“Yeah, but I don’t rob people,” I said.
“You can’t succeed by intimidating people, and for the most part, you can’t succeed by going downtown and playing basketball against some other young men who think they can play. You still with me?”
“Go on.”
“The social contract says you can make it if you have the tools that our society needs so that everybody is happy with you. So you need an education. You need to get some skills that you can take to the marketplace, and you need to understand enough about your assets to turn them into something you can get well paid for.” Elijah said. “But John Sunday was bragging on how hard he’s worked in his life, as if that was the only important thing. Hard work by itself isn’t worth two cents on a rainy day if it doesn’t give you a good life.
“When his wife left him, he thought she had gotten too many big dreams in her head. He didn’t figure out that just because he was doing the best he could, it still might not have been enough to satisfy the needs of a family. I’m not saying she should have left him, but I can understand it.
“The social contract gave John a chance to have his voice heard, but he didn’t vote. He didn’t understand that what he did as a young boy, working hard but not getting an education, was going to affect him all his life. John has a good heart, and he’s got more courage than most people, and he’s trying to ignore the social contract. He’s knocked around in little no-paying jobs all his life and still doesn’t have a clue that the problem is not just him, and that there’s something else going on.
“None of those jobs he had gave him a pension plan, and now he’s in his eighties and he’s still working in that fish market to make ends meet. I had to help him get welfare benefits so he wouldn’t be homeless. He didn’t have the information he needed to do it on his own. Now he’s ending up being just like those crabs. Sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the water to get hot.”
“You think that’s fair?”
“It’s fair, Mr. DuPree, but it’s not easy,” Elijah said. “Our social contract says that there shouldn’t be anything blocking your way to the good life. But if you don’t get up and get it or if you don’t know what’s out there to get, then that’s your problem.”
“I think that’s wrong,” I said.
“And if you feel something is wrong, you have to vote to put people into office who are going to give you a better deal,” Elijah said. “But you need to know what they’re talking about and figure out what that better deal is. John Sunday is a good man and a smart man in his way. But he’s running outside the social contract, and he’s not getting anywhere. There’s nothing dumb about John Sunday, but he’s never going to get much further than he is now.”
“You also said the social contract protects people whether they know it or not,” I said. “How come it’s not protecting him?”
“It protects him against things that threaten the tribe,” Elijah said. “Like crime, or an enemy invasion. It doesn’t protect him against ignorance.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Mr. DuPree, I’m not always comfortable with it,” Elijah said. “But if I truly believe that people are smart enough to learn and to take care of themselves, I have to accept it.”
I left Elijah and started walking home. What Elijah was saying about John Sunday had me down. What I wanted was a system where everybody had enough to get by and could do their own thing. It didn’t make a lot of difference to me that what Elijah said made sense. It wasn’t fair and Elijah knew it wasn’t, but he kept coming back to it like it was the only thing happening.
Just up the street, there was a fire and a car accident in front of the fast-food joint on Frederick Douglass. I went into the house, and Mom had made fried chicken and mashed potatoes.
“Are you learning to cook anything beside soup?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I can just change the amount of stuff I put in the soup and make stews, though. When it gets toward winter, I’ll make some stews for you.”
“When it gets toward winter, you’ll be in school and finishing your college applications,” Mom said.
“Hey, Mom, do you think Richard knew what he was doing?”
“Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think he had a plan for how his life was going and how he fit in and that kind of thing?” I asked.
“I don’t know if he did or not. Half the time I don’t even know what I’m doing,” Mom said. “I go to work every day and try to do a good job. Then I come home and try to take care of the house. I don’t do much else. I just try to do the right thing and work with what feels right for me to do. You know what I mean?”
I did, but it made me really sad. It didn’t make me as sad about Mom because I thought she was doing all right, even though I knew her job at the clinic wasn’t all that great. She liked it, though, and it was helping people and she was holding things together. But when I started thinking about my father, I wondered if he just didn’t know enough about life to get over. If he didn’t know, who was supposed to tell him?
I was close to being mad at Elijah. That was stupid, I knew, but I was still close to it.
It was hard getting to sleep. Real hard.
9
Saturday morning. I discovered Mom never really sleeps. I think what she does is to go into her bedroom every night and wait until I fall asleep and then assume her alternate identity as Alertia, the wonder girl. I had been out Friday night playing ball in Brooklyn with Terrell and some of the guys. When I hit the bed, I was exhausted and aching from being hacked. I had planned to sleep right through Saturday and get up sometime late Sunday night.
“Caroline’s in town,” Mom announced. “We’ve been invited to lunch.”
“We going?”
“Yes. I haven’t seen that girl for nearly a year,” Mom went on. “Can you believe that?”
I could, and I did.
Caroline, Mom’s older sister, had married and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, ten years ago. She used to call a lot at first, but then that kind of tailed off except for around the holidays. I knew she had a son who was older than me, but we had never hooked up in any serious way. Mom said that Caroline and Anthony were in New York for the weekend to go to some kind of film festival.
