by Melvin Dixon
“Rooms? I don’t need no boardinghouse,” Phillip said. He started looking past Jesse and me like he was trying to see the outside. Beyond the visitors’ door, that is.
“I mean Rooms,” Jesse said, pointing to me. “She’ll take good care of you.”
“That’s what he calls you?” Phillip asked. He looked disturbed.
My silence answered for me.
“I don’t like that. You’re not a place. Shit, you’re a person.
“It’s just a nickname between us,” Jesse said. He took my hand this time and held tight. “I started it.”
“I still don’t like it. I mean, I been watching these cinderblock walls and electronic gates for too long now. You get tired of a place real quick, man. Quicker than you get tired of a person.”
“Jesse and I have an understanding,” I said.
“Shit,” Phillip said. “It’s my fault, isn’t it?”
“What fault, Phillip? I’m grown now. I know what I want.”
“Like I did, huh? And look where I’m at. No California sun, just New York City roaches.”
“It could have been different,” I said.
“Shit. I wanted something special for you, Ruella. Being your brother was the hardest damn thing I had to be. I wanted you to know you was special, pretty, for me and maybe somebody else. Somebody who’d appreciate you.”
“Like Jesse?”
“Can he make you happy?” He turned to Jesse. “Can you make her happy, Jesse? I’m asking because I really fucked up at it.”
“Not when you ask me like that, Phillip,” Jesse said. “I can’t even make myself happy most of the time.”
“We try, that’s all we can do,” I said. “But I know how to make myself a little happier. Dancing. You wait till you see me dance, Phillip.”
“I hope I can,” he said. His eyes scanned the visitors’ room again and settled at the far end where a friend of his sat with family. I watched, too. “If I get out,” he said, talking more to the air around us than to Jesse and me.
“You mean, when you get out, right?” said Jesse.
Phillip smiled. He started to laugh. Then his eyes dimmed as if he suddenly realized something. “It’s still pretty tough. Things change here every day. You get used to monotony, routine, and you’re tricked into thinking nothing’s happening. But that’s when you’d better watch out. Guys get stabbed here, beat up. Get their asses kicked just for the hell of it. And right when their bid’s about done.”
“Bid?” I asked.
“Time,” he said. “Time on the inside.”
“You’ll be out soon,” I said, smiling. “Just in time to see me dance. Jesse, too. Isn’t that right?”
“Right,” said Jesse.
“Then I got something to hope for.”
“You’ll stay with me,” I said. “There’s plenty of room.”
Then Jesse looked at me funny, like he knew something I didn’t. “You’re family,” I said to Phillip.
“My Lil’ Sis. She won’t let her brother down this time.”
“Call me Lady. I like that better.”
We were about to leave then, but another prisoner entered the visitors’ section and patted Phillip on the back. He looked at me and held my attention for a moment. He was gorgeous. Full mustache and beard, eyes like seashells. Phillip’s voice startled me. “Ruella, this is Abdul, my running buddy. My partner.”
Then I remembered where I’d seen him before. Comstock. The last time I saw Phillip. Wasn’t he the one who led Phillip back into the cell block after my last visit? Calmed him down just by being with him when I wasn’t. When I too had forgotten how far away time and family are when you’re locked up. Truth is, I didn’t know how Phillip felt about me then. I smiled back at Abdul. “Isn’t that a Muslim name?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Around here you gotta be something or you lost, man. Real lost.”
I smiled again. “I’m glad you and Phillip aren’t lost.”
He smiled and turned to Phillip. “So beauty runs in the family, huh, my man?”
“Oh, I’m not pretty,” I said, too quickly, I think.
“You’re not the best judge,” said Abdul. “Ain’t that right?” he asked Jesse. And Jesse said yes, but he was so distracted by other prisoners coming in that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening between us. I was glad he didn’t.
“You was too young to remember Daddy,” Phillip said. “He was the handsomest one.”
