Knucklehead, page 24
“What?” This from the bedroom. “Shit! Marcus!”
Silence.
Trying the door again. Harder. It was dismaying how her comings and goings were completely silent. She would just appear out there.
Then the thumping started. “Marcus.” Thump. “Open the door.” Thump, thump. “Marcus.” Thump. “Give me back my stuff.” Thump, thump.
Fuck.
I didn’t want to talk to her, even through the door. She might convince me to let her in and give her back her stuff.
The thumping got harder. I had to do something. Our house was full of crowbars.
The phone still sat on the dresser.
“911 what is your emergency,” the most bored person in the world recited.
I told her.
“And where are you, sir?”
By now I was hiding in the closet with the ammo. I said so.
She stopped being bored long enough to laugh, then told me to stay on the line.
Eventually, I peeked out of the closet and saw flashing blue lights reflecting off the bedroom window. I ran to the window to yell to them, like they were firemen instead of cops.
Sarah was out there already talking to them.
I went outside. “Thank God you’re here!” The line didn’t sound right, even to me, but it was how I felt. Right then, I took back every bad thing I’d ever said or thought about the police. The police were my friends. I’d called, and they had come. To protect me.
“Calm down, sir,” one of the officers said as he put his hand on his pistol.
Sarah turned and faced me. She slipped me a little smile while the two armed men regarded me and put a face to whatever she had just told them. She hadn’t even known I’d called the cops. She was straight improvising. This was what I loved about her.
The cops pushed past me and inside my house without a word.
Sarah had been pretty honest with them, apparently. Once we were inside, she repeated her position that her ammo was her property and that I had taken it without permission. I related my discomfort with her being armed at that moment.
They asked Sarah if I’d ever hit her; she told the truth and said no. I understood, completely, why they’d asked her that. They were responding to the proverbial Domestic Disturbance Call. We all think we know how those go. And I understood when they asked her the exact same question again three minutes later. Sometimes victims of domestic violence need to be coaxed. Mind you, she didn’t have a mark on her, whereas I, while not visibly bruised, had a human bite mark under my shirt. They never asked me. But she was tiny, she was a chick, so whatever.
They split us up and spoke to us separately. Her cop pressed her in the kitchen. All I clearly made out was Sarah saying, “No. Nothing like that.”
“This is a big place,” my cop said to me, scanning around. “How can you afford the rent?”
They asked Sarah to lock the dogs in the kitchen and told me to sit in the living room. Sarah moved about freely. When one asked me if there were any weapons in the house, I noted that we had both already told them so, and then I explained exactly where each one was. The cop immediately called for backup. Soon, four more cowards arrived, and most of them started to search the house.
All of the cops were white; all were male but one. A petite female cop with a blond ponytail sticking out the back of her police hat. When you hear the words “affirmative action,” you probably imagine some incompetent black guy with a job he can’t handle and that should have been given to some other, qualified (i.e. white) person. The actual data tells us that the affirmative action poster child is much more like this cop: white, female, blond, cute. That’s what passes for affirmative action these days: cute white chicks getting preferential treatment.
Real-Life Affirmative Action Poster Child struck a pose while she talked into her radio. She was wearing a vest. Apparently SFPD didn’t have a vest small enough to fit her, and swimming in her too-big vest she resembled a blue suit of armor. I prefer my cops big. Male or female, but big and tough, please. Big enough to beat my ass without the benefit of a weapon. This cop would have no choice but to shoot me, and she knew it.
Legally Blond stood in the hallway, conferring with the first two officers on the scene (shit—my house is “the scene” now). When she wasn’t barking orders at them she was shooting daggers at me. Finally, she approached Sarah.
They smiled warmly.
They stood in the front hall and talked about me while I watched. Blond Justice put her arm around Sarah’s waist. She moved her head close to Sarah’s and they whispered secret things. From time to time they glanced at me. We can add that to my list of things I’d have thought would be hotter. Flashing lights glided past the bay windows—more backup. Three more cops walked into my house through the open door. They did not acknowledge me.
