Chapter 7
I didn't know your friend was Mexican," Lisa whispered to Mike in an awestruck voice when he got back to from the cafe with Tony's coffee, which he didn't drink because he was drinking the Keurig. Her tone was that of the interplanetary scientist who has discovered life on Mars. "That's fantastic. That's perfect.”
Mike and Lisa got into the pickup with Tony, who as usual insisted on driving. Lisa wanted to ride up front, to bathe in the divine vibrations emanating from Tony's oppressed being. Meanwhile, Lisa's goons followed in the spray-painted Prius, sulking, shunned, and scolded for having wrecked their room that morning. Not only had Mike found trash and bottles littered everywhere, but the punks had gouged a six by six inch hole in the wall to remove a NSA planted "bug," per Heyward, the spokesman for the group because his intellect at least Rose to earthworm level. The bug turned out to be a junction box that disabled power for that entire wing of the motel.
Being completely focused on her new pet, Lisa was completely indifferent to the abuse Mike gave her henchmen. Despite the depredations of these knuckle dragging brutes, the protest caravan seemed to be off to an auspicious start, until Tony remembered something and killed the engine.
"I forgot to feed my dog," he said, bouncing from the truck on his two bad knees and limping toward his room.
At the edge of the parking lot, Tony's disenfranchised coyote Rolf was sitting upon its sad haunches in the tumbleweeds. Mike pointed out the beast to Lisa and she gasped orgasmically.
"The indigenous peoples here still interact with wild creatures,” she said breathlessly.
Mike was tempted to tell her about Tony screwing the Hooters girl in the bed of his pickup, wondering what she would think about interactions of that sort, but why burst her bubble? He was pretty sure Tony would do it himself, sooner rather than later.
Tony came out of his room holding something that looked like beef jerky. "Just like Dances with Wolves!" Lisa squealed. Then a chorus of angry, outraged yips and barks came from the other side of the parking lot. Cornudo's local wolf pack, composed of seven or eight shaggy, dirty mixed breed semi-strays that all had some percentage of Chihuahua, including one quasi German Shepherd with a peculiarly elongated snout, was making its way toward the Coyote, led by the only dog that could be positively identified as a Chihuahua. All fifteen inches of this diminutive beast was packed with blind aggresion and rage. He very well could have been the Father of the German Shepherd, who seemed to follow him with filial devotion, though the logistics of that mating strained the limits of both imagination and engineering.
"Get out of here you mother fuckers!" Tony shouted, rushing toward the pack with a fistful of stones. These he flung with surprising accuracy, pelting a mangy, discolored poodle on its fluffy haunches. The pack of dogs lost its nerve and retreated beneath the barrage but it was too late. Tony's skittish Coyote Rolf had already spooked and scampered off.
“Goddamn mangy fucking mutts!" Tony shouted, spinning upon his fat axis in frustration.
Back in the truck, Lisa looked like she would cry. Tony brushed himself off, as if the dog breath of the furry brutes had sullied him, then got back in the truck. There he sat surly and silent, occasionally mumbling invective against the strays. Drawing upon the reserves of her feminine wiles, Lisa coaxed him into conversation.
Besides the stray dogs, Lisa couldn’t prod out the kind of greivances she was interested in, particularly how Tony suffered beneath the white man’s yoke. When he confessed to being recently deported, Lisa was indignant, but Tony seemed indifferent. "Oh, that, that's no big deal. Just a running joke between me and one of my border patrol homies. I get a free ride down to Mexico, hang out with some of the old vatos, drink a few beers and hitch a ride back. Sometimes you need a change of scenery.”
"But doesn’t it make you angry that they are profiling you?"
"Profiling?" Tony shook his head. "I don't know. I'm not really into photography."
In the back seat Mike suppressed laughter. Lisa closed her mouth and regrouped.
"But doesn't it bother you, as a Mexican, when authorities deliberately target you because of certain cultural characteristics you might display?" She was foaming up into a good hate crime lather.
