The Growlers

 

Around the time Lehman falls, the Director of the University Writing Program at UCR calls a meeting to let ten lecturers on one-year contracts know there won’t be ten of us next year.  After the news we’re being kicked back down the ladder, I pick up some classes in Sun City, where the pay is half plus four-dollars—only, instead of getting laid off, for the next 52 weeks, I work 3 jobs 80 hours a week. 

Because time is all that matters to me when Christmas break rolls around, I don’t schedule a flight to Washington or make holiday plans.  When Lola flies to her dad’s in Seattle and the roommate drives to his mom’s, I don’t tell anyone I’m home alone for three weeks—until tonight, a Wednesday two days before New Year’s Eve, when Isaac calls to tell me he has to reserve a room for two nights to get tickets for the Raveonettes New Year’s Eve show at the Standard. 

“That’s rude,” I say. 

“Who cares?” 

“I care.  It’s greedy.” 

But Isaac wants to go ahead with it, and I want to see the Growlers at the Echo on Friday anyway. 

On Tuesday, still sequestered in an empty Riverside rental the night before I answer my phone, I’m sprawled out on bad carpet before my Mac, searching LA venues for live music when I come across this Spanish-sounding cowboy surf rock playing in San Diego at 10.  It’s 8:45.  I think about driving there, but it would mean not drinking for another hour and half or two by the time I get a room, find the venue, and manage to get a ticket to the show.  This does not seem worth it.  This seems desperate.  I open a beer instead and lay on the couch, snapping Hipstamatic photos of my Converse. 

In Bellingham, it was easy to get some.  You stepped out of the apartment, walked down two stairwells, and made a left to enter the Up & Up or 3-B or you kept walking and made your way to the Ranch Room inside the Horseshoe, ordered a gin and tonic, and sat back to listen to Tom Waits on the jukebox and wait for the one that wanted you to come.  That, or you turned over in bed and woke Arlan. 

I listen to the Growlers for awhile, thinking about the lead singer’s smirky expression.  The songs sound alike, but the sound has power somehow, smug power.  Nielson reminds me of Johnny Depp, but without the script, or with a script he was writing himself with no help from Hollywood producers or the stacks of cash banks reserve for them.  I’m undecided about Nielson as I listen, trying to discern whether he uses his smugness for good or evil. 

In 2001, when I meet Isaac, who’s just come from Kenya and Uganda following his parents who sought political asylum from Idi Amin, he’s still a skinny African beating rednecks at pool in the bar below his apartment, living on red vines and a beer someone, usually a bartender, finagles him.

The day we’re supposed to meet for lunch the first time, years before either of us has cell phones, I’m two hours late.  He’s still there.  I sit down and apologize, touched by the softness of his voice, the way he raises his hand to his head to twist a piece of hair as he listens to me talk about Thomas Sankara, the West African president who quoted Marx and recommended women not marry so long as marriage continued to exploit them—all this in the 1980s, when Reagan ate coconut cake at the White House, his war on drugs somehow missing the coke stash of his Vice President’s son. 

A decade later, Isaac was a software engineer for Geodelic, the start-up trying to beat Groupon to the punch.  He was the lucky one:  his mom, dad, sisters—they were all thinking about going back. 

When his dad one day stopped paying the rent on an Inglewood house where his mom and three of his sisters lived, Isaac started paying it.  Then a sister lost her job and couldn’t make her car payment, so he took that over, too, which is how we drive to the Echo on Thursday in a BMW.  

 The night air stings.  “It’s freezing fucking cold outside,” I say.  As I say it, I see a body in an alley doorway and gasp. 

Then I see it’s not a body, but a person lying on the concrete floor, legs drawn up like a fetus. 

“It’s freezing, Isaac.  Should we offer to let him sleep in your car?” 

“I don’t know.  What do you think?” 

I try to play the scene out in my head.  We offer the guy the backseat, then what?  Ask him to get out when we’re ready to go?  I think of my alcoholic friend, Tim.  How angry is this guy?  Our laptops are in the car. 

“Let’s see if there’s a second-hand store.  We can get him a jacket or something.” 

When we turn the corner, I see one. 

We rifle through coat racks, trying to find the warmest one.  I choose an army-colored parka lined with down and pick up a sock hat from a rack near the register, where a handmade sign taped to the counter reads like a challenge: No Discounts.  No Exceptions.  Still, when I tell the cashier the jacket is for a homeless guy in the alley, he gives me 10 percent off.

We walk back to the alleyway and find him still lying there, eyes shut.  If he’s drunk or high and I startle him, I might get punched.  So I work my way up to it.  “Hi,” I say.  “We got you a jacket.  Do you want it?” 

He doesn’t answer or open his eyes, like he’s too cold to sit up and put the jacket on. 

“I’m going to lay the jacket over you,” I tell him.  “Then I’m going to take off your baseball cap, put on a warmer hat, and then put your cap back on, okay?”  I kneel next to him and drape the jacket over his body.  Then I take the cap off his head and pull the hat over it. 

Up close, his face is devastating, his features drawn into the expression of suffering, like soundless weeping.  I feel like I’ve kneeled over a body wasted by gunfire, struck by an image of the two of us alone in a Middle Eastern desert, his face cradled in my hands, like I’ve come across a soldier in the end times—only he’s not a soldier.  He’s innocent.  I must look strong kneeling beside him, like he’s going to be okay now, but all I have is my anger.  The contrast is sharp—my anger, his innocence.  A minute later, Isaac will call it humility. 

I let my hands linger before I pull them away.  I put the baseball cap over the hat and adjust the coat.  Then I stand up and we walk away. 

I am walking away from the first time I’ve loved since I can remember, like the first pure emotion I’ve had in months or years, every minute more conscious of the hole where love should be, of the shallow emotional landscape of whole countries. 

