It took a while for me to hear the groundskeeper yellin’ for me to turn around and come back. Once I did hear him, I turnt and seen the hazard tape behind me. I had gone out too far. I started to walk back, but dude was yelling at me like I had stole somethin’. I didn’t want the teachers to hear him and go and tell the security or whoever handed out the punishment. I started to run back toward the groundskeeper and the school, and then my foot hit a weak spot in the turf and I stumbled and came to an even weaker spot of soil and then I straight ate it, fell feet- and face-first, which idn’t even possible, but fuck physics cuz I went head over heels and heels over head and then, just when I was finna touch turf and get my spine realigned, the ground fell in right in front of me. The soil gave way where I plunged with it. I scrambled against the sinkage and kept sinking, and that’s when I panicked and it got worse. I screamed for help.
My eyes was closed with fear, cuz I was unaware that the groundskeeper had dove in after me. It’s one thing to talk all this yang ’bout folks leaving off they differences to help each other, it’s another to get saved by your friendly O.G. big homie groundskeeper inside a bottomless trash dump. A strong hand clutched my ankle, seizing me in place. My fall suddenly stopped. The hand pulled me upward, against the suction syndrome of all that shit. Then O.G.’s hand let go my ankle, but I could feel the force of the man’s whole body like a great human plunger parting sewage and slime to get to me. He grabbed me again and yanked me clean out the muck.
I ended up lying on my back in the dirt looking up at dude. I brushed some landfill out my eyes and stared at him. He was twice my size.
“You hit one of them cocksuckin’ sinkholes,” he grumbled. He took off his mask, bent down, put his hands on his knees, and gasped for good air. “This ground is liable to give way any time. You’re lucky you only fell a little ways. It’s levels to this shit. These weak spots go way, way down where no one can save you.”
I got up and dusted myself off, which only took a moment. I was surprisingly clean somehow.
“Y’all kids don’t listen, don’t read, don’t see,” my savior went on. “Are you out to lunch or what, boy? The boundary line’s where it is for a good reason.”
*
What was that reason exactly? That night in bed I couldn’t stop my muscles from quaking or my mind from shaking out all the reasons, all the possibilities. It was levels to the island, danger zones if you stepped on the wrong spot. I knew what Daddy had told me about the island, that it wadn’t no treasure. I knew yellow tape meant the same thing there that it did in Oakland, a place not to trespass. Back in science class in regular school in Rockwood, where they taught us things that took a brain to understand, I had learnt that the half-lives of radioactive materials lasted for about forever. Wadn’t none of that shit from the 1940s dead. It wouldn’t die for thousands of years. But I might.
The hood fireworks that rumbled all night all spring and summer and sometimes winter, too, trembled my room and shook my nerves. I knew especially after I went and wandered too far on the island that I was probably about a half step away from real jail. The island was a warning. It was more’n a warning, it was some toxic shit that could kill me. But if this is how they scared jokers straight in the free world, what kinda wild shit did they expose you to incarcerated?
I was already twitchy and kinda traumatized from my fall. I tried to put my fear of what I fell into outta my mind and think about other things, like girls, but not even jackin’ off worked to calm me. Wadn’t no girl fine enough to rid me of the fear of death. In the bathroom, I ran my hands over my head, my face, my chest, my ribs, my legs. Everything seemed OK at first, then I noticed one thing wadn’t quite right: my hairline had shifted on my scalp. When I ran my hands along my head, the symmetry that had had barbers praising me from birth, complimenting Momma on her boy’s bad hair, was gone. On the left side of my scalp the hair clumped thick like forest, deep gardens and tall trees of locked up, dreaded hair, while on the right my crown was desert thin and dry, liable to tear away. I knew in juvie they cut you practically bald, just like in the military. Anywhere where they took your rights, they took your hair.
I’m not sayin’ that I could see the radiation at work, I’m just sayin’ somethin’ wadn’t all the way 100 percent healthy. I seen my demise. First, my hair would go one side bald, then the other would dry up and die off. I would waste away to skin and bones. My lungs would fill with the ghetto flu and my throat would dead bolt closed to where I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
I stared into my face in the bathroom mirror with the lights off. I showered in the dark and went to sleep in it, too, glad to still be black. I checked myself each night that I came home from the island just to make sure. I still do this some nights, I stand in a bathroom in the dark and tremble with my eyes closed, thinkin’ that tonight’s the night I’ma open them and be lit like the movie marquee, glowing like uranium.
