In the Nick of Time

by Laveen, Tiana

  “One of the cops, an older short black guy with salt and pepper hair crossed his arms over his chest and said to me, ‘How old are you?’ I didn’t answer. He asked me again, and I told him, ‘Fourteen.’ That was a lie. I was sixteen, but I knew the younger I came across as, the safer I’d be.”

  Tomas nodded as he listened to the story of yesteryear pour out from between his lips.

  “He told me I was the same kid who’d hit the place a while back with a bunch of other hoodlums, that we had pantyhose over our faces and had gotten back in the stock room, stole a bunch of shit. That wasn’t true, it wasn’t me. I never wore any pantyhose over my head in all my life, but—”

  “You wore Gina’s that one time at the Christmas party.”

  “Oh shut up, man!” Nick burst out laughing. “Anyway, I was scared shittless because he was talking big time stuff, like jail time, getting me real amped up. Then, just like that, I didn’t even care anymore. It was so strange… One second, my heart was pounding, then the next, I could have almost fallen asleep from boredom. I just didn’t care about my life, Tomas… didn’t care at all. So anyway, he grabbed me up and put cuffs on me.”

  “You got your own bracelets, felt like a big shot, right?”

  “Hell, yeah!” Nick smirked. “I felt big about it now, glad in a way that I’d finally been arrested. I’d get my street cred and I’d never been to juvie before. But then he flipped the script on me and ruined everything. He told the other cop he’d handle this, so that just left him and me. When he got me to the police car, right, he pointed in my face and told me he wasn’t taking me to juvie or the police station or letting me go. My heart sank. He said he was taking me home to my mother and he was going to show her the tape of me robbing the back of the store all those weeks ago.”

  “Ohhhh, no!” Tomas laughed lightly as he got good and into the story.

  “Ohhhh, yeah! You can tell a Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn that he’ll have a record, that you’re takin’ him to juvie, but don’t tell him you’re taking him home to Ma!”

  They both cracked up loud and hard, so much so, Nick’s eyes welled with tears.

  Damn… I miss you Ma…

  “He wasn’t bullshitting. Home to your mother…must’ve been worse than Hell.”

  “Oh yeah, home to Ma, man! I cannot even explain to you the fear I had of her seeing me in action like that. Something about it tore me up inside, especially since I knew it wasn’t me and he’d give my mother a heart attack, tell ’er some stuff like that, a bunch of lies. Then I relaxed and realized, ‘Hell, she’d know her own son! I’m being silly, right?! She’ll tell the man.’ So I sat back, real proud of myself, got over it real quick. I wouldn’t give him my address though, but somehow he found out anyway and drove right up.

  “We got there and Mom wasn’t home, right? Some of my friends were standing around, pointing and saluting me as I sat in the back of the police car, acting like I was chilling in the back of a limousine. I figured he’d surely have to take me to juvie then, since she wasn’t home, and everything would be just fine.”

  “She still would have killed you in juvie. The one time I got in trouble in school, man, my mother promised to stomp me to death!” He laughed.

  “No see, this is how I was going to play it. I would be on different turf, not home. She’d feel sorry for me, locked up like that. I’d tell Mom it was some misunderstanding, right? That they had the wrong guy, give her the rundown about how the police think all Hispanic kids look alike.”

  “The race card! Classic!”

  “Right! And a being FOTB,” he said with a shrug, “and having a rough time, she would believe me, I thought. I had it memorized in advance. I got my lies all worked out in my head. I’d even picked out my alibi. I had it all taken care of; the plan was hatched and running free. But my bubble was busted pretty damn fast. That stumpy fucker kept me with him for two hours, man, driving around and doubling back over and over! I couldn’t believe that shit.” He burst out laughing.

  “He was determined… Sounds like you, man…sounds like something you’d do to a kid, Nick.”

  Nick’s lips kinked in a smirk.

