The Collective (32 page)

“The mannequins,” she said, “they were just a device. The Globe critic saw right through me. You did, too. All the stuff with the 3AC, everything we’ve been spouting off about since Mac, they’ve been a crutch. It’s been a way of adding agency to my work when there hasn’t been any. I’m just a technician with nothing to say, really. Maybe I should have just gone to med school.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong, Jessica.”

“Am I? What’s it mean, then? What’s the point? Why can’t I do something of substance, like you said, something real, something from here”—she jabbed her fist against her gut—“and not from here?”—she knocked her fist against the side of her head. “From here”—she hit her stomach again, harder—“not from here”—she punched her head. “From here—”

I grabbed her wrists. “Stop it, Jessica.”

She was crying now. “All the hoopla, even before it all turned to shit, I ask myself, Did I really want this? Any of it? Because the truth is, if I could take it all back, I would.”

“It’s not too late,” I said.

“It’s too late.”

“We could drop the complaint.”

“Even if we did, Barboza would never let it go. It’s an election year. He wants a trial. This is the most fun he’s ever had.”

“Maybe he’ll listen to reason.”

“I wish it could all go away,” Jessica said. “I wish it could all just end.”

I knew from news reports that Vivaldo Barboza was forty-seven, and that he still lived with his mother. They had emigrated from the Azores when he was nine. His father had already been in the U.S. for two years, working at a glassworks factory near Lechmere, and once reunited, the three of them had settled in the Portuguese community of East Cambridge.

Vivaldo had arrived knowing no English, but eventually managed to earn a bachelor of science degree in business administration from Suffolk University. Nevertheless, other than getting licensed as a justice of the peace, he never pursued a career outside of the family business. From the time he was seventeen, he and his mother—a widow since the late sixties, when Vivaldo’s father had died of a heart attack—had been running a small corner market near Inman Square.

I took Joshua’s Peugeot and drove down Broadway. I didn’t know the name of the Barbozas’ store, and I couldn’t remember whether it was on Columbia or Windsor Street. I crisscrossed the vicinity known as Area 4, which was largely an African American neighborhood. I stopped at several bodegas and markets, but the merchants were Brazilian, Indian, Syrian. I searched closer to Cambridge Street, and finally spotted Azores Variety on Columbia.

“Hello,” a woman said when I walked in. Friendly, energetic. She was in her early seventies, perhaps—almost certainly Barboza’s mother. The family resemblance was uncanny. A thick body, a wide face with a prominent brow and heavy-lidded eyes, downturned at the corners like the mouth, only Vivaldo’s wavy hair was dark while hers was white, and she was quite short, the counter she stood behind too high for her.

I browsed the aisles, temporizing. The place was dimly lit, rather dismal. I had been expecting Portuguese staples like salted cod, fava beans, and linguica, but there was none of that here, just sundries that could be found in any store, odds and ends, everything dusty, overpriced, the stamps on many of the products past expiration. There wasn’t much of a stock, either, one or two of each item on the sparse shelves, like the one bar of soap or the one package of thumbtacks or the one can of shaving cream. I pulled a gallon of milk from the cooler and set it on the counter.

“Anything else?” the woman asked.

I picked out some gum from the rack of candy bars.

“Bag?”

“Yes, please.” There was a sign on the cash register, written with a Sharpie, that said CASH ONLY. NO CHECK. NO CREDIT CARD.

She slowly counted out my change. She was wearing very thick glasses.

“Is Vivaldo home?” I asked. I had read in the paper that their apartment was above the store.

She brightened. “You friends with Vivaldo?”

“Is he home?”

She pressed a doorbell buzzer screwed to the wall, and I could hear it ringing above us, then the thump of footsteps coming down the stairs a few seconds later.

I was facing the back of the store, assuming he would enter from there, but the stairwell apparently led out to the street. He came in through the front door. “Yes, Măe?” he said.

“A friend has come to visit you!” his mother told him, as if it were a very rare occurrence.

Hesitantly, he shook my hand, confused. “I’m sorry, could you tell me where we know each other from? I can’t place you.”

“I’m Eric Cho,” I said. When my name didn’t register, I added, “Jessica Tsai’s friend. The 3AC.”

He recoiled. “Let’s go outside.” We stepped out onto the sidewalk. “What do you want?” he asked.

“I was hoping we could talk,” I said. “Maybe calm things down a bit. Everything’s gotten a little out of control, don’t you think?”

