Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 42

"Wake up!" I yelled out to the living room.

There was a cla.s.s today. Physics, I think, but me pa.s.sing that now was like a dude trying to be monogamous-impossible. Cocoa hadn't missed a lecture or seminar all year, he'd bragged about it, so the last three days he'd been with me were only getting him in trouble with the mother-to-be. When she beeped him, every few hours, and he called back, she'd say she needed errands run, but her cousin Zulma was around, and her aunt; she was just on that ultrah.o.r.n.y pregnant-woman program and Cocoa knew. He would say, over the phone, "You know I can't sleep with you when you're pregnant, that would be wrong. I might give the baby a dent in its head." He laughed with me when he hung up, but while they were talking I said nothing; I listened from the kitchen to every syllable; if I'd had a pen and paper nearby I would have written it all down.

He stood in my doorway. He was slim as well as short but still seemed to take up all the s.p.a.ce. Cocoa said, "You're messing me up. That stuff from last night is still bothering me. What did we drink?"

"I had a bugged dream," I muttered.

"I'd hate to hear it," Cocoa said. "I'm going to make some breakfast."

My hand, I placed it against the window to see how cold it was out. It wasn't a snowy winter. When I'd enrolled at City College it had been a big deal. I'd be getting my own place. My mother and sister were against it, but when you hit eighteen they call that adulthood and a lot more decisions are yours to make. Plus, you know how it is with boys in a family of women, they won't let go. When I'd first moved in, Mom and Karen were coming by once a week to check on me, but after two years of staying on top of things, schedules, they had no choice, they let me be.

Three nights ago, when Cocoa had come to hang out, I'd made him wait outside while I got things in place: threw my pillows and sheets back on my bed, plugged everything in. I kept up with news, they were doing renovations all over the Bronx: new buildings, the parks reseeded with gra.s.s and imported trees, you could almost pretend there wasn't a past.

After breakfast, for an hour, Cocoa and I took trains up and down the spines of Manhattan. Then we stood outside Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park, on the side farthest from NYU (Cocoa's school), staring at three women he thought he knew. I was shaking my head. "No, no. You don't know them. They're way too pretty to be talking to you."

He spat, "You criticize when you get them herpes sores off your lips."

I touched my chin. "They're only pimples."

"Then wash your face."

He'd been giving me advice since we were kids. He had thought that if he just told me how to be better I could be. Age ten was the first time for either of us that I acted up: When people whispering into telephones were talking about only me, a radio announcer was making personal threats "Someone out there, right now, is suffering and won't get relief until they're our ninety-eighth caller and gets these tickets to Bermuda!". And Cocoa grabbed me tight as I dialed and redialed the pay phone in front of our building, screaming for someone to lend me twenty cents.

Cocoa walked and I moved beside him; we entered the park. The day was a cold one so the place wasn't way too full like summers when you couldn't move ten feet without having to dodge some moron with a snake on his shoulders or a cipher of kids pretending they're freestyling lyrics they'd written down and memorized months before. "I saw Evette the other day" I told him.

He smiled. "What are you telling me that for? Anyway, she married someone didn't she?"

"Well, you staring at them three girls, I thought I'd tell you about one you actually got."

We had come to an NYU building and he told me to wait outside; he was angry that I'd brought up this woman with him trying so hard to be good; really, I don't know why I did. When I'd called him a few days earlier, it had been because I knew I needed help, but once he was with me I avoided the issue.

My hands in my coat pockets, they were full of those used tissues from the flu in March. I had planned to keep them in a pillowcase under my bed when I got better, but those were all filled with the hairs I clipped off and saved, so it was September and I had never truly healed and my hands were full of dried snot.

Maybe if he hadn't been doing so well, if his girl hadn't been so pretty, if his grades weren't soaring, if he'd been unhealthy, anything, but I couldn't confide in someone doing so much better than me. I wouldn't feel like I was asking for help, more like charity. The man he was now, I couldn't sit down with him and go through all the events in my day to figure out which thing was d.a.m.ning me: that I woke up every day, alarmless, at seven-forty? that I couldn't stand the taste of milk anymore? that I kept putting off a trip to the supermarket and so the cupboards and fridge were empty? that I had two pillowcases under my bed, one full of cut hair, the other full of old tissues? They all made sense to me.

