"I......want Charles in charge of me. Ieeeeeeeeeee, want Charles in charge of me....." the young, Kroger employee sang over and over while I checked myself out. I laughed. Was that the song from that awful, Scott Baio TV show, post Happy Days? Way post Happy Days, when Chachi had to acknowledge that it was the '80s? I thought it was some weird joke at first, until I could still hear him singing it as I walked out of the front door.
"Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeee, want Charles in charge of me............".
I was driving south, way south, toward the Stewart Detention Center. The dead grass looked kind of golden. I woke up. I knew why I was dreaming about this for the second night in a row. Alejandro has been free almost ten months, but Cristian is not. And he's headed to Stewart on Monday. Sundays at Stewart. Again. Do the people still cry when the let the guys come out and sit on the other side of the glass and pick up the phone? Cry like I did, to see an innocent person locked in jail for not being able to produce a driver's license? Do the kids still smear the glass with their hands when they see their fathers? Do people still sit out in the car for hours, afraid to come inside, unable to come inside because they don't have the documents to visit, but still willing to make the drive, still willing to at least be as close as they can, even if that means sitting in the parking lot, without laying an eye on the person they came to see?
I remembered the Christmas that Walter Garcia and I spent, driving my shitbox of a car around, holiday songs on the radio, with a dead dog in the back, looking for the Humane Society. The Cremation Society. Our roommate was going to kill us. But it wasn't our fault.
"Do you know we haven't gotten paid yet?" Miranda asked, as she dropped her class off for Spanish on the last day before the break. Huh? Our checks always go through, at like five in the morning. It was afternoon. Hijole, what the fuck?
"I don't care when the money clears my account. Can you just give me the pay stub, even though I haven't gotten the money?" I asked the accountant impatiently. We are supposed to close on our, well, HOUSE in a little more than a week. The lender wanted that check stub to finalize our loan. Our mortgage. On our first house. Why was my job fucking this up?
I remember the hissing of cats in our kitchen, followed by the distinct sounds of cats fighting. Alec and I sprang out of bed. It was Christmas, ten years ago. We didn't own cats, but were pretty partial to the Orange Cat, a big stray that roamed the apartment building we lived in. He would jog with me like a dog and run to me when I called him from all the way across the parking lot. The one that we didn't use, but had cars in it that Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer would drive. We had a cat door that we kept open for him. He would come and go as he pleased, eat, get in bed with us, relax a bit. He was our perfect pet. No commitment. Independent. And now he was knee deep in a snarling fight with a big, mysterious black asshole cat in our kitchen. It had followed him in. Alec has never been a cat owner and is not versed in how to respond to their fights. He grabbed the Orange Cat, afraid that he would get hurt in the fight. Orange transformed himself into a viper and sunk his teeth directly into Alec's forearm, and then ran out the cat door. He returned a few minutes later, as if nothing had happened and laid down on our bed. A few days later, Alec was on an IV in the emergency room. We didn't know cat bites were so nasty.
"Why were you in Mexico?" the lender's email asked for the millionth time. I don't know, running from the law. Selling drugs. All kinds of shit. "I was on a Fulbright grant" I explained, again. "My employment was not interrupted. Nothing scandalous. Congressionaly funded, educational exchange".
No one was helping me with the check stub. The tension was mounting in my head. And, the second graders were making Puerto Rican musical instruments in class. A recipe for disaster. Me, ready to explode, them, with homemade maracas. I didn't want to be a dickhead. I planned the lesson, because I knew that they would love it. I finally got the class lined up to "assault", or surprise carol, the secretary at our school. I heard a loud bang as something hit the wall of the classroom. Norman started yelling furiously at no one in particular and running around like a nut. He had beamed his "guiro" across the room, trying to hit another student. Everyone stopped, stunned. "What the HELL was that?" I asked loudly, in front of twenty-two second graders. "She said 'hell'" someone whispered.
Great.
I remember when Cristian was deported the first time. It was over the holidays. It went on for months, his parents paying bond after bond only to see him transferred to another jail in another state. They were distraught. Holly and I started volunteering in the desert that summer, after he'd been sent "home", to the country he didn't even remember, alone. He was trying to get back and we knew it. Every young man we met made us think of him. Especially the sick one and his friend. The sick one that flew up into the sky while his friend was shackled and frisked and fire lined the mountains and smoke filled the air.
And it's happening again.
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