White Man's Problems (4 page)

Blackhorse Pike, the road back to my house, starts as a little street and becomes a two-lane highway. It grew to service the fancy developments out here in the suburbs. There are two bright-yellow lines in the middle that occasionally become broken to indicate where fast cars may pass slower ones. The road goes up hills and around banks, through woods and past shopping centers. I watch the cars going by and wonder what Mr. Smith would say about their spacing.

When I get to an open stretch near Ridley Creek State Park, I stop. I just stand there, looking at the sky. I don't know what time it is. I stand on Blackhorse Pike for I don't know how long—probably twenty minutes. The day is gone, and it's getting cold as hell.

I think about guiding her hips through a sit-out. I start walking again. I think about her sweater and her lips. I still smell her. I start to run. Slowly at first, kind of a home-run trot. Then I go faster. Then faster still. All the way home.

Slipstream

T
hey say a judge is a lawyer who knows a politician and a federal judge is a lawyer who knows a senator, and so it was for Murphy, who went to law school with Cranston, who got elected after Watergate and promptly gave his old buddy the first seat he controlled. That was in the year of our Lord 1974.

Klezak stands now in Murphy's marble-encrusted courtroom on Hill Street in downtown LA, with its dark walnut benches, gray carpet, and United States seal. There are microphones at the two podiums where the attorneys present argument. It is Monday, motion day. Klezak is next to the big firm lawyer, Stetson, who has the preliminary ruling—written by Murphy's clerk, a Persian from Stanford—in his favor. Murphy is bored.

“Do you have a rebuttal?” asks the judge.

Klezak stammers through a protest about contractual interpretation being for the jury and not the court, and Murphy lets him finish. Stetson knows a good thing when he sees it and, when it's his turn, has nothing to add, ensuring his victory, which Murphy confirms in a tired voice, reading a slipstream of language to the court reporter, which will be repeated into the boilerplate appellate clerks use to burn the case into law.

Klezak gets in the car and inserts his earpiece. He calls the assistant vice president for claims at State Farm to report the beating, but she is out just now, so he leaves word. Klezak already knows he is not going back to the office. He has worked sixteen days straight and twenty-seven days total this month, answering interrogatories, propounding document requests, conducting document review, Bates-stamping evidence, reading deposition transcripts, writing motions to compel, opposition briefs, jury instructions, and orders to show cause. As he drives, another case dead in the water, he feels it coming.

At Wilshire and La Brea, he goes left, then left again on Cabezilla to his house. The grass is the color of hay, like Wyeth grass. Inside it is dark, as it always is, because he thinks darkness keeps the house cool in the long, flat, dry afternoons. He removes his glasses at the bathroom sink and looks at his face. It keeps on coming. He decides he will take the day. He goes to the garage, stuffed with horded junk so voluminous he can't fit the car, and next to the hot-water heater finds the cardboard box. The flap says
Service 9-01; repair Inlet Gauge, monitor regulator
. The box contains black pants and a white button-up shirt, both layered with filmy grime like that of a restaurant floor.

Beside the box is a grease pan he keeps for these occasions. He dabs a finger in it and begins to smear his neck, taking care not to mar the skin too badly while still filling the pores with jet-black. He rubs the thick, oozy emollient through his hair until it gets stringy. He begins changing into the clothes. He shuts his eyes when he breathes in the body odor of the shirt. He feels the blood in his temple as he gets ready to go. His mind begins to loosen when he starts the car.

“Klezak, you fuck,” he says. It is a mutter, and it becomes steady as he backs the car out the driveway. “Murphy, fuck you. Jack-off. Never been a good judge. Fat, lazy fuck. Depends on the clerks, anyway. It's hourly, anyway. Will send the fucking bill, anyway. Let them move the file. Let someone else deal with that Stetson.” He speaks in a loud voice now. “You're dealing with a rich plaintiff, Holly. Ms. State Farm. Fuck you. A fucking plaintiff who can pay a big fancy lawyer, Holly. When the rich man is plaintiff, you're fucked in the ass.” At the light, he pulls at his hair and holds his dirty palms to his cheeks. “Fucked in the ass, Holly.” He drives on. He squeezes the wheel. “Klezak, you
fuck. You do the discovery and then you get removed. Klezak fuck. Klezak fuck.”

