by Jerry McGill
I bet you didn’t know my mother gave birth to me when she was sixteen, just a high school student. She dropped out to take care of me and had my sister two years later. My father is not anyone I have a solid memory of. His presence in my life was practically nonexistent, less a shadow than a ghost, really. What my mother saw in him I do not know. Well, he was handsome. This I know because I’ve seen pictures; black-and-whites of him in his navy uniform. But every man looks good in a uniform, doesn’t he?
The only genuine recollection I have of him is a terribly unpleasant one. I was barely six or seven when he came knocking at the apartment door. I was alone, as I often was; my mother had a receptionist job somewhere and rather than pay a babysitter she simply entrusted me to watch my sister all day long while she pulled a nine-to-five. I was good at it, too. Except for this one particular occasion with my father and that one time I nearly burnt down the apartment with candles, nothing ever went wrong.
My father, Jerome Sr., came knocking one afternoon. When I saw the man from the black-and-white pictures staring back at me through the peephole, I just knew my mother would want me to let him in. He was the hero from the war, after all. Only he wasn’t really in any war and he wasn’t in a uniform anymore. Now he was in tattered clothing, a nervous twitchy energy about him. His face was stretched out and emaciated. At the time, I had no idea what a strung-out druggie was, much less the symptoms of one. When I let him in and he proceeded to tear the apartment apart looking for valuables, I knew something was amiss, so I called my mother at her job.
What occurred after that was the genuinely terrifying part. He, carrying our television in his arms; her accosting him at the front door. He, threatening her. She, threatening him. All that yelling and cursing. And then she pulled that kitchen knife on him—the same large, horror-movie-sized one she used to cut raw chicken pieces—and I thought at that moment I might lose her forever. It seemed to me that he could easily overpower her and use it against her. Thank goodness he just decided to leave with the alarm clock radio as a consolation prize. A couple of years later, when my mother woke me up early one morning to tell me he had been found dead, murdered, I was actually relieved. I would never feel that scared of another human being again. I never even got to see him smile.
Did you know your father at all, Marcus? It’s okay to admit it if the answer is no. I used to be ashamed of it, but that was before I realized how common it was for people like us to have no relationships whatsoever with our dads. It’s actually a disease in our community. Where we come from, Father’s Day is one of those bogus holidays analogous to Arbor Day or Valentine’s Day. Or Thanksgiving. Fuck them, fathers who are arrogant enough to leave us their names and nothing more. Fuck them. Fucking fathers. They should be shot, not their blameless children. Perhaps you were thinking of your father when you spotted me walking down that street? Forget I said that. You don’t owe me any explanations.
But you should know I had lots of dreams; a whole host of aspirations were floating around in that young imagination of mine. There were things I had planned to accomplish. I was a promising athlete. Little League baseball, school basketball team, weekly football games in Tompkins Square Park. I was successful at all of them. And I was a performer as well. My sister and I often sang together; a little brown Donny and Marie we were. Sure, we only did show tunes from the musicals Grease and The Wiz, but hey, we had potential. People enjoyed watching us. I was a dancer, too. And I don’t just mean my popular disco moves that always ensured I would have female companionship at socials and birthday parties. No, in the fourth grade I was handpicked by Eliot Feld’s ballet school to take private weekly lessons at their fine dance studio in midtown Manhattan. Once a week I would get my black tights and white T-shirt on and wear those weird dancer shoes and practice my pliés and my ronds de jambe. Yeah, I was embarrassed to be taking ballet class, but excited as well. That entire world was so fresh and intriguing to me. It was my first glimpse at the way another whole society in New York lived; into a world of whiteness that I had always wondered about.
Right up until our fateful night, I was becoming more involved with drama and musical theater. At Intermediate School 70, I was poised to try out for the next school show and someday attend the famous High School of the Performing Arts. Remember that school from the movie Fame? How much fun would that have been? Can you imagine it, Marcus? Can you? My goodness, the promise. The potential. My future would have been so bright I would have had to wear shades!
I could have hated you forever. I should have hated you forever. But that’s no way to live a life, is it? Anger can be such a draining force. Maybe you were angry, Marcus. If you were, I understand. Maybe none of those things was ever going to be a possibility for you. Life is not always fair. For people like us it’s easy to get mired in resentment and ugly jealousies, isn’t it? It’s okay, I guess, if every now and then we take things out on one another.
I really just want you to know—I had a life. I had … plans, you know? I want you to be aware of that. For all it’s worth.
INT. YOUNG BOY’S BEDROOM—NIGHT
DEAN, white, twelve, LAMONT, black, twelve, ERIC, black, twelve, and JEROME, thirteen, all stand around in a circle. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” plays in the background on a stereo. SUBTITLE: THE LUCK OF THE DRAW
DEAN
Okay, pick a number between one and fifty.
Go.
ERIC
Twenty-five.
DEAN
Lamont?
LAMONT
Seven.
DEAN
Jerome?
JEROME
Forty-five.
DEAN
It was five. Lamont wins.
Lamont celebrates with Dean while Jerome and Eric express disappointment.
JEROME
Can’t we all just stay?
