CHAPTER 2

Philyaw, driving down a coarse commercial street lined with strip malls and artless utility poles, tried to focus on Miles Davis’s magical recording of “So What,” but he’d been listening to it all week, and now it was just another unremarkable component of his surroundings, like the double yellow lines. Miles, Monk, Mozart, it didn’t matter. Played too frequently, it lost its juju.

Suddenly he spotted an apparition, someone in a yellow chicken outfit dancing in place outside a gaily colored fastfood chicken joint. The solitary figure executed what might be a samba deftly and tirelessly in faultless rhythm. He recalled comic strips he’d seen as a kid that showed desperate sad sacks wearing sandwich boards from neck to knee. They were figures of fun. The costumed figures out there beckoning to drivers were their lineal descendants. Along this particular retail street you saw one every couple of blocks. Gorillas plugging payday loans, clowns hopping around in front of furniture stores. Only a minute earlier Chewbacca waved a sign offering cash for gold. What sort of motorists, Philyaw wondered, considered it a good idea to conduct a financial transaction generated by a Wookiee? He recalled seeing a particularly piquant penguin somewhere back there but had already forgotten its message. It was like e-mailing spam. If you hooked one or two customers out of ten thousand you’d make a nice score.

“We need the sixties back,” one of his schmoes, a flower child now pushing seventy, told him during a routine collection call last week. “There’s too much crap going on, and not enough people on the street.” Next time he’d tell her she was mistaken. People were on the street—decked out as penguins and dancing chickens.

This chicken was clearly female. Narrow ankles, purple tennis shoes, fluid movements, and a slender figure under all that material. Philyaw caught a glimpse of a hand that was tan and smooth, almost baby-like. But now she was already in his rearview mirror. Which was when the idea came to him. A silly idea, which in his experience was often the best kind. He turned the corner to circle the block. It would ultimately cost him a weekend in jail. Odd how a quick decision that doesn’t seem terribly important at the time can bear such sour fruit. Like stepping off the curb into the path of a cement truck.

After turning the second corner he was forced to stop behind a line of vehicles. He couldn’t discern the cause of the holdup because the vehicle in front of him was one of those jumbo SUVs that obstruct everything ahead. An “Alumni College of Hard Knocks” bumper sticker identified the driver as less clever than he believed himself to be.

After a couple of minutes Philyaw stepped out to learn the cause of the holdup. Several cars ahead of him, a cop had stopped his patrol car to converse with the driver of a second police car facing the other way. They’d tied up traffic in both directions on the narrow street lined with low-rise condos and townhouses. He couldn’t see their faces, but the more Philyaw watched, the less it smelled like an emergency and more like two cops gossiping across a figurative backyard fence. He returned to his seat and closed the door. The scene seemed eerily familiar, though not from personal experience, which meant it was jamais vu, in this instance a resurrection of all those movie scenes depicting kraut soldiers swaggering around Paris, Amsterdam or some other humiliated city. Officers in crisp uniforms barking orders, ordering the best wine, fucking the choicest women.

He switched from Miles to the radio. A correspondent interviewed state fairgoers about the previous week’s acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida citizen who shot and killed a black teen he thought looked suspicious. Another station measured lingering effects from the global economic crash of five years earlier. A hospital commercial offered hope to listeners suffering from inoperable bowel disease. Back to Miles.

Another minute blinked on the digital clock. It’s important to handle small inconveniences with patience and intelligence, but acting on that knowledge isn’t as easy as acquiring it. Philyaw wished he had a newspaper. All this waiting to talk to a chicken.

Another oppressed civilian pulled up behind him, someone else living a life that the two cops ahead deemed insignificant. Suddenly Philyaw lost the war with himself. He tapped his horn once, twice, thrice. He knew it was dumb. A siren screeched momentary displeasure and blue lights flashed. It happened so fast he wondered if their fingers had been poised above the pertinent buttons. Their gossip suddenly ended, two new centurions, as policeman-author Joseph Wambaugh had affectionately dubbed them, were coming straight toward Philyaw, both scowling. One in uniform, the other in jeans and a long-sleeved pullover with running shoes. A plainclothes detective, beach style. “Couldn’t you see we were conducting police business?” he said. Flashing his badge, he spoke in the flat tones of a man who was bored, upset, and particularly scornful of the shit-bird he was addressing. The bright ten a.m. sun was directly behind the cop, so when Philyaw looked up he couldn’t make out the face, just the dark shape of a head framed in the glare. A long, tall guy now demanding Philyaw’s license and registration. His voice was strangely muffled.

Philyaw was back inside the movie. Your papers, please. Curiously, in digitalized twenty-first century America there were more papers to keep track of than ever. Invoices, receipts, bank notices. HMO directives, enigmatic cable TV and cell phone carrier statements, IRS fright bulletins. Entire regiments of tyrannical authorities not only spewed out tons of these documents (while pleading with you to accept them “virtually” instead), but might drag you through paper-mongering hell if you couldn’t come up with some precise document you’re not sure you ever saw. Mountains of these troublesome scraps of paper must be stored all across the land, everyone afraid to throw them out. What would Tom Paine do? Probably take his musket off the wall. In fact, it’s what he did.

