Grandma Lois had her thing together. It was a church kind of thing, but she had a lot of pride, and it hurt her to see Mom, her only daughter, get knocked around. When Grandma Lois had the chance to go down to Curry, she thought hard and long about leaving Arlena, but in the end she knew she wasn’t doing her any good in Harlem, so she left, hoping to build up something down in North Carolina that would make Mom want to join her.
I washed up and thought about what I would tell the people down at Home Depot. First thing I would have to do is lie about my age. I would say I was nineteen so they wouldn’t ask me nothing about why I wasn’t in school. I had my fake GED in a plastic sleeve along with my Social Security card. I thought about saying that I’d taken some time off after high school because I was thinking about joining the army, but then I thought that probably wouldn’t work.
Home Depot was the joint. I knew if I could cop a job with them, I could get my thing together. Maybe I would find another place for me and Mama or even convince her to go down to North Carolina. I knew she didn’t want to go down with nothing in her pockets.
“I don’t want nobody feeling sorry for me,” she said. “They can think what they want, but I don’t want to be explaining nothing to nobody.”
I could dig that. If you had some money in your pocket, you could walk on your own side of the street and let people walk on they side. If it went down correct, I could send her some money every week and then she wouldn’t have to ask for nothing. That’s what life was about, being able to take care of your own business.
“The clinic opens at eight thirty,” Mama said. She was sitting at the table, making a circle with her fingers around the flowered coffee cup. She had nice fingers, long and slender. If she had had her nails done, they would’ve looked good.
“You got pains in your stomach again?”
“It’s just nervous,” she said. “You look like you going to a funeral in that white shirt. Is that new?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Told you I got a job interview.”
“Well, you should get it, as fine as you looking today,” Mama said. She had a smear of something white on her cheek.
“You coughing again?”
“You a doctor now?” she answered, smiling.
“Doctor Dance,” I answered. “Yo, that’s hip.”
The coffee she made was way too weak. I needed something strong in the morning.
“Where your prescription?” I asked.
“It’s on the refrigerator, in the bowl,” she said. “When you coming home?”
“Depends on how long the interview takes,” I said. “They ain’t in a hurry, ’cause they got their job already.”
Mama said she really needed the medicine because she had run out, and I said I would be home as soon as I could.
The prescription was for painkillers. I went into the bathroom and looked through Mama’s little lineup of plastic containers. I thought I had seen some of the pills she was looking for and found them. I opened the childproof container and dumped the pile out in my hand. There were eight pills left. I put four in my pocket and took the others out to Mama.
“Where were these?” she asked.
“On the second shelf,” I said.
I watched her take two pills with coffee and put two back in the container for later.
I was supposed to meet Maurice on 125th Street and St. Nicholas. We were thinking on going over to the Home Depot interview together. I wanted both of us to get jobs, but I still hoped that Maurice didn’t look too much better than me.
I was glad I had spent the money for a new shirt even though it had left me with less than three dollars.
Maurice was five nine, two inches shorter than me, but broad. We had talked about going into the army together and maybe going to Iraq.
“You don’t hear nothing much about guys going to Iraq unless they get killed,” Maurice said. “You ever notice that? You hear about guys being on trial or guys being blown up, but you don’t hear anything about guys fighting their way out of a trap or taking a hill or anything like that.”
“It ain’t that kind of war,” I had said.
In the end we had both decided not to join up. I didn’t mention nothing about how maybe the army wouldn’t take me because of what had happened down in Texas. I didn’t want Maurice to know about that.
We had checked each other out and said we was looking good, and then we had walked over to where they were having the interviews.
“Man, please don’t tell me that’s the line for the job interviews,” Maurice said, looking down the block. “Just don’t tell me that.”
It was the line. It stretched a full half block down from the store, and more people were coming every moment.
“How many jobs they got?” I asked.
“They said in the paper they had six openings,” Maurice said. “My mother said they probably had about ten or twelve, but this is stupid. Look, that dude even got his dog with him.”
I felt sick. I had really been hoping for the job. I looked over the line and knew it wasn’t going to happen. There were young men, old men, women, Spanish, whites—everybody was out looking for some kind of work.
“I can’t cut this,” I said to Maurice. “I’ll come back later.”
“I’m gonna hang.” Maurice shrugged. “I don’t have nothing better to do.”
I told Maurice I was going to get Mama’s prescription filled and would be back later to see how the line looked. I remembered that Rico had called me last night and asked me if I wanted to run some work. I had said no, putting all my hopes on the Home Depot gig, but that looked like a bust. I hoped I had some minutes on my cell, and called Rico.
“Yo, man, that thing still going?” I asked when Rico answered.
“Yeah, it’s still on,” Rico said. “Where you at?”
“A Hundred and Twenty-fifth and St. Nicholas, outside the church.”
“Okay, I’ll be there in ten minutes. Hang loose.”
I knew that Rico was a stone viper, but sometimes he came up with some crazy money. He was steady dealing weed, Girl, or anything else he could get his hands on. He also had a hundred-dollar-a-day jones he had to support.