*
I had a dream. I was older. My chest and shoulders had rounded and filled out, and for once I actually fit my clothes. I filled the body of an old black suit, a black vest, a white dress shirt. The pants was stiff from never being worn, but I forced my way into both long legs. I wondered how long it’d been since Daddy wore this old thing outta doors. I noticed the white pallbearer gloves that I wore and then I seen I was standing behind a pulpit and before an empty church. I looked down at my wing-tipped feet and instead laid eyes on an empty, open coffin. I knelt and closed it. Then I bore it away by myself, leaving the church and walking a great distance along lonely streets, deep into the thick woods and out upon unshaded, sun-bright paths. In the center of a mountain clearing circled up by a tight ring of trees, I lowered the coffin into a pit that God’s fireworks had tore open in the earth. I unbuttoned Daddy’s best suit jacket, his vest, and his dress shirt. I took off his pants and shoes and tossed it all into the coffin and knelt down and slammed its lid shut.
I woke stained with sweat and sperm. I showered for too long and left out the house twenty minutes late of when I was supposed to. It was 7:48 now. I could still catch the bus, but I would have to do it two stops down, about a half mile away, at High Street. If I could get there by 7:50, I wouldn’t be late for school. What with traffic lights and bus fights and crazy people dancing in the middle of traffic and shit, I figured I had a chance. I broke out the apartment, past the gates, and booked down the boulevard on the dead run. A morning gale rose up against me, jailhouse g-force level of resistance. But I was fast and strong now. I dug deep and turnt my stride over and arrived where I needed to be at 7:49 plus a few pennies. Bus was late anyway, by minutes, not seconds, like always in rickety, raggedy old Oakland, so I had time to catch my breath, let it settle and relax. I felt slightly winded, but not tired like you would expect a half mile might make you. I wadn’t even sweatin’ like would be normal after someone’s ran half a mile in under two minutes, which is exactly what I had accomplished. I guess I had known I was fast ever since the day Vista broke into our classroom, but no matter how fast I ran, I still arrived on Colored People Time all the time, late for everything. But after that day, on God, I ain’t been late not a single date, drop-offs, bus stops, school clocks, and anything else where time’s of the essence.
The sweat only started pouring once I was inside that tin can and we was headed over the bridge. Then my pores sprang the fuck open and the sweat came down like a hard, bitter rain on my forehead, pouring all in my eyes, soaking my mask till it seeped thru the fabric and kissed me.
*
I don’t speak on it much cuz I’m polite with mines, but like any kid going thru puberty, my mind was on sex. Back in the day when Momma and Daddy had enough money to put me on a phone plan, I learnt about girls from Instagram. On Instagram, all the girls are gorgeous and happy that they’re hanging out on the beach 365 days straight. Ain’t no beach in Oakland. We got the lake downtown and the ghetto marina in the east. I admired the girls on the Gram, but I couldn’t see not a one of them showing up in
Rockwood. So for a long time girls was a foreign species to me, pedestaled in my mind. It was only when I started to notice girls at school that I could take them off the pedestal I had built in my head and see them for who they were.
At the day school, wadn’t no one fit for a pedestal, not the three hundred boys, not the forty or fifty girls. But because it was so few females enrolled there, it was hard not to notice them. I didn’t know they names cuz I didn’t have a single convo with anyone, teachers included, while I went to school there. I stayed to myself, but my eyes roamed. The girls was pretty enough, but most of them rocked neck tats and other ratchet signs and symbols that scared me. Keisha didn’t look like that. Free didn’t look like that. They was my markers and these girls, in comparison, was way too scary. But after I got up out that sinkhole, I wadn’t as scared anymore.
