I tried to interrupt here, to say, “Forget it, son.” Tell him firmly that I wasn’t going to do it. No way could he afford me. I didn’t want to touch this case. I couldn’t believe this poor kid was willing to give all his money away. I already hated the woman. Damn right she was guilty and a bad person!
He said that the problem was the police report, which the judge and jury would read. They would pre-convict her because it was distorted and full of lies. He thought I could get her off by showing that his arrest was false, that the report of hers was libelous, the cop she hit was brutal, the arresting officer was psychotic, evidence had definitely been planted. He was convinced that I could discover that they had made other false arrests and had histories of brutality.
He had more to say about how I should handle this case. I can’t explain why I didn’t blow up, tell him to get lost. He argued passionately and well. He should have been a lawyer.
I didn’t just like him. I even began to see that spending his entire inheritance was a necessary rite of passage. A heroic, noble gesture.
It was as if Jesse were from another age, another planet. He even said at some point that the woman called him “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” This made me feel better about her somehow.
I told Elena to cancel a meeting and an appointment. He spoke all morning, simply and clearly, about their relationship, about her arrest.
I am a defense attorney. I’m cynical. I am a material person, a greedy man. I told him I would take the case for nothing.
“No. Thank you,” he said. “Just please tell her that you’re doing it for no charge. But it’s my fault she got into this trouble and I want to pay for it. What will it be? Five thousand? More?”
“Two thousand,” I said.
“I know that’s too low. How about three?”
“Deal,” I said.
He took off one of his boots and counted off twenty warm hundred dollar bills, fanned them out on my desk like cards. We shook hands.
“Thanks for doing this, Mr. Cohen.”
“Sure. Call me Jon.”
He settled back down and filled me in.
He and his friend Joe were dropouts, had run away from New Mexico last year. Jesse played the guitar, wanted to play in San Francisco. On his eighteenth birthday he was to inherit money from an old woman in Nebraska (another heartbreaking story). He had planned to go to London where he had been asked to join a band. An English group had played in Albuquerque, liked his songs and guitar playing. He and Joe had no place to stay when they got to the Bay area, so he looked up Ben, who had been his best friend in junior high. Ben’s mother didn’t know they were runaways. She said it was okay for them to stay awhile in the garage. Later she found out and called their parents, calmed the parents down, told them they were doing fine.
It had all worked out. He and Joe did yard work and hauling, other odd jobs. Jesse played with other musicians, was writing songs. They got along great with Ben and with his mother Carlotta. She appreciated how much time Jesse spent with her youngest kid Saul, taking him to ball games, fishing, climbing at Tilden. She taught school and worked hard, was glad too for help with laundry and carrying groceries and dishes. Anyway, he said, it was a good arrangement for everybody.
“I had met Maggie about three years before. They called her to our junior high in Albuquerque. Somebody had put acid in Ben’s milk at lunch. He freaked out, didn’t know what was happening. She came to get him. They let me and Joe go with her, in case he got violent. I thought she was going to take him to a hospital, but she drove us all down by the river. The four of us sat in the rushes, watching red-winged blackbirds, calming him down and actually helping him have a pretty cool trip. Maggie and I got along fine, talking about birds and the river. I usually don’t talk much but with her there is always a lot I need to say.”
I turned a recorder on at this point.
“So we stayed a month at their house in Berkeley, then another month. At night we’d all sit around the fire talking, telling jokes. Joe had a girlfriend by then and so did Ben so they’d go out. Ben was still a senior and he sold his jewelry and rock star photos on Telegraph, so I didn’t see him much. Weekends I’d go to the marina or the beach with Saul and Maggie.”
“Excuse me. This report says her name is Carlotta. Who’s Maggie?”
“I call her Maggie. At nights she’d grade papers and I’d play my guitar. We talked all night sometimes, our whole life stories, laughing, crying. She and I are both alcoholics, which is bad if you look at it one way, but good if you look at how it helped us say things to each other that we had never told anybody before. Our childhoods were scary and bad in exactly the same way, but like negatives of each other’s. When we got together her kids freaked out, her friends said it was sick, incestuous. We are incestuous but in a weird way. It’s like we are twins. The same person. She writes stories. She does the same thing in her stories that I do in my music. Anyway, every day we knew one another more deeply, so that when we finally ended up in bed it was as if we had already been inside each other. We were lovers for two months before I was supposed to leave. The idea was to get my money in Albuquerque on December 28th, when I turned eighteen, and then go to London. She was making me go, said I needed the experience and we needed to split.
“I didn’t want to go to London. I may be young but I know what she and I have together is galaxies beyond regular people. We know each other in our souls, all the bad and the good. We have a kindness to each other.”
He told me then the story of going to the airport with her and Joe. Joe’s belt knife and zippers had turned on the alarm at security, all three were strip-searched and Jesse missed the plane. He was hollering about his guitar and music being on the plane, got put into handcuffs, was being beaten by the police when Maggie came in.
“We all got arrested. It’s in the report,” he said. “The newspaper headline was “Lutheran Schoolteacher, Hell’s Angels in Airport Brawl.”
“Are you a Hell’s Angel?”
“Of course not. But the report says I am. Joe looks like one, wishes he was. He must of bought ten copies of that paper. Anyway, she and Joe went to jail in Redwood City. I spent a night in juvenile hall and then they sent me to New Mexico. Maggie phoned me on my birthday and told me everything was fine. She didn’t say a word about any trial, and she didn’t tell me she had been evicted and fired, that her ex-husband was taking her kids to Mexico. But Joe did, even though she told him not to. So I came back here.”
“How did she feel about that?”
“She was furious. Said I had to leave and go to London. That I needed to learn and to grow. And she was believing all the shit about her being bad because I was seventeen when we got together. I seduced her. Nobody seems to get that part, except her. I’m not your typical teenager.”
“True,” I said.
“But anyway we are together now. She agreed not to decide anything until after the trial. Not to look for a job or a place. What I’m hoping is by that time she’ll go away with me.”
He handed me the police report. “The best thing is for you to read this and then we’ll talk. Come over for dinner. Friday ok? After you’ve read this. Maybe you can find out something about the cop. Both cops. Come early,” he said,
