He laughed and walked away.
“I think you better go,” Steve said to me.
“What? Am I no longer da bomb?” I asked.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said. “It’s awful. How about we have lunch tomorrow and talk it through?”
“I want to talk about it now,” I said.
“Come on, man, you’re all hopped up. Bill is hopped up. I’m hopped up. Nothing constructive can happen tonight. Just go home and I’ll call you later. We’ll get a beer. Hell, Bill will probably come with us.”
“Are you trying to counsel me?” I asked.
Steve shook his head and walked away. The other lawyers stared at me. They regarded me. I hated their eyes.
“Hey, Steve, nice bunch of friends you have here,” I said. “I’m so happy you racist white boys are looking after justice in our state.”
Immediately ashamed of myself and angry at my shame, I walked off the court, grabbed my gym bag, and headed for the door.
“Yeah, that’s right, kid,” Big Bill said. “Go home.”
I turned and walked back toward him. Steve stepped between us, but I pushed him aside.
“What did you say?” I asked Big Bill. He was three inches taller, but I was three inches angrier.
“I said go home, son.”
“I’m not your boy,” I said and punched Bill in the face. He fell on his ass. His nose was most certainly broken. My thumb and index finger were broken. He wiped his bloody face and stared at his bloody hand. Incredulous, he stared at me. His friends stared at me. Obviously feeling like my accomplice, Steve sat in a corner and covered his face with his hands. I wondered how long it had been since Bill had been punched, and how long it had been since any of them had seen one man punch another man in the face. Bill’s eyes watered. I don’t know whether he cried from pain or embarrassment or both. And then I realized I had punched a lawyer in front of six other lawyers. What kind of fool was I? I laughed and laughed and laughed and finally left the gym. Driving home, I wondered about lawsuits and assault charges. Bill did sue me, but I settled the civil charges out of court and plea-bargained to a simple criminal misdemeanor. Maybe I should have gone to court on both counts, but I didn’t think I was completely innocent, and I didn’t trust a judge or jury’s ability to separate the connotative and denotative meanings of a basketball game. If you want more details, you can go to the courthouse and look it up. It’s all part of my permanent record.
At night, I lie in bed with my ambition, close my eyes, and imagine the inevitable press conference. Barely ahead in the polls, or maybe trailing by a single percentage point, I face the media and answer the terrible questions: Yes, I hit him, it was a terrible misunderstanding. No, I wasn’t trying to hide my history, I just didn’t think it was relevant. After I hit him, I entered anger-management classes and became a more patient and tolerant person. I was a foolish young man and learned that violence is never the answer. On the night I struck him, I drove to my church, and I knelt and I wept and I prayed for guidance. I had never hurt another person before that night, and I haven’t hurt any person since, and I hope people will understand it was a tragic aberration. Of course I have hurt people emotionally. I have, as they say, broken a few hearts, but I suspect that might be a positive quality in a political candidate. Yes, I punched Bill in the face, and I must admit that it felt good and true. Of course I broke his nose. What else was I supposed to do? He was a racist. If you elect me as your next senator from Washington State, I’ll punch every racist in the nose. Yes, it’s true I’m single. I haven’t found the right woman. I’m searching for my Miss Right. What do I want in a woman? Well, intelligence, wit, beauty, faith in God, and goodness. Would I marry another politician? Only if she were a liberal Democrat! I punched Big Bill because he reminded me of my father. No, I punched him because he reminded me of your father. This country would be a better place if every U.S. president had punched racists in the face. That would mean U.S. presidents would have spent a lot of time punching themselves in the face. Okay, okay, yes, it’s true I broke Bill’s nose, but he was ugly to begin with. Hey, I broke my hand and was never able to use it properly again. My hand aches when it rains, and this is Seattle, so it aches all the time. Yes, I wonder if I’m going to be alone and lonely for the rest of my life. After all, I think we marry our mirrors, if you understand what I’m saying, but I work in rooms where the walls are covered with paintings of great white men. Listen, I hurt myself when I punched Big Bill. His face is fine, but I can barely make a fist, and I can’t straighten my fingers anymore. Okay, yes, her name is Teresa, but I never slept with her. I didn’t think we had a future. I barely knew her. She was only a strong possibility. Look at my hand. See how much it pains me? Can you see how much it hurts to use it? Do you understand I have a limited range of motion?