I went down the street to a little candy store and bought a bottle of soda. I took two of the pain killers I had brought along and tried to think what Rico sounded like on the phone. If Rico was right, far enough away from his first hit of the day to have his head straight but not pushing so close to the next hit that he would be dope sick, everything would be cool. I had seen Rico dope sick a bunch of times, licking his lips, acting all jumpy, his eyes darting around as if he was a wolf looking for some sick animal to jump on.
Rico wasn’t somebody you could rely on and he had messed me up before. But just the way Rico got dope sick, the way he turned into something that wasn’t good to see, I was getting broke sick. I was tired of walking the streets with nothing in my pockets, and nothing coming down the way. When Mama got her check, she gave me what she could and sometimes I got some pickup work, but that hardly paid enough to eat on. I could work a full day and come home with less than forty dollars. If I couldn’t find no pickup job and Mama didn’t have no money, then there wasn’t anything to do except stand on the corner wishing I was somewhere else or home staring at the stupid crap on television.
Rico’s ten minutes stretched into a half hour. I was about to call him again when I saw him coming up out the subway.
“Yo, man, what’s happening?” Me and Rico bumped fists.
“Nothing, man,” I said. “What you got?”
“I got a run for Dusty Phillips,” Rico said. “Three loads. That’s a hundred for each load.”
“Where we got to take it?”
“Across from Marcus Garvey Park,” Rico said. “No problem.”
Yeah. No problem. I knew there was always a problem. Dusty wouldn’t be sending out runners and spreading his money if there wasn’t any room for some fuckery. We went up the street to Dusty’s place and
I started talking about the Yankees. Rico was always tripping, and I needed to see how far gone he was already. He seemed sharp enough, so I started to chill a little.
If everything went down right and I copped a full Benjamin and a half, I would split over to the Home Depot line. I’m good with some cash in my pocket, so I could go into the interview feeling righteous and looking confident. I could look the Man in the eye and say I wanted the job and could handle anything. And that was the truth when my life was on the money. I wouldn’t be just another broke-sick fool begging for a slave.
I let my mind go free, even as I was talking to Rico about the Yankees. Rico was getting on the Yankee infielders for not hitting more home runs.
“If you making big bucks, you need to be getting big hits,” Rico was saying.
Yeah, all that was good. But I didn’t dream about making big money. I just dreamed about getting a decent crib for me and Mama, a steady job, and, most of all, not being broke sick.
Dusty Phillips had some hard-ass people working for him, some ugly mothers who look like they went to their first communion in them orange jumpsuits prisoners be wearing. He operated from the back of a ninety-nine-cent store. They hardly had anything in the store, and everybody in the neighborhood knew not to go in there. Once in a while they got a legitimate customer and were nasty enough and scary enough to discourage him from coming back.
Dusty used to be called Blinky when he was a kid growing up on 116th Street because he had a nervous twitch and his eyes looked a little off. It was like he was trying to look at you, but his eyes kept moving away from where you were. When he got older and fought his way big-time into the game, he told people to call him Dusty, and after he shot a guy who called him Blinky, everybody else got the picture.
We got to his joint and Dusty looked me over like I was something that stunk bad. He asked Rico if I was all right, and Rico said I was.
“Y’all meet this white boy at two o’clock. Give him the dope and make damn sure the money you get from him is correct. Then you get that money to me by three this afternoon.” Dusty’s voice was high and he talked fast. “If my money don’t come back correct, everybody is going to be sorry. Anything I’m saying is confusing you?”
“No, man,” Rico said. “I’m hip.”
We got the dope from Dusty, all wrapped up in a plastic sandwich Baggie, and took it to Rico’s pad on 135th Street across from the House of Prayer for All People. As soon as we were inside and had locked the doors, Rico took out the bags of heroin and counted the glassine envelopes in each one. Then he opened a bag, sniffed it, and passed it to me.
“We can tap this nice,” Rico said.
“You don’t be tapping Dusty’s stuff,” I said. “You ain’t stupid. If the white boy don’t buy it, what we going to do, take it back to Dusty all tapped out?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Rico said. “But we can tap a buzz, right?”
I thought that Dusty knew that Rico would tap the loads, taking just a little bit from each bag for himself. But if the dope was as good as everybody said Dusty’s stuff was, it would probably be all right. What I didn’t want was Rico getting high and blowing the whole deal. And what I definitely didn’t want was to mess up completely and get Dusty on our case.
I watched while Rico tapped a few bags from each load, enough to make a half bag for himself. We had an hour to go before the drop, and I figured that a half bag wouldn’t mess with Rico’s head too much, seeing that it was a long way from his regular eight-to-ten-bag jones.
“You need a hit?” Rico asked as he cooked up the dope.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m good.”
What I didn’t say was that I wasn’t into no dealing. The Man catch you with a taste and you get a slap on the wrist. You get caught with enough to deal and you catching calendars. I’d rather die than face fifteen to twenty years in jail.
Still, I copped a bag when Rico started his nod, figuring I could bring it up if I needed to.
