We had dinner then. A fantastic meal. We talked about everything but the trial. I can’t remember how I got started on stories about my Russian grandmother, dozens of stories about her. I hadn’t laughed so hard in years. Taught them the word shonda. What a shonda!
Carlotta cleared the table. The candles were halfway down. She came back with coffee and flan. As we were finishing, she said, “Jon, may I call you counselor?”
“God, no,” Jesse said. “That sounds like junior high. He’ll ask me where my anger comes from. Let’s call him Barrister. Barrister, have you given some thought to this lady’s plight?”
“I have, my good man. Let me get my briefcase and I’ll show you just where we stand.”
I said yes to a cognac. They both were drinking whiskey and water now. I was excited. I wanted to be matter-of-fact, but I was too pleased. I went through the document and compared it to a three-page list of untrue, misleading, libelous or slanderous statements from the report. “Lewd,” “wanton behavior,” “lascivious manner,” “threatening,” “menacing,” “armed and dangerous.” Pages of statements which could prejudice a judge and jury against my client, which in fact had given me a distorted idea of her even after talking with Jesse.
I had a copy from the airport security saying that she and her clothing and bag had been thoroughly searched and no drugs or weapons had been found.
“The best part, though, is that you were right, Jesse. Both these guys have long lists of serious violations. Suspensions for improper use of force, beating suspects. Two separate investigations for killing unarmed suspects. Many, many complaints of brutality, excessive force, false arrest and manufacturing evidence. And this is only after a few days research! We do know that both these cops have had serious suspensions, were demoted, sent from beats in the city to South San Francisco. We will insist upon Internal Affairs investigations of the arresting officers, threaten to sue the San Francisco Police Department.
“So, let’s not just threaten them, let’s do it,” Jesse said.
I would get to learn that drink gave him courage but it made her more fragile. She shook her head. “I couldn’t go through with it.”
“Bad idea, Jesse,” I said. “But it is a good way to handle the case.”
The court date wasn’t until the end of June. Although my aides continued to get more evidence against the policemen, there wasn’t much we needed to discuss. If the case wasn’t dismissed, then we’d have to postpone the trial and, well, pray. But I still went over to the Telegraph apartment every Friday. It made my wife Cheryl furious and jealous. Except for handball games, this was the first time I ever went anywhere without her. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t come too. And I couldn’t explain, not even to myself. Once she even accused me of having an affair.
It was like an affair. It was unpredictable and exciting. Fridays I would wait all day until I could go over there. I was in love with all of them. Sometimes Jesse, Joe, and Carlotta’s son Ben and I would play poker or pool. Jesse taught me to be a good poker player, and a good pool player. It made me feel childishly cool to go with them into downtown pool halls and not be afraid. Joe’s mere presence made us all safe anywhere.
“He’s like having a pit bull, only cheaper to feed,” Jesse said.
“He’s good for other things,” Ben says. “He can open bottles with his teeth. He’s the best laugher there is.” That was true. He rarely spoke, but caught humor immediately.
Sometimes we walked with Ben in downtown Oakland while he took photographs. Carlotta got us to make frames with our hands, look at things as if through a lens. I told Ben it had changed my way of seeing.
What Joe liked to do was to sneak into photographs. When the contacts were printed, there he’d be sitting on a stoop with some winos or looking lost in a doorway, arguing with a Chinese butcher about a duck.
One Friday, Ben brought a Minolta, told me he’d sell it to me for fifty dollars. Sure. I was delighted. Later I noticed that he gave the money to Joe, which made me wonder.
“Play with it before you get any film. Just walk around at first, looking through it. Half the time I don’t have any film in my camera.”
The first photographs I took were at a store only a few blocks from my office. It sells one shoe for a dollar each. One side of the room has piles of old left shoes, the right side has right shoes. Old men. Poor young men. The old shoe seller in a rocking chair putting the money in a Quaker Oats box.
That first roll of film made me happier than anything in a long time, even a good trial. When I showed them the prints, they all high-fived me. Carlotta hugged me.
Ben and I went out together several times, early in the morning, in Chinatown, the warehouse district. It was a good way to get to know someone. I’d be focusing on little kids in school uniforms, he’d be taking an old man’s hands. I told him I felt uncomfortable taking people, that it seemed intrusive, rude.
“Mom and Jesse helped me with this. They always talk to everybody, and people talk back. If I can’t get a picture without the person seeing me now I’ll just talk to them, come right out and ask, ‘Do you mind if I take your picture?’ Most of the time they say, ‘Of course I mind, asshole.’ But sometimes they don’t mind.”
A few times we talked about Carlotta and Jesse. Since they all got along so well, I was surprised by his anger.
“Well, sure I’m mad. Part of it is childish. They’re so tight I feel left out and jealous, like I lost my mother and my best friend. But another part of me thinks it’s good. I never saw either one of them happy before. But they’re feeding each other’s destructive side, the part that hates themselves. He hasn’t played, she hasn’t written since they moved to Telegraph. They’re going through his money like water, drinking it mostly.”
“I never get the feeling that they are drunk,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve never seen them sober. And they don’t really start drinking until we’ve gone. Then they careen around town, chasing fire trucks, doing God knows what. Once they got into the US Mail depot and were shot at. At least they’re nice drunks. They are incredibly sweet to each other. She never was mean to us kids, never hit us. She loves us. That’s why I can’t understand why she’s not getting my brothers back.”
Another time, on Telegraph, he showed me the words to a song Jesse had written. It was fine. Mature, ironic, tender. Reminded me of Dylan, Tom Waits and Johnny Cash mixed together. Ben also handed me an Atlantic Monthly with a story of hers in it. I had read the story a few months before, had thought it was great. “You two wrote these fine things?” They both shrugged.
What Ben said had made sense, but I didn’t see any self-hatred or destructiveness. Being with them seemed to bring out a positive side of me, a corny side.
Carlotta and I were alone on the terrace. I asked her why being there made me feel so good. “Is it simply because they are all young?”
She laughed. “None of them are young. Ben was never young. I was never young. You probably were an old child too, and you like us because you can act out. It is heaven to play, isn’t it? You like coming here because the rest of your life vanishes. You never mention your wife, so there must be troubles there. Your job must be troubles. Jesse gives everybody permission to be themselves and to think about themselves. That it’s OK to be selfish.
“Being with Jesse is a sort of a meditation. Like sitting zazen, or being in a sensory deprivation tank. The past and future disappear. Problems and decisions disappear. Time disappears and the present acquires an exquisite color and exists within a frame of only now this second, exactly like the frames we make with our hands.”
I saw she was drunk, but still I knew what she meant, knew she was right.
For a while, Jesse and Maggie slept every night on a different roof downtown. I couldn’t imagine why they did