VI
I doubt if I have ever known a newspaperman who has not imagined himself at one point or another in the role of cop or private eye, or at the very least as some sort of hybrid private eye/investigative reporter, so maybe I should be enjoying this, an opportunity to conduct my own stakeout, but life doesn’t always work that way. You get to do something you’ve always wanted to do and you find out that you hate everything about it, because the context is all wrong. This feels way too much like I am setting up a stakeout on myself.
I had made up my mind on the way over to spend maybe an hour in the place, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. At twenty to seven, I stand up to head for the exit. I am pretty certain based on Myst’s testimony that my alter-Stanley will show up around eleven, so maybe the best tack for me would be to come back a little before that and find the darkest corner that “Little Girls” has to offer so I can sit back surreptitiously, observe, and perhaps prepare to strike. I am feeling less and less like Stanley Branford.
I see a pay phone in one of those unprotected little semi-cubicles near the exit and I wonder if I should call Diana and ask her – beg her? – to listen for a moment so I can tell her what I have uncovered and what I have inferred, but the music is too loud. A girl on the stage wearing the remains of a tarted-up faux Girl Scout uniform is grinding it out to a song I remember vaguely from the late 70s, “Hot Child in the City,” and the last thing I want to have Diana thinking, before I even have a chance to explain what I have learned, is the truth: that I am hanging out in a strip club, in addition to whatever else she might be thinking about me.
The other consideration is the lack of privacy, combined with the fact that I am already, as I head for the exit, having to run a gauntlet of girls who are asking me for lollipops, offering me lap dances and other intended enticements, and rubbing themselves up against me in ways that I’ll admit I find provocative in spite of myself. They give me the uncomfortable feeling you might get were you standing in polite company and a cat were to come up and start rubbing herself against your trousers or a dog to start humping your leg: sure, it could happen to anyone, but just then it is happening to you. These girls seem certainly to be experiencing no more shame or discomfort than the house pets in question, and perhaps their carefree attitude should have rubbed off on me. To them this just seems like a form of exercise, but I am apparently one of the few remaining Baby Boomers for whom there is little or no compartmentalization between my private self and my public self, between what I expect of others and what I expect of myself (or, for that matter, what others expect of me). I am uncomfortable. It is also not lost on me that these women smell rather ripely provocative, and it concerns me that one other thing that is probably rubbing off on me, in the clinches, is their tactically applied perfume, which I know would not help me to make my case with Diana.
I am trying not to be rude. Two girls stand in front of me, as a an apparent last line of defense three or four feet from the door, while the Girl Scout on stage writhes on the floor to the Norah Jones song, “Don’t Know Why (I Didn’t Come).” One of the girls accosting me is an almost perfectly done early Britney Spears knock-off, and she is speaking to me: “Daddy, why don’t you let Heather and I take you to the back room so we can show you our new toys.”
As Britney speaks, Heather deftly reaches in to unzip my fly and before I have time to react she has hold of my involuntarily thickening penis.
“Oh, my, Daddy,” she says.
“Please don’t,” I say, taking an awkward step backward to disengage, with the unfortunate result that I am left obtruding my trousers. I quickly put myself away, adjust my pants, and escape out the door.
Outside, I take a deep breath and try to collect myself. I had parked near the door, and I get to the car, open the door, and sit behind the wheel. It is time to call Diana. My cell phone is in the glove box, and hopefully it has a charge. I have to admit that I am not looking forward to making this call, because for one of the few times in my life I don’t feel right speaking to her: I don’t feel confident about what little I have to tell her, and I even feel a bit ashamed of myself, without having a clear idea as to why.
Diana doesn’t answer the phone until the fifth ring, just in the nick of time ahead of the voicemail setting. Thanks to Caller ID, she knows who is calling.
“Stanley.” It is the most toneless utterance of my name I have ever heard from her.
“Diana. Listen to me for a minute, honey, so I—“
“Stanley, the police just left here.”
”What? Why would you call the police?”
Can she really believe that her husband is an internet child pornographer?
“I didn’t call them, Stanley. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. They just drove up to the house in three state police cruisers, showed me a warrant, and then five of them marched into the house like we weren’t even there and turned the place upside down. They even tore apart Sam’s and Rachel’s rooms, Stanley.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“The kids are very upset, Stanley. So am I.”
