Slab City

A while ago at work I had to watch a video of our client being interviewed by the police after he had been arrested. He had blood all over his face and head and he was in handcuffs, but he was sitting there like he was in a café.  “ Yes sir. We’ve been living in Slab City for, oh, about 6 months,” he said. “Yep.” Slab City is a place in the desert where people live off-grid in trailers and tents and elaborate shacks. Parts of it  have the same strange sad beauty of an old carousel in the fog, and local artists have created shrines and works that are well-known tourist attractions. There’s a skatepark and Salvation Mountain and another area called East Jesus. It’s called that, not for religious reasons, but the same way someone else might call a place Buttfuck, California, way out of the way in the middle of nowhere. It is pretty much a lawless town that the police stay away from except on rare occasions when someone calls 911 to say their boyfriend has locked them in a room for 2 days.

“Would it be possible to get a glass of water,” the guy asked. “Thank you so kindly.” He was really putting it on. Yes it was his girlfriend who called. And for the record the video I watched is the only documentation of him alive, he was killed in his cell two weeks after it was made.

We don’t usually take clients who abuse women or children. Period. But someone from another firm we work with wanted to take the case because the guy’s family, his nice mom and 6 brothers and sisters, as well as his son whose claim it was, had begged, and because, in this particular lawyer’s opinion, police misconduct (he was badly beaten and then left in his cell for 2 days to die) trumps the drug-fueled misconduct of two people who lived in a van together in Slab City. The lawyer said yes. It was his case and we were not involved in it. Still, there I was, watching the interviews and taking notes.

I don’t watch most of the videos that come in for each case, but the police interviews I can handle: two people trying to communicate. You can tell instantly when someone is a liar. I don’t mean lying, everyone does that to a certain extent, I mean when they are no longer true to themselves. They’re too certain about everything, too unaware of anyone but themselves, and there’s something that makes me uncomfortable about it, like I don’t have the right to see such revealing detail about a person without their permission.

This guy may not have been a Liar but he was definitely full of shit. There were reasons and explanations for his behavior, but facts are facts. He hit and kicked a woman and locked her in a room, and was, for the most part, denying it.

“Dude,” he said to the cop, “What are you going to do? I was having a bad day.”

He explained that the week before, they had gone to the casino together and he lost a lot of money. He took a long pause and then said, “I didn’t win.”  He said it like it was a profound statement of his life, which it kind of was. He said his girlfriend was an alcoholic and was always knocking into things and falling, and that’s why she had marks. “Everybody knows this, come on man.”  The cop asked about her split lip, and he bounced up in his seat, “She always has that!” He said. “You can ask anyone. I used to have a video of her banging into things in the trailer, but she erased it.”

Residents of Slab City. Not the couple in question.

“Well we can look at your phone,” the cop said, “We’ll give it to forensics, they can find all that stuff that’s been erased.”

“Okay,” the guy said, “okay.” He put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands, still in cuffs, together, and leaned his head down as though in prayer. “Yeah dude, take my phone, no problem, whatever you need.”

“All right,” the cop said. “I will do that,” he checked things off on his paper and then shuffled them together. “So that’s it.”

The cop rose from his seat and then the guy did too, hunched a little because of the long chain connecting to his feet. He nodded slowly to the cop who held the door for him. “Help yourself man, help yourself. Fuck it. Take everything.” Then the screen went black.

I ended up watching the video of the girlfriend after that even though I didn’t have to. It was not a part of the case. What the guy did to her didn’t have anything to do with what was done to him in the prison, though from a Buddhist perspective it might have. Her interview took place in the hospital the night before. They hadn’t arrested her boyfriend yet. The camera was on the cop’s lapel which meant that the POV was shaky and moved around a lot, but I could see that her face was tear-streaked with mascara and she was lying down in a neck brace. She had a split lip as well and her mouth was full and reddened. She kept holding her tongue to the cut on her lip and didn’t talk much at first. She just gave one word answers with her eyes closed. Everything about her was oddly regal and beautiful, but sad and broken too.

The cop asked her how she ended up in the ER at 3am. She didn’t answer right away and then the details she gave were random and in no particular order. Her voice was low. He locked her in the bedroom, she said. He punched her and pushed her head against the wall when they went to the casino. He would hit her whenever he felt like it. Her name was Janice and she was born in 1977. The guy was an alcoholic and changed completely when he drank. She drank sometimes too but not like him. They had been together for 4 months. All of a sudden she raised her voice, “Why didn’t you get him? He was right there.” she cried, “He was right there.” Tears slid into her ear.

The lighting in the ER was harsh and jangled and the cop’s camera kept shifting so that the focus went to her chin, then to her mouth, then to her hand curled but relaxed at the side of the stretcher. Mostly though it was on her profile. If you saw her on the street, you might judge, you might say she’s a meth head, she’s lost, she needs help. But here she was beautiful, the neck brace holding her head high and proud and you routed for her instantly.

The cop asked what the guy looked like. She was very generous in her description and except for the height and the hair color, I wouldn’t have known who she was talking about. He asked her if he had any tattoos and she said he had one on his arm.

“What is it of?”

“It’s a girl with a finger to her mouth saying ‘Sssshhhh’,” she looked away for a moment, “How ironic,” she whispered.