No Monument To Justice

There’s this traffic light in town that I swear is against me, personally. I never, ever make this light. I live in kind of a crappy town that is comprised largely of bars, mills, and strip joints. In fact, at different points in the last fifteen years it’s held the dubious distinction of being the per-capita capital of strip clubs and methamphetamine in America and the world, respectively. I believe those titles are presently held by other fine towns, but we had our glory days. It’s the kind of blue collar burg that I can afford to own in, as opposed to renting in the nicer neighboring town. This has virtues of its own, of course, but the light at 28th and Main is not one of them.

Yeah, it’s the kind of burgh that has a Main Street. The junction of 28th and Main is kind of a linchpin in the town. It’s where the zip code changes, where the railroad spur connects the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern lines together, and the biggest Mill in town finds its home there. Between the railroad crossing, the logging trucks for the mill, the gas trucks for the Amerigas plant, and all the buses, the area gets choked out pretty quickly at certain times of day. Which are the only times of day that I ever pass that way, of course.

But I digress.

28th and Main, where I spend an inordinate amount of my adult life, has a trailer hitch shop, a battery shop and a really loathsome little cinderblock tavern on its various corners. The bar is called The OK Tavern, which is a generous assessment. I spent about ten minutes of a bad New Year’s Eve there once, where we actually got “bounced” by the Bouncer because my buddy Doug—who was already drunk when we picked him up at 9:30—chose that charming little bistro as the place to void the contents of his stomach. People like Doug and his vomitus are the reason bars have dim lighting. The night would have been a bust no matter where we spent it, because of the company, but I still hold it against The OK, and have never darkened the door of their establishment since. And it’s been eighteen years, so I guess I showed them. It could just as easily have happened at any of the other wretched hives of scum and villainy that pass as watering holes around here; The Pour House, The Alibi, The White Horse. But it happened at The OK, so fuck ‘em. I ain’t no monument to justice.

But I digress.

I have a love-hate relationship with traffic lights. And vehicles. And cell phones. And computers. And kitchen appliances. Pretty much all inanimate objects. By love-hate, I mean that I hate to love them, and they love to hate me. If there is a field of intelligence that surrounds us, and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together, it might just hate me. All inanimate objects are inherently possessed of a malevolence that is directed at me personally. I always pick the broken one off the shelf at the store, or the one without the price tag which also happens to be the last in the inventory. It requires a large portion of my emotional and intellectual resources to wage my daily war against malfunctions and sabotage, outwitting and outflanking these enemies who deceptively just sit there doing nothing, as though they were not little assassins plotting my demise.

The only inanimate object that is actually on my side is my iPod. My iPod loves me. It understands my moods, and tells little jokes by its song selections. You could argue that I’m crazy, and that none of these objects has any capacity for good or evil outside of our use of them, but you would be wrong about my iPod. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked for as a present that has actually made my life better. Everything else is just stuff taking up space. It always plays the right song at the right time. Like when I’m sitting at the Nemesis Light at 28th and Main.

I’m most likely to get stuck here on my way home from work. As a carpenter specializing in insurance restoration, my days have a huge amount of variety in them. I go from one construction discipline to another from day to day, so it never gets boring. Framing to drywall to roofing to concrete to finish carpentry to paint. If I can indulge my ego for a moment, it’s like having a brown belt in ten martial arts, as opposed to a black belt in one specific form. If you went to work every day and were expected to be an accountant, a chiropractor, a mechanic and a photographer at any given time, then you would know exactly what my career is like. Keeps it interesting, but some days are brutally exhausting, others are messy, and some are truly disgusting. There are dead things under houses.

So the end of any given day can entail a nice sense of satisfaction at an honest job well done, or it can be a gauntlet that tests my will to live before I can get home, strip in the garage, and take a boiling hot Silkwood Shower while my clothes burn in a pyre out on the lawn. On those days, when I’m covered in paint, caulking, drywall dust, or fiberglass insulation, sitting at the Nemesis Light waiting to get clean is particularly galling. It is then that my iPod is a balm that soothes the savage beast.

