“Es agradable! Le daré trescientos dólares.”
What’s this old man saying? “I said—How. Much. Can. I. Get. Foe. This. Watch?”
The old man sloshes his tongue over his gray gums and stares. It must have been apparent that this young girl, this sexy young girl, this beat-up-looking girl hiding behind the dark wide sunglasses, couldn’t understand him, just like every other man, woman, child, and creature, alive or dead, on the face of the planet that he’s come in contact with that’s not Hispanic, has done. He’s gotten used to it. “FEE HuH-Red DaDaS. FEE.” Three puppet fingers spring up from behind the counter
“I’ll take it,” she says anxiously. “That was three-hundred dollars, right?”
“Chest,” the old man replies.
Baby fingers the money for a few seconds before jamming it into her right pants pocket. That’s the most she has ever gotten for the watch. She should have counted the money in front of the old man to assure herself that she wasn’t cheated, but she doesn’t have that kind of time. She doesn’t feel cheated and, besides, time is now her adversary. She knows she has to get back to Dante, that he’s waiting and he doesn’t like to wait for too long. Besides, she feels her chest shiver and knows that the aches are getting worse, that something is really wrong with her. She can feel her pulse building, the blood that circulates to all four corners of her beautiful and beaten body North South East and West rolling frantic. She can tell that she’s sweating more than usual, her light-blue shirt now patched with dark-blue, but it’s hot out on the street this morning and everyone’s sweating this much, right? She knows that something’s definitely wrong. That beating last night from the Horndog is now taking its toll.
She realizes that the quick stop at Drink’s Beer and Wine should have been her first stop, and not the pawn shop. She could have gone another day or so with the money she already had, the money from the street. She could have waited, but getting rid of the watch again was a Now thing. But she’s not well, not well at all. She’s on the streets of West Avenue in the daytime, in front of everyone, the entire world, and she’s feeling dizzy. Bad, bad, this is bad.
Drink’s, luckily, is only two doors down . . . step, step, step, right, left, one step per cement square, almost there, step, there, turn, push door, counter right there, bullet-proof glass, speak through the little circle, try not to faint, calm, caaalllmmm, eeeee-asy, e-asy, easy. But where’s the lighters? And, what else? She’s having a hard time remembering. The clouds.
“What you want?” the dark man <”Damn that guy was a jerk!”> behind the counter demands. Just . . . just shut up! Shut up! Can’t you see I’m thinking? Just shut up! Give me a second!
“Cigarettes,” Baby whispers.
“Marlboro?”
“Lucky Strikes.”
“That all you—”
“Yes. That’s all. Here.” What else was she supposed to get? Too many clouds. She shoves a pinchful of the folded bills into the metal slot under the opening. The man behind the thick bullet-proof plastic looks insulted, but turns and gives the pack a ride on the small carousel until it faces the shaking bruised beautiful black girl. He drops the change into the metal slot, which takes a year or maybe even a century to get through, and turns away to his bunker where the register is.
It’s sunny outside, sunnier than usual for this time of morning (good thing she wore her sunglasses), and clear, and the street and sidewalk is packed with people looking at the sky.
Why are all these people out here? Why now, now that she needs to indulge in solitude?
She turns toward a small Mexican woman. “What’s going on out here?”
“The man up there”—her face turns to follow her stiff finger as it points toward the sky—“the man in the steeple!”
Baby looks to the stiff finger, then across West Avenue to the hollowed-out-by-fire Romanesque-style church that faces them. It looms over West Avenue like an angry dark skeleton, reminding the sinners who haunt the streets about the folly of their lives. And the Mexican woman’s right—there is a man up in the steeple. Everyone is looking up at him, cars stopping mid-commute (ones that would normally fly down West Avenue with their doors locked), some aghast, others curious.
“Is anyone going to do something?” Baby asks.
“We call the police.”
“You did? Good.” Baby looks to the sky again, to the man again. She recognizes him. “That man,” Baby says. “He’s a policeman. Did you know that?”
“Who’s a police?”
“That man,” Baby says. “The man in the steeple. He’s a police . . . I mean, a policeman. His name is Dallas. He’s a policeman.” Dallas was the first cop to run her for soliciting, only a few nights ago. She likes Dallas. He treated her with respect. She wishes he’d have found her last night. He’d have taken care of her. This she knows. She knows this to be fact. Dallas would have taken care of her.
“Look, he out on the ledge now!” the Mexican woman screams. “Look, he on the ledge! Ohhh, no-na-no! He on the ledge now! He gonna get died!”
The Mexican woman’s pleas are now the pleas of the street—faces are turning toward each other, spinning about, yelling for someone to help the cop on the ledge. Baby can feel the blood drawing to her head and a dizzying sleep coming on. The shakes have now given in to shock, and fainting in the street surely isn’t out of the question. She must be more hurt than she thought. Her head is going to explode.
“Let me through,” Baby says, wrestling through the terracotta people, “and keep an eye on me”—a shove to the shoulder of the Mexican woman—“I may fall.”
