NINETEEN, ANOTHER MONUMENT, and it was another hot January, a few days after New Year’s, and I was on the street staring at a sheer wall of words printed on T-shirts in a shop window in Delray Beach, people walking past me up and down Atlantic Ave. I was smoking a purple 305 and grinding my teeth while the snowbirds popped in and out of the shops and the loud restaurants around me.
The shirts said:
DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY COFFEE
FUCK YOU, THAT’S WHAT
FLUENT IN SARCASM
A T-shirt with a weed leaf
A sweatshirt with Obama and Tupac
A sweatshirt with Obama in a turban
I was broke, and the girl I had been running around with had just gotten arrested and, all of a sudden, I didn’t really have a place to stay anymore, didn’t really have anything to do.
She was over at some halfway house where the manager sold dope, and everyone who lived there bought it from him. She was tricking, and I was pretty much just mooching off of her and doing odd jobs for the guy who ran the place. I was sleeping on the beach, and I was sandy all the time. I had gotten crispy and lost my trash bag full of clothes. I hadn’t been back to Tampa in a year, and I hadn’t talked to anyone who knew me in about as long. I was anonymous, one of those shapeless phantoms that slides around the periphery of crack houses with no past and no future.
Looking at all the shirts in the window, I wasn’t exactly missing her, but I was bored, and I wished she was there. Alone, I can start to get weird.
A few hours before, I was smoking crack laced with PCP, and I left ’cause I was broke, and so I went out to Atlantic to see what I could pull. The crack had worn off, but the PCP was still going, and I was flirting with that out-of-body camera — T-shirts, me at the window, T-shirts, me at the window — in and out.
There was a guy I recognized from somewhere, maybe rehab or some job I used to have, playing sad songs on his guitar on the sidewalk, up against the wall with his case open. He looked so foolish, playing gloomy music against all the happy tourists, but the song started to get to me and mess with my head, changing the way I saw the scene unfolding. The people out having fun on that thin street looked like they were just going through the motions, myself included, like none of us actually wanted to be here, like we were just milling around compulsively. I nodded to him while he played, and he nodded back, could probably tell by my grinding teeth what was going on with me, where I was headed, and what I was doing.
I could see the words on the T-shirts being stamped and printed on my brain, in their same all-caps font.
LIFE’S A BEACH
IT’S 5 O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
MASTER BAITER
And I was confused. The words on the shirts started to coalesce and harden into the boundaries and unspoken assumptions of my thoughts. They formed the outer reaches of the linguistic world I lived in; they were the world’s physical laws. I had a pen in my pocket and a napkin, and I wanted to jot all these T-shirt slogans down, copy them, and go somewhere to decipher their messages. And as I started to move to do it, to reach into my pocket, I got a little ahead of myself, and I put the napkin up on the window, which was wet with condensation from facing the hot night, and my pen ripped the damp paper, but I got a couple of phrases down, some crude sketches, and as I felt the paper lose integrity, I realized I was still reaching for my pen. That I hadn’t even touched it in my pocket yet. I turned around quick to see if anyone had noticed what happened, if anyone could remind me what I was reaching for.
I watched the people go by a little more intently. It must have been a Saturday because the streets were crowded with Bermuda shorts and blotchy, red skin. I watched and analyzed their wardrobes, calculating costs in my head, looking at jewelry, shoes, and purses. People were staring back at me, a crazed and crooked figure leaning against the wall, uncomfortable and empty-pocketed, with a clenched and gaunt face, black rings under wild junkie’s eyes. They would glance briefly and, when they saw me looking back, avert their eyes and focus hard on keeping them averted. But they always looked again, once or twice, against their better judgment, an activated animal instinct for awareness and self-preservation even in these most comfortable of creatures.
There was someone who looked like me, only older, softer, and more grounded, walking the street quizzically, examining things like a surveyor, judging the slope of the street and counting the heads of pedestrians. He held a notebook under his arm, a pen behind his ear, and had a squint on his face of pure scientific observation, and behind the squint, if I saw it right, melancholy, nostalgia, or perhaps just recollection. I watched him for a little bit and then moved on to others.
A woman and her husband left one of the shops and started walking toward where I was. She was putting her wallet into her purse. It had no handles, just one thin chain that hung limply down as she held it by the body. It was Louis Vuitton, and I could tell by her shoes and her earrings that it wasn’t fake. I started walking toward them, looking beyond them as if aiming to go past.
