“And he runs out onto the field and arrests the player?” Mom finished it.
“Yeah.”
“Jesse, have I ever told you that you get your intelligence from your father’s side?”
“What he get from you?” Dad was washing up in the kitchen sink, which Mom hated.
“Good looks and charm,” Mom said. “Don’t you think so?”
At the table they were joking around for a while about what genes I had inherited, and then they got into it again about who was doing what chores around the house. I didn’t mind them arguing until the end, when Mom started crying and Dad was getting mad.
“You want me to do all the cleaning and cooking, I’ll do it!” He raised his voice some more. “I’ll quit my job and stay home and be the housewife, because I sure can’t be no man around this house.”
He got up and left the table, and a moment later I heard the bedroom door slam.
“He left his plate just where it was sitting,” Mom said. “But at least with his sore foot he couldn’t stomp off. I need to learn how to draw so I can show him just how stupid he looks. I should leave his plate right there for the rest of our lives together.”
I got up and put Dad’s plate in the sink. There was something going on between them, and I didn’t know what it was. I knew it wasn’t anything about washing dishes, but Dad was upset about something. Sooner or later it would come out, and I just hoped it was nothing serious. Dad couldn’t express his ideas as easily as Mom could, and I think that pissed him off sometimes.
Mom was watching television and Dad was still sulking in the bedroom when the idea came to me. I got out my pad and made some quick sketches, but nothing came the way I wanted it. I remembered seeing a poster of Huey Newton, the old Black Panther, sitting on a chair with a gun next to it and him looking like a king or something.
When I had first seen the picture of Huey Newton, it made me think of a king, but when I saw a documentary on the Black Panthers and saw him in his house with that same picture on the wall, I thought that what I was really seeing was him trying to look like some kind of hero. I started drawing, first from memory, then went to a book that had a photograph of the Huey Newton poster and used that as reference.
My picture of Rise sitting on a high-back wicker chair was good. I thought about calling him up and taking it over to him even though it was getting late. I decided not to.
Sometimes when I sleep on a picture, when it’s in my mind all night, I see it differently than when I’m first working on it. That was the thing with the picture of Rise. In the morning it was still good, but it wasn’t what I wanted. The proportions were right, and Rise was looking like a very satisfied image of himself, but that wasn’t what I had intended.
I messed with the picture a little, putting lines here and there, adding some shading around the face, even adding some abstract figures. But it still wasn’t right, and this time I knew what I really wanted.
When I began again, it wasn’t with a lot of quick sketches or hurried marks on the open paper. It was slow, with the chair in the center of the paper and then Rise on it. He was huge, with his head bigger in proportion than it could ever be in life, and his teeth showing in a half smile as he snarled from the flatness of the page.
“Why you do me like this?”I imagined him saying. “Why you making me look like some kind of freak?”
I had a little hologram, about the size of a nickel, of a skull, and I painted a ring on his finger and pasted the death head onto it.
The paper was twenty inches by twenty-four and heavy, and I remembered an old frame that I had on top of the closet. I got the frame down, slid out the picture of Muhammad Ali, slipped in Rise, and put the picture on my dresser so I could take a good look at it.
It still wasn’t right. There was too much white space around the edges. I took it out of the frame and filled in the white areas with silver paint. The silver wasn’t exactly right, because it toned the picture down too much. I hadn’t expected that. So then I put some highlights in Rise’s eyes, yellow and red to suggest flames. That was boss. That was definitely on the money.
Mom knocked on the door as I was setting up the fan to dry the paint a little.
“What is that?” Mom asked.
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“It looks a little bit like your father first thing in the morning,” she said, her head to one side.
“Mom!”
“Don’t tell him I said that—I don’t feel like babying him all day,” she said. “Well, it could be Bizarro, the mad villain of Gotham City, Stinky Scourge of the Underworld contemplating his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.”
“I like that,” I said. “Stinky Scourge of the Underworld.”
“Or some other monster,” Mom said. “Don’t leave it on the dresser tonight. You’ll wake up and scare yourself to death.”
Mom asked me if I wanted breakfast without guessing who was in the picture. I let it go and skipped the breakfast. I wanted Rise to see it as soon as possible.
Chapter 15
Rise was in the shower when I got to his house. His mother and grandfather were at the kitchen playing pitty-pat for pennies. There were paper cups on the table and an ashtray in front of Mrs. Davis that was piled with discarded cigarettes. She was in her housecoat with her hair up in brown-paper rollers. The kitchen window was closed, and the air had the faint smell of burned hair grease.
“So what you doing with yourself these days, Jesse?” Rise’s mother asked.
“Just hanging out, mostly,” I said. “Trying to stretch the summer out.”
“I can hear that,” she said. “Marvin, you got any eights over there?”
“Play and find out.” Rise’s grandfather leaned back in his chair and smiled. “You can never tell what I’m holding, girl.”
