Land of the Blind (20 page)

Of course, I’m hardly the first student to be struck by Plato’s simple ontology, to make the short leap of imagining my life as a cave, society as empty and illusory, and all that I had been conditioned to want as nothing more than fancy lies. Success, fame, money, women? Shadows. Just shadows.

But if my epiphany was that of a million other disaffected, twenty-one-year-old state school philosophers, it was also that of a young man who had just buried his brother, and I must say—I went a little crazy that day. Behind me, the sun slanted through a window in the classroom and bits of dust danced in its light, a Milky Way of mites and bits and loose particles. How can we still pretend that heaven is
up there
when whole universes—tiny heavens and hells—can exist in a single beam of sunlight.

“Mr. Mason?” Dr. Stanton stepped toward me, and as I looked up from the sunlight to him I felt myself passing, as Plato said, from one realm to the next, from belief to knowledge. Even now I can’t say just what it meant except that I was overwhelmed, a parched man suddenly up to his knees in cool water.

“Mr. Mason?” Dr. Stanton asked again.

For the first time in my life I could see. Or I was blinded. Or there’s no difference. I slapped my head. The other students looked up at me.

“I don’t—” I cast around, looking at the ruffled paperback of
The Republic,
at the students around me, just like me, dreaming our stupid little dreams, competing and succeeding and living and dying by rules that we didn’t make up, rules that made no sense. I reached into the sunlight. Nothing was there.

“What is it, Mr. Mason?”

“I don’t—” And I saw myself on Empire Road, that narrow gash of houses, that stretch of failure—the cruelty of Pete Decker at one end, the frailty of Eli Boyle at the other. That would always be
my
universe,
my
galaxy of dust in
my
beam of sunlight. Tears streamed from my eyes—the bad and the good. Grief is a release and—

“Mr. Mason?” Dr. Stanton said. “What is it?”

“I don’t—” Every dream is an escape.

“Mr. Mason!”

The really shitty thing is this: When someone dies, you never get to see him again. Never. How can you possibly deal with the unfairness of that? How can you deal with the death of the best person you know, the death of everything true and good?

I looked up at Dr. Stanton. “I don’t—” I wiped my eyes. “I don’t believe in God.”

W
hat I meant to accomplish with this confession was not a recounting of the grief-induced, sophomoric insights (though technically I was a junior) that I had in college but something more, something transcendent.

I am a failure even at being sad.

So again, I apologize, Caroline. I only wanted to make the point that I wasn’t always like this—or rather like the obnoxious young politician who was handed his hat in the 2000 congressional elections, the desperate man who drove to Eli Boyle’s house two days ago with murder in his heart, who walked gingerly across the lawn to Eli’s carriage house, who climbed silently up those steps.

At least for a short time, beginning in the fall of 1985 and ending more than eight years later, in the spring of 1994, I was free.

Though I hadn’t known how to express it that day in class (atheism not really being the point), the combination of Ben’s death and Dr. Stanton’s class transformed me, untethered me from all that I’d believed.

I moved out of the frat house and into an apartment above a garage in Wallingford. I quit all my campus posts and all the self-serving organizations I had joined. I gave the Dodge back to my parents and bought an old ten-speed bicycle. I grew my hair out, stopped shaving, and started wearing secondhand clothing; I favored army fatigues and flannel shirts. I stopped wearing my glass eye and went back to the eye patch—a bit self-consciously at first, but old habits die hardest. I sat for hours on the Ave on lotused legs, reading poetry and smiling at strangers. I became one of those people you step around on the sidewalk, a step removed from panhandler.

Strangely enough, this didn’t affect my social life as much as I feared it would. I didn’t get involved seriously with anyone, but I screwed constantly. It turned out there was no shortage of girls who were looking for sad, hygienically challenged men, girls who smelled like patchouli or clove
cigarettes, nice girls who seemed like the sort that Dana would’ve become, the sort that Ben would’ve dated, girls who didn’t really comb their hair, who majored in comparative literature and international studies, who carried string-tied journals in their worn backpacks and rode bicycles for transportation, girls who talked knowledgeably about rain forests and dominant cultures and art-house movies.

I went almost six years without seeing a shaved armpit.

I exchanged the politics of me for the politics of them. And there were plenty of them to help. I raised money for AIDS patients, African famine relief, and Central American refugees. I volunteered at schools and community centers in Seattle’s Central District and at shelters downtown. Free of the strictures of my self-loathing and its corresponding ambition, I ambled in good conscience about the campus, and the city—a better man. Of course, the cynic might look at me now—disgraced politician, low-rent attorney—and doubt the sincerity of this transformation. For them, I offer this one proof:

For ten years, I did not run for a goddamned thing.

