South by South Bronx (7 page)

11.

and not always right you could be not always right and somehow still function still pull it off every day because it's a job NOT an adventure way of life or belief system

pads and memos and files to look up files to shift from PERPETRATOR to VICTIM. Another name gone another piece of past obliterated stamped out no memory no trail as if this person never walked those streets

this is how I will always remember the South Bronx that preen and whore-proud strut to the corner where she tempts the truckers. Short memory so she's never hurt long enough to do something about it. Spread sand over blood newly paved over streets. Make it look new make it smell clean. “It never happened here.” Some people never remember what some people work so hard to forget. Make failure sound like success. Put fake petunias in the windows. Celebrate and go parade. Every June fools. A sometimes Puerto Rican tendency to forget. To shrug and say well

what can you do

swallowed Jonah whale peoples. Live your life SPELLED BACKWARDS is dog. Seats taken, better stand. A long way home and that train is a local. Why burn books that have never been read? He doesn't know about Puerto Ricans. He mentions Castro like he wants to speak my lingo but I don't give a damn about Castro and still think Gloria Estefan is a Cuban torture device. To distinguish between LATINOs. When differences like that don't make a difference anymore then it's time to book a flight buy a house find a seashore far from. Good guys bad guys “when differences like that don't make a difference anymore,” but no matter how you slice that shit it always comes down to the basic fact that Shakira was much better before she started to sing in English.

“What I know about Puerto Ricans couldn't fill a postage stamp,” Myers said. The city blurred through rainy windows. Cranky squawk of windshield wipers wiping. The two of us in search of Spook. “They're U.S. citizens. They love coffee and cigarettes. They play good baseball, like that guy THE A-ROD. They wave around a flag that can't be found in an atlas. I got that from a Puerto Rican guy at the academy. I'm not surprised he washed out.”

The two of us, in search of Spook.

“You forgot salsa,” I said, drowsy with listening with not, with driving with blotting out canceling all like-terms.

“Salsa music,” he said. “Now you're trying to trick me. That's Cuban, right?”

The cigarette thing was a definite problem. Outside of those cheap opportunistic bonding moments with others, there was that stink on the fingers I hated so much that I was constantly washing my hands. My wife made me a special tea. She is sympathetic, having quit two years ago. She never banished me from a room or avoided my stink. On that recent sleepless night, she was there. Getting up from sheets to sit beside me in the dark living room. There while I finished the last two cigarettes, thinking

she's in on it. All of it. This plan, that old plan. She was there when I tried to forget. Names that sometimes fade into files, but I have this thing with faces. Streets retain the memory of them. Sometimes they are caught in the flash of my headlights. They peer at me from fire escapes and stoops. Any cluster of kids in hooded jackets could be them. I developed a brief drinking thing with Lieutenant Jack. Was just learning how to forget when Dirty Harry came. After that came the nether float of an iso-tank. Big words and phrases shrank to a hand-hold, to the slow stroke of her fingers across my face when nighttime black. I was no nation of millions. I was a nation of two. Together we searched the atlas for a country with a flag. A place where houses are sold to foreigners on very favorable terms. Beach. Sun. Spanish. One good down payment

and the rest was gravy. No more South Bronx do-not-pass-go. No more South Bronx do-not-collect-$200. No more South Bronx go-directly-to-jail. Just no more South Bronx

not as culture not as place not as barrier not as wall not as language not as space as condition as sickness as way of life. Not as reason for living not as big as you think—

not as patria

but as springboard. Jettison speed. The ticket in, the ticket out. The one sure place to hit THE LOTTO. It was lightning hitting that power station to bring the blackout we had all been praying for, only this was more than a looted TV set carried through shattered glass streets. I had the images already collected like film strips: the squealing of a stuck pig. A gold shield on the captain's desk. Beach. Sun. Spanish. “The check's in the mail.”

“That's tough about the death threats,” Myers said. My car moved slow motion through dark rain slick. “If the department gave half a damn, they would've rigged your phone up to a DSP-4000 with ripper autotrace functions and digital remote. Could show up at the bastard's house two minutes after he makes the call.”

“I told you, they tried some of that stuff.”

“They didn't try hard enough.”

Establishing shot. Giving Myers those preliminary drives through turf. “Here's the church. This is the steeple.” A game of fingers. The rain kept people indoors or clustered in doorways on stoops.

“I don't even want to know anymore,” I said. To me it was a collective rejection a bad rating a sort of pink slip. I couldn't talk about it while driving strange. I kept pulling to the left. The wheel wanted to go right.

“But the department should want to know, especially in a case where it's obvious the callers are going to be police officers. Police officers making death threats? Why wouldn't they want to look at that? Who is better equipped to carry out a death threat than a police officer? Who has the better resources, better access? How easy is it for people to accept that a cop did it?”

The theme seemed to be shifting, from death threats to cops who try to get away with murder.

“Damn.” Myers searched an empty cigarette pack. “I wouldn't mind at all, nabbing a police officer who thought he was going to get away with something.”

The sound of that crumpled pack reminded me. I reached into a pocket. The gas pedal was a squirmy fat mouse and I was going to squash it. I passed him a cigarette and lit mine. He could light his own—I passed him the lighter.

“I did that once,” I said, more smoke than words. “It's not all it's cracked up to be.”

We sped down Avenue St. John, the street that always sounded like a playground.

“Say, hey, what's the rush?”

“You said we don't have a lot of time.” I ran a red light. Screechy right turn onto 149th Street. A bus honked long and hard. I could imagine cop cars in pursuit, blinking lights crazy zig-zags. Pedestrians jumping out of the way.

Myers laughed. “Man, that's the ultimate treachery.”

“The ultimate treachery?”