This time Tony was outraged. "Mexican? Who says I’m Mexican? I'm a goddamm flag waving American mother fucker, sweetheart."
Lisa had dealt with this sort of response before. "That's what your Wall Street corporate overlords want you to believe. They want to suppress your heritage and pretend to be an American, even though you'll never receive the rights and recognition you are entitled to. They do it to divide and conquer. They do it in to the LGBT community too.”
Tony smiled appreciatively this time. “LGBT? Oh, I know that. A friend of mine showed me that LGBT Facebook page. Liquor, guns, bacon and tits."
Tony laughed so hard he almost deployed the airbag. He either did not notice or did not care that Lisa was not laughing.
The drive got quiet for a while. When they stopped for gas in Tucson, Tony went inside to use the bathroom. When he came back, he was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. Lisa shielded her eyes and switched places with Mike to the back seat. An elephant climbed in the truck with Tony, and smothered all the conversation from there to Nogales. Lisa avoided talking to anyone, and Mike was afraid to talk to Tony for fear of incurring Lisa's wrath.
When they rolled into Nogales in cold silence, Lady Justice watched them vigilantly from atop the county courthouse. Although she often peeks under the mask, in most other courthouse penthouses she resides on, Lady Justice is blindfolded. This is not for any kinky sex games, but to keep her from drawing unfair conclusions based on things like skin color and socio-economic status. In Nogales, however, the entire economy was fueled by unfair, culturally biased conclusions. If this guy over here looks Mexican, we need to detain him for further investigation, and the local merchants will happily cater to his nutritional and toiletry essentials in the process. If that guy over there has a towel on his head, we'll hold him for a few days to make sure he’s not wearing a bomb vest, and in the meantime he will have to be caged and fed, all for the benefit of local commerce.
In the good old days of arbitrary frontier justice in Nogales, having a statue of Lady Justice with unimpeded eyesight atop the courthouse was accepted without question. When the rule of law and its nagging insistence on impartiality moved in later there was some debate about whether to blindfold the bitch, but in the end it was decided just to keep her eyes naked and see what happened.
What happened was revolution south of the border, when Pancho Villa and his associates moved back and forth across the boundary as if it was just an arbitrary line on paper, not an actual physical impediment. Before Pancho Villa the two Nogaleses were really one, the inhabitants of both sides crossing freely either way. If the locals had any knowledge of complex international law regulating citizenship, they didn't bore anybody with it.
After Pancho Villa, however, people got scared. As usual, fear caused them to do unfortunate things they regretted later but could not undo, any more than one can erase a facial tattoo applied as a drunken party dare. After Pancho Villa the people decided to build a fence down the middle of town that could have been easily breached by Señor Villa's goons, but all the same somewhat soothed the town's institutionalized insecurities.
So now an ugly, rickety fence snaked its way up, down and around the prickly hills of Nogales, looking like a geriatric boa constrictor that couldn’t strangle the life out of both countries, but did cause a great deal of indigestion. This is what Mike beheld when his hijacked truck rolled into town. Tony didn't see anything because he had seen it hundreds of times before and, who knows, he may have been a descendant of one of Villa's merry band. He preferred Lady Justice just the way she was, he had remarked more than once about what a hot babe she was and how he would like to lick her toes by way of foreplay. As for Lisa, she didn't see anything because she was looking at her own toes. She was looking at her toes because she was trying not to look at Tony, who disgusted her, and she was trying not to look at Mike, who also disgusted her by not being disgusted enough by Tony.
"Your friend is a pig," Lisa told him quietly as they dismounted the truck in a dirt lot where the protesters were gathering.
Mike could not deny that Tony was a pig, but he had taken a certain proprietary shine to him.
“Your friends are worse pigs. They wrecked my motel. They punched holes in the walls. They're worse than pigs – they are insects."