Does SFPD really have this little to do? How many unsolved stabbings am I going to read about in the back of the paper tomorrow?
At some point I noticed my suitcase.
Sarah was standing right in front of it. The place was cluttered; she hadn’t noticed it. Yet. Once she did, I would be dealing with the person I didn’t want to have any bullets.
I sat there and willed Sarah not to notice the suitcase. It worked for about five minutes. Then some cops passed the two of them in the hallway, and they scootched a little to let them by. Sarah backed into the suitcase and almost fell over it. Blond Justice caught her arm when she stumbled. Sarah turned to look at what she’d tripped over. It was going to be a glance, but when she saw what it was, she froze, body twisted, head down. She stood and stared and I couldn’t breathe. Finally, she raised her head and gazed down the hall at me. I could see the crazy in her eyes from across the house.
Blond Justice was still steadying her; Sarah clutched at the arm and shrank. Then she said something, and Blond Justice put her arm around Sarah again and hustled her out of my sight.
Blond Justice came back a few minutes later. Alone. She snapped a quick order at two lazy stormtroopers that were standing around, and they followed as she quickstepped into the living room straight for me. Her little hand was, of course, on the butt of her oversized security blanket. I wondered if she was going to draw it. She didn’t. Instead, she pointed at the floor and said, “Down.”
It really wasn’t enough information, not for someone who had never done it before. I got down on one knee and held my hands up, Al Jolson style. “Like this?” One of the goons took semi-pity on me and semi-gently helped me into the position: completely prone, flat on my face, hands behind my back.
Somebody cuffed me.
I was lifted by the cuffs to my feet. Given that my arms were behind my back, this hurt a great deal. I didn’t give anyone the satisfaction of hearing me cry out. No rights were read. Somebody unceremoniously robbed me, emptying my pockets while threatening me with what they’d do if anything in my pockets cut their hands. Then someone shoved me out of my living room through the hall and out the front door and down my front steps to one of the six or eight cop cars badly parked around my driveway. No one told me to watch my head, like they do on Cops, but I watched my head get more than a little bumped on the way in. Someone slammed the door.
They left me in the back of the cruiser, cuffed and alone. The car smelled like fresh vomit. The glass between the backseat and the front had a big crack across it—from kicks, maybe?—but someone had since installed a thick wire grate in front of the cracked glass, so there was no longer any hope of escape that way. The windows to either side of me had wire built into the glass. There were no handles, locks, or knobs on either of my doors in the back. It was pretty creepy.
My eyes got accustomed to the dark and I noticed graffiti here and there inside the back of the car. I dint do it, someone had written in what looked like blood on the window to my left. In the cracked glass in front of me someone had etched, FUCK KNEE GROWS.
I thought about that. Some dude got himself busted. He was sitting in here under arrest, like I was now. Either the cops had uncuffed him or he had uncuffed himself; the glass was already cracked, or perhaps he had cracked it. There was no wire grate yet. He had a sharp object in his possession. Of all of the options that lay before this man, he had chosen to spend precious minutes doing that. A real mastermind, that one.
Next door, Rita and Michael stood on their porch, basking in it. It must have been nice for the wolves to be at someone else’s door. Rita was almost pretty when she smiled. Maybe those psychos had left me alone because they knew it was only a matter of time until I self-destructed. Maybe we were so crazy that serial killers kept their distance. We were amateurs. Funny thing was, if I had killed them, the day I went to get Luther’s ball, say, and the cops found a dozen corpses stashed around the house, they would have called me a hero. They’d have let me drive this car, with the siren on. It’s all about context.
But I had bigger problems. They had me. Really had me. I felt the beginnings of panic, so I took a big breath of vomit air, held it, and let it go slowly. Then I took another. I needed to be calm enough to take any opportunities I got.
