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010 – Samuel
Samuel has been working for me for three years now. I’d met him when he was an aide at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts in the fall of 1980. There were about a dozen aides who worked on the wards as trustees. All were men serving life without parole sentences for first-degree murder. All were let out of prison for six hours each weekday on an unpaid work release programs.Samuel had been born Black and poor in Virginia, one of seven children. It really is no excuse. After high school he’d joined the U.S. Coast Guard, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but he was a bit of a misfit, smarter than the others, and not just a little lost. It was while in the Coast Guard that he began hanging out in Boston: women, a little smoke, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Adrift. He and his best friend, Digger, decided to stick up the bar at the Holiday Inn on Massachusetts Ave. outside Central Square in Cambridge one November after midnight. It was ill conceived and more impulsive than well reasoned. They waited until the bar was empty. They nursed their beers. The bar tender served them a last round. Digger pulled out a pistol. Sam claims he didn’t know Digger was even carrying. The bar tender drew a gun. They each fired and the bartender was dead. He had a wife and two young children. Sam was shot in the exchange of fire and ran bleeding from the bar. They’d taken all of two hundred dollars. The FBI knew who he was immediately by his fingerprints on the beer bottles. He became a fugitive and was successfully a fugitive for years. Traveled in fear but without incident. When they finally caught him the Middlesex County prosecutors offered to give him a second-degree murder sentence if he were to plead guilty and give them the name of his accomplice and best friend. Fifteen years to life seemed as long as life then. The disloyalty was too unbearable. He took the case to trial and lost, as he knew he must. There simply was no alternative. And in the end he found himself in state’s prison for the remainder of his natural life without the possibility of parole.
007 – Confession
Yvonne tells me the following story. It is the story she told the police. Perhaps she didn’t remember my telling her not to talk to anyone.
The police found her at her girlfriend’s apartment. They took her downtown to the lockup on “suspicion of murder.” They read her the Miranda warnings. They offered her a lawyer. They told her things would go better for her if she told them the truth. They told her they knew she didn’t shoot Vernald. Then they turned on the tape recorder. They read her the Miranda warnings again. They told her she could have a lawyer, that they would stop asking her questions any time she wished to. They asked if she knew she was being recorded and if she was giving her permission for them to record her testimony voluntarily, and freely, and without threat or coercion or promise. And she nodded her head yes. And they said, “You have to answer audibly, Yvonne, because the tape recorder does not pick up your nods. Is you answer to my last question ‘yes’?” And she answered, “Yes.” The trap doors closed.
The police asked her to tell them if she knew what had happened to Vernald. And she told them. Gave them what they wanted, her tape recorded statement. Sealed her fate.
She had been at the apartment with Vernald and he was beating her. Not viciously enough to draw blood, or to send her to the hospital as he had in the past, just smacking her around, slapping her in the face, punching her in the arms, squeezing her breasts painfully. He kicked her in the ass. He hit her across the mouth with his backhand.
She had been up all night taking tricks downtown. Gave a guy a blowjob in his car. Went down for a guy in another car. Let some funny looking dude from the suburbs unbutton her blouse, unhook her brassiere, rub her breasts, lay his head on her breasts. She jerked him off. He was afraid of disease he said. She had a beer or two. A snort of cocaine. Nothing much. Just trying to pass the time. She worked alone. Came home at about five. Caught a little sleep until Vernald woke up and wanted company and just started messing with her. Was in one of his unfathomable rages. Told her “get outta bed, bitch,” and when she didn’t pulled her out naked. She wrapped the sheet around her. Held it to her with her arms tucked inside. Vernald hit her. Hit her again. Stormed around the apartment. Threw an empty beer can at her. Called her “cunt.” Called her, “whore.” Said she was a no good black bitch. Said she was holding money back on him. Opened the window and took all her clothing that had been laying on the side of the bed and threw it into the street.
She was pissed. Angry. Pulled on a pair of Vernald’s jeans, his floppy old gray sweatshirt and her high heels and was out the door. “Fuck you, Vernald, you bastard,” she said.
When she’d gotten out onto the to street she’d run into her brother, Oren.
“What the fuck happened to you, Yvonne,” he’d asked her. She told him.
“I’m gonna get my piece and scare the shit out of that motherfucker,” Oren said.
Yvonne and Oren go down the street to where Oren’s gun is hidden under a dumpster. They walk quickly back to Vernald’s apartment. Yvonne tells the cops, she knocked and said, “It’s Yvonne, you bastard.” The door is opened. “What the fuck,” swears Vernald when he sees Oren. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says when he sees the handgun. He and Oren speak fast. They yell. Their words are filled with anger and self righteous rage. Three tiny spent brass bullet casings are later recovered. The rest is history.
