Mugshot of John Wojtowicz who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for robbing a bank in order to fund his partners sex change. August 23rd 1972, New York
We should be more pro-active or we’ll see more of such sad fates of honest people.
And the utterly ironic thing is I’ve seen repeated tumblr posts of that iconic photo absolutely slagging the shit out of Peter Norman as “lol white guy so uncomfortable” “Why the fuck isn’t he supporting them”, etc etc.
As an Australian this post surprised me. I knew none of the above.
Reese turns to you, goes, “You’re not smoking anymore.”
The music doesn’t even sound like music right now, it sounds like a threat. Some kind of bass-heavy Southern rap music made to screw-up your face to, made for strippers to dance to. You blink at Reese, feeling ornery all of a sudden: “You get to tell me what to do now?”
He snorts. You can’t hear something like that over the music, but you see his body do the snort movement, and so you snort back. He goes, “First of all, all I do is tell your ass what to do. Second, if you could see yourself right now, you’d go, like…I dunno, find Jesus or something.”
You shrug. “You’re not sober.”
He nods like ‘no, shit.’ He goes, “Yah. I’m fucked up. I don’t look fucked up, though. I’m DJing. All the head-bobbing makes me look like I’m concentrating, and if I look like I’m concentrating, then I gotta be sober, right? I mean, not really, but that’s how it looks to other people, and, since I’m in public, that’s how I’m thinking about it. I mean, I don’t care, I’m just saying. Tomorrow you’ll wish you didn’t look fucked up right now.”
You blink at him.
He grabs the roach, takes two puffs, hands it back, exhales a slow plume upward; you picture the smoke filling up the whole place, like a fog machine. The house is filled with people as fucked up as you are. It’s someone’s birthday. The music has been going three and a half hours, and the night is at its ‘peak.’ No one will be sober again for quite some time, and they are relishing it—this is good news. It’s the kind of party where, if you’re not comfortable dancing, saying yes, and just generally not giving a fuck, you probably left a long time ago. Reese shakes his head at you, like he does to his baby sister, when she doesn’t understand words as much as he thinks she should already. “Go get us two bottles of water. It’ll sober you up. We just gotta last two hours, then we can go. Hold up.”
He leans over to cue up the next song, then he mixes smoothly from one to the other, maybe cutting over a bit too quickly at the last moment, but it probably sounds like fucking Thomas Bangaltar himself is spinning, how convinced everyone is that this is an amazing night. You think for a second that he accidentally put the same song on, then you think about how impossible this is and look at him—he is looking back at you. He goes, “Are you listening?”
You think about it… “No.”
He coughs, goes, “I said, they moved anything edible out of the kitchen and put in the pantry in the basement.” You blink then look over to the party, sprawled out before you. The basement is on the opposite end of the party. The basement may as well be on Alderaan, how far away this feels. You laugh, how unfunny it is. Reese laughs and goes, “Whatever. You remember where it is? You want me to go with you? I can put on like a mixtape or whatever…”
People are always giving you their ‘you’re going to let me down anyway, aren’t you’ option. Nobody ever thinks you can handle what is actually asked of you, only because it never seems like you actually want to do it. You shake your head, “Nah, I remember. It’s, like, opposite the front door.” He nods, “Yeah. There’s a fridge in there—in the pantry or whatever—so, um…if there’s cold water in there, grab that. I’ll take whatever, though. There might be people down there.” He says this last part in bold, but you’re not sure if he means you should be afraid of this, or if this will make your job easier. You nod and say, “Okay,” make a face like someone who doesn’t need this explained twice, hesitate like someone who does, but Reese isn’t paying attention anymore, has just gone back to the music, probably needing it as much as you need to take this walk.
You resign to this fate. You are briefly amazed that you are even walking—that your body just does this, upright even! How many people can say that? Well, most of them. Animals. How many animals can say that?
A hand lands on your shoulder, just as you’ve pushed passed the first couple, ramming their pelvises together in a manner that is somehow one of the most loving gestures you have ever seen, and you seize, this hand on you, and you think ‘they’ve found me out…this is it!’ You don’t know what you did, but you know what you’ve done, and you’re surprised people just aren’t chewing you out all day—you’re pretty sure you deserve it.
But it’s just Reese, being harmless. “I’m going with you.” He shrugs. You nod, feeling sober already.
