Knucklehead, page 7
I couldn’t believe it. There were cats here billing $400 an hour. All this place did was make money. That was what it was for. And they were telling us all to stop. It was odd enough they were telling us to stop making money in the San Francisco office because there was a riot in LA; they were telling them to stop making money in New York. This was going to cost untold thousands—tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?—and they were eating it, con gusto. Still, I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I left immediately. You know, because of the riots.
We stayed up all night, watching the news and talking to friends and family on the phone. It sucked, but it was exciting too. The Revolution meets New Year’s Eve.
Unfortunately, the next morning, the Telephone Emergency Response System message was less auspicious: “All of you, get the fuck back to work”—something like that. I wouldn’t have showered but Amalia made me.
I returned to the office spent yet refreshed, having vicariously let off steam. I felt better.
I was the only one who felt better. It was the exact opposite of the day before. Today, it was everybody else who looked haunted. They’d been up watching TV all night too. People I’d been around daily for months stiffened when they saw me, or wouldn’t look at me at all. At first I was like, Hey! It’s me! Me! But by lunchtime I was more like, Boo, motherfucker! Boo! I went home early to watch more rioting.
They got over it, or whatever they did with it, eventually. But, for me, a certain feeling never went away. It was the realization that that place wasn’t just alien; it was positively opposite. From that point on, I thought of the firm as Bizarroworld.
Snuggle Sex.
Tuesday, June 30, 1992
“Let’s get under the covers!”
My rap had atrophied to this. I didn’t have that much game to begin with, and Amalia, being basically down for whatever, ruined what little game I had.
We hustled back to the bed we’d only gotten out of to call in sick. I’d woken just before she had, and we stared at the thick, wet fog blowing past our kitchen window for a while until Amalia spoke for both of us: “No.”
It was June and we were bundled up like hobos. I was wearing a full set of sweats over a full set of thermals, and two pairs of socks. Amalia was making some sort of social commentary in two pairs of stirrup pants and an unknown number of Cosby sweaters.
We burrowed into the covers from opposite sides of our king-size bed and came face-to-face, an inch apart, inside our blanket fort. Usually I hate breathing another person’s exhale; it’s gross, and I think I might asphyxiate. But I wasn’t thinking about that. For some time we just stared at each other, grinning like bad children. Her eyes were so shiny.
I kissed her nose and started tugging on her clothes. “Why are you wearing so many pants!” I whined. Shmooooove. We took off some of our pants.
She pulled off one of my socks. I kissed her on the cheek, put my hand on her waist, and smushed her against me. Then my hand slid down to her butt.
“Bananorama!” she cried.
Turned out, the only thing around our house that needed a safe word was our safe word. It was abused on a regular basis.
I laughed and slid my hand back up to her waist. I kissed her on the lips. Again. The third time I felt her tongue so I barked, “Bananorama!” She laughed into my mouth but then the tongue went away. I got one of her Cosby sweaters off, but when I went for a stirrup I got the safe word so I left it alone. We kissed and rolled around awhile. When she slid her hand down into my remaining pair of pants I unleashed a torrent of Bananoramas the likes of which Bananorama themselves have never heard. We howled.
We started getting to it a little more seriously. After a while I noticed I was being touched in places that Amalia wasn’t touching. I poked my head out from under the covers. All three cats were lying across us. I’ve never been sure what cats think people are doing when they are messing around. Maybe cleaning each other. Maybe just cuddling. Anyway, it was a group scene now.
Cuddling is as satisfying as sex if you do it right, and I was happy to do our “pile of kittens” thing for a while. But we were pretty far down the sex path. Not to the Point of No Return, but probably the Point of Uncomfortable Return.