The street like a long hallway, and the T-shirts in the window hanging like art on the walls. The comedown was starting to bang against my brain.
She was on the inside, and her purse was too. I hung close to the wall. She stirred a deep hatred inside of me, a measurable feeling of destructive energy. I wanted everything she had. I wanted to leave her naked and confused in the street. I wanted her to feel the terror of my comedown; I wished I could cough it onto her like a contagion, to wipe the dumb happiness from her face, replace it with sick horror, mad loneliness.
Unconsciously, instinctually, even within the hazy lines of PCP streaking across my brain, I judged our speeds, my footsteps and theirs, held them up to the unheard metronome in my internal clock, whatever that true, objective measure of time is, not seconds or man-made minutes, but the one that beats along to life in the brain stem. Timing the sounds of movement with the image of them growing larger, all these little involuntary exercises of perception and judgment, the instinctual understanding of being in the world. How long for ten steps to turn to five, to two. There was sand in my Air Maxes; it was interfering with my steps, making them slide instead of striking the ground resolutely; it was throwing me. And at three steps, I dropped my cigarette onto the sidewalk under where my right foot would be in the next moment. They watched this, and at one step I glanced to the woman, passing my right shoulder not to her exactly but to the height and distance of the purse in relation to me. I turned my shoulder just a little, enough to use my right arm as insurance against the purse getting away, and I reached over quick with my left hand and grabbed it; it slipped out of her hand easily. She was holding it with no care or awareness, and I angled my right shoulder forward hard, to shift my momentum, as I broke into a run, she yelled, and people turned, and I took the first corner as some of them started to chase me. I looked back to see how many there were, and I counted three, and I saw the guitar guy’s face, smiling from where he was sitting on his overturned paint bucket, the guy who looked like me still scribbling in his notebook, watching with cold stillness.
I ran through a parking lot, and I hit the next gear. I put a little bit of space between me and the people chasing, and I threw the purse into a bush at the base of an oak tree in the middle of the lot. I ran a block and turned left and then did it again. I knew this was the most important part because if I could hit that second turn before they could make the first, then I’d be gone. I pushed it as hard as I could. Despite the sand shifting in my shoes, the fear made me faster than whatever was driving them. I did it by a fraction of a moment. Now that they couldn’t see me. I kept running, fifteen seconds, made a couple random right turns, and I jumped behind a hedge that butted right up next to a one-story brick building.
I lay there in the mulch, parallel to the hedge and the brick wall, and I tried to arrest my breathing, to make it quiet. I listened as they yelled to each other, but my heart was so loud in my ears that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
I remembered a game of manhunt when I was a kid. Me and two other neighborhood kids hiding while my brother and some others looked for us. It was Christmastime, the whole neighborhood at our disposal. There was a house with an old plastic manger scene decoration in the front yard, and the owners had painted the glowing baby Jesus a deep brown. On our head start, I got one of the kids on my team to lend me his shirt. I knelt down with the plastic wise men, and I wrapped the shirt over my head. I knelt there as still as I could, grass pushing red indentations into my knees. I closed my eyes, and I held my hands to my face like I was praying to the newborn Jesus. I remembered wanting to laugh as I heard my brother and the other kids walking by, looking everywhere for me. I had to go somewhere in my mind to keep from doing it, so I pretended I really was a wise man. I went to the desert, to the starry Palestinian sky, and I followed a shooting star in my mind. I pretended I was leading a donkey and hiking over dunes of loose orange sand, slipping and striding along in a trail of pack animals, hiking for so long that I couldn’t distinguish between myself and the donkey, lost into the collective consciousness of like-minded animals. I thought about following a star, of being dragged behind it like a comet’s tail, trailed for miles, happily unaware of where I was being led. I thought about the gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I imagined them in an expensive purse, snug in an exotic leather pouch. I was full of hope, faith in the new life born at the end of the trail, at the spot where the star smashed into the Earth. Nobody found me.
I could hear my brother saying, “The game’s over. We give up.”
I could hear him saying to his teammates, “He’s such a little freak. He could be anywhere.”
I was starting to get bored, and I had exhausted my imagination in the desert, had made it to the manger already and seen what I came to see. So, as soon as I heard my brother pass, I jumped up and bolted for “base.”