I didn’t think Mom was going to be all that comfortable with the visit. She loved her sister, but Caroline’s husband was a successful black doctor, and Mom’s husband had been in jail for a good part of their marriage.
“The lunch is at twelve thirty,” Mom said. “Why don’t you wear your suit?”
“Because my suit is a fall and winter suit and it’s too hot to wear it in the middle of summer,” I said. “I’ll wear my blazer.”
“Does it need pressing?”
“No, Mom, it does not need pressing,” I said.
I sat up in bed, and she was still in the doorway. “I’m so proud of you,” she said.
Which meant that she thought I could hold my own when we went to lunch with her sister. It was all right with me. I figured I’d go to lunch, say something that sounded a little smart, chow down, and be out of there.
“When are they going back to Wisconsin?” I asked.
“They’re flying in the morning,” Mom answered. “Maybe the two of you can hang out when he starts at NYU?”
“Could be,” I said.
When Mom left my room, I checked my finances and saw that I was looking good. Well, maybe not looking good, but heavy enough to carry lunch.
Mom fluttered around the house all morning, trying to figure out what she wanted to wear. She kept asking me what I thought of this blouse or dress, and I kept saying that anything she wore would look good to me. The thing was that Mom was still kind of fly and Caroline was definitely not fly, so that kind of evened things out between them. The other thing was that I didn’t really care about Caroline since she hadn’t come to my father’s funeral. It wasn’t a big th
ing, because my parents had been separated, but it was a family thing, and Caroline should have represented.
The lunch was downtown on Seventh Avenue at a Greek restaurant called Molyvos. We were supposed to be there at twelve thirty and showed up on the dot. Caroline and Anthony were already there and looking at menus.
“Caroline.”
“Ebony.”
“Look at you, girl!”
“You must be getting younger!”
“How did we let the time fly like this?”
“Time will fly!”
Kiss-kiss. Hug-hug.
Anthony and I shook hands, and we all sat down. A thin girl with dark hair and large dark eyes came over and took our drink orders. I ordered a Coke, Mom ordered a Diet Coke, and Caroline and Anthony both ordered sparkling water.
Anthony. My cousin was looking sharp. He was wearing a brown herringbone jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a light-blue shirt that might have been silk, and a yellow handkerchief that kind of just peeked out of the pocket. My man was GQing all the way.
“Anthony’s been accepted into NYU’s film school, and—oh, you tell them, Anthony,” Aunt Caroline said.
“I’ve been considering careers in medicine and film for the last several years,” Anthony said, “Last year, I decided to do a few half-hour documentaries just to see how they came out. I had no idea of how powerful a statement a visually valid film could be. I had even less of an idea of how simple they were to produce.”
“His father bought him a camera for his birthday,” Caroline said.
“I completed a project, which I called, for better or worse, The Juniper Song, and it won some sort of prize, and I was offered a fellowship.”
“That’s wonderful!” Mom said.
“A lot of truly creditable filmmakers began here,” Anthony went on. “We’re here to see what the school has to offer.”
“His father is still thinking he should become a doctor,” Caroline said. “The camera was just a hobby.”
What I noticed was that Anthony never looked me in the eyes. He was always looking off into space or at something he was holding in his hand. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was as if nobody else was there except him.
Molyvos was a smoking restaurant. Everything was good. I had octopus for an appetizer just so I could tell Terrell about it, and then I had black risotto, just to get my funky thing on. The octopus, they called it oktapodi salata, was delicious. What made it even better was watching Mom watching me eat it.
Anthony ran his mouth all through lunch as if he was delivering a lecture or something. Their plan was really clear by the time the waiter took away the appetizer plates. Aunt Caroline, the doctor’s wife, and Anthony, college senior and filmmaker, were breezing into town to see his flick at the NYU film festival, and Mom and I were supposed to fall out admiring both of them. Caroline flashed the tickets at us before putting them back into her purse. I wasn’t impressed with Anthony, but I still wanted to check out his movie.
Caroline grabbed the check when it came and paid for it with a credit card. Mom wanted to pay our share, but Caroline just waved her hand as if the money didn’t matter. I saw the bill, and it was just over a hundred bucks. Then we grabbed a cab down to New York University.
The film festival was held in the student center, and we found out that five short films were being shown.
The first film was by a French brother and sister, and it was called Friedrich and Elizabeth. The whole film was about a guy sitting in a corner shouting about something and a girl on the other side of the room writing in a notebook. The film kept switching to an image of a gun, and after nearly ten minutes of the guy shouting, there was a loud bang! Then there was a picture of the guy lying on the ground and a picture of the girl stepping over his body and still writing in her notebook.