I didn’t care, and I suspected Amalia felt the same way, but I still wanted to check. So I went back under the covers and peeked at her. “It’s all love,” she replied. We smooched a little more, then shifted waistbands and other elastic bits to places that were more sustainable. We popped our heads out of our love fort and looked at the babies. The purring immediately doubled in volume and intensity. We were literally a pile—Amalia was half draped over me, Jimi and Suki were sprawled across both of us, and Nia was on me with her head on Jimi’s belly. My limbs were twisted and random, like someone who has fallen out of a moving car. We purred. I think I fell asleep.
Two Papers.
Monday, July 6, 1992
I started reading two newspapers a day. This was back when San Francisco had a morning paper (the Herald) and an afternoon paper (the Inquisitor). This was also before the Inquisitor became a piece of shit. I had subscriptions to both.
I started reading two papers as soon as I realized that another way the partners were hazing us associates, besides piling on impossible amounts of work, was by quizzing our awareness of current events. This came in the guise of small talk.
They knew that we were all spending 80% of our waking hours doing billable work. In fact, had they known that any one of us was not spending 80% of their waking hours doing billable work, that person would have been fired. But at the same time, we were not allowed to become law monks, tunnel-visioned mole people with no awareness of the world around them. We’d be less profitable to them that way.
If those were the rules, that was fine by me. No way those fools were going to catch me sleeping. If they wanted to play Trivial Pursuit, we’d play.
So every morning I read the Herald, on the bus on the way to work, or sometimes first thing in my office. Reading it in my office was not ideal, because much of the quizzing took place on the elevator up to work at 7:30 in the morning. “Marcus! Think they’re gonna filibuster that reform bill?” “Morning, Dick! I don’t think they have the votes. It’d look too bad if they try and it passes anyway. Personally, I think the president has the moderates locked up and they’re keeping that quiet. Have a great day, Dick!” I was pretty sure that partner was named Dick. Most were.
Unfortunately, I was thorough. I didn’t just read the watercooler stuff. I read the whole paper.
The most fucked-up stories in the paper are the tiny ones. Usually they are in the back, but occasionally they are perfect for plugging in a blank space at the bottom of page 3. Sometimes they are mindblowing, like FIRST CYBORG CREATED (seriously—there was a story about a petri dish somewhere that contained a few living cells and a tiny microchip, living together as a single integrated organism). But usually they were horrible, like GRANDMOTHER SHOT BY POLICE (seriously—her name was Eleanor Bumpurs).
The paper was full of those. Every day. December 29: FAMILY FREEZES TO DEATH IN VAN. May 3: WOMAN CONVICTED OF MURDERING 3 CHILDREN SENTENCED TO PROBATION. July 16: HANGING WAS NOT A HATE CRIME, SAYS SHERIFF. October 12: STUDY SHOWS MOST AMERICANS READ AT A THIRD-GRADE LEVEL. And more. And more. Every single day.
My attempts to chat with the partners about those stories always failed, and I soon stopped trying. But I kept reading them. And I came to think of them as the real stories, the important ones, despite the fact that no one else read them. Because no one else read them. Someone had to.
Duck Season.
Monday, November 16, 1992
“Which way is Columbus?” No Hello or Excuse me or preface of any kind.
The cop turned to me. He was smiling. Wasn’t expecting that. And he didn’t stop smiling when he saw me. Really wasn’t expecting that.
The cops here were better than they were in New York. Couldn’t deny that. I’d been robbed by cops in New York. And even though I’d barely been in SF a year I was a respectable adult here, whereas back east I’d been a schoolkid. So my relationship with the police was changing. But cops were still, for the most part, cops. Even here. After all, it had been right here in San Francisco, just the day before, that Jarrold Hall had an exchange with Officer Fred Crabtree like I was having now.
Yesterday, Jerrold Hall was a smartass, like me, in the Bay Area, like me. And, like me, Jerrold had a talk with a cop. Unlike me, Jerrold was a teenager, and not a corporate attorney in the business district in broad daylight. Also, Jerrold didn’t start it. Nonetheless, at the close of their conversation, Officer Crabtree decapitated Jerrold Hall with his shotgun as the young man walked away. Crabtree told investigators that he’d thought Hall was going to get a gun and come back. And that was that.