They all had reasons: 1) for two years I'd had nine A.M. cla.s.ses so now my body, even though I'd stopped attending, had found a pattern; 2) on campus two women had pulled me aside and shown me pamphlets about the haphazard pasteurization process, pictures of what a cow's milk does to human lungs so that even just a commercial for cereal made my chest tighten; 3) I'd dated a woman who worked at the market two blocks away, had been too open in explaining my collections to her one night, sat dejected and embarra.s.sed as she dressed and walked out forever, so I couldn't go back in there even if it was silly pride; there wasn't another grocery for blocks, when I needed food I just bought something already made and I was mostly drinking water now (to watch a cleansing process in myself) and you could get that from a tap. And 4) it wasn't just my body, but The Body that I loved. So where others saw clippings as waste and mucus as excess, all to be collected and thrown away, spend no time on them, to me they were records of the past, they were treasures. Just tossing them out was like burying a corpse too quickly-rub your face against the cold skin, kiss the stony elbows, there is still majesty in that clay. People hate the body, especially those who praise the life of the mind. But even fingernails are miracles. Even odors. Everything of or in the body is a celebration of itself, even the worst is a holy prayer.

I found, as soon as he spoke, as I considered opening myself, I hated him again; I wanted to mention anything that would ruin his happiness. Like that, I brought up Evette and the night before it had been Wilma. Cocoa came out the building, pus.h.i.+ng the gla.s.s door with power. Smiling.

"Your divorce come through?" I asked.

He stopped, composed himself back to pleasure. "Today, a little boy was born."

"Yours? I thought it wasn't for three or four more months." I was suddenly hopeful for the pain of something premature; I could talk to a man who was living through that kind of hurt.

"Not mine. Once a week I find out the name of a baby, a boy if I can, that was born. Newspaper, radio, Internet. This kid was born today, his father already posted pictures. Nine pounds seven ounces, man. Benjamin August something. He looked healthy. It's good luck."

I laughed. "I bet that kid wasn't born in the Bronx. If he was he'd have come out coughing." One fear of every South Bronx parent: asthma. It was enough to make Cocoa tap me one, hard, in the chest and I fell back onto a parked car. His child would be born in the Bronx, he didn't want to be reminded of the dangers. I put my fists out, up. I'd been planning for this, not with him, but with someone. Had been eating calcium tablets every day, fifteen of them (student loan refund checks are a blessing), and now my bones were hard like dictionaries.

He didn't hit anymore. It's what I wanted.

Do you remember the hospital? Not torturous (well, maybe one time), no beatings though; it wasn't even the drugs, try one word: boredom. You could move around but there was nothing to chase the mind, hardly even television if you weren't always good. Just the hours that were eons sitting on a couch, a row of you, ten or twenty, no books, magazines too simple for the mildly r.e.t.a.r.ded and your active mind leaps further and further over an empty cosmos, as lonely as the satellites sent to find life in the universe. But in there, at least, was when I'd realized how they waged their war, my enemies: through sockets and plugs, through a current.

We balanced on a corner as cabs pa.s.sed by in yellow brilliance. It was late morning. I noticed how much energy was on: Some streetlights never went off, people pa.s.sing spoke on phones and the charged batteries glowed, radios came on and stayed on, computers were being run, every floor of every building. The taxi horns, engine-powered, began to sound like my name being called; I kept turning my head; the sounds bounced around inside my body, leafing through my b.a.s.t.a.r.d anatomy like I was a book of poems.

He spoke but the words were coming out of his mouth now all orange. I could see them, like the cones put out on the road at night to veer traffic away from a troubled spot. He said, "Look, let's not get craz, uh, let's not get agitated. I know someplace we could hang out. It'll be real good."

The NYU banners flapped with the wind, loud enough to sound like teeth cracking in your head. And how many times had I heard that noise! Like in the last month maybe five; whenever the remote control wasn't working or the phone bloopblopbleeped in my ear about no more Basic Service and I took each instrument between my teeth and bit down, trying to chew my anger out, that rage of mine which could take on such proportions.

Thought we'd catch the 4 to 149th and Grand Concourse-everybody out, everybody home. We could pa.s.s the murals of young men painted outside candy stores and supermarkets, where a thoughtful friend might have set out a new candle, where mourning seemed like a lifestyle. Instead we took the 6 and got out at 116th, walked blocks, then left, to Pleasant Avenue. My sister's home.