"You marginalized them by giving them second class accommodations."
"If I had a livestock pen I would have locked them in there."
As if summoned, the green spray-painted Prius carrying Heyward, Zack and Otis arrived. The car had been improved since last seen in Cornudo. In black paint sprayed across the green, slogans such as 'Dump Trump' and 'Tear Down the Wall' had been added. What nobody knew was that Otis had dangled Zack from the moving car by his legs so he could write the manifesto. Otis had also been the one driving. Heyward supervised the process.
Tony's Make America Great Again hat got menacing looks from the four or five dozen protestors that had assembled in the parking lot of a body shop. The business operated on a strict cash only basis and primarily stayed in business by redecorating stolen cars. The undocumented workers inside looked at the protesters suspiciously, rejecting any efforts to befriend or show solidarity with them. The owner of the place disliked Trump because he might be bad for business, so he had agreed to let the kids use the lot, for a fee. Otherwise, he had no interest in politics and thought these protesters were pampered idiots who should get a job.
The platform where President Elect Trump was going to give his speech was about two hundred yards down the road, in the skinny shadow of the border fence. As it turned out, it was impossible to walk there. In addition to Secret Service and local law enforcement, a cordon of thuggish militiamen had formed an unofficial barrier around the rally to keep the protesters away.
"I guess we'll just have to get as close as possible and make do," Lisa said when she saw the blockade. "Find out where the media is and we'll do our demonstration in front of them."
"Fuck that," Tony said to Mike. "Your girlfriend gives up too easy. Or did she just come down here to put on a cheerleading show? Where’s her fucking pom-poms? Let me handle it!"
Tony walked down the street toward the militiamen. Mike watched him go uneasily, then looked at Lisa, who was wearing a disapproving bitch scowl.
Tony knew most of the militiamen gathered there. They were delighted to see Tony, because a Mexican wearing a Trump hat was definitive proof that their orange-haired idol was not a racist. Even though the militiamen's conversations were peppered liberally with beaner jokes, they were always trying to convince people that the movement was not about race. They were happy to see Tony not only because he was a Mexican with a Trump hat, but because he told the best beaner jokes.
Tony got high fives and fist pumps up and down the militia line. He laughed heartily when someone asked him where his low rider was parked. He laughed heartily when someone asked if they had let him out of the border patrol holding tank to go to the rally.
Then Tony saw a cute chick wearing a shirt that said 'Build the Wall, Enforce the Law,’ and knew what to do. Tony gave her his charming smile while wondering if this hat gave him a license to grab pussies. He decided he better not, refocused, and instead asked where she got the shirt. She smiled back and pointed to a booth about 20 feet away.
Tony went to the booth and picked up a box of Build the Wall shirts, then returned to the protesters. He met a wall of angry scowls cultivated by Lisa.
"All right guys, listen up because here's what we're going to do. Put on these T-shirts and I can sneak you past the militia. I'll get you right down to the front, where you'll really get on TV."
"I'm not wearing that disgusting thing," Heyward protested.
"You only have to wear it for a minute. It's a Trojan horse, you know like one of those fake dissolving condoms you put on when you want to ride her bareback but she don't want to get pregnant." Tony had no verification that such an apparatus existed, but he had always assumed that was where the Trojan horse expression came from.
There were some chuckles in the crowd, which seemed to be lightening up to Tony.
"This is wrong, guys!" Lisa protested to the protesters. "You can't just sneak in like this. You'll get in trouble."
Tony lowered his eyebrows at Lisa and his thick whiskers could not disguise his contempt. "Get in trouble? You're supposed to get in trouble. If you want to make headlines you gotta get tear gassed and thrown in jail! Are you protesters or pussies? Let's go!"
The group surged toward Tony, thrilled with the prospect of being incarcerated. This is what civil disobedience was supposed to be about, police dogs and rubber bullets, not standing back in a safe place and launching dud verbal grenades.