  Yeah, I guess it does…

  “Yeah… So, Mom got home, looking real tired. Her long, curly black hair was all flat, like she’d been caught in the rain. Her lipstick wasn’t bright red anymore—like she’d eaten something and worn it off, and her facial complexion seemed oily instead of freshly powdered. She always looked real pretty in the mornings but exhausted when she’d get back home from work. I took no accountability for being one of the reasons why.” He took a deep breath.

  “So we get in the house and the guy asks if she’s got a VCR, right? We had one at that time—someone had gave her the old thing. He put the tape in, pushed play. I sat back on the couch with a smug smile on my face figuring this asshole is going to look real stupid in a minute or two. I figured, you know, like so many other guys, it was a case of mistaken identity.

  “Well, the tape started to play and I recognized my friend Jonathan that I’ve told you about. I got kinda worried at that point, ’cause we all hung together. And then I saw some of my other friends, Judge, Liam and Kool, too. And there I was… with the pantyhose over my fucking head…”

  “Ohhhh, man.” Tomas shook his head. “Busted!”

  “My features were all scrambled up from the damn thing pressing into my nose and lips, like some deranged little monster. I watched myself do the whole thing! One minute, I was standing right there on the fuzzy tape, right outside the back of the store, and then, I pulled the knee-high over my head, Tomas. They got a good, full view of me before I’d done that. There was never a camera right there before. We’d wait for the employees to sneak back there on their smoke break, and someone always left the door unlocked. This time, because of their new security system, they knew who was taking things. But I had told that cop the truth, or I thought I had. That was the really messed up part, Tomas.”

  The man looked at him in confusion.

  “I didn’t remember that shit; it was like watching a movie! It choked me up inside that I didn’t recall it and then, as I looked closer at myself, I realized I must’ve been super drunk.”

  “Nick, you’ve been drinking that long?” He didn’t miss the sadness in his partner’s eyes. It kind of shook him, made him feel a few feet lower than he already did.

  “Longer… started at about ten or eleven.”

  “My God, man…” Tomas closed his eyes briefly and sighed.

  “I wasn’t walking straight, and I was laughing, real goofy. It was the first time I realized that I was drinking so much that I would actually forget total events, black out. It must’ve happened before, and sometimes I’d fall asleep in one place and wake up somewhere else…” He shook his head as he rubbed his hand up and down his knee. “It’s amazing I even still have a functioning liver. As I got older, I got better at covering it up and eventually my tolerance built up, made it all easier. Anyway, my mother was standing there crying by this point, her hand up to her mouth, talking about, ‘¿Cómo me pudiste lastimar de esa manera?’ That means, ‘How could you hurt me like this?’”

  “I know what tha hell it means, man!”

  “Oh, really? You are one of those motherfuckers that’s Latino but doesn’t speak Spanish though!” Nick chortled, teasing the man. “I never hear you say anything in Spanish!”

  “I still don’t need an interpreter! República Dominicana y estoy orgulloso!” (I’m Dominican and proud!)

  Nick nodded, reached across the table, and gave the man a pound.

  “So, she’s going on and on and the cop had his hand on her shoulder, consoling her, like she was at my damn funeral or something. I wanted him to get his hand off my mother. I became enraged, jumped off the couch, lying and screaming at the top of my lungs. That was when she smacked the shit outta me, knocked me to the ground, slapped the wind out of me.”

  Thomas leaned in, engrossed.

  “
Her body shook like she was terrified of her own shadow. All that power in that little woman… all that anger and disappointment. The cop intervened, grabbed her, told her to calm down. A few minutes later, he had me in the kitchen, talking about how I had to change and asking me what I planned to do with my life. All while I rubbed the side of my face with a plastic Ziploc bag full of ice cubes. I was embarrassed, totally humiliated. I could have never predicted I’d be so ashamed because my mother had seen something like that. I knew later on, after she passed away, it was because she was the only person in the whole world who believed in me, deep down, and I’d blown it.”

  That uneasy feeling returned. The one with big scaly legs, uneven claws, and a beak that moved and poked about in his gut.