Cocoa saw me turn, flinch like someone had set off a car alarm in my ear, but then he put his arm on my shoulder and pushed hard, said, "Come on. Keep going." Cocoa kept pus.h.i.+ng until we got upstairs, to the door, green, on it the numbers had been nailed in and the air had oxidized their faux-gold paint into that blackened color so familiar to buildings across our income level. He rang the bell. (Are they artificially powered?) The sound was so shrill I guessed they were part of the enemy army. Our first battle, twelve years before in the drab brown medical ward, had been so quick I'm sure they'd thought I'd forget. But I'd squirmed after they set those wires against my little forehead, so when they flipped the charge that one time, the lines slipped and burned both cheeks black; years later the spots were still there.

She opened the door. The whole place was going: television, microwave, coffeemaker, VCR. Karen was surprised to see me, but still, expecting it in some way. She was used to this.

I went to the bathroom but didn't shut the door. I filled my mouth with water and let it trickle out through my pursed lips, down into the toilet bowl so they'd think I was busy, held open the door some and my ears more: Karen: "How did you end up with him?"

Cocoa: "I ran into Sammy a few weeks ago, gave him my number, then he wouldn't leave me alone."

Karen: "You think he's starting up?"

Cocoa: "I don't know what else. It's got to be. He hasn't done this nonsense in years. He calls me one morning and in an hour he's at my door, ringing the bell. I'm living with my girl's family, you know? He started kicking the door if I didn't answer. So I been with him three days."

Karen: "You should have called me or something."

Cocoa: "Called who? I wasn't even sure if you still lived here. I got lucky you and your man didn't get promoted or relocated. I called your mom but the number was disconnected."

Karen: "She needed to get away."

Cocoa: "Well, I know how she feels. You know I love that kid, but I can't keep this up. My son is about to drop in a few months. I'm trying to take care of this school thing. He's bugging, that's all I can say."

Karen: "You think you could help me out here, until Masai comes?"

Cocoa: "I can't take five more minutes. I'm sorry Karen, I am, but I can't be around him no more. I'm through."

I listened to him walk to the door, open and shut it quietly. That thing was a big metal one, if he'd just let it swing closed behind him it would have rattled and thundered, so my last thought of Cocoa was of him being delicate.

Washed my hands and crept out, pulled the door closed, and left the light on so she'd think I was still in there, and snuck into her bedroom. On the door was the family portrait everyone has from Sears. A big poster of my sister, her husband, and that baby of theirs. My niece. There was enough daylight coming in from outside that I didn't need the bulbs; besides, the light would have been like my rat-fink friend Cocoa, squealing to my sister about my goings-on.

There was a big bed in this big room, a crib in the corner, clothes in piles, just washed, on top of a long dresser. I walked to the crib and looked down at Kezia. She was wrapped up tightly, put to bed in a tiny green nightdress. Her diaper bulged and made noise when she moved. Dreaming little girl, she had dimples for laughing. I should have been able to make her smile even in her sleep.

From the hallway a slamming door, then, "Sammy? Samuel?" Karen kicked into the room like a S.W.A.T. team. I looked, but she didn't have a rifle. She flicked on the light and ran to me, but not concerned with me, looked down at Kezia and rolled her over, touched her face, pulled her up and onto Mommy's shoulder. The big light shook Kezia into crying and it was loud, torturous. I laughed because my sister had done some harm even though there was love in it.

"What are you . . . Is everything all right?"

I looked at her and said, "Of course. I was just looking at my niece."

"You might have woken her up."

"Seems like you did that just fine," I told her.

Kezia turned toward me and then looked to her crib, twisted and latched on to it, pulled at that because she wanted back in. Karen finally acquiesced and returned her. The tiny one watched me, remembering, remembering and broke out in a smile. You know why kids love me so much? Because all kids are very, very stupid.

"She'll never get to sleep now."

I thought Karen was wrong. I pointed. "Look at her eyes. She's still drowsy." Kezia was looking at me, intently. I started rocking from left to right on the b.a.l.l.s of my feet and Kezia mimicked me. She held the crib's rail to keep her balance but when I leaned too far right she followed, tipped over on her side, huffed, grabbed the bars, and pulled herself back up to try again. She made a gurgle noise and I returned it, she went louder and I went louder, she screamed and I screamed; Karen flopped back against her married bed, holding her face, laughing.