And about a week earlier, two police officers in Detroit beat a man’s skull open with their flashlights for no reason. Well, I would call it no reason. The reason the officers gave was that the man—his name was Malice Green—had refused to open his hand and show them what tiny object he held in his palm. It might have been crack. So they broke his head into pieces on the street. Nobody cared.
I glanced pointedly at the cop’s nameplate: OFFICER C. CREELEY. His smile wavered a bit, but held. He looked away and up over my shoulder, and pointed. “Columbus is about five blocks that way, up the hill. It runs almost parallel to this street—”
“What time is it?” Back then, a lot of us brothers referred to the times in which we lived as Duck Season. We were the ducks. And if I knew that Officer C. Creeley could kill me and probably get away with it, he sure as hell knew. But that didn’t mean I had to accept it. I wasn’t going to hide.
Officer Creeley regarded my face with mild disbelief. His eyes moved to my wrist, and the large Movado on it. It cost a week of his pay and looked like it. I was in gray flannel, with a Brooks Brothers trench and a fancy umbrella. I should have been wearing a bowler.
He didn’t appear angry. I’d expected him to get mad. I didn’t want him to beat my ass or kill me, but I knew that if he did, he wouldn’t get away with it. I knew too many people. That was the most I could ever hope to expect from the law: not protection, but revenge.
But Officer Creeley didn’t want to kill me. He just wanted to go home. The cop sighed and lifted his wrist and looked at his Timex. “One-thirty.”
“Thanks,” I said. I walked past him, away from Columbus. I felt his eyes on me. I think I heard him sigh again.
That went OK. Next time, I won’t say thanks.
Yuppie Flu.
Monday, January 4, 1993
“Can you go without me, please? I made a list . . .”
This was not the first time, but it was the first time it annoyed me. This had almost become our routine: Amalia and I would make plans to run errands together and then, at the last minute, she’d bail. Because she was “tired.”
I’d never thought of her as lazy before. But I was tired too. In fact, I hadn’t even known that being tired was a reason not to do something. I wondered why she was comfortable laying the “tired” explanation on someone working 60 hours a week.
She’d worked 60-hour weeks too, for a while, and had been kicking more ass than I was. Then, after less than a year and without talking to me about it first, she dropped down to an 80% schedule. I didn’t mind. We were fine on money. A couple of months after that, she dropped down to 60%. Again without talking to me. No one at the DA’s office asked her any questions about it, apparently; maybe they’d assumed that she was pregnant. She wasn’t.
She started researching things. Health things. One day I came home from work and she told me she had allergies. Another day, she was environmentally sensitive. “I’m sensitive too,” I’d responded, but she thought I was joking. Then she’d told me she had something called Epstein-Barr virus. I’d never heard of it, but apparently my wife was, as usual, on the cutting edge, because soon after that I started to hear about it everywhere. As part of the pop media takeover of the issue, the name was changed to “chronic fatigue syndrome” and then, simply, the “yuppie flu.” I liked that name best.
And, frankly, I was a little bit hoping I’d catch it. At my job, a 40-hour workweek was considered part-time. Literally—you had to go to HR and get written permission to work 40 hours a week, and you probably wouldn’t get permission unless you were pregnant or dying. And, whether you got permission or not, just for asking you could kiss partnership goodbye forever. But two yuppie flu cases working two days a week each would still make more money than my mom ever did. So, yeah, I was looking forward to catching the buppie flu too. But I never caught it. I was fine.
Amalia was sitting up in our bed, surrounded by large pillows. She held a slip of paper out to me and tried to smile. I nodded and walked up to the bed and took the carefully prepared shopping list and I gave her a kiss on the cheek and left and did the shopping.
I did not nag her; I did not complain. I did not call her lazy. I kept my mouth shut. That was pretty much a first for me.
Nice Try.