Having passed through the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room, you reach the wooden door off to the side of the foyer, and this is the basement door. Reese opens it. He goes, “After you,” and you nod, and you trot down the stairs, half-expecting him to just close the door behind you, locking you down here, but he comes along, though he does close the door.
The basement glows warmly, like scenes in martial arts movies, when the protagonist walks into his dojo and everything is supposed to feel all…simmered down, like you can go to the bathroom now, if you want. Or her dojo. It is barely lit, and there’s a big poker table set up right in the middle, and there are people in various stages of undress, laughing really loud, and speaking in grunts and purrs, at least that’s the impression you’re getting. There’s about 8 people playing, six of which are girls, and one of these girls, in her bra and in her underpants, looks over at the two of you, standing at the bottom of the stairs, and she says, “Reese! Hey babe, come play with us!” Reese grins beneath eye-lids that are barely open, waves to the group, goes, “Sup, guys. Sup, Molly.” Reese has hooked up with Molly on a consistent basis since last year, hangs out with Molly on a consistent basis, you are sure, yet he never talks about her. You get told Reese talks about you a lot. You don’t know which thing it is better to be. You know which one you want to be, but it’s important to only acknowledge things about yourself you’d be willing to say out loud. You have to trick people about what your hopes are, or else just pretend not to have any. No one’s ever suggested this to you, it’s just an idea you came up with, to keep yourself in check. Even when there’s just orange juice in your system, there’s a way about your look—not your appearance, but your look; meaning, like, how you look at things. You have a tendency to frighten people. How cowardly that makes them, you don’t know. “We’ll just be a second,” Reese says, unable to hold back a smile and leans you in the direction of the underground pantry, off to your left. There’s another door, and, inside it, a string, that when you pull it, light arrives. There is dry food and paper towels and Dixie cups, but you do not see water. There is a fridge—Reese opens it and hands you a bottle of cold water. You look at it like you thought he was making it up, like there was never really a water bottle. He’s already chugging his, so you open yours and do the same, like this was your idea too. Like no one could ever leave behind someone willing to chug water with them, willing to pretend that they want to. Like as long as you’re saying ‘yes,’ nothing bad can ever happen to you.
Reese pulls his bottle away and wipes his mouth with his sleeve, panting, grinning at the joke of being thirsty. You just look at his face and keep chugging.
You sit at the kitchen table swallowing over and over, trying to figure out if you’re getting sick, and, if so, if it just started today, and, if so, what caused it–you were told that common-cold type stuff incubates for like a week, that whatever gave it to you did so when you weren’t looking; you also think you maybe got sick last night, which was a colder night than there’s been in a while, that it happened when you volunteered to take the garbage down to the street–your house is set way far from the road, and so taking down the garbage usually involves a character-assassination-fueled shouting match between your siblings and yourself, one of you finally either stepping forth to greedily acquire the cool points derived from simply taking down the damn bins, or needing to spend some time with the trash in order to not hit one of the others, have a nasty secret revealed in front of your parents. You didn’t wear a jacket, because you didn’t realize it was going to be so cold, and you were out there about one minute longer than the task required, as the only reason you volunteered without the time-honored smear campaign is your friend Buddy (how you greet each other, sadly: “What’s up, Buddy!” “What’s up, buddy!”), who came across a surplus of pot when his brother was unexpectedly up for a job that drug tests people, after the job that doesn’t drug test fell through. “I’m not gonna smoke all this,” Buddy told you, “and I don’t really feel like doing anything nice for anyone else, or wasting anything, so take as much as you want. I owe you.” You were helping him plaster a hole in his wall, hang a poster over it. “If you’re giving stuff away, I will take stuff.” It wasn’t a big deal, but then you got home, and you realized there weren’t exactly a gang of ways for you to even enjoy this gift; you’ve had your own room since Jed moved to the basement, but you’d either have to warn your parents to expect to smell weed a lot for the next few days or sneak out. When your mom, post-dinner, brought up garbage day, after you’d already volunteered to load the dishwasher, your inner Jiminy Cricket floated down from the ceiling, one hand gripping a magical umbrella, the other miming a toke from an invisible spliff, and so you volunteered for that, too. Pre-rolled joint or not, brief tenure in the windy, moonless night or not, your throat immediately started to hurt, started asking why you weren’t wearing a jacket or something, and you didn’t blame the weed, since your body was undoubtedly used to the punishment by now. No. It was the cold, mixed with your body being pulled into a vulnerable, foreign substance accepting state–the sick got in, too! You don’t know if this shit is true–anything you say or think, really–but you know you can’t stop swallowing, just to feel what that part of your body is up to, can feel a growing lump in your throat. Your mom has you cutting carrots, as she’s preparing some sort of duck situation for dinner, as your dad’s parents are coming over, people who you haven’t seen (in person) since, like, the eighth grade, when your grandmother took shots at your mother over letting your sister participate in a school-wide protest against the well-known evangelical minister who was to speak at her high-school graduation, participation in which could’ve meant not graduating with her class, which was, of course, bullshit, but the argument devolved into not-taking-out-the-garbage level mudslinging, your father taking your mom’s side in a mom argument for the first time since asking yours to be his wife, alienating your family from that bit of its history, until today.
