Sometimes a New Day Comes at Night
by Xavier John Richardson
A brand new silver Sony Walkman in hand, barely bigger than a two-year-old, white, Loose Ends cassette inside it, black lettering visible through the machine’s door and above the reels of The Real Chuckeeboo turning, wrap around earphones, the treble, the bass, big as the planet is, I had the nerve to believe I was living large. You didn’t have to be an anthropologist to discern my naiveté from the contents of a single milk crate with a fractured cross in its lattice. My birth certificate, report cards, letters, notebooks, a sketchpad, Darryl Strawberry on the cover of last year’s The Sporting News Baseball Yearbook, everything and nothing fit into that brown milk crate with the name of a local dairy printed in yellow. If you wanted the whole truth, I didn’t exactly leave home either. I escaped. I had no idea what or how much darkness until I was no longer in that cave and I could see those things moving upon the wall were but shadows by torchlight and not that what cast them. Just like Plato said in The Allegory of the Cave.
For me, escape also meant a hasty exile. That’s why the crate had been left with my grandmother’s brother. Granddad’s death had been expected since he received a pacemaker my sophomore year of high school. Nan’s death was sudden and unexpected that autumn. Overnight, ours became my mother’s house and not for the first time I was not welcome in my mother’s house.
In spite of Granddad’s unnerving stoicism, and the arguments with Nan that she wouldn’t leave me alone until she inspired me at my no better than her worst, and her threats to grind glass up in my food, and the violence she did make good on, I still had the nerve to feel like an unwilling expatriate. Even though, for my peace of mind, after the threats started, I ate every meal from made behind a deli counter, or a TV dinner, or yogurt, and I slept with my bedroom door locked.
On my own, although I did not lock the bedroom door, I did not stop sleeping with it closed until a houseguest teased me. The good news was that claustrophobia would never be a concern. Nor isolation. Alone rarely meant lonely. It was rare when I did not prefer time that way. Except in the company of trees.
Uncle Valentine lived in his mother’s old house. Nan had been his landlord, as she had also taken care of their mother. The stubborn remains of my great-grandmother’s flower bed, having survived another summer, lay brown and tangled in overgrowth beside a walkway edged in brickwork my grandfather laid long before I was born. Now my mother was landlord. The house wouldn’t be passing down to me. The only thing my mother ever gave me was a baseball for Christmas when I was fifteen. I gave her a spice rack with spices in reusable jars. If anybody asked, my mother gave me twenty dollars that Christmas. Any further embellishment would have been met with suspicion.
There was no phone but Uncle Valentine was always home. A medium brown skinned man with grey/blue eyes and a head full of white wooly curls. He of slight build, dangerous and brittle, carried himself like the former made up for the latter. It only drew attention to it. He was getting ready to roll a cigarette. A pouch of Red Man Tobacco sat on the kitchen table next to a battered, leather-bound, King James Bible with gilded inlays. Uncle Valentine opened that Bible to whatever page fell to him and ripped it out.
A light dim and yellow on a wick from a soot darkened, copper, oil lamp set on the wall cutout that separated us from the front room. With the shades drawn the front room was almost dark, save for a faint glow against the sofa from an old-fashioned kerosene heater, and that burning kerosene scent, and claw feet. I had seen Uncle Valentine cook on top of that heater. The electricity for the range stove next to the sink and for the celling lights was long shut off and forgotten. The sofa was his bed.
Bible paper crinkled. A sound like gossamer wings crushed around the rich pungency of tobacco grains. Uncle Valentine’s nimble fingers moved deliberately like they were preforming a macabre penance. He stopped. Phlegm rattled around in his bantam chest. An eye stinging liniment. For once no stomach curdling alcohol reek. “God ain’t never done nothing for me,” he said.
I felt like I should have defended God but I did not.
In his day, Uncle Valentine was one of those locally famous musicians who if he lit out for the big city, who knew? Threw it all away. Shooting dice behind the U.A.M.E church with the big steeple. Just across the street, mind you. One house down on the corner from this very front door. Killed a man over a quarter. And his father a preacher. Not over that congregation. The Reverend killed a man too. Slit his throat. He wasn’t The Reverend then. Just a slave escaping his master down Virginia way. Or so it was told.
Uncle Valentine’s man whipped out his blade first. None of the witnesses would say it. There had been a girl jumped off the running board of a car into oncoming traffic. Back then cars had running boards. Killed herself over the way Valentine done her. Folks remembered. Cost Valentine seventeen years at Trenton State Prison and a lifetime of memories he could still be heard arguing with over a bottle of Tiger Rose. If you passed his window at the right phase of the moon.
“Your crate is gone. Alan took it.”
I had stashed the milk crate in a closet in the back bedroom. Seeing for myself was academic. I did it anyway. Uncle Valentine had no reason to lie. He resented the implication. The time it took stopped me from saying something I would not regret.
“How come you never left here?” I was remembering the guitar lessons he gave my brother, Alan.
“You act like when you left you didn’t carry yourself with you.” The smile at the curl of his lip must have been a family trait. Now I knew how it felt.
“Have you been of much use to God?” Not backing down was another family trait.
“What?”
“You said God hasn’t been of much use to you. Have you been of much use to God? Except as a cautionary tale?”
“Have you?”
He had me there. Everybody knew. Alan was the smart one. The brother featured in the first grade in The Weekly Reader. My sister had much talked about episodes where it was sworn it was the ancestors communicating with her. Old folks prodded her for lottery numbers. Me, I did alright in art class, but not like my mother. In high school my mother drew a convincing portrait of what she thought my father would look like when he got older. I couldn’t master portraiture. I was good for nothing. Would never amount to anything to hear the family tell it. They’d also complain I never listened to a word they told.
