I began to wonder how long I could continue to keep Denise in the dark about my wealth. Sometimes, because of the power of my dreams, I believed that she already knew about it. After all, I had never lied to her about where my parents lived. Since she had never been to Barrington, however, maybe she could not make any correlation about the extent of the wealth that was there. Or, then again, maybe she did know and didn’t care. Since she had become a successful woman in her own right, and had moved out to Oak Park, maybe she was saying she didn’t need any of my family’s money. Yet, after my attendance with my son at the Million Man March two years ago, an event that my father felt I should have stayed away from, I had been thinking that the righteous, “atoning” thing to do would be to come clean to Denise and my son about everything. I just had to bring myself to find the courage to do it.
I drove downtown along Lake Shore Drive while listening to Joshua Redman’s soothing jazz album Wish. It was a very peaceful night out, and couples were walking hand in hand. Once I had thought everything over concerning my life and my conflicts, I realized that I just had a silly argument with my wife, and that she was only being honest with me. I was a selfish and shallow man who had been hiding from the truth. And as I continued to suck in the peace of those couples walking in Grant Park and along Lake Michigan, I began to feel romantic myself. I even thought of Beverly and me having our own child. We talked about it a few times, but we never went into detail. I guess we both looked at it as a project in progress. My parents didn’t have me until they were both in their thirties. Nevertheless, I already had a twelve-year-old son.
I bought a pint of strawberry ice cream from a mini market on the way home and made it back in before eleven. I grabbed two spoons and took the entire bag straight up to our bedroom to share with my lovely wife as part of my apology to her.
Beverly smiled when I walked into the room with the ice cream and spoons in hand. She was propped up against two pillows and reading a book. She was wearing the black silk negligee that I had bought her for her birthday a few months ago.
“Aww, isn’t this sweet,” she said, reaching for her spoon. “How did you know that I had a sweet tooth?” she asked me.
I smiled back at her and said, “I’m just trying to get into the habit of thinking of others.”
She took her spoon and kissed me on the lips. Then I got a closer look at the book she was reading, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. I didn’t even know that she had that book. I didn’t say anything about it though. I had other things on my mind.
“So, where’d you drive to—if you don’t mind my asking?” Beverly asked me.
“Just along Lake Michigan.”
She took a scoop of ice cream and said, “I love how the water seems higher than ground level at night. It’s almost as if it could spill over and submerge the city of Chicago.”
I chuckled and responded, “Yeah, it does seem like that. It makes you feel like running in the opposite direction.”
With her book lying across her lap, I was tempted again to comment on it, but I forced myself not to. Instead I asked, “Beverly, when do you suppose that we’ll be ready to have kids of our own?”
She was the only one of her kin who was not yet a mother.
She grinned and said, “Wow, you’re catching on to this thinking-about-others thing pretty fast. Now you’re reading my mind. I was thinking about kids tonight myself.”
After she told me that, it made the situation seem awkward. I didn’t want to say anything else, I just wanted to hold her in my arms.
“I’m sorry about what I said tonight, Walter. I don’t want you to think that I didn’t want to marry you, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have.”
“And I’m sorry for being Mr. Inconsiderate all this time.”
“You couldn’t help yourself,” she teased me.
I didn’t want to ask her if she wanted to begin the baby-making process, but it was definitely on my mind. I was hoping Beverly could read my mind like she claimed I was doing with hers.
Once we finished our ice cream, I asked her if she wanted me to turn the lights off and click the news on.
“You can turn the lights off, but we don’t need the television on,” she told me with a grin.
I grinned back at her. “It looks like you have something else in mind,” I said.
“Maybe I do.”
I clicked off the light and felt a hard-on coming. Then I stripped down to my underwear and climbed back into bed. Beverly moved to my side of the bed to snuggle.
“Are you getting chills like I’m getting?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I told her, kissing her shoulders. Neither one of us went as far as to announce it, but I do believe that we were officially ready to begin the baby-making process.
As Beverly slid her hands under my shirt and kissed my chest, I thought how fortunate I was to have her. I made a note to try as best as I could never to take her feelings for granted again, especially if she was to be the mother of my children. I heard that pregnancy can be really emotional for some women. During Denise’s term with Walter, I didn’t take the time to find out. I wasn’t planning on having the same thing happen with my wife. I planned to participate every single step of the way.
Broken Dreams
was just about to leave the house and head for Kim’s place before going to work, when my mom called me.
“The telephone is for you!” she hollered. It seems like my mom was always hollering about something. Maybe it was because she had been ignored by three hardheaded sons for so many years. It was all our fault, and she had learned to cope with it the only way she knew how, fussing and hollering at us. What else could a small brown woman do with three big black boys in the house and an ailing husband?
I walked back to the phone asking her, “Who is it?”
My mother looked at me and said, “It’s Denise.” Then she asked, “Is everything all right with Little Jay? Nothing happened to him, did it?”
She couldn’t imagine Neecy calling me for anything else. Neecy and I had stopped civil communication years ago.