You don’t know if you should even be touching the carrots you are cutting right now, is the thing. Like, if you’re sick. ‘Maybe it’s just a hypochondria thing,’ your brain offers, ‘like the time you and your first grade class convinced each other a substitute teacher poisoned you, by making you wash your hands with dish soap.’ “Whatever.” Your mom looks up from performing surgery on the duck near the sink. “What?” “Nah, I…I was talking to myself, and I guess I decided to take the crazy out loud. You know. Hey, how many of us is it gonna be at dinner tonight? That duck looks mad small.” She looks at the duck, in a large plastic bowl, in the sink, turns back to you. “There’s a second duck. And it’s us, and your father’s folks, and I think Jed’s girlfriend will be joining us…” “Jed did.” Your brother has entered the room; he said that last line–he takes a little disc of carrot, eats it, sits down. “Is Buddy coming?” You shrug, cut carrots. “I dunno. Should I be bombarding them with my decadent lifestyle? I thought we were trying to make grams feel welcome, and…he’s not good at shit like that. Like, answering questions about us.” Your mom is back to fisting the duck or whatever, says, “You want me to invite him?” “Jeez, I can invite him. I did…that’s not…I don’t know, whatever.” Jed turns to your mother’s back. “Yikes. I think that’s his way of saying he might be considering cutting Buddy loose.” You sigh, start cutting the carrot’s faster. You’re going to have to smoke before this dinner takes place. “That’s not it.” It’s close, though. “I’m just fucking with you. This is your life and your home, so if you want Buddy here, I’ll scoop him up, too. Where’s Morgan at, though? Shouldn’t she be barely helping, too?” Morgan is your sister. “She worked last night. She’s sleeping.” “I saw her on Facebook a minute ago, but okay, I’ll…see you two in a little bit.” He stands, hovers over another carrot slice, you shrug, he takes it.
You do this thing where you look at people in public, and they look back at you, and you tell yourself there’s no way they could possibly imagine what you were thinking about them, not the first time. If they say nothing to you, you figure it’s okay–whatever you were thinking, whether or not they knew it, you got away with thinking it. Then you see them again, and, besides thinking, 'Hey–it’s him again,’ it’s like you picked up where you left off, depending on what it was about them that caught you, and, since you don’t know them, this thing is almost always the same–the way they wear their hair, or the way they carry themselves, or what their face might look like if you could ask permission to look at it the way someone who was talking to them might, the way someone who wanted to understand them might. You’ve been doing this to the same person for the last couple of months, at the food cop-op, where you work, that your neighbors own; the fact that he seemed to notice this almost immediately did not deter your body from thinking it was a good idea to keep tabs on him whenever his shape was visible; your not getting punched in the head seeming to serve as some sort of deluded grant of permission, maybe even a wish, on this other body’s part, that you might simply be unable to look away, as is the case, and that you might even have something to offer, aside from assistance in locating specific organic food items. This person is not Buddy, although it was, once. You sit on your bed and grab your cell phone, which is finally charged. You’ve got an iPhone 3G, which, yes, you feel fortunate to be a person on earth who owns one, but, no, it does not work like it used to, dies unless perpetually plugged in, is mostly for who (and what a sad show it is). You call Buddy. It rings. You think of the other person, passing them in the bread aisle, thinking they were a new stranger, looking in their eyes for a good ten seconds before realizing that was him, hating yourself for forgetting to look away, like a gentleman, who understands the world he lives in. “Yo.” “Yo.” You’re on the phone now, with Buddy. “Are you coming to dinner? I told you about it, remember?” “Yeah, I remember. You want me to?” “Um…my mom’s cooking duck. You ever have duck?” He laughs. “I don’t think so.” “Me, neither. I think she’s trying to show off, but…yeah. Jed’ll pick you up. Later, though. If you want.” “Yeah, cool. Thanks.” “Okay, I’ll see later.” “True. What are you doing right now?” “I, uh…I gotta help my mom cook. Like, pre-cook, or whatever.” This is a lie. “Ah, okay. I’ll see you.” “Alright. Later.” You put your phone back on the bed, opened your top nightstand drawer, saw the pre-rolled joint staring back at you, like your victim, back at the co-op, four days ago, you re-stocking the bananas, unaware that you