Well, since we’re close, she says, let’s start with the school.
Mom’s old high school is my old high school. She tells me in her day everyone she knew wanted to go there. That the ones her age, whose older brother or cousin or sister took them to visit the campus, would come back bragging of cool kids who were swaggered outside the gym, or by the bricked front entry, or near the bleachers by the track. Mom says when she went there (like when I did), the school was known for what happened in its back halls, for throwing the livest school dances, for basketball and football and track teams that were always among the best, for being the school every year that entered a black princess in the Rose Festival courts.
Let’s see, she says. Where should we go?
I’m thinking we should roll by where ya’ll used to kick it, I say. Where ya’ll went when it was time to shake a leg.
Mom titters, tells me she never snuck in the clubs before her time, not because she didn’t want to, but because she never had a fake ID nor looked old enough to not need one. But my friends though, she says, now they were a whole other story. She says they’d steal or borrow ID, hit a hot spot all dolled up, tell her to hold tight, and leave her iced in a car for hours while the partied. That’s exactly why when I turned twenty-one, I was everywhere, Mom says. All the trendy spots in Northeast and North, the one or two in Southeast, even the ones in the boonies: Earthquake Ethel’s, Turquoise Room, The Cattle Yard. I’d waited too long, she says. No one was going to stop me from having my time.
We cruise down Williams and stop outside the building that used to be a bar and lounge. Mom says this was where you went after a day at the beauty shop, where you’d go when you wanted to flash a new dress or jewels. She tells me the owner wore a uniform: a sailor cap, double-breasted big-buttoned blue sport coat, and wing tips polished to mirrors. He’d tip his cap and flash a smile, Mom says, that made you feel like you were the star.
We cruise by what was The Social Club and Mom tells me to stop. Now this right here was it, she says, and goes on about how The Social Club was also the afterhours, the place where old men knocked dice to wee hours in a smoky back room, where they served the stiffest drinks you could find, where you could order a burger big as a dinner plate stuffed with sausage, eggs, and whatever else they had in the kitchen. They never had music or a dance floor, Mom says. But my oh my it always boomed with grown folks having the time of their natural born lives.
The Social Club’s on the same block as the building that used to be Rose City Auto Repair. Mom says the owner (a freckled Creole named Mr. Black who wore clean coveralls with his name patched on his chest) must’ve fixed every knock and ping in Northeast. She says old man Black could keep your Chrysler or Buick or Ford running well past when your mileage turned over. Says he was loved for giving free car washes to customers and always quoting a fair price. And if he knew your people, Mom says, he might let you work out payments.
We ride by what used to be Burger Barn. Gosh, you sure did love them burgers, Mom says. Just couldn’t get enough of them burgers but everybody else was stuck on the chicken baskets. Them and the desserts. Mom says half the folks she knew would’ve pawned an arm for even a teaspoon of their banana pudding or peach cobbler, for the thinnest slice of their sweet potato pie. She tells me twins (who pimped on the side and would let their prostitutes rest in back booths between shifts) ran the restaurant day to day, but that the hoes were only there on weeknights since the after-church crowd ruled the weekends.
Figures, I say. You know how the Christians love their after-church grub.
Those were the days, Mom says. Those were the times. She tells me we should ride by the mall, that if it’s about her day then we have to. We wheel down MLK to Weidler where I pull into the underground parking, see mall security patrolling in a jeep, an old couple strolling for an entrance, wild kids rollerblading between parked cars. Remember those Saturdays after I got paid that we’d come and make a day of it? Mom says. That was everything. I’d shop all my favorite stores for clothes and shoes, then swing by the discount shop to check the ninety-nine cent specials. Mom admits that, while we thought a treat, the times she sent us to the ice rink were times she didn’t feel like being bothered. But least ya’ll got some junk out the deal, she says, and reminds me how we never left the mall without a trip to the Candy Shack and a blessing of our pick of cotton candy or an XL box of caramel corn or an XL box of caramel and cheese corn mixed or a just-the-right-ripe caramel apple.
