“We got called down to the principal’s office and everything, but it didn’t matter. Nobody really cared about anything. They didn’t care about what me and Ryan did, they didn’t care about Omar and them. They were just talking about ordering sandwiches for a meeting.”
There was the sound of a siren outside the window. I looked toward the window and then pointed at the screen. Kelly looked over at me and then clicked the remote, and we were looking at a different view of the street. Another black-and-white had pulled up. Its lights were flashing and the siren was going.
“Something’s up!” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Kelly said. “They’re just sounding their siren to see who comes to the window.”
I was almost at the window and stopped. “You ever run from the police?” I asked.
“No, but I’m not scared,” Kelly said. “I’m thinking straight. You scared and you’re hurting.”
“You ever been hurt?” I asked. “I mean, really hurt?”
Kelly put his head down and glanced at me out the corner of his eye. “Yeah, I’ve been hurt.”
“Shot?”
“No.”
“You ain’t been hurt unless you been shot,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re all world now, huh?” Kelly said. “You can go around bragging on being shot. But pain isn’t all that bad. People learn to deal with pain. People get cancer. People get shot up in wars and blown up a lot worse than you. They learn to deal with it.”
I wanted to go back to the window. I asked Kelly if he was sure there wasn’t anything happening outside. He said he wasn’t sure.
“You think I’m going to be okay?” I asked him.
“I guess it depends on what you mean by okay,” he said. “Everything you telling me sounds like you haven’t been okay in a long time. You don’t know what to go back and change.”
“How you going to change something that happened in the past anyway?” I asked. “That don’t make any sense.”
“So let’s go on to the future,” Kelly said.
I saw the screen flicker and there I was, sliding up the stairs to the roof landing. I knew what was going to come next.
“Hey, Kelly, stop it,” I said. “Yo, man, what’s wrong with you?”
He stopped the screen image, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the still picture. I was half standing, half crouched over. I saw the Nine still in my hand. I looked up at my face. My eyes were like something wild.
I thought I saw the image move and I started to ask Kelly not to let it run, but then I saw it wasn’t moving. It was the image in my head that was still going. I was remembering what I had seen before. It was like a nightmare I could see with my eyes open.
“Breathe,” Kelly said.
I didn’t notice I had been holding my breath. The pain in my arm was getting worse.
“Kelly, I ain’t doing too good getting rid of this pain,” I said.
“Yeah, I see that,” Kelly said.
“You know, the worst pain I ever had, I didn’t even feel it?” I said. “I woke up in the middle of the night and I was like—all crying and shit—and I don’t know why. I didn’t have a bad dream and I hadn’t even gone to bed sad. But I woke up crying like anything. That got me so down, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I still don’t know why that happened.”
“You deeper into your jones than you want to talk about?” Kelly said. “How long you been tracking?”
“Too long.”
“Thought you were scared of needles?”
“It moves you away from yourself quick,” I said. “I know it’s foul, but that’s where I’m at. Can you get the picture back on the street?”
Kelly clicked the picture, and we were looking at the street again. It had started to rain. One police car was still parked under the streetlight. Through the glass I could see two figures. They weren’t clear, just sitting in the front seat. Every so often the wiper swept across the windshield, and for a tiny moment I could see the policemen inside. I wondered what they were talking about, if they were hating me.
“You think that cop is going to live?” I asked.
“How I know?”
“What you think?”
Kelly just shrugged.
I wanted to hear me talking or Kelly talking or even a car passing on the street. Anything but the silence. I tried to think of what I wanted to change in my life, to go back and get something that Kelly could dig on. That’s what I wanted to do. It was like he had a way of understanding me and looking inside of me that made me feel good. No, not good, just that he understood. He was right in saying I was trying to unknow things about myself, things that I hadn’t told anybody before. Some of the things I had heard people say about me. Lauryn had said some of them. But there were things that I wasn’t sure about. Like if I liked myself the way I hoped other people would like me, like I was trying to get Kelly to like me.
“Hey, Kelly, you ever hide what you doing?” I asked. “Like you don’t want anybody to peep your hole card?”
“I guess so,” Kelly said. “Sometimes. You hiding something?”
“You were talking about me not wanting to know things, but I got more things I don’t want other people knowing,” I said. “I got some stuff in me that I don’t even tell Lauryn.”
“Sometimes you don’t have to tell people,” Kelly said. “They already understand where you coming from.”
“No, she don’t know how scared I get sometimes. You know I’m up in here and I’m scared because the police are looking for me,” I said. “But sometimes I’m just scared to walk down the street. I ain’t afraid of being shot or anything, I’m just afraid. You understand that?”
“I understand you feeling it,” Kelly said. “You see what you doing to yourself, you figure you got to be afraid of something.”
