GRATING SPACE

It wasn’t to be the first crime I’d committed, not even in Buenos Aires, where I swore to myself the only thing with which I could ruin my stay here would be a trip to jail. It’s not that I’ve never navigated the bureaucracy of jail before, either — I’ve actually had a bit of fun inside.

Once, during the processing period in a Salt Lake County Jail, when you’re moved from holding cell to holding cell, shuffling through steps, after the drunk tank has already sobered you up, I had just received the document that stated my charges, my bail, and the number of a legal service I could call once I was processed into the general population. The best part of this paper was the lone offense it claimed against me: “AGGRAVATED ASSAULT — BUTCHER KNIFE.”

An enormous Samoan sat next to me and bragged about the crimes he’d committed to the three other people in the cell with us. If they only knew what he’d done, he said, and not just here, in Hawaii, too, especially, he’d be locked up for a long time, probably prison, but all they had on him was a first offense DUI, the suckers.

Dangerous or not, the man’s size was fearsome enough for me. I feigned inattention with the rest of my cellmates until he trailed off, bragging finally to himself in whispers, punctuating every fifteenth word or so with a grunt and a flex of his grapefruit-sized fists. He became silent completely, looked around and locked his eyes on me.

“Hey man, what are you in for?”

Jail movies have made everyone in jail use this phrase.

I didn’t say a thing, nor did I look over. I felt a swell of hilarious pride well up inside me as I moved my paper toward his hand for him to take. I played the quiet sociopath perfectly, didn’t even flinch when he bulged his eyes and scooted away from me down the bench, his jaw dumbfounded into a lax position through which the only noise he could muster was:

“Daaaaaammmmnnn.”

That’s right. Little white boy’s psychotic. Skinny and pale — but who knows what happened with that blade? The importance of perceptions further cemented itself into my psyche. I stuck to the role throughout my temporary sentence, until the detectives investigating the case had determined after the umpteenth interview with witnesses and the victim that, yes, the stabbing in fact had been an accident.

Three years later, sitting by myself at a restaurant in Palermo SoHo, I contemplated how to make this new crime invisible, because there would be no chance to call it an accident at all. If caught, I would only be able to forfeit or run.

I disregarded any chance that she was coming back after 20 minutes. My tablemate only had a card with her when they brought the check — a card that they didn’t accept. I had enough cash to pay for my half, but only a few pesos more. The server said an ATM sat right around the corner, and watched as my tablemate rose to go find it.

“I’ll wait here,” I said.

“Oh, you think I’m going to come back.”

“If you don’t I’m walking out.”

“Of course.” She shrugged, smiled, sassed her miniskirt out the restaurant’s front door and out of sight.

It was all because I stole the muffin. When we arrived she was starving and impatient. We sat on a coffee couch because there were no other seats available, next to a set of shelves stacked with baked goods. She said she wanted a muffin, so I lanked my long arm over and grabbed her one. How she smiled as she stuffed it into her purse. She told me I was the coolest. What an outlaw gentleman, was I, with such nonchalance, to disregard the norms of society and law to provide a cake for a lady.

But once I was willing to do this, what else was I willing to do? We had spoken of crime throughout the course of the meal, and the positive impression my theft left her with enticed me to boast about the rest of the dangerous side of my life. Granted, I’ve done nothing that would land me in front of a war crimes tribunal, and not only because I’ve never been to war. Almost all of my illegal actions — those for which I’ve been found culpable and those that remain unsolved — have been petty risks in the interest of fun. Even the butcher knife debacle began as an playful duel for which I was not the one armed with a spatula.

Almost half an hour after she’d gone, with no reply to the SMS I sent, I knew she’d called my bluff. Flabbergasted by her cinema-style deviousness, I weighed my options among the whirls of attraction and hate for her that were swirling around in my head: I could tell the server the truth, explain it again to the manager, offer all the cash I had along with a profuse apology, and hope the wage at which they paid their dishwashers was sufficiently high that I could work off the rest of the bill before the sun set; or I could calmly get up and walk with speed and conviction the ten clear feet to the door and the forty feet more through the outside seating area without being noticed for long enough to build a substantial head start before the sound of incomprehensible Spanish shouts began to bear down upon me.

A flock of servers entered my dining room and began clearing off all the abandoned lunch tables. They came around the corner from the kitchen in uniform dress with haste, bustled about for unpredictable amounts of time and disappeared again. No mathematician could have plotted their courses. A police officer sauntered in, his sidearm seeming to protrude further from his hip than usual, and went into another room.

I would not be dissuaded. This was a test of my word, a competition between she and I, and a recognizable challenge of will not unlike numerous others I have faced and conquered. Many pivotal actions in my life have been preceded by a dialogue either internal or with another that goes something like this:

“I’m going to X,” I say, half meaning it, half musing at a preposterous undertaking.

“Really?” says the other.

“Yes,” I say, after hardly a pause at all, and bind myself to X, to which I can no longer back down.

(I think it was sometime during the trip to rural North Dakota for my grandmother’s funeral, in an exchange with one of my semi-estranged relatives, when X = “move to Buenos Aires”)

I concentrated on the servers’ patterns, particularly noting that of the one who knew I was waiting because I did not have enough money to pay for the food we had already eaten. Characteristically, my resolve began to quash my anxiety into a small ball in the side of my stomach that would soon manifest itself either as an explosion of adrenaline to help my speeding feet along the Palermo sidewalks, a marvel of deception in the face of a young host who would unclasp his hand from my arm, a stream of stammering bad Spanish explanations that would do no good against the force of justice, or a flush of glee and relief that would intensify the taste of the beer I would soon buy with ill-saved pesos to the point of utter bliss.

Three servers in the dining room now, two in the kitchen, a manager by the door. Two in the room, three out of sight, here comes the one who knows what situation I’m in. The police officer walks back outside, mulls on the corner in his orange vest. The family on the couch next to me gets their check. I’m about to be the only customer in the room. One server left, no manager by the door, through the ceiling-high windows I see the cop stroll to one side of the building. The manager comes back, but he doesn’t know I haven’t paid. The lone server leaves, the rush of eminent peril pulses up into the capillaries in my forehead, I set my cloth napkin atop the tray to which the check is attached, and my lady, red-faced, comes hustling through the door clutching her purse.

“The fucking ATM was not around the corner. It was on the other side of the train tracks.”

Good. Lord.

My body slumps, limp. My heart feels like a throbbing rock inside a wet sack.

Our server comes back and seems confused at the distinction my friend proposes to her between “around the corner” and “across the train tracks.”

We leave plenty of tip to cover the muffin.