3
I’M SITTING THERE WATCHING the whole thing on television, watching my life like it was happening outside my body. The whole thing was fascinating and scary at the same time. I could even feel my body moving when I saw myself on the screen. It was like I was in two places at the same time, being two people, with one of them looking inside the other, checking out his own mind.
“Then what happened?” Kelly had a way of kind of hunching his shoulders when he talked, like he was pushing the words up.
“You think people in the street can see the lights from the television?” I asked.
Kelly clicked the remote and we were looking at the street again. There were three police cars, and some of the officers were looking up at a building, but it wasn’t the one we were in.
“Then what happened?” Kelly asked again.
“We waited around for a while and Rico tapped the lid again. He got another half bag, cooked that up, and hit the line. That kind of freaked me out, because I figured he might just go on tapping and cooking up the stuff until he blew the whole gig.”
“Then he wouldn’t be able to go with the sale?”
“Yeah. So I called him on it,” I said. “If the deal didn’t go down, we could say the white boy didn’t show correct or we saw some wrong-looking dudes hanging around. But if the dope was light when we took it back to Dusty, we were going to have to take the heat, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah. You scared of Dusty.”
“So then it was time to go do the thing and Rico had said we should carry a piece in case somebody tried to rip us off,” I said. “I didn’t think no white boy trying to cop in the middle of Harlem was looking to rip nobody off, so it wasn’t a big thing. Rico was feeling nice, but he wasn’t really high yet, so it looked like a bet.”
“You wasn’t using nothing?” Kelly asked.
“No, I ain’t stupid, man. I just needed to get paid. Drugs and business don’t go together.”
“I always wondered why they put those candles on the sidewalk,” Kelly said.
“What candles?”
“You know, where they find the body,” he came back. “They put candles on the street and write stuff on the wall like ‘June Bug, we love you,’ and ‘RIP.’”
“That’s a memorial to whoever it was got killed,” I said. “You didn’t know that? Where you live? If you from around here, you should know that.”
“Yeah, I know that, but why candles and flowers after the killing when half the time they didn’t even know the dude before he got killed? Or some girl got killed or some baby got killed,” Kelly said. “Don’t make no sense to me.”
“So you ain’t the smartest sucker in the world,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that. But those candles and the flowers and the good-byes written on the wall is like a sign of respect and love.”
“Why you showing love to somebody you don’t know?”
“Later for all this mouth running.” I was getting tired. “How I’m going to get out of here?”
“You think the police are creeping up on you?”
The truth was that Kelly was creeping up on me. He was making me jumpy. He looked like street and he talked like street, but something was telling me different.
“All I want to do is get some distance from here,” I said. “That’s straight up. You got some ideas how I can do that?”
“By changing something you did,” Kelly said, “making it all different. Look to me like you’ve been making garbage for a while and dragging it with you. Now you need to get out of here, and that garbage is weighing you down.”
Somebody had their radio going, and I heard it playing a drum-and-bass jam. It was pounding like my heart was pounding, but it had more rhythm.
“I’m going to make something different with that television and your remote?” I asked. “You got to come up with a stronger line than that, man.”
“You got a better idea?” Kelly asked. “You standing here shaking and sweating and wondering if you gonna make it through the n
ight. You ain’t got nothing going on, so you might as well keep watching the tube and working your brain to figure out where you need to be making some changes.”
“Did I tell you that you’re a spooky-ass chump?”
“I don’t know about the chump part, but I like being spooky,” Kelly said. “You know, like you meet up with somebody in the dark and they see you spooky, they start paying attention. Like you paying attention.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I’m still working on that day. If that day was different.”
“You mean getting up in the morning?” Kelly asked. “You want to stay in bed?”
“That might have helped, but I’m really talking about what happened with the cop,” I said. “Yo, you got any aspirins up in here?”
“Your arm hurting?”
“Why you think I need the aspirins? You know my arm is hurt.”
“Okay, so let’s get back to yesterday and the cop.” Kelly ignored my arm hurting. “Rico was tasting Dusty’s stuff, but you wasn’t using nothing?”
“How many times I got to tell you?” I said.
“Three’s a good number,” Kelly said. “But it don’t make no never mind to me. You the one looking for a change. I don’t need to change.”
“You sitting up here by yourself watching television in this stink hole is what you want to be doing?” I asked. “You look like you need a change to me.”
“Check it out, Lil J,” Kelly said. “You got the Nine and all I got is the remote and the television looking out on the world. But I can walk on out of here and go crosstown and cop a burger and some fries if I want. If I want, I can smile all the way like I’m crazy or ask people for spare change or just stand on the corner and watch the world go by. You can’t do none of that without maybe getting gunned down, so why you still up in my face running game?”
“So what you want to know?”
“Like I said before”—Kelly’s head turned a little, but I still didn’t see his full face—“Rico was tasting Dusty’s stuff, but you wasn’t using nothing?”
“I don’t hit the line, but sometimes I skin-pop,” I said. “Just a little under the skin when I’m down. I used to party all the time, but I know…”