Tonight she was in a comic mood. What a day she’d had. There was the nitwit at the deli counter who tried to sell her a bruised tomato, and the idiot bank teller who shortchanged her twenty dollars. She made him recount the money three times until he realized she was right. And when an overweight businessman behind her in the line had complained that she was taking too long, she had “blasted him to kingdom come.” “He’ll think twice before he opens his mouth again, that fish-faced flunky.” There was a glint in her eye as she said this. I could just see her disrupting the entire bank, demanding to see the manager. By now I was sure she’d earned among the bank staff the proud appellation ‘‘that woman, ” just as she had in the supermarket and the housing office and on at least three floors in our apartment building.
This was how I’d remembered her since childhood. Taxi drivers who tried to pad the route, delinquent janitors, slow-moving bank tellers, and rude department store cashiers were regularly and excessively rebuked. She raised electrical storms like a thunder goddess. She was an avenging angel against incompetence, the wielder of a cosmic fury we could only pray was guided by reason and justice.
That night from my bedroom window I listened to conga drums, honking horns, and voices in the street. A cherry bomb exploded. I could hear the Rojas children arguing in Spanish through the window next door. The city sounds formed a living voice, sprays and bursts of sound, formless and disordered yet somehow of a whole, like a postmodern orchestral piece. I was reminded that my neighborhood was a “dangerous” place. I let my imagination run until I was exhilarated with fear. I peered out into the darkness, half expecting some fluid, formless evil to lunge through the window and spirit me away.
A police siren started in the distance, crescendoed, and then faded towards the north. That’s the Doppler effect, I thought, remembering my earth science lecture on sound waves. I wondered what the officers in that police car were thinking, what horror had triggered their emergency. A shiver of relief ran through me. It felt safe to be indoors. I felt cold and warm at once, just as if I’d chanced upon a wooden shack in the forest in the middle of a rainstorm, thick drops splattering through the doorway, bouncing up into my face, and enough damp chill in the air to make me cherish my protection. I’d known this tingling sensation often as a child, I’d felt it sitting on this same windowsill, but I’d forgotten it in Connecticut. The absence of threat had rendered my emotions bland.
I undressed and got under my covers. I was too agitated with fantasies of danger to sleep. My pores were still open and my skin still tingled. Out of bedtime habit, I started to think about boys.
I thought first of Cady Donaldson. I tried to stir up some of the misery I was feeling earlier, but it seemed I had already forgotten I loved him. Cady was gone forever, I knew, and I’d cried most of the hurt out of my system on the bus ride home. I thought instead of T.J. His mother had driven up to school to pick him up, and I’d said hello to her and good-bye to him for the summer, just that morning, though it seemed like weeks ago. I wondered what T.J. was doing right then at home. He played a lot of tennis in the summer, he’d told me. I could see him now in his white shorts and low-top sneakers, cotton socks drooping over his ankles, tossing his head to flick the hair out of his eyes. Another flush ran through my body as I remembered what he had done to me only days before.
Just then a thought hit me. There were boys in New York, too! All the Puerto Rican boys in the Boys’ Club and at the swimming pool. All my old friends from summer day camp. I was queer now, and maybe one or two of them were, too. The next day I would start looking for my summer boyfriend. The prospect was relaxing. For the first time I was glad to be home. I rolled over and went to sleep.
I awoke uneasily the next morning, lingering in semi-sleep for several minutes. I heard a bird singing outside my window, and for an instant I thought I was back at school. Then I remembered the tall oak tree in the grass lot in front of our building, and the sparrows that had always nested right outside our window. I sat up on the edge of my bed.
On all my vacations, I never felt I was really back home until I had awakened in my own bed. Starting an entire day in New York made it official. I stood up and looked out the window. Two boys were playing marbles in the parking lot, and a class of preschoolers, lined up in pairs, was following its leader up 112th Street. In the distance they looked like the tall of a caterpillar. I’d slept late, it was about ten o’clock. I got dressed and went into the kitchen.