For me, escape also meant a hasty exile. That’s why the crate had been left with my grandmother’s brother. Granddad’s death had been expected since he received a pacemaker my sophomore year of high school. Nan’s death was sudden and unexpected that autumn. Overnight, ours became my mother’s house and not for the first time I was not welcome in my mother’s house.
In spite of Granddad’s unnerving stoicism, and the arguments with Nan that she wouldn’t leave me alone until she inspired me at my no better than her worst, and her threats to grind glass up in my food, and the violence she did make good on, I still had the nerve to feel like an unwilling expatriate. Even though, for my peace of mind, after the threats started, I ate every meal from made behind a deli counter, or a TV dinner, or yogurt, and I slept with my bedroom door locked.
On my own, although I did not lock the bedroom door, I did not stop sleeping with it closed until a houseguest teased me. The good news was that claustrophobia would never be a concern. Nor isolation. Alone rarely meant lonely. It was rare when I did not prefer time that way. Except in the company of trees.
Uncle Valentine lived in his mother’s old house. Nan had been his landlord, as she had also taken care of their mother. The stubborn remains of my great-grandmother’s flower bed, having survived another summer, lay brown and tangled in overgrowth beside a walkway edged in brickwork my grandfather laid long before I was born. Now my mother was landlord. The house wouldn’t be passing down to me. The only thing my mother ever gave me was a baseball for Christmas when I was fifteen. I gave her a spice rack with spices in reusable jars. If anybody asked, my mother gave me twenty dollars that Christmas. Any further embellishment would have been met with suspicion.
There was no phone but Uncle Valentine was always home. A medium brown skinned man with grey/blue eyes and a head full of white wooly curls. He of slight build, dangerous and brittle, carried himself like the former made up for the latter. It only drew attention to it. He was getting ready to roll a cigarette. A pouch of Red Man Tobacco sat on the kitchen table next to a battered, leather-bound, King James Bible with gilded inlays. Uncle Valentine opened that Bible to whatever page fell to him and ripped it out.
A light dim and yellow on a wick from a soot darkened, copper, oil lamp set on the wall cutout that separated us from the front room. With the shades drawn the front room was almost dark, save for a faint glow against the sofa from an old-fashioned kerosene heater, and that burning kerosene scent, and claw feet. I had seen Uncle Valentine cook on top of that heater. The electricity for the range stove next to the sink and for the celling lights was long shut off and forgotten. The sofa was his bed.
Bible paper crinkled. A sound like gossamer wings crushed around the rich pungency of tobacco grains. Uncle Valentine’s nimble fingers moved deliberately like they were preforming a macabre penance. He stopped. Phlegm rattled around in his bantam chest. An eye stinging liniment. For once no stomach curdling alcohol reek. “God ain’t never done nothing for me,” he said.
I felt like I should have defended God but I did not.
In his day, Uncle Valentine was one of those locally famous musicians who if he lit out for the big city, who knew? Threw it all away. Shooting dice behind the U.A.M.E church with the big steeple. Just across the street, mind you. One house down on the corner from this very front door. Killed a man over a quarter. And his father a preacher. Not over that congregation. The Reverend killed a man too. Slit his throat. He wasn’t The Reverend then. Just a slave escaping his master down Virginia way. Or so it was told.
Uncle Valentine’s man whipped out his blade first. None of the witnesses would say it. There had been a girl jumped off the running board of a car into oncoming traffic. Back then cars had running boards. Killed herself over the way Valentine done her. Folks remembered. Cost Valentine seventeen years at Trenton State Prison and a lifetime of memories he could still be heard arguing with over a bottle of Tiger Rose. If you passed his window at the right phase of the moon.
“Your crate is gone. Alan took it.”
I had stashed the milk crate in a closet in the back bedroom. Seeing for myself was academic. I did it anyway. Uncle Valentine had no reason to lie. He resented the implication. The time it took stopped me from saying something I would not regret.
“How come you never left here?” I was remembering the guitar lessons he gave my brother, Alan.
“You act like when you left you didn’t carry yourself with you.” The smile at the curl of his lip must have been a family trait. Now I knew how it felt.
“Have you been of much use to God?” Not backing down was another family trait.
“What?”
“You said God hasn’t been of much use to you. Have you been of much use to God? Except as a cautionary tale?”
“Have you?”
He had me there. Everybody knew. Alan was the smart one. The brother featured in the first grade in The Weekly Reader. My sister had much talked about episodes where it was sworn it was the ancestors communicating with her. Old folks prodded her for lottery numbers. Me, I did alright in art class, but not like my mother. In high school my mother drew a convincing portrait of what she thought my father would look like when he got older. I couldn’t master portraiture. I was good for nothing. Would never amount to anything to hear the family tell it. They’d also complain I never listened to a word they told.
*
You’re not smart like your brother, my mother said. We were in her brand-new summer sky blue Malibu Classic. She lighting a Silver Thins. A feminist cancer stick. Waving the match. A burst of flame. A trail of smoke. On she went: What you have is determination. That’s good. Because you’re not smart you’ll have to be willing to outwork everybody else in order to stand a chance.
She jammed the key in the ignition. A forceful twist of a delicate wrist. Jingle jangle a Capricorn keyring. Sundry traits of the goat aback of it. A rabbit’s foot, other necessities, swung off the chain. The engine came to life. Click-click, click-click blinked the turn signal. Sly & the Family Stone in quadrophonic stereo. A wah-wah base. Sly’s croaking delivery. The electronic snare. That song about two brothers. One loved to learn. The other you’d just love to burn. That’s you and Alan, my mother said, burying that match in a dashboard ashtray that needed emptying.
