Tyler Knight

A dot of red light slices through the darkness and dances on the wall next to my head; the abruptness its existence from the previous nothingness skips my heart, causing me to sit up in bed with a start. The laser finds my face, and sparkles and stars of crimson light burst inside my eye; I turn to follow the beam to its source–a charred and hollow building across the street with dark, gaping windows–but the light dies with the same curtness as it started before I can determine its exact origin.

My stomach protests its emptiness so I dig into the box of Graham crackers sitting on my lap. They do the job at filling the void in my belly but aren’t very satisfying so I snatch my pants off the floor and extract my wallet from it. While counting my money for a McDonald’s strawberry milkshake run, I realize ID is gone. I left it at the library with the clerk when I singed up for Internet time on the public PC. I eat a cracker while I slip on my sneakers, pull a hoodie over my head, then head out the door and back to the library before it closes.

A half-veiled moon casts its glow upon Hollywood Boulevard. The street teems with partiers, street performers, booths, and tourists dressed in costumes. Pinocchio makes out with a naughty nurse in a doorstep. A different song blares on sound systems set up every other block. Sparkle sticks flash and fizzle. I jostle past an overweight family (dressed in normal clothes) as the father buys sweet-smelling street meats and sausages that sizzle and pop on a vendor’s gas powered push cart. Popcorn, tickets, and confetti litter the street. Three kids dressed in glow-in-the-dark skeleton costumes skateboard tandem up and down a halfpipe; two loft back-to-back McTwist on the near face and the other skater floats a stale fish on the other; the crowd erupts in cheers. They knee slide down the walls I recognize Steve Caballero, Mark Gonzales, and Tommy Guerrero. I turn down Ivar street and walk the two blocks to the library.

The library is still open, and my foot hits the first step when I’m blasted with a spotlight. A high revving engine snarls toward me and I look up in time to see patrol car speeding up Ivar, dead at me, from the opposite direction, cutting across the street, and running half way up the curb as I leap out of the way. It stops askew, and the doors fling open, and two street-beasts in blue draw their guns. On me.

The passenger side cop hides behind the door with the “To Protect And To Serve” script over the seal of the Great City Of Los Angeles. Gun trained on my center mass. He screams, “Get on the ground! Now!”

The driver’s side cop screams his command, “Don’t move!”, over top of his partner’s shouting, all the while careful not to cross his partner’s line of fire as he stalks toward me. His weapon is aimed at my left eye–I can see down its barrel.

It doesn’t take much to fire a gun. Three or four pounds of pressure to pull a trigger. That’s it. Because of this, to prevent accidental discharge, a police officer is trained to never place his finger in the trigger well unless the intent is to disable. Or kill. Both cops have their fingers in the wells and on their triggers.

“Do you want me to get down or stay still,” I say. “Make up you minds, I’m not trying to get killed today.”

The driver’s side cop is close enough for me to see his name tag, “Borjas”.

They both shout conflicting commands on top of each other. Finally, Officer Borjas tells me to get on my knees. I do, lacing my fingers over my head and I fall forward. There’s weight of a knee on my back and my hands are yanked from my head to be cuffed behind me.

Borjas says, “Are you in the possession of any weapons? Any needles or sharp objects in you pockets.

I say nothing.

Hands search my pockets, removing my wallet, then frisk up and down my legs.

The other cop is now with Borjas. I don’t see him because my face is pushed into the cement by Borjas, but his voice says, “Where is your ID?”

The cuffs bite into my wrists and even though I’m prone and helpless I don’t dare move to alleviate the pressure while weapons are still drawn on me.

I say, “I left it in the library.”

One of them scoffs at this.

Borjas sighs. He says, “This ain’t him.”

“Cut em loose, then.”

“Not so fast,” Borjas says to his partner, then he says to me, “You got any warrants? When was the last time you’ve been locked up?”

There’s that ticket that turned into a warrant, I’m glad I paid it off. I say, “No warrants, and never arrested.”

“Look, I can run your name and address from other things I took from your wallet.” His knee digs into my neck, grating my chin against the rough cement. “If I do I’m not gonna find out you’re lying to me are ya?”

I don’t answer.

The other cop says, “Cut em loose. Let’s go.”

Borjas takes his knee off of me but leaves me cuffed, face down. He says, “Wait a minute”, and I hear them both walk away.

I mailed that ticket payment to the court but what if it takes a long time to get reported to the LAPD? What if it got lost?

Voices of spectators talking, though I don’t see them. Laughter.

My field of vision is filled by a Djarum clove, trapped immobile in gum, smoldering next to my nose. The smell of leather soaked in molasses then set ablaze hugs my face; tar stains its filter. It looks like it was discarded, half smoked, because of the long ash that’s burning down to the butt where the embers face the inevitable extinguishment.

They return and Borjas removes my cuffs.

“Stand up.”

I do. The name plate of the other cop reads, “Madero”.

Madero says, “Go on, get outta here.”

I look at Madero, then Borjas, back to Madero again. Madero looks annoyed, as if my being the wrong guy has inconvenienced him, fucking up their game of “Pin The Conviction On The Negro”.

I say “What the hell was all that about?”