La Brea is crowded, but when he gets on the I-10, he sails. He gets off at Fourth Street in Santa Monica, where he drives into the Sears lot. The Sears is old, like a throwback, like the sixties or the fifties, a timeless place with women in girdles and those white sunglasses with the points, the Flannery O'Connor kind. He goes down the escalator to the Home and Garden section. The green hoses smell like rubbery-flavored water, the kind you get when you put your lips up to the brass end. “Breach of contract for the jury,” he says. He is spitting his words. “Fuck you. I lick that metal when I drink from a hose. Stick my tongue inside and roll it all around.”

He hears a voice: “Welcome to Sears. Let me know if I can help you find anything.” It's a black girl with a weight problem. She wears braces, the kind with double rubber bands connecting the molars.

“I'm fine,” he snaps. “I don't need any help. I'm fine.”

She smiles at him. “The hoses are on sale.”

“I don't
want
any help,” he says.

“Ok, sir. Let me know if you need anything.”

“
Sir
?” he yells “
Sir
, my ass. Don't give me your bullshit. Get out of this section. Go back to the kitchen sale. Go upstairs to the fucking women's clothes. Get your fat black ass out of here and up to the women's clothes.”

She steps back. She is a nice girl, now sad and upset at the vulgarity directed her way, not the kind who fights back, or files a civil rights case.

“This is how it comes,” Klezak yells at her, moving away.

She lingers a second and looks at him, but he has headed on, over to Automotive. There are dozens of tires stacked. He runs his fingers over the white circumferential line of a steel-belted Michelin. More rubber. “Rubber is what you want from a fucking Sears.” He breathes in deep. “So clean now.” He opens his eyes, angry now. “Not the rotten smell. Not the rotten smell of fucking burning tire piles where it will end. Fucking burning fucking tire piles where it will end. Fucking fire.” He looks for the exit. “Fucking fire and fire and fire and burning, burning smell.”

He follows Broadway down to Ocean and gets out on the grass of the park paralleling the beach. By one of the palms, he closes his eyes again. He feels the grease on his face and hair and presses his hands into the grimy legs of his pants, which have the color and texture of trampled gum on high school hallway floors. “Klezak fuck.” He opens his eyes. “Klezak fuuuuuuuck.” He is yelling it louder now. He heads north on the walkway, dodging skaters and couples. He pays no attention to the shadowy bums lying on the grass and next to the trees, the sunburned, drunken homeless. He faces the ocean just beyond the statue of Santa Monica, at the fence that guards pedestrians from the cliffs overlooking the beach. “Please let it come now,” he says. He starts to loosen.

He focuses first on the horizon and talks to it. “Where do you think this came from, this notion of harmony? Do you think it came from God or from some other source? Do you think it is right and just? Do you think it is
just
that this happens? That these fucking monkeys get it and you get nothing?”

The icy feeling is receding. His stomach, so sour and grinding all morning, is of no bother. He picks up the pace. “You and your
goddamn
money, thinking it is so much. I will tell you one thing: you don't bring it to me or to
America
and think that there is nothing to do. You can't do that, man. You can't do that without hearing from me. I will speak for the people.”

A runner comes down the path as Klezak approaches Colorado. An older, trim, and suntanned man, he looks like Stetson. As he bears down on Klezak, the Stetson runner makes eye contact.

“Is there something? Is there something you want?” says Klezak. The Stetson runner breezes by. “Get out of my
goddamn way
!” Klezak screams. The man looks back and gives a little grin.

Klezak turns right at the light at Colorado and glides onto the Third Street Promenade. He scours left and right for targets, but slowly the monologue takes hold again. He arrives at the intersection of Santa Monica and the Promenade. It is still early. Passersby move east and west, going for bargain movie show times or burgers or to buy Gap T-shirts. He prowls. It is an old, worn groove. He begins to yell. “It all starts with the Bible, you stupid motherfuckers. That was the basis. Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams…
Washington
, you idiots. All before you get to anything else. You don't know Thoreau; you don't know Aquinas. You don't know Steiner and Kafka. You don't even know
that
. You don't even know what it
means
to be
living
. You are ants, you are caterpillars, you are
fucking insects
.”

