I get a psychotic headband of dizziness when my bus oozes through the Sixth Street checkpoint—and I die a forgettable hypertensive mini-death. I can’t take it no more. I really can’t.
An undersized, dun-colored coyote with the weathered face of a homeless wino—a Devil Canyon fire refugee—skips in front of the bus. The beat animal skedaddles across E Street, vanishing behind a palm tree. We’re three blocks from the mall.
I alight from the coach on Fifth Street with the Vons bag, tambourine, and donations bucket. The sun is crapping out in the smog; a moody wind rampages over the sidewalk, driving orange peels and crack vials to El Pueblo’s doorway.
At Pioneer Park a woman in overalls is serving bowlfuls of vegetarian goulash to a soup kitchen queue of winos, mothers with children, and the undocumented. I sidle over to the first person in line, a lanky white man in a patchwork denim shirt. I reach in the Vons bag and dredge up a sizable chunk of twenties. I offer him the money. When he takes it, I approach the next person, a woman with three kids. She snaps up a mound of bills from my hand. I walk down the line, dishing out more dough. If I believe there’ll be a fairy tale ending here, replete with hosannas, I’m mistaken. As I fork over cash to a Mexican lady, she frowns at the fivers I’ve given her.
“Pastor, why are you doing this?”
No way will I tell her the cheese was given to me by a half-insane bank robber. And I won’t say I’m pretty crazy myself—I’ll keep that gem under wraps. But she wants to know my unholy grail?
I’ve been post-trial in county jail for three months—waiting to get slotted into Muscupiabe. One day I hear a ruckus in the adjacent tank. Three guys affiliated with the Brotherhood have a kid on his hands and knees. A slender young sissy who’s squealing through the athletic sock stuffed in his mouth. One holds him still; the other two are taking turns carving his face with a sharpened toothbrush. Another Brotherhood associate slips behind me, his home-cooked-meth stink breath roiling past my nose: “Mind your own business, pinhead. Unless you want to end up like sissy boy in there.”
A trustee stands outside my tank in the morning. He holds a hand mirror sideways, letting me see the most recent doings in the next tank. It’s a new chapter from the prayer book of hell. With ecclesiastical calm the sissy sways from the butt end of a knotted wifebeater tied to the bars, his feet an inch off the floor. His once-pretty face is marbling with early rigor mortis. No longer earthbound, his mouth is upturned in a smile: I’m free. You assholes aren’t.
For a heartbeat, I’m jealous.
Nobody cuts him down. No one wants to get written up for tampering with a crime scene, resulting in the denial of commissary privileges.
I could be up there with him, the two of us dancing together into purgatory. But I wouldn’t smile. Not like him. It’s just not the style. Not where I come from.
My credo: each to his own. I distribute forty-five grand of pharaoh’s money at the soup kitchen, divvying the cash to my lambs on a flyblown, sweltering afternoon—off to the promised land we go. Superman would never approve of me, but that’s his damn problem, not mine.