Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  “It’s my job to be supportive. I’m your girlfriend.”

  “He’s my professor.”

  “He’s your gay professor who touched you.”

  But the act of writing had touched me as well. Since the first class assignment, I’d been doing it every day, cranking out stories and essays as quickly as I could type them. Each one that failed hit me hard; the successes made me high. But I’d sober up quickly and go at it again.

  And to think of how many drugs I’d used, so much deadly experimentation, when this, all along, was what I’d been searching for.

  I now realized I’d been searching for Professor Homewood too, a teacher who would tell me, as so many other teachers had before him, that I would go far. I didn’t care if he said it while his hand was on mine. And I didn’t care that many of the books he gave me had homosexual themes. Some of them were so ancient that mold had eaten away the edges, but usually they were brand-new hardbacks, the receipts wedged between uncracked spines. He never wanted them back, and soon they began to cover my desk at home, a monument, Erica insisted, to his true intentions. But I chose to see the books as merely a way to broaden my horizon, Professor Homewood’s attempt to offer me a glimpse into his culture.

  “So why is he always hugging on you?” Erica asked when I offered this explanation. They’d met a few times by then at college functions. “I mean, what’s that all about?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “He’s affectionate. So what?”

  She shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

  I went back to my book. Erica took it from me and read the title. “The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysos.” She tossed it onto my lap and left the room.

  A month later, I decided not to tell her when he touched my knee. “As soon as I finished reading your first story,” he was saying at the time, “I thought I must get this boy to Iowa City.” So far he had only gotten me to his couch. It was my first time at his condo, a plant- and book-cluttered two-bedroom unit on Chicago’s North Shore. He patted my knee and I thought of Erica’s warning that he’d ply me with liquor and try to seduce me. I’d just finished my third glass of scotch. He reached for the bottle and poured me more.

  We drank for another hour, talking about my stories, the classics he wanted me to study, writing exercises I should do. He laid out a two-year plan of courses for me to take at Loop College and told me the names of teachers to seek or to avoid. By 1:00 AM, when I rose to leave, my academic path to Iowa City had been charted. As we stood at his door, he ignored my attempt to shake his hand and hugged me. His lips pressed against my check, and I noted the peculiar sensation of stubble brushing stubble. I turned and, more than a little tipsy, staggered a few steps down the hall, stopping at the elevator whose doors were already opened. Before entering them, I turned around.

  “Professor Homewood?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you really think I can make it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Unequivocally,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  As I made my way home, I thought of the teachers at my high school who had tried to elicit that response from me, and I wondered how different my life would have turned out if I could have given it. And I remembered how opposed I’d been to attending the elite college preparatory school my elementary teachers had urged me to, how I’d pleaded with my parents not to make me go. Fear of opportunity is a terrible thing. But regret is worse.

  “I’m leaving,” I told Erica when I got home. “I’m moving to Iowa City to finish my degree in two years.” I’d been considering the idea for a while, since Professor Homewood had raised the possibility, but this was my first mention of it. Perhaps that moment was not the best. I was on my knees on the bathroom floor, having just emptied my stomach in the toilet. Erica helped me to my feet. We walked to the bedroom in silence. I collapsed onto the mattress, still clothed. She stood at the foot of the bed now, untying one of my shoes. “Come with me,” I said. We’d been together for two years by then, since 1987. We’d lived together for one. There’d been talk of marriage and children. But she had a good job as a nurse and was about to start graduate school. All of her family was in the area. “Will you come?” I asked. She still didn’t respond. But when she folded her arms across her chest and looked away, I had my answer. The power of the objective correlative.

  We had been driving for only four hours, but the cornstalks we passed might as well have risen from a field in Rome. I stared out the passenger window, dumbfounded by the expanse of earth, the vastness of the horizon, and for the first time realized how small my life had been. I could feel myself shrinking.

  A short while later the size of the campus, innumerable buildings scattered over acres and acres of land, shrank me some more. An hour into the tour, Professor Homewood parked the car and we traversed the center of town on foot, browsing through the public library, resting on benches while children splashed in a fountain nearby, eating a late lunch in my first Thai restaurant. We stopped at a bookstore called Prairie Lights where he bought me a copy of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, writing inside the front cover, “On the occasion of the first visit to the heartlands, Iowa City, 1990.” Then we went to the Writers’ Workshop office. It was late in the afternoon on a Friday, and only the secretary, Deb West, was still there. That didn’t matter. Professor Homewood, standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders, marched me forward until my thighs pressed against her desk. “This,” he said, “is Jerry Walker. He’ll be transferring here in a few months to complete his undergraduate degree. After that, he’ll be applying to the Workshop.” Awkward smiles all around.

  And then a quick stop at the admissions office, where I picked up a transfer application and a stack of brochures. Next we went to the campus bookstore. Professor Homewood headed straight to a display table covered with a mound of sweatshirts. He held one up in front of me, nodded approvingly at the Hawkeye mascot, and then tucked it under his arm as we got in line.

  In the car he asked, “So, what do you think of it all?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, not wanting to sound too excited. “Yes, I can definitely see myself here.”