In the hedge, after I had used up the manhunt memory, I started to think about the purse. I leafed through it in my mind: a wallet stuffed with cash, $500 sunglasses, credit cards, iPhone, and expensive makeup. The bag itself worth probably $1,000 new, but I’d have to convince whoever I sold it to that it wasn’t fake or listen to them try to convince me that they thought it was. I could maybe sell it for a hundred bucks. I started to feel restless again, to feel the absence of the crack like phantoms in my veins. The voices had died down, but I knew it wasn’t time to leave yet. I tried to imagine a map in my head of where I was in relation to the purse and the spot where I grabbed it. I zoomed out and drew Atlantic Ave. first, running east–west, then I put the Intracoastal and Swinton Ave. as my boundaries. I marked the police department and the courthouse and the library west of Swinton, the beach east of the Intracoastal. I marked the Starbucks and the Mexican restaurant where the guy was playing Neil Young on his paint bucket. I found the spot where I grabbed it, and I found my first cross street. I found the angle I took through the parking lot and the tree where I dropped the purse, then I traced my first left turns and then the others, found out I was right up against Swinton a few blocks south of Atlantic. I knew I just had to cross Swinton to get to a dealer. I started getting butterflies thinking about it, felt my mouth water and my heart rate pick up again.
My plan was to wait thirty minutes, but I completely lost track of time. It could have been ten minutes or an hour, I didn’t know, but I couldn’t sit still anymore. I was just thinking about crossing Swinton over to the Haitian neighborhood where guys stood out by the street, pockets stuffed full of crack and blues, waistbands pulled tight around pistols. I imagined my good mood, that feeling of anticipation, chopping it up with the dealers using all ten words of Creole that I knew. I hadn’t heard anything in a minute, so I figured it was probably clear. I just needed to make it a few blocks, anyways.
I went back to the parking lot, warily at first but my mind kept coming back to copping and loading the stem and twisting it around in my fingers, holding the flame and drawing in long and slow. I bent down at the base of the oak, and as soon as I touched the bag, the red and blue lights flipped on behind me. I planted my right foot and took off for a side entrance of the parking lot, but another cop car pulled right in front of me, and I tried to turn on another burst of speed, but I was tapped out. My legs were gone, jelly from no food, no sleep, and all that running. He put me down in the middle of the street, and I felt my face scrape against the gravel and the asphalt, little pieces of grit and sand diffusing into open skin. His knee was in my back with his full body weight, and he must’ve been over two hundred pounds because it felt big and heavy, final. He bent my arms back until the joints hurt and put the cuffs on me tight.
“Where were you headed, big guy?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
He pulled me up off the ground and bent me over the trunk of the car. I felt all the fatigue of sleepless days hit me at once. The prospect of crossing Swinton gone in an explosion of inevitability and shame.
He started patting me down and asked, “You have any weapons?”
I shook my head.
“Anything that could stick me?”
“No.”
“Anything at all you want to tell me about?”
I shook my head again.
He ran my pockets and took out the McDonald’s napkin with ten digits scrawled on it and the pen with no cap.
“That’s it? That’s all you got?”
“I thought I had cigarettes,” I said. “I don’t know where they went.”
He took off my shoes one by one and ran his hands in them, feeling only sand.
“Christ. What d’you live at the beach?”
My shoulders throbbed, my wrists ached, my face stung, and my legs were completely numb. I noticed how thirsty I was; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a sip of water. I couldn’t really make out his face. It was dark, and I still hadn’t caught my breath, every trace of every drug was gone now, and I was in pure lack. My head felt like a stubbed toe. He was big with a big cop head, like a grouper or a pit bull, I tried to focus on him or read his badge, but it was useless.
He read me my rights. “With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”
“Yeah, what the hell.”
“So, what happened here?”
I was watching the second cop unpack the purse, and inside the purse was a wallet that looked just like it, brown with LVs all over it. He opened it up and pulled out three hundred-dollar bills and a bunch of twenties.
“Some people travel heavy, huh?”
He laid the bills out on the white trunk, and I stared at them hungrily.
“What were you gonna do with all this cash?”
“What do you think?” I said.
“You were gonna buy flowers for your boyfriend?”
I stared at him.
“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of boyfriends soon.”