  “I could keep lying to her and selling her a bill of goods, but now she had proof that I was as bad as she probably thought I was all along. I could see in her face I’d taken her somewhere she couldn’t come back from…”

  In that moment, the memory of his mother’s tears, the way she’d sounded that day seemed amplified as it replayed in his head. Nick ran his fingers along his forehead, trying to run away, to be free of the torment, but she remained, coming out of the woodwork, making her child look at her, once again.

  I’m sorry, Ma! I’m so sorry!

  “To this day, I never forgot how she looked at me that night, man. For a while, she’d just stare at me, her heart broken and her face…her face was the saddest thing I’d seen in my entire life. I did that to her, right? I did it…” He was silent for a while. “That’s when I started to turn my life around. It’s a shame so many other things didn’t stop me.” He paused, ran his thumb nervously over his knuckles as Jonathan’s death seeped back to the forefront.

  Seeing my father in the precinct years later didn’t make me want to show him I was everything he was not, either.

  “Seeing my mother struggle didn’t make me want to be a better person; nothing did. My friends were dying all the time, or in juvie, or strung out. I got the name, ‘Lucky Sticky Fingers’ because I’d never gotten busted up until that point. Alcohol ruined my string of good luck, Tomas, or so I thought.”

  “It wasn’t the alcohol,” Tomas began, his voice cracking, seemingly choked up himself. “It was you and your lack of understanding of yourself, of your worth. Alcohol was just the mode of transportation.”

  “You’re right—that’s what I’ve figured out, what I’ve learned. But I was determined to go to Hell. I’d find a ride; I’d find one all right.”

  He dissected his oppressive world, and one of his best friends in the entire world sat there and helped him re-build it back up, brand new, with a conversation he’d never planned to have. Rather than bloodied, crumbling bricks, these were made of gold and sparkled with the glimmer of new beginnings.

  My partner. My friend. My brother.

  “As I sat in that kitchen with the ice on my jaw, the cop asked me what I was going to do with my life because I was going to end up dead in five years if I didn’t change up my path, go in another direction. I didn’t have an answer. I just wanted him out of my house. I blamed him for a while, for everything that had happened… making my Ma all upset like that. I knew deep down I was the problem, but for a few hours, I just couldn’t face my own music. The lyrics and the beat stunk. Couldn’t dance to it… Anyway, he left, and didn’t take me in.”

  “He cared about you.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t see that at the time. I wanted to beg him to take me to jail, but he just left me with her, having to hear her cry and moan and carry on about how I was hurting her, not living right. And then, she started to blame herself, too. I told her I’d do right, but she’d heard it all before. This time though, I meant it.”

  His heart swelled as he revisited that moment in time, the day he stood there and told his mother he was going to try and be a good son. That had been the first time he hadn’t lied to her in a mighty long while.

  “So, after a few months of trial and error, I started to change and see the world differently. I realized that life was bigger than just where I was from, my hood. Maybe I could live a better life. I started thinking that maybe I could be somebody, you know? I started listening better, instead of just talking. I started reading a lot, too.”

  “Reading stuff like what?”

  “Stuff like books on religion, different philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Time magazine, books about making money and investing, The New York Times, and things like that. I started looking at newspapers, reading articles on world affairs and looked at pictures of stuff going on all over the planet.”

  “That’s what’s up, man.” Tomas nodded in approval.

  “I saw old photos of the Vietnam War, and it was strange, ’cause to me, some of those pictures looked like some of the areas in Brooklyn when I was real little, you know? But then, I thought even harder about it, and said, no, it’s not the same, not anywhere near. No one has a gun to my head like this guy right here… That shit was real. I’d seen guns, I’d seen people get shot, but I was still alive…so what the fuck was I doing, huh?! Pissing my life away. I was still alive; that had to mean something.”

  “Now you were getting it! This is when the Nick I know and love was born!” The man applauded, a big smile on his face.

