Knucklehead, page 19
Why am I not pissed? And why am I so horny?
She headed for my chest again, so I went for her eye again. But instead of biting she licked. First she lapped up the blood, then she lapped up the new blood, then she lost interest in the bleeding and started licking my stomach. She released her death grip on my shoulders and slid lower. Funny—her chomping off my dick never crossed my mind.
Without looking, she reached up and clocked me on the side of my head with her half-closed right hand. Hard.
I wanted to let it slide, because she was still licking me. But then she reached up with her other fist and whomped me on the other side of my head. She caught some ear that time. “Ow!”
I grabbed her mean little hands and yanked her up so we were face-to-face again. I bent my right knee and pushed off against the bed, rolling us over so that I was on top. I made a mental note to show the little asshole how to do that later. Right then I wanted to sock her in the jaw. But she wasn’t trying to bite or hit me anymore. She was just lying underneath me, wriggling and moaning.
It took me a minute to figure out that as long as I was pinning her arms down, things were sexy. As soon as I let even one arm go I was getting my ass kicked again. Sarah and I had a safe word and, unlike Amalia and me, we needed one. So I knew she wasn’t actually resisting, because she was not saying much of anything, not “no” and certainly not “sasparilla.” Once I figured it out I stopped letting her go.
I needed to get our pants down. I risked another beating by holding both of her arms with one hand while fighting our belts and jeans with the other. It worked. It occurred to me that I probably didn’t have to grab her hard. I grabbed her hard anyway.
And I fucked her. Hard. Definitely the hardest I’ve ever fucked anyone, before or since. I’d always been a little bit careful with Sarah. She’s tiny, and I’m hung. I’d have doubted she could take, or at least enjoy, a pounding like that. Hard fucking is not my thing anyway. But she took it just fine, if coming twice is any indication.
I fell asleep on top of her, still pinning her arms just to be safe. I didn’t know how she was breathing down there.
We woke up, sweaty and drained, when we started getting dog noses in places people don’t usually get them. It was dark out. Sarah seemed happy, and I had stopped bleeding. She blew me, and then she got up to make us pancakes for dinner.
I laid there in our bloody sex mess, petting dogs and listening to her singing in the kitchen, and I alternated between looking forward to more fight sex and praying that that never happens again.
Space.
Monday, May 22, 1995
I was backing into a spot and a beat-up black pickup truck came up from behind and took the space by driving forward into it. Just zipped right in. I peered into the cab of the truck through my rearview. Two heads. Baseball caps. White boys.
I got out. I wasn’t exactly relaxed, but my breathing was deep and easy. I noted street conditions, bystanders, and cover as I approached the truck. About six feet away from the open driver’s-side window, I stopped walking and opened my mouth.
I spoke to them because I needed the situation to escalate. Also, I wanted them to know why this was happening. It’s silly; I mean, I suspect that dead people don’t care why they are dead. But I knew how things would appear afterward. No matter what anybody else was going to say about “random” or “senseless,” I needed these two men to understand the Cause and Effect of it. If only for a minute.
“I was parking in that spot,” I said through their open window. “The spot you’re in right now.” I never spoke loud enough at times like that. My breathing was so steady that I couldn’t project. My voice sounded very far away to me. But they heard it, and noticed me for the first time. I continued the dance. “I was backing into that spot, and you pulled into it from behind. You took my spot.”
Really, all I wanted to say was, Draw.
My right hand was alive at my side. Sweep the shirt back; heel of the hand against the grip; grab the grip with pinkie then ring finger then middle finger while drawing up and forward; sweep thumb upward across the safety; index on the trigger; left hand comes up under the butt and the right hand; front sight on target; squeeze.
The men sat in the truck and stared at me. They did not move. I waited for one of them to say their lines so we could do this.
“Sorry!” the driver said after a moment. “I can move.”
I waited; neither of them budged.
