On a Neighbor who is Unwell

 

On a fine evening in May, Mother’s Day in fact, I sat on my porch reading a novel.  The slight cool breeze was adorned with bird song.  New green leaves made the trees lustrous in the rays of the setting sun.  My dog sat at the bottom of the concrete stoop, gazing out across the still houses and empty sidewalks.

A friend rounded the corner on his bicycle and pulled up on the lawn in front of the porch.  The man teaches history at the Community College.  His bicycle is notable because of its very high, u-shaped handle bars.  

My friend mentioned that his knee was still sore from joint replacement surgery and that he lacked normal range of motion.  Nonetheless, he was able to pedal his bike.  He said that if he had known the outcome of the surgery – it was mildly disappointing to him -- he might have put off the procedure for another couple years.  The knee felt stiff and swollen to him, as if a balloon were inflated in the joint – this is how he described the situation.  A couple years earlier, he had blockage in the arteries of his heart and required surgery for that condition.

“When I got to be 57,” he said, “my body just collapsed.”

Nonetheless, he seems vigorous to me, and, when I see him, he is riding his bicycle.  

He was planning a road-trip West beginning at the end of the Spring term, classes that he has been teaching remotely by ZOOM due to the Covid virus.  He told me his itinerary which seemed wonderful – first San Francisco, then, Napa Valley and return via Death Valley and the great National Parks in southern Utah.  

My dog began to bark.  Some people were passing on the sidewalk.  

I saw a man dressed all in white walking a full fifteen paces ahead of a woman.  The woman was shuffling along very slowly, pushing the steel cage of a walker ahead of her.  I recognized the woman as a neighbor from the other side of the block.  She is about 53 and suffers from ALS.  The disease has been slowly murdering her for about a year.  This woman, Sara, writes a column about her battle with ALS that is published in the local newspaper every couple weeks.  Her essays are invariably upbeat and optimistic.  My wife sends links to these essays to my mother.  We are still grieving the death of my brother from this same disease.  My mother has told my wife that she thinks the columns are valuable but that she cries every time she reads them: My brother Christopher was a pessimist and felt that he had been cheated by the disease and he succumbed to isolation and depression.  “He lived as if he were dying from the disease,” my mother said.  “Sara writes as if she were living with the disease.”

I came down from the porch to talk to Sara who teetered, a little unsteadily against the steel rail of her walker.  Many years ago, when I taught Business Law at the college, Sara was one of my students – I think this was before she married the man, now standing in his white shirt and white slacks, ahead of her on the sidewalk.  (Her husband is retired but was formerly the Director of Social Services for the County.)  Sara’s father was a local haberdasher who used to stroll about the neighborhood wearing a natty, burgundy-colored beret.  Her brother, who is gay, runs a coffee house downtown.  When my children were little, they played with Sara’s kids.  She was a doting and cautious mother.  Once, when my son was playing with her little boy, she called me to come and escort my child home.  I was a little irritated and said that she could just send my son, who was, then, about seven, home on his own – it’s just the distance of a long block with a corner but no streets to cross (in fact, the same block that she was now laboriously circumnavigating).  “I’m just not comfortable with that,” she told me firmly as I stood on her front step.  There is no point in arguing with young mothers.  Her old two story house is for sale.  She can’t climb the steps either to the basement or the bedrooms upstairs any longer,

I congratulated Sara on her newspaper column.  I told her that I had encouraged myy brother to join a support group with other ALS patients but that he had refused.  Sara said that my brother had probably made the right decision. “The support group is very negative,” she said.  “I tried to quit myself a couple months ago, but the facilitator begged me to stay so that I could help the others.  And, so, I still attend.”

She told me that she was doing everything in her power to extend her life.  “I’ve just had a stem cell transplant.  My own stem cells,” she said.  Sara said that her grown children were established in the world and had their own homes.

Sara was very thin.  She didn’t look exactly emaciated, but, instead, girlish, as if she were reverting to her face and figure when I taught her contracts and negotiable instruments when she was 20.  Sara’s eyes were unnatural bright and glaring.  I noticed that there were some strands of grey in her hair and that her front teeth were damaged – I wondered if she had fallen and injured herself.  

Sara said that she and her husband were moving to a rambler all on one floor and told me the address.

Another neighbor, Colette C–, pulled up to curb-side in her big car.  Colette is a widow.  Her husband, a well-known local businessman and civic booster, died about five years ago.  He was a heavy-set fellow who mowed his front lawn wearing scanty and tight-fitting bathing trunks with pink beach sandals on his feet.  Colette said that she would be happy to go for a walk with Sara and said that if she ever needed company for one of strolls, she should call her.  Then, she drove off.  I introduced my friend who was standing under the tree next to his bicycle.  Sara knew that the college teachers sometimes frequented the Coffee House on Main.  She said that she was the sister of the proprietor of that place.  

I told Sara that I admired her fortitude and courage.  I mentioned that my wife sent her columns to my mother.  

Twilight wrapped itself around the trees on the boulevard.  Down the street, a lamp flickered on.  

Sara said goodbye and continued her slow trek, step by step, down the block.  Her husband walked ahead of her, a white apparition on the pale concrete path.  They looked like some version of Orpheus and Eurydice in the gathering gloom pacing the tedious and winding path that leads up from Hades.

My friend on the bicycle said: “You know, I’ve never had any hardship.  Everything’s just been given to me.”

I said: “This is true for me also.”

“It’s just all been given to me,” my friend said, shaking his head. 

Later that night, I dreamed that I was auditing a small class at the College.  A dozen students were gatherer in nondescript room.  Each of them had created some kind of art: either a sonnet or a short musical composition or a water-color or glazed clay vessel.  One of the students was my daughter, Melissa.  (She has had chemical dependency problems and so I was glad to see that she was rehabilitated to the extent of participating in the class.) The teacher was an older woman.  She said that, after a bathroom break, we would listen to the students as they each presented the work of art that they had made.

“But we need time to tinkle,” the teacher said.  So, we went into the corridor outside the class-room and a line formed by the door to the toilet.  

I knew the building well.  It was as familiar to me as my own body.  We were on the upper levels of a great auditorium building, an ornate structure on a high plinth with concrete columns supporting a mighty portico.  The class rooms were in the attic of the auditorium building.  There was a toilet on the floor below and, so, not wanting to wait in line to use the bathroom, I hustled to the stairwell.  

On the floor below, some kind of fete was underway.  Perhaps, it had something to do with the premiere of a movie.  Happy people in bright clothing were gathered around the ornate marble stairs leading down from above.  They were holding flutes of champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres.  I ran into a man that I knew.  I couldn’t recall his name but knew that he was jolly and faintly disreputable.  He said that the toilet on the level where the party was underway was also crowded but that there was another facility a little lower in the building.  We went in that direction.

On the level of the building beneath the festive gathering, my friend led me to a very large salon with high ceilings and great mirrors in gilded frames on the walls.  Women were resting on overstuffed Victorian sofas and love-seats.  “But this isn’t right,” I said.  “This is the women’s lounge outside the ladies’ room.”  “It’s okay,” he said.  “No one will care.”

But I felt out of place and so we went down another flight of steps.  By this time, I had been away from the classroom in the attic of the building for a half hour and I wondered if the teacher had brought the students back together to discuss the objets d’art that they had made.  “I have to get back,” I said.

But, now, none of the staircases led upwards.  Instead, every stairwell plunged down deeper and lower in the huge building.  I felt the weight of many levels above me, pressing down as if on my shoulders.  My friend glared at me and, then, laughed in a hideous way.  We found an elevator.  My friend said that there was no way to go up without first descending to the very bottom of the building.  