“You know, it’s possible to go a bit overboard with this kind of thing,” Dr. Stanton finally said when I showed him the tattoo on my lower back—the Chinese symbol for compassion (at least that’s what I was told; I found out later it was actually the symbol for
compensation,
the word right next to “compassion” in the illustrated dictionary my tattoo artist used). Dr. Stanton was uncomfortable with my rebirth, I think, because he worried about his role in it, and specifically, that he was now my mentor.

“Look, I’m not really the mentor type,” he said. “I’m sorry about your brother and I’m glad you found something meaningful in my class, but that was Plato. That wasn’t me. I don’t even
like
Plato.”

I was amused and impressed by his protests, which seemed in keeping with the modesty and intelligence that a great mentor should have. Still, it was he who encouraged me to continue along in my previous poli-sci/prelaw track (“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”), insisting that my brother would’ve wanted me to be a lawyer and that I could do more good as a lawyer than “playing bongos on some street corner.”

So I spent three years getting my master’s in sociology at the University of Washington and then found my way into a lesser law school, not so much out of some deep desire to practice law, but out of a much deeper desire not
to leave college, the brick womb of my rebirth. I lingered in law school as long as they would have me, taking a few classes here and there, constantly changing my emphasis.

Dr. Stanton finally gave in to my need for a mentor, and he and I met once a week for lunch, during which time I would share with him some new plan for using my law degree to bring about unlikely social change. I was forever trying to earn his respect, and forever getting his good-natured scorn instead. I will list a few of my ideas and Dr. Stanton’s responses, ideas that I should really have registered with the Patent Office’s Department of Hubris. I planned to:

Open a nonprofit legal services clinic for indigent elderly men (“There’s a great deal of money to be made in hobo law,” Dr. Stanton said); establish a safe house and law office for battered women; use the same house to care for and represent homeless children and orphans; organize a team of lawyers to sue for third-world debt relief and the international removal of land mines (“I do like the idea of sending lawyers to blow up old land mines”); create a pro bono law firm to research old Indian treaties and then sue the government over them; and offer free representation to the families of executed prisoners (“Yes. Help Dutch’s family get his handguns back from the coppers”).

Richard Stanton was—and remains—the finest and truest person I know in the world. We would meet at one of the bars near the campus, spend the first half of our lunch with me fantasizing about my conscience-clearing law career and the second half with Dr. Stanton complaining about the poli-sci department and the university as a whole. He felt no respect from his colleagues; he was mistrusted, he said, because of his television and private-sector background—“Nobody likes a convert, Mr. Mason”—and at the same time, he was seen as something of a simple traditionalist within more progressive academic circles because he rarely published and insisted on teaching forms that had been long taken for granted and left behind. He drank more and more during these lunches, and often stayed to drink alone after I left, although he was the kind of drunk who knew he was ingesting a depressant and so he grew quieter and more reflective with each glass of draft beer—no raised voices or lampshades for him. At the end of our lunches, he always seemed on the verge of tears. Somewhere in there I became aware of a horrible event in his past, right around the time he went in for the earring and the ponytail, something that caused him tremendous guilt and sorrow. He
left a woman behind, I think—his wife, probably, but it seemed to be more than that—and either he assumed that I knew the details or he believed the details were beside the point, because he only ever made glancing reference to it (“my collapse,” or “the big fuck-up”) and thwarted every attempt I made to find out what happened. (“What
happened
?” he responded when I asked him directly. “You think this shit just
happens
? Like the weather? Wake up and smell the self-determination, Mr. Mason. Put down the bong and take a hit of reality.”)

This was my life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a satisfying mixture of college, grad and law school (seventy-two thousand dollars in student loans), sodden lunches with my mentor and friend, and the occasional vegetarian Birkenstock Ten Thousand Maniacs girlfriend.

I finally graduated from law school in 1993—at the age of twenty-eight and near the bottom of my class—and, while I waited to take the bar exam, got a job working with Max Gerroux, Dr. Stanton’s best friend, a former liberal appeals-court judge who’d given up the bench as part of an elaborate plea bargain over the butt of a joint that a state trooper saw in his car ashtray one day, a plea bargain that allowed him to continue practicing law and smoking joints. The latter he did with far greater passion and frequency than the former. Every time I knocked on his door, Max would grunt, “One moment, please,” like someone who has been punched in the stomach, then let out a great exhale, spray something around his office and answer the door with narrow, red eyes. “Clark!” He always seemed surprised that I was there.