A fluorescent Capricorn air freshener twisted and turned lazy from the rearview mirror. My mother broke. Not a dime to her name. We going to the custard stand out on the highway towards the next town. A black person could shop but we could not linger. Or loiter. As they called it. The milkshakes would be my treat. So my mother would not charge me gas money. At the first corner, at a Stop sign, my mother put her foot on the brake. Do you love me, she asked? I didn’t feel anything for her. How could I? I didn’t know her well enough. My mother knew nothing about me that she hadn’t asked that summer. And hers were like questions from her favorite talk show host. The Dinah Shore Show. Dinah’s sassafras voice. Unless Burt Reynolds was the guest Dinah was always touching herself and looking toward the camera as though she was more amused by herself than anything a guest had to say. And maybe with good reason.
If you don’t love me, my mother said. I would rather you hate me than feel nothing. I don’t matter to my own son. She put her foot on the gas and drove like stay tuned, she’d be right back with her next guest after a brief commercial break and a few words from her sponsors.
She jammed the key in the ignition. A forceful twist of a delicate wrist. Jingle jangle a Capricorn keyring. Sundry traits of the goat aback of it. A rabbit’s foot, other necessities, swung off the chain. The engine came to life. Click-click, click-click blinked the turn signal. Sly & the Family Stone in quadrophonic stereo. A wah-wah base. Sly’s croaking delivery. The electronic snare. That song about two brothers. One loved to learn. The other you’d just love to burn. That’s you and Alan, my mother said, burying that match in a dashboard ashtray that needed emptying.
A fluorescent Capricorn air freshener twisted and turned lazy from the rearview mirror. My mother broke. Not a dime to her name. We going to the custard stand out on the highway towards the next town. A black person could shop but we could not linger. Or loiter. As they called it. The milkshakes would be my treat. So my mother would not charge me gas money. At the first corner, at a Stop sign, my mother put her foot on the brake. Do you love me, she asked? I didn’t feel anything for her. How could I? I didn’t know her well enough. My mother knew nothing about me that she hadn’t asked that summer. And hers were like questions from her favorite talk show host. The Dinah Shore Show. Dinah’s sassafras voice. Unless Burt Reynolds was the guest Dinah was always touching herself and looking toward the camera as though she was more amused by herself than anything a guest had to say. And maybe with good reason.
If you don’t love me, my mother said. I would rather you hate me than feel nothing. I don’t matter to my own son. She put her foot on the gas and drove like stay tuned, she’d be right back with her next guest after a brief commercial break and a few words from her sponsors.
*
Behind Uncle Valentine’s backyard was a skinny path through yellowing foxtail, seedy heads, bowing over it. There was another backyard behind his and a sandy clearing between two houses and onto the next street over and passed a heating tank and its oil fumes on the side of another house across that street and passed a clothesline and up a slight incline and across sharp edged gravel moving and crunch-crunch underfoot and railroad tracks, a burning tar scent from the ties under the tracks and onto a street where the neighborhoods had much smaller lawns and stop running, walk up that block and across the street. I used to run this route to Kuhl’s Delicatessen like I was an NFL running back, avoiding this, spinning around that, leaping over and ducking under the grasp of imaginary defenders. On the wall beside Kuhl’s Delicatessen was where I got my milk crate.
Our town was small and dying like other New Jersey towns that depended on a single industry in decline. Like if you’d heard New Jersey native, Bruce Springsteen, you’d know what I mean. Where I was from, you didn’t need a car to track someone down even if they were in one. There were only so many places left to go. It was no surprise I ran into Alan in front of Kuhl’s. Kuhl’s where if you ordered a sub (a hoagie in Philadelphia) if you did not ask for a soft roll the one they gave you was pretty near fossilized from the Mesozoic Period.
Alan was standing in front of a red, white, and blue Pepsi-Cola machine, eating a brown pickled sausage. That hum was from the cooling motor. The vibration of a screw loose. The smell of brine from the barrel the sausage had been soaked in mixed with that of marijuana off Alan’s clothes and something burnt and chemical I had not learned yet.
“I needed it,” Alan said of my milk crate, an abundance of milk crates stacked in the alley behind us, his lips singed blue, fingertips brown, his complexion darker than it should be in winter but still light enough that every blemish shone.
“What did you do with my stuff?”
“I didn’t need it. I don’t know. I threw it away.” Alan was three years my younger and six-four. Since I could remember and before I was giving up three inches in height and significant weight classes, I could always take him. I had the last time and every time. He still always had the idea the next time would be his time. I never had the slightest doubt, no matter how many times it wasn’t that this time he would learn his lesson. I was tired of trying to teach it to him. I knew when I was licked.
“Check this out. I was staying with Uncle Valentine after I got out [of jail] right? Your mom knocked a few dollars off the rent and told him if he didn’t like it, get out. Besides, Uncle Valentine doesn’t use that back room anyway. He sleeps on the couch and uses the other bedroom for his piddling storage. I know. I went through it. Did he tell you? Last week, when his SSI check came. He thought he hid the money. I watch how a person acts. They get different around where they keep what’s important to them. The money was in the sofa under the seat cushions. Like in jail. To get to it you have to go through him. Nah, man. That night I waited for him to get up to take a leak. An alcoholic always has to piss. Uncle Valentine didn’t even check his spot when he got back. Just tucked himself in. We both slept like a baby.” Alan cracked himself up. His shapeless sweatpants with lost hems dancing around his ankles. His puffer jacket didn’t look much better. Ashy. At his height, the spectacle reminded me of a tin soldier in The Nutcracker marching on tangled strings.
“So, that’s why he wasn’t drinking.” I should’ve known Uncle Valentine wasn’t trying to quit.