We took the elevator to the lowest level.  A short corridor led to a threshold that opened to the outside.  We were standing beneath the mighty portico with its huge fluted columns and the marble steps leading up to immense entrance doors that seemed to me to be locked.  Huge concrete piers like the paws of a sphinx thrust out along the side of the steps.  Where I stood, at the base of the pedestal on which the auditorium soared upward, the edges of the building were curved, the wall not supported at a right angle to the paving stones, but, instead, gracefully arching into a hollow space at the bottom of the immense structure.  I noticed that each of the bricks underfoot and comprising the curve from vertical to level were marked with a name and two dates, numbers that identified years and represented, I thought, the life-spans of the persons memorialized on the sloping wall and level moat around the building.  It was gloomy and the trees were dark green shadows hanging over the pavement.  

Now, there was no way to reach the classroom hidden in the attic of great auditorium building.  The class was underway.  My daughter was no doubt disappointed by my absence. She had created something very beautiful but her father was not present to admire it.

My friend handed me a manila folder.  “This is your Red Folio Ticket,” he said.  “It will open all doors for you.”

We feel that dreams are visions, even, perhaps prophecies.  In fact, I suppose that they are mostly the product of intestinal gas or pressure on the bladder.  I woke suffused in a sense of sorrow and disappointment.

After going to the toilet, I went back to bed.  The white glimmer of dawn lightened the window a little.  I dreamed some more, this time lucidly – in other words, I knew that I was dreaming and, even, presumed that I could control the mise-en-scene.   Hollywood Boulevard ran along the base of the big auditorium building.  I clutched the Red Folio Ticket to my chest.  I thought that if I encountered my malicious friend, I would ask him why he had misled me.  I would also demand that he explain the meaning of the Red Folio Ticket.

I found an narrow escalator leading up into the auditorium lobby.  But my guide had now vanished and entrances to the stairwells were all locked.  The Red Folio Ticket was written in a foreign language that I couldn’t read.

O Lord, grant me patience / O Lord, grand me speed

 

1.

How do you persuade a seven-year old child not to love her mother?  This is not done easily even when the mother was abusive.

2.

Two days after Derek Chauvin was convicted by a Hennepin County jury of murdering George Floyd, amidst rejoicing and ubiquitous calls for something vaguely called a “racial reckoning,” I drove to Fargo, North Dakota.  My twin daughters live there with their four children, two kids apiece.  One of my daughters had a new baby, about ten days old when I made the trip.  It also happened to be my daughters’ 35th birthdays.  My son, Martin, hosts a  program on a Fargo public radio station.  He invited me to appear as a guest in his studio.

3.

In good weather and with light traffic in the west Metro, a road-trip to Fargo takes six hours from my home in Austin, Minnesota.  The transit, north to south, crosses two or three zones of different weather – at least ordinarily.  There is drought this Spring in the Red River Valley and so “red flag” warnings were posted – these caution against the danger of wind-driven grass fires.   

4.

The Spring was dry and cold.  The shelter belts in the Red River Valley were leafless, stark with wind-contorted trees, each a vortex of twisted brown bark and branch.  South of the Metro (St. Paul and Minneapolis and their suburbs) the trees were less black and spidery, softened by a haze of brown and green bud.

5. 

Worry knocked me awake at 4:15 a.m. and, so, I rose, bathed, fed my dog, and, then, left town about an hour later.  I felt feverish and hungover, notwithstanding the fact that I hadn’t drank anything the night before.  When the sun rose, the pale light on the prairie caused me to feel a little better.

6.

Visiting my children in North Dakota is always slightly troubling.  Once I drove the six hour way to Fargo, only to be excluded from a parent-teacher conference that I planned to attend, because my ex-wife hadn’t alerted the school that I was planning to be present.  One of my daughters, who has serious substance abuse and mental illness problems, has lost her parental rights with respect to her two children.  These children live with their grandmother, my ex-wife, and, when I visit them, their mother can’t be present – this is by Court Order.  My seven-year old, eldest granddaughter, who has been taken away from her mother, talks about her all the time, obsesses over what she is doing, and wants to see her.  But this isn’t allowed.  The little boy is more listless about his mother.  He probably doesn’t remember much about her and the horrible circumstances that led to the termination of her parental rights.  My son, Martin, who is de facto a primary caregiver for the children living with my ex-wife, can’t really tolerate his sisters, both of whom have histories of serious alcoholism and methamphetamine use.  When you have to live with a person who is an addict, you develop strong feelings of aversion and, even, hatred toward that person whose misery is contagious and spreads suffering.  Therefore, when I visit, Martin prefers not to be present when I see my twin daughters.  So there are a lot of complicated issues to be navigated.  (I have two children in Austin but they don’t play a role in this specific story.)

7.

There is no way to write about these things without hurting someone’s feelings or without slipping into a parlance that I despise.  Getting to what I want to say requires stealth, reticence, and a crooked route that detours around truths that can’t (or shouldn’t) be stated outright.

8.

Do you understand me?  Of course not.  If people understood one another, there would be no reason to write.  

9. 

Normally, a trip to Fargo is easy – at least in theory.  You drive on 90 to 35 and, then, take the western belt-line (494 to 694) around Minneapolis.  In the northwest corner of the Metro, you 694 becomes 94 which then makes the hypotenuse of a triangle, running diagonally across the western to Fargo.  The route is all Interstate, fast and direct but the belt-line freeway, once at the outer edge of the Metro is now enfolded in populous suburbs and, often, dreadfully congested.  Furthermore, there’s no longer much in the way of open country between the northwest Minneapolis suburbs and St. Cloud seventy or so miles up the Mississippi River.  Forty years ago, there were only a couple of town along the river corridor between Minneapolis and St. Cloud – now almost all of route runs between strip malls and vast tracts of apartments and other housing, the ancient cores of the villages surrounded by concentric rings of industrial parks and sprawling housing and commercial districts.  If an accident occurs along that thoroughfare, traffic backs up for miles and, often, there is road construction and so the passage around the Cities can take several hours if there has been a crash or some other complication.

10.

Anyway, the Northwest suburbs include Brooklyn Center and this where the cops gunned down a 20 year-old Black kid on the very day that the jury in Hennepin County announced that the Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, was guilty of three-counts of murder.  There were massive protests in that suburb and the National Guard was deployed on the streets and, for all I know, the police rampage might possibly include in its depredations old White men driving to visit their grandchildren and, perhaps, I would be pulled over and frisked and, then, tortured with a taser before being shot to death and, so, this was something that I supposed that I should avoid.  

11.

You never know if your license tabs are expired or your cab-card documenting insurance is out-of-date or a turn signal defective.  Maybe, you have air-freshener shaped like little black pine trees illegally dangling from your rear-view mirror or, perhaps, a window is partly blocked so that you don’t see the swirl of red lights behind you or, maybe, the red of your Honda excites the State Troopers or the local deputies.  It’s all unpredictable, arbitrary and capricious.

12.

A map showed me a State Park near a place called Elbow Lake, far away in Northwest Minnesota and there were said to be some Indian mounds in that area and, so, I decided to make my way to Fargo via that place on two-lane highways thereby avoiding the Twin Cities and its savage cops.  So I drove to Mankato, then, angled up out of the Minnesota River Valley, making a dog-leg to Gaylord, then, north to Hutchinson, about ninety-miles west of downtown Minneapolis.  From there, I planned to drive to Willmar and, then, continue in a pattern that would map out as right-angled steps leading up (north) and west toward Fargo.

13.

I bought some gas in Gaylord.  I was surprised that there were a couple of young women fueling up at the Casey’s in town – but, then, I considered that was about 6:30 and the girls, casually dressed and without make-up, were heading to some factory job in one of the towns nearby.  The cars on the two-lane highways were driving their familiar way to where people worked and, everyone, was speeding heedlessly to their employment.  The rising sun was just a smear of yellow in the eastern sky, wan clouds blurring the sunbeams so that they were too diffuse to cast shadows.