Mike was torn between staying with Lisa or donning a T-shirt and going with the rest, but Tony settled the argument for him. "Come on, I got these shirts on IOU. You have to go pay the T-shirt lady." Mike gave Lisa a helpless, palms out, what can I do look and went forward. Lisa stayed back alone with her bullhorn.
Everybody was swept up in the moment. The Trojan Horse Trumpsters pushed their way down the street toward the militiamen, who were suspicious about these young kids with corn rows, painted hair, and facial piercings, but lightened up when their pet Mexican Tony assured them that they were students from the U of A who were sick of liberals telling them what to think.
“They smell like California to me," said one crusty old timer as he spit a wad of something onto the ground.
"They were just on a field trip to San Diego,” said Tony. “That seaweed smell don't wash off."
They listened because it was Tony doing the talking, and they all knew Tony. Here was a man who had made a living chasing free-loading punks off the railroad through the skillful application of ass whippings. They accepted his explanation and let the kids pass.
Once inside the cordon, the protesters wriggled their way to the front of the crowd. Tony used a combination of bullying, begging, bribing and finally, outright lying to get the kids through hundreds of adoring Trumpsters who wanted a front row seat for the President-elect. "Come on, step aside, they're just kids! Do it for the children!..Come on George, I got you onto the Duke's place in 1975. You owe me one…Yeah Ralph, I can help you get a break on that shipment, I'll make a phone call. Just make a hole...Hey people, the President wants some young, fresh faces up front, not a line of dried up, wrinkled old farts like you. Don't make me go get the Sheriff!"
When none of those techniques worked, Tony stuck out his two stout elbows and forced his way through like an angry rhinoceros. The momentum of the disguised agitators gathered force behind him and they steamrolled their way to the front. As he floated along in the flotsam of this kaleidoscope throng of rainbow skin colors, dazzling hair tints, and gaudy earlobe pendants, Mike stumbled and almost tripped on some hard object, which turned out to be a brick. He kicked it aside thoughtlessly and kept moving forward.
From the front of the packed mass of humanity, the greatest flock of two legged creatures ever splayed out across this upper Sonoran scrubland, Mike noticed that the brick he had stumbled over matched those piled on a concrete platform next to the stage, where there was also a tub of wet cement and a trowel. Apparently the President-elect was going to use these implements to make a big show of laying down the first portion of his magnificent, legendary, holy covenant border wall, a barrier pledged to his dedicated, adoring disciples, an insurmountable fortress to prevent the unworthy from invading this thorny land of milk and honey. In other words, Donald Trump was Moses in reverse.
A chorus of boos erupted in the throng as the opening bass line of the famous Pink Floyd song about tearing down walls issued forth from the loudspeakers. Then a familiar voice in a distinctive New York accent coming from parts unseen said "whoops!", after which boos turned to whoops as the song changed to Oasis' Wonderwall.
"That's right folks!" Trump said as he walked out on stage to deafening roars of approval. "We're going to build a Wonderwall here, a real first class wonderwall, the best wall ever in the history of walls."
As he presented himself to the throng, the President-elect quaked with undercurrents of suppressed enthusiasm, like an ADHD child forced into a straight jacket for a school assembly. His unruly shock of orange blonde hair, its unnatural color proclaiming its dubious authenticity, gleamed in the infinite supply of Arizona sunshine.
“There have been some great walls, wonderful walls, some really fantastic walls throughout history," the President-elect continued, gesturing to the crowd with a little circle formed by thumb and forefinger, a circle that represented a life ring for some but a noose for others. "The Chinese..." derisive cat calls erupted from the assemblage, "...the Chinese tried to build a wall once, as we all know, to keep out illegal immigrants. They had the audacity to call it the Great Wall, but that wall turned out not so great. Hilary, yes our friend Hilary, tried to build a wall made up of lies and fake news to keep us from the White House. Let’s just say that all of those walls were real choke jobs, just like all the chokers and losers who said that, first of all, I would never be nominated, then said that I would never be elected, then said I would never, ever build a wall across the entire length of the Mexican border."
