I kept calling my parents, sometimes several times a week. I decided to contact my two sisters as well, both of whom had been horrified by the lifestyle I’d chosen seven years earlier. They were surprised to hear from me, even more surprised when I invited them to my apartment for dinner. Next I invited my brother Tommy to watch a Bears game. During each of these gatherings, my brother and sisters counseled me, too, just like the telemarketers, and I listened with an opened mind about the armed services, the field of computer repair, the money to be made as a stockbroker.
Someone mentioned yoga, and I was immediately attracted to what it promised—spirituality without God, sanctity without religion. A stress-free existence. I found a yoga instructor in the Yellow Pages. The woman who answered the phone mentioned some of the masters she’d learned from, people with multisyllabic names that began with the letter K. There was a class the next morning, she told me, if I was interested. I said I was. She told me to wear comfortable clothing and that payment—fifty dollars for the first three sessions—should be in cash. Before we hung up, she asked me my name. “Jenkins,” I said. “Bobby Jenkins.”
At nine the next morning I wandered around the neighborhood of Hyde Park, feeling half tourist, half prowler among the million-dollar homes. I’d been to Hyde Park before—a friend had moved to the area with his family when we were teens—but never to this part of town. This was near the University of Chicago, and as I continued walking, some of the campus’s majestic Gothic buildings came into view, looking not unlike the Emerald City. People my age rode toward the campus on bicycles, or marched on foot hauling large backpacks. It was autumn, the start of the semester I could only assume because I knew nothing about college. I continued looking for my yogi.
I found her house at last, a three-story Queen Anne with a bright yellow door. I rapped the lion-headed knocker five quick times. A man probably in his twenties answered. He wore a long beard and his hair was twisted in a white version of dreadlocks, the ends held together by colorful rubber bands. “I’m looking for”—I glanced down at the paper in my hand—”Ms. Friend.”
“Sure,” he said. “Follow me.” I noticed a vague hint of marijuana in the air as I was led through the parlor to a narrow flight of stairs. The surrounding walls were covered in rich burgundy wallpaper that I couldn’t resist touching. It felt like crushed velvet, some of it worn thin from a century’s trace of curious hands. At the landing we made a right and passed several closed doors, finally stopping at the end of the hall near a pedestal holding a hookah. The man stepped to the side and motioned toward a room on his right. The door was slightly ajar. I opened it and walked inside.
It was bare except for a mat in the center of the floor, pictures on the wall of elderly dark-skinned men in loincloths, and, in a chair by a window, a morbidly obese woman. I turned to look at the man who’d escorted me but he was gone. I looked back at the woman. She furrowed her brow and glanced upward as her arms slowly rose from her sides, Moses in a white muumuu before the Red Sea. “Please remove your shoes, Mr. Jenkins,” she said, “and let us begin.”
For the next hour she talked me through a number of poses, telling me their names and explaining what they would do to improve my flexibility and worldview. She never left her chair. And I never left her instruction. I would wonder about that for a long time afterward, concluding only that nearly a decade of drug and alcohol abuse had so destroyed my self-esteem that learning yoga from an overweight woman in a chair did not anger me. But I did have enough self-esteem left to know, even as I was paying her the fifty dollars, that I would not return for the next two sessions. I walked away from her house feeling duped and as confused about what to do with my life as ever.
The next six months brought no more clarity. But they did bring books. I’d joined the Book of the Month Club and now my companions were the authors who regularly arrived at my door. I read constantly and indiscriminately, sometimes all through the night and always on the trains going to and from the medical center. And I read there, too, since I worked the second shift, 3:00 PM to midnight, and there was never much to do. I generally kept to myself, but suddenly I was an object of attention and curiosity; not many unit clerks spent their downtime reading, and if they did it was The National Enquirer rather than Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. There seemed to be a consensus among my colleagues that I should be in school.
I deflected questions about college by saying I couldn’t afford it or that I was saving money in order to go. But the truth was that the thought of going terrified me, not because I might fail, but because I might succeed. I had made a life for myself within the urban underclass, and even though that life was filled with boundaries and constraints, there was a certain comfort there. There was no comfort in allowing myself to be free.
But now comfort of any sort was increasingly hard to find. I hated my job. I hated the thought of always having it. And I hated myself when the train I rode to and from work pulled into the Halsted Street station, home of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Twice a day I would look up from a book and watch people of all ages enter and exit the double doors with backpacks bearing the school’s logo. I would glance over the expressway toward the university’s buildings, sometimes imagining myself in one of them taking a class. I did this without fail until at last, when the vision of myself as a college student no longer struck me as absurd, I stood when the students around me stood, and moved with them toward the double doors. I half expected someone to stop me.
We exited the train and walked as a group up the platform stairs before turning right and heading for the campus. The traffic light in front of us flashed from green to yellow; I found myself sprinting with the others to make it across the street in time. It was there that the group—maybe twenty of us—began to disperse. I picked someone to follow, a woman in a red parka. She led me straight to the library, an imposing concrete structure with narrow windows. I hesitated before entering, but only for a second. The woman in the parka stopped at the circulation desk. I found a seat at an empty table and opened my book. For the few minutes I sat there pretending to read, I feared that at any moment someone would spot me and instantly know that I was not one of them, that I did not belong. I stayed only ten minutes before my paranoia forced me to leave.