“Then I can’t be that bad,” I said, laughing. And Abdul laughed also, showing all his teeth and watching my mouth get bigger in a grin. But I stopped laughing when a young boy entered the room. His eye was bruised badly and one side of his face was purple. Someone shrieked from the other end of the visitors’ gallery.
“My boy! Christ Jesus, what have they done to my boy?”
And her shrieks got louder as the boy walked toward the woman leaning frantically out of a younger girl’s arms. The boy’s mouth was so swollen he could hardly speak.
“My boy! Christ Jesus! What have they done to my boy? Lonny? You all right? Christ Jesus.” And she sobbed louder, the tears choking her voice. I couldn’t stop watching them, and neither could Phillip and Abdul. Then Jesse said, “It’s him.”
I froze.
“It’s him,” Jesse said again. “I’m sure of it. He was one of them.” His words caught in the air.
“God, no,” I said. But watching the boy fidget his way to a seat and sit cautiously as if he hurt all over, I tried to imagine the face and disheveled hair from the police mug shot I’d seen. Then I knew him. Lonny. The one who had confessed. Phillip and Abdul both stared at Jesse and me staring at him. Lonny didn’t seem to know what was going on.
“He ain’t never had a chance. Christ Jesus! My Lonny ain’t never had a chance.” The girl held the woman in closer, but she kept sobbing and crying as if she were the only mother in the room. Lonny didn’t say anything. He just sat there with his head in his hands as if he couldn’t even remember why he was there. “My Lonny ain’t never had no chance.” They said nothing together. The mother continued sobbing, and Lonny, like a battered machine, got up from the table and started out.
Just then Jesse shot up. “And what about us?” he yelled. He was out of the booth and yelling at the top of his voice. “What the fuck about us? What about me, goddamn it?”
I tried to make him sit down and shut up. He pushed me away.
“You know me? Your friends know me? Murderer! Why did you have to kill him? Why? You greasy little punk, you shit-faced motherfucker!” And Jesse was lunging at him like a lizard after a roach, trying to climb the glass wall of the booth. A guard came from behind. Phillip saw him first.
“Cool it, man.” Phillip said. “Cool it.”
“You’ll get us screwed too,” said Abdul.
But it was too late. The guard was on Jesse and hustling him out of the door. Jesse kept lunging back before the door closed. Then it did, with the clang of a lock.
“You better go, Lady,” Phillip said. But before I could get my things together another guard was upon me. “And you, Miss?”
“I’m visiting my brother here. I’ll only be a minute more.”
“Visitors who can’t behave don’t come back,” he said in a gruff voice.
“I’m sorry, sir. I won’t be long.” He left and I settled back down. I thought of Jesse waiting outside. I hoped he was waiting outside and not locked up somewhere for disorderly conduct. “Can they lock you up for that?” I wondered aloud.
“No,” said Phillip. “But what’s eating your friend?”
Then I told them the whole story. As much as I knew, anyway. I told them why Jesse said that boys named after their mothers are different, how I met Jesse and he started calling me Rooms, how Metro was Jesse’s lover, how Lonny and the others stabbed Metro late one night. Phillip said nothing at first. And when I finished talking I was sure he’d hate Jesse for being gay, or me for being a part of the mess. But he didn’t say th
at. He just looked at me, then looked at Abdul for a long moment.
“You know, Lady, a man sometimes will do anything for love. A woman too, I guess. And who’s to say who you can love and who you can’t.” Then Phillip looked straight into my eyes, and I tried to say with my eyes that I loved him, and that I loved Jesse too for what he was. “Sometimes a man just wants to lie there and be loved, Lady. And it don’t much matter if it’s a man or a woman doing the loving.”
“And that boy,” said Abdul. “Lonny. He killed Metro?”
“Yes. Well, he confessed. He was part of a gang,” I said.
“And they were all arrested?”
