. . . And My Dog Is Dead

In this county of 9 million souls, there is misery beyond measure.

At any given moment, someone is being robbed, falling sick, failing a test, being arrested, getting divorced, losing a job or coming home from work early to discover his wife in bed with a carpenter.

You don’t have to look very hard to find travail. Ask the guy sitting next to you on a bus “How’s it going?” and he’ll tell you it’s going lousy.

His kid is on drugs, his job is in jeopardy, his stomach hurts and his brother’s a transvestite.

It’s like the cartoon that shows a man in dark glasses with a tin cup, standing next to a dog lying on its back with all four legs sticking straight in the air. The man carries a sign that says, “I am blind and my dog is dead.”

All I have to do is answer my phone or open my mail and I am awash in human misery.

A few months ago my wife became concerned that it was making a wreck of me and took over my mail. But then it began making a wreck of her so she gave it back. One wreck in the family is enough.

I have before me at this very moment a letter from a man about to lose his muffler business due to a fight with a daughter, and a message from a seriously ill woman whose health insurance company has dumped her.

That doesn’t even count the letters I get from women being raped by ghosts or men receiving telepathic death threats from Jupiter.

Trust me when I tell you there is anguish everywhere. I’m not feeling too great myself. I’ve been using a nose spray to relieve a sinus condition and now I discover it is eating away at my nasal membranes.

I am sitting here writing with a rotting nose.

Believe me, I am not making light of anyone’s problems. They are very real. It’s just that there isn’t anything I can do about them.

Take the case of Maria Zamora of Alhambra.

Here is a decent, loving woman who has raised a beautiful family, takes care of three adoring grandchildren and opens her warm, well-kept home to foster children.

Barely 5 feet tall, Maria is as gentle as a butterfly. She cares for foster children not for the money (her husband is an electrician) but because her own mother taught her to help kids in need.

“For each child you help,” her mother said, “you take another step on the ladder to heaven.”

Then how come as she was climbing that ladder, Maria suddenly found herself in handcuffs being booked for battery at the Alhambra police station? You don’t send a saint to the slammer.

It’s this way.

On a recent Saturday, the family attended a church wedding and then went to Chuck E. Cheese’s for lunch and games for the little ones.

That in itself tells me what a fine woman she is to withstand the bedlam of Chuck E. Cheese’s for the sake of the kids. I would rather take them for a hot lunch in hell.

At any rate, they came home and were preparing to attend the wedding reception that night when in comes a black sheep son-in-law.

This kid is no sweetheart but a guy with a rap sheet who is separated from Maria’s daughter, Anna. Trouble is his middle name.

Maria says she was in the kitchen when she heard a noise, went into the living room and found Mr. Trouble pulling Anna’s hair. Maria pushed him out the door and called the cops.

They came, talked to everyone and then slapped the cuffs on Maria as well as the son-in-law. The guy claimed that Maria, who comes up to his shoulder, attacked him.

“I don’t believe this,” Maria is saying all this time. “I call for help and I end up going to jail. How can this be?”

Simple.

When someone makes a citizen’s arrest, the cops have to receive the suspect, as the Penal Code says. The son-in-law made a citizen’s arrest of Maria even as she was making a citizen’s arrest of him.

Depending on who you talk to, the arresting officer has some discretion in determining whether it’s a good or bad arrest. If it’s bad, he can make a field report and let the suspect go.

Despite all kinds of witnesses willing to testify on Maria’s behalf, the cops took her in anyhow. Alhambra apparently allows no discretion. A perp is a perp.

After three hours in jail, she was released and the charge against her dropped. Her son-in-law remains in trouble.

“I’m embarrassed and humiliated,” Maria says. “I don’t even feel comfortable in the neighborhood anymore.”

It’s a compelling case all right, but there’s nothing I can do for her either. The system is screwy. At least her arrest record will probably be expunged and she will not have to back-step on the ladder to heaven.

Also, she isn’t blind, her dog’s alive and her nose isn’t rotting away. She can be grateful for that.