DEAN
Sorry, man, my mom said only one tonight. She’s got a headache.
ERIC
Come on, let’s go. It’s getting colder out.
JEROME
Shit, my mother’s gonna kill me.
three
Have you ever been inside a hospital before, Marcus? My, what fascinating places they are. There is a subtle yet deafening moroseness to those alcohol-perfumed gray halls and white and blue uniformed folk who move about them. Hospitals are like your blandest, least profound nightmare. Being in them stays with you, but not for reasons you would ever care to reflect upon.
Everybody in there wears a mask, surgeons and visitors alike. No one really wants you to see what’s going on inside their head. Everybody wants to give the impression that they are being strong and supportive, but in all honesty, they are scared. Terrified even, that possibly someday they could wind up just as miserable and pathetic as you are lying in that bed with your intravenous drip and your stats posted on a wall, your urine dripping pale yellow into a see-through bag at the end of the bed for the entire world to see. It is as if someone had turned your skin inside out and all of your veins and capillaries were on display. That a great number of our fates are inextricably linked to this place is a reality best denied.
Six months, Marcus. Six fucking months I spent in this place! Half of a year. And that isn’t including the return trips made later for surgeries, infections, therapy sessions. In the blink of an eye I became a member of a club that no one ever volunteers to join: the institutionalized. You know what’s odd to me still? Some nearly thirty years later I can still tell you clearly so many of the events there that helped to break me down and pull me up; in vivid detail no less. I still remember the taste of the food, the patterns on the walls, the lines of certain nurses’ smiles, the hands of my therapist, the legs of my psychologist, the smell of the liquid soap they gave you to wash up in a basin every morning, the texture and scent of the lotion applied afterward.
I know so many of their names, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Debra, the sexy, voluptuous nurse straight out of Charlie’s Angels. Donna
, the tough-talking, potty-mouthed Italian straight out of a Mafioso casting call. Margie, the sarcastic Latina bitch who gave just as good as she got and wore her white pants so tight you could see her panty line from down the hall.
I can even tell you what my first night was like. From the stretcher in the emergency room I couldn’t even turn my head. All I could do was look straight up at the ceiling. That ceiling, whiter than any cloud I’d ever recalled seeing. The lights in a hospital are oppressively bright. At this moment they were horrid and they were all I had. Anytime someone spoke to me they had to look down at me and into my line of sight. I remember hating that room. I just wanted someone to turn off the lights.
I knew what had happened to me. From the moment my head hit that pavement I knew I had been shot. I could still hear the loud popping noise in my ears; could still see myself falling in slow motion; could still hear the sound of Eric’s muffled voice: Get up, Jerome. Quit joking around. He sure came around to reality pretty soon. I wonder what it was like for you, Marcus. What did you do right after? Did you go and make a sandwich? Maybe turn on the television to see how the Knicks did that night? Or did you go into your room and cry, painfully aware that you had done something very wrong? Very wrong and very stupid; and now, there was no going back.
I remember my first visitor: my mother. And the shame. The shame, thick like mayonnaise, putrid as a sewer in August. She had wanted me home the night before, but I bargained with her to let me stay out one more night. Hell, it was New Year’s Eve. And she had relented. Why did she relent? Weak parenting you think? Hardly. She was losing more and more of these battles with me, as I was getting more persuasive the older I got. The task a single mom faces in attempting to keep her only son in check; most people have no idea. Also, I believe deep down she was happy for me that I had such good friends with whom I wanted to spend so much time. And so that night we made a deal: I could stay over at Dean’s but I had to be back home by a reasonable hour the next day. In my mind, there was no “reasonable hour” to return to the Lower East Side. I hated it. My time away from there with my friends had become a refuge, an escape from the dark prison of the Lillian Wald Houses of Avenue D.
But as most long-term prisoners learn, you can leave the confines of the place, but they never really leave you. You will always have the scars. You will always wear the stench of the place like an albatross. You can take the kid out of the neighborhood, but you can’t take the neighborhood out of the kid, isn’t that what they say? And so it goes, a kid with dreams of grandeur winds up on a stretcher in the corner of a noisy ER trying to see his mother’s face as she holds his hand and tells him everything will be just fine, lying to herself and to him because the truth, though still cloudy, is too painful. That truth being that nothing will ever be the same again.
When you are a kid, you know a few things, but the depth of what you don’t know is unfathomable. For example, you know that you have a brain, you know that it is somewhere at the top of your head, underneath all your hair, but you don’t know jack about the complexities of its mechanics. You have no idea that it is broken up into several different parts that function as a whole. You don’t know that there is the cerebral cortex that controls our emotional responses and our language. That there is the cerebellum that coordinates movement and balance or that there is the hypothalamus that helps to regulate your body temperature.
Similarly, you believe that the heart has something to do with feelings of love and affection and that if it is broken it usually leads to sadness and depression. But you know nothing of blood vessels, the circulatory system, the four chambers and the ventricles. What many of us learned about the brain and the heart we probably learned first from the Scarecrow and the Tin Man.