Most of insurance restoration work is trying to prevent or eliminate mold. Whether from fire suppression, holes in the roof, or burst pipes, mold is the new asbestos. It has the power to induce spontaneous decapitation, and is believed to be the leading cause of dog hickeys and uncle abuse. Or so the lawyers would have us believe. The point being, mold scares the shit out of everybody in a superstitious way that you used to need a witch-doctor to induce. You’d swear it was plutonium, just radiating cancer everywhere. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about how to prevent mold. It amounts to “Keep Things Dry.”

There are specific protocols involved in preventing mold, and even more involved in eliminating it once you’ve got it. Insurance companies send us across the country to attend Mold School. We take continuing education classes every year. The thing you find out at Mold School is that there is no such thing as killing mold. No. Such. Thing. Mold can survive in the vacuum of space at nearly Absolute Zero. Their spores are almost everywhere, indoors and out, and only the environmental conditions prevent it from growing all over. It needs moisture, food, darkness and relatively still airflow to thrive. Failing these conditions, it remains in a dormant state. 

In that state, spores are effectively immortal. Radiation, heat, cold, caustic chemicals? No effect. That bleach water you’ve been using just puts it to sleep. That’s all. Then it naps until favorable conditions exist again, and it’s back to business as usual. And while fire can technically kill a mold colony, it instantly begins to eject its seed in a panicked plume of spores that almost always find a way out of the given environment. So even if we burned the world down, mold would almost certainly outlive us. The best we can hope for is containment. Really, that’s it. I had to go all the way to Vancouver, WA to learn that you need to keep stuff dry, or else bleach and paint it. Seems like they could have put that in an email.

But I digress.

So some days when I’m sitting at the Nemesis Light, bottlenecked because of a little yellow schoolbus and a choo-choo train, my iPod will throw on a song that just makes everything alright. It has a library of choices that’s about ninety-five hundred songs, organized into eighty-one playlists; one for every possible mood or occasion. It never fails to amaze me how much better music makes everything. Doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, or crawling through the boneyard under somebody’s house looking for dry rot, doesn’t matter. The right song can make it ok. Music is a panacea for what ails us, and a perfect reliquary for memories. Most days, that's a great thing. But sometimes the things it brings up out of that repository of memory can hit you like a ton of bricks. The other day when I was sitting there at the Nemesis Light—righteously ignoring The OK—one of those songs came on. And even though I’ve heard it a thousand times, it still blindsided me in that moment. The song is “Yellow” by Coldplay. It’s arguably the best song in the canon of a great band, the music and the lyrics matching each other in simple beauty and depth. I have live versions, acoustic versions, live acoustic versions and even a cover or two; it’s just exquisite.

I was pretty surprised to discover that it’s my niece Kailee’s favorite song. It’s fairly mature for a five, almost six, year old. To be accurate, Kailee is actually my cousin, once removed. Her Mom is my first cousin, the daughter of my Dad’s sister. Most people call my relationship to Kailee second cousin, but a genealogist would tell you we are first cousins, once removed. I let all my cousins’ kids call me uncle, or cousin, or just Lawrence. I’m not much for standing on ceremony. Neither are kids her age, which is something else we have in common. I didn’t find out “Yellow” was Kailee’s favorite song until we were planning her memorial service. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always wished I knew that sooner.

Kailee was killed by a drunk driver the evening of June 17, 2009. She and her parents were headed home from Church one Wednesday night, southbound on I-5, and a forty-one year old man named Stephen Whitaker was headed north on I-5, in his 1972 Winnebago. He had a blood alcohol content of .24, three times the legal limit. There was a lot of speculation about a fire that may have occurred in his RV. Whatever the reason, he lost control and crossed a sizeable median doing in excess of seventy MPH and, entering oncoming traffic, intersected with my cousin’s Oldsmobile Alero. He took the lives of Kailee, my cousin once removed, and the other passenger in his RV, a homeless friend named John Ratcliff. 

Stephen had three previous DUI’s, and was driving on a suspended license. He spent four days in the hospital and emerged with a broken leg, only to be taken into custody and held for manslaughter against $890,000 bail. I think $890 would have sufficed to preclude his release, given his homeless stature, but it was time for Statements to be made about how Seriously the System was taking this. You’d think that Statement might have been made between DUI’s two and three, but you’d be wrong about that.