***

My name is Torres, and I am a Santa Monica cop. “Only you, Torres—only you could get this one,” Noah said when I turned it in. Marcello Noah—100 percent prick. I asked him what kind of cop has a twenty-four-foot fishing boat in San Pedro. “Dude,” he said, “my name is Noah.” He used to do the same beat as me when I was new to SMPD. But he had a lot of seniority, and one day I look up and he's been bumped up to sergeant. I guess he saved his money, and with lots of OT, lots of benefits, who knows? He managed his shit. Good for him. I know he thought I was soft. But that's another story.

Ten years ago, it became obvious that the Third Street Promenade—the big commercial area
downtown—was a problem for us, logistically speaking. We couldn't take a patrol car in there because it is a crowded walk street. When we drove a unit on the walkway—it's a big walkway—everybody freaked out. That meant we had no clear way to get the bad guys and the nuts and the bums in line, always stopping on Santa Monica or Broadway and jamming up traffic.

So they decide to put us on foot, in shorts and golf shirts. Except not exactly golf shirts—bigger, big enough to put the vests under. Anyway, it becomes obvious that that's not going to work. Let's imagine that an incident goes down on, say, Wilshire, and we're over on Broadway. Now we got to run down the fucking Promenade, all
Five-O
, blazing through like maniacs. Gives you two problems: one, we've got everyone on the streets all freaked out again; and two, we're
running
.
Oyame, chico
. We could be a quarter mile or a half mile away from that call, and we'd have to all run down through the crowd, getting everyone crazy watching the chase. And then what? Be so tired we're worthless whenever we get to the perp? Pretty soon there's a complaint from ten people who say we smashed into them running by, and the city council starts saying it's really dangerous. Next thing you know, nobody's shopping, and it's all our fault, yada yada.

Point is we ended up on bikes. Bicycles. The union stopped it at first, but then some guys—and this included me—said, “What the fuck?” It made us more mobile, and once we saw that the bikes weren't so bad looking—they were black and kind of cool—we got on board. And there we were: on the bikes patrolling Third Street. Better than trolling around all day in a worn-out unit with some nutsack. And I'm still in Santa Monica,
entiendes
? It's safer being a cop here than teaching social studies at Crenshaw.

When you cover the TSP in the morning on the bikes, it's kind of peaceful. You want to let the driver on the street cleaner get done, or if you have to be out there, you stay clear. I like to think of the Promenade as my beat, my neighborhood, like an old-school cop. I talk to regular people: waitresses, kids who make the drinks at Starbucks, and the trash guys. Due respect, they let too many low-end retail places come in, like bad stores with slutty clothes and Foot Locker. Doesn't make sense to me that they don't put in upscale stores like Gucci, Dolce, and shit like Whole Foods. A better class of people would follow. But what do I know?

The day I'm talking about, I'm moving along from the Broadway Deli up to Borders, where I usually stop in to look at the books, read magazines a little, and get some coffee. There's a girl working there with orange streaks in her hair and a nose ring; she's a good kid. We're catching up, saying hi and whatnot, when I hear yelling. I head out. It's a guy, who I figure is from a shelter, looking pretty rough, on a rant.

He's all “Insects—you're all a bunch of insects.” He's screaming it. You have to be careful with that profile; when someone begins yelling in a street, it's a sign that they've lost touch with the rules that govern people. This one looks like a typical tinfoil-glasses, the End is Near type. We get them often in the morning. High percentage of psychotics. The drunks sleep late; the ones walking around and yelling before lunchtime are usually pretty far gone. PSs—paranoid schizophrenics. Referential mania, too. Really jumpy.

It was right at noon, so I can't rule out that he's a drunk or a junky. He shut up once he saw me riding over. I put the bike against the bench. “Good morning,” I say. He backs up against the wall of the J. Crew. Almost puts his fucking hands up. He stinks like b.o., but not like alcohol. Loud and clear, I say, “How are you today, sir?”

“I'm fine,” he says.

“Well,” I say, “you're making a lot of noise. You're yelling, sir. Do you know that?” There was no response. “Have you been drinking?”

“No.”

I poke around him a little, getting closer to smell him again. Still he stinks but no booze, so what he says about drinking appears to be true. This presents a problem for me, because to send him away with more than a ticket—say, a PC 647—instead of just writing him up for a PC 415 disturbing the peace, he needs to be visibly intoxicated. And even for a section 415 I have to see an actual fight, an unreasonably loud noise, or something intended to provoke an immediate violent reaction. You wouldn't believe the shit I've taken from judges not being able to put a bum on one of those three.

“Where you staying?” I say.