Dissident Gardens (33 page)

From his earliest impressions, the family’s home took for the child the shape of a field hospital, one stationed within the battlefield that was the city. Cicero was fairly certain this had nothing to do with the matter of Diane Lookins’s burden of physical ailments, at least not at first. Nor was it solely because of the parents’ literal professions: mother a trauma nurse (albeit only in some hazily referenced past), father a daily operative on the urban front, a policeman carrying a soldier’s rank.

Instead it was a worldview, or two worldviews intricately dovetailed out of mutual necessities. The urban soldier must recuperate somewhere, must find a place where he can be nursed—a place to offload injury, insult, grievance of all kinds. The nurse, in order to be a nurse without ever leaving the sanctuary of the apartment, needed a supply of patients, or rather the same patient every night, bearing home diverse unfleshly wounds that neither killed him nor healed. The hospital ethos that was conjured, when a person crossed the threshold into the dark, neatly kept rooms, was the function of an attitude of
triage
, directed toward the permanent emergency of being alive.

The child’s sensibility and sympathies, on coming to first awareness from within that threshold, were allied with the outlook of
her
, the nurse-who-was-also-a-patient, the woman fluttering in the dark rooms, not the lieutenant muttering grimly home from duty. This, because the battlefield outside was only a matter of rumor and conjecture, for interpretation from minimal clues, from Douglas Lookins’s bitter snippets of reportage, flares routinely doused by his wife’s plates of food and snapped-on television, by her soothing and hushing and
not-in-front-of-the-boy
, by her attention-revamping swoons, every manner of daily thing that made sustained talking impossible.

Ailment came later, with its inadequate ritual cures, half-drained bottles of quinine water, bitters recommended by a knowledgeable cousin down South, shades drawn in vampirish prohibition of the sun, the diagnosis confirming everything the child and mother already knew. Her affliction was elusive, phantasmic, sneaking across the threshold with a wolf’s name, efflorescing in moods and colors as much as in medical conditions. Even prescription bottles of hydroxychloroquine, when those entered the scene, were drawn out of the realm of medicine into the irrational twilight of the lupus aura. Cure could be a mood, too, the seductive and submitting odor of Diane Lookins adhering to curtains and bedspreads, to the telephone’s heavy receiver, to sandwich bread in a lunch box he’d open midday at school.

The dangers of the world beyond the apartment’s limits were the subject of the interrupted talk, transmitted in a series of fragments worthy of Sappho or Pound. They suggested a world for which the child felt himself unsuited—at first helplessly so, soon enough defiantly. Still, they had the appeal of opening the cloistered apartment to something beyond its humid atmosphere of pity and apprehension. The allusions to a policeman’s universe of treachery bore the appeal of mental intrigue, in a language of seductive opacity.
The Wandering Boys and the Four Horsemen. The Guardians Association. The Payne Brothers. The James Barber Incident. The William Haynes Incident. Reefer. Horse. King H
.

On the Take
.

Vice, Harbor, Housing, Motorcycle, Patrol, Internal Affairs, Transit
.

One Hundred Twenty-Fifth, Convent Avenue, Twenty-Eighth Precinct
.

Or simply
Harlem
, name to an abhorrent chapter in his family’s life, one recent enough that the child’s earliest memories flowed from it. Another home in another city, where everyone was colored and where he and his mother still occasionally journeyed to call on aunt and cousins. A time before they’d come to settle in the rooms venting to the concrete inner courtyard of Lincoln Manor, on Fortieth Street and Forty-Eighth Avenue, south of the el that overhung Queens Boulevard, south of the greener districts of Sunnyside Gardens (despite living among the white Irish and Italians and just a scattering of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, the child gained a sense of the wrongside-of-trackness in which they’d landed, an ache in the whole neighborhood to be
over there
instead).

On the take
named a policeman’s cardinal violation, and the undertow of the wave that had driven Douglas Lookins from Harlem—a wave of recriminations, of barely suppressed scandal. Of unnameable former friends and phone calls with no one speaking on the other end. From the start, on foot patrol, Douglas Lookins had been fixed in these crosshairs: the black policeman’s irreconcilable crisis. Hemmed by prejudice in the wider ranks while taken by the street as a betrayer and informant, house nigger, Uncle Tom. Walking that tightrope, between a sky of distrust and a canyon of scorn, you reached out to those like you, those hunkered down and bearing up, in the same fix: your fellow black shields. You formed an
association
. There had been many of those over the decades, many now dissolved and only rumor. The black policemen’s support networks, meetings conducted in basements for purposes of pooling expertise and salving disgruntlement, then also gathering, under cover of sociality, to get the wives together, to give out some award for outstanding service, like an Elks Lodge. Always, in any event, to stanch the isolation. The loneliness.

These associations, past and present, provided some of the strangest and most evocative names to be hurled out like swears from Douglas Lookins’s lips: the Centurions, the nearly mythical Wandering Boys, later the Buffalo Soldiers. Above all, the Guardians Association. The sole black cops’ guild to be not merely tolerated but sanctioned by
the NYPD, therefore by far the lastingest and with the widest reach. So it was that Douglas Lookins, who’d skirted participation as long as he could, could feel forced, being a decorated patrol veteran and one of a paltry contingent of black lieutenants citywide, to accept an honorary post in the Guardians. He attended the ballroom ceremony to accept the honor and then turned his back on them.

Why? What could be so wrong with the beleaguered Negro policeman seeking solace among his kind?

This: Three-quarters of black cops, like any cops, were dirty. Numbers according to Douglas Lookins; go check it yourself if you want. So to make allegiance with the Guardians was to avow a brotherhood of omertà with so many hundreds of brothers
on the take
. Taking utmost seriously the height of promotion he’d reached, Douglas Lookins understood himself answerable to the brass, specifically to the deputy commissioner who’d come calling a week after promotion, coffees not even cold on the desk before he’d started asking for names.

