Soon the Rest Will Fall (9 page)

Taking off her orthopedic shoes, she added, “You must learn to be a ghost.”

In her stockinged feet she moved soundlessly across the bedroom's shag carpeting.

One year she and Robert had lived above a Chinese herb shop on Clement Street. A kitten came to their door. The cat was a three-month-old female with orange and white markings on its chest and head. It had piercing green eyes and a prehensile tail. The kitty was skittish, but Robert managed to tame it. He even made a pallet for it from a coat.

His grandma would have none of it. “The cat is a whore!” The same Christmas she prepared dinner for Robert and his grandfather. The meal was boiled cow's tongue, unsalted mashed potatoes, and cabbage. The old man sat with Robert at the kitchen table. His wife turned from the stove and taunted him, something she was brilliant at. “You don't have a penis.”

“And you're a witch,” he retorted.

“Hey, Grandma,” Robert piped up, “do I have a penis?”

Her face was an unwavering mountain of madness. “You? Who knows?”

 

Her sandpapery voice faded and was replaced by the noise in the parole unit. The offices were steamy enough to cook an ox and redolent of Lysol. Caseworkers were shouting at each other. Marvin Gaye crooned “What's Going On” from a ghetto blaster.

Robert was at the intake window and spoke to the receptionist. “I've got an appointment with my parole officer.” He was dressed in his finest vines, a button-down white shirt from J.C. Penny's and creased tan slacks with tasseled penny loafers. His scalp was pomaded; he didn't have on any jewelry or cologne.

The clerk was a large fifty-year-old Salvadoreño man in a mint green golf shirt and polyester slacks. His complexion was dark brown. A tonsured fringe of hennaed hair topped his elfin ears. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and had a clipboard in his hand. He wrinkled his nose. “What's her name?”

“Athena Diggs.”

“And you are?”

“Grogan. Robert Grogan.”

“Grogan?”

“That's right.”

“Wait here. She'll be right out.”

Thank Christ his parole officer was a broad. Robert grinned to himself. That was great. It sure as hell was. With his charm, he'd wrap her around his little finger. Chicks were easy to handle. A whole lot more than the dudes were. The punks threw their weight around. Talked tough. Thought they were streetwise.

Athena Diggs buffaloed into the waiting area. She had on a white denim miniskirt, white tights, red high heels, and a low-cut peach silk jersey. A filigreed gold crucifix dangled from a chain around her neck. A halo of impatience crowned her unsmiling face. “Mr. Grogan?”

“Yeah, that's me.”

“Come this way.”

The agent and Robert legged it into the corridor. Athena's backside rotated clockwise as she walked, the skirt's hem riding her thighs. Robert was spellbound. Nice ass, he observed. Athletic. Tasty. Well toned. Too bad she was a cop. He craned his head and checked out the unit. There were cubicles in every direction he looked.

In her office Athena slid in behind the desk and told him to grab a chair. “Sit down.” The room was bare, save for the steel desk and two folding chairs. Last year's calendar hung from a tundra-white Sheetrock wall. The window had bars on it. A naked lightbulb sizzled overhead. It was nuthouse decor.

Robert did as he was told. He would've jumped off a twenty-story building if she'd asked him to. Whatever it took to keep her off his fucking case. Unseen voices burrowed
through the walls, other parole officers and their clientele. It calmed him, knowing he wasn't alone in hell.

The black woman crossed her arms. “Your record is shit.”

It was a fact. Robert's first bust had been on his seventeenth birthday for being a runaway with no money or identification. The cops took him to the substation on Fillmore Street and locked him in solitary confinement to keep the chicken hawks from molesting him. Everything went downhill from there. He was smart enough to agree with Athena. “You're right, it is.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

“Huh?”

“You need a job. Do you have one?”

“No, not yet.”

“How come?”

“I just got out.”

“Where are you living?”

“The Trinity Plaza Apartments.”

