Walking the Dog (7 page)

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

I was a millionaire by the time I was ten or maybe twelve. I gave my parents full control because money meant nothing to me. I wasn't autistic and didn't have Asperger's, but something in my brain caused me to dedicate hours each day to filling white squares with color, shape, textures, shades, lines, and on and on and on. The white squares went quickly from “Baby's Sketch Pad” to real canvas. I wasn't an idiot savant either—my room was extraordinarily clean and I had fine table manners. I did have a tendency to walk away in the middle of a conversation, but that was because I had a white square to fill. Adults, rather than be offended by this, found it “fascinating.”

I was popular in grammar school partly because I was famous, primarily because of my pranks. I hung out with kids who later in life probably ended up as nerds or greasers. My little gang worked well despite occasional fistfights and nasty name-calling on the playground. I remained aloof. If they started fighting I just abandoned the whole gang and went off to paint. I don't remember exactly what we did. Time is not my friend, and I've been beaten to shit so many times I'm like a boxer who has to learn jabs and hooks and footing from scratch every time. I still have recollection of a few choice events though. Some neurologists have requested that I take
some tests. They're flabbergasted that I remember so much after so many beatings. I can't explain it to them. Except that no assholes are going to steal my life from me. Even in the form of memory.

  
1.
  
The time we let all the frogs out from biology class before the chloroform routine started to sink in. It was a class of twenty, and it was a hip-hop hopping festival. They showed up in such divergent locations: gym class, the English teacher's desk, and on someone's Salisbury steak in the cafeteria.

  
2.
  
Once, I brought my parents' bottle of vodka in and, not only did we get drunk, but we carefully spiked the juice of the first graders. It was wild to see what six-year-olds did when they were smashed, although a bunch of them did throw up. I poured a bit into the teacher's thermos so she couldn't control the twenty-five waving, giggling, vomiting, sobbing, dancing drunks.

  
3.
  
Clogging all the toilets with dog food so it looked like shit.

  
4.
  
The time I made dinosaur costumes and about twelve of us invaded the school, “ate” composition books and papers, covered the security guards with glue, destroyed the copy machine, and ate all the food that was being prepared. We also used that day to kidnap any “cool” kid who'd disparaged us and wound them up in duct tape.

I think I was expelled a few times before my parents decided I would be better educated at home with a select group of extremely intelligent tutors who also specialized in
“singular” or “different” children. The smart ones gave up on me and just let me paint while they read out loud or played roaring boom boxes.

My father was a leading ophthalmologist. He specialized in research and treatment of diseases of the retina. He was a quiet man, often amused, and was fascinated from a clinical point of view by the content of my painting. He was too busy and laid-back to worry about my minidelinquencies, and figured it just came with my exceptionally odd talent. He often sat in the doorway of the basement they'd converted into a studio and worked on his papers as I slashed and rubbed and stroked away. We never tried to talk to each other. I often felt like a favorite specimen, or a pet.

My mother was a dyed-blond Jewish lady who was a sort of elegant drag queen. She didn't have to work, but she was smart, and got herself on the boards of directors of many organizations:

  
1.
  
Children with messed-up faces

  
2.
  
Tiny theaters in Brooklyn

  
3.
  
Reversing clitoridectomies in the Congo

  
4.
  
A kibbutz in Israel that made vegan clothes

  
5.
  
The Museum of Modern Art

  
6.
  
Self-Esteem for Secretaries and Clerks

  
7.
  
The Feminist Jewish Historical Society

  
8.
  
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene

  
9.
  
Shakespeare Association of America

10.
  
The International Food and Housing Organizations

11.
  
The Bronx Zoo

12.
  
The National Center for Homeless Education

13.
  
The Amputee Coalition

My mother wasn't superficial. She had several phones and old-style computers and lived at her desk when she was home. She went to meetings constantly. She genuinely wanted to make a better world. From what I could gather she was hard-working, über-efficient, and in great demand. She and my father attended benefits and chic private dinners. She was slightly cold, a borderline alcoholic, but not an unhappy woman. She just didn't particularly like me. I don't think that she or my father cared one way or another about having children. It was just that I turned out so messy and noisy. She was miffed.