My mother was slicing carrots at the kitchen table. She said good morning, and then sent me across the street to buy a quart of milk and a half dozen eggs. She had always sent me across the street to buy milk and eggs, since I was seven, and I was annoyed to return to a forgotten routine. I felt no sentiment for any of these childhood reminders: sparrows and conga drums and milk and eggs. No one ever sent me to the store at prep school, I grumbled to myself as I crossed 112th Street.
The store across the street was run by three Italian brothers, the Izetta brothers, and an old Italian woman named Maggie. A short, black-haired Puerto Rican boy named Hector had worked for the Izetta brothers for years. I had always liked Hector. I liked his ashy, golden skin, his translucent mustache, and the way he deepened his voice to sound tough. I looked right at him when I went into the store this time, hoping he would notice that I’d been away, but he ignored me. He was talking with the old woman Maggie in his cute, tough voice. Hector had made his girlfriend pregnant and he wanted to marry her. “Marry her,’’ said Maggie. “You gotta marry her, Hector.” The oldest brother, Joey Izetta, kept telling Hector he was stupid. “They’re giving away free milk, and this dummy wants to buy a cow.”
I bought my milk and eggs and left, displeased that Hector was getting married. He was only sixteen years old!
“Shit!” I said aloud as I rode alone in the elevator back up to our apartment.
I went into the kitchen and put the eggs in the refrigerator. I put the milk on the table. My mother was chopping celery on the breadboard. With each slice, she made a hard knock on the board with the knife handle. “I’m making barbecued meat loaf,” she said. I poured myself a bowl of Corn Pops and sat down.
“Where’s Malcolm?” I asked.
“I don’t know where Malcolm is.”
“How’s he doing?”
“The same.”
“He dropped out of the program?”
“No, he didn’t drop out of the program.” She put the knife down on the breadboard. “He got kicked out of the program.” Her eyes turned glassy with anger. Her voice seemed to echo off the kitchen walls. “He told me he finished the program, but I didn’t believe him. So I called over there. He tested positive for marijuana and heroin. Marijuana and heroin.”
I turned back to my Corn Pops, cowed by her outburst. My mother was still glaring at me. I turned and looked out the window. Two young girls were playing on a tricycle in the parking lot and screaming at each other. I looked as far as I could to the west, but the cityscape of the Johnson Houses blocked my view of the horizon. My mother calmed down and started chopping again.
“How’s that fella at your school doing?”
I played dumb, I knew who she meant. “What fella?”
“You know what fella I’m talking about. I met him that first night. In Mr. Bennett’s house.”
“T.J.?” I smiled to myself as I scooped the last spoonful of cereal into my mouth. She asked about T.J. every time I came home.
“That’s right. I knew it was T.J. or T.B. or P.J., or something.”
I turned to her with a wide smile on my face. I almost felt like laughing. “He’s doing fine.” I got up and put my cereal bowl in the sink and went out of the kitchen.
My brother Malcolm was a junkie. Not a totally wasted, garbage-pail junkie, like you might see in a crime movie. He didn’t slur his words or wear ragged clothes. No, Malcolm dressed. Lizard-skin shoes; rabbit-fur hats; leather, suede, or cashmere coats. Fancy colored slacks, orange or yellow or bright red. We
figured he either stole the clothes or stole to get the money to buy them. Malcolm was twenty years old, and he’d only recently become a dope addict. He’d volunteered for the army at seventeen. He’d even volunteered to go to Vietnam because he wanted to kill, but they wouldn’t send him because my brother Basil was already in ’Nam. Malcolm went AWOL from the army after a year and came back home a heroin addict. A fresh, fast, hunky, young dope addict.
