ha, ha, ha.”
“By the way,” Seede said. “The cops don’t just give out that kind of data, you know. License plate registration is not public information.”
Freeman twirled the waxed end of an imaginary mustache. “Ve have vays,” he said.
“You’re starting to really scare me now,” Seede said, only half kidding. He looked out absently over the line of cars to his left—and caught sight of a familiar head of spiky, white-blonde hair.
Salem was sitting in the passenger seat of a mud-streaked Chevy pickup truck, a wheelbarrow in the bed. The driver wore a ponytail, a backward baseball cap. His jaw was grinding side to side; his eyes were glazed and fixed on the car ahead. The truck rolled forward a few feet.
“We have to do something,” Freeman said. “It’s getting worse. Last night I found one in my fucking garage.”
“One what?”
“A hooker. She was passed out. She still had the syringe in her arm!”
“Are you kidding? How’d she get in?”
“Crawled beneath the door. It had gotten stuck about a foot off the ground; the repair people had to order a part. She didn’t weigh ninety pounds. She probably could have crawled through the mail slot. I had to call 911. I couldn’t believe how long they—”
“Well, well, well! Look who’s finally decided to grace us with their presence!”
Wolfie was standing on the southwest corner of Corcoran and Thirteenth, a wisp of a man with moist, rubbery lips, dressed in camouflage fatigues and a pair of midseventies-vintage platform heels. His circa-Vietnam walkie-talkie—an ancient piece of military hardware the size of a dorm-room refrigerator—sat by the lamppost, abandoned. With Wolfie on the corner was the rest of the whore patrol—longtime partners Sam and Dave. Midforties and affable, Sam and Dave looked and dressed alike, as many couples of long standing tend to do. The problem was, no one was sure which was Sam and which was Dave. Not even Freeman, who’d sold them their house. Everyone on the street just addressed them collectively, as in “Hey, SamDave, what’s the gossip?” Since they were always together, it worked out fine. At the moment, one of them was standing beneath the streetlamp, holding a spiral notebook and a pen, taking down license numbers. The other was stationed near the stop sign, in the shadows behind a parked van. He had a stack of bumper stickers. As each vehicle in the line came to a halt, preparing to make the turn south, he’d reach out stealthily and slap a bumper sticker on the rear end.
Wolfie assumed the toe-forward pose of a fashion model, one hand on his hip. “I was beginning to think you needed an engraved invitation.”
Freeman jerked his thumb at Seede. “This one over here took a little convincing.”
“It’s nice to have the fourth estate behind us, so to speak,” Wolfie said, his vampish manner reminiscent of a forties film star, with the addition of a pronounced liquid lisp. Every aspect of Wolfie’s persona seemed to radiate the sentiment of his favorite activist cheer: We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it! The rhinestone tiara didn’t hurt either.
“I’m here strictly as an observer,” Seede insisted, playing along.
“What’s that for?” Freeman asked, pointing to the elaborate leather sling-type device that was affixed to Wolfie’s chest like a baby harness. Instead of a baby it held a very old, very large, Hasselblad camera. Affixed to the side of the camera, with the help of some bailing wire and duct tape, was a huge industrial-grade flash attachment.
“It’s one of Bob’s toys,” Wolfie explained. “It’s magnesium or something. Check this out.”
He popped open the viewfinder, aimed the camera toward the intersection, closed his eyes, depressed the shutter.
For one brief moment, the entire intersection was bathed in blinding silver light.
And then: a sickening crunch of metal against metal, a tinkle of glass, the outraged squeal of hastily applied brakes …
Seede rubbed his eyes. Slowly, patches of his sight returned. He was able to make out the image of a fat man getting out of his car, cursing, mad as a hornet. Planted into the rear end of his vehicle was the front bumper of the mud-spattered pickup truck, the suspension of which had been tinkered to a higher than normal height, resulting in greater than normal damage to the fat man’s car. Salem was still in the passenger seat of the pickup. She was struggling with the ponytail guy, trying to open her door, trying to get out. The ponytail guy was amped and hollering. He had Salem by the meat of her arm.
Without hesitation Wolfie moved toward the muddy pickup. He grabbed the passenger door handle and yanked …
… and Salem tumbled out, knocking Wolfie into the gutter, landing on top of him.
The ponytail guy came out after them. He had a blue-steel revolver in his hand. He stood unsteadily over the tangle of writhing limbs that was Wolfie and Salem. “Get back in the truck, ho,” he slurred. He raised the
gun, pointed it at Salem’s face.
Wolfie depressed the shutter.
Blinding silver light.
Followed by a distinct hollow crack—a sound like a hammer splitting a coconut.
And then a heavy thud—like a side of beef hitting the floor.