Cops streamed in and out of our house. Most of the ones coming out carried ammo. I guess you could say we had a “stockpile.” We kept it in military ammo cans—those big green metal rectangles with the flip tops—because that is what they are for. They keep your ammunition dry and safe. I didn’t really intend to stockpile per se. We’d pick up a box or two every few weeks or so, and we didn’t go shooting much anymore. But watching the ants march out with our property, I knew that they would say I had been deliberately stockpiling ammo for something. Not that we had been stockpiling. Me.
One cop, at his limit with just one ammo can, actually took the time to walk up to the car I was in, peer in at me, and whine through the slightly open passenger-side front window, “Why do you have so much ammo?” I wanted to say, Because guns don’t work without it, but I knew I couldn’t say that so instead I said, “I don’t know what to tell you.” The weakling cop trudged away with his burdens.
I had been in my cage for maybe a half an hour when another cop came by the car to get something out of the trunk. A brother.
I watched him through the rear window. He tried to open the trunk but it was locked and I guess he didn’t have the key because he walked over to the passenger side and opened the front door and leaned across the seats to pop the trunk using the latch near the floor on the driver’s side. He paid me no mind. He would be gone again in a second.
“Excuse me? Officer?” He didn’t react at all. The trunk was now popped, and he was starting to back out of the car. He still hadn’t acknowledged me, but I knew he could hear me because I had heard the weakling cop. “Officer? Do you know Debra McGee?”
He had almost completely exited the car, but at that he froze and turned and looked me in the face for the first time. “Yeah?”
“Would you please call her and tell her that this is happening, please? Please?”
He said nothing, and his face never changed. He pulled himself back out of the car and slammed the door.
I felt pretty good about the exchange. Black cops were for some reason particularly unpopular in hip-hop at that time, but still I hoped. It was something.
I figured that was probably the only break I’d get, so I settled into my seat and took in my surroundings again. FUCK KNEE GROWS. I stared out the window again. Rita was smiling at me. I smiled back. Kind of meant it. She had, after all, punched Sarah in the head. I closed my eyes.
The door slammed and I jumped. Two cops sat in front; one started up the car. Had I actually gone to sleep? It was completely dark now. My house was still a buzzing hive. I did not see Sarah. Maybe she was upstairs, fisting Blond Justice in our bed. I kind of hoped so.
I didn’t want to show weakness by saying anything, but when we got on the highway I cracked: “Where we goin’?” Of course they didn’t answer. No one had read me my rights, or said much of anything to me after “Down,” so I wasn’t even sure I was officially under arrest. Granted, I was chained up in a rolling cell, but I wondered if a court would find that I was being detained in the constitutional sense. I mulled over that awhile, until I remembered that the question was moot because the Constitution did not apply to me. I was right all along.
Two exits later we were back on surface streets in the South of Market District. Still not a word from either of my abductors. Maybe the jackbooted thugs were taking me to 850 Bryant—jail, or, as the rappers call it, County.
They were. We pulled into an underground garage and one of them dragged me out of the car and shoved me toward a freight elevator. I was in the belly of the beast, but at least I wasn’t at the dump, or on some pier.
The freight elevator doors opened into a dirty, crowded office. One of the klansmen plunked me down in a chair by a desk and left me there. I sat for a while and watched other manacled black men get led around. It was a lot like Sankofa.
Most of the prisoners looked like criminals, for what that’s worth. I probably looked like a criminal too. OK, I definitely did. But a few of them didn’t look like criminals at all. A few looked like how I felt. Their frozen haggard faces said, But I did everything right! I did everything you told me to do. This happens anyhow? Yes, yes it does. You cannot escape your destiny, young Skywalker.
On TV, some pig sits down at a typewriter on the desk and barks, “Name.” That never happened. Maybe, since they’d stolen my wallet, someone got it off my license. What happened instead was nothing, until a huge pig scooped up my arm as it waddled by and pulled me back over to the freight elevator. We went up, up, up. I’d have thought they’d keep us down below, in the hold. But instead they keep us in the tower. Maybe those are the most difficult floors to escape, or to evacuate in a fire. I didn’t know. It was all new to me. I’d made it to almost 30 without any of this.