Madero says, “You fit the description of an armed robbery suspect.”

There is a crowd of tourists across the street that has gathered to see the police action. Some have cell phones out, taking pictures and filming video clips. Others point at me.

“Great.” I turn to leave.

“Stop.”

I turn to face them again. It’s Borjas. He waits until Madero is half way back to the cruiser. Borjas, alone with me, lowers his voice and says, “You’re that porn guy.”

He’s smiling at me the way a kid would if he caught Clark Kent changing into superman. Poc marks from his adolescence riddle his face. Though it’s empty, his eyebrow is pierced.

He says, “You have a beautiful cock.”

“No,” I say, backing away from him with small, careful steps, “you got the wrong guy.”

I enter the library. Inside, I grab a book off the shelf, find a reading chair, and sit. Feelings in new combinations flood through me and right when I think I’ve got a handle on one, another rips through my gut. I sit in that chair on the edge of crying laughter, but neither crying nor laughter happens. The book shakes in my hand and I notice the title, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book’s clenched upside down. I don’t right it.

A clerk calls out five minutes before closing. I sit there, waiting until another clerk comes to my table to tell me the library is closed. I leave. It’s not until I’m among the party of Hollywood Boulevard again that I realize I forgot my ID. Again.

I walk down the middle of the street against the current of the crowd of partying super heroes, and monsters, and a group of devils (selling tickets for rides), making my way back to the hotel, scanning the sky for helicopters, and UNKLE on this block’s sound system wailing, “Fat bloody fingers are sucking your soul away…”, and the pressure of people flowing against me is great (at one point I actually loose ground) so I drift to the pedestrian friendly sidewalk. It’s October but an Indian Summer heats the Los Angeles night, and the combined body heat, energy, and the friction of all the people rubbing against each other causes sweat to stream from my forehead; I pull off my hoodie and tie it around my waist, exposing my t-shirt with the soaked armpits underneath. A coin-operated fortune teller machine looms in my path and as I squeeze past it I notice there’s no fortune teller or glowing ball inside. Instead, an animatronic cowboy sits backwards on a crimson horse; the horse stands next to a tree; a rope hangs from a branch; the rope ends in a noose tied around the cowboy’s neck. His eyes follow me like a painting of Jesus on the far side of the room that seems to be looking at you no matter where you stand. Except I’m too close for this illusion. The eyes are following me. I make it past, and the machine’s laugh recording sounds like a 44rpm record slowed down to 33. My eyes scan the crowd and I plot my path through. Stairway To Heaven bellows from this block’s sound system, and a man in a hoodie, hood over his face, movement slowed down by the effects of a strobe light, bumps my shoulder as he pushes past me. My street, Las Palmas Avenue, intersects Hollywood Boulevard three blocks away, so I cut across the partiers, and I notice another man dressed in the same hoodie as the guy that just bumped my shoulder, bumps my shoulder as well. I dab my forehead with the my sleeve as I turn to watch him fade into the crowd, and I yell “watch it asshole”, seconds too late, when a nagging thought stops my breath as it shoves its way forward: both men wore the same hoodie. The exact same hoodie tied around my waist right now. I drive against the crowd even harder, pushing and shoving past a porno shop with a headless cardboard cut-out of me in its window, nudging people out of my way when my hand stops mid-fall before it lands on a man’s shoulder. He stands, back toward me, my height and build, in the same hooded sweatshirt. Every person between me and Las Palmas is dressed the same. I put my hoodie on and pull the hood up so I obscure my face, and I slow my urgency the last few steps to my street. Las Palmas is empty. The neon-script sign sits atop the hotel’s roof five blocks away, and that’s what I focus on as I slink up the sidewalk, making use of shadows. Two blocks into my walk the roar of the party behind me fades to the level of a neighbors TV that’s not quite loud enough to bang on his door. The next block, the sound dampens to a buzzing in the back of my perception as I replay events in my mind.

Motion. Across the street, two buildings up. The dull sound of blunt objects impacting on wet flesh reaches me as I creep closer and crouch behind a car, but by the time I can make out what’s happening across the street, the action is almost over. Borjas and Madero, night sticks out, beat on a hoodie-clad man. I want to run over and do…something…but my legs are slow to obey my commands to move. Just as I’m about to take a step I see him. A man floats on the shadows. The cops beat their prey–bones snap, the downed man wails–oblivious to the new man who stalks up behind them with a stout, nickel-plated .45 that glints in the moonlight. The hotel door beckons me three blocks away. I run. I run until the soot-soaked Hollywood air sears my lungs, and my legs tingle with lactic acid, and my body screams for me to quit, and then I run some more. Voices behind me, first low then escalating, and my goddamn key refuses to stay still in my hand so I can fit it in its hole. Door open, body shutting down, I will myself up the stairs on screaming quadriceps, and into my room–

Bang, bang!

Bang-bang-bang!

–splits the air as I slam the door. Adrenal glands wrung out and body spent, I shuffle back to bed, lean my back against the wall and sit, hugging my knees.

The red dot slices through the darkness and dances on the wall next to my head. It traces a crimson figure eight on its side. The sign for infinity.

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Tagged: Fiction