My hands went around Kezia's middle, then I lifted her up as high as my arms would allow, brought her belly to my mouth and bit her there. She kicked her feet happily, caught me, two good shots right in the nose; that thing would be flaring up later. But she laughed and I did it again. I dropped her down two feet, quickly, like I'd lost my grip, and across her face came the look that precedes vomit, then a pause and like I knew it would, laughter.

Put her back in the crib and we returned to yelling, added movements with our hands and feet. Whenver I threw my palms in the air she did the same, lost her balance and fell backward; she lay there, rocking side to side so she could get some momentum for rising. I tickled her under the chin. We did it like this while Karen left the room and returned (repeat three times). Finally Kezia sat, watching me. I twirled in arms-open circles and she still had enough energy to smile, but not much else, and then she didn't have energy enough even for that and she watched me, silent, as she lay on her back, then Karen had to tap my shoulder and shush me because the kid was sleeping.

The lights were still on: Around the crib there were pictures taped up. Of our family and Masai's, all watching over; the picture of me rested closer to Kezia than all the rest, but in it I was only a boy. Looking at my crooked smile I felt detached from that child-like we could cannibalize his whole life and you still wouldn't have tasted me. Every memory would someday make the catalogue I kept in my room, eleven small green notebooks.

Me and Karen sat in the kitchen. She had been preparing dinner. I started making a plate. "Leave a lot for Masai. He'll be home from work soon."

I covered all the pots and poured myself some berry Kool-Aid. Karen's Kool-Aid was the only thing I would drink besides water. After I gulped I told her, "You need more sugar."

She sucked her teeth. "Masai and me decided we should still have teeth when Kezia gets to be seven." Karen finished her rice. "You look awful," she said.

"Yeah, but I've always looked bad. You got the beauty and I got everything else."

She smacked me, gentle, across the chin. "I had my bachelor's before you had been left back for the first time. Have you thought about coming to stay with us?"

"I like where I'm at."

"You need to be around your family. You're acting stupid out there."

"Whatever. I shrugged. You don't know what I'm doing."

"I can see what you're not doing: was.h.i.+ng, changing your clothes. Probably not going to cla.s.s."

"Man," I said. "You don't understand subtlety. You've got to bring these things up cool, easy, otherwise you'll close all avenues of communication."

That's how long she paused, watching me. Then she went to the fridge, found a green plastic cup. She put it on the table, sat, sounded stern, "How about you take the medication mixed with something? You still like it with orange juice? I'll make it."

I looked at the cup, the white film on top, that clump and beneath it the actual Tropicana Original. There had been plenty at my apartment, taken regular for two years, on my own. But someday you want to rest. "How about you put some vodka in there?"

On top of the fridge Karen had left a Tupperware bowl of the boiled egg whites she'd been cutting up for her next day's meal. Even in the light blue bowl they seemed too bright. She wasn't kidding around. "Drink it. You told us you would. You were doing so well."

"It makes my head feel like rocks."

"But at least it keeps you thinking right. Just drink this cup. It'll be a new start. Come on."

See, but I was supposed to take that medicine twice a day, every day. She wanted me to drink this one gla.s.s and everything would go right but you can't dam a river with just one brick.

I said, "Karen, you can't stop the electric soldiers."

I was twenty-two years old and Karen was thirty. How long before it's just frustration in her, screaming to get out, wis.h.i.+ng whatever was the pain would go away.

"Can you?" she asked.

Blissfully the G.o.dd.a.m.n fridge worked, I could hear its engine going, regular like a heartbeat, mumming along and I was so jealous. When I got up she draped herself across the table, spilling the juice and the orchids she had in a vase, the ones her husband had bought two days ago, purple like lips too long exposed to the cold.

It was lucky Masai was at work. I was much bigger than Karen and I could simply pluck her off my arm and leave, but if Masai had been there it would have gotten louder, the trouble in this kitchen would have been contagious, contaminating the living room, the bathroom, their bedroom. We would have been all over the place. But at some point, as I was tugging, she let go. She could fight harder, she had before. Her hands fell to her sides; she opened the door for me.

I had other people I could have seen, but I kept forgetting their addresses. I might have pa.s.sed four or five out on Malcolm X Boulevard. Later, I walked by the mosque, the brothers in their suits and bow ties selling the Final Call; I wanted to buy one, help them out; walked over to a short one in a gold suit, he pushed me a paper like it would save my life. "Only a dollar."

