Don Lee - The Collective

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.”

Both Jimmy and Noklek pled not guilty, and Margolies and Grace, representing them in court, arranged for their release, Jimmy on $500 cash bail, Noklek on personal recognizance, pending a hearing in one month. After the arraignment, however, Grace told us that the INS had been alerted to Noklek’s immigration status, and she might be deported before her case ever reached trial, green-card marriage or not.

“That’s fascist crap,” Joshua said. “Cambridge is a sanctuary city. The police aren’t supposed to cooperate with the INS.”

“She gave them a fake name. She had a fake ID,” Grace said. “That’s what set everything in motion. The line gets fuzzy if they learn someone’s illegal while in custody. Even then, they normally wouldn’t bother doing anything, especially for a minor offense. But this isn’t normal. Not with so much about you guys in the press. You know, you could have given the rest of us a little warning you were going to file the complaint against Barboza. Or maybe even have let us weigh in on it. But what did I really expect from you three prima donnas?”