Alan’s boy, Stan, came out of the delicatessen, the same height as he, a played-out ban collar jacket of undeterminable hue. Two loops broken. The strap hung loose. Khaki knees worn thin. His kicks more ancient than Alan’s. Bags like pleats under Stan’s eyes looked like they should hurt and made him look blinded out of his mind even when he wasn’t. He never seemed sure he wanted to close his mouth. Most of the time his bottom lip sagged. While the top lip had other plans. A cheesesteak’s white wrapping stuck out of the top of Stan’s brown bag. The white jostled around with a teal that meant a bag of Wise potato chips. Stan saw Alan laughing, asked what? Further distorting his face. Laughing like he had already heard.
Stan told him he was telling me about Valentine’s check. They howled. Relived the moment Alan told him. I just had to hear about the pleas for mercy this old biddy made outside of the Acme. I should’ve seen her face. She still wouldn’t let go of her pocketbook though. Stan hit her like Ken Norton broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw. Ah, man. I should’ve seen it. All that for just eight dollars!
Her or you, I asked.
Stan wiped tears from those pleats, pointed at my fresh pressed, three-quarter length, grey cashmere, said look. He and Alan fell out again. Like the wrong one of us would get mistaken for somebody who wasn’t raised like this.
“You still running?” Stan asked. They all did. Everybody we knew. As though it was just last week they saw me in sweats coming home from high school track practice. We were in our twenties now. Who got locked up, who was getting out, who cracked what joke on who, the NFL, the NBA, boxing, for them that was as far as current events went. While ‘remember the time’ was relived with a clarity that when it came to where they were now they were not as cognizant.
Our town was small and dying like other New Jersey towns that depended on a single industry in decline. Like if you’d heard New Jersey native, Bruce Springsteen, you’d know what I mean. Where I was from, you didn’t need a car to track someone down even if they were in one. There were only so many places left to go. It was no surprise I ran into Alan in front of Kuhl’s. Kuhl’s where if you ordered a sub (a hoagie in Philadelphia) if you did not ask for a soft roll the one they gave you was pretty near fossilized from the Mesozoic Period.
Alan was standing in front of a red, white, and blue Pepsi-Cola machine, eating a brown pickled sausage. That hum was from the cooling motor. The vibration of a screw loose. The smell of brine from the barrel the sausage had been soaked in mixed with that of marijuana off Alan’s clothes and something burnt and chemical I had not learned yet.
“I needed it,” Alan said of my milk crate, an abundance of milk crates stacked in the alley behind us, his lips singed blue, fingertips brown, his complexion darker than it should be in winter but still light enough that every blemish shone.
“What did you do with my stuff?”
“I didn’t need it. I don’t know. I threw it away.” Alan was three years my younger and six-four. Since I could remember and before I was giving up three inches in height and significant weight classes, I could always take him. I had the last time and every time. He still always had the idea the next time would be his time. I never had the slightest doubt, no matter how many times it wasn’t that this time he would learn his lesson. I was tired of trying to teach it to him. I knew when I was licked.
“Check this out. I was staying with Uncle Valentine after I got out [of jail] right? Your mom knocked a few dollars off the rent and told him if he didn’t like it, get out. Besides, Uncle Valentine doesn’t use that back room anyway. He sleeps on the couch and uses the other bedroom for his piddling storage. I know. I went through it. Did he tell you? Last week, when his SSI check came. He thought he hid the money. I watch how a person acts. They get different around where they keep what’s important to them. The money was in the sofa under the seat cushions. Like in jail. To get to it you have to go through him. Nah, man. That night I waited for him to get up to take a leak. An alcoholic always has to piss. Uncle Valentine didn’t even check his spot when he got back. Just tucked himself in. We both slept like a baby.” Alan cracked himself up. His shapeless sweatpants with lost hems dancing around his ankles. His puffer jacket didn’t look much better. Ashy. At his height, the spectacle reminded me of a tin soldier in The Nutcracker marching on tangled strings.
“So, that’s why he wasn’t drinking.” I should’ve known Uncle Valentine wasn’t trying to quit.
Alan’s boy, Stan, came out of the delicatessen, the same height as he, a played-out ban collar jacket of undeterminable hue. Two loops broken. The strap hung loose. Khaki knees worn thin. His kicks more ancient than Alan’s. Bags like pleats under Stan’s eyes looked like they should hurt and made him look blinded out of his mind even when he wasn’t. He never seemed sure he wanted to close his mouth. Most of the time his bottom lip sagged. While the top lip had other plans. A cheesesteak’s white wrapping stuck out of the top of Stan’s brown bag. The white jostled around with a teal that meant a bag of Wise potato chips. Stan saw Alan laughing, asked what? Further distorting his face. Laughing like he had already heard.
Stan told him he was telling me about Valentine’s check. They howled. Relived the moment Alan told him. I just had to hear about the pleas for mercy this old biddy made outside of the Acme. I should’ve seen her face. She still wouldn’t let go of her pocketbook though. Stan hit her like Ken Norton broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw. Ah, man. I should’ve seen it. All that for just eight dollars!
Her or you, I asked.
Stan wiped tears from those pleats, pointed at my fresh pressed, three-quarter length, grey cashmere, said look. He and Alan fell out again. Like the wrong one of us would get mistaken for somebody who wasn’t raised like this.
“You still running?” Stan asked. They all did. Everybody we knew. As though it was just last week they saw me in sweats coming home from high school track practice. We were in our twenties now. Who got locked up, who was getting out, who cracked what joke on who, the NFL, the NBA, boxing, for them that was as far as current events went. While ‘remember the time’ was relived with a clarity that when it came to where they were now they were not as cognizant.
