What We Are (38 page)

So this threesome came with bats and a knife and the hand-held film of a cell-cam. Got the idea from a video called
Bum-Beaters
. Caught their victim at the Palo Alto bus stop in the bushes, a quarter of a mile from the pristine, higher-learning halls of Stanford University. According to other transients on a bus in East San Jo he'd tried to get on the line 22 and pitch his tent but the inner sanctum was already lined with sleepers. So he walked out the exit to the cold outside, breath cloud rising to the heavens like a prayer. The three kids hog-tied the bum and then wrapped him up in his own blanket. No Christian compassion, no pagan compassion. When the cops found the corpse there were twenty-six holes in it from head to toe. Twenty-five were in the legs, arms, hips, and ass, and the last was in the throat. They were playing with their prey, Orcas flipping the seal with their tails. Sawing into the soul of man. The youngest, Mrs. Nineveh Franzen's son/boy/man, wants to represent himself so he can ask for the death penalty. Unprecedented legal stuff. By the looks of his oily skin, he's supposed to be getting his permit to drive.

The victim has no family this time, at least no family in this country. Which might be the same thing. No one knows his name, unidentifiable. But that doesn't mean there's no ancillary damage, right, Mrs. Franzen? With appeals and attorneys and all those goodhearted
support groups against capital punishment now claiming your son as a cause, he'll live for two decades plus, get ready; with weekend visits to the high-walled nineteenth-century “Castle of Evil,” Quentin's Condemned Row, get ready; with the years of denying the devil in your son, with the mornings and evenings ruined forever, with every social gathering, get ready; with the eyes of public pity that are yours for the taking like, let us say, at a fortieth birthday party, your sister's (to be gentle), or your own (to be harsh), there will be no moment from here on down that you will not think about him, get ready; what you did wrong in his rearing, why why
why
in the end he hadn't thought of you, or of God or the law or his country or shame, or of the life of another human being, get ready; your days will be the same in timbre and tone as your son, you may as well be there in the four-by-eight pit of concrete and iron with him, daily enervation on the horizon, get ready; guilt and terror and fear only because you clearly love him, ma'am, get ready to be eaten from the inside out, dear lady. Get ready.

Aw, man
.

I don't want to think about this shit right now or these amoral assholes or—please bless him,
bless him
—the deceased Mexican bum, so I flip through the paper to find some innocuous news to scan or Little Caesars pizza coupons to use or whatever. Sports, Business, Local. I turn to the Metro in the middle of the fold and, as you might expect by now, find myself again the center of controversy, there I am, sort of.

I don't know how she did it, but I know why. I blink a few times and find the same thing still in front of me, the caption:
Who is this mystery poet of love
? The Os as hearts, the lettering in pink. And then the slanted image of a book with the imprint of kissed lips on its cover, the title
Beatrice
, the author, Anonymous.

I open to the article and find a photo of La Dulce reading an excerpt at City Lights Books in North Beach. At the podium, she's all
gums and teeth, glamorous sparkles across her cheeks. I'm surprised she wasn't up there in a G, pushing her beautiful ass out at the crowd for a good
sasa
, as we say in Samoan, a good spanking.

The article notes: “Ms. Schneck is very careful to articulate that while she is the subject of the book, she is not the author.” The University of California has published
Beatrice
under its Local Poet series, a first-book contest drawing hundreds of submissions. The book was selected as a finalist by a panel of national poets, then chosen as best in the bunch by the president of the NEA.

The citations are pretty impressive. With its “incomparable range” and “celebratory spirit of the beauty of Woman,” the book is endorsed by local literati including the Dean of Creative Writing at the Silicon University of the Valley, Gabby von Morley; confirmed by the Poet Laureate of Pittsburg, Kim Maddodondia, with a plea to the poet to personally reveal to her “the fiery horizontal intent thronged in the body of these poems.” Even the famed Shakespeare critic Herod Budoom has rung in from his lofty chair on Thermopylae or Olympus and afforded the book his highest praise in decades: “
Beatrice
is readable and decent and possibly worth the purchase.”