006 – The Suffolk County Courthouse
I enter the Suffolk County Courthouse. Court officers looking at women are lazily scanning the metal detector. This is definitely not federal court. The old courthouse is an absolutely amazing architectural structure and every time I walk into it I feel as sense of awe. I know it’s corny, but I do. The courtyard has the first fourteen amendments to the Constitution cemented into it as a walkway leading to the stairs leading to the entrance to the courthouse. Big bronze Roman numerals are embedded in the concrete. It is like the tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. Sometimes I walk around them out of respect for the law, not wanting to trample the high and revered principles they espouse. Other times I walk right across them. Intentionally. Sometimes I feel I am trampling on the law because it is so irrational and unjust. At other times I feel the message and intent of the law being seared into the soles of my feet. I am inhaling the law into my body. From the roots to the brains, traversing my body like blood.
Paul Digiaccomo is one of the nicer court officers. Can’t be more than five foot three inches tall. Waddles when he walks. Easily, or not so easily, weighs more than three hundred pounds. Once I watched as he dieted for months down to a very reasonable one eighty. It was amazing to see him shrinking before my eyes every day I came to court. He was on a liquid diet. I remember him being so proud of himself. And then in no time at all, literally no time, a month maybe, he was back up to three twenty. Don’t ask me how it happened. Too much pasta I suspect. But Paulie’s smile is still real. Every day it is real. He’s not one of these “good morning, counselor” guys. It’s “Hi, Todd, how ya doin’?” Every day. To everyone.
“Who’s in the First Session, Paulie?”
“Burns,” he says and he groans.
“She’s a piece of work now, isn’t she,” Digiacomo says, “a lesbian, which I don’t care about one way or the other, but man is she also not a very pleasant person, a down right ignorant person, if you ask me, can’t make her mind up half the time, I swear I don’t know how she gets dressed in the morning, and besides that she’s ugly, but hey, that’s just one man’s opinion.”
“Thanks for the encouraging words,” I say.
I sit in the jury box with the comfortable seats waiting for our case to be called. Time passes. Lots of time. I schmooze with other attorneys who come in and out of the session on status conferences. I read back copies of appellate court decisions. I marvel at the stupendous waste of time, at the arcane process for the processing of criminal defendants through the system. The wheels grind slowly and frankly only partially fine.
Yvonne comes up into the dock. I go to stand next to her. Our case is called. The prosecutor says the police responded to a shooting and found Vernald Jackson, aged twenty-two, sometimes pimp and full time punk dead in Yvonne’s apartment. There are three bullet holes in poor Vernald’s back. His sneakers are untied. The homicide detectives at the scene think the loss of life is no big deal. It is finding the preps, completing the puzzle, filling in the colors, that turns them on. Find the bad guy. Get more scum off the street. Just doing their job. All of this takes two minutes. Yvonne pleads not guilty. It is a capital case. The defendant has a history of defaults. Bail reduction is denied. A pre trial conference date is set. The next case is called.
004 – One of those Days
It’s one of those days. I’m up at six A.M. and out in my car in the fifteen-degree morning and at exercise class by seven. The heat in the studio didn’t work. I could see my breath indoors. The instructor’s nipples were firmly pressing against her tee shirt for the entire hour. Not that I noticed. I was in the office with a bagel and juice by nine. The phone rang. And rang. And didn’t stop ringing until five in the afternoon when I forwarded my calls to the answering service. That kind of day, when the phone is never out of my ear and I never leave my chair except to visit the men’s room. People come in to visit without appointments. Old clients. New clients. I sense the business is booming. Not that I’m making money, thank you, just that business is booming. I put people off. I don’t take their calls. Prisoners call collect to talk about anything with someone outside. Stockbrokers. Relatives. Friends. Old clients. Claim adjusters. I tell Katrina to say I’m out of the office. “I hate lying,” she says, “I’m going to go to hell for this Todd. I want a raise.” I beg people to call me later in the week. “I don’t want to blow you off, Charlie, but I’m having one of those Mondays. You’ll call back mid week, okay? Promise? Take care.” I triaged my calls. I attended only to potential new clients. There are a dozen new client calls if there are any. Katrina brings in the mail she’s opened by ten a.m. I never finish reading it before leaving at nine that night. I see my son in his bed being read to by his loyal lovely mother just as his eyes closed. These are the bread and butter days. I don’t really mind them, except when they preclude my other pleasures and endeavors. Most of all I remember perking up when I hear it is Yvonne calling. I can smell her too, “Please, Mr. Lawyerman. I been busted. Please come get me out of here.”
003 – My offices
I’ve had my offices in the same building for twenty years. Don’t ask me why, it just happened that way. The building is squeezed in next to some big old department stores, not far from the red-light district, and surrounded by the downtown building boom. It’s amazing what happens when yuppie urban planners and real estate developers turn old cobblestone streets into a mall. I’m on the fourth floor in a corner office. Really sort of nice once you’re inside. Cool in color, awake to the street below, oriental rugs, a framed print of the Constitution given to me as a Christmas gift by my young partner in crime, an infrared photo of Cape Cod from space, a lithograph of the port of Boston in the eighteen hundreds, the picture of F.D.R. that adorned the vestibule to my parent’s apartment in Newark.