Can I Get a Witness?
AFTER EATING LUNCH ALONE in Good Food, a postcolonial wonder house that served Japanese teriyaki, Polish sausage sandwiches, Italian American pizza, and Mexican and Creole rice and beans, she sipped the last of her coffee and looked for her waiter. He’d taken her credit card over fifteen minutes earlier and had not yet returned. Maybe he’s banging a waitress in the pantry, she thought. Let’s not be homophobic, he might be banging the handsome Guatemalan busboy. Maybe he’s buying Internet porn or remaindered celebrity biographies with my card; maybe he’s a bitter and lazy employee; or maybe he’s kind and decent and terrible at his job. Or maybe my bank has finally frozen my overextended accounts and the IRS is on the way to arrest me. She wondered if the United States would ever reestablish debtors’ prisons. If so, she would probably be sentenced to life without possibility of parole. But prison might not be so bad, she thought, and solitary confinement would be quiet. She was the wife of a big man and the mother of two teenage sons, and she hated their male cacophony. She’d enjoyed more solitude and meditative silence when she was a seven-year-old living in the endless pine forests of the Spokane Indian Reservation than she did now as a fifty-year-old woman trapped in this water-trapped city. She was a prepubescent monk! She was closer to God when her vocabulary was 75 percent smaller. But she’d give away all of her five-, four-, and three-syllable words if God would return to her. She missed God! And she missed her waiter. But maybe her waiter had never existed. Maybe he was a ghost. Maybe I’m delusional, she thought, and I don’t even realize it. Do crazy people know they’re crazy? Look at me, she thought, the paranoid schizophrenic at lunch. She laughed and wondered how she had become a lonely person who ate alone and laughed loudly in public. I’m a homeless crazy woman who happens to pay rent, she thought. Pretty soon I’ll wear shopping bags for dresses, and what would Donna Karan think of that? And where the hell is the waiter? She looked around the restaurant for any proof of his physical existence: a dirty apron, a ballpoint pen, the smell of pheromone-soaked cologne. But the waiter was gone, missing, absent, destroyed.
Good Food was busier than usual because the sun was finally shining in Seattle after 113 consecutive days of gray and rain. In the absence of UV rays, the white folks had turned penal-colony pale, and the black and brown people had faded to concentration-camp beige, but everybody was happy and hungry today. She’d eaten a chicken burrito and a teriyaki-chicken sandwich. She’d ordered only the burrito, but the sandwich had mistakenly arrived with it. Chicken this, chicken that, she’d chanted to herself as she ate both meals and enjoyed them, though the meat in each tasted like it had been sliced from the same bird. She’d never been one to complain about poor service. She searched the restaurant for her imaginary waiter, checked her watch, and wondered if she was going to get fired for being late yet again. She worked as a paralegal at Ruffatto, Runnette & Kurth, a medium-sized firm that focused on civil rights cases. She knew it was good and great work, and it should have inspired the best in her, but she was a distracted and incompetent employee, a paraparalegal. She always ran late and had been officially reprimanded four times in the past year for tardiness. Civil rights lawyers might have been reluctant to fire poor employees, but they certainly knew how to humiliate them. Her employee file was four inches thick. Ah, the height, width, and length of her inferiority! She was a parawife and a paramother and a parafriend. She checked her watch once more. She was going to be at least twenty-five minutes late. A new office record! She looked around for her waiter, wondering if she should bother to return to work or if she should buy a newspaper and start scanning the want ads. God, she thought, I am so shockingly average. What had happened to her? Didn’t she used to be special? Wasn’t she supposed to be somebody important? She couldn’t remember a time when she still had potential. She was middle-aged (if she lived a century!) and college-educated and made ten dollars an hour. What kind of life had she created for herself? She was a laboratory mouse lost in the capitalistic maze. She was an underpaid cow paying one tenth of the mortgage on a three-bedroom, two-bath abattoir. And where the hell was her waiter? She stood and stretched her neck and scanned the room like the world’s tallest prairie dog, hoping to get somebody’s attention, and looked at the front door as a small and dark man stepped inside, shouted in a foreign language, and detonated the bomb he had taped to his chest.