“We’ll leave. Sorry.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
The driver started his truck, backed up slowly, and drove past me at a crawl. I watched both men’s arms and made sure the truck was never pointed at me.
“Sorry!” the driver said again as they glided by.
I watched the truck as it sped up and made a right at the corner. Only then did I notice that the block was basically empty.
There was my car; there was the car I’d been trying to park behind. There were two or three cars sprinkled up and down the block, and maybe another six total across the street. Leaving at least twenty available parking spots right there on that block alone.
I stood squinting up and down the street. And I saw myself. I was me alright. But still, I was kind of surprised.
Taken for a Ride.
Sunday, May 28, 1995
Mom was in town! I had big plans. I couldn’t wait to show her the house and the cats and the dogs and how happy me and Sarah were and how much better my life was now. She’d never sounded convinced over the phone.
Of course, I met her at the airport. Scooped up her bags and whisked her to my ride. She’d never seen me drive before—I’d had a license, but who drives in New York? I’d bought Claire at some point after her last visit. Everybody says that your car makes a statement about you. Claire was low to the ground and unattractive to thieves. So maybe they are right about that.
It was a 20-minute drive from SFO to our house on the southern edge of the city. I made it almost 10 of those minutes, chatting and cruising at the limit, before some shit popped off.
A young homie in a hooptie. I suppose I should say another young homie in a hooptie, since that probably would have described me too, but this cat was a thug, and I only looked like a thug. I saw him in my rearview, baseball cap pointing northwest, weaving in and out of lanes like Speed Racer for no reason, endangering us normal folk. The problem with normal folk is that they tolerate that shit. If the normal folk ever rose up and clubbed the assholes to death, it’d be over in a day and the world would be paradise. But they never will.
Speed Thug was now immediately behind me, having forced his car into my lane from the right, causing the vehicle behind him to slam its brakes. I calculated his next move: to my left in about two seconds. Sure enough, he swerved left out of our lane and gunned it, preparing to pass and cut me off as he’d done the others. But I swerved left too, so instead of passing me he slammed his brakes the way he’d made the others. A crash would have gone worse for him than for me.
I smiled. Maybe he would learn from that, maybe not. I had come to settle for bringing momentary discomfort to people who behaved badly. I was never going to change anybody. We are just too stubborn.
He reappeared a few seconds later. I had forgotten about him already. He came from my left. Even though there was a wide-open lane to his left, he shoved his piece-of-shit ride smack in front of us. I’m talking inches. I refused to hit my brakes. Instead I glanced in my mirror, hopped two lanes to my right, floored it, passed Thug Racer, and hopped back over two lanes to cut him off. This time, he didn’t hit his brakes either.
The dogfight went on for miles. It was early evening; rush hour was basically over, but there was traffic. Changing lanes got kind of hairy sometimes. But Claire was my F-16, my trusty steed, and she and I were one. I was happy.
Then I glanced over at my mom.
She was clutching the little leather loop that hung from the ceiling with her right hand and bracing herself against the dashboard with her left. Her face was a wooden thing of horror called Head-on Collision. She was certain she was about to die.
Oh.
Shit.
Thug Racer sped by in the far left lane, staring into my car and laughing. His car was empty.
I got over to the far right lane and slowed back down as quickly as I safely could. I didn’t say anything, and neither did she.
That is the only thing I have ever done that I regret. The only thing.
* * *
“Mom!” Sarah hollered. Mom said nothing.
My mother had loved Amalia like a daughter, but it had taken respectful time. They’d shared a common understanding of the process. It may have been a Black Thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a Sarah Thing, because right now she was on my mom like a needy kid on Santa Claus. Amalia hadn’t hugged my mom like that until Mom had hugged her first, and that hadn’t been until the night we announced our engagement. This was a first meeting.
Mom wasn’t returning Sarah’s embrace because Sarah had her arms pinned. That was one reason, anyway. Mom’s tiny too, but less tiny than Sarah, and she was holding her nose up sharply, trying not to drown.