Malcolm always knew he would end up a junkie. He told me so when he was fourteen. He came home one night, drunk on Bacardi Rum, and stumbled into the bottom bunk bed. “I’m afraid I’m going to be a junkie when I grow up,” he told me. This was an amazing thing for a fourteen-year-old to say, a statement packed with moral and metaphysical complexities of knowledge and intent and fate and blame. But when Malcolm came home on his first furlough in the army, he’d been transformed into something stupid. He wasn’t afraid of drugs anymore. “Only people with weak minds become addicted,” he lectured me then. “My mind is strong enough to handle it.”
I was terrified by drugs, because my oldest brother Jackson had died of an overdose when I was twelve.
We held a memorial service at the drug rehabilitation center. Jackson’s dope addict friends from the rehab program spoke at the service. The dope addicts said wonderful things about Jackson. I believed them. My brother was a good person.
At least he’d made an effort to support his children. Before Jackson’s wife left him, he did a fair job of fathering his boy and girl. Without his kids, he couldn’t hold his grip and fell back into heroin. I thought of the night his first boy David was born, the aura around Jackson, the light in his eyes. I thought of that the night he died.
My mother cried wretchedly at the memorial service. Horrid, guttural noises, the worst sounds I’ve ever heard; harsh, choking sounds, as if her throat were coated with rust. At one point she started rocking forward. I thought she was having a heart attack. My brothers and I got up and circled close around her. I thought she was going to die right in front of me. She just kept choking and crying. Her eyes were wild and unfixed and filled with tears. It was as though she couldn’t see us, didn’t know we were there.
For months after Jackson died I lived in fear. I felt inside of me a need to scream, except there wasn’t anything there to scream at. There was another boy in a room somewhere, I thought, and he was the one screaming. The room he was in had white walls and was empty, and he was sitting on a chair. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew what he felt. I was connected to him by ESP. I knew how he was feeling, and that was what I was feeling inside, except I didn’t scream, because it wouldn’t do any good. I was here, I wasn’t in that room, and I couldn’t see what it was that was making him scream.
That afternoon I ran two miles around the track in Jefferson Park. It was my fancy to pretend I was a horse, and I galloped around the curves, springing forward out of my shanks, pridefully lifting my knees. During the winter film festival at school, we’d seen a film called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, about an English barstol runner who obstinately stopped yards short of winning a race trophy to spite his prison warden. The title of the film was my chosen mantra; I chanted it in rhythm as I ran? filling my mind with it, gaining strength. The chant had propelled me through the fields at school on misty mornings. It became the theme song for long stretches of my life, like the one that was just beginning this summer.
I exhausted myself in the last quarter mile of my run, then lay on my back in the grass to catch my breath. The clouds overhead were caught in a quick wind travelling north. I followed one puffy nimbus mound as far as I could with my eyes, wishing I could hitch a ride on its polar-bound journey. I felt vaguely troubled as I lost myself in the eternally rising blue. There were faint tremors just below my skin, and an uneasiness in my stomach as though I’d eaten poorly. I lost track of the time. I might have lain there for an hour. A dog barking nearby brought my thoughts back from the sky. I turned my head sideways on the ground and, through a jungle of grass blades, saw a long-haired setter nipping playfully at his master’s pant leg. Hard pebbles were pressing into my back. A caterpillar was crawling on my leg near my knee. I flicked off the bug with my finger and stretched my arm around back to brush off the dirt and stones. Then I picked up my towel and bathing suit from where I’d hidden them under a bush, and walked towards the park swimming pool.
The pool was free of charge in the morning, but I knew there would be more boys in the afternoon. I avoided the cashier’s eyes as I paid my fifty cents and pushed through the turnstile. I felt sneaky and smart, as though I were walking into the movies with a phony ticket. I walked towards the boys’ dressing hall. I could already hear water splashing and run-amok screams, the orchestral mesh of squeals, yelps, and hollers of children already in the pool. “Which one will it be?” I wondered.