As his sight returned, Seede was able to make out the image of a large black man, wearing wraparound sunglasses and a three-piece suit, holding what appeared to be an athletic sock full of quarters.
Jamal stepped over the unconscious figure of the ponytail guy. “What up, Seede?” he said, reaching down to help Salem to her feet, a Cheshire cat grin on his face. “Can I be of some assistance to you and your friends?”
13
Sojii swam languidly upward from the depths of sleep, bits and scraps of dreams and memories floating past her mind’s eye … A blue party dress. A salt-and-pepper Afro. The lonesome scree of a bird. A Greyhound bus pulling away from the terminal, spewing oily fumes. A hot pretzel, crusty and chewy at once, yellow mustard on her fingers.
Breaching the surface of wakefulness, she rolled over and stretched luxuriantly. Sleeping every night in a moldy old sleeping bag on the cement floor of the Pope’s church was hard even on a teenager; she felt more rested than she had in months. She inhaled deeply through her button nose—the dorsum slightly concave like her Korean grandmother’s—and then exhaled slowly through pursed lips—full and spongy like her dad’s, a Louisiana Creole. At last, she opened her eyes—twin emeralds inherited from her great-grandfather, born in a shtetl in Lithuania.
And found herself on a beach.
In a patch of shade beneath a coconut palm.
The fronds clattered in the breeze—a faint, percussive melody, like a marimba.
She sat up and looked around. The fine ivory sand was guarded on three sides by a lush tangle of vegetation. A line of red ants marched over a miniature dune; a hermit crab in a colorful shell motored sideways, probing with an outsized claw; a gecko darted into the brush. The lagoon lapped gently at the shoreline. Fish of all kinds fed in bands and swirls of shimmering amethyst and aquamarine. The sky was the blue of a story-book; frigate birds and herons and pelicans wheeled gloriously overhead. A half mile distant, ocean waves crashed upon a protective coral reef.
The last thing she remembered, Sojii had been sitting in a beanbag chair in the cluttered disarray of the Pope’s attic hide-away. For most girls her age—for most people of any age, for that matter—this radical change of scenery would have no doubt caused a panic. But Sojii was no ordinary girl. As it was, she owed her very existence to a series of cosmic hiccups.
Her grandmother had been born in a small village in South Korea, a farmer’s daughter forced by the circumstances of war into a life of prostitution in Panmunjom. Her grandfather was an American GI, a troubled Jewish premed student from Chicago who’d left school, over his parents’ vociferous objections, to enlist in the army. The two met in a comfort bar at the beginning of a ten-day furlough. Within a week they were engaged to be married. Despite the language barrier, he wrote his brother, “I have found my soul mate.” One month later, the Jeep he was driving blew a tire on a mountain road. He was killed.
Sojii’s mother, Ruth Yeong Cohen, was thus born by special arrangement in a Red Cross field hospital in the heady days preceding the signing of the Korean armistice in July 1953. She was raised by the brother and sister-in-law of the dead GI in a Craftsman house in Evanston, Illinois. Following the adoption, the heretofore barren couple (a city planner and his wife—a wonderful cook, doting mother, and popular past president of the sisterhood at Temple Oheb Shalom) went on to conceive two daughters and a son. Ruth grew into a spirited young woman with high cheekbones, wavy chestnut hair, and the pronounced nose of her eastern European forebears, which lent to her face an asymmetrical, Picasso-esque quality—more than a few likened her to an Asian Barbra Streisand. While the family atmosphere was certainly loving, Ruth lived a mercurial life, given to elaborate flights of fancy and deep bouts of depression. She could never shake the notion that she didn’t really belong—on the playground with her younger siblings, she was often mistaken for the nanny. So it would be for a lifetime. Neither this nor that, she was always searching.
By 1974, twenty-one and divorced, Ruth found herself employed as a receptionist in the biology department at UCLA, serving a group of scientists that included a handsome, light-skinned Creole microbiologist named Robert Lawrence. Born in the tiny backwater of Morrow, Louisiana, population 242, Lawrence was one of ten children—a rainbow assortment of recombinant features and hues, a gene pool comprising African-American, French, and Native American DNA. At sixteen, seeking a better life, Lawrence had run away from the bayou and joined the navy. With the help of the GI Bill, he worked his way through college and graduate school. Ten years older than Ruth, he sported a large, prematurely gray Afro. The colorful dashikis he favored offered a comfortable alternative to the department-mandated shirt and tie—during those early days of affirmative action, no one was brave enough to tell him to put on regular clothes. The couple was married in a civil ceremony at the Beverly Hills city hall, then flew immediately to Paris, where Lawrence was slotted for a fellowship at the Pasteur Institute.
Two years later, the marriage in tatters, the spouses already encamped in separate domiciles in Washington, DC—where Lawrence was now employed at the National Institutes of Health—a daughter was born. In honor of her serendipitous heritage, they named her Sojourner Yeong Cohen-Lawrence.