Philyaw, on the other hand, had a role to play—to grovel and squirm, thus allowing the cops to detach their hook and chuck him back as an obedient, chastised mackerel. He pulled his license from his wallet, and searching the glove compartment for his registration, he looked up from a different angle, allowing him to see the cop a little better now. He was a white man with elongated Clint Eastwood limbs and a hint of horse to his face, possibly from a touch of Marfan syndrome. Balding, short dishwater hair. Odd, but after Philyaw found the registration certificate and straightened up behind the wheel again, the cop’s skin looked blue. Philyaw blinked and blinked again. Damn if the guy wasn’t really and truly blue. The color of his complexion brushed a supernatural patina of madness over the entire scene, over everything Philyaw might see, hear, or even imagine. Because if there were blue-skinned cops in Hermosa Beach, California, anything was possible. Unicorns, elves. Leprechauns. Where did it stop?

The troll-like figure studied the license and registration awhile, then leaned in toward Philyaw, owning the situation. He was blue all right, though not precisely blue, just as people are never precisely white, black or brown, but a blend of dominant and lesser colors. This cop’s leading hue was powder blue, more pronounced in some places than others. Probably several years younger than Philyaw, who was fifty, but already suffering from some improbable ailment. Blue jaundice or something. No wonder he had such a crappy disposition.

If it was such urgent police business, why weren’t your roof lights flashing? “Sorry, officer, I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I’ve got to be somewhere.”

“You saw what was going on. I saw you get out of the car.” There seemed to be a muffler on his voice because the cop barely opened his mouth. Could his jaw be wired shut?

“I just thought . . .” The cop looked at him expectantly. Although still emitting cold hostility, he seemed poised now to hand Philyaw back his miserable papers. But all at once Philyaw couldn’t go on with it. His disgust was too deep. Not with the cops, but with himself, which was of course their goal.

“Look, what’s my crime?” he asked. A not-so-silly question.

The blue cop tilted his head, looking at Philyaw and seeing something odd. “Ned? Look at this.” He was smirking now, and suddenly Philyaw understood why. Sometimes he forgot about the family face. This tinted geek was talking about Philyaw right in front of Philyaw, as though he were a potted plant.

The other cop, moving up closer, was in the standard navy blue uniform with standard brown Hispanic skin. He had one of those cruel, vacuous expressions you might see on a male model. He was acutely beefy—one of those body builders who’d passed the point of sound mind. I could crush you, his mesomorphic resources announced. He checked out Philyaw and now both cops smirked, making sure Philyaw understood he was the joke. Philyaw, who’d endured a lifetime of schoolyard taunts and amused references to his cursed countenance, required no exaggerated gestures to understand.

Breathing harder now, he stifled bluish-based insults. No matter what the provocation, you don’t go around needling people about their medical conditions. Meanwhile two other patrol cars had shown up. They must have sped down the sidewalk so they could reach the scene of Philyaw’s honking atrocity. Funny how this morning had seemed so ordinary. He’d been planning to cold-call some doctors’ offices for an hour or so and then help his employees stay on top of the schmoes. If it hadn’t been for the chicken girl none of this would have happened. He’d be on time for a forgettable day.

Philyaw counted the expanding cluster of cops on the scene. One, two, three, four . . . Maybe next they’d bring up a tank.

“Okay, Bogey, listen up,” the blue cop said to Philyaw. “We’re—”

Bogey! That did it. “My name,” Philyaw said, “is Spartacus.” The brown cop turned his head toward the blue cop and took a deep breath, wordless moves to define Philyaw as a half-wit, then turned back to him. “Well you’ve got a problem here, Spartacus or Bogart or whatever your name is.” He leaned over to read the license still in the blue cop’s hand. “Philyaw? Is that how you pronounce it?”

“Wait a minute,” Philyaw said, “you mean you’re not shooting one of those reality shows? You guys are real cops?” The skirmish escalated. Somewhere along the line he complained about assholes in general. The words just flowed through him as though they’d originated elsewhere. Like the creative process described by countless artists. His cell phone rang. The little screen identified the caller as Beesling. Philyaw had been trying to reach him all week about the lease extension. A reminder that he still had a daily grind to grind.

“Excuse me,” Philyaw said to the cops, ready now to debase himself again.

“Put your hands on the steering wheel.”

To Beesling, he said, “Listen, can I—”

At that point a cop—he didn’t notice which one—yanked open his door. The phone flew off somewhere as they grabbed him by his shirt, pulling him from his seat like a tub of laundry. Philyaw was surrounded by at least a half-dozen cops. Someone tripped him down to his knees. Sharp pain as they struck pavement. His arms were yanked behind him, and handcuffs snapped. They sat his ass on the curb for all the world to see. Now the other drivers had something to distract them, the fuckers. Was he driving drunk? Wanted for molestation?

Philyaw knew cops carried little digital gadgets to record arrest scenes. That’s why they hadn’t cursed.

“Looks familiar, doesn’t he?” said the blue cop.

“You should see him in a trench coat.”

“Here’s looking at you, kid.”

And they all laughed a dry laugh at Philyaw’s expense, at the morning fool they’d bagged.