Then the dogs came. And for the first time I noticed how fucked up it is for four good-sized dogs, including two pit bulls, to come stampeding up on a person and probe them. They did that all the time.
Sarah and the dogs swarmed my mother. Her eyes had settled on Luther. Specifically, his enormous, bulletproof pit skull, overflowing with drooly knives. Luther was smiling, but she didn’t know that. All she saw was teeth. Mom was not dog people. She was barely cat people.
Sarah still had my mother in a bear hug. Luther took my mother’s limp hand and held it in his wet, deadly jaws. He did that. It was cute.
It became clear that hanging back and letting the women work it out was not the right call. I hugged Sarah and Mom at the same time, then slid my arm between them and peeled Mom away. Now the dogs were jumping, snagging her cashmere sweater in dirty ragged claws. We have bad dogs! I did not know that. “Back back!” I barked. I tried to sound playful.
Freeing Mom was harder than I’d expected, as Sarah had her other arm. She was trying to pull her down onto the sofa. Oh my God—the sofa’s covered in fur! It’s disgusting!
The plan had been for Sarah to cook. I smiled as big as I could. “Let’s go out!”
* * *
I took them to Stars, for want of any better ideas. We were walk-ins, and I was afraid we wouldn’t get a table. But the man behind the little podium seated us immediately. I suspect that, even in tatters, Mom’s bearing overcame that of the two ragamuffins flanking her and rated us all a table.
I did not order the calamari for old times’ sake. Making conversation was difficult enough. I’d bring up a topic, squirm while Sarah rambled, and eventually try to engage my mother, who did little more than stare down at her plate. Repeat. Repeat.
And Sarah thought things were going well, apparently, because she never stopped talking and laughing very loudly and every now and then putting her hot little hands on Mom. I vowed that the remainder of my mom’s visit would be just the two of us, assuming she didn’t take a cab to the airport as soon as I paid the check. This introduction was not salvageable.
“I’m tired,” my mother declared outside of Stars, her back to Sarah. So instead of taking us all back to the house, I drove the few blocks to the Hyatt at Union Square. I pulled up in the red zone for Mom to hop out and she sat there. My home training twitched in its shallow grave. I got out of the car and trotted around and opened Mom’s door.
“Take me up to my room,” she said, clutching my arm.
“I’ll park and meet you inside!” Sarah yelled from the car.
But I didn’t make it past the lobby. I pushed for the elevator and when I turned back around to apologize I was getting slapped in the face. It hurt a little, but mainly it was shocking. My mom had never, ever hit me before. I felt tears before I had even processed what was happening.
“I did not. Raise you. For this.”
Ding! the elevator said. Shiny metal doors slid open and she stepped inside. She stood in the corner, hiding her face. I know when a woman is waiting to be out of sight so that she can cry.
I stood there touching where she’d slapped me. It felt warm. My eyes burned too. It was pretty, all of the sparkly glass through blurry eyes. I tried to focus on that.
“Where’d she go?” Sarah was standing next to me. “What floor?”
I wiped my eyes. She was wearing overalls. A hillbilly and a thug stood in the lobby of the Union Square Hyatt, the thug freshly slapped by his mother. The blank faces of the rich white people all around insisted that they saw nothing.
It Doesn’t Fit.
Thursday, June 15, 1995
O.J. was trying on the gloves.
It was absurd. Imagine if someone handed you a pair of gloves and said, “Try these on. If they fit, you will go to prison for the rest of your natural life.” I’m guessing your performance would look a lot like O.J.’s.
The Juice struggled mightily to get the regular-sized glove on his hand. He couldn’t seem to pull it past his thumb. The deputies on either side of him looked like they wanted to help.
“This is a shame.” I hadn’t realized that Sarah had come into the bedroom. She was drying a green mixing bowl with a dish towel.
“Yeah. The whole case has been a joke.”
Her eyes cut from the TV to me. “There’s nothing funny about this. A woman is dead.” I don’t know why, but for a second I thought she was going to say, “A white woman.”