I went back the next day and, emboldened by the previous day’s success, stayed for a full hour. I went twice more the following week. And then going to the campus became my morning routine. One day I stopped at the campus store, bought a backpack with the school logo, and filled it with my accumulated book club selections. I ate lunch in the cafeteria. I bought a sweatshirt that said UIC FLAMES and wore it while I sat in the library pretending to study. For two months I was an impostor, an infiltrator in a forbidden land, until I managed to convince myself that this land was mine, as much my right as any other’s. An admissions counselor disagreed.
“You’ll never be accepted here,” he told me. I was in his office, or rather at his desk in a large room full of other desks, counselors, and prospective students. He’d just finished reviewing my application, having lowered it from his puzzled face to confirm with me that I was indeed twenty-two years old, had received failing grades in high school, and had dropped out at age sixteen. While he slowly shook his head, I glanced around the room. Young people were everywhere, smiles on some of their faces, their futures spread before them like red carpets. I looked back at the counselor. He handed me my application. When he apologized and wished me well, there was genuine pity in his voice, just as there had been in the voices of my high school teachers and my parents when they saw me going down, caught in the urban undertow. And now I smiled because I knew there was no need to be pitied anymore. I had resurfaced, after all. I had survived. I had a backpack full of books. I had toured a college campus and even read in its library. And I knew that, somewhere, there had to be a place like this for a person like me.
SCHOOLED
When my brother Tim was eighteen, he received
a scholarship to study mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Two years after he started classes, when I was fourteen, he tried to lure me into his world of probabilities and figures, taking me with him to hear lectures on Ptolemy’s theorem and Benford’s law. But it didn’t stick; I was a poet at heart, too quick to laugh and cry, too slow to rationalize and reason. I spent my free time devouring novels, anything I could get my hands on, including my sister Linda’s Harlequin Romances. Tim snatched one out of my hands one day and rapped it against my head. “Those are for sissies,” he said.
Sissies was not a word the Walkers used. If my parents had heard him he would have been sternly punished. “Here,” he continued, tossing me a paperback. “Read this.” It was Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim. I cracked it open and scanned the first paragraph:
Her name was Maude and she “Georgied” me around 1921. I was three years old. Mama told me about it, and always when she did her rage and indignation would be as strong and as emotional perhaps as at the time when she had surprised her panting and moaning at the point of orgasm with my tiny head wedged between her ebony thighs, her massive hands viselike around my head.
I looked up. Tim winked at me as he turned to leave. I lowered my gaze back to the page and didn’t lift it again until the book was finished. The lives it had rendered were terrifying and sinful, different in every way from mine and the people I knew. I hadn’t really even understood much of what I’d read. But I was curious, and that mattered more.
A few days later, Tim told me it was time.
“For what?” I asked.
He said, “To be schooled.” He led me to our parents’ garage, where my twin brother was leaning against the hood of the family station wagon, a beer in one hand, a joint in the other. I was astonished, especially when I learned that Tim had been getting him high for months. “I wasn’t ready for you yet,” Tim said. “I wasn’t sure if I should let you turn out like Tommy.” They both laughed. Our brother Tommy was twenty-one and still as straitlaced as the pope. I had not been entirely opposed to turning out like Tommy, but I was very much opposed to being laughed at. I opened a beer and took a swallow.
“Want to try some weed?” Jimmy asked.
“Sure,” I said. He handed me the joint. I took a hit, triggering a bout of choking from me and hysterics from my brothers.
“You all right?” Tim asked, patting me on the back. “You okay?”
When I could speak, I said, “Hell yeah.” I’d never cursed before. “Hell yeah,” I said again. After the joint was gone, we grabbed the rest of the beers and headed inside, settling in the living room in front of the TV.
It was still early in the evening, probably around seven. Other than our recently adopted two-year-old brother André, whom I assumed was sleeping because I didn’t see or hear him, none of our siblings was home. Our parents were in their bedroom next door, but since they were blind it didn’t matter. Tim only had to whisper when he schooled me. “The Prophet is nothing but a hustler,” he said, “and we’ve all been his marks.”
I’d learned the meaning of “marks” from Iceberg Slim. I’d learned “tricks” and “johns” too, which Tim also said we were. “How do you know this?” I asked.
Tim grinned. “Let’s just say it’s been revealed to me,” he said, sounding very much like a prophet himself. But in 1978, you didn’t have to be a prophet to know that the world had not ended in 1972, nor later, in 1975, the Prophet’s revised time of peril. I remembered how, on the eve of 1975, I lay in bed unable to sleep, waiting for the stroke of midnight to arrive, when God would swing his mighty arm through the clouds and knock the unchosen from the earth, like chess pieces. As soon as my clock read eleven fifty-five, I tiptoed through the house and stood in front of my parents’ bedroom door. When their vision was restored, I wanted to be the first person they saw.
