The Glass Cafe Read Online Free PDF Page B

development.”
    Of course a lot of it has been in the papers and on television which is how I found out I am photogenic although it doesn’t matter because I’m never going to be an actor or work in films. But I found out one thing about television and the news media which is that when they write about me or Al and what happened a lot of what they say is just flat wrong, like when they say we were rich, which we weren’t then but kind of are now, or when they say everything turned out all right because Al was a close friend of a senator who offered to help us. Except that the senator was a woman who Al met in a yoga class and not a man who offered to help us because Al is beautiful and an exotic dancer, like the press said, so it makes you wonder about everything they say, the press I mean.
    The truth is we got arrested and held that night and Al called a friend who was a lawyer and the lawyer came down that night and talked the way lawyers talk and in the morning we were released without bail which made me feel all right because I was sick of looking at the boogers on the wall but not all right because I was still talking to Benny about breaking records. Not by stealing bikes, because that was Benny’s idea, but I thought breaking a record of some kind might be the way to get famous and rich.
    We went home and for a week nothing happened except that the biker stopped me outside one day and held his hand up to slap mine and said:
    â€œHey, cool, man . . .”
    Which I think meant he liked me because I’d been arrested and maybe had a chip in my butt now so I would be tracked by the black helicopters too. But it didn’t matter and Waylon and I went down to the beach and spent a day and I went back to school and I thought that was the end of it.
    Then Mrs. Preston filed formal charges of assault and resisting arrest against Al and then added charges of child endangerment and mistreatment against Al and the television crews came to talk to us and the newspapers came and they spent more time than they would have spent because I’m a little photogenic but Al, she’s
really
photogenic and knows how to stand and smile so they kept coming back and the headlines read:
    STRIPPER MOM FIGHTS SYSTEM
    And:
    MOM BARES ALL FOR ART
    And they had some pictures from the brochures and posters from the club and that brought the press back again and then they published the drawings I’d done of the girls and that brought them back again and by the time we were scheduled to go to court for the first hearing everything was completely out of control and the press was there from all over. We had to fight our way into the courthouse and the camera flashes were going off so thick inside I was half blind.
    We had spoken to our attorney, a blond man named Wilton, and he was joined by an attorney from the art people who showed my drawings and they were joined by an attorney from an artists’ rights group who said our freedom was being infringed upon which I agreed with and thought they should go talk to Mr. Gomez whose door got shot as well but they brought another attorney who was a specialist in family matters and he took Al aside and said:
    â€œAll right, in which ways were you accused of mistreating the child?”
    â€œ
The
child—you mean Anthony, you mean
my
child?”
    â€œWhatever. Yes. Not that it matters because this is just a preliminary hearing and I don’t think they’ve got a case but how did you mistreat him?”
    I could see it coming in her eyes and I thought it might be bad form—I’ve always wanted to use that phrase, “bad form,” but never had a chance until now—to attack your own attorney so I tugged on Al’s arm until she remembered I was there. We went into the courthouse without bothering to answer the attorney.
    If I thought it was going to be calmer in the courthouse I was completely wrong. If anything it was worse. I found out