“You guys started it. I didn’t do a thing.”

“I think we’ve all said a few things—without really meaning to—to stoke the fire.”

“I’m not going to apologize,” Barboza said. “I’m standing by my principles. I’m just doing what I believe and what’s in the best interests of my constituents.”

“Don’t you think it’d be mutually beneficial,” I asked, “if we could take a step back and, you know, discuss this rationally?”

“I am being rational,” he said. “I ask again: What do you want?”

“We’ll drop our complaint if you’ll drop yours.”

He smirked. “Pressure gotten too much for you and your friends?” he said.

“I admit, we didn’t anticipate this level of hysteria,” I said, willing to bend a little.

“Well, you asked for it,” Barboza said. “I’m not going to drop the complaint.”

“The show will be over in a week. You’ve already made your point.”

“Not going to happen.”

“We listened to bad advice, okay?” I said. “We shouldn’t have brought the courts into it. We see that now. So wouldn’t it be better for the taxpayers if we both pulled back?”

“If I dropped it, it’d look like I caved in to you.”

“What about this, then?” I said, encouraged by the small opening. “Let’s agree to both withdraw the complaints at the end of the month, when the exhibit’s over. That way, it won’t look like anyone compromised. In the meantime, how about we impose a gag order on ourselves and not talk to the media anymore?”

Barboza was wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt. He tugged on the knot of his tie—it was a clip-on—and removed it. He rolled the tie into a compact spool, stuffed it into his front pocket, and loosened the top button of his shirt. “You see this street?” he said. “Look how brightly lit it is, every streetlight working, the reflectors in the road in front of the crosswalks. Before I took office, this was a pedestrian hazard. Two kids got hit in one summer. One of them died. You think I’m uncultured and stupid. What makes you think you’re so much better than everyone else, just because you’re an artist? What do you contribute to society? At least I’ve made the streets safer, at least I’ve gotten foot patrols increased and put bike paths in and reduced the rodent population. Maybe these are small things to you, things that don’t matter, but they’re not to the people who live here. I’ve worked hard to make their lives a little better. What have you done?”

The street was, in fact, impressively well lit. I could see the crease marks on his neck from his shirt collar, a mole in the notch of his jugular. “We’re trying to improve the lives of Asian Americans,” I said.

“I’m an immigrant just like you. You think I wasn’t made fun of, being Portuguese? You think I didn’t get teased as a kid?”

Briefly, I wondered if Barboza ever experienced saudade. What did he yearn for? I knew he had never been married, did not have children. I doubted very much he had a girlfriend. A part of me wanted to feel sorry for him.

“Why’d you say that thing on TV?” he asked. “Why’d you have to bring race into it?”

He thought I was Joshua. “We didn’t. You did. Remember? ‘Little egg rolls’? ‘Bonsai bush’?”

“One of the hosts on the talk show, Louie, he fed me that line. I regret it. But I ask you, should it have been such a big deal? Now people think I’m a bigot. Yeah, it was colorful language, but that’s talk radio. You get caught up in the hyped-up energy of the show. There wasn’t any harm intended. It was just creative license.”

The milk was getting heavy, the handles of the plastic bag cutting into my fingers. “What’s that mean, ‘creative license’?”

“They’re just words,” he told me. “What’s it matter? Race has nothing to do with this. It’s about decency. It’s about whether government agencies should be sanctioning perversion. So to say what you did, using the race card, that was a cheap shot. I would have reacted the same way if the artist was white.”

“Don’t you see?” I said. “It makes all the difference that the artist isn’t white. The context is what separates her exhibit from pornography.”

“Just because you’re Asian American, you get a free pass?”

“You don’t understand the cultural references.”

“Explain them to me, then.”

“The whole exhibit is about caricatures, the stereotypes that Asian Americans are saddled with.”

“Uh-huh,” Barboza said.

“It’s a satirical treatise on—”

“Listen,” he said, “you guys always say how you don’t want to be treated any different.”

“We don’t.”

“But anything happens, you automatically say it’s racist.”

“A lot of times, it is. You think your comment was innocent, but these things are never innocent, it’s never just a joke, they’re never just words. If you really think about it, you’ll realize what you said was racist.”

“Oh, yeah?” Barboza said. “Tell me, who made you Martin Luther Kim?”

