Uncle Janice (35 page)

Two Latinos walked in side by side, as if they’d just been holding hands, the both of them dressed for a different season in fitted T-shirts and shorts. The same rigmarole all over again: Huxtable went momentarily quiet, the old obese man sneered, although perhaps he’d never stopped sneering, perhaps his face was just like that, and her father stood up to pour the guys some coffee. Brother Itwaru running for mayor wherever he went. The next latecomer, however, beat him to the pot. A Latina in nurse scrubs and with a long braid of ponytail snaked over her shoulder, she helped herself to a cup while Brother was still making his way down the row of chairs. He looked defeated, then annoyed when she took the pot around the room to top off everyone’s cups. Janice gave her a big smile, unseen behind the headscarf. Young Huxtable meanwhile had given way to the white guy, who told a rambling story about living under a car, the logistics of which Janice found hard to follow and even harder to believe. Another heavy white guy, although thinner than the first, came into the room reeking of alcohol. He took a front-row seat as if in penance. The nurse brought him a cup of coffee, but because he had his face in his hands she left it for him on the floor, where it seemed statistically inevitable that he’d kick it over. When the first white guy finished his monologue, the second white guy started his own. Out of the rotation, Janice thought. And thank God. Because this was Queens, where start times were considered approximations, more bodies filed in late: a stylish young Asian woman in designer sunglasses, looking lost, as if she’d come to the wrong room; a bespectacled, baldheaded, vaguely Indian-looking Latino whom Janice immediately recognized as K-Lo.

He sat in the last row, in a corner chair where he could see everyone at once. She doubted he was an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise. More likely he attended meetings—AA, NA, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters
Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous—all over the borough for the access to others’ secrets. He had one leg crossed over the other and his foot bobbing with excitement. When the nurse, who’d brewed a new pot, brought him a coffee he nodded his thanks but stashed the cup under his seat without taking a sip.

Her father was standing. The second white guy had finished sputtering, it seemed, and Brother wanted to get his own confession in before somebody else tried speaking out of turn. Like K-Lo, he seemed less nervous than eager. He gripped the seatback of the empty chair in front of him and introduced himself by name, as an alcoholic, the only one in the room to have done so, but everyone still knew the next line.

“Hi, Brother,” they all said, even Janice.

“The fifth time I hit rock bottom, I woke up to the police banging on the front door of my house. Bang, bang, bang, like how they do. I roll over in bed, okay? To tell my wife to go downstairs and sort it out, but she’s not there. The police, they want to know what happened last night. I say, ‘What do you mean, what happened?’ And I’m very scared, right? I’ve got my two daughters watching TV in the room. And the police are telling us my wife’s at the hospital. With everything above the shoulders okay but her body they tell me is done. Like beat to hell. I go, ‘When? How’d this happen?’ Turns out I’m how it happened. And I believe them, right? I don’t remember but I believe it. If Savita says so. If that’s what she says … The cops are having to take me to jail now, but I’m asking about the kids, what happens to the kids, six and eight years old? The cops, they’re trying to help me out. They go, ‘Do the girls have grandparents they can stay at for a while? Any family friends, neighbors you can trust?’ I say we got none of that. Both sides of our family’s back at home and it’s not like I’m the best-liked guy in the neighborhood these days. So it’s off to lockup for me, Child Protective Services for the girls. When my wife finds out, she goes buck wild. Runs out of the hospital. She’s the one that bails me out of jail even, but I still can’t go home, so I check into a motel. The Kew Motor Inn? Not too far from here? I’ve got a nice little view of an alleyway outside my window and there’s a liquor store across the street where if you want anything, you
gotta talk to the guy through bulletproof glass. I’m living in the motel room less than two hours when I tie the bedsheets to the headboard and jump out the window. I don’t want to hang myself in the shower, scare the maid half to death, but I figure they can cut me down in the alleyway—no one’s got to see anything too gruesome. But I’m too heavy. From all the drinking, I guess. Go figure. The headboard snaps, comes flying out the window with me. Now the cops are waking up my wife. ‘What happened last night? Your husband’s in the hospital with a concussion and two broken legs.’ That’s the rock-bottom number-five story. I made a promise to myself and my family that I’d never touch another drink after that. After lucky rock-bottom number thirteen, I move out of the house for good. I was working the program by then and I’d write my daughters these long ten-page letters I find out never really got into their hands. Because their mother, I guess. She tore them up maybe and I don’t blame her, I really don’t. It’s a good thing she did that, I think. I was a poison, you know? I was a poison that had to be flushed out of everybody’s system. But what I wanna know now: am I
still
poisonous? If I tell my youngest about those letters, am I doing it to be selfish? More for me than for her? Not like she’s gonna jump into my arms over a couple letters, believe me. She’s not like that. She’s got … she’s got a hard bark on her. But see, I
want
to tell her, I want to be a part of her life somehow. I just worry that because I want those things, I should do the opposite. For her sake. As God is my witness, I’m not sure I know how
not
to hurt people, you know? So what am I supposed to do? I don’t know. I really don’t. I haven’t had a drink in eight years, including today. And with that, I think I’ll pass. Thanks very much for listening.”