“Everything about the church,” Tim continued, “all that stuff we were raised believing, were lies.” A chilling bitterness crept into his voice when he began speaking of the secret extravagant lifestyle the Prophet lived by pilfering church funds, a charge that would also be leveled by the investigative reporter Mike Wallace a few months later on 60 Minutes. I looked at Jimmy for his reaction to this disturbing news, but he’d nodded off in the easy chair. I looked back at Tim. He was staring intently at the TV, which I understood to mean, at least for the moment, that my schooling was done.
SEDUCED
A tall white male walked into the classroom with papers in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other. He wore typical professor attire—wrinkled khakis, oxford shirt, and tweed blazer—and his hair was gray and flourishing on the sides and in back, enough to comb some of it over a bald spot and to have a ponytail. He sat at his desk, put on a pair of half-rimmed glasses, and began reading names from a list, pausing to look up when someone responded. A dozen students sat before him, most of us black, most of us in our twenties, and all of us academically unfit to be anywhere but there.
I sat in the back row, hoping to go unnoticed as I continued to test the academic waters, tests that so far hadn’t gone very well. I had already failed three classes. They had not been difficult; I’d simply stopped attending after deciding my life’s calling was not architecture or sociology, but rather political cartooning. So I enrolled in a private art school only to discover I could neither afford the tuition nor draw. And now I was back here again, at Loop Community College, bobbing along the curriculum like driftwood. On a whim, I’d signed up for a course in creative writing.
The professor called my name. I raised my hand. He raised his eyebrows. “My dear boy,” he said. “Why on earth are you so far away?” Before I could think of a response he lit his cigarette, exhaling the smoke toward a NO SMOKING sign. He pointed toward an empty desk in the front row. “Come, come. Deposit yourself right here.” As I reluctantly stood, all of the students stared at me and a few of them snickered. I ballooned with embarrassment and considered walking right out the door; only the thought of further humiliation prevented me. But by the time I took my seat, I’d decided to drop the class the next morning. “Much better,” he continued. “After all,” he added, “what’s the point of being a rebel if no one can see you rebelling?”
“Who said I was a rebel?” I asked.
“You did,” he replied, “and that’s the power of the objective correlative, one of a writer’s most important tools. Now, class, imagine this: The story you’re reading opens to a young man sitting along the back wall of his class, with not one but two empty rows in front of him. He’s wearing a black leather biker’s jacket, black pants and shirt, combat boots, and sporting a mustache that curves ever so slightly down the edge of the lips in the perfect mimic of his ever so slight frown. His arms are folded across his chest, and his long, thin legs, stretched into the aisle, are crossed at the ankles. The writer of this story is very skilled, for he has had the protagonist say not one word, not one word, and yet the protagonist has told us he is a rebel, he is a loner, he is iconoclastic, and—most important—he is hiding something.” The professor looked at me and smiled with teeth too perfect to be real. “Now, we don’t yet know what he is hiding, do we? For that, we must read the entire story.”
But he’d already read my entire story, even the parts still unknown to me. “You’ll go far,” he’d soon be telling me, and I would want desperately to see what he saw, this future place where my life turned out well. At the moment, though, all I could see was what was behind me, a wasteland of failures and defeats.
We first shared our respective visions with each other a month into the semester.
He’d taken me to lunch, a fast-food restaurant near the school. As soon as we carried our baskets of hot dogs and fries to the table, he—Edward Homewood—asked me how old I was.
“Twenty-four,” I said.
“How old were you when you dropped out of high school?”
I squinted at him, curious how he knew. I wondered if he’d checked the school’s
records, or if I’d been exposed by my poor grammar. “Sixteen,” I told him, unwilling to say more.
He said it for me. “You were bored shitless with your classes, no doubt, and the streets were more alluring.”
I nodded.
He took a bite of his hot dog. “Tell me more.”
I confessed some of my crimes, literally, starting with the burglary of my high school that accelerated my downward spiral. I told him of other burglaries, of other thefts. I mentioned my addictions and arrests, the violent death of a close friend, the murder conviction of another—laying before him a few of the things he’d told the class I was hiding.
He swept them away. “We’ve all sinned,” he said.
I mentioned one more thing, a bag of groceries I took from an elderly lady, expecting and wanting a moral stoning. Instead, he threw confetti. “What wonderful material you have,” he said, beaming. And then he praised the stories I’d written so far, tales of urban mayhem so autobiographical that as I’d typed them, and even as he cited them now, I cringed with remorse and guilt.
“So,” he asked, “what’s your major?”
I hunched my shoulders, waiting for him to tell me.
“English,” he declared, and then he mentioned the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which I’d never heard of. Nor had I heard of its famous alumni, bestselling and prizewinning authors whose names he pulled from the smoky air. I’d never considered being a writer, but his belief that I could both intrigued and confused me. He intrigued and confused me. Especially when he reached out to touch my hand, patting his fingers lightly against mine. I didn’t know what to make of that.
My girlfriend Erica did. “He’s trying to get into your pants,” she said when I told her. “What do you think all that flattery is for?”
I reminded her that she liked my writing too.
Street Shadows Page 2