I look up from the paper to process this onslaught of irony and the answer is not a joke: on the office television, already, Mrs. Nineveh Franzen's kid, Marko. Oh, he's finished now, up the river. Little Marko Franzen will be there until some other nutty kids copy-cat the cruel act somewhere in middle America and he's referenced as the trendsetter. Now his lifeless greasy face is in the corner of the screen, a still-shot yearbook pick of (of course) black eyeliner and black lipstick, with the cynical echo of his mother's quotation beneath it:
NOT A HAIR ON HIS CHIN
?

The show:
The O'Reilly Factor
. The host spewing venom. The television is in mute mode, but I can hear him just fine.
There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face
. He hates this kid, the ring-leader. He would kill this kid, premeditatively. If he had a chance,
he'd wring the kid's neck with his big Irish hands, rip out the larynx and chew on it. Maybe that's why he's so appealing to people: finally we have someone in the public eye who isn't afraid to demonstrate the senseless emotion, in all our hearts.

One of the host's shaking hands is virtually thrust into the hollow chest of Lomas Gerragos, his guest for this segment, the Franzen family attorney. The lawyer is taking the attack in stride, blinking and nodding respectfully at every jab of the opposing index finger, with a contented look that likely speaks to his own murderous hourly fees, and I have this urge to organize a mental outline of the ugly American issues on the silent TV when I hear, “I can't believe you're, like, watching that guy.”

“It's not my television,” I say, even before turning toward the direction of the voice. One watches what one has to watch. One watches what is around: the world at large. Or one closes one's eyes. And then there is also the matter of one's ears and one's mouth, the little monkey.

See no world, hear no world, say no world
.

“He is just, like, totally wrong.”

It's the girl at the door. She's looking down at a cell phone, the nose rings shaking from the fierce way she's punching in digits.

“Right,” I say.

“The only thing, like, I agree with him about is Jessica's Law.”

“Why is that?”

“Because these guys are taking advantage of innocent little girls—hold on.”

The jingle from
I Will Survive
announces itself like a music box and she stops it in mid-jingle by pushing a button on her cell phone. She puts it to her ear, says, “Hello.... Can I call you back? ... I know, I heard.”

“I don't think they're all innocent,” I say, quite loudly but to myself.

“Let me get right back to you, okay?” She looks at me. “These poor girls are getting taken advantage of, and it's time we did something about it.”

I say, “Are you with O'Reilly that the Bum-beater Boys should be sent up as men?”

“Yes, I'm afraid I am.”
I Will Survive
happens again. “Hold on.”

She picks up the cell, says, “Hi, Leticia sweetie.”

“But how can these boys be grown men while these girls aren't grown women? Or vice versa,” I say.

“No, no, no, sweetie, I'll talk to you about that later. Let me get back to you, 'kay?”

“And then,” I say to myself, or O'Reilly, or whoever, “if you claim that these girls who get voluntarily naked are actually victimized by a society of hypersexualization, why aren't the boys victimized by one of desensitization to murder and violence? And what did you expect, anyway, from a feminist revolution that teaches girls to celebrate their bodies? Of course they're gonna get naked. A lot. Often. With many. The young, the old, either gender, doesn't matter. You're Everywoman, 'member?”

She hangs up, looks up, says, “Now, where were we?”

“We were on your penchant for little boys being men.”

“That's right. Like, I usually don't agree with the guy.” She looks up at O'Reilly, gasps, jumps at the remote on her immaculate desk, points up, and makes O'Reilly disappear. “I just can't stand looking at him.”

Though it's an odd conflict (she likes what he says but not who he is), I say, “I can understand that.”

“I hate his red face. He looks like a drunkard on Skid Row. And he's so, like, mean.”

“I suppose so. But his show's a rigged game, you know that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's got the home-team advantage.” I'm tempted to look around at the office for another kind of home-team advantage, the complete dearth of heterosexual men, but I keep talking. “A crew of brown-nosers working his fact checks. People think the story ends with the facts when, in fact, the story actually starts with the facts.”

“Yes, like, that's so true.”

“I read that somewhere.”

“Great.”

“See, this guy O'Reilly has structured his show masterfully. He makes the segments seven minutes long so he can talk for six of the seven minutes.”