The elevator doors opened onto a small bulletproof waiting area, though you could see the cells in the back. The fat pig pulled me past the coward behind the glass who buzzed us in, then it finally uncuffed me and shoved me into a cell. I was not alone.
Although, yes, I had tried my whole life to avoid what was happening, that doesn’t mean I hadn’t thought about it. I’d probably thought about it every day. But as soon as Officer McPigwich closed the cage door and left, I understood that I’d never had any clue what it was really like.
There were six other men in the large cell. Half wore baggy orange sweatshirts with matching pants—the jail uniform, I guess. The black-and-white-striped getup must cost more. The other three were still in their real clothes, like me. All of us were black. I wondered if this really was a representative sample of the penal system’s inventory. I had not seen anyone but brothers getting pulled around downstairs.
At first I was tense, waiting for other inmates to try to jump me like Sarah wanted or take my shoes or whatever. But they all pretty much ignored me, and each other. I guessed I was the only first-timer. The big man who pulled his sweatpants down and took a noisy dump in the exposed toilet was my pick for most frequent flyer. There was no sink.
I spent my time not afraid but disgusted. No rats, but there were plenty of droppings in the corners, and squads of roaches on the walls. It was quiet, save the occasional clang or buzz. In my limited experience, jail isn’t so much dangerous as it is gross and boring.
I was there a long time. I don’t know how long, because there was no clock, I hadn’t worn a watch in years, and even if I did wear one they’d have taken it when they robbed me.
They stuck two more men in the cell with us: first a black man who was dressed like a pimp, and later a black man wearing a janitor’s uniform. Initially I thought he was there to clean up, which, although welcome, seemed odd. But he had no mop, and once inside he just sat down on a bench and looked sad.
I may have fallen asleep again.
The next time someone came, they came for me. A bored frat boy opened the cage and gave me that annoying finger-beckon cops do. I wanted to ignore it but all that would have gotten me was a closed cell door. So I rose and followed. Frat Boy Pig turned his back on me and walked out to the elevator. We rode down, down, down, and exited into a lobby.
“Go,” it said.
One hundred and thirty years earlier, a little girl named Azzie McCoy was out in a field working, like she was every day. All of her friends and family were working around her. And some asshole—who probably looked a lot like that cop—rode out to them on a horse and said, Y’all free now. Git. Those were his exact words. We have passed them down. The asshole rode off, and Great-Great-Grandma Azzie and her people got. They just walked away. So did I.
It was late. There was a cop standing on the big front steps outside. “Debra says she’ll call you,” he said as I passed. It was the black cop I’d asked for help in the car. It took me a minute to process his words, and by the time I finally said “Thank you” he was already walking back up the stairs to be with his buddies.
I had no money; my wallet, and my keys, were taken and gone. I didn’t dare go back in and ask for them. Cell phones didn’t really exist yet, and if they had they would have taken that too. So I walked. I walked home. It no longer was a home, but it was someplace.
* * *
Ten minutes on the highway is hours on foot, and I didn’t exactly rush to get back to the scene. By the time I could see our house at the end of the block it was almost starting to get light out. In a way, it seemed safer to be in there now than it had that morning, as our drama was now a matter of public record. I naively assumed they’d taken her guns as well.
The front door was open; the lights were on. The house was trashed. It was impossible to tell how much of it had been done by Sarah and how much had been done by her goons. It seemed like everything I cared about was gouged or smashed or, in the case of electronics, doused. That last was definitely Sarah’s touch. I wandered from room to room, marveling like a hurricane survivor. Yup, the cat was definitely out of the bag about us now.
The cats.
Now I ran from room to room, eventually into the kitchen. It was the only room that hadn’t been destroyed. Nia was sitting on a counter, cleaning. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be up there. Suki was asleep by the oven. Finding Jimi was harder. After a while I spied him squeezed behind the refrigerator. He was still scared, but I coaxed him out with tuna juice and got most of the dust out of his thick fur with damp paper towels. Then we all had tuna.