We take Seventh Ave up from the mall—past Broadway, Siskiyou, Knott, Monroe. Mom points at Irving Park and I circle an island and pull near the day care center across the street. Nothing doing on the courts but dudes playing a scrap-game of one-on-one. Talk about summers, she says. Me and my girls couldn’t wait for the sun. Couldn’t wait to put on high cut shorts, stroll up here, and make an afternoon of parading around the fields and courts, while the guys huffed and sweat through games. We’d traipse till our legs hurt then make our way to the street, where there was never a shortage of highsighting guys sitting on their hood or trunk with their eight-track blaring a Motown hit.
We (Mom and me) have been how long out? Neither one of us have checked to see. She asks what I have planned for Kim.
Oaks Park, I say. Gone hit the rink.
Oooh, skate night, she says. Now that should be fun.
It should, I say. You wanna roll?
With these knees? No, you two enjoy. Enjoy yourselves just you two. You need that sometime. Mom turns to me and flashes a seismic smile. Soooo, what about you? How about you show me a spot or two?
What comes to mind first is MLK: the used car lots, the liquor store, the barbershops, the beauty supply, the car washes, Albina Bank, the precinct, the Job Corps office, the gas stations that sold that cut-rate low-octane ethanol shit that gave my ride the coughs.
Can’t let you off that easy, Mom says. Lets see them. Let’s go.
The first spot of mine we hit is the hand carwash on MLK. This is where, soon as there was a inkling of heat, the hustlers would gather with their old-schools: chameleon-painted Mustangs, Monte Carlo Super Sports, ’64 Impalas tricked with dual exhausts, El Caminos customed with trunks of big-ass woofers. You’d see the carwash packed with flossy rides, with dudes cooling against a fender or craned by the ear of a blushing young broad. What I don’t tell Mom is how I’d sputter by in my hooptie (a Buick Regal with a faulty alternator) and dream of being among the go-getters, of being posted beside a late-model four-door on pristine five-stars swathed in low-profile meat—how I longed to seize a place in the life.
I cruise a couple blocks up to Quickies, the brick convenient store where, after a long day of park balling, me and my hoop patnas would slog to (T-shirts drenched and feet on hell in high tops) intent on copping a sports drink or juice, and if we had the loot, a hot link or jo-jos or a flaky bean burrito. We’d hit the store and either tramp back to the park for the close-to-sunset runs or trek back home to wash our sweaty nut sacks. Then around the time I hit my growth spurt, about the time the old heads started letting me ball on the main court, niggers caught in that red and blue strife were turning Quickies’ lot into the Wild Wild West. Got to the point where you’d bop out carrying your half guzzled drink and sack of JoJos and get caught in ballistic funk. Quickies is where one of my homeboys from grade school got shot in the chest and lived, where the brother of a JV teammate got shot in the neck and died.
Where do we end up?
Where could we end up but the corner of Sixth and Mason.
I park across from the house and for a time the both of us sit quiet and gaze. The light is dying behind the clouds. Whatever was left of the season’s heat has been sucked out the air. We get out and walk to the fence. They’ve got the lawn cut and the porch painted, a new screen door. What I think of about then is this, I say, and sweep my arm.
Mom nods. She nods and smirks. Tell me what you remember most, she says.
When Mama Liza would keep us hostage for hours o
f prayer and devotion. Stealthing into Bubba’s fruit stash for a kiwi, plum, or mango. Oh yeah, and remember the year you bought me that rolltop desk and encyclopedia set? I say. The one I talked my boys into playing school all summer?
Yes, I do. Yes, I do, she says.
Mom, have you ever thought? I say. Sometimes I think, I say, how we spend all this time looking further and further, when what we need was behind us all along?
Yes, Champ, she says. It would be nice, it would, if we were all at some point sprinkled with light.
Mom asks how often I come by the old house.
That’s a good question, I say. Not that often and often, I say. Or whenever I feel the need.
