“I’m an Indian,” I say to Officer Dave, “and we hate lawyers.”
The cops laugh. They keep laughing as they drive me to kid jail in Seattle’s Central District. The CD used to be a black folks’ neighborhood. Now it’s filled with rich white people who like to pretend it’s still a black folks’ neighborhood. But the kid jail is still here, right across the street from a fancy coffee shop.
Starbucks can kiss my shiny red ass.
They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We’re the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.
“Where you from?” the black kid asks me, because he wants to know what gang I run with and if he should fight me or not.
“I’m from a little town called Eat Me,” I say.
The white kid and the Chinese kid laugh. The black kid doesn’t do anything. He’s already beaten by my words and doesn’t want to get beaten by my fists. I can tell he isn’t a gangbanger. He’s just an ordinary sad black kid. I could steal his basketball shoes right off his feet if I wanted to, but I don’t. I’m a nice guy. And those fancy shoes might be the only valuable thing the kid owns.
“What’s your name?” the white kid asks me.
“Zits,” I say.
“I’ve heard of you,” he says.
“What you hear?”
“I hear you’re tough.”
“Tougher than you,” I say.
There’s no reason to talk after that. Why would we talk? We’re boys. Boys aren’t supposed to talk. So we sit there in our boy silence.
Pretty soon, the Chinese kid’s parents pick him up and spank him like he was five years old, and the black kid gets transferred to another cell.
And then it’s the white kid and me.
He sits on the floor at one end of the cell. I sit on the floor at the other end. He stares at me for a long time. He’s studying me.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“Your face,” he says.
“What about my face?”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he says. “They got all sorts of medicine now. I see it on TV. They got miracle zit stuff. Clear your face right up.”
I’ve seen those commercials too. The ones where famous people like P. Diddy and Jessica Simpson and Brooke Shields talk about their zits and how they got cured by this miracle face cream made from sacred Mexican mud and the sweet spit of a prom queen. And, yeah, I’d love to buy that stuff, but it costs fifty bucks a jar. These days, you see a kid with bad acne, and you know he’s poor. Rich kids don’t get acne anymore. Not really. They just get a few spots now and again.
“Why do you care so much about my face?” I ask the white kid. “You some kind of fag?”
I don’t care if he’s a fag. I just know that fag is a powerful insult.
“Just talking,” he says. “I’m not looking for a fight.”
And the thing is, I can tell he’s not looking for a fight. He stares at me with kindness. Real kindness. I just met the guy, and I feel like he cares about my skin and me.
His complexion is so clear that it’s translucent. I can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. I have to admit, he’s a good-looking guy. In fact, he’s pretty like a girl.
Damn, maybe I’m a fag.
“How come you don’t get zits?” I ask him.
“Because I pray,” he says.
I laugh hard.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“You’re one of them fucking Christians, aren’t you?” I ask. Those bastards are always trying to save me, a poor Injun heathen. “Are you going to give me a ticket to Heaven?” I ask.
And now this pretty white boy laughs hard. “Beware of the man whose God is in the skies,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
“George Bernard Shaw wrote it.”
“So what?”
“So it means I’m not Christian,” he says. “I hate Christians. I hate Muslims and Jews and Buddhists. I hate all organized religions and all disorganized ones, too.”
“That’s a lot of hate,” I say.
“I suppose. But hate can be empowering.”
“That’s a big word.”
“You don’t know what it means, do you.”
“I know what it means.”
“Tell me, then.”
This guy probably thinks I’m just another stupid street kid. A dyslexic drone in the social welfare system. But I’m smart. Really smart.
Well, okay, maybe not that smart. I am currently sitting in a jail cell.
People go to jail for a reason. Well, for a couple of reasons. They’re in jail because they’re stupid enough to commit crimes. And because they’re stupid enough to get caught. And so, yeah, maybe I’m smart but I’m also double-stuff stupid. Adults are always telling me I don’t live up to my potential.
I say, fuck potential and anybody who says that fucking word to me.
“You sound like a teacher,” I say to the pretty white boy. “Or a preacher.”
“And you sound like a child,” he says.
“What are you, my grandfather?”
“I’m wise for my age,” he says, and laughs, like he’s making fun of himself, like people have described him that way before and he thinks it’s goofy.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Seventeen. How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“All right, Mr. Fifteen,” he says. “Tell me what it means to be empowered.”
All of a sudden, I feel the need to impress this kid. I want him to like me. More than that, I want him to admire me.
“Empowered means you feel powerful,” I say.
“Well, yes, that’s obvious,” he says. “But how do you obtain that feeling of power? And what do you do with your power after you’ve found it?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
He smiles. I can see all thirty-two of his teeth.
“I can show you,” he says.
Three
SUDDENLY, THE PRETTY WHITE boy is my best friend. Maybe the only real friend of my life.
We talk for hours. He understands me. He’s only two years older, but it seems like he’s lived for two thousand years.
I fall in love with him. Not romantically; it’s not about sex or anything physical like that. No, this kid is some kind of Jesus. I know it’s silly. And I know this kid doesn’t even like or respect Jesus — or Allah or Buddha or LeBron James or any other God. But I really get the feeling this white kid could save me from being lonely. I bet he could save the whole world from being lonely.
When I tell him my mother is dead and my father is invisible, the white kid says, “Santayana says there is no cure for birth and death so you better enjoy the interval.”
When I tell him I’m an Indian, he says, “I’m sorry that my people nearly destroyed your people. This country, the so-called United States, is evil. And you Indians were the only people who fought against that white evil. Everybody else thinks we live in a democracy. Everybody else thinks we’re free.”
“Indians have never been free,” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said about Indians? He said, ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’ How can it be a democracy when presidents talk like that?”
When I tell him I like to start fires, he says, “It’s wrong to burn good things. If you want to set fires, you must burn down bad things. Remember, revolution is not about spontaneous combustion. The true revolutionary must set himself aflame.”
When I tell him that I get lonely, he says, “The individual has always had to work hard to avoid being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself.”