*
My mother’s house was back from the way I came, passed Uncle Valentine’s, Mt. Olivet, down to the next corner, a right toward a dead end and halfway to it. My front gate with its little squeak. Not mine anymore. Up my mother’s sidewalk. Calfskin cap toes shush-shush up her front steps. Ding-dong. My sister let me in through the enclosed porch where I used to sit on a daybed for hours playing a dice baseball game I made up. No one would buy me Strat-O-Matic Baseball. Strat-O-Matic advertisements taunted me from the back covers of sports magazines. That inspired me to create my own version. Or what I imagined it to be. The Strat-O-Matic box on the page wouldn’t open.
My mother had made my grandparents’ bedroom up into her luxury suite independent of the rest of the house. She had her mini refrigerator, cache of snacks, video games… It was where you took your audience with her among Native American dream catchers, blankets, weavings, feathers, trinkets, flutes, bowls, and a mix of pastels. Her grandmother/my great-grandmother was full blooded Blackfoot. She would not recognize that hodgepodge display. A rocking chair and a cedar trunk bench were the only seats besides the bed. I opted for the cedar.
The gradual changing of appearance that everyone undergoes, so that no one notices unless enough time has passed since they had seen one another last, that was my mother and me. Her first words to me were that I couldn’t do portraiture because I couldn’t read emotional cues. She was critiquing my sketches. Sketches I had not shown her.
I knew Alan was lying about my milk crate.
“How could someone so odd come from me?” asked the woman, once a psychology major at Glassboro State [Rowan] College, surrounded by heraldry objects she knew nothing about. One side of Granddad’s ancestors were most likely descended from Spanish Jews with a touch of Moorish blood. They fled to Ireland during the Inquisition. Then to South Carolina to become slave owners. A parallel family line on the plantation was created. Same last name. One side to say jump and his side to know how high. Add Nan’s full blooded Maasai father and that explained why strangers excused themselves and without introduction asked my mother where she was from.
My mother chose my father, in part, for his rough-hewn Alabama field hand blackness that thumbed its wide, Igbo nose, coarse hair, and full lips at her self-image. That explained my complexion. My father’s parsimoniousness was legendary. I was lucky to get that.
“Those sketches mean nothing to me anymore. I need my birth certificate for my job.”
“I don’t have it.”
“I understand.” I never begged for anything.
“You can get a new one from the registrar’s office in Mannington.” There was that slick curl of the lip like Uncle Valentine gave me. “Have a cup of tea with me.”
“I have a bus to catch.” I didn’t think my mother would poison me. That I had to ‘didn’t think it’ did make me think.
In the living room, on my way out, my sister was sitting cross-legged, too close to the TV, watching the Cosby Show. I hesitated just long enough for her to laugh and tell me she knew why I didn’t like Bill Cosby. It was because I couldn’t imagine a family like that so I thought his show was fake. There was that curl of the lip again.
No, Cosby’s most famous parenting quote was: ‘Son, I brought you into this world and I can take you out.’
My mother had made my grandparents’ bedroom up into her luxury suite independent of the rest of the house. She had her mini refrigerator, cache of snacks, video games… It was where you took your audience with her among Native American dream catchers, blankets, weavings, feathers, trinkets, flutes, bowls, and a mix of pastels. Her grandmother/my great-grandmother was full blooded Blackfoot. She would not recognize that hodgepodge display. A rocking chair and a cedar trunk bench were the only seats besides the bed. I opted for the cedar.
The gradual changing of appearance that everyone undergoes, so that no one notices unless enough time has passed since they had seen one another last, that was my mother and me. Her first words to me were that I couldn’t do portraiture because I couldn’t read emotional cues. She was critiquing my sketches. Sketches I had not shown her.
I knew Alan was lying about my milk crate.
“How could someone so odd come from me?” asked the woman, once a psychology major at Glassboro State [Rowan] College, surrounded by heraldry objects she knew nothing about. One side of Granddad’s ancestors were most likely descended from Spanish Jews with a touch of Moorish blood. They fled to Ireland during the Inquisition. Then to South Carolina to become slave owners. A parallel family line on the plantation was created. Same last name. One side to say jump and his side to know how high. Add Nan’s full blooded Maasai father and that explained why strangers excused themselves and without introduction asked my mother where she was from.
My mother chose my father, in part, for his rough-hewn Alabama field hand blackness that thumbed its wide, Igbo nose, coarse hair, and full lips at her self-image. That explained my complexion. My father’s parsimoniousness was legendary. I was lucky to get that.
“Those sketches mean nothing to me anymore. I need my birth certificate for my job.”
“I don’t have it.”
“I understand.” I never begged for anything.
“You can get a new one from the registrar’s office in Mannington.” There was that slick curl of the lip like Uncle Valentine gave me. “Have a cup of tea with me.”
“I have a bus to catch.” I didn’t think my mother would poison me. That I had to ‘didn’t think it’ did make me think.
In the living room, on my way out, my sister was sitting cross-legged, too close to the TV, watching the Cosby Show. I hesitated just long enough for her to laugh and tell me she knew why I didn’t like Bill Cosby. It was because I couldn’t imagine a family like that so I thought his show was fake. There was that curl of the lip again.
No, Cosby’s most famous parenting quote was: ‘Son, I brought you into this world and I can take you out.’
*
Fresh off NJ Transit, I caught the El a short ride out to 46th and Market. I used to think Philadelphians were showing off, the way they always gave map coordinates. Now I did it too. The Watusi Pub was at 45th and Walnut. A nondescript spot. Or incognito. It depended on your business. I had to pass it on the way home. The entrance was two steps down from street level behind an old maroon door, rougher to the hand than it should be, missing one of its brass numbers, still with that digit’s shadow dark.
The handle had to be pushed hard. The door winced when it gave. Two bars. The one on the right, with a dance floor, was usually roped off until the weekend, when there was a d-jay. The too high heating felt good. For the tenth time, the manager wouldn’t let it go that no, I wasn’t a fellow Ethiopian. No need to compliment me on my American accent. I wasn’t passing. There was no secret to be kept safe between us.