Anthony’s film came on next. It started with a dark screen, then the sound of a clarinet playing a slow blues. I was impressed. Then the music grew soft, and we were looking down a narrow alley. At the end of the alley, there was something on the ground. It looked like a body. I recognized Anthony’s voice as it came up.
“And Medea sprinkled powerful drugs over his eyes while she sang....”
The image switched to a young white girl standing on a corner. Then the camera followed her into a hallway and onto the first-floor landing. She took down her pants, pulled out a hypodermic needle, and shot herself up. She was a druggie.
The camera stayed on her as she pulled up her pants and went back out onto the street.
The next shot was of an older white guy, maybe nineteen or twenty, sitting in the park. He was talking about something he was calling the Argonautica or something like that, but he was slurring his words and you got the impression he was high. That was what the film was all about, this guy getting high and in between talking about gods and whatnot. It sounded as if he was heavy into Greek mythology.
A lot of the scenes were really hard to look at. The young girl and the guy were friends, apparently, and they both shot up. There was one light moment when they broke into a house and the girl fried some eggs up and they had breakfast together. What was funny about the scene was that the guy picked up a newspaper and started reading it as if he were in his own house having breakfast with his wife and not robbing someone’s pad.
They lived in a basement. They had put a padlock on the door, and at night they locked themselves in. The movie ended when one morning he tries to wake her up and finds out that she’s dead. The camera has him crying and holding her body for a while. But then he goes out, cops some dope, and shoots up. Once he gets himself high, he goes to an alley, the same one that opens the flick, and falls asleep. The sound of the clarinet came up again, and the credits rolled.
Film by Anthony Rock
Directed by Anthony Rock
Photographed by Anthony Rock and Gino Colavita
Thanks to Gary H.
Thanks to Lavinia F. (1996–2011)
The film got a huge round of applause, but I didn’t dig it. We watched the next three films, one of which was a cartoon, and then some school official invited us to the lounge to meet the filmmakers, who were all college students.
“Yo, Anthony, that girl really died?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said.
There were easily a hundred people in the lounge, drinking wine or sodas, and I was ready to split. I told Mom and she said okay and apologized to her sister.
I don’t know if Aunt Caroline was really on to the idea that we were leaving, she was so busy fluttering around Anthony.
“I think it was a very serious film,” Mom said as we got on the uptown D train at West Fourth Street. “I think that any young person thinking about using drugs should see it and see what might happen to them.”
I grunted and stretched my legs out in front of me. The train wasn’t crowded, and we had found seats. I checked my watch and saw that it was only six p.m.
“I wonder where they got the money for the drugs,” I said.
“Weren’t they breaking into that one apartment?” Mom asked.
I nodded. What I was really wondering was if they had gotten any of the money from Anthony. People like him didn’t have to worry about a social contract. They didn’t have to figure out how their lives were going to go, just what paths they wanted to take. There was nothing in the film that said what he thought about either of the two druggies. They didn’t even call each other by name. But for some reason they had let him hang around them and film them shooting up.
“You think that my father shot up like that?” I asked as we walked down the hill to our place. “In alleys and basements and places like that?”
“I don’t want to think about that,” Mom answered. “I really don’t.”
I could dig that, her not wanting to deal with my father’s life. But I had to deal with it. I had to figure out who he was so I could give him a place in my mind.
10
Sometimes my thoughts wander an
d I don’t know where I’m going. Or maybe I know where I’m going, but I’m not thinking about it and I just get there. That’s what happened when I was going home and ran up on Sly.
“Hey, philosopher, where you going in such a big hurry?”
“Just chilling,” I said. “Probably check out the baseball games on the tube.”
“You in a big hurry to get upstairs?” Sly asked. He was leaning against the front door of his Bentley.
“No. I don’t think so,” I said.
“I got to make a run down to Thirty-second Street,” Sly said. “Get in and go with me so I can see how much more you know about the social contract.”
I wanted to say no real bad, but when Sly opened the back door, I found myself getting in. Sly closed the door and got in the front passenger seat.
“This is my man Paul,” Sly said. “What’s your last name, Paul?”
“DuPree,” I answered.
D-Boy grunted without looking around.
As D-Boy pulled away from the curb, the only thing I could think of was that they didn’t have a real good reason to kill me.
“So what has the old man been teaching you?” Sly asked.
“He’s talking about how the social contract is important for all of us to deal with,” I said. “It’s like rules that people have to follow if they want to get ahead.”
“Follow the rules, follow the rules. That’s what they used to tell the slaves. All you have to do is to follow the rules, and you’ll be happy. Today when they talk about how we should all follow the rules, we hear people talking about crime,” Sly said. “You know—‘Crime does not pay!’”
“He’s talking about taking things from people,” I said. “Like, if you had a ham sandwich, I’m not supposed to take yours and you’re not supposed to take mine.”
“Ham sandwich?” Sly looked back at me, peering over his glasses. “You serious?”