“What’s Rise doing in the shower so long?” Mrs. Davis asked. “He knows Jesse’s out here waiting for him. He spends as much time cleaning himself as Mama does cleaning the house.”
“I don’t mind waiting,” I said. I had put the picture in Rise’s room on the dresser.
Mr. Johnson smiled, put his last three cards facedown on the table, then turned them up one by one. “Why people got to be in a hurry to get their beating?” he asked, pulling in the small pile of pennies in the middle of the table.
Mrs. Davis looked at her cards, sucked her teeth, and started dealing again. Mr. Johnson looked at his cards. “Woman, who taught you how to deal?”
Rise came out of the shower and got dressed. By that time I had changed my mind about the picture I had made. When I did it, when I drew the picture and colored it, I thought I was making an image of Rise that he would see and get puzzled over. He would wonder why I had made him look so strange, and I imagined myself explaining to him that, in my eyes, he was changing.
“You’re becoming a different person,”I imagined myself saying. “Somebody I almost don’t know. That’s why I drew you that way. You’re not the same person I grew up with and who was my blood brother.”
But waiting for Rise, sitting with his mom and his grandfather, I could feel myself growing more and more tense. Rise was going to be mad, I thought.
Then it came to me that maybe it wasn’t so much how Rise had changed his appearance, after all. Maybe what was wrong was really about me and how I was seeing Rise. With everything going on, the shootings and the way Rise was acting, I was looking to make things right again, to get back to what I was comfortable with. That was the old Rise and the old hanging out. Looking at Rise, thinking about him, was like going to a horror movie and seeing an evil doll that killed people. It was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. And it was the unfamiliar, the not knowing how a doll could talk or think, or how someone I had known for so long could deal drugs, that made it so depressing.
“Yo, Jesse!” Rise came out of his room wearing slacks and a T-shirt and holding up the picture. “This is me, man! Truth rules, little brother. Truth rules!”
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He started showing the picture to his mom and his grandfather. All the time, he was telling them how great it was. His grandfather said something about me being the best artist he knew, and his mom was talking about how good the colors stood out. I knew they were coming from what Rise was saying, his enthusiasm. He was holding the picture with both hands, as if he didn’t even want to let it get out of his possession.
I wanted to see it again myself.
Chapter 16
Tania called.
“So you don’t have a girlfriend, right?” she asked.
“I guess not,” I said.
“You guess? You don’t know if you got an old lady or not?”
“Okay, then I don’t,” I said.
“Okay, then you do,” she said. “I’m going to be your girlfriend from now on. You don’t have to buy me nothing, or even take me out. All you got to do is be nice to me and talk to me sometimes. All right?”
“Sure,” I said. “But how come you decided you wanted to be my girlfriend?”
“Well, you’re not too good-looking, but you’re sweet and you don’t know so much about me you’re going to be tramping me out and stuff,” Tania said. “So we can make it. Except I don’t want you to start going out with other girls so I don’t have to beat them up or anything. That’s, like, respect.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
She said good-bye and hung up.
That was the first time I ever told a girl that I loved her. And even though I really didn’t know Tania, I liked having her for my girlfriend. I liked having a girlfriend. Period. Maybe I even loved her.
I was getting dressed and trying to figure out who I was going to tell that I had a girlfriend when C.J. called. He asked me if I would come over to the church. He sounded upset, and I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing, but the way he said it I figured it had to be heavy.
What I thought it was about was that his moms had put down him playing with our little Cuban band.
As I was putting on my sneakers, my mind was jumping back and forth between Tania, and how she was kind of a needy person who could really use a friend, and thinking about sex. She had said that she had it going on, and she did. But she also said she didn’t want to be tramped out, and I could dig that.
I thought C.J.’s mom—she was the main person in his family—should have let him play in the band. C.J. was good on the piano and on the organ. He couldn’t do anything else that I knew about.
When I got to the church, Elder Smitty was there. His real name was Arthur Smith, but all the kids called him Elder Smitty. Tall and broad shouldered, it was easy to imagine him swinging a big hammer or lifting a piano. He walked slowly, and always looked tired or as if he had pains in his legs when he moved them. But on Sunday mornings, when the sermon got good to him and seemed to lift his body up and make his step lighter, he looked twenty years younger. When he didn’t shave, his white whiskers gleamed against his black face and he could have posed for a picture of the black king that came and saw Christ.
Elder Smitty had retired from driving a moving van and spent a lot of his time taking care of the church. When I walked in, he was sitting in the front pew, a broom standing between his legs.
C.J. was sitting on the piano bench and Little Man was sitting next to him. I nodded toward Elder Smitty and went up to where C.J. and Little Man were.
“He teaching me to play the piano.” Little Man looked up at me.
“I didn’t know you could play at all,” I said.
“Check this out,” Little Man said.
He started banging on the keys, not even trying to play anything, and grinning. I looked at C.J. and he looked miserable. I could see what was going on. Little Man was just messing with C.J.
After a minute he stopped and looked at C.J. and asked him wasn’t that good.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “You can’t play for nothing.”