14. 

On the radio, I am warned that the funeral of the young man gunned down by police in Brooklyn Center will be broadcast on public radio at noon.  This is something that I don’t want to hear.  The Black Activists will overplay their hand – this is customary, now.  The dead youth will be extolled as some sort of martyr and extraordinary, even super-human, virtue will be ascribed to him.  Politicians and media stars from out-of-state will make fiery speeches.  People will demand Justice as if anyone knows that means – although, I think, it is fair to say that we know what injustice, at least, looks like.  There will be extraordinary music performed by accomplished musicians.  But the music, most likely, will be in genre to which the young man would have been indifferent during his short life – the cops killed him over an expired license tag (and a gun warrant) – that is, church anthems and jazz.  Everyone will be flogged into righteous indignation and will vow to take to the streets and, then, the cops will shoot some other Black man somewhere else and the whole traveling circus will move on to the venue leaving the next-of-kin to their sorrow and the prosecution of their civil damages lawsuits.  None of this has much relevance to me and I don’t need to pour more sorrow and resentment onto what will likely prove to be a long and trying day.

15.

At Winthrop, a plant processing corn into bio-fuel runs beside the highway, a sort of factory made of huge, pale Lego blocks with pipes and spiral tubes that look like they are producing moonshine on a massive level (which, I suppose they are in a manner of speaking) and the air smells like beer and there  are big puffs of white smoke and steam sculpted by the cold winds into the profiles of presidents or bears.

16.

Willmar is within an enchanted circle of detours and byways.  The roads seem determined to lead the traveler around all of the outskirts of town, through weedy lots, gravel pits, auto salvage yards and car parts places, trucking firms, dilapidated trailer-home parks, a community college surrounded by big empty lots where cars could be parked, although all learning is now on a remote basis, lumber yards, modern banks built from brushed zinc and brick veneer at forlorn intersections, brand-new churches in metal pole barns, open land dimpled with inscrutable piles of gravel and sand and black dirt.  It seems that I just keep turning and turning as the orange detour signs rotate me around the town.

17.

Then, there are crises in my office and I have to stop in an empty field next to a power substation, a plot of gravel studded with transformers and oblong metal blocks radiating high-voltage power lines behind a raw-looking cyclone fence.  I talk with my receptionist and, then, an angry client.  The day advances.  The substation hisses and growls, no doubt irradiating me with some sort of electrical discharge that makes the tips of my fingers tingle and my lips numb and that causes the words that I am speaking to sizzle with static.

18. 

In the next town, on the sidewalk, a Native American youth, big and round as a sumo wrestler is leading a tiny dog on a toy breed on a short leash.  The youth has his black hair gathered up into a pony tail.

19.

In West-Central Minnesota, the road is never more than a half-mile from some kind of water.  The landscape is pitted with marshes and eutrophied lakes now grown over with reeds and sedge and there are bodies of open water next to the road or scattered out to the horizon, sunk under the palisades of bare trees or with hapless little forests caught in the flood and killed, innumerable creeks braided and meandering across the land and, every four or five miles, a bridge spanning a peat-black and cold-looking river creeping across the land like a black snake.  The villages sit on high spots among the sloughs, islands apparently, and, sometimes, there are low wooded ridges, moraines left by glaciers bisected by streams in ravines and encircled by round pothole lakes.  

20.

On the open water, I see big flocks of white birds, most of them like small, compact swans, white as snow, big creatures with serpentine necks floating on the chill water next to prehistoric-looking pelicans, also large with great pouch-gullets, white armadas drowsing on lakes.  Sometimes, I see the big white swans – perhaps, they are some kind of goose – quarreling among themselves over fallen ears of corn in the stubble of the harvested fields yet to be plowed.

21. 

The newscaster says that it will colder tomorrow with rain and that the showers will commence around midnight “when you are sleeping” the woman says.  The pre-recorded weather forecast plays all morning and into the early afternoon.

22.

A trumpeter is playing “Amazing Grace” on the radio with a wide, sobbing vibrato and elaborate jazz ornamentation.

23.

All the spooky little towns – at intervals of ten miles across the sodden landscape: streets broader than Broadway’s “Great White Way”, a scatter of dilapidated houses crouching under old shade-trees, a brick church pointing its steeple angrily into the sky, the village’s one impressive building, formerly a Bank, now selling antiques or converted to a museum that is open only one afternoon a week or serving as a “community center” behind heavy brick-walls and carved pilasters with scrolls and acanthus leave capitols, the name of the abandoned bank carved into the lintel above the door opening onto Main Street in characters intended to defy the years and the elements and vicissitudes of the farm economy but it’s all over now: the public school has been closed for two generations and when a house falls down into its cellar it’s not replaced and all the owners and directors of the old bank have died and gone to their rest in the cemeteries on the country lanes outside the village and the young people have moved away to distant cities and the hamlet has a desperate, dogged appearance as if it is just barely hanging on by its fingernails, suspended over oblivion which out here looks like a rusted mail box riveted to a pole that a snowplow has caught one too many times next to a long driveway leading to a tattered shelter belt where the house has burned down and the barn fallen over in the blizzards and all that remains is a wooded ravine full of corroding plow parts and harrows and an old brick silo with its dome shattered by long ago lightning strikes...

24.

There’s no State Park near Elbow Lake as far as I can determine and no Indian mounds either, although by this time, after seven hours driving I’m too tired to look for these places, probably hidden at the end of some nondescript gravel road.

25. 

The two-lane blacktop arrows along a railroad right-of-way that is aimed, I think, for the train yards at Fargo-Moorhead.  The next day, I learn that there was a fatal car crash on this very highway, a two car head on collision after midnight resulting in two deaths and I would like to report to you that I sensed a cool tremor of dread when I passed over the place where the people would be killed.  I would like to report that the hair on the back of my hands stood up, horripilated when I traversed the place where in another ten hours there would be death on the highway.  But, of course, I felt no such thing.  The strange elbow-shaped lake wrapped around a promontory where there were a few grain storage bins and another eerie, empty Main Street and, then, I passed over some bluffs and dropped down onto the absolutely level and vast plains of the Red River Valley, the great alluvial delta where the soil is so sweet and fertile that you can eat it like chocolate and be nourished thereby.

26.

On the plain, the far off woodlots float like mirages in the shimmer of sunlight.  The shelter belts are only one tree wide, stretched out like rubber bands or taffy across the empty land.  A sugar beet plant sends a ray of smoke into the air on the blue horizon and there are little graveyards, shorn of their trees, clusters of red and white headstones standing along the railroad tracks, cast iron fences skirting the Great Northern Empire Builder right-of-way.

27.

After nine hours, I come across a bridge spanning the brown Red River, the channel all snagged-up with jagged-looking deadfall, current running a hand’s length below mud banks wooded with gnarled cottonwoods and elms and willows and, then, one-hundred yards into North Dakota (the river is the boundary between the States), I am in an urban sprawl, approximate to Sacramento, the flat land organized into a grid of great boulevards as wide as a football fields with hundreds of identical apartment buildings stretching as far as the eye can see, huge field-houses with metal roofs, shopping malls and commercial districts with the wide lanes lined with fast food place and enormous restaurants with various themes – wild west or nautical or chinoiserie – movie theaters and miles of parking lots, intersections with lights that hold you suspended so long in your car that you could nap between red and green, inscrutable industrial conclaves of windowless buildings or low structures like glass skyscrapers tipped sideways on the prairie, the wind whipping up little sullen-looking dust devils in vacant lots.

28.