“That’s true. Well, two people are dead. But what I mean is that the prosecution of this case has been so tainted, he could go free.”
Sarah froze and stared at me.
“And, I mean . . . at this point, maybe he even should go free.” I don’t know why I said that, other than because I meant it.
She looked very angry. Not at O.J.; at me. Granted, we had our best sex when she was mad. But this wasn’t the sexy mad. The bowl she was holding was large and heavy.
I put my hands up. “Look. I think he did it. Pretty sure he killed Nicole. And the other guy. But what we know, for a fact, is that LAPD officers got on the stand and lied. They got caught committing perjury. And in our legal system, that is supposed to matter.”
“It’s called framing a guilty man,” Sarah said. She glanced back at the screen. O.J. was standing there with his hand in the air, the empty tips of the gloves bent where his fingers ended. Those cops really wanted to put that glove on for him. O.J. started to wrestle the other one on with his half-gloved hand.
“And you’re saying that’s a good thing?” I asked her. “Framing a guilty man?”
She just stared at the screen and went back to drying that long-dried bowl.
I lowered my hands. “Look. The exclusionary rule—where bad evidence gets tossed out—doesn’t exist just to protect innocent defendants. It’s to punish dirty cops. The only way cops won’t lie every time is if it could hurt them.” She still didn’t respond, and I decided to believe that meant she was listening. “The Founding Fathers wrote the Fourth and Fifth Amendments because they recognized that a corrupt police force was at least as harmful to our society as assholes who kill their wife. Ex-wife. And other dude.”
Sarah was completely still.
“The Founding Fathers also ‘recognized’ that blacks were animals,” she said. Rage came up from the earth and filled me. I could feel it shooting out the top of my head. “And that women were children,” she added. “It’s funny that you should care what the Founding Fathers thought.”
She turned and walked out of the room.
O.J. shrugged.
Good Fences.
Monday, July 17, 1995
I was playing fetch with Luther and I threw the ball and it bounced off a tree stump and ricocheted over the fence into our neighbors’ backyard. Our alleged serial killer neighbors in their nursing home of horrors.
I went to their front door and knocked. Big Rita opened up.
“Hi,” I smiled. I tried to sound friendly. After all, our relationship had not yet exploded into the inevitable violence you could smell, stuck inside your nostrils, whenever we were near her or her goon. “My dog’s ball just bounced into your yard. Do you think I could go get it, please? It’d just take a minute.” I beamed like a salesman.
And Rita smiled back, sort of. She moved her bulk aside. “Come inside!” Not so much an invitation as a command.
“Thank you so much!” I cruised into the darkness. All of the curtains were heavy and drawn. It did not smell good in there. It was that whimsical Norman Rockwell classic, Neighbors Go In, But They Don’t Come Out.
I followed Rita through the house. The nursing home inmates—all of them chain-smoking old Asian men dressed in rags—did a double take as I passed, then turned away, bored again.
“Hi,” I said to the craziest-looking one.
“It’s downstairs,” she called over her shoulder. “In the basement. The door to the backyard.”
“OK!” That was plausible.
Rita glided down the steps in front of me. She seemed more relaxed than I had ever seen her out in the world. Her henchman wasn’t around; I didn’t see him, anyway. A single bulb hanging over the top of the stairs was the only light that was on.
At the bottom of the stairs, I saw a rough wall about six feet ahead, a door stuck in the middle of it. A room built within a room. In the basement.
“In here,” she gestured with her chin. “Through there. Is the yard.” I get so turned around without any windows that I didn’t know if that made sense or not.
Rita opened the door and stood aside. “In there.”
I walked up to the entrance. What little light had made it from the staircase revealed what could be a door at the back of the room within a room. Maybe it was a door, and maybe it was unlocked, and maybe it opened out into her backyard. Possible.
“Thank you,” I said again, as I walked past her and inside.