My notoriety embarrassed her. Both she and my father refused to pose with me for
People
,
Art International
, or
Vanity Fair
. It was always me—dwarfed by a large man's shirt, looking as if someone had smudged a multicolored palate across my face and hair—my paintings, and one or two famous collectors. Not private views of a prodigy's homelife. The one valuable task my mother did do was audition, in her woozy, brusque way, the most important dealers in the country, and she chose a man, Rico da Silva, who, through my adolescence, respected my artwork, got me into the best galleries, found rich but tasteful collectors, and timed my one “woman” shows so they would be huge events. I don't think he was a bad man. In fact, I think he was dismayed that my general communications with him were shrugs. He left me alone to do what my chemically colored brain commanded. He also made me, and himself, a fortune. Not everyone liked my style—some despised it. I started out as a baby phenomenon, but I endured. Collectors streamed in and out of my studio for years. My mother took
offense to my messy appearance and my refusal to let her contribute any of my money to her worthy causes.

“It just sits there,” she'd say. She was scary in her own way and guilt provoking, so one day I wrote a note to my very honest business manager and told him to break into one of my trusts and write her a check for thousands of dollars.

When she received the check she quietly descended the steep stairs down to my studio and worked her way through the messy floor to stand next to me. She put her hand on my head. I was too wet with paint to hug.

“Thanking you is not enough for this,” she said. “You know I won't spend a penny on myself.” She smelled of Scotch and hand lotion.

“You'll do what's righteous,” I replied in a somewhat-sarcastic teenage voice. She cautiously leaned forward to see if she could kiss my cheek without getting paint on her. I pulled away. She let out a quiet, husky laugh-cry. She stayed where she was with her arms folded. She looked exactly as if she was doing an imitation of one person staring intently at another. But no one was staring back.

“Let me introduce myself,” she snapped. “I'm your mother. We both occupy this house.”

“We walk through each other,” I said, “like poltergeists.” I noticed for the first time that her eyes were a very unusual green with brown flecks and rims. Like a swamp. I didn't know what I'd have to do to capture that color. She walked unevenly toward the steps.

“Where'd you come from?” she asked the universe.

“And where am I going?” I replied.

My parents never understood my vision or hunger or technique because they were workaholics in their own right.
Although unimpressed by my success, they were flabbergasted by my arrest, and I don't think they had the emotional equipment to deal with the tsunami that accompanied my conviction. As if they were each an ancient Egyptian clay vase, so thin that if one crack appeared thousands of years of history would shatter. Years of pretense and pretending would be revealed to show ugly emotions and secret perversions. I don't know what they were so afraid of, but nothing in their behavior changed. They gave no quotes. They wouldn't speak about me. The glacier stayed as it had always been. They never visited, wrote, or saw me again. Something in my house caused great distances, nonexistences, and a desperate need to deal with the color white.

EARNING COURAGE

I'm forbidden from driving or even taking any mode of public transportation out of the city limits, but Joe Kasakowski got me a special pass so that Tina can drive me every two weeks to Ossining to visit Charlie. Charlie is the cop who got paralyzed during the robbery, which was part of my crime. Miko hit him on the head with a club three times, half blinding him and severing enough nerves in Charlie's neck to render his legs unusable and his left arm quite weak. Charlie was married to Saundra, and for a while she was this washed-out blond who stood by him after he'd been attacked by us, the Terrartists. There were articles in
People
, interviews on
The Today Show
. They even made a special home for him with ramps and various gadgets on some TV show where they build new homes for the disadvantaged. Charlie and Saundra wrote a book,
Love Moves Us
, referring to Charlie's paralytic state and how that would never come between them. Also how he dealt with his two partners being killed. Two or three years after the incident, Saundra moved to South Beach, Florida, to try her hand at designing bathing suits, and she met up with a condo management executive named Zak. She divorced Charlie and married Zak. The divorce was really ugly. Saundra claimed that she was Charlie's slave all those years without so much as a thank you.
She washed his clothes, prepared his meals, took him to shit, showered him, endured his PTSD. He even tried to run her over with his wheelchair. They were in their early thirties, and she wanted a life other than as an uncompensated nurse. She didn't mention sex. Charlie sold his TV home and had to go live in a retired cop home in Ossining for the poor and injured with no insurance or back-up. I went out to the place as soon as I was allowed to because I wanted to tell Charlie I had nothing to do with the murders, not directly, and I'd legally sanction Rico da Silva to sell a couple of my paintings if he wanted his house back. (I lied to myself and others about my ignorance of my financial state. But in reality, I did this because it was much easier for me to pretend it didn't exist and not complicate things. I wanted to be the simple stroke of a brush. Acknowledging my wealth opened the door to a kind of morality and guilt for life's actions that could overtake my art.)