The following morning, June 18, 2009 at 6:22 AM I was up for work, engaging in the ritual of making coffee and stretching out for the day of mold containment ahead of me. The rolling narrative of the previous day’s disasters was being recited by the talking heads on the morning news show. The background noise of life, all the things that were happening to Other People while I was busy making my plans. I had no sense of premonition that while Kelli Warner was talking about a little girl, name withheld, being killed by a drunk driver—to me, just another addition to the endless litany of tragedies that had happened to Someone Else—that this tragedy wasn’t passing me by. This one was for me.

The words were no sooner out of her mouth when the phone rang. I was at first surprised and then annoyed to hear it going off so early. My boss usually had the good sense to wait until the 7:00 hour to start regulating on me. It’s funny how a call from someone you love and ordinarily look forward to hearing from, can suddenly turn into a foreboding toll of the bell if it comes outside the windows of normal, civilized communication. When I saw my Aunt Kathy’s name show up on the caller ID at 6:22 AM, I knew something was terribly wrong. Without preamble, she told me that Kailee had been killed, and that Brian and Cathleen were in the hospital for minor injuries. As I tend to do in times of shock, I made some irrational objection to the idea. This time I based my rebuttal on the non sequitur that I’d just heard about an accident matching those details on the news, and the news is what happens to Other People. So clearly, what she was saying was patently ridiculous.

There is no way Kelli Warner knew that my first cousin, once removed, was gone before I knew, and was presently telling fifty thousand other people about it, name withheld. That Kailee had been absent from the world for almost nine hours of my life, unbeknownst to me. But of course Kelli knew. And so did her co-anchor, Mark. And the producer, and the camera man, and the sound guy. And for all I know, the intern that brings them coffee, too. To them, it was another in a series of ongoing tragedies that they report on each day before they get to the puff piece at the end about the Panda born at the zoo. Which seems unforgiveable, until I consider that it otherwise would have been another in the series of Other People’s tragedies that wash right over me until they get to the puff piece about the Panda, at which point I know it’s time to put the coffee on.

Without exploiting the grief of those that I love and who shared in the surreal apocalypse of this staggering loss, I can say that the ever-expanding shockwave of bereavement is somehow compounded and magnified by the logistics of death. Caskets and plots of ground to be chosen, flowers to be arranged, stationary to be selected for the order of service, pictures to be sifted through. To say nothing of Police Reports and sworn affidavits, all the professional concern of the DA and reporters. While we were circling the wagons and looking for the ripcord on the parachute to save us from this freefall of unimaginable shock, anger, and loss, Stephen Whitaker was denying and obfuscating for his life. Pleading with his doctors and priest to advocate for his innocence. It wasn’t alcohol, it was a seizure. There was a fire in the RV. The Devil made me do it. Whatever. 

It was during this process of selecting which wavelength of grief we were going to tune in to that I found out something about Kailee that I hadn’t known. I was in the back bedroom, combing through grandma’s photo albums for pictures of Kailee to scan into digital images for the memorial service. The rotating staff of the Picture Selection Committee was hard at work printing off pictures and mounting them to posterboard, or scanning images to create the computer slide show for the projector at the Church. No one could take the duty for too long without meltdown, so we rotated fresh souls into those trenches hourly. As hard it was to go through the mountain of pictures of Kailee as a baby, a toddler, learning to swim, riding their dog—a Chocolate Lab named Knuckle—we all knew that eventually we’d come to the end of them. And when we did, we’d permanently run out of pictures of Kailee, and never be able to add another. The silence beyond that was like a tsunami that could not be denied or kept at bay.  

Apple makes it super easy to come up with a photo montage set to music, and the Selection Committee was running through the demo version for the service when the unmistakable opening chords of Coldplay’s “Yellow” came on. My Aunt’s house is the last place in the world I’d expect to hear any music composed after 1965, so my curiosity was piqued immediately. I came out to the living room, to see the slideshow in progress with its musical montage. It was at one of those strange moments of grace and peace that arrive as unexpected interludes during the grieving process. A lull between tears when fond recollections and stories bring laughter and sighs of contentment, before you return to the reality where the stories are all that remain, and the wailing on the inside of you resumes.