* * *
Skate night. We (my girl and me) swank in late with our arms looped. Ain’t been in here in a hot minute, but ain’t much changed. Walls wood-paneled, raggedy carpet, a glass case filled with old skates and trophies, lockers with the paint rubbed to patterns. And it’s dim in here too, disco dim with a light machine playing colored swirls across the rink. We find a seat in the lobby and I help Kim pull off her boots and carry them to the counter, do that and ask the counter girl for new skates for my girl if they have them cause I should. You shouldn’t have, Kim says, and slips on the new wheels. She gets to her feet and scissors her stilts apart this way, then that. Then who walks in but this funnstyle super-skate dude who’s been a mainstay at the rink since my old summer program was coming here on field trips. He lopes in dressed in a field jacket and fatigue pants and carrying a metal box. He finds a seat close by and lifts a pair of calf-tall skates (black leather joints with zebra laces and neon rubber wheels) and small can out the box, drips oil on his axles, and gives each wheel a spin. He swanks on his custom skates, ties the zebra ropes in intricate-ass bows, locks his combat gear away, and rushes onto the floor.
That man means business, she says.
Can’t mean no more business than that, I say.
We laugh, and there isn’t anything in our laughs but truth.
Tonight the rink’s crackin; I’m talking a fusillade of couples, cliques, one or two drowsing in solo-dolo, a few dudes I balled against in grade school, a trio of chicks in flourescent leggings—one of whom I smashed too recent for me to be blithe about it. The chick gives me the eye, gives Kim the eye, and she’s modest about the shit like none, a sign hard to ignore but I hope my girl ain’t peeped it.
You know her? Kim says.
Yes and no, I say.
And that means? she says.
In passing, I say. Why, cause she’s mugging us? That ain’t nothing but hate.
Hate on who for what? Kim says.
Cause look at you, I say. Look at us.
Alright, Champ, she says. Whatever you say.
I slip on my skates and lock away our stuff. The next song muddles over the speakers. Slow-mo skaters lap the rink. Kim stands and pirouettes and faces me. What a great idea, Babe, she says. Why can’t we do stuff like this all the time? She puts out her hand and says, Come, let’s show them how to do it.
I tell her to give me a sec, but only so I can watch her make the rink alone. What’s better than watching your girl swoon through a crowd under strobes. Oneiric is right, damn near everywhere we go, my girl’s the girl, that dark skin, eyes always one color and then another, legs you could climb to heights. I love, love it. Love being out with her. No lie, when we’re out my nuts swell up from seeing (as long as that shit don’t approach disrespect) mortal niggers awed.
The DJ calls couple skate and plays a slow jam. Here comes Kim gliding off the floor, her hair floating behind her. Babe, come, she says, reaching out. Get up, will you.
Now? I say.
Yes! she says, and tugs me off the bench and onto the floor. We catch each other hand in tender hand and lock a tandem stride for laps. The DJ mixes one slow song into the next. The chick I hit rides by snickering with her bright-clothed crew. Superskate flies by in a backwards scrawl and nudges me into a stumble. My girl grips me tight, keeps me steady.
Look at us, she says.
Right, I say. Look.
Chapter 9
That I’ve been searching for the same things ever since.
—Grace
It’s like lightning, like love, like the cure. And if you haven’t felt it you can’t judge—or at least shouldn’t. If you haven’t felt it, how could you ever really know what us addicts, us experts, are up against in this life of programs and counselors and sponsors, what we face because of or in spite of our earned expertise? Ask, and if any one of us is telling the truth we’ll admit that our kind of lying is like a religion.
This is why they say no one does this alone. Why they say once an addict equals always one. Why they say your program membership should be lifelong. Why they mandate ninety meetings your first ninety days. It’s tough to guess how many are here except to say that it’s more maybe than expected and never enough as it should be. Up front a new group leader—he’s a shaggy redhead with freckled arms—sits on a table and sips a steaming mug. He raises a hand and waits until the gabbing stops, until the members scrape their chairs into place; he waits and clears his throat and sets aside his drink and stands.