When I got out of law-school I was forty years old and not such a desirable commodity. I’d worked as a hospital administrator for years and there were simply no law jobs for forty year old freshmen lawyers with a background in hospital administration. So when I was finally offered a position paying less than half of what I made at the hospital I took it and worked for nine months with an in-house insurance defense outfit. I felt I really had no choice. And I learned a lot. That firm was a little like being in a MASH army field hospital. There were lots of cases needing attention, thousands of cases, with more coming in all the time. American Field Insurance Group represented mostly taxi companies. The insurance side of the company had actually been established fifty years ago when the immigrant founder of the taxi companies got tired of paying someone else for his mandatory auto insurance premiums. So he started his own insurance company. And then he bought garages and parking lots and real estate and before you knew it he was ninety years old, many times over a millionaire, and the proud possessor of the first nickel he had ever earned or stolen.
002 – Yvonne
I drive to Yvonne mother’s home through neighborhoods I haven’t been in for years, streets that haven’t changed a bit, one, two, and three family houses, some boarded up, shingled, every one, once a working class neighborhood, now just poor, yards with fences and dogs barking behind them, nobody on the street in daylight.
I stand on the porch and knock at the door of the first floor apartment. I hear someone coming down the hall on crutches. “She’s a looker,” Crawford had said to me, but I’m still unprepared for the stark beauty of Yvonne Smith. A junkie no doubt, probably a sometime whore, twenty-five or six perhaps. Angry. Or is it only guarded? Skinny. Sexy. Five foot seven maybe, with gorgeous dark skin, dark eyes, and tight straight hair pulled back in a bun. A loose black shirt is buttoned up to the middle of her sternum between her breasts. I see her taught nipples when she leans over on her crutches. I note the tingling in my lips. I remember the story a doctor friend told me of how he compulsively peeked down his female patients’ shirts and stared down their blouses even after he’d completed their physical exams.
Yvonne’s wearing impossibly tight jeans cut off below the knee on the right leg so she can get them on over her cast. Bare footed. Her toenails are painted red. The skin on her face glistens. She wears no makeup. Her lips are full. She sticks the tip of her tongue out between them when she’s thinking. Who is this person, I have the space to wonder. Where is she from? What is she really like?
“Come on in mister lawyerman, I thought you’d never come by to visit me.”
“Well, I couldn’t get you to come to my office. And you said you had to see me or you’d go to another lawyer. And the court hearing for the fellow who was driving the pickup that ran over you is this Thursday. And I know you’ve been talking to the people from the district attorney’s office. And you’re going to give testimony under oath. So here I am.”
“Come in then. Let’s go to the kitchen and sit down, please.”
I follow her down an empty hallway, past a closed bedroom door on the right. There are no posters or pictures on the hallway wall. The light from the kitchen guides me.
“Pardon the mess. This here’s my mother.”
“Ma’am. Pleased to meet you.”
“Same here.”
“Nice little apartment,” I say.
“Oh not really,” says Yvonne’s mother, “but kind of you to say. I can never get the maintenance people to do anything”
There are so few clients who connect with me on a real level and here are two women who I sense are talking with me as straight as if we were long time friends.
“You want some instant coffee Mr. Benjamin?”
“Please call me Todd. No thanks. I really haven’t got a lot of time, but I did bring a copy of the police report and I’d like to go over it with you.”
“Well that’s fine, but I want a coffee. Say momma would you pour me some hot water please into this cup?”
“Sure, Sugar.”
“Okay, go ahead mister lawyerman, your time is more valuable than mine’s.”
I let that slide.
“Well, here are the police reports,” I say, pulling the folded photocopies from the inner pocket of my suit jacket. “And here is the interesting part from the first one. You see here where it says ‘description of accident’ how it says … no better let me read it to you. ‘Officers on routine patrol in the B104 car receive radio call of woman down on Seaver at Forest. Twenty-six year old black female in obvious distress laying in roadway crying with manifest ankle injuries. Victim states she was thrown from truck and tires ran her over. Called 911. EMT’s arrived for transport to City Hospital.’”
“Yeah, well that’s what happened. It did.”
“I believe you, but what I want to focus on here is the phrase ‘victim states she was thrown from truck.’ But before we do that let me also read you what officer Collins said after his visit with you at the hospital.”
“Victim, Yvonne Smith, age 26, states she was waiting for bus when picked up by unknown stranger. States driver, black male, six one, 180 pounds, 30 years old, light skin, baseball hat, no recalled scars, stopped and offered ride. Says she wanted to go to Brookside and he headed toward downtown. Tried to get out and he wouldn’t let her. Pushed on door of moving vehicle. Fell out landing on right shoulder and run over by rear tires. Could ID.”
“Interesting, no?” I say. “Because in this report it says, ‘pushed on door of moving vehicle and fell out,’ which makes it hard to place the blame squarely on the driver.”
“Well, but that’s exactly what happened. I told you.”