“I think my moms is scared too. When I was thirteen things really got bad for us. She started hitting the bottle hard. At first she would go out and get her a bottle of rum and bring it home. I didn’t like that because we didn’t have money for anything. We’d get some money on our family card and she would cash part of it in for money to buy liquor. That’s a street hustle.
“Then she started hanging out half the night. One time I was home and a neighbor came to the door and said my moms was downstairs in the hallway. She said she looked sick. I rushed downstairs and she wasn’t sick, just drunk. When she wasn’t drinking, she was depressed. Sometimes she said she had pains in her stomach, but I think mostly she was depressed. If I got up late at night to go to the bathroom, I would find her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. I’d ask her what she was thinking about and she’d say, ‘Nothing.’ When I started messing up in school and they asked me what was wrong, I said the same thing. ‘Nothing.’”
9
“SO YOU WANT TO CHANGE what happened to you in school?” Kelly asked.
“It wasn’t real enough to change,” I said. “School is like a dream that’s going on, and it’s good and everything, but it ain’t going on about you. That’s the way it was for me, anyway. I was supposed to be filling my head up with what they were teaching, but it didn’t go down that way.”
“Nobody gave you the right information?”
“They give me the right information, or it was right as far as I was concerned, but I wasn’t hopping around passing out high fives or nothing,” I said. “It was like I was knowing two different things. One was like school is smoking and your trip to the big time, but the other thing was that hey, it didn’t do nothing for people I knew. Can you get my school on the television?”
“Is it strong enough in your mind?” Kelly asked.
“It got to be strong in my mind to get it on television? You never said that before.”
“Is it strong enough?”
“I think so,” I said. “Check it out.”
Kelly started with his remote again and had me thinking about how strong school was on my mind. I was wondering if he really meant that it had to b
e strong or if he was just messing with me.
I watched as the television focused on the hallway in the first floor of Carver High. Then I saw me sitting in the office, but I was younger. I leaned forward and took a look at myself. My face was rounder on the bottom. I had on my light brown sweater and my fly Nikes and I was looking good.
“How old are you again, Jeremy?” All the kids at Carver High knew that when Mr. Lyons took off his jacket, he was serious. He had his jacket off as I sat in his office.
“Thirteen,” I said.
“Jeremy, why don’t you look over your test scores and tell me what you think about them.” He pushed a long sheet of paper in front of me.
Why didn’t he just go ahead and tell me I messed up? That’s what the meeting was all about. He knew what the scores were like. Why did we have to go through all the gaming?
“You were doing fairly well in math before,” he said. “I think you were at grade level, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s been happening this year?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” He leaned back in his chair like he was expecting a different answer.
He was talking and I was looking down at the sheet with the test scores. They had circles around the bad marks. Almost all the kids in my class have been called down for this same jive talk. What happened? Why didn’t you do better?
I was sitting in the classroom and my head was filled up and I couldn’t get no more in it.
“What’s going on in your life to make your test scores fall like this?” His voice was okay, like he wasn’t trying to put me down.
Yesterday—was it yesterday or the day before yesterday? The days run together—I was home and Mrs. Burnett came to my door and said my mother was down in the hallway and she looked sick. I ran downstairs and saw her lying in the hallway. Her dress was up around her thighs and I pulled it down.
“Mama! Mama!” I called to her and she moved a little. I could smell her breath and it was stinking. “Mama! Get up!”
She was heavy, but I pulled her up. No, she wasn’t heavy, just kind of limp. I didn’t want nobody else to see her like this. When we got to the stairs, I tried to get her arm over the banister. Mr. Alston came out his house, and when he saw us on the stairway he just stood there a minute and looked. He asked me if I needed any help, and I told him to get the hell back into his own apartment.
He didn’t move and I kept trying to get Mama up the stairs.
Mr. Alston told me to get on the inside and put one arm around her waist and hold on to the banister to pull myself up. He steadied her while I changed positions. I was crying a little because I was ashamed for him to see us like this. Two more people passed us on the stairway. One woman said something about wasn’t it a shame the way people carried themselves. I wanted to punch her in her face.
I got Mama up to our floor and then put my hands under her shoulders and dragged her down the hall. Once I got her into the apartment, I just left her there, lying on the kitchen floor. I started thinking about who she had been drinking with, and what she had been doing. I felt mad and sorry at the same time. I wasn’t sorry for her, either. I was sorry for me.
“You know there aren’t a lot of young black men with good math skills.” Mr. Lyons was still talking. Still saying what I should be doing and how important school was.
What did I look like to him? Did I look like I was just a retard who couldn’t figure out what school was about? He could shut up and I could give his whole rap right back to him the same as he was giving it to me. What would I say?
“Jeremy, school is the most important thing in your life. If you don’t go to school, you’re just going to be like all those other black guys hanging around wasting your time and getting in trouble. You can’t get a good job without a good education. You need to read to succeed. You can be anything you want to be. You just need to make up your mind that you want to be somebody. Your future is in your hands! Jeremy, if you don’t get yourself together you will be sorry.”