I tried to think of something to say back. Cops always think they’re funny, and they think they can freak you out, and I guess they were right because I didn’t have anything but shame in my stomach, passing through my veins into my head like a regular drug. All of my abstractions melted away. I felt like a normal person again in the worst possible way. Aware of consequences, of reality and fear. I was thrust back into the supervision of normal people, people who ate breakfast and dinner, who laughed at the same jokes and held the same things dear. I hated this part more than anything. The lights on the car were still on, revolving red and blue.
“You know anything over three hundred dollars is a felony, right? Five years minimum.”
The other one piped up, “How did you know she was gonna have so much cash? Lucky guess?”
“Were you following her?”
I clammed up, and they stuffed me in the car and drove me to county. I was trying to kick my mind into gear, to get it to race again, to think of something, some way out of this shit, but it was empty.
In the car, the lectures started — the moral high ground, the horror stories, and the tales of redemption.
In booking, at first, it was just me and another kid my age sharing the big yellow room with benches on either side. He was an ugly, weaselly looking kid with bad tattoos and holes in his ears for gauges. He didn’t have the gauges in, and the lobes of his ears were swollen and infected, puckered and yellow and purple. Looking at them made me nauseous, so I tried to look away when he talked.
“Those shoes are sick,” he said.
I ignored him and lay out on the bench. I tried to look out the vertical windows on either side of the big steel door, the glass thick and latticed with safety wire. Outside just looked like a hospital or some anonymous office, the only difference being that everyone was in a cop’s uniform. I could feel all the muscles in my back and my legs tightening up, sore from withdrawing. My face was still stinging and starting to itch, and as bad as I wanted some crack, I realized I wanted a cigarette more.
As the hours of the night grew larger and then receded, more and more people were brought in. We got taken out one by one, fingerprinted and strip-searched and examined by the nurse and then returned like a library book. She put some paste on the edge of a long Q-tip and rubbed it onto the cut on my face. It burned, but it concretized the pain at least. She scribbled topical Bactroban onto my paperwork.
When I got back, the spot where I had been lying on the bench was taken, and I had to squeeze in somewhere else. The room was starting to stink with bodies, bodies from different neighborhoods and families with their different smells, doing different things, skin holding and excreting different chemicals — body odor and booze, the lingering smears of strip club body butter, dust and drywall from jobsites, smoke and cheap cologne and unwashed dick, unbrushed teeth. Just as it was getting crowded and loud, someone got up and started taking a shit on the little metal toilet in the corner of the room. Everyone yelled at him, and he was yelling back. He was big enough that nobody would do anything about it, and it was booking, so it wasn’t even real jail, and no one wanted to fight, but the yelling was a necessary step. No one in there was a stranger to this phenomenon, the communal toilet, but they yelled anyways, sticking up for whatever lingering dignity they had. Getting popped makes your nerves go wild, makes your stomach speed up, but even still, there was something too primal about it, this man squatting and shitting four feet away from us. It was too uncivilized. It was something, subconsciously and without articulation, we were all told we were better than as a species. The days of indiscriminate animal shitting were supposed to be over. We were supposed to have evolved beyond that.
The noise was overwhelming me, and I put my hands over my ears, and I closed my eyes and laid my head back against the painted cinder-block wall. I tried to will all of my senses off — sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. I tried to separate the ghost that lives in my body, to coax him out and walk him through the wall and out of the building, to fly him up over the highway and out back to the beach, or maybe farther, out into the ocean, vast and insensitive, the desert of timeless space. But my imagination was dead, and I couldn’t even feel my ghost. I was just body, mortal and material, one sensory organ, feeling and smelling and hearing, decomposing a little bit every second.
I took off my shoes and turned them over, pouring the sand out onto the tile floor. My feet felt much better in the shoes, had some room to breathe, the curves of my toes falling into their assigned indentations. I realized I was sweating even though the room was freezing. I was sweating from fear, which was crowding the inside of my heart. I started to notice all the faces in the room, how close they were to mine, how scared of them I was. All of the unknowns. The unknown people and the unknown place, unknown where I was going next, for how long. And the scariest unknown of all, how I got there, the purse and the cop car purged from my memory; I couldn’t remember a room before this one, before the open toilet and the scary, ugly company; their eyes beaming thoughts into my head, Who the fuck is this kid, why is he acting so strange, their heads nearing mine every second, tilting in and getting closer and closer, stifling my sense of self, making me even more discrete, hardening the outline of my being but shrinking it every second.