“Oh, okay. Well, here’s Jimmie,” my mother said, handing me the phone.
“Hello.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I am seeing someone and that he has been around Jimmy from time to time,” Neecy said to me. It sounded like she was in a rush.
“Yeah, I’ve heard,” I told her. “You got yourself a little truck driver,” I said with a laugh.
She said, “He’s far from little.”
“Yeah, I guess he would have to be big enough to handle the wheel,” I cracked.
“And handle his business, too,” she told me.
I stopped laughing after that. It sounded like she was trying to rub things in my face. Yet, I was trying to do the same damn thing to her. It was a sad situation for both of us.
I asked, “Is that all you called me for?” I think my feelings were hurt.
“What else would I be calling you for?”
Obviously, she still had some bad feelings left. I tried to simmer the conversation down a bit.
“I thought you were calling to tell me that you missed me,” I said, fantasizing.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Jay. I haven’t missed you in a long time.”
That definitely hurt! Neecy had sure gotten meaner over the years. I remember when I could make her laugh and enjoy my company at the drop of a dime. I guess all of the things I put her through had finally caught up with me. She was deciding to give the bullshit back to me.
I said, “You really do hate me now, hunh? I remember when you used to love me.” I walked away from my mother when I said that. I didn’t want her getting too much into the conversation.
“And I remember when you used to do the right thing,” Neecy responded to me.
I got pissed off and said, “Look, Neecy, I’m on my way to a new night job right now. I’ve been hanging out with my son, and I haven’t been arrested for shit. I am doin
g the right damn thing! Don’t call me up talking that shit to me! Who do you think you are?” I was having a tantrum, a grown-ass man.
“I’m a mature parent who has provided for your son for fifteen years without all of a sudden jumping on some bandwagon about playing some damn basketball!”
I was so fucking mad that I didn’t know what else to say! My mother stood in my face just waiting for me to go off. Instead, I just handed the phone back to her and headed for the front door.
“Where are you going?” she asked me.
She knew where I was going. “I’m going to work,” I told her again.
“Neecy, what did you say to him?” I heard my mother ask as I walked out. Mom sounded as pissed as I was, and she was calling Denise “Neecy.” Maybe she was on my side for a change.
I walked to the sidewalk and got curious as hell. I wondered what my mother was about to say. I turned around and went back inside like I forgot something. Mom was letting Neecy have it!
“He’s been trying real hard to better himself and all he talks about is his son. And I don’t care if it’s just about basketball right now. They’ll start to talk about other things eventually. That’s just how men are. All of ’em are sports crazy! My late husband was a big basketball fan, too.”
I walked into my room and noticed that I had forgotten something, my cigarettes. I grabbed them and walked back out to listen in on my mom again.
“I understand how you feel, Denise. And nobody knows my Jimmie better than I do, so I know what he hasn’t done. But I also know what he’s trying to do! And it doesn’t do him a bit of good for you to call over here and get him all upset right when he’s about to go to work! I’ll have you know that Jimmie works all night long now!”
I looked over at Mom and got concerned about her health. She was getting a little too excited. It looked like the steam was about to blow her head off.
I walked over and tried to hold her. “Calm down, Mom. I’m not that upset.” I wasn’t, after seeing how pissed off she was. I was getting a kick out of it! Neecy was getting some of her own damn medicine! My mom was a strong black woman too, and she had been through enough problems of her own in this hard black world.
She shook me off and said, “I don’t need you to tell me what to do. I know how to handle myself. You just go on to work.”
I shook my head and smiled, but I didn’t go anywhere. I wanted to see what Neecy’s response would be.
Mom calmed down and said, “You don’t have to apologize to me. But I do believe that you owe Jimmie an apology.”
I was ready to break out laughing like the kid that Neecy thought I already was. My mom had put her back in her place. Quick!
“Now I’m not telling you what to do, Denise, I’m just saying how I feel about this, because I see Jimmie every day, and you don’t. So I know what he’s been doing and what he’s not been doing.
“Mmm hmm,” Mom mumbled. “Well, he’s standing right here now, about to head out the door for work. You want to talk to him?”
I looked at Mom. She stopped, listened, and handed me the phone.
“Hello,” I said, expecting an apology.
“Jimmie, I think we need to talk, face-to-face, about our son.”
“What about him?”
“We’ll discuss it when we discuss it,” she answered.
I knew better than that. Neecy just didn’t want to say anything around my mother. She didn’t really want to talk about Jimmy, she wanted to talk about me. And she wasn’t apologizing either. I didn’t think that she would. She had too much damn pride, just like I had.
“Aw’ight, you name the time and place, and I’ll be there,” I told her.
She said to meet her at her office that next afternoon and gave me the address on Halsted Street. I agreed to it without thinking. It was a simple manhood thing to prove that I wasn’t the least bit afraid of her ass! She wasn’t really no high-class sister, she was just a wannabe.
When I hung up the phone with her, my mom looked at me and said, “You should have married that girl when you had the chance, Jimmie.”