A few seats down I recognized an older guy in a 1970s McCloud hook up. A shearling with lamb’s wooly lapels. He even had that Dennis Weaver mustache and cowboy hat. Olde Dude was way out of my weight class but going soft around the middle. He had the reach on me. Chances were I was a lot quicker. I had more stamina. If it came to that. What we had in common for it to come to that was a woman.
I hoped Olde Dude didn’t know who I was. That lasted until a drink arrived that I did not order. Olde Dude tipped that ten-gallon behemoth. The manager got ghost. Olde Dude introduced himself. I did the same. He spoke with a Louisiana delta accent. We shook hands. I called down the bar, tapped in front of his glass, nodded. Did he smile with or at me?
As his drink was being refreshed Olde Dude explained his recipe for French fry slices. The secret he said was to cut up the potatoes into thick chunks and put them in the freezer overnight. That way, when he dropped them in the fryer the next day the outside would crisp while the inside thawed just enough to stay tender. This took patience, he bragged, that most brothers lacked.
Yeah man, whatever’s clever, Miss Trevor. I’m keeping my Aunt Tee’s recipe for a banging four cheese macaroni under the cap.
He asked if I wanted another drink.
I knew my limit.
“You’ve got some Geechee in you too,” he said.
I’d heard that but didn’t know enough about it to compare myself.
Olde Dude talked some more. Mostly, I nodded in the right places. Finally, he reached over and patted my shoulder with his heavy hand. I knew to see if I could take it. I had been told I wasn’t as thin as I looked. Olde Dude said his goodbyes.
“I knew you had it in you. Good. Good. Very good. You make me proud as though my own son.” The manager was back in front of me as soon as the door closed behind Olde Dude. He had another drink poured for me. “Peaches is young. Burt knows he can’t keep up with a fine young frame like that anymore. Sharing is caring. But don’t let your ego tell you that you and Burt are both seeing that woman. And not that she is seeing the both of you. That one there, Peaches, she knows what she wants and she knows how to go about it.”
The handle had to be pushed hard. The door winced when it gave. Two bars. The one on the right, with a dance floor, was usually roped off until the weekend, when there was a d-jay. The too high heating felt good. For the tenth time, the manager wouldn’t let it go that no, I wasn’t a fellow Ethiopian. No need to compliment me on my American accent. I wasn’t passing. There was no secret to be kept safe between us.
A few seats down I recognized an older guy in a 1970s McCloud hook up. A shearling with lamb’s wooly lapels. He even had that Dennis Weaver mustache and cowboy hat. Olde Dude was way out of my weight class but going soft around the middle. He had the reach on me. Chances were I was a lot quicker. I had more stamina. If it came to that. What we had in common for it to come to that was a woman.
I hoped Olde Dude didn’t know who I was. That lasted until a drink arrived that I did not order. Olde Dude tipped that ten-gallon behemoth. The manager got ghost. Olde Dude introduced himself. I did the same. He spoke with a Louisiana delta accent. We shook hands. I called down the bar, tapped in front of his glass, nodded. Did he smile with or at me?
As his drink was being refreshed Olde Dude explained his recipe for French fry slices. The secret he said was to cut up the potatoes into thick chunks and put them in the freezer overnight. That way, when he dropped them in the fryer the next day the outside would crisp while the inside thawed just enough to stay tender. This took patience, he bragged, that most brothers lacked.
Yeah man, whatever’s clever, Miss Trevor. I’m keeping my Aunt Tee’s recipe for a banging four cheese macaroni under the cap.
He asked if I wanted another drink.
I knew my limit.
“You’ve got some Geechee in you too,” he said.
I’d heard that but didn’t know enough about it to compare myself.
Olde Dude talked some more. Mostly, I nodded in the right places. Finally, he reached over and patted my shoulder with his heavy hand. I knew to see if I could take it. I had been told I wasn’t as thin as I looked. Olde Dude said his goodbyes.
“I knew you had it in you. Good. Good. Very good. You make me proud as though my own son.” The manager was back in front of me as soon as the door closed behind Olde Dude. He had another drink poured for me. “Peaches is young. Burt knows he can’t keep up with a fine young frame like that anymore. Sharing is caring. But don’t let your ego tell you that you and Burt are both seeing that woman. And not that she is seeing the both of you. That one there, Peaches, she knows what she wants and she knows how to go about it.”
*
Someone must have told Peaches they’d seen me and Burt buying each other drinks at the Watusi. Burt may have done it, himself. Peaches, I didn’t call her Peaches. She asked me to call her by the name her mother gave her. Lisa showed up on my doorstep at two in the morning in a black catsuit and a purple suede maxi coat more for show than it was keeping her warm. Her shoulders drawn up like a cat stretches. She rubbed her hands together. Her cheeks flush. She saw a light, she said.
My apartment was dark oak paneling, yellow ochre where it wasn’t, and all throughout in what was originally the first floor of a four-story, single-family home in a row house across the street from a supermarket with an armed security guard stationed out front. My front room was space for a sofa and a portable TV in a bay window seat without feeling crowded. The bathroom used to be part of the front room and was crowded. My kitchen table sat four, one chair sticking out a little into the pass between the front room and my bedroom. The bedroom was large enough for a floor model TV, a queen-sized bed, and a rocking chair. Rooms behind it, cut off from it, had been made into an efficiency apartment.
That we could what we did and if Lisa wasn’t going to mention Burt, neither was I, left no lines to read between. We ignored them anyway. For a time. Lisa clasped her hands, elbows on the table. Shirt sleeves wide and unbuttoned slipped back down her arms. The singsong of her voice that at first had been a challenge, had grown on me, was less, was almost sultry to me at a time like that. “You poor thing. You went all that way for nothing. Kiss me again.”