  It was dark by then, the sun having recently set in the early-August sky. We were headed to spend the night at the house of his friend, a woman he’d attended The University of Iowa with in the 1950s. I turned on the light above me so I could look at the brochures, marveling at all the course offerings, the endless extracurricular activities, the sports teams, and then coming to a halt when I reached the out-of-state tuition. I ran the enormous numbers over in my head, moving them around, squeezing them, trying to make them shrink along with me. They wouldn’t. Behind me, my dream receded with the campus.

  I must have sighed or cursed; Professor Homewood asked me what was wrong. “Tuition’s pretty steep,” I mumbled, not expecting that he would offer to help me pay it. I was speechless when he did. And yet, somehow, I was also not surprised. For the rest of the ride, I sat quietly thinking of all that he had done for me, wondering how I could ever repay him.

  By the time we reached his friend’s house, we were in a celebratory mood. We sat in her country-style kitchen drinking heavily until 2:00 AM. When ten seconds couldn’t pass without someone yawning, we knew it was time to turn in. Professor Homewood and I grabbed the bags that we’d parked by the door and followed our hostess up the stairs of her two-story bungalow. She pointed out the bathroom as we passed it before gesturing to an open door on her left. Wishing us good night, she headed back the way we had come.

  Professor Homewood and I started to walk into the room, but I stopped when I saw what was before me—one bed. For an instant, my old fear and self-doubt manifested itself in a single terrible thought: Erica had been right all along. Getting me interested in writing, constantly praising my academic abilities, was just a part of Professor Homewood’s el
aborate ploy to lead me to this city, to this room, to this bed. I didn’t have what it took to be at a major university. I’d never be a writer.

  “Perhaps one of us should sleep on the couch,” he said.

  I was still standing by the door, I realized, my mouth open. Professor Homewood had realized it too. He looked wounded, like a man falsely accused of lying. I walked in and sat my backpack near one of the pillows. “That’s not necessary,” I said.

  “I don’t mind taking the couch.”

  “This is fine.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I said, “Unequivocally.”

  We exchanged smiles. He carried his bag to the bathroom. I undressed and put on my pajamas. A moment later he returned wearing something out of Dickens, a long white nightgown that fell to his ankles, and a matching nightcap. I went to brush my teeth. His teeth, I saw, were in a cup of blue liquid on the vanity. When I returned to the room, he was already in bed, thumbing through one of the brochures, but he placed it and his glasses on the nightstand when he saw me. I turned off the light switch by the door and then lay next to him. A brief conversation about a book he was reading ended midsentence when, after a short silence, his snore filled the room. I closed my eyes, but I could not sleep. I lay there imagining myself still on the university’s campus, and then I thought of Professor Homewood, and all of my teachers before him, who had finally gotten me there.

  THE LAKE OF FIRE

  Tim drove my fourteen-year-old twin and me around the block with the windows down and the heater blasting to help get rid of the smell of marijuana. When Tim, Jimmy, and I pulled up in front of our house, our parents were coming down the porch steps with our baby brother, André, and our oldest brother, Tommy, but only one of our sisters, Linda, because Mary was away at college. After they piled in with us, we headed off to church.

  We were greeted at the door by Mr. Paulson, our middle-aged minister whose short Afro stood in defiance of a big-Afro world. We didn’t make fun of him, though, because he was already an object of pity; it was rumored that his ten-year-old daughter had lost her mind as soon as she learned that she and her mother were being forced to leave town.

  The Prophet would say that the children’s mental instability was due to their mixed blood. God strictly forbade interracial marriage because, according to the Prophet, himself a white male, it weakened the superior white race and it did the inferior ones no favors. He preached that we should marry our own kind, even within our own kind: redheads should marry redheads, light-skinned blacks should marry light-skinned blacks, midgets should marry midgets. And people of mixed race should of course marry each other, thereby making the best of a bad situation.

  If Mr. Paulson and his white wife had researched the doctrine of the church, they might not have been so interested in joining. That was probably true of most of the people who, like my parents, had been sucked into the whirlwind of the Prophet’s charisma, which Mr. and Mrs. Paulson first experienced one Saturday morning as they sat listening to their radio. They noted the frequency of the station, as well as the time of day, and then they tuned in regularly for two months until there was no doubt in their minds that this was the word of God. After contacting the church and inquiring about joining, they were interviewed by three deacons who were sent to their home. The deacons congratulated the Paulsons for being chosen, gave them brochures, reviewed the church’s overall philosophy, prayed with them, read scriptures with them, and then explained that, unless they separated soon, the entire family would burn in the lake of fire.

  She took the daughter. He took the son. Now heaven, they were promised, would take them all.

  After he became a minister, the lake of fire became Mr. Paulson’s signature theme, slipped in at least once during each of his sermons, as it was that morning I sat there stoned. I tried to ignore his vivid description of my fate by drawing pictures on my notepad and handing them to my seventeen-year-old sister. The latest one was of a robot that I’d surrounded with musical notes. Linda wrote “Dancing Machine” beneath it before handing it back. I drew another one, this time of Bozo crying. “Tears of a Clown,” Linda wrote. As I tried to think of something more difficult to draw, I heard the minister boom, “And he who hath not been redeemed shall burn in the lake of fire!” I closed my eyes and promised God I’d never get high again.