The motel in south Fargo must know something about me that I don’t know.  I’m assigned a handicapped room with a shower without a door, drains on the floor of the bathroom and various rails and other accessories to help someone navigate the space in a wheelchair.

29.

Later, I’m with Martin in the radio studio.  He asks me to guess the genre of the tunes that he plays.  I am wearing headphones and the studio in a brick building near Fargo’s old downtown is very warm.  After listening to a song, Martin asks me how I would characterize it: “It starts off like Lou Reed’s machine metal music,” I say, “and then, goes into some kind of rhythmic drone with wall-of-sound flourishes and ends up with a industrial sort of rock and roll beat.”  Martin replies on-the-air: “You used a lot of words to describe ‘Post-Rock’.”  He has a loose leaf notebook from which he reads a scripted appreciation for one of the program’s underwriters – it’s a business that sells organic teas and ciders.

30.

We go to a restaurant.  Martin used to run a bingo program here pre-Covid.  People are pretty relaxed about the virus and no one in the restaurant is masked.  A woman sings covers of old Top 40 hits.  Martin knows her.  She was a guest on his show a few months ago.  I tip her 20 dollars for her efforts, pretty thankless work it seems, with no one in the joint paying any attention to her singing.  “I gave her a twenty,” I tell Martin.  “I hope you get credit for it.”

31.

The next morning is cold under low grey skies that are spitting sleet.  

32.

At my daughter’s apartment, we take turns holding the new baby.  Martin takes some pictures.  I am shocked to see how old I look in the photographs, how grey and shrunken, my beard stark white above the new-born baby’s pinkish red head.

33.

We have some cupcakes in substitution for a birthday cake.  My daughter who has lost her children looks very sad.  When I say to her “happy birthday”, she replies that it is her “death-day.”  She looks unwell and has tears in her eyes because she misses her children.  Her teeth have all been ruined by methamphetamine and she has no smile left -- it’s all eroded away.  A flabby white beer belly flops out from under her shirt.  I suppose there is nothing to say to her to persuade her that her love for her children isn’t in vain.  She missed out on the chance to save her parental rights because she was drunk and high or simply absent for weeks on end.  Now, there’s nothing that can be done.

34.

Above the bed, there’s a tapestry depicting an ultimate fighting champion, a feral young man with bare chest who snarls at the viewer, showing a mouth full of shattered teeth.  The tapestry says that this is 

Ricky Diaz, but Martin, who knows about these things, tells me that the picture actually shows Ron Diaz, Ricky’s brother and that someone has made a mistake.  (In fact, I think the picture shows the Cuban-born professional wrestler Ricky Reyes who was born Ricky Diaz – but who knows?)  The wall tapestry imports ferocity into the room that seems inconsistent – even potentially damaging – to the small infant sleeping in my arms.

35.

My daughter with her boyfriend go out on the wooden balcony tacked to the side of the apartment.  They smoke cigarettes and, reluctantly, my other daughter joins them.  After a while, they push back the sliding window and come back into the house.  My daughter’s boyfriend says that he is going to find a two-by-four, make a bridge, and climb over to the adjacent balcony where a puppy is being abused.  Apparently, the owner of the animal, a pit bull mix, has left the little dog on the porch in the cold sleet for two or three days.  My daughter’s boyfriend, the Ultimate Fighting Fan, isn’t very friendly and he takes the older child, a toddler, into another room where he vacuums.  The toddler is afraid of me and wails piteously.

36.

I go out on the balcony to see the mistreated puppy.  On a balcony identical where I stand, there’s a small reddish dog with a big, square snout.  The dog has little inflamed eyes and it wags its tail hopefully when I appear.  The wood slats of the balcony are encrusted with black globs of dog shit and the animal has no food in its bowl although there seems to be an inch or an inch and a half of water in a silver saucer, most likely deposited by the rain overnight.  The puppy shivers and feebly keeps wagging its tail hoping that I will rescue it.  This is very disturbing to me.  On the lawn, under a bush, a little brown rabbit is grazing in the leaf litter.

37.

After the birthday gathering, we pick up the other two grandchildren and take them to a place called The Frying Pan.  It’s an old-style family restaurant with a salad bar featuring wilted lettuce and various salads made with macaroni and peas and chunks of Velveeta cheese.  It’s a long time since I’ve eaten a salad from an array like this under plexi-glass sneeze guards and so I’m happy to make myself a plate of lettuce with sunflower seeds and bacon bits and some rotini with green peas in sour mayonnaise.  

38.

My eldest granddaughter is very severely diabetic.  After she orders a plate of noodles in Alfredo sauce, Martin uses an app on his phone to calculate the insulin dose that the little girl will have to inject into the fat of her belly.  She pricks her finger and takes a blood-sugar reading and, then, Martin reads the app – “thirteen,” he says.  She opens her small handbag, prepares a shot, and stabs herself in the gut just above her belt-line.  Notwithstanding these proceedings, she seems happy and enjoys her noodles although she ends up with her cheeks and snout smeared with the sauce.

39. 

Streets are closed in downtown Fargo and we detour around the several blocks passing a place where the Red River runs fast with furious-looking rapids.  A man is fishing in the channel pools below the rapids.

40.

Under an upswept curtain on concrete, the Hjemkonst, a facsimile Viking ship, is on display.  It’s expensive to see the ship but the children haven’t been inside the museum and so we buy tickets to gawk at the vessel.  On the curl of the prow, a fierce dragonhead imperiously surveys the galleries.  The man who built the ship, a major venture requiring must sophisticated technology to bend the wood for the vessel’s curved prow, suffered from leukemia and he never saw the completion of the project.  In 1982 the Hjemkonst sailed from Knife River on Lake Superior through the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal.  Then, the ship departed Manhattan and, after four weeks, and some adventures at sea, made landfall in Norway at Bergen.

41.

A traveling exhibit reminds us how the world nearly ended in the late fifties and early sixties when the United States trembled on the brink of nuclear war with Russia.  It’s disheartening.  A map on floor shows concentric circles of total, severe, moderate, and light destruction.  For some reason, the city targeted is Milwaukee and the blast zones are oriented around the waterfront on Lake Michigan with destruction extending far out into the suburbs.  A video shows a campy public service announcement with servicemen exchanging quips about nuclear war – “she’s like a woman,” the captain says, “destructive, dangerous, and you can’t underestimate her strength.”  The man is pale under a khaki fatigue cap and he looks like Bob Crane on Hogan’s Heroes.

42.  

We stand in the sleet under the dark, shingled form of the Stavekirk next to the museum.  The wood looks soaked and the dragon heads bracketing the building arch up the threaten the unseen demons that crowd the sky overhead.  

43.

I’m back on the road at about 2:30.  It’s Friday and I think I will drive through the west suburbs but, then, I recall that the police are deadly there and protestors are protesting on the side-streets and, so, at Alexandria, I take a highway south and east through what was once the Big Woods, the swamp country in Meeker, McLeod and Sibley Counties.

44.  

Every place in Fargo is now hiring.  Out in the country, every big hog or turkey building is posted with “Help Wanted” signs.  The corn distillery in Winthrop is barricaded behind a half-dozen signs offering jobs with good wages and benefits.  

45.

I pass through depressed-looking county seats.  The court house buildings are well-kept and ostentatious with high, brown-brick towers and white cupolas but the villages seem to be half-abandoned and festering with burnt-out neighborhoods and abandoned store-fronts.

46.

All of the Minnesota schools named after the State’s second governor, Henry Hastings Sibley, the general who chased the Dakota Indians out of Minnesota have been given new names.  Sibley, who began his career as a fur trader with an Indian wife, is now accounted a genocidal racist and a persona non grata.  But what about the County named after him – is there some plan afoot to correct history and change that name?  How would that be accomplished?

47.

