An Excerpt from “Street Hassle”

A ripe pear sprays across the table when Daisy bites into it. She laughs in a dumb way when it gets in my eye, which makes me like her more because I know how smart she is, and because it gives me permission to go dumb myself. I imagine that we’ll leave the library later, and a movie will play in front of a couch that barely fits us both. Except I don’t speak Czech, and by that point, I will have forgotten how to read. The subtitled plot will then be lost on me before it even begins, since I’ll have spent all night wondering how I might be able to iron out this corkscrew inside me.

A heart-shaped hole in the clouds frames three-quarters of a moon, but the frame will muddle by the time we’ve inched close enough for her knee to touch mine. She’ll drape over me with her cheek tucked into the curve of my neck, coinciding with when the mistress pulls a hidden gun on her lover. Quiet will come when the last of the credits have rolled, and it will peel her away from me, giving her the chance to tell me it’s past her bedtime. I’ll drop dead with my face against her skirted thigh and look up, sidelong and smiling, hoping that my begging her to stay goes unnoticed. My clumsy kiss will rest at the top of her leg, she’ll widen her eyes and grin until it’s ugly, then my head will rumble around her lap as she kicks up an earthquake and settle only when my hair takes root around her fingers. Before we’re too tangled to part, she’ll say that this is where we stop. Our last words will be only our two aching goodnights.

In my stupor, there’s a story Klajd told me from when he was with his first wife, the one he once referred to as the ground he walked on. Maybe what he meant to say was that he worshipped the ground she walked on… In any case, whenever he mentioned her, I couldn’t shake the image of her as cocoon and him as the larva curled up inside her, squirming to get out.

When he was twenty-six, he went to a wedding without her. There was another woman there, and the night ended with the two of them sitting on a stoop behind a strip mall taco shop. When a hunchbacked dishwasher tossed out the trash at closing time, the woman took one last drag of the cigarette they’d been sharing before getting up to tear open the garbage bag with her chipped black fingernails (I asked Klajd if she also wore cherry red lipstick and wrote poetry about sex and dying, and he told me to go fuck myself). She waved Klajd over and told him to hold out his hands onto which she lay a tortilla stuffed with lukewarm pork. She squeezed a lime for him before biting into her own food. He watched her and imagined no life in which he’d find his wife serving him alleyway garbage; not once awake past her bedtime, alive to the hours when things just begin to happen. He savored the divide a moment could cut between yesterday and the rest of his life.

That story came from the driver’s side of a patrol car, from the inside of a uniform Klajd loved to wear. I wore the same one but loathed it, and so by the end of the story, I loathed him too and the type of cowardice it must take to steal time in so many ways––whether with handcuffs and a gun or with snare-set smiles––but then Daisy takes another bite of her pear, and its juice trickles down her wrist, dripping onto the pages of a Book of Mormon she reads because she’s curious. Lately I doubt that anyone has ever been brave.

#

Marianne’s scolded me before about taking myself too seriously, so when I ask her if she thinks there’s such a thing as courage or if all acts of what’s-usually-called bravery are simply borne from absolute necessity, she pauses the TV and folds one leg under herself with a canted smile. I ask the question again, this time in a funny voice so she might take it seriously, bringing up Klajd for the first time since I retired from policework. 

There was a routine during the four years Klajd and I were partners. I’d begin: I get that everyone is different, but… and she’d give the benefit of the doubt: well, maybe that’s just what works for him… and I’d ultimately return to a conclusion that had been formed long before the question was even asked, which usually went something like: Klajd’s just an asshole and I’m going to drive very fast into oncoming traffic the next time I’m locked in a car with him, and she would respond: okay.

To say I didn’t deserve that kind of patience would make me a martyr; to say I didn’t then, but I do now implies that I’m reformed. To say that Marianne is simply a patient woman who loves me deeply is closer to what’s probably the truth. I’m always glad to find that she still has some patience left, even if her smile patronizes me as I once again tell the story about the first time I met Klajd.

The department had rounded the rookies into an overheated bungalow for a week of Advanced Officer Training, and Klajd, just days out of the academy, showed up to roll call even later than I had. A roomful of starched uniforms and clip-on ties turned to the door to tell him his nameplate was dangling sideways. As he fumbled toward the back of the room while trying to fix it straight, the sergeant demanded to know where Klajd thought he was going. 

“To sit down, sir…” He looked back down to his shirt.

“Would you quit fucking with your nameplate?” the sergeant said. “What’s your name, trainee?”

“I’m––”

“You wanna come up here and tell us since you seem to like the attention?” The other rookies stirred awake. They jeered Klajd up to the sergeant’s podium, though he didn’t seem to notice. 