I watched television in my room for a while. There was a movie on, but all I could see in my head was Mama drinking with some men on the corner. Even though I hadn’t seen her do that, I knew what some of the men did to women when they were high.
There wasn’t anything in the refrigerator that looked good. Some leftover stew. Some franks and beans we had had the night before. I knew she hadn’t eaten anything. I remembered a program I had seen about a man choking on a hot dog. I didn’t want her to choke, so I ate the franks and beans. I was going to warm them up, but cold was just as good.
I had to step over her to get to my bedroom.
When I got up in the morning, she was in the bathroom. I saw she had made tea and the water was still warm. I had tea and oatmeal. She came out the bathroom and asked me why I hadn’t left for school.
I looked at the clock and it was still early. Then she asked me why I wasn’t home when she got home last night.
She didn’t remember! She didn’t even remember lying in the hallway, nothing! I wanted her to feel bad, to say she was sorry. I wanted her to look away when I walked into the room. Instead, she didn’t remember a thing.
She asked me where I had been again, and I said I had been out playing ball.
“You win?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I lost.”
My Sunday shirt was the only clean one, and I wore that. She said I looked good. She smiled when she said it. She had a nice smile when she was sober.
I went to the bathroom and saw her pills on the sink. One bottle was for her rash and the other one was for her nerves. I took two of her nerve pills.
English was my first class and the teacher didn’t call on me.
Math was my second class. Miss Callie was talking about square roots. Her mouth was moving and words were coming out and I could hear them as they floated across the classroom, but none of them was sticking in my head. It was like Miss Callie was talking English but I wasn’t understanding it. Or maybe like calling your friend and he’s not home and having the voicemail say that there was no room for messages. That’s what my head was like, no room for messages.
“Is there something bothering you, Jeremy?”
What was I going to say? Tell him the best way to carry your mother up the stairs was to put one arm around her waist and pull yourself up along the banister? The best way to get her up off the floor was to pull her by her shoulders until you got her sitting up, then get behind her and lift her and hope she didn’t fall on her face? Uhn-uhn. I ain’t going there. You can’t do nothing about it, so why do I need to go there? So you can feel sorry for me or go home and tell your wife what you heard in school today? And nothing we were talking about was going to change the test scores, and we both knew that was true.
Then I was standing up and he had his arm around me saying something about how disappointed he was in me because he felt I could do so much better. I guess that meant he thought there was more to me than he was seeing.
I thought there was more to me than he was seeing, too.
I left Mr. Lyons’s office feeling bad like I knew I would and thinking he’s feeling just like he knew he would. Maybe he was frustrated and wishing something else would happen, but it didn’t.
I didn’t want to go straight home after school, so I hung out for a while in the school yard until they started closing the gates. Mr. Lyons was okay, but I was mad at him. Nothing that was happening was his fault and it didn’t make any sense, but I still felt mad at him because I wanted him to know what was going on in my life and I didn’t know how to tell him.
10
“I CAN USE A HIT,” I said. “You holding?”
“You know I’m not holding,” Kelly said. “But let me ask you—what you need Lauryn for? All you want to be married to is your habit.”
“Ain’t you married to your habit? Ain’t you married to sitting up here shooting up being spooky? Or you just skimming and saying you don’t
have a jones?”
Kelly looked over at me, and his stare sent a chill through me. It wasn’t mean but like he was looking right into me and didn’t like what he saw. It flat out scared me, and I looked away from him. I could feel he had a power over me. All this crap with the television, the questions he was asking me, he was knowing things about me I didn’t even know.
“Hey, Kelly, where’s all this going?” I asked him. I felt myself holding my breath.
“Yo, Lil J, check it out,” Kelly said.
He had turned off the television.
“Why you do that?” I asked. “Turn the sucker back on, man.”
“In a minute,” Kelly said. “But check this out. You say I’m getting off on being spooky. I can deal with that, Lil J. It ain’t everything I would like, man, but it’s something I’m being. Can you get next to that? You ain’t being that stuff you getting from Dusty or the Girl you scored in Houston. That stuff is being you. It’s telling you what to do. It’s telling you where to go. It’s telling you what to think. How are you dealing with that?”
“Put the television back on.”
“Why you need a hit?”
“If you ain’t holding, what difference does it make?”
Kelly took the remote and put the television on. It was on a regular station. Some woman was watching her children run around the room. Everywhere they ran some little germs or something was following them. Then she sprayed everything and the germs disappeared.
“Why you watching that?” I asked Kelly.
“What you want to watch?”
I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. He had to know that I wanted to know what was on the street. I wanted to see the other stuff he was showing me, too. Stuff about my life and whatnot. I thought he knew more about me than he was saying, that when I talked to him about needing a hit, he would understand.
“What you want to watch?” he asked again. He was flicking through the channels. They were all regular channels.