Human history makes sense only in light of a certain project to which we are all obligated.  Unwholesome, destructive love must be replaced by wholesome healthy love.  Excessive love of self or smothering love for others should be transformed into love for nature or art or humanity.  Doesn’t this make sense?

48.

On September 12, 1862, at the end of the Dakota Conflict, the war-chief Little Crow wrote to his old friend Henry Sibley.  At the head of an army, Sibley was marching against the Dakota to avenge the massacre of White settlers on the Minnesota prairie.  Before the fighting, Little Crow had counseled against the uprising, but reluctantly agreed to lead his people in the war.  By September 1862, after only about four weeks of fighting, it was obvious that the rebellion had failed and that the Dakota would be brutally treated for their depredations.  Little Crow must have been desperate to restore peace and avoid the mass-murder of his tribe.  In his letter, he told Sibley that he would surrender hostages, mostly women and children, “who will fare with me as well as with you”.  He concludes the letter with the words “Your truly friend.”

49.

A few days later, the Dakota tried to ambush Sibley’s column near a prairie pothole called Wood Lake.  The attack went awry and the Indians were badly defeated.  Little Crow fled to Canada where he tried to make alliances with Western tribes to continue the war against the White settlers.  But it was all too late.  The Dakota Sioux in Minnesota were imprisoned in a wretched stockade on the river flats at Fort Snelling (south of present day Minneapolis) and 38 warriors had been hanged in Mankato, the day after Christmas in 1862.  Little Crow with his son, Wowinapa (“One who Appears”) left Canada and, traveling by night on trails far from the pioneer settlements entered the labyrinth of fens and murky lakes in the Big Woods.  

50.

The murders of White settlers mostly south of the Big Woods in August and September of 1862 had put the pioneers farming in central Minnesota on edge. A family had been killed by Indians, hacked to death with hatchets, and settlers had built a stockade with birch palisades in which they sheltered when rumors of wild Indians circulated in the neighborhood.

51.

Nathan Lamson was a 62-year old settler with a small farm near Hutchinson, Minnesota.  Lamson was hunting deer in the woods near his farm with his son Chauncey.  (Accounts vary – some narratives claim that Nathan was looking for strayed cattle.)  Nathan and his son were joking about being ambushed by Indians when Chauncey saw Little Crow and Wowinapa resting a few yards away under a tree.  The Indians were, apparently, on foot and had stopped to pick some wild raspberries.  At that time, there was bounty of 500 dollars, a considerable sum at that time, payable for killing any Indian found in the Big Woods.  To this bounty, there was added a 75 dollar reward for scalps.

52.

Nathan shot at Little Crow, wounding the Indian in the hip  Little Crow seized Wowinapa’s shotgun and fired at Lamson, hitting him in the shoulder with buckshot.  Both sides were armed with muzzle-loading weapons and there was a pause in the fighting while the men re-charged their guns.  Chauncey’s gun was loaded but Little Crow got off the next shot, narrowly missing the young man who was only about 35 feet away in the wooded thicket.  Chauncey returned fire and the musket’s ball ricocheted off Little Crow’s gunstock, piercing his belly.  After this exchange, the combatants went to ground.  The White father and son retreated and Nathan told Chauncey to hurry to the settlement and bring help.  It wasn’t clear how many Indians were in the war party.  Little Crow and Wowinapa crawled into the dense woods.  It was clear that Little Crow was dying.  Wowinapa gave the wounded man a drink of water while his father told him to flee to Devil’s Lake to the Northwest where his mother was living as a refugee.  Little Crow died and Wowinapa is said to have crossed his father’s hands over his chest and, then, put new moccasins on the corpse’s feet so that he could better walk the winding path to heaven. 

53.

Where love has grown crooked and, even, malign, the fracture heals with twisted bone.  It’s not easy to straighten places in the heart ossified into crookedness.

54.

Little Crow’s body was hauled to Hutchinson covered by a blanket in the back of an old wagon. The corpse arrived in the midst of the settler town’s 4th of July celebration.  People were drunk and the body was dragged down Main Street while kids shot off whizz-bang fireworks.  A soldier beheaded the corpse and, then, the gory mess was tossed in an offal pit.  Later, someone retrieved parts of the body because evidence was required to collect bounties.  Nathan Lamson was paid $500 for killing the Indian war chief.  Chauncey received a $75 dollar bounty for the scalp.  In that era, most people’s annual income was about $250.  

55.

It took several weeks to identify that the decaying cadaver was, in fact, Little Crow.  The scalp was displayed in the office of an Assessor at the Capitol in St. Paul for five or six years before the thing was tossed in the trash.  (The display of fragments from Little Crow’s body was always controversial – even in 1908, Asa Daniels, who had been involved in the Uprising, decried the macabre spectacle as “barbaric,”a “sad commentary” on supposedly Christian people. Little Crow’s skull and deformed forearm, a childhood fracture that had healed into crooked bone, was kept in a case at the Capitol until 1918 when the war chief’s grandson, Jesse Wakeman, asked that the artifacts be put away.  (Little Crow’s mortal remains weren’t put to rest until 1971 when he was buried on Indian land at Flandreau, South Dakota, the place where his kins ultimately had settled.)

56.

Wowinapa was captured three weeks later, west of Devil’s Lake and half-starved to death.  He was gnawing on the rib bones of a wolf that he had shot.  Wowinapa was Christian – it must be recalled that Little Crow had been a deacon in the Episcopal Church – and, later, was instrumental in founding Indian chapters of the YMCA.  He took the name Thomas Wakeman and it was his son, Jesse, who asked that his father’s skull and forearm be taken off public display.

57,

Entering Hutchinson, I see a fire-truck red shed in a copse of trees marked with a black-lettered sign that says Little Crow Shooting Store.  The Chamber of Commerce has erected a statue of an Indian, erect and wearing a sort of toga, as he gazes out over the lake the brushes up against the commercial district in downtown Hutchinson.

58.

Many trucks are gathered at the pumps at the Kwik Trip in Hutchinson.  It’s Friday night and kids are fueling up for their nocturnal excursions.  The mood is upbeat, even celebratory – people shout out to one another.  The truck at the pump ahead of me has a decal in the cab’s window – Eat Fast Food with a picture of two deer, one with ornate antlers, leaping across a field.  

59.

Minneapolis isn’t Minnesota.

60.

On the highway, I see a cemetery in which all the new graves seem to be 55 gallon drums tethered by chains among the old granite headstones.  How can this be?

61.

The news on the radio is all about racial injustice, the nation’s unfinished business.  I don’t want to listen to people pontificating on that subject.  So I switch the station to The Current, a satellite of Minnesota Public Radio.  Someone is singing: In my hour of darkness / In my hour of need / O Lord grant me patience / O lord grant me speed.  It’s a beautiful song that I recall having heard once or twice before, although I don’t know when.  (Later, I discover that the song is by Gram Parson’s and was released on his album Grievous Angel in 1974.  The record is comprised of music Parson’s recorded before his death in 1973, two years after Little Crow’s remains were finally returned to the family plot in Flandreau.)

62.

East of Gaylord, on the road to Hutchinson, the lowering rain clouds dissolve for a moment and I am driving through a great sunlit amphitheater five or six miles in circumference rimmed by black and blue rainstorms.  The beams of oblique light falling through crests of the storm-clouds paint the yellow center-line of the highway the color of a Halloween pumpkin.

63.

A little later, the prairie shines on remote hilltops, but I can’t tell where the light originates.  Near the Minnesota River, the trees on the bluffs are colored like Rembrant paintings, dusky golds and browns, a soft blur of color where the rolling fields tilt down toward the wooded valley.

64.