Hello, I’m an addict and my name is Randy, he says. Welcome to the Learning to Live chapter of Narcotics Anonymous. I’d like to open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict who still suffers. This settles us. Randy hops off the table and pads near a portable chalkboard.
Is there anyone attending their first meeting? he says. If so, welcome. You are the most important people here. All we ask is that everyone present follow one law: Never attend a meeting with drugs or paraphernalia on your person. If you’re carrying, please take it outside and leave it and we’ll welcome you back. This protects our meeting place and the NA fellowship as a whole. Randy moves near the first row of seats. He’s short and soft, a mix that usually gives grown men a complex, but somehow commanding. You have to make five years or more to lead a group, which means for us—or at least those of us know who’ve been in this place, those who’ve tried and failed, who’ve quit and joined—Randy is an apostle. If you’ve used today, please seek out a fellow member at the break or after the meeting, he says. It costs nothing to belong. You are a member when you say you are.
As is my habit, I scan the shoes of the members in my row—it ain’t a clean pair among them—then off to my sides. My neighbor’s arm is sprent with needle pricks, his thumbnail discolored. No way to justify this life, my life, but slamming a needle is a whole other harm. Randy leads us in the we version of the Serenity Prayer: God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
We finish and members volunteer—everyone’s always so eager to submit—to read from the basic text.
Who is an addict?
What is the program?
Why are we here?
How does it work?
The twelve traditions.
The meetings begin the same. So goes a theory of resurrection.
An addict, any addict, can stop using, lose the desire to use, and learn a new way of life, they say.
They say and they say and it sounds so easy, as if living clean is no more than hitting the right switch, as if it takes something less than heroics to face history dead-on, to accept the life we’ve earned. The meetings are meant to be havens, but not everyone comes for safety. Last week. I wasn’t but few blocks away last meeting when this guy approached me—breath smelling like the worst breath—claiming he had what I need. I’d seen him in the meeting, reciting the steps, even stuffing money in the seventh principle basket, seen him running his glazed eyes up and down the rows. No, I think I got what you need, I said, and offered him a handful of mints.
We make fearless and searching inventories.
Hello, I’m an addict and my name is Mark. My drug of choice is meth. I used to deal it, then, bam, my first hit. Couldn’t breathe without the shit after th
at. Every day spent chasing the next score. The next hit and nothing else. Up for a friggin week straight sometimes, getting high, no food, a sip of water when I remembered. A real addict too. Would piss myself if the dope wasn’t finished and a trip to the bathroom meant missing a hit. It wasn’t long before people I’d known all my life turned their heads when they saw me coming, seen someone resembling the old me, with the way, on a good run, I’d shrink down to a percent of myself, skin with a few sharp sticks inside. Got so bad I couldn’t friggin stand to walk past a mirror. The dope dropped me so low that I broke in my mom’s place and stole her wedding ring. Worthless man, no other way to put it. Scum who didn’t deserve to live.
We make fearless and searching inventories and tell the fearful to keep coming back. Keep coming back and it works. We can stand up and testify when we so choose. But what would I tell them? That the first time I took my eldest. That Dawn, my best friend, promised I’d feel better and forget. That I’ve been waiting for that to happen ever since. Though when we tell our story, a bit of our trouble becomes another’s, there will be no fearless and searching inventory for me. Not today. My business is my business until it isn’t.
Randy announces Cleaniversaries, and awardees stroll up to accept their tags. It makes me think of the time I earned a tag, years ago, my first stint in NA. Was proud of it too, but not proud enough to show it. Too afraid of what people might think, or, worse, what they might say. The awardees palm their foil-scripted color tags and stroll back to their seats while the rest of us boom our hands together. Honest, it makes me jealous seeing them. Makes me anxious for my time to come. And when it arrives this time, who cares who sees? When it comes this time, let them all see.
We pass around the seventh-principle basket. We search for something to give, singles mostly, a few fives and tens, an odd twenty. I scrounge for dollars, the best I can do. We read up to the twelfth tradition, the first one I learned by heart: Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.
The Residue Years Page 6
