“‘Class, can we tell Jeremy where the Americans are today?’ she asked.
“As usual, Sarah’s hand went up. ‘They’re still at Valley Forge,’ she said.
“Miss Petridis laughed and explained how we were all Americans. That made me feel proud and everything, but none of the pictures she showed looked like me or any of my friends.
“There’s me on the corner waiting for my father. I didn’t know he was going to bring Eddie. Eddie is his other son. He’s a little younger than me and he used to be skinny, but now he’s kind of cut. When he showed up with Eddie, I was disappointed. Eddie had something with him in a box and he brought it to the pizza place.”
An image of me and Eddie sitting at the table in the pizza place. My father was talking on his cell phone and Eddie and I were eating pizza. The pizza was okay, but it wasn’t nothing special, because Eddie was there and he lived with my father. All the time we was eating, I thought that maybe Eddie had a present for me in the box he was carrying. When me and him finished our slices, my father told him to show me what he had in the box. It was a trophy he had won playing basketball in the Biddy League.
My father didn’t say nothing about my birthday, and I figured he had just forgot about it.
“Then he took me home in his car. He dropped me off right in front of the house. When I went upstairs, I was kind of down. I still had my card with the gold star in my pocket, and when I felt it, I took it out and looked at it. Then I looked in the mirror to see if I could look like an American. When I was looking at me, I didn’t think I looked like an American or nothing else. That’s why I say you got to figure out what you about first and then look in the mirror. You know what I mean?”
“You have any trouble opening the soda?” Kelly asked.
“Why you going there?” I asked. “What you care if I had trouble opening the soda? You drinking, ain’t you?”
“You got any money?” Kelly asked. “I could go out and see if I can get us something to eat.”
“I ain’t hungry.”
“Yeah, you hungry,” Kelly came back. “You just more scared than you hungry. You scared if I go out I might turn you in. You scared if I go out I might not come back. You scared to be alone with that gun. You scared of the remote. You scared to look in the mirror. Lil J, what you ain’t scared of?”
“So you the big-deal encyclopedia brother,” I said. “You need to be walking around with a cape and an outfit with a big EB on it so everybody know you got all the answers. Yo, Kelly, you got ears, bro, but you don’t hear all that tough,” I said. “Everything that’s me ain’t all my fault.”
“That’s the deal,” Kelly said. “You got to find a way to make your life all your fault.”
“No, man, what I got to do is to get through today,” I said. “And if you don’t know what that’s about, then you probably ain’t black enough, or ain’t poor enough, or ain’t been beat down enough to get next to it.”
12
I COULD FEEL MYSELF GETTING mad, wanting to go upside Kelly’s head. And I could hear myself thinking that my mad wasn’t working with him. It didn’t make no difference to him, but it was making a difference to me. He had been talking to me all night and listening to me and showing me things about myself that I didn’t even know. Now it was morning and we was sitting being quiet with me out there on the edge like I always was and him sitting in that chair looking away from me, his shoulders kind of slumped forward, looking smaller than he should have been.
“Yo, Kelly, I ain’t really trying to play hard, man,” I said. “But I thought you were digging where I’m coming from.”
“You want me to dig it or you expecting me to bust out with some applause?” Kelly asked.
“Just understand, man.”
Silence. I thought I could hear his breathing, but I wasn’t sure. From somewhere I could smell bacon cooking. A picture came into my mind of some woman making breakfast for her boy. I was thinking the boy was happy.
“Can you get my mother on the television?”
“Probably won’t come in clear,” he said. “You ain’t really thinking about her, are you?”
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “But let’s check the news first.”
Kelly clicked the remote and there was a man, a woman, and a little girl standing in front of some microphones. The sound was down low, and I asked Kelly to make it a little louder.
My husband is holding on. He’s always been a fighter. He took my hand and whispered that he loved me.
I watched as the woman started crying and the man next to her put his arm around her. The little girl leaned against the woman and put her face against her side. A caption appeared under the picture:
MRS. SHERRI GAFFIONE, WIFE OF WOUNDED OFFICER ANTHONY GAFFIONE, GIVES STATEMENT ON CONDITION OF HUSBAND.
It made me feel terrible to see her crying and I started crying, too. It was just so hard to figure that I was part of this whole scene, and yet, there it was. It was me. Like Kelly said, it had to be somebody’s fault, and if it was about my life, then I had to make it my fault.
The news switched to a tornado in Tennessee and Kelly clicked the remote again. The picture came in black and white with only a touch of color, like it needed adjustment. There was somebody laying on a bed, face to the wall. On the little night table there were some pill bottles. Mama. I couldn’t tell what pills they were. I knew I had taken some of her pain pills. She wasn’t moving.
“She okay?”
“What you mean by ‘okay’?” Kelly asked.
“I mean…you know…she ain’t moving,” I said.
Kelly didn’t say nothing. We watched my mother for a while. For most of the time she was still, but then she moved her arm and wiped at her face. At least she was alive. I put my head down in my hands. I didn’t want to see her anymore.