That first day Tina drove me to the gate, but she didn't go in because cripples freaked her out—nothing, absolutely nothing, bad had ever happened to her, and she was afraid if she got too close to someone with cancer or who'd had a stroke, she'd catch it out of God's revenge for her having had such an easy life. Doorbell drove up with us. He took up the whole back seat of the car and chewed on a stinking piece of rawhide the size of a softball.

“I'm going antique shopping,” Tina said to me. “I saw a bunch of shacks in the area. Doorbell and I will look for a stream. I'll come by in an hour when you're finished with whoever it is you're visiting—I don't want to know. Don't tell me.”

She let me off at the gate, and I had to hike almost a half mile up a gravel road surrounded by a dark arch of forest trees. It all opened up into a facility made up of low brick houses in a semicircular shape like a British boarding school. There
were guys on crutches swinging around and wheelchair sports. Some quadruple amputee was reading a book up on a post, and he turned the pages with a stick he held in his mouth like a large toothpick. That freaked me out. This was a place where soldiers who'd gone to Iraq or Afghanistan went too. Images of legs and arms started making circles behind my eyes as if someone were juggling them.

I wobbled up to the desk. I was a bit faint. There was a small, chubby woman with white curly hair and thick glasses that magnified her eyes and made her look demented. She was filing already stubby nails, but seemed chipper and not the least bored.

“I'm here to see Charlie Timms,” I said.

“Does he know you're coming?” the lady rasped. She didn't look up at me. She'd hit a cuticle.

“No,” I said.

Then she focused her revolving planet eyes on me and smiled. She had huge gray teeth that made her look like a sweet-natured donkey.

“Oh, that's the best,” she squealed. “They love surprises, you know. You have to leave your bag up here with me and get it on the way out. If you've brought him a gift I have to inspect it.” She transferred from sweet and roly-poly to memorized and efficient.

“Yeah, well, I heard he likes cashews.” I extracted my gift box of cashews from my bag and gave it to her. She grabbed a sharp letter opener, ripped the plastic, took the lid off the box, and started to rummage around the various sections of cashews—the plain ones, the salted ones, the chocolate-covered ones. Then she patted the mess down with her chubby little palm to make it look neat and stuck the cardboard top unevenly back on.

“Sorry, but this is a police and military facility,” she said in
her Auntie Em voice. “These kids understand. Not that we haven't had complaints. But if you're blown to pieces what's the use of being blown to pieces again?”

“Absolutely,” I replied quickly. I was too nervous to get into it. “Charlie Timms,” I repeated.

“I'll call him and you can meet him in the visitors' lounge.”

The visitors' lounge wasn't so different from where we watched TV at Clayton once you reached Level 3 privileges. The difference was that the lounge had large flat-screen TVs, a ping-pong table, a pool table, a table hockey game, and a wall of noisy pinball machines. But the men weren't crowded around any of the toys. Small groups were scattered about as if they were trying out machines for the first time. I could see through wide glass windows that there was a gym across the hall where men were lined up for weights, heavy boxing bags, and cardio machines, as well as various ropes and chains that looked more like torture equipment than rehabilitation devices. Laughter, shouts, grunts, and wails of pain were slightly muffled by the windows.

A man with white John F. Kennedy hair, a soft, clean-shaven face, and a black patch over one eye zoomed toward me in one of those small, manual athletic wheelchairs. His upper body was thick with muscles. His chest and arms were covered with tattoos. He could've been a world-famous wrestler. His withered legs were covered by black nylon running pants with white stripes. Suddenly, he came to a dead stop about six feet away from me. Then he squinted and appeared confused. Stupidly, I tried to close the distance and hand him the cashews. He didn't take his teary dark brown eye off me.