Two months after that, Ruth appeared unexpectedly one night at the door of her estranged husband’s apartment. There was a wild, defeated look on her oddly beautiful face. She thrust the colicky bundle of their daughter across the threshold. “I just can’t handle it anymore,” she said. And then she slung her backpack over her shoulder and was gone, never to be seen again.
So began Sojii’s nomadic youth—a Korean-Lithuanian-African-American-French-Native Indian Jew with no mother, a workaholic father, and no particular place to call home. As you could imagine, from an early age, identity was a big issue for Sojii. Her dad preached the “one drop rule”—one drop of African-American blood makes you black, no matter what other kind of blood you might also have. Sojii’s experience didn’t prove quite so cut and dried. As a first grader in Manhattan Beach, California, she’d been the darkest in her class. One day a kid told her that her skin was the color of poop. When Sojii’s father called the boy’s house—the teachers at the school knew the child as Horrible Harry—the mother was nonplussed. “We’re not racist,” she insisted. “We have season tickets to the Lakers.” During middle school, Sojii and her dad moved to Richmond, Virginia—where she was tormented by a clique of dark-skinned girls who called her Chinky. Who am I REALLY?????? she’d doodled in her sketchbook/journal. Absent unequivocal answers, she had learned over the years to operate without them. She had become accustomed to going where life led, each new day neither a mystery nor an adventure, simply another day to survive.
Rising from her place beneath the palm tree, Sojii walked toward the water. The sand was hot between her toes. She couldn’t help but notice that she was now dressed in a beautiful batik lavalava, a large rectangular cloth native to the South Seas, arranged ingeniously into a halter-top minidress, secured behind her neck with a bow.
She kind of figured she was dreaming, yet everything seemed so real. She swam around for a time in the warm and gentle water; it was hard for her to relax. Something was about to happen—why else was she here? She wished to herself that it would just go ahead and happen.
Sure enough, the next thing occurred. She heard this weird fluty music emanating from the jungle.
She waded out of the water, scanned the tree line, trying to locate the source. The scale was strange, but the tones were pure—haunting round notes floating on the air like a sweet aroma.
A well-worn path led into the sun-dappled jungle, all vines and ferns and razor grass, presided over by tall coconut palms, curved and vain, r
ipe with green nuts. The underbrush chattered and rustled with the presence of lizards and small mammals. Insects sang; birds twittered and fussed. Sojii was charmed.
At length, the music ceased. She came upon a large circular clearing, the ruins of an ancient place, a meeting or prayer spot, most of it reclaimed by the jungle. At the center was a stone slab, three feet high, four feet in diameter. Atop the slab was the Pope’s crystal skull.
Instinctively she picked it up, heavy as a bowling ball, and cradled it in her arms. It was a marvelous object—flawless, transparent, anatomically correct.
As she held it, the skull began to darken. Inside the cranium, an image began to form, a hologram—what appeared to be clouds. Three-dimensional, well resolved, rendered in full color, the clouds became thicker and more dense, like a time-lapse video of a gathering thunderstorm. After a few moments, a dark spot became visible at the center of the storm. The spot grew slowly larger, until the central mass of the skull was entirely dissolved, leaving a black void. It was as if the fabric of daily life had been eaten away, revealing a small patch of limitless space.
Presently, an image appeared.
She was asleep in a beanbag chair in the littered disarray of the Pope’s attic hideaway, wearing her pink angora sweater and vintage bell-bottom jeans. A copy of High Times magazine was open in her lap. Next to her, on a low table, was the Pope’s crystal skull.
A door in the floor swung open. A man emerged. He was wearing a peacoat and a hooded sweatshirt.
And then someone was touching her shoulder. She could feel the breath, hot and urgent on her ear: “Wake up. Hurry. We gotta go.”
PART TWO
14
Jonathan Seede backed his motorcycle to the curb, levered down the kickstand with his heel. It was Wednesday morning, just after dawn. Dulcy and Jake had been gone since Monday afternoon. The air was raw, the light was tenuous and grainy. Pigeons cooed in the eaves of the ruined townhouses that lined both sides of the street; starlings chattered in the spindly bare limbs of the forlorn, planted-by-the-city ginkgo trees. Also called maidenhairs, identified by scientists as the oldest species of tree on Earth, ginkgos were prized for their fall foliage, a dazzling yellow. By some curious bureaucratic decision, all of the ginkgos in the city, roughly one per residence, were female. Each fall, along with their beautiful leaves, the trees produced an abundant crop of gooey, malodorous fruit, with mildly toxic skin, that stuck underfoot like doggie diarrhea. It seemed a perfect metaphor for life in the nation’s capital.