She recognized the address. The other white boy, that Slatts Calhoun, he also dwelled there. This was not good. Convicted felons weren't allowed to fraternize. She put her manicured hands flat on the desktop. “Here's the deal. Inmates released from the pen in California face a 70 percent chance of returning to the joint. You need help to avoid that. Medication is necessary.”

His sphincter tightened. “I ain't sick.”

“Your jacket indicates otherwise. You have anger management issues. I recommend Prolixin.”

“That shit is too extreme. I don't need it.”

“Yes, you do.”

The conversation had taken a treacherous turn. Robert
remained steady by employing the breathing exercises he'd learned from doing yoga in San Quentin. “No, I don't.”

The parole officer X-rayed him from head to toe with her coral black eyes and saw little that she liked. “I want you to take a pee test.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“No fucking way.”

“Then you're going to lockup.”

Robert immediately changed his mind. “All right, all right, I'll take it.”

Maybe he was dead. This was how parolees died. Sticking their dicks in glass jars. Forget about drinking beer and smoking pot. His days of getting loaded were over. Might as well join a convent and become a nun. Funny thing was, he was able to get high in prison. It made him question the price of freedom.

Diggs assembled a piss-test kit: a glass jar, a pair of latex gloves and a brown paper bag. “Let's hit it.” The parole agent led him out of the cubicle and into a corridor to the men's room.

She trained a finger at the restroom's doorway. “In here.”

Maintaining his composure, Robert swaggered into the john. Acting like he was going to a night at the opera. A good attitude was necessary. How things were going, this was eternity. He asked Athena, “Do you got to be in here with me?”

“You know the rules.” She handed him the glass jar and the paper bag, then donned the latex gloves. “You piss in the container and stick it in the bag.”

“This ain't right.”

The agent was perplexed. “What are you bitching about?”

“Why do you have to watch me do it?”

“It's the law.”

“Well, fuck, I think that's uncool.”

“Why?”

“Because you'll be looking at me.”

“Too bad.”

“I seriously ain't into it.”

“Grogan?”

“What?”

“Are you fucking with me?”

“No, all I'm trying to say is, like, I need some space or whatever, you know?”

“You are full of shit.”

“Aw, girlfriend, mellow out or something. I have to be by myself when I take a leak.”

“Shut up, asshole. You pee in that jar.” Athena Diggs produced a pair of nickel-plated handcuffs and jangled them in front of him. “Or you're going back to the joint.”

 

There are two kinds of people in the universe, the cops and everybody else. Being an asshole was normal. It was human nature. Robert stirred in his sleep and cried out to god. To stop the voices in his head and to send his grandmother and the parole officer back to hell. No one heard his frantic pleas. He called out again. Nobody listened. There was no reply. He begged a third and final time.

His prayers were answered. The knot in Robert's soul dissolved into nothingness. He was no longer in pain. There were no prison guards. No barbed-wire fences. No
parole offices. He groaned, turned onto his left side, adjusted the blankets in the bed, and eased an arm over the cheeks of his wife's heart-shaped ass. The rest of the night boated away on a dreamless ocean.

In 1910 the black heavyweight prizefighter Jack Johnson was in San Francisco training for a match with Jim Jeffries. The boxers were vying for the world championship. Johnson's manager was a former brothel keeper. There was a falling out between him and Johnson, and he was fired. The fellow was later seen on Market Street with a loaded gun looking for the fighter, who rehired and fired him again.

 

The morning of Robert's fourth day out of prison was proceeding quietly when the mailman slipped a letter under the apartment door. The ex-con was in the living room cleaning his rifles with oil and solvent. His wife was at her friend's house—that dyke Simone. The kid was in the bedroom reading a science fiction novel.

He padded over to the door and picked up the missive, opening it. The return address on the manila envelope was from a Gough Street law firm. Perusing the one-page document, Robert turned whiter than white. It was a bill from his lawyer. Demanding the immediate payment of six thousand dollars or the matter would be turned over to the
authorities. This is total shit, he thought, remembering his trial three years earlier.