“How'd you know I like nuts?” he asked as he took the gift. His voice had a raspy, choked sound. I couldn't remember if Miko had injured his windpipe in their fighting match.

“Research,” I said.

“Who are you?” he asked. “My memory's not what it was.”

I didn't say anything. The noises in the rec room took on the silence of a cue in a movie score. The man's face began to turn red. I could see the outline of a long white scar from his forehead to his jaw.

“I'm Carleen Kepper,” I answered.

“That wasn't your name before though, was it?” he pushed. His voice was definitely impaired.

“No,” I replied.

“It was some kike name, right? Some Jew bitch name. Some high-class Jew bitch name.”

“Ester Rosenthal,” I whispered.

“That's right—I saw on TV somewhere. You got out? They actually fucking let you out?”

He threw the large box of cashews at me. The nuts stung like rubber bullets. He tore at the cardboard lid with his good hand. He tore it to little pieces.

“Eat it,” he rasped. “Eat your goddamn guilty bribe. Eat the paper of your fucking parole and the paper you wipe your shit with too.”

I didn't move away despite the fact that his next move might've been to try to run me down. A cleaning lady descended on the mess of nuts with a hand broom. A male nurse stood ready to push me away.

“I was miles away when my partner attacked you and shot your friends. It wasn't supposed to happen that way—”

“I know where you were,” Charlie spit. “And it don't make a piss of difference. Unless you're here to give me a blow job, get the fuck out.”

The veins on Charlie's neck and forehead were sticking out. His good eye was bright red. The nurse had some kind of
syringe ready. I registered the helplessness of this brutalized man. I registered it deeply.

“I'm pathetic!” I shouted. All the witnesses look surprised. “Pull down your pants! Good. Yes. I'll give you a blow job. I'll lick your asshole. I don't know why the fuck I'm here. I just thought you'd want some money.”

The nurse moved closer to me and a woman in a purple cable-knit sweater had now joined the small crowd. She held on to a notebook nervously. Charlie spit in my face. He missed and hit my hair. Then he went quiet. I saw what was left of a smile. He was an exhausted man. But not dead inside. I was glad to see that.

“I go over the money shit with that dealer and accountant every couple years,” he said in a singsong voice. “I know you Jews think money takes care of all burdens, but it don't suck bullets from flesh or get people breathing.”

“Fuck your pride,” I said. I shook but couldn't control my mouth. “You don't have to forgive anyone. I don't expect to do an Oprah show. I could just help make you more comfortable.”

Charlie blasted his wheelchair right into me. He'd caught everyone by surprise. I thought my legs were broken because he rammed me so hard.

“Get the fuck outta here. I got friends here. I got brotherhood here. I'm gonna die here and it's fine. I'm more alive than you'll ever be. You stupid rich girl—fucking
gang leader
. Where're your ‘Terrartists'?”

“Mostly dead,” I whispered.

Charlie Timms smiled. “Are you gonna suck my dick or not?”

“If you want,” I said, acting bored.

I went painfully to my knees and reached for his pants. Everyone else got very busy pulling me off of him.

“Next time,” he said. “I can't believe you're out. Who kills cops and gets parole?”

“I got lucky in a bunch of ways,” I said.

“You ever sleep at night?” he asked.

“I do,” I said. But I wanted to say that my days were darker than his nights.

“I hope you got dyke AIDS,” Charlie said. “Die slow, like me. Have death say good morning every day. Have sores that never heal . . . like me.”

He did an expert wheelie with his chair and rolled back to the gym. The male nurse, woman in purple, and a few patients stared silently at me. I limped straight for the door. I slowly crossed the lawn and saw Tina's car chugging at the gate. He hadn't broken any bones. I'd just have black-and-blue marks for weeks.

“How was it?” Tina asked. There was an ugly antique bedside table wedged in the back seat. I twisted around it. Doorbell had taken over the front and I didn't want to order him to move.

“Not bad,” I replied.