A white deputy commissioner, and Douglas Lookins’s commanding officer.

Walk a tightrope between a sky of distrust and a canyon of scorn and one of these days even that tightrope might rise up to form a noose around your neck, if it consisted of your fellow black cops keeping vows of dirty silence under auspices of the Guardians.

Having achieved your lieutenancy in Harlem, squelching black-on-black crime, walloping the shit out of kids in order that they
not
have records, breaking up picket lines of Black Muslims boycotting the Amsterdam News Building, escorting Mayor Wagner for
New York Post
campaign photographs, his tall head beside yours even taller in a sea of black kids half of whose hides you’d tanned and might again, distinguishing yourself painstakingly within
the community
, where worth and stature might be measured in what tidal floods of bodies crossed the street upon catching sight of your high, buttoned-up sentinel’s form easing down the sidewalk, one week after promotion you named a bunch of names in return for the transfer to Sunnyside, there to spend your pavement hours knocking Irish kids with screwdrivers off vending machines and hearing
nigger
stage-whispered down every block you strode.

But fuck it, the beat was behind you, those dues paid. Let them disembowel every vending machine from here to the Whitestone Bridge and each other in the bargain.

The child took years understanding that his father wasn’t actually the only clean black policeman in the history of the NYPD.

A few years beyond that for it to occur to him that Douglas Lookins wasn’t certified stainless himself, that some shred of guilty overcompensation might lie behind all the righteousness. But no way to ever do more than wonder whether his father had once had a packet of cash thrust at him and not thrust it right back.

The child took years gathering some sense of it all in the first place, puzzling the policeman’s lament out of Douglas Lookins’s volunteered and unvolunteered fragments. The inescapable truth was that it was Rose who provided the keys, Rose who aided in the puzzling. This might be the core of Cicero’s slavish fury at Rose: that he’d learned more about his father from an hour with Rose than from seventeen years locked inside Diane Lookins’s domesticity. Their home was an institution devised
not
to understand Douglas Lookins. Not to receive his testimony, inasmuch as the last thing you wanted in a hospital was for the patient to
talk
. You wanted them to eat, yes—and you fed them to shut them up. You put on the television, fluffed a cushion, and ceded the whole couch in order that the patient stretch his long form out; you remarked on the remarkable vividness of mountain ranges behind John Wayne on the latest color set; you starched and pressed the sheets, all in favor of their comfort—and to entice the patient to slumber.

And when that didn’t do the trick, you could begin dying.

Cicero used lexicon and streetwise attitude and an appetite for paradox all derived from Rose Zimmer in order to understand his father. The project was enabled because it was a mutual one, Rose herself trying to get closer to Cicero’s father by means of Cicero. So the two of them could work together on that. It was from Rose that Cicero understood that his father was a strict Eisenhower–Nixon Republican—well, no shame there, loads of cops were, as was Douglas Lookins’s avowed upstanding hero, Jackie Robinson (who’d even endorsed Goldwater). For that matter, James Brown was a Nixon
man; Republicanism was a disease common to the self-made, the self-willed Negro.

James Brown was Douglas Lookins’s surprising musical hero, acknowledged to his son once, while in a disreputable mood (“Louis Jordan’s natural heir,” he’d claimed). But it was from Rose that Cicero understood even to inquire about his father’s music, since they owned no records and Diane controlled the kitchen radio’s dial. It was from Rose that Cicero learned to imagine Douglas Lookins mourning his regular use of free seats at the Apollo, offered gratis by a Harlem bigwig, or to picture him instead listening with solitary pleasure to the radio in a police cruiser resting in the shadow of the Grand Concourse—it was from her he understood to imagine his father as being capable of taking pleasure, rather than just being out there all day brutalizing and being brutalized. It was when Cicero and Rose began comparing notes that Cicero’s view of his father changed, from one derived from Diane’s image of him as a monolith rumbling home needing to be dealt with and endured, fed, and eased to bed, to that of a monolith cavernous on its interior, swirling inside with
appetites
. (There was nothing wrong with the food Diane Lookins cooked, but you didn’t consume it with appetite, you bovinely fed.)

Of course, it was by failing to disguise her own appetite for his father that Rose led Cicero to extrapolate his father’s. For, among other things, Rose. Seeing Rose’s appetite taught Cicero that appetite existed—appetite beyond Cicero’s own, which might otherwise have struck him as a unique property, shamefully defining his isolation from the whole of humankind. His mother’s appetite was cloaked in deference and debility, his father’s in stoical fury. Well, Rose demolished the image of stoicism, among other things! Rose let herself be transparent to the child, exposing every kind of raw loneliness, and defiance against loneliness, that had fallen over her in losing Albert and the CP, and in surrendering her daughter to Greenwich Village. And then, exposing to him how loneliness and defiance produced themselves as hunger—an active process of devouring that thrilled Cicero even as it threatened to devour
him
.

Is anything more unforgivable than what a child learns about his parents from their lovers?

And who the unforgiven? Not the parent but the lover.

If Cicero had been thrust at Rose Zimmer, thrust by his father, in order to collaborate with this crazy Jew in the study of his father, who was designated to make a study of Diane Lookins? Who’d etch her legend into the world? The fact excluded, in this scheme of Rose and Cicero puzzling Douglas together, was, merely, that of Diane Lookins’s entire existence. She didn’t fit in the puzzle. Diane Lookins had no witness apart from her own child. He who, if he contemplated this duty, that of entering into her abjection, of fully grasping it, could only run screaming. Diane Lookins’s existence was too heavy and too light, both at once, for a child to assume as a mirror of his own possibilities.