“I understand that’s exactly what happened, and I don’t want you to lie, but remember what I told you, that if it wasn’t an accident you won’t recover any money. If you’re interested in pursuing a criminal complaint it’s one thing, and we would treat that differently, and you wouldn’t need me as your lawyer. But if what we’re trying to do is recover money then this has to have been an accident. Now couldn’t you have just leaned against the door and it sprang open and you fell out.”
“Well, that’s exactly what happened.”
“Or maybe you were partially out the door when he accelerated and took off and that caused you to fall.”
“Yeah, well it was like that also.”
“Good.” I say. And then I say some more.
001 – Telephone
The first time I spoke with her was by phone, in mid-September. I remember the Red Sox had just lost a critical game to the Yankees. Pedro Martinez had thrown eight brilliant innings and the Sox had scored no runs. They lost one zip. I got to the office early Monday morning after my run and before I even closed the door, Katrina, the paralegal from hell, yelled out from the library, “Someone looking for a good lawyer, I told her to try another number, pick up on line two.” A little commentary about my competency made over our technologically sophisticated intercom.
“Todd Benjamin,” I say into the phone.
“Mr. Benjamin, I’m looking for a lawyer.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a lawyer, right?”
It always starts this way, very sharp on the probing repartee.
“Yes I am ma’am, how can I help you?”
“Well where do I start? It’s such a long story and I’m not sure what to do.”
“Why don’t you just try to tell me what you want to tell me about how you hope a lawyer can help you.” I yawn, barely containing my impatience.
“Well, I had a little accident the other day and I saw your name in the Yellow Pages and want to know if you can help me.”
“Maybe I can, and maybe I can’t ma’am, but I have to know what it is you’re talking about. What kind of accident was it? Where did it happen? How did it happen?”
“Well, you see, I was waiting for the bus when this guy came up to the bus stop in a big truck and asked if I wanted a ride. And I sort of knew him, or had seen him around, so I got in. And then we drive somewhere I didn’t want to go. I know the city, and he is way the hell away from where I was going, and I tell him “stop and let me out.” But he didn’t. So I opened the door and he grabbed onto my belt and then he let go of my belt and sort of pushed me and I fell out of the truck and the rear tires ran over my ankle.”
“Tell me your name please.”
“Yvonne.”
“Yvonne what?”
“Smith.”
“And where do you live, Ms. Smith?”
“Well, you see, I’m calling from the hospital, and I had to have two operations, and I don’t think I’m going be able to keep my apartment, and I’m going to have to live up with my mother again, and I don’t want to.”
“And what is your mother’s address?” I ask. She clear has my attention.
“How much is this going to cost me, mister lawyer?”
“Nothing Ms. Smith. The way I work on accident cases like yours is that I don’t charge anything for my time and effort unless I’m successful in recovering money for my client.” Here comes the spiel, it’s rote by now. “… and if I do recover money for you, then I get one third of the money we recover and you get two thirds of the money, but if we get nothing then my time and effort cost you nothing. Now tell me, did the police investigate the accident?”
“Well, yes and no.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well they came to my hospital room to talk to me.”
“I see. And did the police also come to the scene of the accident?”
“Well, that I don’t know, you see I was hurt pretty bad and the ambulance came and took me to the City Hospital before they was any police there at all that I know of.”
“And who called the ambulance if you know?”
“Well I don’t, you see.”
“Alright, I understand Ms. Smith, Yvonne. A case like yours can get complicated fast, even though it’s only an auto accident. And I think, if I’m hearing you correctly, that you’d like to get some money to pay your medical bills and to compensate you for the pain and the injuries you’ve suffered in this accident. Am I right?”
“You got that right.”
“Right. And there are just so many things that can go wrong in a case of this kind that would make it hard for you to collect that money, just so many things, that you really must retain a lawyer. Whether its me or some one else, its important that you have legal counsel representing you, making sure that you get the money you deserve, that you don’t say anything that hurts your case, that the insurance company, if there is one, treats you fairly.”
“Oh, I understand that. I’ve been hurt before. I want the money. And I’ve decided already, you’re my lawyer, mister.”
“Thank you, Ms. Smith. Okay, to start working on your case I will need you to sign certain documents. One is a contingent fee agreement which confirms there will be no fee due me from you if I am unable to successfully recover money for you but that if I do help you recover money I will be paid the one third fee we discussed.”
“That’s fair.”
“And, of course, I also need a medical release, so that I can get your medical records from City Hospital, or from any other place where you may receive treatment.”
“That’s fair too. So when are you coming out to see me?”
“Well, what I’d actually like to do Ms. Smith, Yvonne, is to send my investigator, James Crawford, out to meet with you. Mr. Crawford will have the papers for you to sign, he can get some additional information from you, take some photographs, and he will then get us a copy of the police report.”
“That sounds good.”
“Good. Now promise me that except for me and Mr. Crawford you will not talk to anyone else about this case, this accident, the circumstances that come before your accident. Nothing. To no one. Please. You can’t even talk about how you are feeling in regard to the injuries you suffered in the accident except to tell the doctors and nurses how much it hurts. You get it? Nothing related to you accident. To anyone.”
