Amor and Psycho: Stories by Carolyn Cooke Page A

his amorality—it’s his freedom.
    SCARFACE HAD BEEN ASKING since September what I was going to buy him for Christmas. “Jews don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told him.
    “But
I
celebrate Christmas,” Scarface said. “And what I’d really like is a bag of weed.”
    Just before winter break, I arranged to take my students to the city for a day—a two-plus hour drive—to see the murals in the library, city hall, and a mosque. It turned out everyone had a grant for a mural; everyone had a narrative they needed to reclaim.
    No one showed up except Scarface, so we drove down together. At the library, we walked through a detecting machine. “It’s to make sure you aren’t walking away with a book that isn’t checked out,” I explained.
    Scarface looked incredulous. “Who’d jack a book?” he asked.
    At city hall, he walked confidently up to the metal detector, and when it went off, he levitated three feet, turned in midair and bolted. I found him out front, sitting on the rear bumper of a black limousine with embassy plates.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “You said they checked you for books.”
    “That one’s a metal detector. To check you for guns.”
    “Or
knives
,” Scarface said, brandishing his.
    We watched together as a beautiful woman walked down the staircase, wearing a long dress of cream-colored satin and carrying a bouquet of roses.
    “Bitch looks like an angel,” Scarface said.
    We strolled through alleyways in the Mission, observing the iconography of the murals. Scarface peppered me with questions about urban life. When you bought coffee in a restaurant, did you get all the milk and the sugar you wanted? When you bought a house, did it come with electricity? Whenyou bought life insurance, could you kill yourself? When you bought stocks, like Coke, did you get Coke for free? If one of those johns paid you to lie down, could you get your nut off, too?
    I thought, This must be what it is like to have a child. Not that I wanted a child, but it was nice, walking around with a kid asking question after question, expressing curiosity.
    In the mosque, we ran into a stampede of empty shoes on the mint green rug. Men prostrated themselves, or leaned up against the walls, or knelt before the Imam, who spoke rapidly in Arabic about moderation, modesty and patience. Scarface and I sat in back with an interpreter, who wore a headset and translated what the Imam said. Men came and went freely, clasping the hands of their brothers as they passed while putting the other hand over their heart—a formal yet intimate gesture.
    I joined the women in a separate, closed-off room where we could hear the Imam but not distract or be seen by him. Handwritten flyers pasted to the walls admonished us in English not to whisper during prayers. Nevertheless, the women introduced themselves in whispers. One was an Austrian who had converted; another was Apache from the Southwest. The Apache woman had just converted last Thursday, and she wished everyone in the world the same happiness she had found in Islam. A high school senior said Islam gave her a beautiful privacy. She was not oppressed or forced to choose.
    The mural itself was disappointing—the usual romantic imagery: camels. City kids had done it, but everything about the mural spoke to a distant past in the desert.
    The mosque served a free lunch—cumin rice and falafel, chopped salad, and baklava. Somebody opened up the soda machine at the front of the mosque and handed out free sodas. Scarface was impressed, and he drank two Cokes.
    “I want to be a Muslim,” he said.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “I like these guys because they scare the white guys.”
    “You want to scare people?”
    “I already scare people,” Scarface pointed out. “And I know how to pray.”
    When we reached the car, somebody had broken the small rear window. The backseat was covered with glass.
    “Why did they go in the back window?” I wondered aloud.
    “They didn’t want to make