As I drive along the channels of the Minnesota river, the sky darkens and raindrops spatter my windshield.  The river looks immeasurably ancient, still and motionless under the cracked, naked trees that guard it.

65.

On the radio, an announcer tells me that rain will commence around midnight and will “continue while you are asleep,” assuming I suppose what the young must assume: we all sleep soundly in the gentle night.  

66.

East of Mankato, on the road home, darkness slowly blurs the world.  Do you know what it is like to be reading on your porch in twilight when it is too dim really to make our letters and words on the page before you?  It’s the same with the landscape, the words of trees and swamps and plowed hillsides are now fading from view, too dark to be legible.  

April 27, 2021

 On the Trial of Derek Chauvin

1.

As everyone knows, Derek Chauvin is a Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, an African-American, while making an arrest for passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill.  Floyd’s killing was recorded by cell-phone video shot by a witness as well as by body-cams on the arresting officers.  (Four police were involved in the botched arrest, a multi-racial posse under the command of Chauvin, who is White, and consisting of a cop of Hmong or Laotian ethnicity, an African-American and another White officer.)  A surveillance camera mounted on a building across the street also offered a different perspective on the scene.  Floyd died in broad daylight and I don’t recall a homicide that was so thoroughly documented by clear visual images.

Pictures showing Floyd’s death were broadcast on all networks around the world.  What people saw was an arrogant-looking White cop kneeling on the back of a helpless Black man’s neck.  The crowd gathered to witness the arrest was reasonably well-mannered and, except for a few outraged insults, did nothing to interfere with the arrest that turned into a killing by asphyxiation.  Chauvin apparently knelt on Floyd for four minutes after the suspect had become unresponsive and, so, it seemed pretty clear that not only had the cop killed Chauvin but, also, interfered with any effort that could have been made to resuscitate him.  

Most instances of police brutality are ambiguous.  In this situation, however, it is hard to imagine any excuse for continuing to kneel on a handcuffed suspect who has passed out and seems to be dying.  However, there are no “perfect victims,” particularly with respect to excessive use of police force.  Although avuncular and well-liked by those who knew him, Floyd seems to have been a drug addict prone to committing petty crimes when in the throes of his substance abuse.  There is no doubt that he vigorously resisted his arrest and repeatedly claimed that he “couldn’t breathe” in circumstances in which this was objectively not true – although, of course, this complaint became true when he was crushed on the concrete under the cop’s knee.  (Some have suggested that Floyd’s initial untrue assertion that he “couldn’t breathe” related to some kind of panic-attack.)  Furthermore, Floyd’s death occurred as a result of a combination of factors which, certainly, included overdose quantities of Fentanyl and other narcotics in his system.  It also appears that the initial efforts by the police to implement Floyd’s arrest were reasonable.  The encounter lasted about 17 minutes.  Blatantly unreasonable use of force seems clear during the last four to five minutes of the episode.  

Chauvin was convicted after a trial in the county where the killing occurred that lasted about four weeks.  The police officer was convicted on all homicide counts in a circus-like atmosphere involving street protests, visits by various famous Civil Rights leaders, and the death of another young African-American man, accidentally killed in a traffic stop (the cop deployed her gun instead of her taser and shot the kid) in a nearby suburb.  This shooting occurred while the jury was deliberating.  Under any fair assessment of the situation, Chauvin didn’t receive a fair trial primarily due to the circumstances surrounding the proceedings.  Before the Trial began, the City of Minneapolis paid a well-publicized and ludicrously enormous settlement to the Floyd family (27 million dollars), thereby, expressing in the only way available to a municipal entity obvious contrition and, indeed, shame over the killing – this settlement, of course, created the prejudicial appearance that Chauvin was not just guilty but damned guilty.  One of the jurors, who swore no involvement with the Black Lives Matter organization, a social justice movement that opposes police brutality, seems to have dissembled during jury selection  – but, in fact, he attended a protest march closely aligned with demonstrations arising from Floyd’s death and was photographed wearing a sweat shirt on which the words “KEEP YOUR KNEES OFF OUR NECKS” (or something to that effect) were prominently displayed.  The liberal media, who convicted Chauvin daily or, even, hourly on some occasions, beginning with their reports on opening statements, have pooh-poohed that notion that this juror’s conduct might be grounds for a new trial.  But this assertion is based upon two factors that may not be entirely rational – first, Chauvin was deemed by the media guilty of all charges regardless of what might happen at the trial (the courtroom proceedings were, in effect, designed as a “show trial”) and, so, there are strong elements of confirmation bias in their reporting; and, second, one can well imagine the furor that would have resulted if a White juror had been photographed wearing a Blue Lives Matter or Thin Blue Line (support the police) tee-shirt.  Most likely, this juror’s misconduct, if it exists, will be considered “harmless error” and, therefore, not grounds for a successful appeal.

Not all trials are fair.  In fact, some trials are so high-profile that they can’t be fairly conducted.  Viewed objectively, State v. Chauvin was embedded in a historical moment in which, viewed in the totality of its circumstances, a fair trial was functionally impossible.  That doesn’t mean that the outcome of the trial is necessarily unfair or unjust – to the contrary, a trial may be procedurally unfair but result in a verdict that is just.  However, law focuses on procedural guarantees and, it seems questionable to me, that Chauvin’s trial was fairly conducted.  

2.

There are many kinds of police work.  However, if we focus on patrol policing – that is, the cop on his or her beat – encounters with the public follow a certain specific and limited logic.  This logic consists of two elements: first, the cop commands and the person encountered complies; second the cop demands some kind of submission and the person interacting with the cop submits.  If a person encountered by the cop ignores a direct command or resists it, then, the encounter becomes dysfunctional – that is, the theorem that the cop is trying to establish on the street can’t be proven.  This is why police react with irrational ferocity when their commands are ignored.  In general, however, people are disposed to oppose direct commands.  Our society is largely permissive and egalitarian in theory and most people don’t have military experience in which commands and orders are operative and must be obeyed.  Therefore, it is a natural inclination to resist a direct order.  Police militarize their encounters with the public and regard suspects (or those they encounter) as subordinate – this is intrinsic to the structure of a command that must be obeyed.  It is important to realize that defying a direct command made by person authorized to issue that order undercuts the very system on which policing is based – defiance of a command, therefore, subverts the logic of policing and will trigger a violent response.  

3.

It was initially declared that Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.  Then, this figure was revised downward to 7 minutes and 46 seconds.  (No one knows why this reduction in time was alleged.)  At trial, the various videos showed Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds.  Floyd was handcuffed and crying out for help for four minutes and 45 seconds.  He seemed to flail around with seizures for 53 seconds.  Chauvin continued to kneel on Floyd’s neck for 3 minutes and 51 seconds after he was unresponsive and, perhaps, even clinically dead for part of that period.  There was controversy as to whether kneeling on the back of Floyd’s neck during the first four minutes and 45 seconds was reasonable – some interpretations of police policy might support that tactic for restraining Floyd since he physically resisted arrest even after being handcuffed.  (However, most likely Floyd was effectively helpless after the handcuffs were applied and so the use of the knee of the neck in that context probably was an unreasonable and excessive use of force.)  I suppose that Chauvin may have been confused by Floyd’s spasms while suffering an apparent seizure – perhaps, he interpreted that spasmodic activity as an attempt to escape or wriggle free.  But there is no rational warrant to continue kneeling on Floyd’s neck after he had become unresponsive.  That conduct seems pretty clearly indicative of a malign, criminal intent to inflict great bodily injury on the suspect.  