“Shit,” said Phillip. “No wonder they kicked his ass, or had somebody else in here kick his ass. They always get them after a while. Vengeance is a bitch in here. It’s part of the danger. And people don’t forget. It’s like time done stopped. And people take grudges out on you when you least expect it. You don’t have no privacy here. You got open toilets, open cells you can look through to an open bed, the roaches, and open showers. You ain’t ever alone. Not even taking a shit.”
“Right,” said Abdul. “Here you got to be something. Anything. Just to protect yourself. Just so you know who you are.”
“Or you lost, man. Real lost,” said Phillip.
Suddenly, I was scared for Jesse. I really hoped he was waiting outside. “I better see about Jesse,” I said, getting my things together. “Here are some cigarettes. Give some to Abdul, too.”
“See you again, Lil’ Sis? I mean, Lady.”
I smiled and Phillip smiled back. “I’ll try. I’ll really try.” Phillip and Abdul got up to return inside, and I watched them walk more closely together than I remember seeing before. I left the visitors’ gallery, and I could still hear the old woman sobbing more quietly now from the far corner. The young girl was stroking her bent head. “He ain’t never had a chance,” she kept saying, more to herself now.
I found Jesse waiting outside. His eyes were dry, stony, his hands calm at his side.
“I’m going back to West 4th Street,” Jesse said.
“Want me to come?”
“No.”
“Jesse, don’t be angry with me. I didn’t know Lonny would be there. I just wanted you to meet Phillip.”
“I need to be alone now.”
“Call me later?”
“Yes. I’ll call you later.”
“You’re not holding something against me, are you?”
“No.”
“Men always hold things in. Or they share it only with other men.”
“What?”
“Pain.”
“Well, it hurts, Ruella. It really hurts.”
Truth is, it hurt me too. I thought Jesse knew that. I thought he was different from the others, those men who make a secret border of their pain, as if you could actually touch it and make it worse. But what about a man’s borders when another man touches them? Maybe it’s just to keep women out. Protection, maybe. No woman intrudes that far, and even if another man does, he can still heal himself in that secret sharing. Some heal themselves by wearing track shoes and jogging outfits or playing basketball on Saturday afternoons. Others by wearing leather or cowboy outfits or denim with full key rings hanging from their belts. Women carry their wounds with less fear. We bear children. That’s how we stay alive. But being alive hurts. And with that pain you got to just keep on dancing, even if you dancing solo.
Dancing solo requires your own motion. You follow your own lead. Isn’t that what Phillip was saying? Isn’t that why Jesse wanted to shuffle-step all over Lonny’s face? Others had got there first, the heel-step, heel-step, toe-step down. And what about me? Lil’ Sis, Rooms, a place they all came to in their pain? What about Lady? And Missy? Where was I leading myself? I hate walls. I hate ceilings and heavy window moldings. I hate panes of glass all covered with metal gates to keep the burglars out and hold you hostage inside. I want to be in the air. Make a space out of movement. A space I can even break if I want. But give me one good arabesque or five o’clock extension—which is only frozen flight, isn’t it?—or one honest leap into a man’s waiting arms, and I find out too late that the ground is clay or the man is not strong or willing enough to take my weight.
I took the subway. I descended underground. Occasional flashes of light from local stations. Darkness everywhere on the express. Motion. Screeching movement. Bodies frozen on seats or with arms tangled in the metal grips for anchor, for something to hold on to, for anything, really, to stop the steady rush of darkness and fear. I had come out of the subway then with the address of the pier on a tongue of envelope. I had climbed the broken stairs. I had found Jesse and brought him back. But he didn’t come back to me. And I didn’t come back to Phillip, like I promised.