“Uh-huh—hold on.”

I Will Survive
has chimed in again but gets muted fast, and she says into the micro-mouth of the phone, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

I say, “And he solicits ‘succinct' one-liner letters so he can beat you with the question, ‘Where's your evidence, ma'am?'”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if you make a good point he'll say, ‘You're being philosophical. You've gotta join us in the real world of common sense.'”

“That's, like, unbelievable.”

“And he calls attorneys
counselor
so it seems as if he's the judge.”

“Umm.”

“And then he'll get other guests to shit-talk previous guests in their absence.”

“I know! Okay?
I get it!
” she cries out, hangs up the cell, says, “I'm gonna put it on vibrate,” and lays it on the immaculate plane of the desk.

She says, “And, like, that No-Spin Zone: what's that all about?—Hold on.”

The little creature of a cell phone is now shaking, as if it were about to explode. It sounds like a dozen drumming fingers. You expect steam to come out its ears, wherever the hell its ears would be.
She picks the damned thing up, this animated
CB
, hits the button, and as she starts rattling on to the other party about matching pastels in the world of fashion and how torn she is about looking good in the world while still feeling good about herself inside, I say, “The No-Spin Zone? More like the Non-sequitur Zone. The Dingbat Zone. The Dead Zone. The End Zone. More like the Twilight Zone. A Hole in the Ozone.” I stop to catch my breath, get another thread going. “A Hole in the Head. More like the Headless Zone. The Bonehead Zone. The Bone-Down Zone. The Down-and-Out Zone. The Out-house Zone. I've never seen more loaded questions in my life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That Gaelic prick's like a drill sergeant barking orders at Forrest Gump. Anyone who titles his memoir
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
has some serious self-image problems. I mean, it makes me want to rush off to the head and lay a bold fresh piece of humanity.”

“You're so right. Let me get back to you on that one, baby.”

The beep of her postponed conversation extends throughout the office and she says to me, “But I don't know. I wonder: Why were you recommended to us again? What do you, like, do?”

“I write poetry.”

“And you write pretty good?”

“Yes. I write pretty good, pretty well, pretty pretty.”

“So you're applying to write grants?”

Sounds about right. “Yes.”

“Do you have a résumé or something?”

I would have thought my sister had taken care of that. “Well.” I can't believe I'm about to say this. “I have a book.”

“Like, published?”

“Yes.”

“You have it with you?”

“No.” I can't believe I'm about to do this: “But I have something else.” I hand her the article in the
Metro
praising the anonymous
author of the book in question. She looks it over and shouts, “I love that book! Wait! Oh my God! You wrote
Beatrice
?”

I feel entrapped by the truth. There is nothing stranger in the world than the feeling of detesting, and therefore privately denying, a book you've in fact written. The story starts with the fact of your antipathy. I feel like a brand-new father whose secret gut reaction at seeing the infant for the first time is:
Whoa, there! That is one ugly baby!
But I have to own something in this world, goddammit, and I guess it may as well be this allegedly award-winning book of poems that everyone, especially women, seems to love.

At least it's mine
, the new father reasons.
And I guess the baby got ugly from someone. You are a cutie, cute little baby
, he says, reaching out for the beginning of a new self-definition.

“I composed that book.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“You wrote ‘The Poet Will Be Uxorious from Here On Out'?”

“Yep. Composed.”

“Really?”

It's a refreshing accusation not to be believed.
Excellent!
She wants the proper disposition of a poet, which is to write: one with visible depression. Or she expects the lover with pink cheeks enraptured by the Nerudan passion for women he cannot control. Or maybe she's troubled with the half-breed features. Despite her correct political rearing, she expected someone with angular Anglo cheekbones, ten-dollar words, and a regal air, like Teddy Hughes. And then she wants Silicon Valley evidence of the quality of the work; in other words, that I have no need to visit her enterprise strapped for cash. Yes, I disappoint this cell-phone princess: She's supposed to come to me, not I to her. It's always something of a letdown to meet the authors of books you love because the books, even the worst of them, are the best confection of what is bound to be a flawed human being.