“I didn’t ask you,” he said.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “You can’t play for nothing.”
He stood up and got as close to me as he could, trying to punk me down.
“You want to step to me?” I asked him. “Let’s go outside and get to stepping.”
He started laughing again and moved back. “I don’t have time for no lames,” he said.
Little Man jumped off the platform, grabbed his jacket off the pew next to Elder Smitty, and strutted down the middle aisle to the front door. All the time, he had his hand up giving us the bird without turning around.
“Don’t worry about it none,” Elder Smitty said. “He’s just trying to bring you down to his level. That’s all he’s trying to do. There’s people like that in the world. They can’t do nothing themselves, so they try to bring everybody else down to their can’t-do-nothing level.”
Elder Smitty was right, and both me and C.J. knew it. But him being right hadn’t stopped Little Man from messing with C.J. and hadn’t stopped him from dissing the church. So the thing was, in a way we were dealing at his level whether we wanted to or not.
I told C.J. to come on over to my house, and he said he just wanted to play awhile. He turned to the piano and started playing “Amazing Grace.” Reverend Loving, our minister, didn’t like that song, and we never sang it in church or played it, but as C.J. sat at the piano playing, it sounded like the most beautiful song ever written. C.J. played for about five minutes straight, and then he was crying.
“Let him cry.” Elder Smitty had come up to the piano and leaned against the walls. “Sometimes it takes tears to wash the pain that somebody like that young man can bring into your life.”
I put my hand on C.J.’s shoulder as he played softly. “Don’t let it bother you, man,” I heard myself saying, knowing it didn’t have any meaning.
“Old as I am, I’ve never learned to deal with people like him without bloodshed,” Elder Smitty said. “You did real good, Jesse. We need to celebrate God and the joy in our lives and let these fools dance with Satan if they want.”
I waited for C.J. to get himself together. It took a while. When he finally did, we left the church and walked toward home.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We just have to outlast these dudes.”
“He called me a faggot,”
C.J. said.
“Hey, C.J., you go one-on-one with people like him and he’s got to come out on top because there’s nothing he cares for,” I said. “Why would he want to hurt you, diss the church, diss Elder Smitty?
The sucker is just evil.”
“Man, I’m fifteen, I should be able to deal with dudes like him,” C.J. said.
“You can deal with him,” I said. “But not on his level. And he can’t deal with you on yours. Word.”
“Yeah, but I’m living in his world,” C.J. said. “He’s not living in mine.”
“I don’t have it all worked out in my head, but I know you’re okay and we can be people together,” I said. “We can’t let fools drag us down to their level. If that’s all they got, then that’s all they got. We got something else.”
“I don’t know if I got a level to deal on or not,” C.J. said.
“You got talent, so you have a level to deal on,” I said. “That’s the word, chapter and verse. I got the art thing going on. You got the music thing going on, and that’s important to me, because what you’re doing makes me surer about what I’m doing. You see what I’m talking about?”
“You getting a little deep,” C.J. said. “But it feels right.”
Chapter 17
STICKUP MAN DEFIANT
Mason Grier, the 19-year-old defendant, a member of the street gang called the Counts, made an obscene gesture at the end of his sentence procedure this Wednesday at Criminal Court in Manhattan. Ernest McKinnon, the state-appointed lawyer for the 19-year-old, promised an appeal of the 84-month sentence, which he denounced as “excessive.”
“So what is this
all about?” My father knew I had seen the article in the Amsterdam News.“Since when did the Counts become a street gang?”
“That’s probably what Mason told them,” I said. “He’s trying to go down in a blaze of glory, like he’s a superhero or something.”
“He sure doesn’t look like a superhero to me,” my father said.
“He made the papers,” I said.
“That’s a superhero to you? Somebody who makes the papers?”
“I’m not saying that, Dad,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “What I’m saying is that guys like Mason jump on stuff like that as if they have done something wonderful. You can say it sucks, I can say it sucks, because he’s in jail, but when you talk to them, they’re acting as if it’s big-time.”
“I want you out of that club,” my father said, taking the paper from me and folding it up. “You don’t need to be no Count.”
“Are you taking me out of the neighborhood, too?” I asked.
“Watch your mouth, boy.” He raised a stubby finger in front of my face. “I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it!”
“Why don’t you hit me?” I said. “Maybe you’re as tough as Mason.”
I didn’t see the blow coming, and it caught me hard across the face. It stung my eye bad, and I started to bring my hands to my face, then stopped and just looked at him.
“That your best shot?” I asked. My right eye was blurring fast, but I could see he had his fist balled up, ready to hit me again.
He was yelling, something about how he hadn’t raised a child to be going to prison. There were curses, too, and he kept pulling his fist back to hit me. I saw the anger in his face and it got me mad and we were both glaring at each other, with him standing over me, holding my bunched T-shirt in one hand and threatening me with the other.
The door opened, and I could hear Mom coming into the room. She pushed her way between us.