Except for the drunken white guy, with his own problems to noodle over, and her father, who was easing himself back into his chair, everyone in the room turned to look at her, as if they knew, as if they’d somehow ID’d her as the youngest daughter. But no, come on, don’t be so paranoid: it was her turn, that’s all. They were only waiting for her story.

“Do I have to speak?”

“What’d she say?” asked the obese white man. “I can’t hear what she’s saying.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” the nurse said, a preposterous lie. “It’s entirely up to you.”

“Then I think I’ll pass.”

“Great!” the nurse said as she stood up. “So there’s this guy at work driving me crazy …”

When the meeting finally did end, everyone circled—even the drunken white guy—to hold hands and recite the “Our Father.” She had her own father on one hand, squeezing tight; K-Lo on the other, his palms grossly sweaty. Like her, he had abstained when his turn to speak had come around, probably one of the few times in his life he’d passed on an opportunity to run his mouth.
And forgive us our trespasses
, they said. About her father’s speech, she wondered only if Judith knew about the letters, and if so for how long. Janice couldn’t really give it any more consideration than that, because she at last had a plan coalescing and needed to concentrate. Afraid K-Lo might recognize her eyes, she stared at the floor.

“Amen,” said the AAers. And then, arms raised, they shouted, “Keep coming back! It works if you work it!”

The circle broke apart, but people still hung around the room to fold up chairs and kill the coffeepot. Young Huxtable hawked religious literature out of his duffel bag. The nurse was telling the drunk guy about an evening meeting over in Astoria. To delay returning to the outside world with its neon-lit bar signs, some of the other members had formed a new circle—a smaller, chattier circle—everybody sipping on coffee except for K-Lo, which made her nervous because he always knew things others didn’t, like maybe he’d seen Young Huxtable cleaning out the pot one time with toilet water. Or maybe Mrs. Lo insisted he drink only decaf. Janice went to go fold chairs in the back of the room, where she knew her father would follow. She felt his hand on her arm, gently turning her around. The fluorescents’ stark lighting tinseled his teary eyes.

He said, “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to make it seem like Mom was the bad guy, because that’s completely not what—”

She shushed him. She didn’t tell him—she shouldn’t need to tell him—that she would never consider her mother the bad guy. She couldn’t. No one could. Not if you’d met her. Not if you’d ever seen her, behind a scrim of steam as she poured hot water onto a T-shirt, or sitting big-eyed on the stairs with the tattered end of a bandage between her teeth. Bad guys didn’t look like that. They looked like Korean Marty and Cerebral Pauly. They had the giant sloping forehead of a Ned Shu or an Ed Shu or ex-governor Eliot Spitzer, or they had Commissioner Ray Kelly’s preposterously punchable jaw. Bad guys were married guys who flirted with tipsy women in bars. They had evil cackles and miscolored eyes. White cats on their armrests. They sold drugs. They hit and ran. Hit and retreated cowardly to Viper rooms. They busted through back doors uninvited, wore droopy dandelions in their lapels, and tossed little girls’ book bags onto the roof of the 4 Aces Car Dealership on Atlantic Avenue. They asked their Yankee teammates to inject their ass cheeks full of steroids. They sat behind big desks like Lieutenant Prondzinski. They slept under bigger desks like Inspector Nielsen. They looked like Sergeant Hart. They looked like Gonz. They looked exactly like Gonz. They mocked
Rubí
like Gonz, avoided A.R.’s Tavern like Gonz, called people pussies and faggots, abandoned their ghost posts, sucked up to investigators, sneered, strutted, snarled, and were despised like Gonz. You want to know what a bad guy looks like? That’s what a bad guy looks like.