“You need a hit?” Kelly asked. “I could go out and find something in this neighborhood.”
“Fuck off.”
“Don’t you want to stop feeling bad?” Kelly went on. “Ain’t you dope sick? Don’t your nerves feel all jagged and messed around? Don’t you want to get away?”
“Away from this place? This raggedy apartment?”
“No, I mean, away from you,” Kelly said. “Isn’t that what you’re running from?”
“You were talking about me changing something before,” I said. “Me changing one thing in my life. What happened to all that talk?”
“You are changing things,” Kelly said. “You changing that woman’s life. You changing that cop’s life. You changing your mama’s life. Don’t you want a hit so you can nod on out of here?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“That’s good,” Kelly said.
“Yeah, but it’s a lie. You probably know it’s a lie too. I want a hit so bad, I feel like my head is screaming for it. Nothing sounds better than being away from this mess. Nothing sounds better right now than getting higher than the hole I’m in. I know you can’t imagine it, but I can almost feel it. Even when I’m getting nervous, cooking up the hit, I start to feel better. And when I do the hit, and my face is all flushed and the tingling in my fingers has started and then there’s nothingness like I didn’t even weigh but an ounce and the world is floating, drifting away from me. Then I feel human.
“Kelly, you can’t tell me nothing about getting high, man,” I said. “I know every hit is steady downhill and all the things that can happen when I’m using. But with that stuff in me I can shut out the voices that say Wrong and You ain’t nothing and You ain’t going nowhere. When I’m straight, I can’t keep them voices out my head. But when I’m high, I don’t hear no voices. Nothing putting me down.
“You talking about what I see when I look in the mirror, and I’m telling you I don’t see nothing, but you don’t know how that feels. You can’t get there; right?”
“You want another soda?” Kelly came back.
“What I really want is to be away from here,” I said. “Away from your warm soda,
away from this stink hole you living in, and away from all you running your mouth. You can talk ’til you turn blue and it don’t make no difference ’cause the real deal ain’t different. Look at me, man. I don’t need no true. I need some different.”
“Yeah, could be. But everything you reaching for ain’t really different. You know what you said just now?” Kelly turned and looked at me. “About how when you get high, you get all flushed and you feel so light and the world is floating away?”
“Yeah, I know what I said, and I know what I feel,” I said.
“Good, because that’s just the way dying feels, too,” Kelly said. “And when you get to that point—when you know you dying—you’re going to feel just as sick and disgusted with yourself and you’ll be wishing just as hard that you made something of your life, that you created something. Maybe something small, like a relationship with you and Lauryn and Brian. Maybe something even smaller, a way to get to know yourself enough not to mind looking in a mirror.”
“You don’t know what dying is about, Kelly,” I said. “You ain’t that damn smart.”
“Don’t bet on it, Lil J,” he said. “Don’t bet on it.”
“It don’t bother me that much if I’m not thinking about it,” I said. “Maybe I’m getting used to it.”
“Yeah, that’s funny, huh?” Kelly clicked to Oprah’s show. “Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.”
“Sometimes I sit and watch television when things go wrong,” I said. “Or I play video games. You know, take my mind someplace else. Remember that white girl I told you about? Sabrina? She used to say that for her television was like methadone. You couldn’t really get high, but you could, like, walk away from the stuff that’s messing with your mind.”
“So you chilling out with Oprah?” Kelly asked.
“I didn’t ask you to put Oprah on,” I said. “You turned her on. Why don’t you get back to the street?”
Kelly pointed the remote at the screen, then stopped and threw it to me. I went for it with both hands and got a sharp pain in my left arm. The remote fell and rattled across the wooden floor. I realized I had been holding my arm against my side the whole time. When I tried to move it, even a little, it hurt like hell.
“You got anything for pain?” I asked Kelly.
“No.” A little sharp answer, like he was mad or something.
I picked up the remote. There were numbers on the bottom half, from zero to nine, and I thought they must have been for the different channels. Above that there were four colored buttons, red, green, yellow, and blue. The red button had two arrows pointing to the left. The green had one arrow pointing to the left, the yellow had an arrow pointing to the right, and the blue had two arrows pointing to the right. On the very bottom there was a button with a black square in the middle of it.
“Which buttons should I push?” I asked Kelly.
“Try them,” he said.
I thought about him showing the picture of me on the roof landing. One time I had had the Nine up to my head and my eyes squeezed shut. I didn’t want to go back to that. If the buttons with the two arrows made things go fast-forward or fast-backward, I wouldn’t know what to do if I came on that scene again.
“What happens if I mess up?” I asked Kelly. “Get on something I don’t want?”
“Isn’t that the way things go?” he asked. “Sometimes you do all right and sometimes…sometimes you don’t.”
I stood up and started toward Kelly to give him back the remote, but got this real cold feeling. It was like there was something between me and him that kept me at a distance.
“Why don’t you take the remote?” I asked. “You know how to use it.”