It stands to reason, then, that when I arrived at St. Vincent’s Hospital I had no idea of the profound effect that what occurred that first evening of 1982 would have on the remainder of my life. I imagine you didn’t, either, Marcus, because if you did I doubt you would have pulled that trigger. For the first few weeks I honestly thought, Okay, this looks pretty bad, but once these doctors and nurses are all through with me I’ll be back out there dancing at birthday parties, trying to dunk the ball like Doctor J or catch the touchdown pass like I was Lynn Swann. I was clueless as to the realities of what a spinal cord injury was and the permanence of it all. I knew the spine was a sensitive thing because a very pretty classmate of mine with big breasts suffered from scoliosis and had to wear a back brace. Other than that the thought of it never crossed my mind. In my short life I had never even met anyone in a wheelchair.
Now here I lay, staring up at ceilings, crying out for help at all hours of the night. Being fed, washed, poked, prodded, dressed daily (though only in hospital gowns). It took me months to realize that I was still pissing and shitting, just without any control or knowledge of any of it. My goodness, the humiliation of it all, Marcus. The humiliation of it all.
During the first two months it seemed like the visitors would never stop coming. My first visitors after my mother were my closest friends from Westbeth, the housing project in West Greenwich Village where I spent most of my time. It was the morning after my shooting and I was still in shock, but I could clearly recognize their concerned faces at the side of my bed, peering into my eyes, blocking the fluorescent light.
There was the aforementioned Eric, who had to be wondering as I did for so many years—what if things had been different? What if he had been walking on the outside of the sidewalk and I on the inside? What if we hadn’t stopped off at Mamie’s to play video games for twenty minutes? It was after hours, but the manager was such a gregarious guy and he knew us well, so he opened his locked doors to let us in to play. What if one of us had decided to leave just a little bit earlier that night? What-ifs can kill you if you let them, Marcus. They can eat you up slowly like bone cancer or a flesh-eating bacteria. What if: two of the most useless words in the English language. I prefer never to dwell on the what-ifs, but it’s so enticing at times.
There was Lamont, my other “brother.” Lamont, Eric, and myself were the “three black amigos.” We had all met in the fifth grade at Public School 3 in the West Village and became fast friends. We spent numerous nights at one another’s apartments, attended sleepaway summer camps together, competed voraciously at video games, traded girlfriends and baseball cards. We had all been walking to school together when we heard the news that John Lennon had been shot and killed. I didn’t know much about him except that he sang a very pretty love song about the woman he loved. Lamont’s mom played the record endlessly in her room. I couldn’t grasp why my homeroom teacher cried at hearing the news of his death. It’s kind of ironic now, I guess.
And there was Dean. He lived in Westbeth and it was his house that we were leaving that night after spending the last two nights there. We loved staying over at Dean’s because he had his own room complete with a record player, television set, and video game unit. Dean amazed me because he could get away with speaking any way he wanted to his parents. When his mother asked him to clean up his room Dean could say, “Shit, mom, can’t you see I’ve got all this fucking schoolwork? I’ll get to it when I can.” And Dean’s mom would respond calmly, “All right now, honey, no need to get all heated about it. Just get to it when you can.”
Incredible. Could you have gotten away with such a thing, Marcus? I know I couldn’t have. My mother would have beaten my ass black and blue if I ever dared use foul language with her. It was my friendship with Dean that first opened my eyes to some of the differences between black and white children and their upbringing. I always thought that white kids and their families had things so easy. I saw things only on the surface. I guess that’s how most kids see things, but boy did Dean’s family teach me a thing or two. I had no idea that beneath all that passive behavior and subtle tension there existed great sadness.
One evening, a year or two after my accident, Dean woke up in the middle of the night and found a note on his bed fr
om his mother. He read it and rushed to his parent’s bedroom. From there he and his father rushed to the roof, but it was too late. Dean’s mom had already jumped, landing in that same courtyard where for so many years we roller-skated and played Dungeons & Dragons. I can’t begin to imagine how deep and all-encompassing her depression must have been. All I could think of was the face of that nice woman who made us peanut butter sandwiches and hot chocolate. Even in my darkest days—and trust me, there were many—I never once thought of suicide as a genuine option. I just couldn’t. I’m not a quitter. You helped me realize that, Marcus.
Tamara was another visitor that morning. Tamara had been my homegirl, one I could always depend on for a little carnal therapy should I be feeling restless or horny. Now mind you, we were not even teenagers yet, so our experiences consisted of mostly second-base type stuff, heavy petting, sloppy tongue kissing, but it was fun and exciting. Tamara was quite overdeveloped for a girl her age and a few of us took a go at “exploring” with her in dark stairwells and the closets of friends’ apartments.
Behind her back we had degrading terms for her like “Roadkill” and “Too-Easy Tamara”; dumb-ass kid shit. And now here she was, at my bedside, crying and holding my hand while stroking my face. I couldn’t feel any of it but it sure felt good to know she was there. I wanted to leave with her. I wanted to go back to that basement laundry room where we had been mischievous together so often and nuzzle up against her full breasts that smelled of sweat and baby powder. The worst part was that I didn’t fully understand just why I couldn’t.
