By Sal Difalco
1
“Empty your pockets,” the officer says. His thick black moustache distracts me. Stalinesque, in a word. I could never grow such a moustache. He repeats his command. I empty my pockets. What do I have in those pockets? Forty dollars—one twenty, one ten, two fives—in a silver billfold I received as a groom’s gift for Sam Perri’s wedding. That was twenty years ago. I still see Sam on occasion, but everything else has changed since then. It’s a different world, I’m a different man. Some loose silver: quarters, dimes, nickels. We got rid of pennies long ago. A red lighter. The red leans toward orange and yet is not orange. What is that colour precisely? I don’t know. A receipt from Shoppers Drug Mart for toiletries and a bag of russet potato chips. Another receipt from Phipp’s Bakery for a blueberry scone. A ginger lozenge free from its wrapper and collecting a beard of lint. A small steel cylinder containing one gram of Afghani-adjacent hashish. “What’s this?” the officer asks, holding the cylinder up to the caged lightbulb of the interrogation room. “Hashish,” I say. “You know,” he says, “just a few years ago I could have busted your ass for this.” I want to say, “The law is a bitch, my friend,” but think better of it. Legalizing cannabis may have been the greatest thing my country has ever done. “You think you’re smart, eh?” the officer says. “No smarter than average,” I reply, speaking the truth as I know it. “Well, you’re in big trouble now,” he says. “How so?” I ask. “I think you know,” he says. But I have no clue.
2
As a matter of fact, I’m held overnight without explanation. I share a cell with two interchangeable long-haired thugs who boast of robbing a convenience store. “Ever robbed a convenience store, bro?” one asks. I don’t answer him. Not to be rude, but to show how honestly indifferent I am to his reality. “What are you in for, bro?” he asks. I look at him and look at my hands. “He’s a mute,” says his cohort, reclining on the dented aluminum bench. Both chuckle. The yellow cinderblocks of the cell anger me for some reason. Is yellow a triggering color? I thought red was the winner of that contest. Show a bull a red cape and what happens? But I’m not a bull. The first fellow eyeballs me. “You look like you want to beef,” he says. “He looks like he wants to beef,” he repeats to his friend. I don’t quite know what he means. I don’t have a beef with him, if that’s what he’s implying, at least not for the time being, though I suspect that within a minute or two I will have a beef with both him and his amigo. “He has mean eyes,” says the amigo, sitting up. I know I have mean eyes. I’ve been told that many times during the course of my life. Even as a young lad I was told I had an unfriendly look about me. This often led to fisticuffs or beatings from older people. But I am mean. I am a mean man, and I own that shit. And I like myself just fine. You want me to list a few real monsters? No need, huh. We all know who they are and how we compare to them. “Hey,” I say, “you want me to show you how mean I really am?” Both say nothing. Good for them. A little dust up would have been gratifying, but they saved me the clean-up and potential further charges. “You guys are lucky,” I say.
3
Luck has nothing to do with it, some might argue. Who the some are remains unknown. If we maintain the thread and not break from the dream, perhaps we will end on a satisfying note. Otherwise, preserve the wanking for the lads at the pub over pints of flat Guinness. The pending charges fell away after further investigation. Without looking back at parts one and two, and with a memory scored by pinholes caused by drug abuse and congenital cognitive issues, I suspect the officers were lovers mid-spat who decided to make sport with me for a while as a diversion from their own supper of eels. Later they stripped nude and wrestled on a mat they kept for such moments. I state that with no judgment save an aesthetic one. I have no beef with cops. It is impossible to know what goes on in the minds of others, what gears and wheels crank and spin in their braincases. My friend Malvolio, who recently self-published a collection of poetry, tells me that the key to life is not trying to figure out what everyone is thinking, or attempting to determine the motivations of people. “People are idiots,” Malvolio says. “We have barely evolved, emotionally speaking, since the cave man.” Malvolio’s poetry leaves me cold, I must say, as does most poetry written these days. This is not the fault of the poets. It is the fault of social media and politicians and systemic bias. I had to pause for a moment to wipe a speck from my eye. I’m sorry. It’s easy to blame the world for our mediocrity. As mentioned earlier, I am a mean man. I feel mean and say mean things. I’ve been told that enough times and am self-aware enough to realize the validity of this assessment. I’m not violent, just mean. But if there is room in this world for mediocre poets is there not room in it for a mean man? As a matter of fact, most people get away with meanness every day—look around you—but none would admit to being mean. I admit it. Why should I be shunned by the world for being true to myself when everyone else thinks they merit a parade just for being?
Sal Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.