The dressing hall was a large, square room, empty except for a row of foot-high benches nailed to the floor. The cement floor was damp everywhere, and in some spots there were puddles of water. The scent of chlorine had soaked into the floor and walls. A single low-wattage bulb hanging from the ceiling cast the hall in what seemed like brown light. On one side of the room was the clothes check window. The attendant there was a handsome, stocky young man with an auburn crew cut, wearing a green park uniform. I stripped out of my track shorts and shoes and stuffed them into one of the numbered wire baskets stacked by the clothes check window. The attendant took my basket and handed me an elastic band with my basket number on it.
When I was in summer day camp, years before I went to Briarwood, I came to this pool almost every day. The chlorine smell in the hall and this clothes-checking routine brought back memories of these earlier summers, when the sex in me had been just a formless cloud. Ronnie James had reached out and grabbed my dick in this hall. I still remembered Wilbur, the golden-skinned black boy who took his time drying his loose-hanging, golden brown dick, three shades darker than the rest of his body. And Willie, the tiny dark-skinned boy who had jumped out of the toilet stall with his pants still down around his ankles and his arms up in the air, scaring me half to death. And Guy, who could have been my twin, the boy I’d fallen in love with, except I didn’t know it at the time. I always gave Guy my cookies and soda at lunch. I also started a fight with a Puerto Rican kid who tried to take my place as Guy’s lineup partner; I must have been in love to be so violent.
I didn’t think of approaching any black boys now. It didn’t make sense, somehow, that any of them would be queer. Besides, they all knew me and my family. Their mothers knew my mother. I hardly knew any of the Puerto Rican boys. I knew some of their faces, but almost none of their names, except Skito and his little brother Willie. They lived in their own little Puerto Rican world, stayed with their friends and their brothers and sisters, and that distance made me feel safe. At least one of them is going to like me, I thought.
I put on my bathing suit and looked around the dressing hall. Two thin, brown boys were at the far end near the entrance to the pool. One was standing and rubbing his back with his towel. The other was stretched out on the bench, his feet pointed apart and his arms folded behind his head. Water was dripping from their hair and bathing suits onto the floor. They were both about thirteen years old. I looked over at them, but they were talking and giggling and paid me no attention.
I went outside and dived into the swimming pool. Most of the kids in the pool were younger than me, some very young. I swam around and tried to make contact, but everyone was splashing up too much water and having too much fun and making too much noise. I got out and walked over to the stone benches by the gate, where you could look out at the spectators in the park. Two handsome boys were lying on their towels sunning themselves. The elastic bands with their basket numbers were wrapped around their ankles, and their eyes were closed, though I knew they weren’t asleep. I sat down on the bench by the gate, and looked at them but they didn’t budge. The bench was made of concrete and was scraping against the bott
om of my thigh. I thought to myself that those concrete benches were stupid and useless, since everyone in the pool had on bathing suits and the concrete would scrape everyone’s skin. I kept waiting for the two boys to stop pretending they were asleep, but they just twitched their feet and turned their heads away from me, nestling back into their folded forearms.
I got up and walked to the ten-foot diving pool. Some older boys, about nineteen or twenty, were jumping from the high board. They were muscular, but none of them looked especially cute. They looked more like men than boys. I dived into the pool from the side and swam to the bottom, and then back up again. I did this over and over several times, then swam to the edge of the pool and propped myself up on my elbows. I peered back at the wading pool and looked for some cute boy who was watching me, but my eyes were stinging and I could barely see. “Shit!” I said to myself and pulled myself up out of the water. I went into the dressing hall and got my clothes basket, got dressed, and went home.
8
The two detectives knocked on our door Sunday morning. I looked through the peephole and then stepped back from the door quietly. The detectives knocked again.
“Who’s at the door?” my mother called from her bedroom.
I went to her door. “Two men in suits. I don’t recognize them.” She opened the door and gave me a doubtful, almost bemused look. Then she brushed past me and went to the front door.
The Color of Trees Page 9