The cheering reverberated, and the President-elect let it ring out freely across the length and breadth of the Gadsden Purchase, from where it spilled over into Mexico, a blast of hot wind that wilted foliage. "But here we are folks, here we are," Trump continued as the clamor gradually subsided. "Here we are to build a wall, and to teach those Chinese a thing or two in the process. First of all, we're going to teach them how to honor trade agreements, and then we're going to teach them how to build a really great wall, a wall that none of the rapists, or criminals, or drug lords, or freeloaders down in Mexico will ever be able to cross!"
The crowd exploded again, and under cover of the hypnotic thrall Tony ordered the protesters to remove their Trump shirts, exposing diverse protest garments beneath. One shirt read "Impeach Trump," a message urging that the President-elect be removed before he could leave so much as a sweat ring in the oval office chair, a slogan fueled by the fantasy that although no President had been ousted by impeachment before, the process was as easy as donning a T-shirt. Another shirt declared "Tear Down the Wall," a catchphrase that earned enthusiasm points, even though no such structure yet existed. All of these taunting garments of the invading army of civily disobedient immediately drew unfriendly stares, though Mr. Trump was apparently so absorbed with himself he didn’t notice.
When the buzz in the assemblage quieted, the Donald picked up one of the red bricks from the platform. There was nothing especially resistant or inpenetrable about it, it was just a typical red brick that looked like the ones used to build houses in the days before seismic standards, a commonplace red brick that might stop the big bad wolf from blowing your house down but wouldn't stop the San Andreas from crumbling it into dust in a matter of seconds. With the adoring, adorning crowd looking on, Trump inspected the brick lovingly, sensually, from each side.
“These are great bricks," he said. "These are magnificent bricks. We had these bricks custom made on the East Coast." This part was fake news, though in his defense the President-Elect did not know it. In truth, a scared rookie Secret Service agent had bought them in a frenzy at a Home Depot in Tucson that very morning, hauling them onto the stage in such a rush that one or two had fallen off the cart. But the truth was no obstacle for Trump. "They have the best brick makers in the world over there on the East Coast. Nothing against your local brickmakers, because Arizona has some fine, fine brickmakers. I build folks, that's what I do. I know my bricks. So I can tell you that over there on the East Coast they have the best brick layers on the planet, making the absolutely strongest bricks. When I was building my fabulous casinos over there, we had these bricklayers that just boggled the mind. Truly, truly magnificent bricklayers that..."
Tony took Trump's long winded diatribe on the state of brick making in the US as a signal to launch the protest. From his side of the protest group he evoked a chorus of rowdy anti-Trump cheers that quickly spread among the dissidents. "Dump Trump! We reject the President-elect!" Followed by soulfully singing "We shall overcomb!"
On the platform the President-elect lowered the brick, which he had been caressing and conversing with like Yorick's skull. Where be your jibes now, your gambols, your songs, he had been whispering in a gentle soliloquy to the brick, but now his full attention turned to the protesters, to whom he delivered an outraged, stalinistic stare of disapproval. Next he shot a perturbed wtf look toward his Secret Service and the militia men, intimating there may be purges. Trump didn’t like these Secret Service people. They refused to wear the TRUMP logo in large gilded letters on their clothing. To him, if it didn't bear the TRUMP brand it couldn't be trusted. Here was the proof.
Trump let the brick roll off of his fingers. It hit the concrete base of the podium and split in two. Somewhere along the high hills of inner Mongolia, stone soldiers encased deep in some emperor’s crypt high fived in celebration of their own wall's continued supremacy.