“I’m so sorry, Diana. But it’s all some kind of colossal mistake.”
“Sure it is, Stanley. They took the computer and a couple of boxes of other things. I don’t know. We couldn’t watch. We’re packing up and going to my sister’s but I don’t want you to call us there. The kids and I both need a time-out.”
“Diana,” I manage to say, my voice pleading, but my lips are unable to form a specific plea.
“A good long time-out, Stanley.”
“Diana.” My voice is diminishing for lack of breath. How can this be happening? How could all of this have happened in just an hour or two?
“Think about what you’ve done to your kids, you asshole.”
She hangs up. I drop the cell phone and it falls on the passenger seat beside me. For a long time I sit without movement except for the rhythmic jingling of my keys in my hand every few seconds.
“Jesus,” I say aloud. If I knew how to pray in any way that I found credible, this would definitely be a time for prayer. If I had any tendency to violence I would probably be slamming my fist or my head on the steering wheel or the dash or even the windshield. Instead I start the car, anxious to feel that something in my life is still under my control. The car starts right up and idles a little high, but quiets down when I instinctively tap the accelerator a couple of times with my right foot.
Any hopes I had of being able to return home before I come back to “Little Girls” at eleven to see the alter-Stanley are gone now, but I struggle with myself to stay positive and come up with the next logical step in trying to decipher what has happened to me and what it means. I need to get back online and see if there are any other clues to examine. There are free online computers at the Belmont Public Library a mile from home, but it seems inevitable – especially this evening – that if I go online there somebody I know will come along and try to strike up a conversation with me at the worst possible time. I keep telling myself I have nothing to hide, but I know that I need to be secretive if I am going to be able to prove that I have nothing to hide. I need privacy, and I figure I am more likely to get it, strangely, if I sit down at one of the dime-a-minute computer cubicles at the Kinko’s on Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square. Relieved to at least have a plan, I take another deep breath, take my foot off the brake, and head out of the parking lot.
I get about five yards.
Two state police cruisers appear out of nowhere and force me to slam on the brakes by coming right at me and veering off at the last instance to form a wedge around the nose of my car. I am suitably impressed, even though I have seen this maneuver at least half a dozen times as a reporter, and probably an equal number of times in movies. Cops just love being cops, and they love – even more, I suspect – being watched being cops. If you doubt me on this, become a police beat reporter or, failing that, watch a small-town holiday parade or any episode of any “reality” or fictional cop show on television. The esprit de corps is like a religion.
What is different here of course is that, while I have watched this flying wedge maneuver before and been mildly impressed (if also mildly amused), I have always before been in the role of the observer, as a result of being tipped off by a source inside the law enforcement community, either a friendly cop or an assistant DA with his heart set on a political career. But this evening I am the man in the middle, and there is a strange dual-track quality to my experience of this moment: it is devastating, terrifying, and disorienting, yet at the same time I am made aware of a deficiency in my previous role as a reporter: I never spent even two seconds wondering about how the experience might have felt to the man who has to slam on his brakes and speculate (unless he already knows) about what this could possibly be all about. Although I would be posturing here if I were to claim that my fear and confusion was not the dominant track in my consciousness just now, it is nonetheless true that some part of my mind and my heart is focused on a sense of inadequacy that owes to this failure of mine as a journalist. I have always tried to be the type of journalist who can get inside the skin of the underdog, the gadfly, the rabble-rouser, the victim, the perpetrator, the loser – the least popular figure in any human drama. This is a contrarian approach to journalism, because first, in some perverse reversal of reality, most journalists – regardless of gender, race, big city or small town, etc. – make it a point of professional pride to present themselves as tough-minded cynics, full of testosterone, and second, most journalists are front-runners, either because winners are more likely than losers to provide them with stories in the future, or because the reason they are journalists in the first place is that they like to hobnob with the powerful, the famous, the wealthy – in short, the winners.