“There” was a small office on the second floor of a brick storefront in the funky Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, above a Greek restaurant, behind a door marked simply
LAW OFFICE
. The office smelled like feta cheese and tahini sauce, and was decorated with metal filing cabinets and a horrific nude self-portrait of Max in oil colors (Dr. Stanton called the painting “greasy gnome porn”). Max was barely five feet tall, with jet-black hair. He was half Flathead Indian and half Jewish—“the first and last of my people”—and he credited this background for creating his heartbreaking sense of humor and his preternatural ability to abide suffering and deflect bullying.

Luckily, these were just the sorts of law he liked to practice.

“Look,” he would say over the phone when some prosecutor was playing hardball on a plea bargain. “I am a Flathead Jew. You’re welcome to keep busting my ass, but you’ll have to forgive me if I
don’t fucking notice
!”

He represented drug cases almost exclusively, and twice he came under investigation for taking his payment in product. Our office was even hit once. During the raid I stood next to Max, who smiled as filing cabinets and drawers were emptied on the floor. He wasn’t a great lawyer, but the man knew how to hide a stash.

Unlike Dr. Stanton, when I confided in Max my plans for pro bono and legal social work, he beamed with pride. He got positively giddy about the hobo clinic and the Native People’s Justice Center and the rest, nodding and grinning and planning right along with me. “Yes, I see it. We should get right on that, Clark. I know some influential people who will demand to fund this idea of yours. We’ll have this thing up and running by the first of the year.” I don’t think he really knew any influential people—they certainly never came to our office—and anyway, we barely made enough on his drug cases to pay for our spot above the Greek restaurant, let alone do pro bono work.

I passed the bar, and by the spring of 1994, when I got a letter that would mark the beginning of this recent trouble, I was a bearded and ponytailed practicing lawyer and a junior partner in the two-person progressive law firm of Max Gerroux Law Offices. But before I detail the contents of that letter, I should make one more thing clear about Max, a detail that explains both Max and my deep loyalty to him.

He was dying. A snakelike tumor had taken up residence in his spine. It was wrapping around the bone and working its way through his body, wearing a kind of Ho Chi Minh Trail from his brain to his testicles. He had long ago given up on the doctors’ ability to beat the tumor, saying that it seemed more natural to have the cancer kill him than the doctors. Everyone knew he was dying. He used this fact most effectively in court, pushing for speedier trials and expediting plea bargains and cutting through reams of legal bullshit (“We all know I won’t be here to appeal this. Don’t make me go through the motions of something I’ll never see to the end”).

If this sounds manipulative, you will just have to take my word that he didn’t wield his illness cynically or unnecessarily. In fact, he talked about his painful and insidious cancer so plainly and without affect that to this day, I consider matter-of-factness a form of courage. Some days we would be going over paperwork and he would make a small groan or squeeze his eyes tight—“Clark, I need to make a quick phone call”—and I would understand that he needed to get high to fight off the intense pain. It was also understood
between us that I needed to protect my future as a lawyer by leaving the room, that I was to never witness his drug use—in case the cops returned to finish their raid. I honored the small deception and usually went for a walk down to Lake Union when I knew he was getting high. I was with Max for six months before I realized why we represented drug dealers: partly because Max honestly believed that the police violated civil rights in drug cases and partly because Max needed to be paid in dope.

As for me, I suppose I cared for Max out of a surrogate loyalty toward Ben, and as I watched Max’s cancer progress, I concentrated on every detail, every wince and groan, those things I’d missed nine years earlier with Ben.

One day in the late spring of 1994, Max and I were working on an appeal, the paperwork spread out before us on his pressed-board desk. My mind was elsewhere, specifically on the aforementioned letter, which my parents had forwarded to me the day before. And so I didn’t notice that Max was making small huffing noises, as if he was being punched in the rib cage. Finally, when I looked up, I could see that he was glistening with sweat and having difficulty breathing. His eyes were pressed shut.

“You need to make a phone call,” I said.

He winced with pain. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Let me help,” I said quietly.

“I don’t think you should—”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“No.”

“Please,” I said.

He pointed to the oil painting of himself naked. I was shocked that it would be in such an obvious place. Even the cops had looked behind that painting. I took the painting down but there was nothing behind it on the wall, no safe or false panel. “Frame,” he muttered. “Lower right-hand corner.” I pulled the frame apart and saw it was hollowed out. A small ceramic pipe, matches, and a sandwich baggie of rich green marijuana slid out. I loaded the bowl and slid it between his quivering lips. I waved the match in a circle around the bits of green bud, and he inhaled with short, raspy breaths; the buds sparked red and burned away, and a line of gray-blue smoke issued from the pipe. Max’s eyelids fluttered and he held the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, then let it seep out. A quiver of something—pain or relief, I’m not sure there was a difference—rolled through his body.