I was sorting through these emotions and realizing that Brian and Cathleen wanted you to talk about Kailee; not avoid the mention of her name, not talk about her in hushed tones, or in the past tense. So when I came out and said how much I loved the music they were playing, they told me it was Kailee’s favorite song, which came as a delightful surprise to me. Coldplay is an acquired taste that doesn’t really fit in with the Top 40 sensibilities of most people, let alone the Church crowd. How fascinating that this little soul had resonated with something so mature and sublime in its beauty. I felt like I understood her just a little better. Like another piece in the beautiful mosaic of her had dropped into place for me, even as Yellow played over pictures of her life floating by on a computer screen, only to fade and dissolve into the next in an endless loop that could have no more added to it.

Over the coming days and weeks I was granted an opportunity to speak about Kailee at various venues. At her memorial I remarked how her eyes had the kind of shape that always looked like she was laughing. Like she already knew the punchline to the great cosmic joke God was telling. She was in on it. I told one of my favorite stories about her. How once, when she was four, she had gotten into an argument with her Mom, Cathleen, and as Mom’s sometimes do, Cathleen ended it with “Because I said so.” To which Kailee responded, “Mommy, sometimes I want to make the rules.” That was the kind of mind that she had. Even at four years old, she understood the logical structures at work in the world, the idea of Authority and where it flows from. She could game the system with the best of us; a force to be reckoned with. All of these stories I told about her, whenever I could. But never about “Yellow.” That one I’ve kept to myself until now.

During this swirl of days and months, Whitaker found it in himself to come to terms with the truth and plead guilty to the charges leveled against him. We were spared the agony of a trial, and were able to move directly to the Penalty Phase of the court proceedings. It was a small mercy that I’ve always been grateful for. The Sentencing Hearing was brutal enough; I can’t imagine having to go through the gauntlet of a whole trial to get there. At that hearing, the Prosecutor read letters from our extended family across the country who could not be there. Via his attorney, Clara Rigmaiden, Stephen Whitaker had a letter read aloud by way of apology. He said in part that he was "sorry to have been the instrument of such sorrow and tragedy," and that he would "gladly trade his life for Kailee's." The DA and the Defense made statements to the Judge. As a family, we were allowed to address the Court as to sentencing recommendations, and even speak to Whitaker directly. He never once picked his head up off the defense table, as though laying prostrate before the court and Kailee’s family.

It was a remarkable testament to us as a family that every single word that came out of our mouths was in absolution and forgiveness toward the man who had taken everything from us. Not one harsh word or epithet was hurled at him, not one voice was ever raised, only pity for his lost state as a human being. When I got up to speak I had all kinds of thoughts in my head. I’m an articulate guy; I’ve spoken to hundreds of people, even in paying gigs, and never felt a moment of stage fright. With three whiskeys in me, I ad-libbed my Best Man’s toast at my best friend’s wedding to hundreds of people and brought down the house with laughter and tears. That said, you’d have thought I’d suffered a stroke by the way I yammered when I got up to that lectern to address the Court.

I went on and on about the bizarre confluence of events that had to mesh together with clockwork precision for this man to have ended the life of my flesh and blood, instead of Somebody Else’s. Because it’s always supposed to be Somebody Else’s! I talked about how nothing could be done to reverse this and how only preventing Whitaker from doing this again could be accomplished at this late date. I was like some drunk that wants to get all deep and talk about God. May He forgive me for all the “For Whom the Bell Tolls” horseshit I blathered on about. I went on and on until I was embarrassed with myself and hated the sound of my stupid voice; until the gracious words of my family highlighted to me how much better they all are than me. Until I realized that when someone steals a car or a TV set, they can give one of those back or exchange it for equal cash value. But when something like this happens… There literally is no such thing as Justice.