Silence.
Trying the door again. Harder. It was dismaying how her comings and goings were completely silent. She would just appear out there.
Then the thumping started. “Marcus.” Thump. “Open the door.” Thump, thump. “Marcus.” Thump. “Give me back my stuff.” Thump, thump.
Fuck.
I didn’t want to talk to her, even through the door. She might convince me to let her in and give her back her stuff.
The thumping got harder. I had to do something. Our house was full of crowbars.
The phone still sat on the dresser.
“911 what is your emergency,” the most bored person in the world recited.
I told her.
“And where are you, sir?”
By now I was hiding in the closet with the ammo. I said so.
She stopped being bored long enough to laugh, then told me to stay on the line.
Eventually, I peeked out of the closet and saw flashing blue lights reflecting off the bedroom window. I ran to the window to yell to them, like they were firemen instead of cops.
Sarah was out there already talking to them.
I went outside. “Thank God you’re here!” The line didn’t sound right, even to me, but it was how I felt. Right then, I took back every bad thing I’d ever said or thought about the police. The police were my friends. I’d called, and they had come. To protect me.
“Calm down, sir,” one of the officers said as he put his hand on his pistol.
Sarah turned and faced me. She slipped me a little smile while the two armed men regarded me and put a face to whatever she had just told them. She hadn’t even known I’d called the cops. She was straight improvising. This was what I loved about her.
The cops pushed past me and inside my house without a word.
Sarah had been pretty honest with them, apparently. Once we were inside, she repeated her position that her ammo was her property and that I had taken it without permission. I related my discomfort with her being armed at that moment.
They asked Sarah if I’d ever hit her; she told the truth and said no. I understood, completely, why they’d asked her that. They were responding to the proverbial Domestic Disturbance Call. We all think we know how those go. And I understood when they asked her the exact same question again three minutes later. Sometimes victims of domestic violence need to be coaxed. Mind you, she didn’t have a mark on her, whereas I, while not visibly bruised, had a human bite mark under my shirt. They never asked me. But she was tiny, she was a chick, so whatever.
They split us up and spoke to us separately. Her cop pressed her in the kitchen. All I clearly made out was Sarah saying, “No. Nothing like that.”
“This is a big place,” my cop said to me, scanning around. “How can you afford the rent?”
They asked Sarah to lock the dogs in the kitchen and told me to sit in the living room. Sarah moved about freely. When one asked me if there were any weapons in the house, I noted that we had both already told them so, and then I explained exactly where each one was. The cop immediately called for backup. Soon, four more cowards arrived, and most of them started to search the house.
All of the cops were white; all were male but one. A petite female cop with a blond ponytail sticking out the back of her police hat. When you hear the words “affirmative action,” you probably imagine some incompetent black guy with a job he can’t handle and that should have been given to some other, qualified (i.e. white) person. The actual data tells us that the affirmative action poster child is much more like this cop: white, female, blond, cute. That’s what passes for affirmative action these days: cute white chicks getting preferential treatment.
Real-Life Affirmative Action Poster Child struck a pose while she talked into her radio. She was wearing a vest. Apparently SFPD didn’t have a vest small enough to fit her, and swimming in her too-big vest she resembled a blue suit of armor. I prefer my cops big. Male or female, but big and tough, please. Big enough to beat my ass without the benefit of a weapon. This cop would have no choice but to shoot me, and she knew it.
Legally Blond stood in the hallway, conferring with the first two officers on the scene (shit—my house is “the scene” now). When she wasn’t barking orders at them she was shooting daggers at me. Finally, she approached Sarah.
They smiled warmly.
They stood in the front hall and talked about me while I watched. Blond Justice put her arm around Sarah’s waist. She moved her head close to Sarah’s and they whispered secret things. From time to time they glanced at me. We can add that to my list of things I’d have thought would be hotter. Flashing lights glided past the bay windows—more backup. Three more cops walked into my house through the open door. They did not acknowledge me.
