Picking Locks (2015)

Charles didn’t realize how hungry he was until he watched Officer Portly take a bite of his donut. The fried, doughy treat was covered in pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles and Officer Portly ate it with a leisurely smugness, and by doing so, asserted his power in a way that was far more effective than flashing any of his badges.

“Alright,” Officer Portly said, brushing donut crumbs off of his chin in a let’s-getdown-to-business manner. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.

“Tell me in your own words what happened today.”

What other words could he possibly tell it in Charles thought to himself, his contempt for law enforcement rising to a previously unsurpassed level. He had only dealt with the pigs one other time in his life, that being back in junior high school, when his group of friends got caught tagging outside the gymnasium. Charles had hardly been the ringleader in that endeavor. If anything, he was the shy, lanky one who had obligingly trailed behind the rest of the group, the one who would have been cast in a movie as the guy who says “I don’t know about this guys, I don’t know about this.”

Twenty-five years had passed, however, since that mischievous day in the fall of his twelfth year, and that timid boy had turned into someone else, someone that Charles was not entirely sure he recognized.

“Go on,” Officer Portly urged. “Take it from the top.”

Top? Charles thought. What top? Though of course he knew that by the top the Officer meant today, when Charles got onto the subway, before the whole incident even got started.

But for a moment, one of Charles’ more abstract, meditative moments, he wondered if by “from the top” Portly meant from the beginning, thirty seven years ago, when Charles was brought, kicking and screaming, into the world. He wondered if Officer Portly wanted to hear the whole sorry story, about how he grew up poor in the Bronx with a depressed alcoholic mother and an absent locksmith father who managed to enter everybody else’s house but his own. If he wanted to hear about Charles’ brother Sammy, who was born four years after Charles and had always been the “good one,” the one who was better at sports, and at school, and who joined the army at eighteen just so he could get the hell out of their house.

Charles wiped the sweat off his brow, suddenly feeling suffocated by the dampness of the interrogation room. Would Officer Portly want to hear about how he dropped out of high school and spent a year drinking and feeling sorry for himself before turning to construction, spending days pounding away at asphalt and nights studying geometry so he could earn his GED? How he fell into a brief spell of unemployment after the construction company disbanded before finding work as a doorman at Park East Highrises? How this job was supposed to be the landing stop before going to college, but then the plans for college never actually materialized?

Or perhaps Officer Portly would want Charles to jump further ahead in time, to describe the moment when he first saw Suzanne at a pizza shop in Brooklyn eight years ago, and how, when he tried to talk to her, his throat went dry and his knees trembled and he turned into a defenseless little boy. He wouldn’t tell Portly about how getting Suzanne to love him was a long, tiresome process, and how he was still worried that one day her love would just cork to the surface and bob away, enticed by another current. How he felt guilty about the fact that she was still working as a receptionist for an orthodontist who didn’t give her health insurance, and that he didn’t have the flexible income to let her stay home with the kids.

Would Officer Portly want to know about Charles’ kids, Tommy and Richie, five and seven, who he played ball with in the apartment building’s communal yard on a good day? He wouldn’t tell Portly how, on a bad day, their mother would tell them to go to their rooms while she yelled at Charles in the kitchen for never making enough money.

Or how those fights always seemed to knock the life out of him, and when he went into the boys’ room afterwards to read them stories before tucking them in to bed all he could do was smile an empty, defeated smile and promise them that tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, they would play ball again.

“Take it from when you got on the subway,” Officer Portly said.

Charles shifted in his seat. He thought vaguely about asking for a lawyer, about refusing to speak until he saw one, but he found himself dismissing that idea, doubting that a lawyer, at this point, would be any better or worse than Officer Portly. Charles felt contented in the fact that he simply had an audience, and that even though his audience was only one person, and a person with a squashed nose and donut crumbs all over his face at that, he was still a person who had an interest in what Charles has to say. The fact that he was getting paid to listen, much like Charles’ last shrink, was entirely beside the point. Charles became preoccupied with wanting to dazzle Officer Portly, to entertain him, to enlighten him. He wanted his story to make Officer Portly sympathetic to the plights of a working man. And so, with the characteristically high expectations that he set upon himself, Charles cleared his throat, desperately trying to frame this in the best way possible, to not fuck everything up even more than it already was.

“Well,” Charles said, “I finished my shift at eight, and so I headed over to the subway immediately after, the one on 72nd and Lexington, right by where I work.”

Officer Portly looked through his notes. “And you work as a doorman at Park East Highrises, correct?”