The scales cannot be balanced, no matter what we do to men like Whitaker. So we build statues and monuments to Justice, and rightly name the Justice System as what it is. A System. It stands in for Justice, in the same representative way that the monument of the blind woman with the scales stands in. As my stupid voice echoed plaintive in my ears, I saw that it’s not Justice that is blind, but us. Lest we look on the world, and ourselves, and understand that Justice cannot exist in our midst. Merely representations of it. In that moment, I just trailed off. It was then that Stephen Whitaker became an object to me, and I went and sat down.

If a tree had fallen and ended Kailee's life instead, I would feel the same animus toward it that I do toward Whitaker. None at all. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup today, any more than I would be able to pick out the particular branch of a tree if that had been her fate instead. I have no memory of him at all. I wouldn’t be more satisfied if they’d elected to feed him feet first into a wood-chipper like a tree limb, instead of giving him sixteen years in prison like they did. Stephen Whitaker’s punishment, even unto death, means nothing to me. The absence of his punishment would indeed be an injustice, one I could not tolerate. But the presence of his punishment is not Justice; it’s no balancing of the scales. His punishment, no matter the severity, restores nothing; therefore he is irrelevant to me. With men like Whitaker, the best we can hope for is containment.

Only the absence of Kailee, and the presence of memory remains for me now.

There’s this constellation of awful impressions and memories that orbit around me now, even a dozen years later. Ones no one should ever have to experience. The words of Whitaker’s attorney as she argued that he should receive a lighter sentence for the death of his passenger, John Ratcliff, because Ratcliff was also a drunken, homeless drug addict who’d knowingly elected to get in the RV with Whitaker. She said, "I don't want to sound calloused, but he was there by his own choice, drinking with Mr. Whitaker and getting into the car with him that day. He had some culpability in that situation." I guess that's lawyer-speak for "He kind of got what he deserved." It worked, too. Whitaker got four fewer years in prison for that. He’ll be out in 2025 instead of 2029 because Ms. Rigmaiden convinced the judge that Ratcliff mattered less than Kailee. I don’t envy her for having to have those words come out of her mouth in defense of her client. At first I was disgusted, but eventually I came to see that she was just doing her job, and then I pitied her. Because unlike my days down in the boneyard, there’s no Silkwood Shower that’ll ever wash that off of her.

But by far the worst of it all is the memory of the graveside canopy that we all stood under, the mass of us huddled in its shade on that blazing hot day. When the pallbearers came into view from around the bend in the path through the copse of trees, they were carrying the smallest casket you can imagine toward us. When we laid eyes on it, together and at once, the collection of mourners began to sob with a fervency beyond language. It began with a single, otherworldly cry from her mother as she collapsed into our arms, and then it was as if a match had been lit in a gas-filled room. Our collective wail went up to the Heavens, raw and inchoate, with a grief and anger deeper than any language or tongue. The casket was just so fucking small. No one should even know those exist, let alone ever see one. Because you can never unsee that. It's just a part of you for the rest of your days.

Most days when “Yellow” comes on, which is pretty often on my iPod, I simply enjoy the beauty of it and how wonderful life can be. Given its fragile, clockwork delicacy, and all the things that can go wrong, life is actually pretty great most of the time. Sometimes when “Yellow” comes on I really remember that moment of revelatory connection with Kailee, that affinity of our souls, and I smile and just soar on the memory of her. I sing at the top of my stupid voice, “Look at the stars, see how they shine for you. And all the things you do. Yeah, they were all Yellow.” And it’ll be the best thing that happens all day. Because around here, we don’t talk about Kailee in hushed tones or the past tense.

But sometimes I’ll be sitting at the light at 28th and Main, and “Yellow” will come on and it lights a match in a gas-filled room and I dissolve into uncontrollable sobs, even all these years later. I guess that’s the thing about loss and grief, there’s no such thing as killing it. No such thing as getting over it. It lies dormant and awaits the proper conditions, and then it’s alive and well, as fresh today as it was at that June morning at 6:22 AM. On days like that I repeat to the Almighty what I said to Him from the dais at Kailee’s Memorial: “Lord, if you’ll forgive me a moment of impertinence, I’d like to say...Sometimes I want to make the rules.”

But I don’t get to. The best I can hope for is containment.

“Your skin, yeah, your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

Do you know? You know I love you so

You know I love you so”