“Do you know what you just did?” 

“Don’t,” I say. “I should have touched him longer.  I didn’t want to—impose.  He was so innocent.  I looked in his face and I saw his innocence.” 

“He was humble.” 

I look at Isaac and nod, it suddenly occurring to me his own humility is more disciplined than accidental, that humility is something one works towards, that I almost went along without even trying to be the one good thing. 

We eat at the pizza place next door to the Echo.  I pull a straw wrapper into pieces, wad the pieces up, and roll the paper in the condensation from my glass. 

When I thought the man in the doorway was a body, my reaction is the one Freud describes as the uncanny—that thing we recognize and then fight to the death to feign we don’t recognize, like an arm thrown up to keep something close at bay.  Then, when I realize it’s not a body, but a man out in the cold, I’m disgusted all over again. 

 “Why are people not rioting?”

“I don’t know.”  He takes a bite of his salad, his skin smooth and dark cherry.  “Where do you think he was from?” 

“I don’t know. Where do you think?”

“I think Cambodia.  Because otherwise what makes it worth it, you know?  Anywhere else, you could just go back.” 

In line to buy tickets an hour before the doors open, we hear a guy announce the show is at capacity, but Isaac manages to get two anyway. 

We go to the wine bar across the street and sit at stools facing the bar mirror.  He asks me about the conference papers I’m supposed to deliver at the MLA in eleven days, one for a panel called “The Lives of Part-Time Faculty.” 

“Fine,” I shrug.  “I’m just saying what happened.” 

“You’re too good for that job.” 

“Dogs are too good for that job.” 

He thinks I should write.  I don’t say I have no faith in that either.  I nod.  It’s New Year’s.  “I want to go talk to these guys after the show tonight, okay?”

“What guys?” 

“The band.”  

“Yeah?” 

“Yes.” 

“Ok.” 

Throughout dinner and drinks, I keep thinking about him—why we don’t put him in the car and drive him to my house, why we leave him there to freeze.  It seems like a risk we don’t think about, as if we are aware only that our legs are pegs on a track under someone else’s control. 

A week earlier, as I’m driving Lola to the airport during the rains, when the brakes and steering go out on the freeway and we hit the meridian wall, careening across five lanes of traffic to the shoulder, I notice it then, too. 

I’d asked Jen to take over a winter intersession class for me so I could manage my schedule at the other two schools, but now that I needed the car I’d loaned her back, she didn’t want the class.  Two days before Christmas, we drafted another letter to the department chair at Moreno Valley College and waited to be pinballed around. 

At 9:30, we make our way back to the Echo, order drinks, and stand before the stage.  Before I finish my beer and go outside to smoke, I take some pictures of the band, and Nielsen’s face shows up pink, like a Warhol print, in all of them. 

When I try to get back in, the bouncer points at a sign that reads No Ins and Outs, like “Ins and Outs” is a thing, like Idiocracy, like You know, ins and outs, Scro.  My girlfriend was a tard, now she’s a pilot. 

“What’s this for then?” I ask, pointing at the wristband.

“Alcohol.” 

“We just spent fifty bucks on fifteen-dollar tickets.” 

“Too bad.” 

“I drove up from Riverside to see this show.” 

“Not my problem you can’t read,” he says. 

The third time he says it, I can’t help myself.  “I teach College English, which means I teach people how to read, so when you suggest I can’t read, I don’t feel like I’m illiterate, I feel like you’re a tool.” 

“You need to leave.” 

“Then you need to give us our money back.” 

“That’s not gonna happen.” 

“Then I’m not leaving.” 

It goes back and forth like that until a woman stumbles outside clutching her stomach, and I try to push past him before he puts himself in front of me, Isaac appearing at the door.  He tries to smooth things over, but neither of us will budge.

For a minute, the bouncer puts his hands up like he’s going to lay them on me. 

I look at him, curious but daring him, too. 

“You just see a big fat black guy.” 

“You’re just telling everyone what you’re insecure about.” 

He links a rope through some poles to forge a divider between us.  When I don’t move, he takes a phone out of his pocket and dials the cops.

I think he’s bluffing until I hear him say, “It’s a woman” and back off to sit on the curb and wait. 

“What are you doing?” Isaac says, “Let’s go.” 

“I want to tell the cops they took our money.” 

“Kathryn.  They don’t care.  Let’s just go.” 

“It’s wrong, Isaac.” 

“I know. 

Then I am sobbing on a Los Angeles street curb, waiting to tell some cops why a business that takes your money should provide a service, and why it’s their job to see to that, how important it is understand what crime is, real crime not prime time TV, how the transfer of money is a record of criminality, how intangible injustice because it is a relationship, not a thing, how you can’t get a handle on it like you think you can, the way you think you can make a fist around time but you can’t, time is thin air—but they don’t come. 

Isaac sits next to me on the curb.  I let him pull me up and walk me to the car, his arm around my waist.  When I look for the man in the doorway, he’s gone.  I’m overcome with guilt and the fear we let him die.  Did an ambulance come for his dead body?  Did he walk away?  Did a better person lead him into her home? 

On the drive back, suddenly ashamed of the space I take up in Isaac’s car, of making someone listen to that, I rub my eyes dry, my face grainy with salt.  Tomorrow, it will be a record of tonight. 

“Isaac, he said I thought he was fat and black.” 

“I know.  It’s okay.” 

In a minute we’ll walk through glass doors into the lobby, take the elevator up to our room, press our faces into bleached sheets and wake up to drink coffee at a nearby Starbucks on the last day of the year. 

Why does love weaken our resolve?  Is resolve a dam?  Are tears, like a gag reflex, the sign we have registered another’s love?  A sign of its effect on us?  Is everyone who cries just somebody loved?