I wonder, as four state troopers approach me with firearms drawn but not yet aimed at me: what is my current mental state? One hears these possibly euphemistic phrases: “he was in a state of shock,” “he was stunned,” “he was in a fugue state,” “he didn’t know where he was.” I remember the weekend around the time of the “one giant step for mankind” moonwalk, in July of 1969, when Mary Jo Kopechne died. Teddy Kennedy or his spokesmen tried to explain away several hours of inexplicable inaction with euphemisms, and by offering up a description of a few isolated moments of apparently dissociative behavior. There followed several days, before he went on television with an apologia that became the kickoff for his next Senate campaign, when he was described as being kept “in seclusion” while he was “in a state of shock.” It was not until a few years later that I wondered over the willingness of the Boston news media to respect Teddy’s shock and seclusion, but I remember being fascinated for the first time then as I have been many times since by the question of what really goes on with the functioning capacity of the human mind when it is shocked beyond any possible expectation: What do you know? What do you comprehend? What choices occur to you?
Now that I am the one being shocked beyond any possible expectation, I am afraid there is not much to report. No choices occur to me: that is possibly the main thing, but it may be more about the reality of my situation than about the functional capacity of my brain. I’m not much of a cowboy to begin with, but the reality is that there are no options such as flight or suicide or fighting back. One would have to prepare for suicide, but nothing palpable in my situation leads me there anyway. Without choices, I feel as if I will shut down and simply watch what happens to me, as if I am disembodied.
I am told to step out of the vehicle. With surprising gentleness I am guided to lean forward against the side of the car so that I can be patted down. I am dimly aware of the flashing of a camera. I am being read my Miranda rights but I am not closely attentive. I ask what I am being arrested for and one of the troopers laughs. Then the others laugh, too.
“I am glad to see that you haven’t lost your sense of humor, Mr. Branford,” says the lead laugher.
This strikes me as a no-win game, so I don’t participate further.
“You’re under arrest for larceny, Mr. Branford.”
“Larceny?”
“Larceny. Uh, a few counts. Larceny over.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, you know, Mr. Branford, it’s a start. We had to start somewhere, so we just filed these one hundred and twelve counts of larceny to start with. But we just came from your home, so maybe we will have a few other items at your arraignment.”
I am being handcuffed and by one of the other troopers.
“It’s just a misunderstanding with my bank, I’m sure.”
“One bank? How many banks, Mr. Branford?”
Now I realize these things. First, with respect to my own functioning, that I have not shut down entirely. Second, that I am suspected – and, obviously, accused as well – of something far more serious and sinister than I as yet understand concerning my online banking mix-up. Third, I realize that I have already reached, and surpassed, the point where any competent defense attorney would have advised me to shut my mouth and keep it shut.
The state police sergeant who is clearly the leader of this crew senses that I have stopped talking, so he speaks again: “You’ll have your day in court, Mr. Branford, you can be sure of that. But if there is anything you would like us to look into to help us understand what has happened here, you just let me know and I will take it down.”
“I should speak to my attorney.”
“Yes, you should, Mr. Branford. Yes, you should.”
I am sitting now in the back of one of the cruisers. They have taken my keys and the other contents of my pockets and checked them off on an inventory form there in the parking lot. The sergeant hands my keys to one of the state troopers who is associated with the other cruiser and they briefly discuss the protocol for impounding my vehicle. The sergeant fires up his cruiser and we head out, another trooper in the front passenger seat.
I don’t rely much on meditation or prayer, so I would not allow myself to exploit it by going to it now that I am in a bit of a tough and unfamiliar situation. It does occur to me that it would be nice to be able to clear my mind through meditation the way Diana does, but I fear that an extension of the axiom that “there are no atheists in the foxholes” would expose an inauthenticity with which I would be very uncomfortable.
Instead, I try to think my way through to a point where this nightmare will begin to end, when my life will begin to return to normal. I should have contacted Wade Gannon as soon as I found the stuff on the computer, but Jesus, who knew it was going to end with me sitting in the back of a cruiser? Besides, it occurs to me now, I was too embarrassed to call Wade. I am a skeptic by profession and I tend to surround myself with professional skeptics. I realize now that I had already started, this afternoon, to create a force field of static to help me out of the position of having to explain to Wade what that trash was doing on my computer. It was so unseemly.
Well, it is a hell of a lot more unseemly to be sitting in the back of a cruiser in handcuffs. I will have to call Wade at home or on his cell when I get wherever we are going to ask him to drop whatever he is doing and come over and bail me out. He will do everything he can to make it easy for me, and to get this over with properly. Wade has a great sense of humor and, even if he does not ordinarily handle criminal matters, a great manner with clients. Before I know it I will be riding shotgun in his Beemer SUV heading back to Belmont, and we will be making plans to go for a jog along the Charles together this weekend.
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