I did.
Now the teakettle was on. Lisa shared my affection for peppermint tea. Her catsuit, coat and other items were haphazard over my rocking chair left in bedroom. Fresh from a shower, my Shower-to Shower in the green bottle scent, Lisa sat at my kitchen table. A black and blue, fleece lined, flannel shirt, mine, drooped off one shoulder laying bare her collarbone and a mole there. A brightness in her eye, a color in her cheek were lighter than when she walked in, trying not to look unsure of where we stood because I had met Burt.
“You poor thing,” she kissed me back.
“That bus ride turns an hour by car into twice that. But you know what? At night. In the dark. Not a city dark. A back road dark—”
“Wait, there are no streetlights in Jersey?”
“There are.” I hopped up at the teakettle’s hiss. Cups and saucers were in the cupboard. Teabags in a tin on the counter: Honey. Lemon. Spoons. “Down in the boondocks it’s different at night. Maybe because highway lights are the only light except headlights. And they are spread out pretty far between them and there’s nothing above them but night. And big thick woods to the left and to the right of the road reached by no light. And when traffic is light there is nothing but pitch black in front of you beyond your headlights, no sight behind you at all except night. Until another set of headlights set upon you and they get bigger and bigger out of the night until they flood your windshield too bright. Then it’s night again until red taillights appear in the rearview mirror getting lighter and lighter until they are swallowed up out of sight.”
“That sounds spooky.”
“It can be.”
“I like how you wait for the water to boil before you set the table,” she said as I poured our tea.
“Hold still.” I straightened and buttoned my shirt she was wearing. Lisa caught cold easily.
“As gentle as you are. Still, it’s a wonder your grandparents didn’t raise a serial killer.”
“Cereal killer? Me? I don’t even like milk.”
“Not that kind of cereal, silly.” Lisa laughed on to me, Shower-to-Shower mingling with honey, lemon, and peppermint from our cups. Back and forth we swayed in that close space over a joke that wasn’t that funny, just for the fun of it.
“Seriously, one advantage of not being ordinary is that you learn to take ordinary what an ordinary individual wouldn’t and there’s nothing extraordinary about it. Not to me.”
“What’s this? Is this your class?” Lisa pointed to a notebook on the counter. She could reach it without getting all the way up.
“No, that’s Hatshepsut, a woman pharaoh of Egypt.”
“You drew this?”
“Class, work… That keeps me from falling asleep.”
“You write this too: ‘She and I never got along / I was too much like you / for anyone but you / to understand / still she rose to my needs / old and tired as she was.’”
“It’s nothing.”
“What does a someone like you see in a someone like me?” Lisa’s chin sunk toward her left shoulder like it had been weighted there.
“The same as you see in me. I’m just not as cute in a catsuit. Lisa, do you remember what you told me when we first met?”
“I told you I was seeing someone. He’s married. So it’s not like that but in a way it is.”
“Then you said: You couldn’t cheat on him. Only his wife could do that. Nobody owned you. Could I handle that?”
“I love you. As throw-ed off as you are. So help me God, I do.” Now why would Lisa want to go and make us have to deal with a lie like that? I could understand if it had been out of a desperation. It wasn’t.
“When I was in junior high school,” I told her, “There was a play, Your Arms Are Too Short to Box with God. The TV commercial promised: ‘More singing, more dancing, more joy live than you’ve ever seen on any stage.’ I remember being on my way home from the store. Kuhl’s Delicatessen. I stopped in the middle of the wet street. Summer. After a rain. That commercial stuck in my head. Looking straight up. Some of the stars had come back out in amongst wispy clouds shot through with moonlight still blue, but yellow too. I shook my fist at them: ‘Oh yeah? Devil, watch my footwork!’”
“A woman pours her heart out to you and that’s your response?”
“You know, God has a lot more time than we do. So does the Devil. Which isn’t the blessing for the latter that one might think.” I knew what I was saying would make Lisa feel like she was the one wronged. The one who needed to let bridges burn. I gave her that. If we kept seeing one another, Lisa disappeared for both of us when she flipped fair exchange is no robbery into Peaches trying to play me. I told her, when we met, that just because the boondocks were slow didn’t mean she could pull a fast one. She laughed. I smiled at her laughing.
We understood one another.
My apartment was dark oak paneling, yellow ochre where it wasn’t, and all throughout in what was originally the first floor of a four-story, single-family home in a row house across the street from a supermarket with an armed security guard stationed out front. My front room was space for a sofa and a portable TV in a bay window seat without feeling crowded. The bathroom used to be part of the front room and was crowded. My kitchen table sat four, one chair sticking out a little into the pass between the front room and my bedroom. The bedroom was large enough for a floor model TV, a queen-sized bed, and a rocking chair. Rooms behind it, cut off from it, had been made into an efficiency apartment.
That we could what we did and if Lisa wasn’t going to mention Burt, neither was I, left no lines to read between. We ignored them anyway. For a time. Lisa clasped her hands, elbows on the table. Shirt sleeves wide and unbuttoned slipped back down her arms. The singsong of her voice that at first had been a challenge, had grown on me, was less, was almost sultry to me at a time like that. “You poor thing. You went all that way for nothing. Kiss me again.”
I did.
Now the teakettle was on. Lisa shared my affection for peppermint tea. Her catsuit, coat and other items were haphazard over my rocking chair left in bedroom. Fresh from a shower, my Shower-to Shower in the green bottle scent, Lisa sat at my kitchen table. A black and blue, fleece lined, flannel shirt, mine, drooped off one shoulder laying bare her collarbone and a mole there. A brightness in her eye, a color in her cheek were lighter than when she walked in, trying not to look unsure of where we stood because I had met Burt.