“Well, of course I did talk to the police.”
“Yes. Well in the future tell anyone who wants to talk with you about the accident, even the police, that you are represented by counsel and can’t talk to them without talking to me first. What is it you said to the police?”
“Well, like I told you, I told them I was waiting for the bus and that I went for a ride with this guy, Jeff I think his name was, and that I wanted to get out of the truck, and he didn’t want to let me get out of the truck, and then he sort of pushed me out, and the rear wheels ran over my ankle and busted it badly.”
“Alright Yvonne, please understand something. If what the man who drove the truck did was an intentional act, that is, if he purposely pushed or shoved you out of this truck, then your chances of recovering against his, or the truck owner’s insurance policy, assuming there is such a policy, are less good than if you just fell out of the truck, and the accident was a result of the truck driver or truck owner’s negligence, their lack of care under the circumstances. That’s what we mean by negligence and then you will be able to recover. You understand the difference? Because to my mind it is important for you not to say you got pushed out of the truck. Do you understand me?”
Oh I could go on. And I do. What a life this lawyering is.
Cow!
The morning we leave Summerland, after we gather the other passengers, the Japanese couple who have been traveling together for nineteen months, another Japanese woman traveling on her own for the last nine months in South and Central America who says a Maasai offered ten cows for her, and the No Way girls, who have softened considerably and are on a fifteen week post college graduation round the world tour. Titus is moving at a good clip, as all the drivers seem to do, dancing around pot holes, passing on the inside of the road, missing sheep, goats, gazelles, and dogs by inches. One of the No Way girls asks Titus if he has ever killed anything in the roadway and he says righteously, “Never.”
We cross the equator line from the southern into the northern hemisphere on our way to visit Lake Bogoria, home of the famed pink flamingos who line the shores like a Christo wrapping and who fly off as we approach them like windblown fabric torn into thousands of flapping pink pieces. We also stop at a hot spring where the water is so hot it is literally boiling, steam rising from the surface, so we can drop in a dozen eggs in a plastic bag tied to the end of a pole and ten minutes later we are peeling and eating hard-boiled eggs.
On the way back from the lake to Nairobi I tell Titus I’d like to stop to buy some of the local honey that women are selling at the side of the road, where I can see hives made of hollowed out branches about two feet long and the diameter of a big man’s upper arm, hanging in the trees with holes drilled into them that apparently invite local bees to gather within. And then I’m asleep.
I am awaked by the sound of a loud impact, as I see the van pulling hard to the right off the road. When the van stops one of the No Way girls says we hit a cow and, when I climb out of the severely dented passenger door, laying off the road on its side is an already very dead, very big, brown and white cow who breathed its last and is leaking.
The van is quite smashed up, the front left grill collapsed in, the left headlight shattered, the door caved in, but all in all still useable. A crowd gathers quickly. The focus of conversation is about who is responsible, the driver of the van or the boy guarding the cow as it grazed and who has himself run away. Did someone say tort lawyer? I’m on it. Clearly the pedestrian has the benefit of a rebuttable presumption to the right of way. But the owner of the cow cannot or refuses to be identified. And the young cowherd has run away, all of which raises the quite reasonable suspicion/inference that they are afraid of being found responsible for the damage to the van.
On the other hand, the van clearly hit the cow, there’s a sign at the side of the road right before the accident site reading “Slow, cattle and children crossing,” and Titus saw the cow at some point before impact while moving at a fairly good clip as evidenced by the fresh skid marks in the roadway. Did someone say accident reconstructionist? And, of course, no one actually knows what the behavior of the cow was before the fatal impact except Titus, and his story is that the cow burst upon the roadway quite without warning and literally ran in front of the van as Titus tried to brake, turn, and avoid impact, and there are no witnesses to contradict his version of the events.
The notion that no one knows who owned a creature worth close to $1,000 US dollars seems very odd to me. Yet everyone in the village denies any knowledge of who the owner might be. Even when the local police arrive an hour later, alighting from a civilian car they flagged down after they’d walked from the police station to the main road, about ten kilometers away (having no car of their own or police vehicle), no one comes forth to claim ownership of the cow, or to identify the cow’s owner. Village solidarity is strong; the police effort to crack the wall of silence weak. Titus is of course quite concerned because it is he who will be responsible for repair of the vehicle.
I propose that, since the owner of the dead cow cannot be identified, Titus take it in compensation for his loses, and when he tells me there is no way he can get the cow in the van (duh), I suggest we call the butcher in Lake Namuku, have him come out and butcher the cow on the spot, and give Titus fair value for the meat. Titus quite likes this idea, especially the thinking outside the box it represents, and goes to the police to run the idea passed them. But the senior policeman, who is not the most articulate fellow, says quite augustly, as if quoting familiar statute and verse, “there is no provision in our law for the removal of a dead cow.” And so we are forced to leave our only source of potential compensation bloating in the sun and to wonder who will claim/harvest the hundreds of pounds and dollars worth of meat when night descends aside from jackals.