Friday, February 26, 1993
I was making dinner in my work clothes. Amalia was sleeping. She’d been sleeping when I left that morning. The TV was on. Dinner was almost ready; I was trying to decide whether to wake her when the mindless crap I wasn’t listening to was interrupted by a Special Bulletin. The World Trade Center had been bombed!
I stopped slicing garlic and turned to the screen. False alarm, pretty much. Car bomb in the underground parking lot. Six dead. Cabbies kill more than six people in a Manhattan afternoon.
I went back to my garlic. Alright, terrorists! Way to swing for the fences.
We’re from Marin.
Wednesday, March 3, 1993
A baby! In a wasteland as sterile and joyless as a law firm, a baby is an irresistible beacon of cuteness. I pulled up to the edge of the crowd and started working my way inward, like a sperm.
Carlos Lopez was officially coming back from paternity leave next week; this was just a quick recon visit. Carlos was my hero because he was the first man I’d ever heard of risking his job to take paternity leave. But also Carlos was most certainly not my hero because he insisted on pronouncing his name Carliss. Carliss Lopes. At first I took this as an insult to the intelligence of everyone in the building. But later I learned that when white people like you, they pretend that you are white too. So that they don’t have to hate you. Carliss was just getting with the program.
Carlos had also come by to show off his good-looking family. Marie was gorgeous. Glamorous. She dressed like Mayflower trash, and she acted like it too, and she almost almost looked like it but for what real Mayflower trash might call a vaguely “ethnic” complexion. I harbored a strong suspicion that Carliss’s lovely Marie was really Maria With a Silent A.
The baby was ridiculous. Eleanor (Eleanor? Seriously?) was a perfect six-month-old, happy and drooly and fat. She was wearing a red sundress. You knew that somewhere there was a matching hat.
Being yuppies, Carliss and Mari(a) had all the cutting-edge baby technology. As we stood around adoring the baby, Mari(a) scooped some organic apple sauce into a large plastic bowl and slammed it down on the tray of Eleanor’s travel high chair. Eleanor (seriously—Eleanor?) immediately grabbed the bowl with both hands, presumably so that she could throw it at us. She struggled with the bowl. I was starting to think that those thick guns she was rocking were just for show, until I saw that the underside of the bowl was a huge suction cup. I felt proud to be an adult. They still have all the power, but at least we’re smarter.
“If this law thing doesn’t pan out, I’m selling baby accessories,” I said.
“I’m in. Let me know when I should pack up my office,” Dick Morrison said. Pretty sure his name was Dick.
“And I’ll take one of everything,” Mari(a) smiled at me. I suppressed a shudder. The only thing scarier than that perfect face smiling at you every morning would be taking it for granted.
Eleanor gave up on trying to throw her glop at us and regarded the crowd, digging the scene with a gummy grin. Like me, many of my colleagues seemed to think that a baby looking at you is good luck or something. When her eyes landed on someone, they would make a surprised, delighted sound. People who’d barely spoken to me were making fools of themselves over this fat baby. I was liking them a little better. I searched for Evan, but he wasn’t there.
Eleanor’s eyes met mine and stayed there. After a few seconds it became evident that she was no longer scanning the crowd but was now staring at me. At me! I tried not to make too many cooing noises as I stared back and sucked up the baby rays that Eleanor was beaming at me from her giant eyes.
We must have been locked like that for 30 seconds—me trying not to coo, Eleanor fixated with a blank expression. I was about to start asking her who was a little baby when Mari(a) lifted Eleanor out of her chair and began fussing with the sundress. She seemed different now. I looked around. So did the others. They all had the same blank gaze the baby did. Which was odd—she had been smiling a moment ago. So had everybody else. Before the baby noticed me. Until she noticed me.
Oh.
The others had beat me to it. Suddenly the educational children’s song Which of these things is not like the others / Which of these things just doesn’t belong started playing in my head. Only faster. And it sounded kind of evil. While Mari(a) fake-fussed over the baby, I thought for the first time about the implication of that song: that which is not the same does not belong. Never too young for that, I guess.