Does SFPD really have this little to do? How many unsolved stabbings am I going to read about in the back of the paper tomorrow?
At some point I noticed my suitcase.
Sarah was standing right in front of it. The place was cluttered; she hadn’t noticed it. Yet. Once she did, I would be dealing with the person I didn’t want to have any bullets.
I sat there and willed Sarah not to notice the suitcase. It worked for about five minutes. Then some cops passed the two of them in the hallway, and they scootched a little to let them by. Sarah backed into the suitcase and almost fell over it. Blond Justice caught her arm when she stumbled. Sarah turned to look at what she’d tripped over. It was going to be a glance, but when she saw what it was, she froze, body twisted, head down. She stood and stared and I couldn’t breathe. Finally, she raised her head and gazed down the hall at me. I could see the crazy in her eyes from across the house.
Blond Justice was still steadying her; Sarah clutched at the arm and shrank. Then she said something, and Blond Justice put her arm around Sarah again and hustled her out of my sight.
Blond Justice came back a few minutes later. Alone. She snapped a quick order at two lazy stormtroopers that were standing around, and they followed as she quickstepped into the living room straight for me. Her little hand was, of course, on the butt of her oversized security blanket. I wondered if she was going to draw it. She didn’t. Instead, she pointed at the floor and said, “Down.”
It really wasn’t enough information, not for someone who had never done it before. I got down on one knee and held my hands up, Al Jolson style. “Like this?” One of the goons took semi-pity on me and semi-gently helped me into the position: completely prone, flat on my face, hands behind my back.
Somebody cuffed me.
I was lifted by the cuffs to my feet. Given that my arms were behind my back, this hurt a great deal. I didn’t give anyone the satisfaction of hearing me cry out. No rights were read. Somebody unceremoniously robbed me, emptying my pockets while threatening me with what they’d do if anything in my pockets cut their hands. Then someone shoved me out of my living room through the hall and out the front door and down my front steps to one of the six or eight cop cars badly parked around my driveway. No one told me to watch my head, like they do on Cops, but I watched my head get more than a little bumped on the way in. Someone slammed the door.
They left me in the back of the cruiser, cuffed and alone. The car smelled like fresh vomit. The glass between the backseat and the front had a big crack across it—from kicks, maybe?—but someone had since installed a thick wire grate in front of the cracked glass, so there was no longer any hope of escape that way. The windows to either side of me had wire built into the glass. There were no handles, locks, or knobs on either of my doors in the back. It was pretty creepy.
My eyes got accustomed to the dark and I noticed graffiti here and there inside the back of the car. I dint do it, someone had written in what looked like blood on the window to my left. In the cracked glass in front of me someone had etched, FUCK KNEE GROWS.
I thought about that. Some dude got himself busted. He was sitting in here under arrest, like I was now. Either the cops had uncuffed him or he had uncuffed himself; the glass was already cracked, or perhaps he had cracked it. There was no wire grate yet. He had a sharp object in his possession. Of all of the options that lay before this man, he had chosen to spend precious minutes doing that. A real mastermind, that one.
Next door, Rita and Michael stood on their porch, basking in it. It must have been nice for the wolves to be at someone else’s door. Rita was almost pretty when she smiled. Maybe those psychos had left me alone because they knew it was only a matter of time until I self-destructed. Maybe we were so crazy that serial killers kept their distance. We were amateurs. Funny thing was, if I had killed them, the day I went to get Luther’s ball, say, and the cops found a dozen corpses stashed around the house, they would have called me a hero. They’d have let me drive this car, with the siren on. It’s all about context.
But I had bigger problems. They had me. Really had me. I felt the beginnings of panic, so I took a big breath of vomit air, held it, and let it go slowly. Then I took another. I needed to be calm enough to take any opportunities I got.