My body was the problem. Couldn’t get no worse than radiation. Suddenly some tats and criminal charges ain’t seem so risky. I decided to step to this bad Mexican bitch who all the guys talked about but stayed afraid to speak to. It wadn’t that she was all that, but that she was the lightest-skinned girl in that piece that had them interested in her. I peeped that and seen how the black girls and dark brown indigenous girls got hella play from dudes, sneakin’ off to the maintenance yard to smoke and have sex. Meanwhile, everybody kept they distance from homegirl, who they probably assumed was just too close to white, too close to a gringa, to give them none. She didn’t make it easy either, cut eyes like straight razors at the other girls and would drop dead ’fore she met eyes with most boys. I think she was lonely, though, cuz when I did luck up and get her attention on accident one morning, absentmindedly staring at her, she looked back at me and the light in her eyes was like a welcoming. I could tell she had been wanting to talk to someone. I had not a word to say to her, but I did smile.
Between class periods, she came up to me. “You wanna get into somethin’?”
It was the most substantial thing anyone had said to me in my months on that polluted mug. “Cool,” I said.
She mapped for me how to dip out the class and slide to the storage lockers in the back of the maintenance yard. “I just go there and smoke,” she said, which I don’t know if that was true or if she had been messin’ around in the maintenance yard with hella dudes before me. At the time, I figured I was good as gone, wouldn’t matter if I caught a disease, which is why I cain’t tell you homegirl’s name. It was a whole gang of things sexual I knew nothin’ about. I learnt what I didn’t know up in that storage closet in the maintenance yard that afternoon. I fumbled with her belt buckle, her bra hooks, and my own hands, not knowing how to handle any of the above. She took my clothes off swiftly and slipped her pants down. She was Mexican with long black hair and bright white skin that glowed in the dark locker like the full moon at midnight. “You got protection?” she asked, taking off her mask. Her breath hit hot against my face. It took a second for me to realize she was asking ’bout condoms and not about my mask or if my neked ass had a weapon on me. I stuffed my mask in my back pocket and grabbed around inside the locker till my hand hit some kinda grocery store plastic baggie. I took it and wrapped it around my dick. She looked at me like I was too dumb to breathe. “Nigga,” she breathed even hotter and closer, melting into me. “Let’s fuck,” she said. She grabbed the baggie and tossed it away and pulled me into her. It was my first time inside a girl, and I had no idea what I was doing, but I kept going. Not wanting to get caught, we went slow, banging into each other like two quiet hands clapping. If she made a sound, I don’t remember it. I looked away from her steady eyes. Then I felt her long nails sinking into both my shoulders like sharpened whispers tellin’ me to stop. I stopped still inside her, fearful she had heard somethin’ I had missed and we was ’bout to be found drawers down. For a few seconds I just held myself there inside her. “Don’t cum in me,” she mouthed, circling her hips in a subtle grind. She patted my back till I understood to start again. We got to clapping a little louder, but nothin’ that would alert the authorities. She whispered in my ear, told me I was too nice for her.
Afterward, me and the girl went our different ways, she back to where boys and girls was men and women from birth, and me back into myself, whatever it was that I was. I peeped her here and there throughout the school year, but if we as much as spoke, Jacq, let alone let the other child know that they meant more’n a body in the dark, I cain’t remember it now.
*
Daddy woulda jailed me his damn self if he knew I had got intimate with anything on that island, but nobody but me and the girl ever knew what went down in that storage closet. Instead I got reprimanded for trespassing into a chemically hazardous janitors-only area cuz that was what got caught on tape—like they say, it ain’t what you did wrong, it’s what they got receipts on you about. To my surprise, instead of maximum-security apartment imprisonment, Daddy took pity on me and removed me from his work crew, which meant I in turn got to spend my afternoons chillin’ on my dumpsters bearing witness to Rockwood. Perched there, I seen beaucoup of nothin’ new, brothers playing basketball, still talkin’ about Oakland street ball legends from the eighties, while girls swapped gossip and spilt tea loud enough to split speakers. Vista wadn’t new neither, but she was different. She looked at the world in a unique way that most people did not, so when she rolled up on me on my dumpsters one day to collect her cans, I started spillin’. I told her about my arrest, about being transferred out the real school into the island school. I told her about the trouble I fell into there.
She heard me out. “I mean, baby boy, I told you to live for tomorrow. You didn’t wanna listen. Probably don’t listen to your momma neither, do you?”