“I’m not the one that needs to be changing, Lil J,” Kelly said. “You’ve been talking about how you need to get in some better place, and how your dope is getting you so you don’t feel the weight anymore. You’re tired of being blown around by whatever stink wind that comes along. You don’t need to be lighter and you don’t need to deal with the wind. You need to be the wind. Take the remote.”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “I’m too scared, Kelly. No lie. I can’t do it, man. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Kelly put the remote down on the arm of his chair.
“I think you are sorry,” he said.
“You mad?” I asked.
“Just tired,” Kelly said. “I been up awhile.”
He clicked the remote and I could see the street again. The television news trucks weren’t there anymore, but there were a lot more cops. We watched for a few minutes, and I thought about asking Kelly to switch to a news station, but I didn’t.
I was tired and my arm was hurting bad again. This time it was like a throbbing pain. I looked at my hand and it was swollen pretty bad. It didn’t make no difference if I could get out of the building, because I needed to get to some kind of hospital.
“Kelly, I need to get this over with,” I said. “Can you call the police with your cell? Tell them I’m up here and I want to give up?”
“You do it,” he said. He laid the cell phone on the floor and gave it a push with his foot.
“You know I’m not that bad a guy,” I said. “What you think? You think I’m going to be in jail for the rest of my life?”
“How I know?”
“You can look at it on your television,” I said. “That’s how you know. The same as you been doing all night long!”
“No, Lil J, what’s going to happen to you depends on what you going to do, not what’s on the television,” Kelly said. “And right now what you doing is sitting there waiting to see what everybody else is going to do. The cell phone is there if you want to call the police. Pick it up. Or if you think you bad enough, grab your Nine and shoot your way out.”
I couldn’t see myself in jail for the rest of my life. And if Rico got over with his story, I might even get the death penalty. And I knew in my heart that I didn’t want to shoot anybody or get shot up myself. Everything that happened started going through my head, and it was just as clear as it was on television. I thought about me and Rico at Dusty’s place, tapping the bags of dope, going to meet the guy who turned out to be a cop, and the shooting.
We had gone back to Rico’s and I remembered being so shook up I couldn’t think straight. Rico was talking some crap about how the cop thought he was slick and I kept asking him if he had shot him or just scared him.
“Yeah, I capped the sucker!” he had said.
I went into the bathroom and threw up. What I wanted to do was to beat Rico to a bloody pulp. But then I remembered the guns were still on the table and…Shit!
“Kelly, suppose Rico switched guns?” I said.
13
“SUPPOSE THE GUN I GOT was the one he shot the cop with? Maybe that’s why he’s saying I’m the shooter!” I said.
“So what you saying?” Kelly stood up.
I was surprised to see him stand and face me. He seemed even taller than he had before, as if he had changed and had grown so that he was more than I was. When we had first met, I had just taken him for some homeless dude with maybe some street smarts. Now he was standing, looking at me, and I thought I was feeling something coming out of him, but something in him that I could sense, that I was sure was there. A power.
He looked at me, waiting for me to say something. “I want to take back that minute,” I said, “when I was being sick in the bathroom.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said reaching for the remote, “but suppose he didn’t switch Nines. Maybe the police don’t know what gun was used to shoot the cop?”
“So why he saying…?” I didn’t know what to do. Kelly sat down and shook his head like he was getting tired of me. “It don’t matter what gun I got. I have to get rid of it before the police get here.”
“You still want me to call them?” Kelly asked.
“No.”
“Yo, Lil J.” Kelly put one leg over the side of th
e chair, the way I do sometimes. “You thinking the world is supposed to stand still while you make up your mind how you want to live? You thinking everybody supposed to freeze in place while you bopping around doing your thing?”
“I ain’t bopping around,” I said.
“You came here huffing and puffing with a gun in your hand,” Kelly said. “That was last night and this is morning and you still standing there huffing and puffing with the gun in your hand. You going to shoot your way out or not?”
“I just need some time to think, man.”
“You don’t even know what time is,” Kelly said.
“You the one holed up in here and ain’t got no life,” I said. “I’m stone street. I know what’s going down. And I didn’t learn it from no television, either.”
“You know what’s going down?” Kelly asked. “No, I don’t think so.” He picked up the remote and clicked it twice. There was the picture of me on the roof again with the gun up to my head.
“Kelly, stop it!” I said. I turned my head away from the screen. “Come on, man!”
From the corner of my eye I could see that the screen had gone dark. I looked at it slow and saw that the television was on another channel. I was looking at an advertisement for a household cleanser. My legs were weak as I found my chair and sat down.
“Hey, Lil J, what you thinking that picture was?” Kelly asked in this real quiet voice. “You thinking that was the future? Something down the road and you looking to see which road it’s on so you can change direction? Your mind just running loose, going every which way? Like you were thinking that maybe Rico switched the guns?
“Or you thinking that maybe that picture is just another ‘right now’ trailing after you, looking to catch up with you while you standing still trying to make up your mind? What you thinking, Lil J?”
“I’ll leave the gun here,” I said. “And I’ll go outside and give myself up.”