"And what do I get?" I asked.

"You get the truth. All the news the white media won't show you."

I leaned close to him, he pulled back some. "You don't know that all this stuff is past tense?" I asked.

Now he looked away, to his boy at the other corner, in green, white s.h.i.+rt, black shoes, talking with two older women; each nodded and smiled, one brought out her gla.s.ses to read the headlines. "So you want to buy this or what?" My friend held it out again, the other twenty copies he pulled close to his chest. I could see on his face that his legs were tired.

But for what would I be buying that paper? Or if a Christian was selling Bibles? Name another religion, I had no use for any. I wanted to pull my man close, by the collar (for effect) and tell him I knew of a new G.o.d, who was collecting everything he saw around him and stas.h.i.+ng it in his apartment on Amsterdam Avenue; who walked home from the 1 train stealing bouts of Spanish being spoken in front of stores and when he came home prodigiously copied them down; who stole the remnants of empty beer bottles that had been shattered into thirty-seven pieces, took the gla.s.s and placed it in his living room, in a jar, with the greens and browns of others-in the morning he sat there and watched the fragments, imagined what life had come along and done such destruction.

Instead I walked backward until I got to a corner, hugged myself tight against a phone booth with no phone in it as the people swam around me and ignored everything but the single-minded purposes of their lives. After an hour was up my brain sent signals to my feet: move.

I stood in front of my apartment again, had a paper to hand in. Go upstairs and slide it in an envelope, address it to the woman who led my seminar on black liberation movements. The one who lectured me only when I missed cla.s.s and never remembered to mark it in her book. The one who had a.s.sured me that if I wrote it all down this mind would be soothed, salvaged. One Tuesday (Tues. & Thur. 9:0010:45 A.M.) she had pulled me aside when lessons were over, confided, "These days, the most revolutionary thing you can be is articulate."

I had told her honestly, "I'm trying. I'm trying."

I touched the front door before opening it. I'd been struck by the fear that the building was on fire; a church and a mosque had been burned recently. In the secret hours of night they'd been turned to ash and in the daylight their destruction was like a screaming message to us all. Had the door been hot I would have run farther than I needed to, but it was cold so I walked in.

The elevator was still broken. I had ten stories to climb; my legs felt stiff and proud. I moved effortlessly until I reached the sixth floor and Helena stopped me. She was with her girls, they were coming down the stairs. As pregnant as she was I knew the climb couldn't have been easy, but the look on her face had nothing to do with exertion. It was all for me. "I was coming to talk to you Sammy," she said. Helena's cousin Zulma stood beside me; she was so big I felt boxed in.

"You should be out looking for your man," I told Helena.

Zulma looked like she wanted to leave, bored, but was there to get her cousin's back in case it was needed. If Helena had been alone I wouldn't have had any problem kicking her in the gut and running. When she'd rumbled to the bottom of the stairs I would have crawled down beside her and in her ear asked, "Now tell me, what does this feel like? Tell me every detail."

"Why you causing so much problems?" another of Helena's girls asked, but I didn't answer. Instead I told them one of my philosophies to live by. "I never tell a pretty woman I think she's pretty unless we're already holding hands."

Helena rubbed her face with frustration. "You need to leave Ramon alone. He's good when he's not around you." Her watch beeped, not loudly, but it echoed through the stairwell. Its face was glowing. Batteries gave it power.

"Have you been drafted too?" I asked Helena.

"f.u.c.k this," Zulma muttered, then her elbow was in my chest.

As the five girls got all over different parts of me I swung wild. Caught Zulma in the mouth and the first drops of blood on my face were hers. They were yelling as I kicked out with both legs. Then I was burning everywhere and I knew without looking that the off-silver colors in my eyes were the box cutters finding whole parts of me to separate. Fabric was tearing as they removed swatches of my clothing so they could get nearer to my skin. Zulma and Helena were at my face; neither of them smiled as they did the cutting. They didn't seem angry. Their faces were so still.

I grabbed and reached for something, dipping my fingers in everything spilling out of me. The colors were hard to make out in the bad light, but the stuff was beautiful and thick, it pooled. The girls rose and ran; I listened to five sets of sneakers move quickly down those stairs to the emergency exit; the door swung out and stuck, there was the flood of an empty wind up the staircase.

Clarity.