“It's just that you can never trust words. You're a detective, you know that. Humans have a failing that they only believe what they feel sounds right. Nothing as outlandish as the truth. That Kennedy thing, they're still arguing about that! They could've shot that man with a bazooka and have it all on film and people would still swear it was lone-gun Oswald pumping away on an antiquated slingshot. Words? What's the point? I don't go that way. I go by gestures, body movements. That's the ultimate treachery.”

There was a jolting buzz from his words. I enjoyed the car splashing through puddles, a slick almost slip-slide feel to the handling that made me go faster.

“Those little things. Fear, guilt, anxiety. All these have their unique physical manifestations. The way fingers grip a steering wheel. The beads of sweat on a man's upper lip. The way he starts accelerating the car wildly at certain points in the conversation.”

I flinched from a bump. It was the car fighting me, the car. Red light. I went through. A batch of honks and one frenzied car squeal.

“Not my favorite conversation,” I said.

“It's completely understandable. I don't know if I would take it so well. After twenty years on the force. A gold shield. And still, cops walking around calling you a traitor.”

The car growled, the rain slapped the windshield all blur. The car wanted to speed. The car wanted to scream.

“I wonder what you would do,” he said, “with ten million dollars.”

It was not the first time I had heard that question. Did Myers somehow know that, the way his eyes were all searchlight strength?

“You tell me first,” I said.

The storm raged over. Rain like a million baby fists pounding the car. I slowed down, pulled into a blank space. The seething engine, through with tantrums. The dashboard felt hot. I pulled the lighter out click. Put it pressed sizzle and lit cigarette number two.

Myers laughed. “Great,” he said, saying nothing. And me saying nothing back. And whoever says nothing best, wins.

Which brings me to David Lynch.

A few nights before I met Myers, my wife bought the entire first season of
Twin Peaks
for a weekend marathon. I was hooked to Lynch's hypnotic story-telling style and his characters, especially a certain Agent Cooper (played in the series by Kyle MacLachlan). I couldn't help feeling this was who Myers wanted to be. Young, smart, inquisitive, spiritually gifted with the ability to locate answers in symbols and dreams. Cooper was a city-slicker who found himself in a small town, and loved it—unlike Myers, who seemed hardly interested in his surroundings. His empty face could go innocent or malicious, his eyes briny with sincerity or closed like a door. He tended to laugh when facing opposition, to joke when he didn't know an answer. Facts figures case scenarios like a long-winded lecturer like a loathsome FULL OF HIMSELF bore who needed to show there was no point in trying to stop him. Facts passed for cockiness and strut. I got the feeling he invented his own job, made it up on the spot, convinced others they couldn't do without him. Sold himself to some big hat with a problem. He was all job, jumping from place to place on the map. He was in service to some amorphous national entity that gave him no real connection to people, turf, community. He was being real or he was being fake. All faces fit perfectly. Yet with me on the street, he was different. I saw timidity, bits of humble and moments of fumble where he showed it was not his turf. He was NOT mister everyman. He did not BELONG everyplace. This time, he was the scrub.

Those first few days he was on me like glued. Took interest in every word every picture every nick and crook. Every scribble on the edge of my desk, every doodle on the side of the page. That my car was a 1998 Caprice somehow unsettled him. On the street, he stuck close. No major scenes, no fleet of cop cars, no flood of blue. Just Myers and me, knocking on doors, talking to people. (Sometimes the “Myers team,” all two of them, put in an appearance as bookends.) Sitting in the Caprice and just watching. Who comes, who goes. “Stuck to me like glued.” Coffee, cigarettes. The surreal aspect of me on South Bronx streets, involved in a case of national security. Hand-picked by some Washington yoohoo. I suppose I should have felt proud, elevated despite that MARK OF CAIN. “Still part of the team.” But all I felt was

suckered

more like I'd been set up. My pockets filling up with cigarettes. Death threats? It was pretty funny how they always started to come in right around the time I had almost forgotten.

I had a hard time forgetting.

What happens when you fight to get in?

What happens when you get in?

What happens when you want out?

After three days, we still hadn't found Spook. No David either.

I should have gone to him first, Myers or no Myers. A costly mistake. I felt I led it all right to them. I had opened a door. It was me. I let something in, something ugly.

The South Bronx has always been a self-contained world to me. Take the 6 train, rolling down from green lawns of Pelham. Coasting through Westchester Avenue on elevated tracks. A turn and steep plummet into Hunts Point station. To speed under Southern Boulevard streets. Longwood Avenue, 149th Street, 143rd Street. Scraping against the Bruckner Expressway to Cypress Avenue, then Brook. The South Bronx ended right at 138th Street and Third Avenue, the last stop before going under the East River into Manhattan. That's where the planet mostly stopped. The world can go to shit south of that station, but up here—the same timeless timbales rhythms, the same girls dipping bare feet in cool streams of rushing hydrant water. It was the end and the beginning, that fucking 6 train. It was the Bronx troubadour spreading its snake length from south to south, bringing South Bronx to Park Place and back again. Could hear it pulsating in Willie Colón, in Eddie Palmieri, clatter boom bang and hiss of sliding doors. Could hear it on any salsa album from the late '60s or early '70s, though YOU CAN'T HEAR IT AT ALL on the Jennifer Lopez album named after the chugging Bronx local. 149th Street has its own sound like that roaring 6 train, that blast of steam pouring out of a crusty old radiator. As much small town as any city can be. The world and its events lay outside, distant. The South Bronx was any town in any spaghetti western, sleeping calm when the men in black pull up to the saloon. Bad guys make it easy in westerns: They wear black. They blow into town, and everyone knows. Ripples go through streets like stones skimming pond face.
Good guys bad guys
is a Hollywood formula. In the South Bronx right here right NOW, you cannot tell who is playing second base or outfield without a scorecard.