On Distance, Part I

Claustrophobia isn’t a concrete jail cell, isn’t a glaring courtroom. Claustrophobia comes later: repeat visits to the courtroom, to the lawyer, being caught in a legal loop that seeks to inconvenience one out of wanting to commit another crime. There are rules in a courtroom. There is little fine print in jail.

Physical movement doesn’t equate with freedom nearly as often as it should. I felt more joy listening to tall tales in a cold, colorless steel bunk than I did listening to State rabble for a sixth time in the sixth location. In the police station, a massive man grown weak by the daily four hundred calories of starch and xanthum gum mumbled my direction, Free your ass and your mind will follow. I said, “I’m one step ahead of you, mate,” but he had already fallen back asleep, snoring like a chainsaw and chest heaving like chain gang, great big effort.

There are a lot of folks who need some sort of anchor to keep themselves from reeling off. Some folks see that same anchor as deadweight. Most of us, thank God, can’t help but find it playing both roles, and know when to let the damned thing fall off. It’s not a rare case, either, that the anchor holds tight as a barnacle, and there isn’t a thing can be done to set yourself loose. Sometimes, you’re the anchor. I knew a woman once, serpentine grip and a special talent for letting go. All it took was some time alone and she ran off like wet paint. I’ve found work is a fine cure for worry.

Some of my state-ordered community service involved a fair amount of physical movement, loading and unloading furniture and estate sale remnants into trucks that belonged to Habitat for Humanity. Once, while I groaned under the weight of a marble-slab coffee table, a seventy-something man loosed a gleeful cackle at the enormous sum signed to him by the strip mall contractors who had purchased his property.

“My friends, they said, ‘you’re going to cry when you move out,’ they said. I said, ‘I won’t be crying when I cash that check.’” He put his hands in the pockets of his oversized pants. “I’ve lived here since nineteen forty-one, since I was a boy. Own that one across the street, too.” I nearly drop the table, or do.

To have a legal obligation to be rooted to the city is a sin; to live a lifetime on the same block without some oppressive exterior force is a low-down shame. Laziness, is what it is.