Back on the road we stop for lunch at a restaurant that serves freshly cooked meat from its massive outdoor grill, one of three such competing restaurants with massive grills at exactly the same junction on the road, this being the only highway going north from Nairobi for truckers and tourists alike, and this is the one good highway rest stop for hours in each direction.
It is like a comic scene in a weird movie to see at least a dozen African men, all wearing tall white chefs’ hats, come running into the roadway waving with long forks, trying to direct cars pulling off the road into their respective establishments. I have no idea how we pick the restaurant we do, but before long a man is standing at our table with a couple of grilled legs of goat, cutting chunks off the legs on a wooden chopping block, then cutting the chunks into bite size pieces using his hands to pull the pieces together in small piles, then leaving them, along with a big pile of salt, on the cutting board, whereupon we all dig in with our hands to the very tough, quite tasty and chewy, pieces of meat, the smoke created by the fat of cooking meat dripping onto the ten foot long grills and into our faces as we consume a good percentage of some goat who met its own fate in its own roadway.
Dancing in Summerland
I am leaving the tent camp at Maasai Mara with two men hitching a ride with us into Narok where we are again going to lunch at the Dreaming Garden Restaurant and where I will wait to switch to another van to go off with its passengers to Lake Nakuru, while Damian and Natalia (the Argentinians) will continue on to Nairobi. Another two men will ride with us to the point in the road where their cattle transport truck got stuck in the mud and where they have contracted to meet a local tractor owner who will try to pull them out. As we are waiting to leave camp I’m seated in the passenger seat of the van with the door still open. Maasai men in traditional garb with thick bracelets around their wrists and ankles are milling about the van, chatting with the drivers, checking out the vehicle, passing time, saying goodbye. I point to the watch on the wrist of one of the Maasai men shaking hands with me. The watch has a very unusual and attractive face, and I say casually and totally unconsciously to the man pointing to his wrist, “Nice watch.” I’ll learn not to do this one of these days, because in a flash he has his watch off and is attaching it to my wrist. So I take my watch off, one of probably comparable value, a Casio, or Timex, and hand it to him. He likes my watch. It has a much nicer Velcro band than his watchband that is plastic. Another Maasai man comes over to the van; he takes off his watch and places it on my other wrist. He takes my watch from the first man. He examines it. I give his watch to the second man. A third man comes over, not to be denied a part in the action of trade, and soon watches are being examined and moving from hand to hand. I end up with all three watches while they admire mine. I give back two of the watches and keep the one I first admired. The owner of that watch takes my watch. We each put our new watches on. The van driver arrives, says “Twende,” (we go). All of the Maasai men and I shake hands. I admire my new wristwatch – ascribe it with Maasai meanings, with the pleasures of time and travel, of possessions and value, of good faith and non-attachment. It acquires significances not associated with my one time watch now adorning the wrist of a Maasai man hundreds of miles away. I feel myself to be an inordinately happy trader.
As opposed to my new driver, the loud and sometimes impatient and annoyed Titus, who is definitely not happy with his current six passengers, two of whom are a young Japanese couple, a single man, a single woman, and the two somewhat dour (shy?) young women from Norway who the driver tells me never say yes to anything he asks or suggests and will probably not tip him well, if at all. I nickname them the “No Way” girls and commit myself to getting a yes out of them by offering cookies I’ve bought, or to buy them sodas. I even ask if I can help them out of the van, or carry something for them. By the end of the day I am batting zero in my effort to get them to yes.
Titus is just not my favorite guy. He is opinionated and believes things I don’t … that Obama hates Kenya, that Tanzanians are lazy, that I should help support his kids. He is critical and annoyed with other drivers on the road. The father of three young children, two of whom are in private school, he is also very obviously trying to see what he can get out of me. Nothing ventured nothing gained.
When we get to our overnight guesthouse on the far side of Nakuru, a bustling town one hundred miles northwest of Nairobi on the main (only?) Mombasa/Nairobi road that goes to the Somali and Ugandan borders and is filled with big trucks making their runs, Titus takes me aside and asks if I trust him.
“Sure,” I say hesitantly.
“Would you like to stay at a better guesthouse, the one I stay at?” he asks. “No extra cost. Nicer rooms. Better showers. We’ll have a drink and dinner together.”
“Sure,” I say … hesitantly.
So we drive to a part of town that I would say is definitely seedy. On the way we pass what I’m sure will forever be my favorite store name in all of Africa, the “Pentagon Butchery.”