“Good morning. My name––” 

“Seriously? Why don’t I just…” the sergeant said. He reached over to tweeze away the nameplate that Klajd was still fucking with. “Better?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

He told us his name is Klajd, spelled K-L-A-J-D but pronounced Clyde, as in Bonnie and… He was a clerk at his uncle’s Cuban bakery until “a tax thing shut them down,” at which point Klajd put himself through the academy as a self-sponsor. His secondary dream had always been to be a cop, he said. The sergeant was sure to remind him of the common understanding of self-sponsoring as a sort of prostitution, in which the self-sponsored recruit graduates the academy then sticks their ass out for whichever department might have them, compared to the supposed dignity of being selected from a batch of preferred applicants whose respective departments would put them through training upon hire. Yes sir, Klajd said before telling the story of his first dream. 

He’d been a star pitcher in college, but dropped out after he was recruited by a scout for a minor league Dodgers team. He played a full season and there was even talk of him going Triple A, maybe even Major League, until he rolled down the side of Mount Baldie in his brother’s hatchback. I get the sense he would’ve gone on about his future as a pro and the injury that led him to his new and nobler calling, but the sergeant interrupted and told him to sit. The sergeant began to speak but stopped himself to toss Klajd his nameplate before he continued. One of the pins must’ve stuck Klajd when he caught it. He brought his thumb to his mouth and kissed away the blood.

He was surprised when Frida got home early that night. He was still in his workboots when he microwaved the dinner she’d left him in the fridge before her shift. When she went into the kitchen and said he looked so tall in them––so handsome even despite smelling like wet dog as she rubbed her palm against the back of his buzzcut pulling him closer still––there was an urge to smile that only reminded him of the wedding. 

Smiling always came easiest. It was his best bet in anything, thoughtless even when he had to fake it, so when he felt one escape him, he chased it with a fever. He asked Frida about her day, thanked her for leaving him dinner, then asked what sent her home early before forgetfully thanking her for dinner once more. He chewed each word like gristle until it went down and each time braced himself to ensure it didn’t come back up. He was sick by the time she said she didn’t want to talk about it, that she just wanted to take a shower and lie with him and watch a movie and he should join her because they hadn’t even had the chance yet to share a shower in their new home. It was the first time in their marriage he considered using the excuse.

He’d learned more in the academy about rumors of a bottomless well of imaginary overtime than he had about anything else. Granted, drill instructors only spoke of it indirectly, like a hex that can only be learned through practice under the closer guidance of whoever would train their recruits in the field—or, in Klajd’s case, from voices overheard from the next locker room aisle over during his first day of work. One officer warned another that they wouldn’t want to have another Trujillo situation on their hands, would they? 

Klajd found the sergeant taking his lunch in his office the same day he’d berated him. He interrupted to ask what it means to have a Trujillo situation on one’s hands. The sergeant paused his movie to keep himself from choking on his leftovers. He set down his dollar store reading glasses as he coughed and saw that Klajd was serious. There’d been a decade of trainees like him, so before Klajd had even spoken that morning, the sergeant had him pegged at a point between Toyota salesman and failed jock nagged into a real job by Someone Who Cares. The sound of Klajd’s voice, like that of a toddler wondering aloud an unanswerable question, made the sergeant reconsider. Another bit of food went down sideways. 

The joke Klajd told me he told the sergeant that day was something to the effect of “Try not to die, sir. We haven’t gotten to our Heimlich training yet.” The sergeant held back another fit as he laughed and shook his head, extending a hand to Klajd. Klajd smiled in return then was regaled with what the officer in the locker room had probably meant by “Trujillo situation.” Read: any time the husband or wife of any cop at this department since Trujillo calls the watch commander’s office to discover that there is in fact no midnight detail at Men’s Central Jail. That their spouse’s partner whom they’ve only ever referred to by their last name is actually named Yesenia. That when they have no clue where their favorite person in the world could possibly be at that moment, they’re forced to wonder whether it might feel better if that person was simply dead, so they show up at the station bleating away two late night bottles of wine to find out, leading to a write-up for the officer who, in getting caught in their lie, would be considered to have exhibited Conduct Unbecoming of an Officer.

The shower echoed from the master bathroom. Klajd wasn’t even going to use the excuse for the same reason most do; he’d never even touched the girl at the wedding aside from when their hands grazed one another as he walked her to her car and said goodnight, both of them standing there smiling until their faces cramped. Him, unable to stop smiling until he got to his hotel room and thought of the last time he was in Santa Barbara.

There was the karaoke Frida coaxed out of him by slackening his leash and feeding him an extra shot of tequila, and the tenderness of her voice after she’d had a couple of her own and said I love love love love you and he said I love you you you you too. Then the drunk drive to the beach where they would fall asleep in the sand and wake the next morning in a panic over how much money they didn’t have to waste on a hotel room. The panic, like the hundred thousand others they’d share in the years to follow, would become a punchline’s perfect setup with the years themselves always the punchline. 

Ba dum tss was the sound of a shampoo bottle bouncing off the wall and sliding across the shower floor. Frida said ‘ow’ the way she does any time she drops something, even when it doesn’t hurt. Klajd stood in the bathroom doorway and watched her rinse her hair. He made sure to tell her he got called into work before she could open her eyes.