Independence Day Read Free Page A

when a tiny though uniformed Vietnamese security person (a female) approached him just beyond the checkout, where as a diversionary tactic he’d bought a bottle of Grecian Formula, he bolted but was wrestled to the ground, whereupon he screamed that the woman was “a goddamned spick asshole,” kicked her in the thigh, hit her in the mouth (conceivably by accident) and pulled out a fair amount of hair before she could apply a police stranglehold and with the help of a pharmacist and another customer get the cuffs on him. (His mother had him out in an hour.)
    The security guard naturally enough has pressed criminal charges of assault and battery, as well as for the violation of some of her civil rights, and there have even been “hate crime” and “making an example” rumblings out of the Essex juvenile authorities. (I consider this only as election-year bluster plus community rivalry.)
    Meanwhile, Paul has been through myriad pretrial interviews, plus hours of tangled psychological evaluations of his personality, attitudes and mental state—two of which sessions I attended, found unremarkable but fair, though I have not yet seen the results. For these proceedings he has had not a lawyer but an “ombudsman,” who’s a social worker trained in legal matters, and who his mother has talked to but I haven’t. His first actual court date is to be this Tuesday morning, the day after the 4th of July.
    Paul for his part has admitted everything yet has told me he feels not very guilty, that the woman rushed him from behind and scared the shit out of him so that he thought he might be being murdered and needed to defend himself; that he shouldn’t have said what he said, that it was a mistake, but he’s promised he has nothing against any other races or genders and in fact feels “betrayed” himself—by what, he hasn’t said. He’s claimed to have had no specific use in mind for the condoms (a relief if true) and probably would’ve used them only in a practical joke against Charley O’Dell, his mother’s husband, whom he, along with his father, dislikes.
    For a brief time I thought of taking a leave from the realty office, sub-letting a condo somewhere down the road from Deep River and keeping in touch with Paul on a daily basis. But his mother disapproved. She didn’t want me around, and said so. She also believed that unless things got worse, life should remain as “normal” as possible until his hearing. She and I have continued to talk it over every bit—Haddam to Deep River—and she is of the belief that all this will pass, that he is simply going through a phase and doesn’t, in fact, have a syndrome or a mania, as someone might think. (It is her Michigan stoicism that allows her to equate endurance with progress.) But as a result, I’ve seen less of him than I’d like in the last two months, though I have now proposed bringing him down to Haddam to live with me in the fall, which Ann has so far been leery of.
    She has, however—because she isn’t crazy—hauled him to New Haven to be “privately evaluated” by a fancy shrink, an experience Paul claims he enjoyed and lied through like a pirate. Ann even went so far as to send him for twelve days in mid-May to an expensive health camp in the Berkshires, Camp Wanapi (called “Camp Unhappy” by the inmates), where he was judged to be “too inactive” and therefore encouraged to wear mime makeup and spend part of every day sitting in an invisible chair with an invisible pane of glass in front of him, smiling and looking surprised and grimacing at passersby. (This was, of course, also videotaped.) The camp counselors, who were all secretly “milieu therapists” in mufti—loose white tee-shirts, baggy khaki shorts, muscle-bound calves, dog whistles, lanyards, clipboards, preternaturally geared up for unstructured heart-to-hearts—expressed the opinion that Paul was intellectually beyond his years (language and reasoning skills off the Stanford