The gate to the guesthouse/motel-like structure we will arrive at is opened by one of the armed twenty-four hour security men on duty. We are again the only guests I can see and we park inside a gravel courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by the motel, a barricade, a fort. My room is meager but fine. I do yoga, have a shower, play with the functions on my new watch, do not use the hair pick left so considerately hanging next to the room mirror. Titus comes to call me for dinner around seven. We pass through a small locked gate opened by another security guard on the other side of the courtyard, pass through an open air restaurant with a few customers, pass goat carcasses hanging in the open restaurant kitchen, pass some private dining rooms, and end up seated at a table with a pool hall on one side and a bar with a big dance floor on the other. Some men are playing pool, but no one else is dining and no one is in the darkened dancehall. Titus has preordered our dinner, a big single plate of stewed chicken in a light tomato sauce, steamed spinach, which I tell him is kale (which it is), and he insists is spinach, and roasted whole potatoes that are just fabulous dipped in the sauce. There are no utensils on the table. A waitress comes over with a plastic pitcher of quite hot water and a basin. She pours hot water over our hands, which we “wash.” The meal is shared and eaten with our fingers. Titus tells me he always sits at this table so he can see people coming from all sides.
“If something is biting you it’s inside your clothing,” he says.
Titus calls his wife in Nairobi. He puts me on the phone with her. She is delightful. He next puts me on the phone with his eleven year old daughter Elizabeth who wants to be a doctor and loves science and who I encourage with all my heart to live her dream. Then I take my leave, and retire for the evening by eight, falling asleep quickly.
I am up again at midnight, awakened by fabulous throbbing music coming from the dance floor on the other side of the gate. I so want to go and see what is happening, but this exploration seems beyond even my comfort zone and sense of prudence; that I would walk into a bar somewhere in Kenya where I’ll be the only white person and watch people dancing. I don’t think so. But I so want to go. I really do. I want to see Africa. Isn’t this what I came for? So I get dressed. Then I get undressed. Then I dress, struggling gaily with myself about the potential risks and potential rewards. I think I must have taken off and put on my pants three times. I’m laughing at myself having such a good time not knowing what the hell I’m going to do and enjoying my struggle. Of course in the end my pants are on and I cannot deny myself the experience of seeing what can be seen.
I leave almost all my money in the room, taking just a little cash, my passport, and one credit card, as I head out into the night, cross the courtyard, am admitted through the small locked gate that separates the motel from the rest of the complex by an armed guard, pass tables filled with people, and enter into a totally transformed environment, the music loud and pulsing, the dance floor, complete with strobe light, in what is a very well designed bar and tables surrounding the dance floor, a night club atmosphere, busy waitresses taking drink orders, and the dance floor filled with sixty or seventy people moving in delight.
I park myself in a corner of the room, but it is not long before a quite attractive woman in a lowcut blouse finds me and asks if I want to dance. I decline. She smiles. She comes near enough to rub her leg against mine. She has a genuinely lovely smile.
“Buy me a drink?” she asks.
“I left my money in my room,” I say.
“Well let me go to your room and get it with you,” she says. I say no.
A man comes over to introduce himself. I recognize him as a guide. He says he’s headed to Maasai Mara tomorrow. We have a pleasant conversation about where I stayed in Mara, who my guide was, what animals I saw. He tells me again that he is a guide, as if I didn’t get it.
“You are about to have a real taste of Africa, my friend,” he says smiling and nodding toward the woman, “Just watch your passport and your money, I don’t want to find you crying in the morning.”
The dancers are absolutely wonderful. Mostly men are dancing with men, or dancing by themselves, or dancing with whoever is next to them. There are also women dancing, some with women, some with men, some alone. The movements are subtle, feet often hardly leaving the floor, shoulders and hips so fabulously expressive in such a narrow range. Some men dance with women whose backs are turned to them, the man’s hands on the woman’s thighs, pulling her into him as she dances and moves. Some women caress their breasts as they dance. Older men are dancing alone. Big men are dancing lithely. The strobe light magnifies the movements. The dancers seem so happy, so lost in delight.
“Welcome to Summerland,” the same woman says to me, “I’m Kendin, would you like some company tonight?”
“Well yes and no,” I say.
“Tell me three reasons why no,” Kendin says smiling coyly.
“Well one is that I have a woman at home I really really love,” I say. “Two is disease. And three is that I’m just not the kind of guy who goes off with women he meets in bars, women who go off with strangers.”
“You not fear on me,” she says, and I cannot hear if she is saying fear or fair. But it doesn’t really matter.
“Come, dance,” I say, and walk onto the dance floor where the music literally doesn’t ever pause or stop, the sound and the Afro pop beat awesome, the dancers in some state of delight, and before long so am I, other women coming near as we dance together, no one paying the slightest attention to me as best as I can tell, except for one slightly drunk man who comes over to bumps fists with me and shake my hand as Kendin leaves the dance floor, and I am alone … with about sixty other people, in a bar, in Africa, dancing in delight.
Later Kendin asks again if we can go to my room.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she says, “Just be friends. Have company. Be fear on me.”
She is thirty three, and beautiful, a beautician with a three year old son. And my answer is still no. The fact is no. Fear or fair is no. And when I say goodnight to Kendin I almost feel badly for her. Later, when the first rooster calls at four in the morning and wakes me in my room, the music is still playing.