She eyed me stern than a schoolteacher.
“You got a bitch with a throat tattoo reprimanding you. That should be a solid hint to slow your roll, youngster. Look, I doubt that that sinkhole Nagasaki’d your ass or you wouldn’t be sitting here speaking to me. But it might could be some new ghetto flu. You don’t have to fall in no sinkhole. If that island’s got it like that, probably it’s all kinda mess out there that could make you sick someday. Maybe you should file one of them damn Freedom of Interrogation Acts, figure out what these devils got goin’ on, cuz you know if it ain’t one thing, it’s somethin’ else evil. It’s so many atrocities that’s been perpetrated it’s hard to keep up. Thirty years of sterilization of black men in North Carolina. You heard ’bout that? Nah. Well, it’s true as I’m talkin’ to you right now. Tuskegee syphilis injections? How our cell phones and computers is investigating us 24/7?”
I shook my head at my own ignorance. I didn’t know none of what she was talkin’ about.
“Don’t believe what I say,” Vista said. “Read your ass up on the undercover shit that’s being perpetrated. Side note: I apologize, real talk. You know what they say ’bout cocaine.”
Apology accepted. I followed Vista’s advice and read up on hella atrocities against us. It’s a gang of them that you won’t find in no school textbook. And besides mixing up some sterilized women with sterilized men and sellin’ North Carolina short on how many decades they done did that shit, she did speak the truth. A lotta these conspiracies ain’t theories—real talk.
*
“You’re Copeland Cane?” the mailman asked. He was a young Vietnamese man who had only recently took over for the old black lady who dropped the mail for most of the years of my life. He was young and thin and had a scar deep as a buck fifty from his right ear down to his jawline. It was only, like, his second or third week on the job in our hood and he was still trying to match faces to names. I didn’t know why he was trying at all, when all the job required was to drop the envelopes in boxes. Hella jobs been roboticized, but instead of armoring up a robot and having that nigga deliver the mail, here we have real live mailmen gettin’ slashed across the face for they goods and shit.
But at that moment I was glad for the in-person contact. Never would a robot mistake me for my father and never would i
t hand over mail to a person when it could drop it in a mailbox. I nodded at his question and the mailman handed me a single envelope. I knew it was bad as soon as I seen the Treasure Island engraving and the little picture of a paradise island that they probably photoshopped off a Caribbean brochure or some shit—a white sand beach in the shadow of San Francisco, the bridge lights gleaming down on a tropical destination in the middle of the bay, baobab trees, coconuts, mangoes, and other mess that you will never, ever find between San Francisco and Oakland.
I walked into the courtyard where the mailman couldn’t see me and opened the envelope. I read a statement of my infractions, nothin’ that Daddy didn’t already know. The school had emailed and called both times I line-stepped. But they had attached no penalties to it. I felt my body turning tense as I read on. I was feeling a pattern progressing: whenever somethin’ real bad was set to happen against me, mugs put it in a letter and mailed it. Institutions wadn’t messin’ with no email and whatnot; when it came to the big verdicts, straight analog. The words “insufficiently compliant” jumped off the page at me like the logo embossed on an old head’s FUBU jacket.
Hella befores and afters in my life—before I was grown, now that I am; before that letter found its way into my hands, which I didn’t tell my parents about cuz I wadn’t tryna get in any more trouble, and after the next letter arrived along with an email and a phone call. Daddy got the letter, Momma got the call, and we all got the email. I was in trouble, plain and simple.
It’s these terrible moments that get stuck in time like old family pictures, if your family pictures only showed you at your worst. Momma has three pictures of me that she sets out with the other family photos. In the one, I’m a baby. She and the old man look dapper’n a mug, Daddy in that same suit out the Goodwill I keep seeing in my dream, Momma still losing her pregnancy weight, wrapped in some kinda shawl. They’re holding me together. In the second, I’m older, able to stand on two feet; my hair’s hella big and they actually have me dressed in some old-ass FUBU kids gear that I think they ganked from the ’90s and forced me to wear. In the third, I’m like eight or nine years old and thin as spider legs. My hair’s been cut low by the Muslims and I’m standing in front of the barbershop underneath they sign:
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 6