Cops streamed in and out of our house. Most of the ones coming out carried ammo. I guess you could say we had a “stockpile.” We kept it in military ammo cans—those big green metal rectangles with the flip tops—because that is what they are for. They keep your ammunition dry and safe. I didn’t really intend to stockpile per se. We’d pick up a box or two every few weeks or so, and we didn’t go shooting much anymore. But watching the ants march out with our property, I knew that they would say I had been deliberately stockpiling ammo for something. Not that we had been stockpiling. Me.
One cop, at his limit with just one ammo can, actually took the time to walk up to the car I was in, peer in at me, and whine through the slightly open passenger-side front window, “Why do you have so much ammo?” I wanted to say, Because guns don’t work without it, but I knew I couldn’t say that so instead I said, “I don’t know what to tell you.” The weakling cop trudged away with his burdens.
I had been in my cage for maybe a half an hour when another cop came by the car to get something out of the trunk. A brother.
I watched him through the rear window. He tried to open the trunk but it was locked and I guess he didn’t have the key because he walked over to the passenger side and opened the front door and leaned across the seats to pop the trunk using the latch near the floor on the driver’s side. He paid me no mind. He would be gone again in a second.
“Excuse me? Officer?” He didn’t react at all. The trunk was now popped, and he was starting to back out of the car. He still hadn’t acknowledged me, but I knew he could hear me because I had heard the weakling cop. “Officer? Do you know Debra McGee?”
He had almost completely exited the car, but at that he froze and turned and looked me in the face for the first time. “Yeah?”
“Would you please call her and tell her that this is happening, please? Please?”
He said nothing, and his face never changed. He pulled himself back out of the car and slammed the door.
I felt pretty good about the exchange. Black cops were for some reason particularly unpopular in hip-hop at that time, but still I hoped. It was something.
I figured that was probably the only break I’d get, so I settled into my seat and took in my surroundings again. FUCK KNEE GROWS. I stared out the window again. Rita was smiling at me. I smiled back. Kind of meant it. She had, after all, punched Sarah in the head. I closed my eyes.
The door slammed and I jumped. Two cops sat in front; one started up the car. Had I actually gone to sleep? It was completely dark now. My house was still a buzzing hive. I did not see Sarah. Maybe she was upstairs, fisting Blond Justice in our bed. I kind of hoped so.
I didn’t want to show weakness by saying anything, but when we got on the highway I cracked: “Where we goin’?” Of course they didn’t answer. No one had read me my rights, or said much of anything to me after “Down,” so I wasn’t even sure I was officially under arrest. Granted, I was chained up in a rolling cell, but I wondered if a court would find that I was being detained in the constitutional sense. I mulled over that awhile, until I remembered that the question was moot because the Constitution did not apply to me. I was right all along.
Two exits later we were back on surface streets in the South of Market District. Still not a word from either of my abductors. Maybe the jackbooted thugs were taking me to 850 Bryant—jail, or, as the rappers call it, County.
They were. We pulled into an underground garage and one of them dragged me out of the car and shoved me toward a freight elevator. I was in the belly of the beast, but at least I wasn’t at the dump, or on some pier.
The freight elevator doors opened into a dirty, crowded office. One of the klansmen plunked me down in a chair by a desk and left me there. I sat for a while and watched other manacled black men get led around. It was a lot like Sankofa.
Most of the prisoners looked like criminals, for what that’s worth. I probably looked like a criminal too. OK, I definitely did. But a few of them didn’t look like criminals at all. A few looked like how I felt. Their frozen haggard faces said, But I did everything right! I did everything you told me to do. This happens anyhow? Yes, yes it does. You cannot escape your destiny, young Skywalker.
On TV, some pig sits down at a typewriter on the desk and barks, “Name.” That never happened. Maybe, since they’d stolen my wallet, someone got it off my license. What happened instead was nothing, until a huge pig scooped up my arm as it waddled by and pulled me back over to the freight elevator. We went up, up, up. I’d have thought they’d keep us down below, in the hold. But instead they keep us in the tower. Maybe those are the most difficult floors to escape, or to evacuate in a fire. I didn’t know. It was all new to me. I’d made it to almost 30 without any of this.