Alan Berkman – NYT Obit
Physician, fugitive, federal prisoner, clinician to the homeless, advocate for AIDS patients. epidemiologist: That was the arc of Alan Berkman’s career.
Dr. Berkman, a Vietnam-era radical who spent eight years in prison for armed robbery and possession of explosives and who later founded Health GAP — a leader in the coalition that helped make AIDS medication available to millions in the world’s poorest countries — died in Manhattan on June 5. He was 63 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was cancer, with which he had struggled for nearly 20 years, said his wife, Dr. Barbara Zeller.
Eagle Scout; high school salutatorian; National Merit Scholar; honor student at Cornell, class of 1967; graduate of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, class of ’71; medical director of the Highbridge Woodycrest Center in the Bronx, one of the first residences designed for AIDS patients; vice chairman of the epidemiology department at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health since 2007: Those, too, are parts of Dr. Berkman’s record, along with his years working in clinics in the South Bronx, Lower Manhattan and rural Alabama.
His life was laced with an activism that went to extremes, both in the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s and into the Reagan years.
On May 23, 1985, Dr. Berkman and a friend were arrested outside Doylestown, Pa. In their car, federal agents found a pistol, a shotgun and keys to a garage that contained 100 pounds of dynamite. That day ended Dr. Berkman’s two decades of participation in radical groups, among them the Students for a Democratic Society.
Four years earlier, on Oct. 20, 1981, an offshoot of the Weather Underground had attempted to rob a Brink’s armored truck in Nyack, N.Y. In the shootout, two police officers and a guard died.
A year later, a federal grand jury investigating the case subpoenaed Dr. Berkman, who, a witness said, had treated one of the robbery defendants for a gunshot wound. When he was indicted and charged with being an accessory after the fact, Dr. Berkman jumped bail; he spent several years on the run.
While a fugitive, he entered a suburban Connecticut supermarket with a friend; they brandished revolvers, tied up the manager and stole $21,480. Prosecutors later said the money was used to buy the explosives found in Doylestown and to support other radical groups. Dr. Berkman was sentenced to 10 years in prison; he served 8.
In 1994, when a reporter for The New York Times interviewed Dr. Berkman at El Rio, a clinic in the South Bronx where he was treating drug-addicted parolees, the doctor, too, was on parole.
“There is plenty to learn from all the mistakes we made,” he said at the time, referring to his radical colleagues. “Power is corrupting. And the use of violence is a form of power. People motivated to stop the suffering of others have to be careful not be caught up in the same dynamics.”
He changed his dynamics, not his motivation. In 1995, he became a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia, working with mentally ill homeless men who had AIDS.
In 1998 and ’99, Dr. Berkman did research in South Africa, where AIDS was rampant. Upon returning to New York, he gathered a group of fellow AIDS activists and founded Health Global Access Project, known as Health GAP, which became one of the leading groups in the campaign to provide antiretroviral drugs to poor people around the world.
“He was one of the key figures in changing 20 years of U.S. trade policy on patents and medicine,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, one of the organizations that shared Dr. Berkman’s mission.
Health GAP, along with other advocacy groups, successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to change its opposition to compulsory licenses — orders by foreign governments requiring the owner of a drug patent to issue a license to a generic manufacturer, making the drug cheaper. Until that policy change, trade tariffs were often used against countries that issued compulsory licenses.
At the time, antiretroviral drugs cost about $15,000 a year for a patient. Now, with some American manufacturers sharply reducing their prices, and with generic marketers, particularly in India, offering them at very low prices, the drugs can cost as little as $150 a year.
In 1999, fewer than one million people, all in Western countries, had access to the H.I.V. medications they needed, said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health GAP. “Now,” she said, “there are close to four million, and more than half of them are in the poorest countries.”
Born in Brooklyn on Sept. 4, 1945, Alan Berkman was one of four sons of Samuel and Mona Osit Berkman. The family later moved to Middletown, N.Y., where his father owned a plumbing supply company. Besides Dr. Zeller, whom he married in 1975, Dr. Berkman is survived by his brothers, Jerry, Larry and Steven; his daughters, Sarah Zeller-Berkman and Harriet Clark; and a grandson.
Dr. Berkman learned he had a cancer of the lymph nodes while in prison and had recurring bouts with the disease.
In 1994, while treating parolees in the South Bronx, Dr. Berkman was asked how someone so committed to saving lives could have joined groups that were willing to plant bombs.
“I had seen pain in the communities I worked in,” he said, and “an increasing indifference” to that pain. “We became desperate and kept going further out on the limb.”
He added, “Between going to prison and having cancer two times and knowing that death sits on my shoulder, I try to make every day matter.”
Correction: June 17, 2009 – An obituary on Monday about Dr. Alan Berkman, a Vietnam-era radical who became an epidemiologist and AIDS activist, described incorrectly a group to which he belonged. Students for a Democratic Society was a radical group in the 1960s, not an underground group.