Joshua Mohr - Model Citizen

Its six in the morning on New Years Day and Ava cries from the crib, which means my wife says something to me like, Your turn, and I say something whiny like, Bottle, fine, and stumble into the kitchen and spill milk on the counter and dont wipe it up, leave it for later, after coffee, after caffeine makes my mind fire right. I tuck the bottle in the waistband of my drawers so I can hoist Ava up with both arms, and she says, Lets play, a new phrase for her, and I carry her back into our bed and lay her in the middle and get back in myself, Lelo and I flanking her, the three of us lying like a happy family, and for twenty seconds thats what we are.

Then the numbness starts.

I notice it first in my right arm, then realize its creeping into my leg, too. Thats weird, I think, two limbs falling asleep at the same time.

Soon theres no feeling on that entire side of my body, from shoulder to toes.

I shift positions, rolling onto my back, so blood can flow freely.

Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.

Still numb.

Fear spills out of me like the milk rolling down my daughters chin. I shake my dead hand back and forth, back and forth, and say to Lelo, Somethings wrong, and she says, What? and I say, 911.

Shes to the phone fast and I roll over onto my stomach, a gesture that Ava interprets as an invitation to play and shes straddling my back and yelling, Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop!

My frantic wife doing her best to conjure the paramedics and me knowing beyond any doubt that the numbness will zip over me like a body bag and Ava keeps chanting, Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop! and I am crying uncontrollably, grieving a girl Ill never get to see turn into a woman, and if this is the end of my life, I wish it had ended sooner. Wish I had died before meeting Lelo, before ever seeing Ava on the ultrasound, the size of an orange seed, our nickname for her until she was born.

I wish Id never gotten sober, never tried to be a better person. Why endure so much harrowing improvement to die like this at thirty-eight years old?

In 2004, while I was in grad school at the University of San Francisco, I volunteered at a halfway house in the Mission District, teaching creative writing.

Kae was one of my students at the halfway house. He had spent fifteen years in San Quentin and was out two weeks when I met him. One of the conditions of his parole was that he had to stay clean or hed be busted back to prison. After the first session we had together, he came up to me and said, Gonna be the first American Indian to win the National Book Award for nonfiction.

It made me like him immediately. Here he was fresh from the penitentiary and he had no fear of odds, no concept of how remote the chances were of that happening. Or he did know and didnt care. Maybe winning the National Book Award seemed easy after pulling all those years in prison.

The first essay he handed in made me think he might actually do it. The scene was short, maybe four or five paragraphs that dramatized Kae sitting on the sidewalk, against the front of a twenty-four-hour donut shop in San Franciscos Tenderloin District, the part of town where junkies roamed in an animal refuge, no police, no poachers, so long as they kept their chaos in a contained radius. This is changing as the city gentrifies, but back then, the TL was an addict asylum.

In the scene, Kae was out of heroin and he wore only an undershirt and hed never been so cold in his life, so hungry, so depleted. A taxi parked out front of the donut shop, the driver talking on his cell, arguing with someone. Kae watched words explode from the drivers mouth and then he saw the exhaust puffing from the tailpipe, looking like a steam room, giving him an idea. Freezing, Kae crawled, pulled himself across the sidewalk to the cabs back, first warming his hands in the exhaust, finally submerging his head in that toxic cloud, lathering himself in the cars warmth and affection.

The story ended there, the reader sucking carbon monoxide right along with Kae, smelling the acrid poison, but also feeling its billowy tenderness.

I finished it and started right back at the beginning, reread it a few more times. This guy was good and needed help, needed someone to treat him like he wasnt just another convict.

You might do it, I said to Kae, handing his essay back with my notes, ways I thought he could make it even better.

Do what?

Win the National Book Award.

He eyeballed me. Kae was in his fifties, dark complexion set off with pale patches of eczema that he constantly scratched. His head was kept in a crew cut. Old and faded tribal tattoos on his forearms.

Course Ill do it, he said.

They were always calling out, screwing around, and I dug their chaos during our classes. They didnt have to front tough; no one was a gangster while we wrote. Nobody had felonies hanging from their necks like nooses. We were people talking about storytelling, and that was all we were.

I had one student who was illiterate. She came up to me and said, Do you have to know reading for this class?

She was in her forties. I stayed after our sessions and read our assignments to her. Usually, she didnt like the stories I chose, saying something like, These people is snobs. She was right. My first batch of stories was too much head, not enough heart. All the characters brandished vocabularies like weapons, but all it really did for them was provide more words to describe their disappointments in life.

Everyone was in some sort of halfway house.

One time, I was scheduled to teach the morning after Valentines Day. My ex-wifewell, not my ex yet when this all happened, Blue was still my disappointed wife, my why-did-I-pick-this-guy wifedecided that we should go out for a fancy Valentines Day dinner. It was only one meal, after all, and what could go wrong?

I went from martinis to a few beers and we drank a couple bottles of champagne during the meal and dont forget after-dinner drinks. We had to cocktail hard, otherwise there was this whole conversation thing. Couples have to talk, they say. We hadnt been talking much at all because earlier that week wed had a huge fight. Id done another dumb thing so I bunked at Shanys house, making up maudlin and self-sympathetic remixes of what had happened. Shany was my best friend, and even she thought I was in the wrong.