might already be sick, according to certain theories, sensing the peripheral presence of outside regard, turning to your left, to see what kind of thing might be laughing at you in that particular moment, seeing him turn away, grab a bag of lettuce, proceed to checkout. Him, though. Turning away from you. Not that you blame him. You grab the joint. You grab a cough drop. You walk downstairs. You go out back. You climb over your neighbor’s fence. You trudge through their crops until you find a safe place to smoke. You get to a patch of dirt, and you stand there–try to figure out how far from the house it is; you’ve been in these crops before (you work for these people, after all), but sometimes it’s hard to remember exactly where you are, and impossible to know if the smoke will carry far enough for someone to smell it. You lick a finger, hold it up, luck out, as the wind seems to be blowing toward the back of the fence, toward the trees. You pop in the lozenge, swallow a few times, see what your throat thinks of this–it doesn’t like it. You light the joint anyway.
You saw him again today, banging out the couple of hours of overtime you had left–you’re buying Jenna’s dad’s old car, and so you need the money–and you almost wanted to yell at him. 'There’s a Whole Foods like thirty minutes away, motherfucker! Do you realize how ashamed of myself you make me feel? I can’t even talk about you! I’m not even allowed to look at you, not based on, like, ethics, or social mores, or whichever! Stop coming here!’ All of this, you wanted to say into the store’s intercom–'he’ll get the message’ you would think, as every customer in the store turned to him, as he tossed his basket to the ground and ran from the co-op, never to return. But you said nothing, obviously, the internal tongue-lashing manifesting as an outward face-staring, totally by accident, but totally happened anyway, you only realizing it was happening when you sort of snapped to, realized he was just standing there, like, ten yards away, trying to decide between two somewhat equally-priced cuts of steak, one in each hand, weighing them, looking like Jim Lee designed him, but smiling, always smiling, about something, and your eyes veered to the right, saw that he was with someone, some dude, that this dude was watching you watch them, confused in a way that suggested you had a problem, one it might be his job to remedy. He turned to say something to his smiling friend, and you walked away. You spent the remaining hour of your shift wandering around the back, trying to look busy while simultaneously twisting reality into something that made your heart beat a little slower, and the imaginary conversation in your head, starring the boys by the meat cooler, less scathingly accurate, a version in which they’d no clue as to what you had in mind for the smiling one, where they thought you exuded a toughness that nothing short of a brawl was on your mind, and you were the bigger man, as you spared them. Maybe they’d become Whole Foods regulars, after all. You hope, anyway.
Getting dressed in the foggy bathroom, you can hear everyone downstairs, gabbing, Jed talking louder than everyone save your dad, who will always talk the loudest, no matter how loud the nearest attention whore has chosen to project his or her voice. Being stoned for this means forgetting how to be yourself, only because the point is to not feel like it, assuming that your job is to stay out of the way, and nod at things that sound right, and let others highlight whatever’s good about you, without accidentally looking like you don’t know your place, whatever that is. You trot down the stairs, see your dad at the foot of them, facing the living room, talking to his dad, the former looking up to smile at you, you nodding back, the latter shaking your hand, offering the small bit of regard for the lives of others the men in your family have been trained to, as you look to the living room, see that it’s empty, turn toward the kitchen, where the rest of the gang is, some sitting at the table, a group including your grandmother, looking the same age she has since you’ve known her, you nod to her, compose a plan for maneuvering through the others, in order to give her a hug, see Buddy near the stove, smiling at your mom as she explains how to fist ducks, and then bake them–he turns to you, with the same smile, always, as your brother moves out of your way, your stoned mind telling you to shake Jed’s hand, and so you do, already acting out of character, as you pass him, and put your arms around Buddy, who expected a similar handshake, but who hugs you back. You pull away, and smile at his shoes, realizing you’ve already fucked up, just not knowing according to whose rules. Your own probably.