“That’s the one,” Charles said. “It was a bad day. Pretty miserable if you want to know the truth. There was a cocktail party going on and people kept coming in in droves. I was supposed to leave at seven but I had to stay an extra hour because of all the commotion. I must have opened the door for over 100 people.” Charles didn’t tell him that one of these people was Jerold Wilson, the self important stockbroker who he opened the door for every day precisey at six and who always called him ‘Chris’ even though his name tag clearly read, in bold letters, ‘Charles.’ Or the fact that out of the hundred people he opened the door for that evening, only one person had actually made eye contact with him. Instead, he cleared his throat and said:

“So I was doing okay, a little annoyed by staying late. The only thing that really irritated me was when some lady who was outside waiting for her husband came up to me and asked me if I could fan her. Fan her. Do you believe it? They call me a doorman but sometimes I wonder if the job title should read ‘certified ass kisser.’”

Officer Portly’s eyes narrowed into a squint. It was hard to know if he was intensely thinking about the incident or about the leftover pink frosting on his paper plate. Finally, in an attempt to curb the silence, he grunted under his breath and said, “So you must have been pretty annoyed, huh?” The comment unsettled Charles. It seemed that Officer Portly was taking a new approach, trying to lure Charles into admission of guilt with the false appearance of camaraderie. Charles was not going to take the bait.

“It was irritating, I admit. But par for the course,” Charles said. “You’re opening the door for the Upper East Side’s finest day after day, and these things happen. You’ve got to have a thick skin about it.” It’s like a duck that lets the water roll of their back, thought Charles, not questioning for a moment that rather than a duck he might be more like a sponge, and that it might be his curse, instead, to permanently absorb all of the world’s shit. “Anyway,” said Charles. “I finished my shift, late, and got onto the subway. I was sitting and minding my own business, as always. And then, on 96th Street, they walk in.”

Officer Portly looked through his notes again. “The Stratfords?”

“Yes, the Stratfords.” Charles tried to loosen the muscles in his face so that Officer Portly wouldn’t interpret his expression as a scowl.

“So what happens then?” Portly asked.

What happens then? Oh for Christ’s sake, Charles thought, nothing at first. Isn’t that how these insidious interactions always begin? Nothing happens at first. Charles mentally replayed the image of the Stratfords walking onto the train. They were a stuffy older white couple, the husband wearing a pinstriped suit with his hair gelled back and the woman wearing a frilly white dress and an absurd Scarlett O’Hara-esque hat, covering what looked like the aftershock of a shoddy perm. They looked like a garish, costumed imitation of what they must have imagined rich people looked like. In a sense, the couple reminded Charles of his own parents, at their worst, when they decided to act like a couple and go out to The Sizzler and pretend that they were happy. Maybe that is what caused the unpleasant stir within Charles when he saw them, this reminder of his past. That, and something else he had failed to identify but was undeniably true, that their outsider ness made them somehow aligned with him.

“So the Stratfords caught my attention, and not in the most flattering way,” Charles said. “But I wasn’t going to say anything, Officer, really, I’m not the kind to just drop a snide remark in the middle of nowhere. I’m a doorman, for Christ’s sake. It’s my job to be nice.” He took another deep breath. “But that was all before Sampson came into the picture.”

Officer Portly narrowed his eyes again. “Sampson.”

“Yes, Sampson, that stupid little dog, Yorkshire terrier or whatever you call them.”

“So you see the dog...”

“Yes, I see the dog. It was peeking out of Mrs. Stratford’s hideous red bag. At first his eyes just bob around and Mrs. Stratford gives him a good old pat and I look and think nothing of it. I mean, you’ve got to understand, I’m a dog person. I like dogs. But this, this was just different.”

“Different how?”

Different how? Charles drummed his fingers against the table. Could he say it was different because he was already in a lousy mood, and that Mrs. Stratford had made it exponentially worse just by simply being herself? “I don’t know,” Charles said, grasping for the right words. “This woman was just so...loud. Like there was nobody else on the goddamn subway but herself. You know the type? The type that scream into their cell phone at the doctor’s office? She was just like that, Officer. Aren’t those people the worst? She was talking to her dog. Talking to the dog, I swear to God! Not a comment but a full on conversation. Imagine the sight: her beefcake of a husband piddly diddling on his iPhone, and this woman with a Scarlet O’Hara hat talking to her little rat dog.

Tell me, Officer, that you wouldn’t be pissed off too.”

Officer Portly jotted something down in his notepad. “What did she say to the dog?”

