Some single malts go down smoother than others. I’m mostly a Highlands kind a guy, and stay away from the peaty malts altogether. Balvenie 15 is what they had at the local store, and that will work just fine. Typical of us arrogant gringos selling Mexico short. I, of all people, should know better. Now where were we?
Discussing the murky lines of distinction between me and the guy I share these ruminations with. I was about to say that he and I are both counter-punchers and veritable Jacks-in-the-boxes, meaning neither of us plays true to type and often winds up being the surprise at the bottom of the box when the shit hits the fan. Where his calm, detached and cerebral outer crust conceals the volcanic core within, I’m the opposite, a volatile avenger eager to wage total war on the drop of a dime. That’s often a calculated overreaction on my part that can buy me the measured detachment essential in my line of work. He’s soft on the outside, hard underneath, where I’m the opposite: Kevlar exterior with a softer, kinder interior. But please, keep your trap shut. You’ll ruin my professional reputation as a hard-nosed equalizer, and I’ve still got a daughter in college and a Fat Tuesday sized mortgage on a Greenwich Village brownstone to pay off.
If you were to put me and my author together you’d probably wind up with a whole person, and therein lays the key dynamic to this duet he and I are playing in this journal. Some would call it a variation on the ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine, or maybe it’s really more an alternating current of ‘Hide and Seek’ on one hand and ‘Show and Tell’ on the other. Like I said, that’s for you to sort out.
Neither one of us is so much offended by the snap judgments our outer guises prompt as we are amused by them. Take the incident with the rookie cop I took exception with in the opening of my last case, Portrait of Deadly Excess. I appear on the scene and instantly become a large, read threatening, black man (being half of anything doesn’t count when you’re any part black) in a predominantly white world and therefore probably guilty of something. Why do we persist in being so inherently dishonest about race in America? Let’s be real here for a moment and call shit what it is. The rookie saw me as suspicious on sight simply because I was black, and took it as his personal mission from God to discover the crime I had inevitably committed. Nothing else mattered. Not my past, my education, my training, the fact that I was a former cop myself and close friends of the owner of the house I was visiting; only his stereotypical perception of me, and his reaction to it, entered into his ‘thinking’.
Admittedly, I’ve been known to have that effect on people. I take jaded pleasure in the reactions I prompt, but that’s not something my author would know much about. Not directly, at least. He’s a somewhat self-contained loner by nature who can fit in well enough but prefers not to. Go figure. He doesn’t want to run with the herd. He’s too guarded and self-conscious in public to mix well with others, whereas I figure I’m a marked man from square one and tend not to give a shit whether you like me or not. If I have business with you you’ll deal with me, regardless. I’m big and bad enough to force the issue. Guess the time I spent being a half this and half that high wire act paid some dividends after all. I take a twisted sort of pride fucking with the heads of those who fuck with me. Despite outward appearances to the contrary, I’m usually very much in control. Oh, I’ve been known to teeter on the wire. Sometimes that’s an act, inviting others to make a mistake by trying to exploit a perceived weakness, sometimes I really am damaged goods in desperate need of a pit stop, but you, dear friends, and the proverbial bad guys will never know which is which. I’ve become adept at maintaining the illusion I’m always rock solid, a pillar of strength and stability as good as the gold sitting in the vaults at Fort Knox. You may hurt me, but you’ll be the last one to know it, and many have learned the hard way that hurting me and stopping me aren’t the same thing.
My balancing act sometimes makes me feel like that tightrope walker in Thus Spake Zarathustra, tenuously prancing high above the crowd. In Nietzsche’s parable the tightrope walker was crossing over from one tower to another and ultimately fell, but that’s one of the few places where he and I part company. Screw that! I’m no bridge over troubled water, nor am I pretending to be a mixed-race poster child begging sympathy. I just don’t walk the line, like some Johnny Cash wannabe, I live it. Where I’m going is as irrelevant as where I’ve been. It’s only where I am, here, this minute, that matters. No origins, no destinations, just journey. Think about it. Given all you do and don’t know about me, could I play the hand I was dealt any other way?
Welcome to my world, where falling down isn’t an option. Like the self-contained chick in the Bob Dylan song, I never stumble because I’ve got no place to fall.
How about you?