Baby, a lost zombie, works her way through the spinning faces on the street and into the skeleton church. She’s not sure why she decided to get into this mess. She can’t breathe. Her chest is heavy and Dante is waiting and God-knows-what-else, but the one thing she knows is that Dallas was nice to her. But she feels like a fool. She should have gotten down here earlier, and went to Drink’s first thing so that she could have bought the shit for Dante earlier and not been in this predicament. How could she have been so, so, so, so, so, so stupid? How? Dante’s going to kill her now.
She follows a black-charred trail through the vestibule until she sees the door to the steeple, or at least what should be the door to the steeple. Who knows? Who cares? She doesn’t. She stopped caring the minute she decided to help Dallas. Dante will kill her for sure.
The black claustrophobic stairs spiral to the tower, where the small windows allow enough light for her to maneuver to the ledge. The man, a tall man, a cop-looking man, a man with a shoulder harness (does he have a gun?) and dressed sort of nice, a man looking back at her, scoots further onto the steeple’s ledge when he sees the shaking bruised beautiful black girl.
“You . . .wait,” Baby stammers. She can’t control herself. She knows that her body is fighting against her, punishing her for her lack of discretion in coming up here to help Dallas. She could use a drink. And a smoke. Even though she doesn’t drink or smoke. “Wait a minute.”
The man on the steeple ledge acknowledges the other presence but, although Baby can see that the man is looking at her, there’s no recognition of her. Or understanding. No fear or bravado. The empty eyes glazed like a dead fish. The steeple sways and, whether really happening or imaginary, Baby wavers to the window, crawling against the swaying and onto the ledge.
As the sun spotlights them like stage actors before West Avenue, she feels less frightened. She begins to feel comfort, able to take care of this present and most fascinating experience. She looks again into the man on the ledge’s eyes, looks at the perspiration working down the side of his face, his stiff body that’s so close to her that she can reach out and touch it. They don’t speak at all to each other. There’s an element of understanding between the two of them, maybe, that transcends this steeple and this ledge and this place and to a higher level that can only be attained by the hurt-filled people, the pain-filled people, the
desperate, the hopeless, the despondent, those who’ve decided that there is no longer anything left for them in this world anymore. Anywhere. The world around Baby and Dallas blends into a gray canvas and the sounds of the street become one low whine of incidental droning, the voices as melted with the backdrop as the faces and the surroundings.
She stands next to the taller man, the cop, and slips her hand around his fingers.
“I’m going to jump,” Dallas says, almost apologetically.
“I know,” Baby replies. She sees the spark of solitary acceptance on Dallas’ face, and kisses him on his cheek.
MondayintoTuesday
Here is Wisdom
These are the people in your neighborhood.
The Parks Brothers. They were notorious hoods when you were a kid, the Parks Brothers. But now, now that you are all older, they’re just older hoods who hang out in and around the neighborhood, trying to score drugs, and when you see one of them he’s almost always carrying around a 40-ouncer in a paper bag. They still look the same, too. When you were kids, they towered over you (of course, they are a lot older than you), and could chase you down even when you were riding your bike (of course, they were a lot faster then). Now you’re taller than them, and more muscular than them (of course, the drugs have turned them into skeletons) and it doesn’t take much to stare them down. In fact, you stare them down quite a bit, almost to get even with them for what they did to you when you were a kid (of course, you wish you could put them out of their misery).
If you continue to walk down the street, you’ll get to the fish store, which was once a gas station and a church before that. Handy owns the fish store. He lives in Delray. Delray is the smell you smell if you’re approaching Detroit from the south on I-75. Delray has a soap factory in it, which exudes yellow stuff from its stacks. The yellow stuff is so heavy that it gets up above the neighborhood and then levels off, goes horizontal making a yellow streak in the sky, and you can see that yellow streak all the way to Toledo. Handy has lived in Delray all his life, which means one thing—when he sweats, he smells just like the soap factory. The stink comes right out of his pores. It’s ingrained in him. Delray was once a great place. Some of the greatest area athletes came out of Delray. Now, some of Detroit’s Most Wanted come out of Delray. To play basketball at the park in Delray in the early days, the Good Ol’ Days, you had to be a Basketball Jones. Now, the park is only for dealers and scammers trying to waste what little time they have left on earth Jonesin’ the other crackheads.
A few doors down from the fish store is one of the many big beautiful Baptist churches. The Baptist churches seem to be the only places in the neighborhood that can be appreciated for their cleanliness, and their glamour. A lot of money is funneled into the churches, because people in the neighborhood do a lot of praying. They pray to get out of the neighborhood, to get a better life, to bribe God to help them get away. And the churches gladly accept the donations.