“Everything! She was giving him a recap of the day. She’s all like ‘what a day, Sampson, what a day! You must be so tired. Aw, Sampson, I know you’re scared of the vet, but it wasn’t so bad, was it, Sampson? You’ve just got a little ear infection is all! You’re just going to take your little doggie pills and everything is going to be so much better!”

Charles found himself out of breath. Panting, he looked up at Officer Portly for some gesture of sympathy. Officer Portly chewed on his pen instead.

“I take it this upset you,” was all he offered.

“No,” Charles insisted. “I mean, a little bit, obviously. It was irritating as hell, for sure. But like I said, thick skin, right? After her little monologue the rat dog went back to sleep in the red bag and her grease ball husband fell asleep probably playing Tetris on his iPhone, and all was well. Until Mrs. Stratford started singing.”

This caught Portly’s attention. “Singing?”

“Yes. Singing. She closed her eyes and started shaking her head from side to side, like she was in a trance. Then she started singing “Sampson, Sampson, my angel Sampson. To the tune of ‘Angel Baby.’ Do you remember that crappy oldies song?”

Officer Portly nodded vacantly. Charles had a flashback of his mother driving her beat up Cadillac, singing ‘Angel Baby,’ her voice hoarse from crying after one fight or other with his father. Charles would always be in the passenger seat on these trips, even though he was technically too small to be sitting up there, but his mom didn’t care and he liked the thrill of being next to the driver, looking out at the open road. He always insisted on wearing his Boy Scout uniform in those days, just because it made him feel resourceful. When his mother started humming and getting teary eyed and sentimental, he would look out at the side of the highway and pretend it was somewhere rural and beautiful, where he could pitch tents and count stars and roast s’mores with an infinitely happier family that he was completely unable to picture.

“So she stopped singing briefly,” Officer Portly said.

For a confused moment Charles mistook the ‘she’ for his mother, but then came back to his surroundings, to Officer Portly’s impatient stare, and his reverie gave way to the interrogation room once more. “Right,” Charles said. “She stopped singing for a couple minutes, started petting her dog, and I thought it was over. But then--then she started singing again.”

“Again?”

“Yes! This time even louder! She was petting him and singing, ‘Because I love you, I love you, I do, Angel Sampson, my Angel Sampson.” Charles closed his eyes, and thought that by doing so he could somehow open up his diaphragm and hit those agonizing high notes with the same awful intensity that Mrs. Stratford had just a couple hours earlier. When he opened his eyes and looked up, however, he saw that Officer Portly’s face was blank. Charles began to panic as he wondered if he had maxed out on any potential sympathy. “So that’s when I got fed up.”

“That’s when you got fed up,” Officer Portly said.

“Yes, that’s when I got so fed up I knew I needed to say something. For my own sanity if nothing else.”

Charles’ palms began to sweat. He wondered what Portly’s netural expression meant. Surely he can relate, Charles thought. In his day-to-day endeavors in law enforcement, he must come across equally aggravating situations. Maybe he would be so mesmerized by Charles’ oratory skills, so impressed by his refusal to take any more shit from such an indifferent world, that he would let him go back out into the hot New York night without so much as a warning.

“Well?” Officer Portly said. “What did you say?”

Charles shifted in the seat, trying to ignore the cold sweat accumulating down his back. What did he say? It was a simple enough question, and yet this question had been the underlying source of Charles’ dread. All roads would lead to this. He knew that this part of his story would polarize Officer Portly: he’d be forever on Charles’ side or despise him to the core. And the fact that the whole story had been leading up to this one moment troubled Charles to such a degree that he found himself trembling, and he wondered if he was in the throes of a panic attack.

“Alright,” Charles said, finding himself out of breath. “The whole thing got blown up completely out of proportion.” And he thought back to that fatal moment on the subway when the incredulous woman with the Scarlet O’Hara hat had looked at Charles as if he had just put a bullet through the dog’s stomach. “I admit, my impulse control isn’t the best sometimes,” Charles told the Officer. “But finally I just got so fed up by her singing that I just said ‘for Christ’s sake, the damn dog can’t understand what you’re saying! Give it a rest!’ ”

“And how did Mrs. Stratford react?” asked Officer Portly.

“How do you think she reacted?” Charles said. “This is a completely irrational woman that we’re dealing with. She got mad as hell.” Charles thought back to the moment again, of his frustration giving way, how after he made the comment the woman seemed to fuss and growl in a way that was quite similar to Sampson himself.

