“Can I help you?” she said through the peephole.
“We’re the police. We’d like to talk to you, please.”
She opened the door and the detectives showed their badges. They were two heavy black men, one with a beard, both with bellies that stretched the buttons on their white shirts.
“Are you Malcolm Givens’s mother?”
“Yes.”
“We’re looking for Malcolm Givens.”
My mother stepped back and let the officers in.
“There’s been a serious crime. We would rather not mention any details right now. We just want to talk to Malcolm. If he didn’t do it, then that gives us a good idea who did do it, and that’s what we want to know. We just want to rule your son out.”
“Well, I haven’t seen him.”
“When did you last see him?”
“A week ago. He doesn’t live here, you know.”
Malcolm had a criminal record. He’d already spent six months on Riker’s Island for stealing a leather coat from Bloomingdale’s — and injuring a security guard. He’d walked through the electric eye, triggered the alarm, then punched the guard in the head and ran. He sold the coat to his friend Manny. When Manny was stopped by the police, they recognized the doctoring done on stolen coats. Malcolm had torn out the security attachment and sewn up the inseam. Manny told the police who sold him the coat. They arrested Malcolm for assault and robbery, and since there were video pictures of the theft, his defense attorney advised him to plead guilty. This happened when he was sixteen.
Then there were the watches. Malcolm came out of the army a heroin addict. He needed money for drugs, and he figured he could sell the watches to get it. He hid in a department store changing room by removing the insulation panels in the ceiling and climbing up into a ventilation shaft. Apparently, he planned to hide a rack of watches in the garbage can and return the next morning to retrieve them. That way he could break a window to get out of the store that night, and if he was caught he wouldn’t have any goods on him. He was surprised in the bathroom by the night watchman, who clubbed him with a flashlight, wrestled him to the floor, and cuffed him. The scar on his forehead is permanent. He served another six months for burglary.
The detectives left and didn’t come back, so I assumed they found the person who did whatever it was they didn’t want to mention. What I felt when they left was a mixture: an exaggerated sense of threat, and an absurd sense of being offended — how dare they? My mother thought I was silly, reacting as if the detectives were muggers or axe-murderers, but what she didn’t see was my bewilderment that the police were actually there, in our house. I was shell-shocked by the actuality of their presence, as if someone had hit me in the head with a pan.
That night gunshots were fired in the parking lot downstairs below my window.
Malcolm showed up at our apartment the following Friday afternoon. My mother and stepfather were out at work, and I was home alone. He had a woman with him.
His eyes darted aside as soon as I opened the door. “Peter!” he said.
“Hi, Malcolm.”
“Lisa, this is my brother Peter.”
“Hello, Peter,” Lisa said.
They came in and sat on the living room sofa. Malcolm was wearing a new blue windbreaker with black silk pants and black dress shoes. Lisa was in blue jeans, white toeless heels, and a man’s white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over her elbows and the front tied in a knot over her navel.
“Wait a minute,” Malcolm said. He went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of soda. He set them on the coffee table and sat down with his arm around Lisa’s shoulder.
“So how is school?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. “I’m trying out for varsity football in the fall. I think I’m going to make it.”
“You number one yet?”
“No, still number two.”
“Lisa,” Malcolm said, leaning forward. He was speaking in a hushed, submissive voice. “My brother goes to private school in Connecticut. He’s doing really well, he’s like number two in his class. And then, medical school, right?” He gestured towards me with his hand.
“Probably law school,” I said.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Lisa said flatly, curling towards Malcolm. She tugged on the zipper of Malcolm’s windbreaker and smiled. “So what’s cooking, sugar?”
“Peter, we’re going to hang out in the back for a while, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you minding the house? You can go out for a while. I’m going to be here at least an hour.”
“Okay.”
I went outside and across the street to the Izetta Brothers delicatessen. Hector and Maggie were there alone. I walked to the freezer and got a pineapple sherbert, then walked up to the counter. Hector took my money and rang up the sale.
“Since when you been working the register?” I asked.
“They always let me work the register,” he said indignantly. I stiffened and turned to walk out, smitten by the meanness in Hector’s voice. He doesn’t know I love him, I thought. I walked across 112th Street and went back upstairs.
When I got back to my apartment, there was a pungent smell coming from the back bedroom, Ken and Tyrone’s room. The smell was thick and sweet, and could have come from burning almonds or plastic. I walked to the back of the hallway, but the door was closed. I listened but didn’t hear anything, so I went back and sat in the living room. I turned on the radio and took out a magazine and sat down to read.
After a half hour, my mother called from work. I told her Malcolm was home, and she asked to speak to him.
“He’s in the back,” I said.
“Go get him!” she hollered.
I walked back and knocked on the door of the back bedroom. This time I could hear voices inside.
“What is it?” Malcolm called through the door.
“Go away,” said Lisa, laughing.
“Mommy wants to talk to you.”
Malcolm opened the door. He was sitting against the wall naked, a towel in his lap, reaching up from the floor with his hand on the knob. Lisa was naked too, with a rubber tube around her arm and a syringe in her left hand. She sat on the floor glaring at me.