  After church we climbed back into our station wagon and headed home. Once there, we spent the next several hours sitting around waiting for the Sabbath to end at sundown so we could watch TV, or listen to the radio, or maybe drive to the projects to visit Aunt Bernice and our cousins. These were the cousins, I’d learn later, who had recently introduced Tim to marijuana, after which Tim introduced it to my twin and me. As soon as the Sabbath ended, we went to smoke some more.

  STRANGE FRUIT

  Leaving Erica wasn’t easy. She was the first steady girlfriend I’d had in over a year, since I’d stopped using drugs. I understood that there was a correlation there; all of the eligible women I knew still got high, if only on a little pot now and then. But I’d quit it all, focusing instead on my new life as a person who could function in society without narcotics in his veins. I was taking college classes at Loop; I was making sober, law-abiding friends; I was paying my bills on time. But I could not get a girlfriend to save my life. The closest I’d come was Rita, one of the nurses at the medical center, with whom I had become good friends. But Rita was a married mother of four, so there were some limitations there. She was also white, and that posed a problem as well: I refused to date outside my race.

  “That’s stupid,” Rita had said the first time I’d expressed this view. For the longest while she’d been trying to set me up with one of her white nurse colleagues. She wasn’t trying to promote racial integration; there simply weren’t many black nurses at the medical center, and the precious few there were probably wouldn’t have dated a nonprofessional if he were the last brother on earth. Based on my observations, and on the rumor mill, the white nurses seemed to have shown some flexibility in this regard. “You mean to tell me,” Rita continued, “that you won’t date someone because of the color of her skin, just because she’s white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not attracted to white women.”

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “No, it’s true,” I insisted. But she knew I was lying. I’d told her many times I was attracted to her. The fact of the matter was I didn’t want to be that stereotypical black man with the white girlfriend, the kind you see holding some bleached-blonde’s hand and suspect harbors deep-rooted hatreds for his own race.

  Like my friend Dale, for instance, who worked at the medical center too. Dale was into Chinese and Filipinas, and in a pinch he’d go for Puerto Ricans, but his obsession was white women, the finest and fairest, he’d told me, of them all. Every time I saw him he seemed to have a different one on his arm, and while his betrayal saddened me, I admitted to a certain envy of his success. I made the mistake once of asking him his secret. “It’s all about the penis,” he’d said. He leaned back in his chair, looking very pleased, like he’d just revealed his new six-figure salary. “I just make sexual comments, you know, play up the wild-Zulu-warrior-of-the-jungle thing. From then on, it’s like picking fruit off a tree. You should try it.”

  Had I wanted to take his advice, there was a great deal of fruit at my disposal. I was a “floater unit clerk,” meaning I circulated among the wards from day to day, so I literally had hundreds of white nurses from whom to choose. It was to my advantage, too, that I was on friendly terms with many of them; sometimes we even ate our bag lunches together in the staff lounges. I knew, for instance, who was interested in sports, who was single, who was sleeping with which intern, and who, at any given moment, suffered from bloating and cramps. All of these topics had come up in various conversations, but the subject of my penis had never been broached, and I had no intention of broaching it.

  And then I d
id an uncharacteristic thing, motivated, no doubt, by a bad seed Dale had planted in my subconscious. I was in a staff lounge—along with five white nurses, all of us in our early twenties—when the conversation turned to sex, as it sometimes had in the past. I don’t recall exactly what precipitated my comment, only that it seemed the natural lead-in for me to interject, “Well, ladies, you know what they say about black men.” The room filled with laughter, which lasted for several long seconds, as did the heat radiating off my cheeks.

  “Pick the fruit,” Dale urged me when I relayed this incident. “Pick the fruit right now.” We were on the North Side, shopping for clothes that he said would aid me in my pursuit of female companionship. This was the ultra-cool part of Chicago, the epicenter of chic where open-air cafés ruled the strip and some of the restaurants had throw pillows instead of chairs. Almost everyone we passed was dressed head-to-toe in black—even though it was the height of summer—and soon I would be too. The bags I carried were filled with black pants, shirts, socks, and a pair of black shoes with soles so thick that they were disturbingly similar to the stacks I’d worn in the 1970s. I’d even bought a black leather biker’s jacket, complete with half a dozen zippers and snaps, though Dale said I should wear it sparingly so as not to be typecast. Being typecast, he’d said before we went shopping, was my problem. “You always dress like a dork,” he’d told me. I did not dispute this; dressing like a dork had been my goal. I was trying to blend in with all the other dorks around me, interns and medical students who never strayed from their oxford shirts and wrinkle-free khakis that fell far short of their penny loafers. My hope was to disguise the fact that I had been raised in the ghetto. Dale, who’d been raised in the ghetto too, insisted that the best disguise of all was a white girlfriend. An artsy outfit was a close second.

  “I don’t like it,” Rita said when she saw my new look.

  “Why not?”