  “So, I started writing, and thinking and walking places just to get some fresh air and check out the world around me, too—but with different eyes. I began to do things alone, not with my boys. My mother’s tears and disappointment haunted me but washed me clean, too; it was the catalyst. It took a while, but that was the start of my turning point. Age sixteen was a terrible year in my life… but there were some important lessons learned, too. So, I tried and tried, but my grades were still pretty bad. I wasn’t expected to succeed anyway; the odds were stacked against me, but I kept pushing ahead. I got me one of the free tutors at the community center.

  “And then I went to a few teachers, my tail between my legs. Some of them didn’t care about me or the other kids, either, but others listened, realized I was for real. I told them my situation, that I wanted to do better in school because without a high school diploma, I wasn’t going to end up anywhere. I told them I needed help with my studies.”

  “And that’s when you met your mentor you told me about, right?”

  “Right. Frederic was from the Boys and Girls Club. One of the teachers I had went to set me up with him. She didn’t tell me she’d done it, but she did, and that made me feel good, because that meant somewhere inside of her, she cared about me, too. Anyway, he had been assigned to me, basically. I was labeled an ‘at risk youth’ after I told the teacher of my hardships, but it worked to my advantage and hell, there was no point in me being mad about that.” He shrugged. “It was true. I was an at-risk youth. Gotta call a spade a spade.”

  Tomas nodded in agreement.

  “So anyway, he started taking me places, like the movies. I had never been to a movie that I had paid for.”

  They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “It’s true…bad, I know. This time, we walked through the front doors, got a big bucket of popcorn, and he let me get like four or five types of candy. I’d never had anyone do anything like that for me—actually take me out somewhere, and treat me like that. Ma did sometimes; she’d take me out to dinner but she had to be careful with the money. She couldn’t waste it on soda and candy. So anyway, I remember it real well, you know, being with Frederic.”

  “It’s funny how something so simple makes our world change, you know?” Tomas leaned back in his seat, looking reflective. “Things we now take for granted.”

  “True. You would’ve thought I was meeting the actors in real life or something, the way I was grinning so big and carrying on.” He laughed as he slipped further into the sentimental recollection. “… And fizzy juice, I had one of those.” He snapped his fingers trying to recall the name. “Those ice cups with all the sugar and dye in them.”

  “Slushie.�
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  “Yeah! That’s it! I sat there in the row of seats next to him and asked to keep the ticket stub. What kinda soft ass shit is that? Keeping ticket stubs… so corny.” He grinned. “It was amazing to me.”

  “We started playing baseball and basketball and doing things together after that. He was only a few years older than me, but he seemed so much older than that. He was so smart, man. A college student, had his shit together. I wanted to be like this guy! He was the first man I stood next to and actually really thought, ‘This is who I need to try and be like. This is the guy that I need to follow.’ He couldn’t get rid of me, and he didn’t try to. He was like a big brother I no longer had but always wanted. I used to imagine Marco, my brother that had passed away, would’ve been like him had he had the chance to live and grow up… Anyway, he helped me with homework sometimes, too, and with his help and the tutor, my grades improved.”

  “You were on the road to recovery. I like this, man. This is good.”

  “Ma seemed to start forgiving me, believing in me again. That was my payment, my reward.” He looked sadly at the worn stack of magazines that someone had deserted on a nearby table. It seemed the facility was riddled with leftover books and periodicals placed here, there, everywhere.

  I wonder if there is a Time magazine in there somewhere…

  “One day Frederic asked me what I was going to do after high school graduation, job wise, and I honestly had no idea. I told him I wanted to help at risk kids like me. Not just kids, but everyone, actually. I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher—the idea of being trapped in a building all day behind a desk didn’t appeal to me. I had no idea what type of job I’d be good at, what I should go for. I told him if I didn’t find something to do, I’d fall back into the same stuff I was doing beforehand. It was just too easy.”

  “It’s a set-up, man.” Tomas bobbed his head as if listening to music. “Why’s it so easy to do wrong and so hard to do right for the youth? Hell, for everybody, really. By the time we get to people, they’ve been messing up for a while. What about before that, you know? Before the shit turns into a habit? The streets call kids with no guidance. We’re like surrogate parents half the time.”