“What did you say?” said Malcolm.
“Mommy’s on the phone. She wants to talk to you.”
“Damn, why did you tell her I was here?” he said, stumbling as he stood up. He wrapped Lisa’s shirt around his waist and slipped his feet into my brother Ken’s bedroom slippers.
I followed him into the living room. He picked up the phone and started muttering into the receiver. He was facing me, with his head lifted backwards and a pained, confused look in his eyes. He raised his voice for a second, and then he was silent. He kept drawing his breath as if he were trying to get a word in.
I went back to the bedroom. Lisa was still naked, sitting up on a pillow with her knees together. The rubber tube was lying on the floor in front of her. I stared at her in silence and she stared back. We stood like that for several moments. Then she leaned forward and flicked the door closed with her fingertips.
I heard the phone slam from the living room. Malcolm came back through the hallway.
“Don’t ever tell her I’m here, you hear me?”
“You shouldn’t be doing that stuff here,” I said.
“Doing what stuff?”
“Heroin.”
“That’s not heroin,” he said and pushed past me. He went into the room and closed the door behind him. About ten minutes later, he and Lisa came out fully dressed and left the apartment. Malcolm didn’t say anything, he just let the front door slam behind him.
It wasn’t hatred I felt towards Malcolm at that moment. What I felt was a lost emotion, something more diffuse than hate — a question for me to dwell on, a thought hiding in the shadows. There were flickers of pain beneath my eyelids, causing me to squint. I was no more than blandly agitated.
If I didn’t hate Malc
olm, it was because I was afraid to. I knew it would show, and then he would hurt me. I feared Malcolm because violence was in his nature and not in mine. I didn’t feel like a coward, though. I knew Malcolm was fated to spend time in prison. His drug habits, too, would surely lead him hand in hand to hell. Strangely, I thought his pushing us around and getting away with it now was his due — advance compensation for the terrible price he’d pay in the future. His terrible future would redeem my cowardice, I believed, and this belief allowed me to stand by grim and mute while Malcolm polluted my mother’s home, without despising my own weakness. This was a rationalization, of course, and it worked, but only so well. There had to be a fury hidden somewhere within me, somewhere inside a stifled wish to fight.
If I hated Malcolm at all, it was not because he stole from my mother and shot dope. It was because he dared me to stop him and I couldn’t. He shoved my cowardice down my throat.
It seemed very still in Harlem that summer. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance, the voices of kids playing were like echoes in a canyon. Most of my friends from public school or summer day camp had discovered girls, and I felt I was intruding on their sex life if I talked to them. Everyone was a stranger to me.
Every day I did my running and training so I’d be ready to play football when I returned to school in the fall. I ran from my house through Jefferson Park, then along the East River Drive to the cabled drawbridge that crossed the East River to Ward’s Island. Sometimes I’d spend the entire day on Ward’s Island. There were picnic areas and ball fields there, and a private rest home for war veterans. At the center of the island were rough hilly terrain and uncut forest. The center was unapproachable, and I knew nothing about it.
Further into the island stood two massive pillars of the Triboro Bridge. They swelled up in the distance from behind the thorny mound at the island’s center, inching fully into view as I rounded the island’s curve until they loomed monstrously before me. On sunny days, the Triboro cast its shadow across a flat field of grass. I slowed to a trot, then meekly ventured into the shade. It was always cooler under the bridge. The grass there was wet, and the earth soggy and aromatic. I looked up at the black iron underside of the highway. The rumble of cars and trucks overhead made loud, angry echoes against the gigantic granite pillars. The echoes became louder — more frightening — when I looked overhead. Still I couldn’t resist the urge to glance upwards and scare myself mortally. I stood beneath the mass of rattling iron and orange granite, and terror rushed to fill me, spreading in an instant from my head out to my fingertips. I was afraid that the bridge might collapse. Could I run clear of the falling steel plates in time? I felt compelled to fall to my knees, even to prostrate myself on the grass. I could only bear to be under that bridge for a few moments; I stepped back out onto the sunlit grass and sun-dried dirt and shook the fear out of my bones.
It was good to run along the edge of the island, near the water, since the picnickers kept their children away from the bank. The water lapped up against the rocks on the island’s shore, and a faint stink of pollution floated inland when the river tide was high. One day I saw a water rat, as big as a watermelon, disappear between two gray wet rocks. The East River was the dirtiest river in New York. All the kids in my neighborhood knew this because our mothers warned us not to swim or fish in the river.
My stride was getting stronger every day. To my surprise I could easily run halfway round the island, to the Triboro and then back to the East River Drive. From there I had to stop running and walk about a mile home. All the way I walked, I daydreamed about boys.
Keith Hanson called me up at home one day. He was coming into the city, and he asked me if I wanted to see a movie. We went to see the new science fiction feature and then went to the penny arcade in Times Square. Then we stopped off for hot dogs at Nedick’s. We talked about our summer jobs. Keith was working at his dad’s electronics shop on Long Island. I was working on a neighborhood newspaper at the East Harlem community center, typing and writing articles and drawing cartoons. Keith told me he didn’t want to go back to Briarwood, but his mother wouldn’t let him quit.