She told her father, “I need a favor. The guy in the glasses, the one who came in last … don’t look. After I leave, I need you to go over to him and say, ‘Hey, how was that crack Sergeant Hart gave you?’ And then walk away. Take a cab back to work and don’t let him follow you, all right?”

“What?”

But she was already walking away herself. She knew he’d do it. She also knew an anxious K-Lo, worried about the potential loss of his CI gigs, would call Hart later tonight, probably sooner. That’s why she needed to get out of here straightaway. She had a three-point plan now—sit still long enough, clenching your jaw, and something’s bound
to occur to you—but this part here with K-Lo was only the first bullet. Send him to Hart, who’d want to know what the guy at the meeting had looked like, how he acted. And K-Lo would say,
I don’t know. Overweight? Sorta sad? Told a story about blacking out, beating on his wife, and didn’t seem to get in too much trouble over it
, and Hart would say,
A cop, no doubt about it, probably Internal Affairs
. Janice knew exactly how he’d think. She knew the catastrophic film festival in his brain would project a silhouetted image of the IA building in Manhattan. Shit, what didn’t she know? How the movie ended, for one, but she had a few guesses. If Internal Affairs jammed up Hart, he’d assume she was the snitch and so he’d snitch on her, not to IA, but to all his department-wide cronies and goons, who’d block every promotion she ever came up for, if they didn’t kill her first, sending her into a drug bust without backup, Serpico-style. Even the uncles would shun her, unless she could cast a more convincing villain to play her part. On her way out of the room, when she heard Young Huxtable’s mini-groan, she knew without having to turn around that the drunk white guy had finally kicked his coffee cup across the floor. She ran, the burka’s dark material billowing around her legs.

She needed to find a bad guy. That was the second bullet. Or rather, she needed to
fabricate
a bad guy. Make a preexisting bad guy seem even badder. Because K-Lo might spot her if she hung around the building, she drove six blocks away, to a corner pay phone on Roosevelt Avenue, but apparently a frustrated juicehead had recently ripped out the armored cord. Imagine the news he must’ve received. Janice got back in the car, where she tore off her swampy burka. She sped to a pay phone she knew still worked, her pay phone, outside the Corona bodega with the music-making carousel-for-one taxicab. No one was riding it. No Korean Marty across the street, either, or any pigeons perched beneath the el. No snow left on the sidewalks. While the inevitable 7 train shrieked overhead, she found fifty cents at the bottom of her purse. She didn’t think Gonz’s Pure Magic fuck buddy was originally from Long Island, but the
accent out there was the whitest one Janice could approximate, and so before dialing she practiced saying,
It’d be horrible if I spilled coffee on my new Prada bag. It’d be the worst if chocolate melted in my drawers
. Outrageously competent, Richie the Receptionist answered before the first ring had finished ringing.

“Queens Narcotics,” he said.

She kept her back to the pay phone so no one across the street could sneak up on her. “Can I talk to Gonz?” she asked, pronouncing it
tawk
. “Raymond Gonzalez?”

“I’m sorry,” Richie said, “but I can’t transfer you unless you know the extension.”

“Oh,” she said, as if surprised. “Well, can you give him a message, please?”

“I can’t confirm that anyone by that name even works here.”

“Can you tell him I’m sorry?” The pay phone shell’s sticker continued to offer fortune-telling services—
DON’T GIVE UP HOPE!
—at reasonable rates. She said, “I’ve been trying to get ahold of him on his cell, but … can you tell him I was just feeling so pissed off, you know? Like literally crazy. Sir? Hello? Can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, probably with his pen poised above a pad of paper, determined to get every detail correct before broadcasting the story throughout the rumpus. At the top of that pad: the number that had come across his caller ID. “Go ahead,” he told her.

“If you make a complaint on a cop? Like an official complaint? And it isn’t entirely true … is that like against the law? Can you go to jail for something like that?”