Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,24

called to explain that he was the government official charging me with Grand Larceny and Possession of Stolen Property. He explained that the bonding company was the party pressing the charges, not the Lone Star Café itself. He advised me to retain a lawyer, and said, if I liked, he would send a squad car in half an hour to bring me in to his station on West Tenth Street. He read me my Miranda rights over the phone.

“Do you understand fully everything that I have just explained to you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Iassou, Gabriellaki,” called Dimitri, as I entered the Terminal Food Shop Deli. He looked at me fully, with his eyes fixed on mine. “You are coming home too late, kooklamou,” he said, like a concerned uncle. He had seen me many mornings, getting out of a cab, struggling to appear coherent, as he was opening the shop.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I sat on the front stoop with my egg-on-a-roll waiting for the cop car, not in a million years the way I imagined a felony arrest would be.

The next day, I called the only person I knew who had ever been able to help me out with money: my brother Todd. He had amassed a collection of guitars that filled a whole basement room in his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, but instead of becoming a professional musician, he had cut his hair very short, invested in a few work suits, and started a career on Wall Street, in Ginny Maes. A few too many bone-a-fied humiliations surrounding money experienced in his youth, perhaps, had driven the artistic impulse right into the basement, to be let out on weekends only. Hidden under his crisp white Brooks Brothers shirt, he wore a thin leather necklace with a sterling silver electric guitar dangling at the throat, and years later, when he was a very secure and well-compensated veteran of Goldman Sachs, he wore a silver bracelet and didn’t worry that it was not hidden by his white cuff. Rather, that was his point.

“This is Todd,” he said, picking up the line.

“Todd, hey—”

“Steve, two fifty! Two fifty!” he shouted to someone. “What’s up?” he shouted to me, uncertain to whom he was talking.

We managed a clipped and perfunctory four-minute phone call, Wall Street traders shouting behind him in the background, and he shouting at them with me mid-sentence hanging in his ear, during which he put me on hold more than once. This was how all phone calls would be with him for the next dozen or so years that he spent on Wall Street, and they were, those phone calls, the very first step in an incremental distancing that would eventually lead to a complete and definitive loss. I knew it was too bothersome to call him during work. It was too alienating to try to talk, like siblings, with someone who is putting you on hold every twenty-five seconds, as his work demanded. The days of lucky rabbit fur leg massages were long behind us both. I learned to call infrequently and to talk fast when I did. But in those four minutes, while on hold, he had retained a lawyer to help me, for fifteen hundred dollars, and conferenced her in to the call.

“Jesus, Gabs. I had no idea this was going on,” Todd said in closing.

“Right,” I said. “I know. Sorry.”

The lawyer and I then spent twenty minutes on the phone during which she asked me to describe the details of the scheme and how I had learned it, and then, in the final three minutes of our strategy conversation, she asked me my date of birth. When she put the math of the year together, she stumbled for a minute: “Are you telling me you’re only seventeen years old and you’ve been serving alcohol at the Lone Star Café for the past year?”

As I explained that part of my story, I could nearly hear her smiling ear to ear through the wires.

It apparently took less than an hour of her time, billed against her retainer, to get the charges dropped, but when she called me a few days later to tell me the good news, she was not festive. She advised me, authoritatively, to get my life together.

“You need to enroll in school and get out of state,” she counseled. “In lieu of juvenile prosecution they could consider you for a juvenile diversion program, with counseling for twelve months, and this will also show on your