A car drove by, going much too fast, the windows tinted black, hip-hop thumping from inside, the bass concussive enough so we could feel it out on the sidewalk. “Hey, hey, slow down!” Barboza yelled. He stared after the car until it had sped out of sight. “Fucking … ,” he began to mutter, then caught himself. He turned to me with a sheen of embarrassment.

“I know what you were about to say,” I told him.

“You don’t know shit.”

“By the way, I’m not an immigrant, and it wasn’t me on TV. That was my friend Joshua. I realize we all look alike to you.”

“We’re done here,” Barboza said.

“Forget the offer,” I said. “We’re not going to back down. We’re not going to drop the complaint.”

“Neither am I.”

“Go give your mother a break, Vivaldo. You shouldn’t make her work so much.”

“Fuck you.”

“Here, dump this. It’s expired—a public safety hazard,” I said, and left the milk on the sidewalk.

We received another anonymous letter, this one written in crayon on a page torn from a spiral notebook. “Its because of sodamight motherfuckers like you this country is going to Hell. Enoughs enough. Im coming after you. Prepare to meet the reeper and be delivered to pain. Prepare to die you crepes.”

The misspellings, punctuation errors, and childlike handwriting aside, we were chilled by the threat, more so because it did not include any racial epithets. Rather, the envelope contained hundreds of tiny pieces of sheet metal, methodically snipped into razor-sharp triangles.

“I don’t know why,” Joshua said, “but it’s the green crayon that puts it over the top. It makes it feel truly deranged.”

“Keep the front door locked,” I told him. “You’re always forgetting.”

Glumly, Jessica nudged pieces of sheet metal across the dining table with her finger. “You said it couldn’t get any worse.”

I gave the envelope to the police, along with the rest of the hate mail and the microcassette of hate messages from the answering machine, but they didn’t seem overly concerned. Instead, they chose to investigate the 3AC.

I was dealing with a crisis at work. Our list broker had screwed up, and I realized we would be woefully short of addresses for our direct-mail campaign. Then I stumbled upon another snafu. The lettershop had neglected to apply for an additional mailing office in Vermont, and the process usually took thirty days. I phoned the General Mail Facility in Boston to plead for an exception, but was told that they had just canceled our bulk-mailing permit, claiming we had not used it in over fifteen months.

In the midst of all of this, Joshua called me. “Dude,” he said, “Jimmy and Noklek are in jail.”

The police had set up a sting operation on Pink Whistle, sending two undercover detectives to the salon the day before, both requesting massages. The first cop told Jimmy that he was in a hurry. “You want the fifteen-minute, then, for fifty,” Jimmy told him. According to the police report, the cop gave Jimmy a twenty and three tens (marked bills) and was led into the back office, which was furnished with a massage table, towels, assorted body oils, a low-lit lamp with a red shade, and mirrors framed by tassels and black lace. Noklek entered the room, wearing a tube top and hot pants, and she offered him a menu of “Extras”: Topless, Nude, Doctor, Foot Fetish, Domination, Russian Ending, and Pop the Cork, priced between $25 and $150. The detective chose Topless, and Noklek, after taking a twenty and a five from him (also marked), removed her tube top, massaged his chest and stomach, fondled his testicles, and gave him a hand job until the timer rang. Three hours later, a second detective stepped into Pink Whistle for the same services, whereupon they arrested Jimmy and Noklek. They had been held overnight and were being arraigned this morning.

Joshua picked me up at the office and drove us to the courthouse. “Why’d they have to spend the night in jail?” I asked. “Couldn’t they get bail?”

“I don’t know. Jimmy called me less than an hour ago.”

“Why didn’t they let him call earlier?”

“I don’t know, okay? I’ve been scrambling around, trying to find Margolies and Grace. I’m still fucking half asleep. I was up all night writing. I finally got on a roll, man.”

In court, Jimmy was charged with keeping a house of ill fame, Chapter 272, Section 24, and deriving support from prostitution, Chapter 272, Section 7. The penalty for the first charge was no more than two years, but for the second charge it was no less than two years in state prison, with no chance of early release, probation, or a reduced sentence. Noklek was charged with engaging in sexual conduct for a fee, Chapter 272, Section 53A, punishable by up to one year or a fine of $500. I discovered that Chapter 272 of the Massachusetts General Laws—the same classification under which the counter-complaint against Jessica, dissemination of obscene materials, had been filed—was entitled “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order.”