“You poor thing,” she kissed me back.
“That bus ride turns an hour by car into twice that. But you know what? At night. In the dark. Not a city dark. A back road dark—”
“Wait, there are no streetlights in Jersey?”
“There are.” I hopped up at the teakettle’s hiss. Cups and saucers were in the cupboard. Teabags in a tin on the counter: Honey. Lemon. Spoons. “Down in the boondocks it’s different at night. Maybe because highway lights are the only light except headlights. And they are spread out pretty far between them and there’s nothing above them but night. And big thick woods to the left and to the right of the road reached by no light. And when traffic is light there is nothing but pitch black in front of you beyond your headlights, no sight behind you at all except night. Until another set of headlights set upon you and they get bigger and bigger out of the night until they flood your windshield too bright. Then it’s night again until red taillights appear in the rearview mirror getting lighter and lighter until they are swallowed up out of sight.”
“That sounds spooky.”
“It can be.”
“I like how you wait for the water to boil before you set the table,” she said as I poured our tea.
“Hold still.” I straightened and buttoned my shirt she was wearing. Lisa caught cold easily.
“As gentle as you are. Still, it’s a wonder your grandparents didn’t raise a serial killer.”
“Cereal killer? Me? I don’t even like milk.”
“Not that kind of cereal, silly.” Lisa laughed on to me, Shower-to-Shower mingling with honey, lemon, and peppermint from our cups. Back and forth we swayed in that close space over a joke that wasn’t that funny, just for the fun of it.
“Seriously, one advantage of not being ordinary is that you learn to take ordinary what an ordinary individual wouldn’t and there’s nothing extraordinary about it. Not to me.”
“What’s this? Is this your class?” Lisa pointed to a notebook on the counter. She could reach it without getting all the way up.
“No, that’s Hatshepsut, a woman pharaoh of Egypt.”
“You drew this?”
“Class, work… That keeps me from falling asleep.”
“You write this too: ‘She and I never got along / I was too much like you / for anyone but you / to understand / still she rose to my needs / old and tired as she was.’”
“It’s nothing.”
“What does a someone like you see in a someone like me?” Lisa’s chin sunk toward her left shoulder like it had been weighted there.
“The same as you see in me. I’m just not as cute in a catsuit. Lisa, do you remember what you told me when we first met?”
“I told you I was seeing someone. He’s married. So it’s not like that but in a way it is.”
“Then you said: You couldn’t cheat on him. Only his wife could do that. Nobody owned you. Could I handle that?”
“I love you. As throw-ed off as you are. So help me God, I do.” Now why would Lisa want to go and make us have to deal with a lie like that? I could understand if it had been out of a desperation. It wasn’t.
“When I was in junior high school,” I told her, “There was a play, Your Arms Are Too Short to Box with God. The TV commercial promised: ‘More singing, more dancing, more joy live than you’ve ever seen on any stage.’ I remember being on my way home from the store. Kuhl’s Delicatessen. I stopped in the middle of the wet street. Summer. After a rain. That commercial stuck in my head. Looking straight up. Some of the stars had come back out in amongst wispy clouds shot through with moonlight still blue, but yellow too. I shook my fist at them: ‘Oh yeah? Devil, watch my footwork!’”
“A woman pours her heart out to you and that’s your response?”
“You know, God has a lot more time than we do. So does the Devil. Which isn’t the blessing for the latter that one might think.” I knew what I was saying would make Lisa feel like she was the one wronged. The one who needed to let bridges burn. I gave her that. If we kept seeing one another, Lisa disappeared for both of us when she flipped fair exchange is no robbery into Peaches trying to play me. I told her, when we met, that just because the boondocks were slow didn’t mean she could pull a fast one. She laughed. I smiled at her laughing.
We understood one another.
*
The next time I was in my hometown my mother would send word by my sister that she would send me straight to hell if I should ever darken her doorstep again. Shadows darken doorsteps. Just like Plato said. That night, on the bus back to the city, I let myself sway in the dark to the highway speeding by beneath the chassis. As it sped, I knew my Uncle Valentine was in his kitchen ripping another parchment page out of his Bible, rolling another cigarette. Alan and Stan were roaming the night for a house where the windows were dark, the rooms silent, breaking in would be easy. My sister watched a sitcom, her familiarity with that episode the closest she had to a best friend. Burt’s French fry slices for Peaches’ dinner tomorrow were almost frozen. Lisa was wondering what Peaches would wear. My mother knelt before her fireplace, my birth certificate in hand. White vellum caught hot, flamed blue-tipped orange, singed black, curled up around its edges, flaked to ash, tumbled into nothing.
I switched on my passenger overhead light. A warm yellow and close around me. I had a magazine from Kuhl’s, dislodged the subscription insert and scribbled onto the back of it: Patience is a virgin / you once laughed at me // As you moved your brown stones around backgammon points / placing my white stones on the bar / before you bothered to cast your dice // As they rattled from your cup / you excused yourself for the bathroom / leaving me to contemplate them / as you had already moved // I should have left you then / but I was too proud to admit / I could not hang with you.
None of these people played backgammon.
I switched on my passenger overhead light. A warm yellow and close around me. I had a magazine from Kuhl’s, dislodged the subscription insert and scribbled onto the back of it: Patience is a virgin / you once laughed at me // As you moved your brown stones around backgammon points / placing my white stones on the bar / before you bothered to cast your dice // As they rattled from your cup / you excused yourself for the bathroom / leaving me to contemplate them / as you had already moved // I should have left you then / but I was too proud to admit / I could not hang with you.
None of these people played backgammon.