The defense argued that the last nine minutes and 29 seconds of the encounter had to judged in the context of the altercation during the first eight minutes in which Floyd resisted arrest. (Footage of that part of the arrest was not available to the public before the trial and has not been widely disseminated after the verdict; this is because news organizations are not inclined to show video clips exceeding a few minutes and one would have to devote more than 15 minutes of viewing time to assess the entire cncounter.)  The defense lawyer’s position, an argument that I think had some limited merit, was that what occurred at the end of the lethal interaction had to be viewed in light of what took place earlier.  

4.

Everyone has an opinion on the incident involving George Floyd’s death.  But, fundamentally, there are only 12 people in all the world whose opinion matters – and they have spoken.

5.

A week ago an event occurred at my law office.  This event has affected my own views on the encounter between Derek Chauvin and George Floyd.  Here’s what happened:  

A few months ago, someone who plays poker with my partners, Marty and Steve, prevailed upon them to authorize a client of C– V– Rehabiliation Systems (“CVR”) to perform shredding services for us.  Initially, the idea was to deliver documents requiring shredding to CVR every couple weeks and let them process the paper into illegible ribbons at their facility.  But Steve pointed out that this was imprudent and could lead to a breach of attorney-client confidentiality if some of these documents went astray.  So, the idea was revised to involve the disabled man coming to our office in the custody of his “minder” or attendant, shredding the documents on-site, and, then, receiving some nominal payment from our firm.  Under the obsolescent “people’s socialism” in USSR, a joke circulated that under that regime, “workers would pretend to work” and the employers “would pretend to pay them.”  With regard to the arrangement with CVR, a similar system prevailed at our office.  The mentally disabled guy would come with his attendant, ineptly cram some paper into a shredder, and, then, we would give his warden eight dollars or something on that order.  The notion was that work imparts dignity and meaning to life and this arrangement would be beneficial to the handicapped person. And the shredding agreement, apparently, worked out without incident for awhile.  I don’t recall ever seeing the CVR worker in our office; similarly, I don’t recall seeing his attendant either.  

On Thursday last week (April 29, 2021), I was working in my basement office.  Something had come up just before noon and I had to figure some things out, make a decision, and, then, get a letter dictated.  My paralegal, Rhonda wasn’t around and so I was alone downstairs.  I worked over the noon hour.  My partner, Marty, had gone to lunch.  The other offices upstairs were empty.  Our real estate closing paralegal wasn’t on-site and, my other partner, Steve had gone to the golf course.  So it was just me together with Lori W., a secretary, and Kayla, the receptionist.  

About five minutes after one, I heard an unearthly high-pitched howl and, then, a tremendous crashing sound.  I was startled and just about fell out of my chair.  The howl shattered into a series of wordless barking sounds and, then, something was flung against a wall so forcefully that I could hear the projectile shattering.  There was another protracted howl, really more of an enraged bellowing sound and, then, thudding that sounded like bombs falling on the hollow floor above my head.  My office is none too solidly built (it was put together from pre-fabricated trusses and panels forty two years ago) and I expected the detonations to flex the walls and spurt out my window into the window well, a concrete pit above my desk and, in fact, the whole building rattled as if under the fists of a tornado.  I thought it was a storm, perhaps, trying to batter down the building, but when I pulled apart my curtains, I could see the sky hot and cloudless up to the zenith overhead.  Maybe, it was an earthquake but we don’t have those around here, right?

Someone was braying upstairs, a bestial noise like an animal being slaughtered.  This was very frightening.  But, of course, like all true heroes I ran in the direction of the danger, charging into harm’s way as others were fleeing – I heard their feet pattering across the floor above me.  I dashed up the steps and rounded the toilet corner in the short corridor leading the reception area, wondering if it might not be prudent to simply conceal myself in the rest room behind a locked door.  More thunderous bangs came from the lobby and someone was now screaming in a high-pitched voice.  The racket sent a chill up my spine. 

Stepping into the lobby, I first saw a great fan of documents spread across the floor, a paper delta paving the carpet from the entry door all the way to the front desk.  Kayla was standing behind the signing station with an appalled look on her face.  A couple pounds of shredded paper, ripped into fine confetti-like streamers, were heaped next to the entry, and, with each wild shriek, the volume of air displaced by the scream upset the debris and caused the cellulose fiber to flutter around like dead leaves in an autumn storm.

On the floor, near the east wall, a burly, bald-headed thug was outstretched on top of slender man who was howling and kicking at the floor.  The thug’s shirt was disarranged and I could see his green tattoos like moss on his straining biceps.  The man’s victim was writhing and screaming in pain.  I stepped forward fully prepared to kick the thug in the throat – but I was wearing soft tennis shoes and I wondered whether the burly man’s throat might not be covered in an armature of taut, hard muscle that might break my toes.  So I looked around for something that I could use as a club to beat the guy away from the little fellow wriggling in the heaps of scattered paper.  I stepped toward fray, hesitating about how best to attack the burly villain with the shaved-head.  The chairs in the lobby are separated as per proper Covid protocols and, on the furniture forbidden to the rumps of our clients, there are positioned either art books (courtesy of yours truly) or children’s picture books.  Two of the chairs were upside down.  An antique map of Minnesota displayed on our wall had fallen and the framed chart was half-hidden in the litter of paper.  The art books were strewn all around the area where the combat was underway.

I asked the two men tangled together on the floor:  “Is there something I can do to help you?”  

The burly thug said: “No, I’ve got this under control.”

I turned to Kayla.  “What is going on here?”  

She told me that a “mentally challenged individual” had become agitated and was now flailing around on lobby’s carpet.  I thought that I should maybe ask her which of the two combatants was the retarded guy and which the minder.  But, after surveying the situation, I figured out that the guy with the shaved head and tattoos was employed by CVR and the wiry little fellow shrieking and clawing at the carpet was his client, the fellow retained by our office to shred documents.  

I stepped over to the wrestling match and asked again: “Can I help you somehow?”

“No,” the bald guy said, “I’ve got this under control.”

At that moment, the “mentally challenged” guy wriggled to the side and, then, rising up to his knees, pitched the attendant to the side. As his charge tried to stand, the attendant hurled himself onto the man again, smashing his head onto the carpet.  I was concerned that they were getting too close to one of the upright chairs still standing in the lobby and, so, I pushed it aside.  The retarded guy had thrust out his hands and was trying to grapple to himself one of the chairs as if to enlist the furniture to in his battle with the attendant.   

“Are you okay?” I asked the CVR minder.

“Yep,” he said.  “I’ve got this completely under control.”

The little man began to punch himself in the side of the head.  He was aiming his blows at the burly guy with the shaved head, but the man on top of him had his arm partly pinned and so the punches were landing short, on the mentally challenged man’s jaw and chin.  

I looked outside and saw a client approaching the door.  This man was a mild-mannered-looking elderly gent, walking slowly with a cane.  He was clutching to his polo-shirted breast a little satchel from which the top of an abstract peeked out like a friendly rabbit or vole.  I unlocked our front door (always locked from the inside for Covid) and went to greet the client.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

The old man looked a little bemused.  I think he felt he had the situation under control.  I told him that he couldn’t enter the lobby just now because we were having an “incident”.  The old man was baffled and I could see he was yearning to see what was going on.  I asked him the name of the lawyer for whom the documents were intended.  “Marty H– ” the man said.  “Okay,” I assured him, “I’ll get the documents to him right away.”  I reached forward and snatched the package containing the abstract.

A little saddened that he wasn’t afforded a perspective on the exciting events in our lobby, he turned and leaning on his cane limped back to his Subaru.

I went back into the lobby.  The mentally challenged fellow had wormed his way into a corner between two chairs and was trying to buck the CVR worker onto the sharp point of an upturned leg of a chair.  

“Is this all okay?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” the guy with the shaved headed panted.  “I have this under control.”  The retarded man began to kick against the floor and unshredded documents splashed up into the air and, then, he began wailing: “No, No, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

I told Kayla to call the cops.  “Dial 911 and get them here right away!  Someone is going to get badly hurt...”