I didn’t say anything when he told me that. I couldn’t wait to get back to school. I was festering inside, I was sick of hot, white concrete and loud, screaming, running children and boys with their arms around girls’ shoulders (what were they whispering in those ears?). None of the cute Puerto Ricans were paying any attention to me.
Keith and I made a date to go to Jones Beach on the weekend. I left him at the Long Island Railroad terminal and took the subway back home.
When I got home my mother was seated on the sofa. She seemed not to notice that I’d come in. I walked over to the sofa, and she turned abruptly to look at me. Her eyes were glairing, her pupils were small and focused on the bridge of her nose. She had an envelope in her hand.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“They arrested your brother — again.”
“For what?”
“I got a call this morning, and this was in the mail.” She handed me the envelope. “He wants me to post bail.”
In the envelope was a handwritten letter from Malcolm and a copy of a criminal complaint. Possession and sale of narcotics, possession of a firearm, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer. And a bail notice of $750.
“You can’t pay this. He’ll skip bail.”
She didn’t answer me. She kept turning and pausing and looking at different places in the room.
“All you would be doing is wasting the money. And if he skips bail and they catch him, he’ll get even more time.”
“No he won’t,” she said nastily. “Read the letter, smarty. He could be waiting a year just for a hearing.”
I stopped and read the letter from beginning to end. Malcolm denied doing anything. “I was minding my business on the street,” he’d written. “The pig challenged my black manhood and I refused to bow and scrape like a nigger and an Uncle Tom. So he arrested me and planted drugs. That is the way of the pig.”
“And he says the jail guards might hurt him because he’s accused of hitting a cop,” she said.
“That’s what he gets for being a junkie.”
My mother stood up and looked out the living room window. “I’m going to pay his bail,” she said.
“You can’t do this! You’ve got to be rational. I know he’s your son, but — can’t you see? — paying his bail is just a mistake. It’s not a hope. It’s just a mistake.”
She was still looking out the window. She turned and sat back down on the sofa. “Don’t you think I know that?” she said wearily, angrily.
“I don’t believe it—”
“Shut up, Peter. I’m not leaving him in jail. Do you understand? You can come with me or you can stay here, but I’m not letting those bastards—” she hissed, “—those bastards have him.”
I went with her a week later down to the House of Detention on 13th Street near the West Side highway, in a no-man’s neighborhood I couldn’t recognize as part of New York. I didn’t know then that the streets around this city jailhouse teemed with gay men at night, or that ten years later I would haunt these same streets like a vampire, cruising for sex at insanely late hours.
We went to the desk and paid a fat, hairy black man by check. My mother signed some papers and the man told us to wait. I looked around the lobby. The floors and walls were smeared with dirt. An air vent was covered with a puffy layer of black dust, thick as sponge. Black scuff marks had worn through much of the gray spotted linoleum. Pairs of police officers were leading men back and forth in ankle chains and handcuffs. Again I’m ashamed to admit this, but what good is it to you, my reader, if I don’t tell the truth? I was infuriated. Why was I, a Briarwood schoolboy, standing here in the House of Detention? You may think me an ass for saying that, but it is honestly how I felt.
Malcolm came out through a heavy iron door and hugged my mother. Then he reached for my hand and shook it. He was speaking clear
ly and smiling. His demeanor was officious, celebratory, as if he’d just been married or graduated from college and expected congratulations. I realized he was trying to cast his release from jail as a joyous rather than shameful occasion. He told my mother he loved her. He looked at me again, now with frozen eyes, hesitated, then spoke. “Thanks for coming, brother,” he said, again smiling. The falseness of this show was palpable. It was horrid and eerie, to know that he hated me though he hid it so well. It was as if Malcolm’s spirit, possessed of shame and hate, had left his body and was floating around that dingy hallway, spewing silent and invisible malevolence, while his body smiled and postured and talked with clarity and utter falseness.
He stayed at home for a couple of days. He sat around eating bacon and eggs in his bare feet and stayed up late watching television. I was afraid to show my contempt for him, and so when he asked me to play a game of chess, I obliged. He beat me several times. Then we played poker and he won again. We discussed politics and he matched me thought for thought. But I’d always known that Malcolm was smarter than I was.
After two days he disappeared. He took my mother’s camera and my stepfather’s gold watch and my checkbook from the Green River National Bank. I wasn’t worried since there was only five dollars in my account. A week later I got a call from the baseball stadium ticket office. Malcolm had paid for fifty dollars’ worth of baseball tickets with one of my checks. I asked the man calling if he ever wondered what a drug addict in New York was doing with a bank account in Green River, Connecticut. Malcolm’s impression of me had apparently been flawless, down to my newly formed Connecticut accent; he had convinced the ticket clerk he went to private school. (Malcolm had been studying my preppy style at home. Once he asked me to talk to him using “big words,” and now I knew why.) I thought I was obliged to pay the check, but my mother picked up the phone and told the man he was out of luck.
The Color of Trees Page 10