 

After weeks in the felony wing at 850 Bryant, he was removed from his tank, handcuffed and shackled to a long chain, then bundled into a rusted service elevator going to the courts on the second floor. There were bloodstains on the lift's walls. A piss stain besmirched the floor. Two burly, gum-chewing sheriffs stood at his side.

Downstairs a bailiff took off Robert's manacles and manhandled him into a courtroom. The chamber was air conditioned, paneled in blond wood. The overhead fluorescent lights were melanoma bright. The spectators' pews were deserted. The lawyer Harriet had found was installed at the defendant's table.

The shyster was in his early thirties, five and a half feet tall, pudgy, and balding, with a hideous comb-over. He had on a stained ice cream suit offset by a psychedelic green silk tie. He introduced himself to Robert with a smirk. “I'm Roy Wonder.”

The judge was another saga. He wore bifocals and had a shiny, diabetic forehead. The black robes of his office were demon's wings. He read the arrest report, the dirt the cops had on Robert. “How does the defendant plead?”

“Not guilty, your honor.”

As he was a first-time adult offender, Robert was granted bail in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. Harriet sold all her jewelry in a pawnshop on Sixth and Mission to get the money. Then she went to Atlas Bail Bonds on Bryant Street—“don't perish in jail, call us for bail”—and brokered her husband's release. A day later Robert Grogan flew out of the Hall of Justice, free as a bird with no wings.

Robert had no money, so being out on bail wasn't great. Two things happened, one good, one bad. He got a free prescription for fifty ten-milligram tabs of Valium. Then Roy Wonder wanted a three thousand dollar retainer fee. Robert wrote him a check, but it bounced. The morning he returned to court, the shyster met him at the chamber's entrance and blithered, “Where's my dough?”

The second floor in the Hall of Justice was a river of attorneys, cops in combat overalls, meter maids. Roy Wonder was wearing his ice cream suit like he'd been sleeping in it for two weeks. Robert had just taken the last Valium. It wasn't kicking in yet, and he was jittery and didn't want to talk about the cash. “It's up your ass, Roy.”

In the courtroom Robert and the lawyer huddled at the defendant's table. A bailiff was stiff at attention by the door. The stenographer was at her machine. The presiding judge was now a distinguished septuagenarian Chinese gentleman with wispy black hair.

The magistrate rifled through Robert's file with a sour mien. Robert knew what was coming down the pike. It didn't surprise him when the judge upped his bail to seventy-five thousand dollars. Even a retard could see that shit was going to hit the fan. Another date was set. Exiting the courtroom, Roy Wonder whispered evil tidings in Robert's ear. “You owe me three grand, you fucking asshole.”

Hard luck is a thief 's best friend. Harriet appealed to her mother for the extra bail money in a last-ditch effort to keep Robert out of the hoosegow. The old woman coughed up the cash. Robert celebrated by going to Uptown, the bar at Seventeenth and Capp in the Mission. He got drunk out of his gourd and was beaten up by a jock in the bathroom.

A week later, the judge found Robert guilty on account of the overwhelming evidence and set a new date for sentencing. They were in and out of the courtroom in no time.

On the morning Robert was to be sentenced to prison, he ingested three tabs of blue double-dome acid to prepare for the ordeal. The previous judge, the old Chinese man, had kicked the bucket. His replacement was a black dude with jade green eyes and terrific acne. The court remanded Robert into the state's custody for a period of no less than thirty-six months.

The bailiffs escorted him upstairs to the felony tanks. The same evening he boarded the bus to San Quentin. He was chained to a seat next to a teenager sentenced to death for slaughtering his mother with a pickaxe. Printed across the vehicle's rear windshield was an advertisement: “The Department of Corrections. An equal opportunity employer.”

The drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to the pen was boxed in fog. The bus was alone on the slippery road. Robert's seatmate was talkative, describing how he'd slain his mom. Wouldn't stop yammering about it. The acid made Robert hallucinate colors and patterns. He saw whirligigs of fire every time the kid opened his mouth. It was a relief when they wheeled up to San Quentin's front gates.