Kayla called the cops.  

Around this time, Marty H– came into the lobby.  He was a bit non-plussed.  The bald guy knew Marty. 

Marty asked him if there was anything he could do to assist him.  The skinny man seemed to be trying to burrow into the floor.  He was scratching at the carpet with his fingernails and drumming his toes into the carpet.  The idea, I suppose, was to open up a fissure in the floor and, then, slip down through it. 

“Could you take my phone out of my pocket?” the burly minder said.

Adroitly, Marty fished the phone from the man’s breast pocket.  The man barked out some numbers that I took to be a pass-code and, then, asked Marty to call Carol.  Apparently, Carol’s number was registered among recent phone calls.  Marty placed the call and, then, stooped to hold the phone to the burly man’s ear.  He said that there was a problem at the law firm and that Carol should come immediately.

About this time, two cops showed up.  Restraining a madman in a law firm seemed the last thing that they wanted to do – indeed, it was pretty apparent that they didn’t want anything at all to do with the situation, wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot long police baton, and, probably, thought that they were being lured into doing a “George Floyd.”  You know how it goes: you try so hard not to do something bad; indeed, you obsessively promise to yourself that you are going to resist the temptation to taze a vulnerable adult, that you won’t beat anyone up or use the handcuffs to dislocate someone’s shoulder or pepperspray anyone in the eyes even if they fucking deserve it (which they do!) – this is always on your mind because enemies of the thin blue line are everywhere and they are constantly watching, eyes on the alert hoping to film some infraction that will end up on the Nightly Evening News and, so, you simply have to keep repeating to yourself this simple mantra – “I will not brutalize anyone, I will not brutalize anyone, I will avoid the temptation of beatingmacingtazingshooting anyone, yes, indeed, this is my objective – no violence, none at all...”  And, of course, the more you repeat to yourself that there will be no beatingmacingtazingshooting, no violence at all, then... well, you know how it goes!  Oops! you just inadvertently fucking beat-maced-tazed-or shot someone and, then, in technicolor and surroundsound suitable for broadcast on Cable New.  And, then what?  So these cops were understandably reluctant to join the fray, very skittish about really doing anything at all except kibbutzing about the situation in low reassuring tones and, then, calling for more back-up because, after all, misery loves company –

The idea was to de-escalate the struggle which had now become tediously protracted.   One of the cops remarked that it was a very nice day outside and that, perhaps, it would be nice to go outside and enjoy the sunshine.  The mentally challenged guy didn’t take the bait and just howled like a dog imitating an ambulance siren.  The other cop said something also about the nice day.  The burly guy with the shaved head said: “Come on, do you want the police to have to put you in handcuffs?”  This was catnip to the struggling man on the floor: “Yes! Yes!” he wailed, “I want to be handcuffed.”  One of the cops said: “Come on, you don’t us to take you to jail, do you?”  This was also the wrong question to pose.  “I wanna go to jail,” the guy shrieked.  “I wanna be in jail.”

There was no end in sight to the struggle.  The cops were now kneeling next to the man and, in fact, getting dangerously close to putting their knees on his spine, if not his neck, and I couldn’t see any good outcome to this wrestling match.  I told Marty that I couldn’t stand to watch this: “I’m going home to have my lunch.”  I said.

As I walked out the front door, a van skidded up to the sidewalk outside, sliding into a parking space all kitty-wampus, as people used to say.  Then, the side of the van burst open and a fat girl leaped out and ran toward the front door of the law office, sprinting and waddling with her head down, bosoms flopping all over the place.  She didn’t say a word as she brushed by me and charged into the office.

I went home and watched the news for an hour.  I reflected on the fact that what you see doesn’t always show the whole picture.  In fact, what you see may be positively misleading.  If I had used my cell-phone to record the Battle of the Law Firm Lobby and, then, leaked the images to CNN, let’s say, the headline would be “Two Cops and Fat Bully restrain mentally handicapped Individual”. There’s no doubt that at one point, both cops were on the floor with their hands on the “vulnerable adult” as Kayla called him, their knees no doubt itching with the desire to crush him under their weight, and this was in addition to the big bald man who was pressing down on the guy with all of his not inconsiderable mass.  Probably, a mere snapshot of the fracas, filmed for a minute or so (or, dare I say, nine minutes and 29 seconds?) wouldn’t exactly tell the whole story.  It would tell some of the story, no doubt, but not the whole story.  Context would be lacking.

After lunch, the lobby was cleaned-up and there was no sign of the bald thug or the madman and the cops were gone as well.  Marty told me that another fat girl from the Group Home (CVR) showed up a minute or two after I had departed the scene and the two young women coaxed the “vulnerable adult” to abandoning the fight.  No one had to be beat-maced-tazed or shot.  The guy simply walked out under his own power to one of the CVR vans and so that was the end of it.  I never learned exactly what triggered the retarded guy’s rage.  Someone said that he hadn’t taken some of his customary medications that morning, that he was agitated at the shredding job that preceded our appointment, and that he had simply and decisively said that he was all done with shredding for the day, a declaration made as he was entering our premises, and that he later repeated in a tone that brooked no commentary nor response and that a little later, when his minder told that there was just a little shredding remaining before his day’s labor was complete, the mentally challenged fellow again demurred and remarked that he preferred not to do any more shredding.  This was supposedly a few minutes before the outburst.  

6.

Everyone who peruses this writing should also read George Orwell’s 1936 essay, “Shooting an Elephant.”  I insist upon it.  Eric Blair, Orwell’s real name, worked for a time as a colonial law officer in Burma.  In that capacity, Blair was called to the outskirts of a town where a domesticated elephant had run amok and trampled a man to death.  Blair found the great beast peacefully grazing in the rice paddy near the bloody corpse, apparently tame once more, and the cop didn’t see any reason to murder the elephant.  But a crowd of colonial subjects had gathered and they demanded that the cop kill the animal.  After some hesitation, Orwell tells us that he shot the elephant solely “to avoid looking a fool” in the eyes of the large crowd of local people watching him.

Orwell says that as a representative of the oppressive colonial power, he felt compelled to behave as the so-called “natives’ expected.  “When the White man turns tyrant,” Orwell writes, “it is his own freedom that he destroys.” Colonial police do the “dirty work of Empire at close quarters,” Orwell adds. “It is a condition of his rule (as a colonial authority) that he must impress the ‘natives’.”

The incident reported in “Shooting an Elephant” is supposed to have happened in Moulmein in northern Burma in 1926.  But there is no contemporary account of the encounter between Eric Blair and the rogue elephant.  Animals of this kind were valuable and, probably, worth more in the Burmese economy than the “coolie” that the elephant killed.  So one would expect some record to exist.

Critics have suggested that Orwell invented the encounter to express certain truths about Imperialism.  Orwell’s widow was outraged by these suggestions: “Of course, he shot a fucking elephant,” she remarked,” he said he did.”  

7.

I began practicing law forty-two years ago in a world that was not under constant surveillance.  In many lawsuits on which I “cut my teeth”, the attorneys would speculate, usually over beers, about what had really happened in the incident giving rise to the encounter.  If only a video existed showing the occurrence that we were litigating? – images of that kind would answer all questions.  

Now, moving picture imagery does exist of many things no one expected to see documented in 1979.  In particular, we now know what policing looks like.  Of course, I was naive in my faith that video imagery would resolve all disputed questions.  In many cases, pictures of an event merely raise more questions than they answer.

Seeing is never direct and unmediated.  In fact, we have to learn how to see.  Vision is processed through prisms of bias and expectation.  Not always but, sometimes, the more you watch footage of a controversial encounter, the less you know.

May 7, 2021