As you walk, you notice an inordinate amount of billboards, the smaller kind that are only meant to be seen by drivers on the side streets. They are usually torn, with the message peeling off. But what message you can see usually has three themes: (1.) liquor, (2.) God, or (3.) health. The liquor ads usually depict black people, black people more well off than the black people who will see the ads, usually a man and a woman, the woman an exotic looking black woman, like Sade or something, cozying up to the man with a goblet in her hand, and the two are toasting. The liquor ads are normally near the liquor stores, and the liquor stores in the neighborhood would never be patronized by the people on the billboards. Do the liquor ads make the patrons feel as though they are someone like the couple on the billboard, someone of class and distinction? Probably. Advertising is funny like that.
Then we have the God billboards. The God billboards usually have slogans in bold white with black backgrounds, so that their message stands out better. They say things about God watching you, or God caring about you. And they’re usually a service message from the local Baptist church. I guess they’re supposed to give the people hope, which is kind of deceptive, since most of the people who will read it, the people from the area, are in hopeless situations.
The health ads tell you to use condoms and get HIV testing regularly. Those ads don’t work. But to try to bring their message down to the level of the people who will see them, they ask celebrities, celebrities the people can relate to, to put their faces on the billboards. There are several in a row that depict Magic Johnson speaking out to the people about getting tested.
The advertisers could save money if they all got together and asked Magic Johnson to do ads telling people to use condoms while sipping from a goblet wearing a “Jesus Saves” T-shirt. Three birds with one stone.
Some of the lesser-seen billboards are about education. They are mostly for one of those “leave home and get practical experience” GED-type places, like “Job Troops” or something. They prey on the helpless that look at the billboards and believe there’s an easier way to get a high school diploma than actually going to high school. But then again, do you blame them? You wouldn’t, if you were forced to go to school in the city of Detroit. The Detroit Public School system is one of the worst in the country, with its impressive 30% high school graduation rate. Get this—if you know someone who is in a supervisory position in the Detroit school system, then you’ve guaranteed yourself a laptop computer. Or last year’s computer, depending upon how guilty the person who stole your computer for you feels about stealing the computer from the kids who go to public school in Detroit. They’ll either steal the new stuff for themselves, or steal the computers that are being replaced. There’s no accountability. They consider it their right, because the teachers in the Detroit Public Schools make nothing, and have to put up with teaching kids in a war zone. They get no hazard pay. And the buildings look like they’ve been in a war, too—they’re crumbling with every gust of wind. And get this—the Detroit schools are so out of control that the state decided it should take control of the school board and reform it itself. It’s sad. And pathetic. Even the mayor has no control over the school system. So why would anyone want to go to school there? No one does. They only go because they have to, they have no other option.
Detroit Public Schools was so scared it would be losing its federal funding that it implemented what it called a Count Day. That’s where they tempt children who should be in school to attend school for one day so that their head count in the school system is up, inflating the numbers artificially to give the appearance that they actually have children going to school in Detroit. If your count is low, your school is on the chopping block because it won’t get any money to keep it running (at its inadequate rate). They tell the children who should be in school to come that one day, Count Day, and they will get fed breakfast and lunch, and maybe a snack. They tempt the mothers to wake their kids and send them off to school by offering Big Box gift certificates (bribes) to all the children in attendance that day—come to school and your mom will get a gift card to go buy another pair of shoes and some canned potato chips! Or you’ll be entered into a lottery for big prizes, prizes that the school system can’t afford! Whatever it takes to get your kids to school on Count Day!
And get this—they had a big rally for Count Day. They brought in Bill Cosby (“Dr. Cosby if you’re nasty!”). They brought in the Reverend Jesse Jackson. They had the Detroit mayor, the basketball Hall of Famer himself, there. And get this—while they were all in the auditorium trying to promote Count Day at the Count Day rally, someone stole all the tires off all their SUVs. So much for Count Day. As you continue to walk, you notice all the abandoned houses that also have abandoned garages on the same quarter-acre. It was in one of these garages that Christian, a neighbor of yours who was slow, who tried to join a gang but couldn’t figure it all out because he w
as slow, who tried to get a job but couldn’t figure it all out because he was slow, who lived from foster home to foster home, beaten regularly over the head until it was misshapen, who could barely form a legible sentence, killed himself out of pure desperation. Christian’s death must have been very slow (as he was) and very painful, because he used a plastic clothesline to hang himself from the garage rafter, and when he jumped, the clothesline stretched. Christian didn’t have the mental capacity prior to his suicide attempt to realize it would stretch. He died with his feet on the floor, and nearly decapitated himself.
The Bloody Man
Father Costa has been to Receiving Hospital many times before, mostly to issue Last Rites to the dying. Sometimes to see a parishoner’s/friend’s baby newly born, sometimes to bring a blessed rosary or a Get Well card or flowers, or sometimes to make his presence known, just be there, mindful of the fact that him just being there was comforting to those who felt the isolation of being in a hospital. But this is the first time he has ever been in the hospital’s chapel, in its generic, blue-and-red paned and unadorned hebetation. He feels better once Father Bologna arrives.
In Nine Kinds of Pain Page 5