Out in the unruly crowd, a spectator took Trump dropping one brick as a cue to pick another up. Meanwhile, Mike Gasden was nervously eyeing the proceedings. Willingly enough, he had been swept along in the bum's rush to the front, but now he realized that this deed went beyond the abstract and was subject to the laws of cause and effect. A year ago, when Mike was still just a starving software developer, social activism was his church on Sunday, but now he was a man of property and needed to keep his eye open for a safety valve, an escape route, a way to invoke plausible deniability later in case things turned sour. This intensified scrutiny of his surroundings was why Mike was the first to see the brick as it whizzed inches above his head, flying from somewhere behind where husky Otis was standing.
Civil disobedience, bored just standing around behaving itself, crossed the fine line over to rioting, just like when matriarch Eve, restless watching soap operas and waiting for Adam to come home from the bar, had started flirting with the serpent and wound up tasting the forbidden fruit.
Trump removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves in an instant. He assumed an intimidating pugilist stance, but his eyes grew wide and his face went pinker than normal as he beheld the projectile racing straight for him. Mike followed the President-elect's eyes backwards and saw the brick zooming in with a perfect spiral, like a cubist-rendered football that would drill Trump directly between the eyeballs, instead of between the numbers. Reacting immediately, Mike extended his arm and lightly touched the spinning projectile with the tips of his fingers.
The contact was not enough to stop the brick, but was enough to slightly alter its trajectory and velocity. What the intervention of Mike's extended fingers did was to move the brick just enough in space and time that it missed its precisely aimed target, that being an imaginary bull’s-eye square in the geographical center of Donald Trump's face.
There have been some great shot blockers in the history of the National Basketball Association, heretofore to be referred to here as the NBA, if referred to at all. Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar constitute the top three in career shot block leaders. The mighty Wilt Chamberlain once blocked 26 shots in a single game. You won't find him or Bill Russell on any shot block lists because no one was really counting back then, but in 1967 the Celtics defensive legend Russel made an immortal blocked shot on Wilt the Stilt, demonstrating quite plainly who was the champion of diverting thrown projectiles from their path. That is until Michael Gasden came along.
Michael Gasden made the shot block heard round the world, one that probably changed the course of American history, although we will never know for sure because there is no one hundred percent accurate way of determining what the effects of a brick striking the unprotected face of a 70 year old man will be. Not bad for a computer nerd who had never touched a basketball in his life.
Suffice to say that the brick did not strike Trump in the face, where it was aimed. Instead, it glanced off the top of his forehead, dealing there a greatly attenuated blow, though still a meaningful one. Looking toward the President-elect in horror, Michael beheld a series of events that unfolded so rapidly there was no time to correctly interpret them. First of all, he discerned a fuzzy, reddish-blonde mass fall from the general region of Trump's forehead onto the ground, where it seemed to scurry off to safety of its own accord, like a beleaguered rodent. Immediately thereafter, there followed a brilliant, blinding reflection of the sun off of a smooth, rounded surface, so intensely bright that Mike shaded his eyes against retina damage. But all of this flurried activity was impossible to make sense of to any degree of certainty, because Trump was instantly smothered to the ground by his Secret Service agents, who formed a protective dog pile over him, including the one who had bought the brick that almost took the boss out.
Michael stood motionless, paralyzed into inactivity by the set of circumstances the quantum probability theory of human history had placed him in. He froze in place and did not flee, even as his fellow protesters wisely scattered in every direction.
From the bottom of the Presidential dog pile, a Secret Service agent now looked outward and pointed a finger at Mike, who stood pale faced and dumbfounded in an evacuated circle of bare dirt where the protesters had once stood. "He did it! He threw the brick!" growled the agent. "Get him!"
Mike turned meekly to the left, then timidly to the right, trying to see if he could locate the target of the agent's accusation. Before he could spot the culprit, Mike was blind-sided and wrapped up in a human cocoon until forced to the ground, smothered within his own not so Presidential dogpile.
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Photo of Lady Justice atop Nogales courthouse by Ken Lund. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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