The elevator doors opened onto a small bulletproof waiting area, though you could see the cells in the back. The fat pig pulled me past the coward behind the glass who buzzed us in, then it finally uncuffed me and shoved me into a cell. I was not alone.
Although, yes, I had tried my whole life to avoid what was happening, that doesn’t mean I hadn’t thought about it. I’d probably thought about it every day. But as soon as Officer McPigwich closed the cage door and left, I understood that I’d never had any clue what it was really like.
There were six other men in the large cell. Half wore baggy orange sweatshirts with matching pants—the jail uniform, I guess. The black-and-white-striped getup must cost more. The other three were still in their real clothes, like me. All of us were black. I wondered if this really was a representative sample of the penal system’s inventory. I had not seen anyone but brothers getting pulled around downstairs.
At first I was tense, waiting for other inmates to try to jump me like Sarah wanted or take my shoes or whatever. But they all pretty much ignored me, and each other. I guessed I was the only first-timer. The big man who pulled his sweatpants down and took a noisy dump in the exposed toilet was my pick for most frequent flyer. There was no sink.
I spent my time not afraid but disgusted. No rats, but there were plenty of droppings in the corners, and squads of roaches on the walls. It was quiet, save the occasional clang or buzz. In my limited experience, jail isn’t so much dangerous as it is gross and boring.
I was there a long time. I don’t know how long, because there was no clock, I hadn’t worn a watch in years, and even if I did wear one they’d have taken it when they robbed me.
They stuck two more men in the cell with us: first a black man who was dressed like a pimp, and later a black man wearing a janitor’s uniform. Initially I thought he was there to clean up, which, although welcome, seemed odd. But he had no mop, and once inside he just sat down on a bench and looked sad.
I may have fallen asleep again.
The next time someone came, they came for me. A bored frat boy opened the cage and gave me that annoying finger-beckon cops do. I wanted to ignore it but all that would have gotten me was a closed cell door. So I rose and followed. Frat Boy Pig turned his back on me and walked out to the elevator. We rode down, down, down, and exited into a lobby.
“Go,” it said.
One hundred and thirty years earlier, a little girl named Azzie McCoy was out in a field working, like she was every day. All of her friends and family were working around her. And some asshole—who probably looked a lot like that cop—rode out to them on a horse and said, Y’all free now. Git. Those were his exact words. We have passed them down. The asshole rode off, and Great-Great-Grandma Azzie and her people got. They just walked away. So did I.
It was late. There was a cop standing on the big front steps outside. “Debra says she’ll call you,” he said as I passed. It was the black cop I’d asked for help in the car. It took me a minute to process his words, and by the time I finally said “Thank you” he was already walking back up the stairs to be with his buddies.
I had no money; my wallet, and my keys, were taken and gone. I didn’t dare go back in and ask for them. Cell phones didn’t really exist yet, and if they had they would have taken that too. So I walked. I walked home. It no longer was a home, but it was someplace.
* * *
Ten minutes on the highway is hours on foot, and I didn’t exactly rush to get back to the scene. By the time I could see our house at the end of the block it was almost starting to get light out. In a way, it seemed safer to be in there now than it had that morning, as our drama was now a matter of public record. I naively assumed they’d taken her guns as well.
The front door was open; the lights were on. The house was trashed. It was impossible to tell how much of it had been done by Sarah and how much had been done by her goons. It seemed like everything I cared about was gouged or smashed or, in the case of electronics, doused. That last was definitely Sarah’s touch. I wandered from room to room, marveling like a hurricane survivor. Yup, the cat was definitely out of the bag about us now.
The cats.
Now I ran from room to room, eventually into the kitchen. It was the only room that hadn’t been destroyed. Nia was sitting on a counter, cleaning. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be up there. Suki was asleep by the oven. Finding Jimi was harder. After a while I spied him squeezed behind the refrigerator. He was still scared, but I coaxed him out with tuna juice and got most of the dust out of his thick fur with damp paper towels. Then we all had tuna.