“What nerve,” she said. “How dare you.’” Even in retelling the story, Charles felt his heart begin to race. It was because he could only know in retrospect about the series of misfortunes that lay ahead. The domino effect of disaster had begun and was now threatening to capsize the natural order of his world, and none of this was as clear to him as it was right then, at a police station, on a Tuesday evening.

“So, is that about the point that her husband got involved?” Officer Portly asked.

Yes, that’s when the greasy motherfucker got involved, Charles thought. The dominos were toppling uncontrollably now.

To Officer Portly he said “Yes, that’s when Mr. Stratford got involved.” He didn’t describe to Officer Portly the troublesome quality of Mr. Stratford’s glare. Troublesome precisely because it was so empty: behind the glare was a tired indifference, a glare that came not out of personal interest in the context of the argument, but rather in the desire to cut Charles down, just because he could. He didn’t tell Officer Portly about how the look reminded him of the look his father gave him when he came home after getting caught tagging the gym back when he was twelve, his cold gaze as he lowered his paper, as if this incident had only cemented his decision that his son was a verifiable disappointment.

“And what did he do after he looked over at you?” Officer Portly said.

Christ this room is small, Charles thought. He wanted to suspend the moment, put it on pause, and step outside into the hot, smoggy night and catch his breath. Portly’s steady gaze, however, told him that this would not be an option. “Well,” Charles said, “his wife told him about what I said, about the dog not being able to understand her, and then he looked at me and said ‘you told my wife that the dog couldn’t understand her? What kind of faggot says that?”

“So that’s when you punched him.”

“No, that’s not when I punched him.” Charles felt his blood pressure begin to rise.

He looked at Officer Portly’s bald head, glistening under the bright overhead light, the donut crumbs dangling from his lips, and his dull, unsympathetic squint, and Charles felt sorry for himself, sorry that it had come down to this, to dealing with another person who just wouldn’t listen. “I didn’t do anything,” Charles insisted. “I mean, after he called me the- the ‘f’ word I just looked at him for a moment and said ‘what did you say?’ and then he looked at me and said ‘I said you are a fucking faggot. My wife can talk to her dog whenever she feels like it.’ And then he went back to Tetris.”

“So that’s when you punched him.”

Yes, but it was so much more than that. It wasn’t just punching a man, but all he represented. His gelled back hair, his cruel indifference. His ability to cut a person down with one comment, carelessly taking a Jenga block away from the tower of pride that Charles stood on and then turning his back as the entire thing came crumbling down. Going back to playing Tetris, or picking a lock, or doing whatever these cruel people did after they had ruined someone’s day with a scathing comment and disappeared, once again, into their mundane, indifferent routines. Charles felt that his punch was a necessary act of defiance, that he was breaking through the comfort zone of these assholes who were as omnipresent in New York as rodents, who were rodents, the same rodents who he opened the door for day in and day out, the people who never acknowledged him except if they wanted to be fanned. And in his mind, this all unraveled into a yarn that made some kind of cognitive sense, that made the punch not only excusable but also admirable.

He didn’t say this to Officer Portly though.

“Charles,” Officer Portly said. “Charles, is that when you punched him?”

Charles put his head down. “Yes,” he said.

At that moment there was a knock on Officer Portly’s window. He got up, opened the door, and started talking to another officer outside. Their conversation was mumbled, and Charles wasn’t paying attention anyway, instead focusing on curling up inside of himself, feeling the blood rush to his head.

“Sit tight, Charles,” Officer Portly said. “I’ll be right back.”

He shut the door, and as it locked behind him, Charles looked down at the floor, and then at the cream color walls. He looked at his phone, seizing this as the perfect opportunity to call Suzanne, but the phone had run out of battery. His heart began to race as he pictured how angry his wife would be at him. His mind went down a corridor that faced two possibilities. The first was that he would borrow Officer Portly’s phone and tell Suzanne to come bail him out, but the thought of her trudging into the police station, her hair frizzy from the sticky heat and her eyes frazzled at the sight of Charles hunched over in a plastic chair, was enough to make his stomach drop. The other option was that he would be able to leave on probation, with the understanding that he would be required to complete anger management classes and community service. He imagined walking through the hot New York night, inhaling his freedom until it threatened to suffocate him, before descending into the underground of the subway. He would then resurface and walk the few extra blocks home, trudging up the stairs to his apartment building until he approached his front door. He found himself unable to imagine Suzanne or the boys’ reaction in this scenario, or the words he would even be able to string together to tell them. He could only go so far as up to the door.