I couldn’t believe she said that. I just stared at her. I knew it was the truth, though. Deep down inside, I envied Neecy so much I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Mom went on and said, “She’s very protective, and she speaks from the heart. She’s just real confused right now. And I know exactly how she feels. Sometimes, as a black woman, you just sit down and pray to God and ask him why he made you love black men so much.”
I looked at my mom and she had tears welling up in her eyes. She had lost three black men, my father and both of my brothers. We didn’t even talk about it much. Both of my brothers were killed in gang-related shoot-outs. Knowing that the people who did it were still alive, and that I hadn’t tried to do anything about it, wasn’t too healthy for me. But I’d only end up back in jail or dead my damn self if I tried to get revenge. That’s why I kept thinking about my son going pro in ball. I needed a big dream to hold on to. I had to feel that one day I could escape all of the shit the world kept feeding me. Or all of the shit that I kept making for myself. Either way, whether it was my fault or the world’s fault, I was just tired of dealing with it.
“Go on to work, Jimmie, before you end up being late. You don’t need no more excuses. You hear me? So go on,” my mother warned me. She took a seat on the living room couch and wiped her eyes. I stood there daydreaming about my brothers and my father, three more victims of Chicago’s impoverished West Side.
I walked out the house feeling as if I was carrying boulders on both of my legs. I didn’t feel like going to work anymore. I was in good shape before Neecy’s phone call. I was looking forward to work. But after all of the drama, it seemed as if the energy had been drained out of me. By the time I made it to the bus stop, I was thinking about getting high and spending the night with Kim. She wanted me to stop by and see her again in the morning anyway.
“Yo, Jay, I hear you workin’ the night shift, man! They still hiring?”
I turned around and spotted my man Calvin sitting on a milk crate across the street from the bus stop. He was a sophomore when I was a senior at West Side High. He was the only sophomore who made varsity that year on the basketball team. The boy had skills back in the day! But he was looking ragged that night.
“What’s been up, Cal!” I yelled at him. I rushed over there to give him a pound before my bus came. Calvin smelled like he pissed on himself. I shook his hand anyway.
“Bring me an application when you come back,” he told me.
I looked over into the corner of the abandoned storefront he sat in front of and noticed fresh piss running down the cracks in the sidewalk. I was relieved that Calvin had taken a leak, instead of going on himself, but he still looked terrible. His twisted face made him look fifty. He was only thirty-two.
All of a sudden, I was glad to see my bus coming. “Aw’ight, I’ll see what I can do,” I lied to him. I ran back across the street to my bus.
“Aw’ight, dawg!” he hollered at me.
I took a seat next to the window and watched Calvin being approached by some young hustler offering him a small package.
An older black woman sitting in front of me grunted, “Mmmph,” and shook her head.
Calvin didn’t want any damn job. He wanted to be high. High forever. Because when you’re high, you don’t have to punch in, wear no uniform, listen to no bosses, or wait on no hot, funky bus. When you’re high, you’re not going anywhere, and your only track of time is how long it took you to get from one high to the next.
I sat there on the bus, philosophizing about getting high for the entire ride to the train station. Then I thought about it some more while on the train. By the time I got off at my stop, I knew that I wanted to be at work, because I liked being able to go places. Getting high always made me lazy, especially when I was still running ball every day. That’s when I first started sitting around thinking about doing stupid shit, like robbing p
eople. In fact, I was high the night I got arrested.
I got to work at ten of twelve. My boss, Roger Collinski, looked at his watch and said, “You’re late,” with a smile on his face.
I grinned at him and said, “Yeah, I knew I should have taken that taxi. You just can’t count on these buses sometimes.”
We laughed about it. Then he asked me about my son’s basketball game.
“My boy did all right. He had twelve points, eight rebounds, and a couple of blocked shots, but he was in foul trouble most of the time,” I told him. “They ended up losing sixty-eight to fifty-seven. It was the other guys on the team that lost it for ’em. They were playing like they didn’t expect to be there, all nervous and whatnot. My boy was the only one playing defense, that’s how he ended up getting in foul trouble.”
Roger nodded and said, “I know just what you mean. My oldest son, Johnny, had a great arm in high school, but he didn’t have any guys who could get down the field and catch the deep ball. My second son, David, used to work out and catch the ball with him, but he was a freshman when Johnny was a senior.
“Now David has some great hands in his junior year, but the quarterback sucks; a damn candy arm. I even thought hard about transferring my boys to a school where they could really use their talents, but I decided not to. Because although I love the game of football, I understand that an education is the only guarantee to success. Now that ain’t even good enough. Nowadays, you gotta get yourself a master’s degree, kick ass, and take names!”
“Yeah, that’s the same predicament my son’ll be in this year. He’ll be going to Belmont Creek,” I told him. “I don’t know if they’ll win much, but at least he’ll be the star of the team in a few years.”
Roger looked at me and said, “Belmont Creek? That’s in Oak Park, isn’t it?”
I said, “Yeah, he lives out there with his mother. She went and got herself a degree in business, kicked ass, and took names,” I added with a chuckle.