Jesse stayed in my rooms until the space was nothing but pain. The pain of his remembering the dance that killed Metro and sent him to me. And what am I left with? Two rooms that feel empty. A drug criminal for a brother. A handsome man needing refuge. I thought I could get higher than that if I danced well. What magical space can music and quick feet or stretched muscles of leg and torso create now? I took the leap anyway. I dragged Jesse with me to Rikers Island. But neither Jesse nor Phillip knew I was heading their way, that my one long leap before the final curtain was a lunge-two-three into their waiting arms. But their arms were weak, their thighs bent in grand plié. And I fell right to the ground.
Lonny
I USED TO THINK THAT ALL YOU HAD TO HAVE was your own space. Then everything would be all right. Once you had your space you could build things, like my old man did. But he found out he knew more about other people’s spaces than he did his own. Before he realized it, the place where we lived got too crowded. Then he died. He didn’t have a chance to do anything. But why talk about Pops. All he knew was work anyway. And there he was building spaces for everybody else instead of taking care of his own. He had a chance, yeah. Got lost in it. He found out too late that he couldn’t even get invited back to the houses he painted or the garages he built on slabs of concrete no bigger than this one but without the bars. Pops built things—he brought space to life. I guess the walls just closed in on him at home, and being poor must have kept him away from the inside of anywhere else.
Now, I was on the inside. On a chance I took myself. Moms couldn’t make bail. Nobody could. So we had to lay there until the trial. Until I could get away upstate. I could have told Moms just how I felt and told her not to worry since she said herself that I’d be better off inside these walls than out on the streets—away from the freezing meatpacking warehouses and the slimy platforms where they load the meat onto trucks or take meat off the truck and put it inside. Whichever way you look at it. Away from the Chelsea garage and the cycles I could never buy anyway. So who cared? Not Moms. She could dry up those tears ’cause they didn’t do no good. Naw, I was on the inside. But that wasn’t all. And it wasn’t Moms’ fault that she didn’t know about the inside or what can happen to a guy here. Pops breaking his neck building walls and then being kept outside. I couldn’t tell her ’cause my lips was swollen.
But looking at her, I could tell she was already older in the face than she really was. And looking at her made me realize what had happened to me and how I was somebody different then. Somebody she was afraid to know. The feeling I had started up again as I was about to leave the visiting room. I thought my eyes was playing tricks on me and shit. Like I was high and the pounding in my head was making everything bent out of any shape or sound I could recognize. They saw me. I knew he was a friend of Metro’s. I could tell by the way he looked at me. He had a woman with him and black guys from the inside talking with them. The thing was that I had to walk past them to get out, to get away from Moms’ shrieking at me like I was something she was afraid of. Like her crying out about the chances I never had could help me any when I was trying to tell her with just my swollen eyes and lips and no words that I took my chance, shit, and look what I got.
Nobody helped. Not even the guards. Then he said something to me. She said something to me. And the two black guys from the inside just looked at me like my face and name was burning into their minds, just like my head was burning from the pounding blackness all around it. Lips and eyes. Lips calling in my mother’s voice, “Chance? Christ Jesus! He ain’t never had a chance.” She had said the same thing at night court when they brought me in by myself, and she kept on saying it when the cops brought in the others and we had to stand in front of the night judge and get arraigned for murder. I hated that voice. It never shut up. No wonder Pops wanted to build walls all the time or work in other peoples’ homes. He had to get away from that voice. I bet he heard the leaves, too. Didn’t he? The goddamn leaves keep falling, and they lay on the ground in a dry spell even longer than they’re supposed to. Everything’s a bitch. Ain’t nowhere to hide. Not even from the things you thought you forgot a long time ago. ’Cause they come back, just like the leaves come back. And when you on the inside, you remember everything.
“I have a friend, Lonny.”
“So what.”
“Don’t you want to know about him?”
“Naw, man.”
“He’s black.”
“Shit.”
“What’s wrong with that? Where I come from there are black people everywhere. We’re the ones in the minority.”
“Where’s that?”
“Louisiana.”
“Huh?”
“Louisiana. Lafayette County. You all don’t know about it up here.”
“I never heard of it.”
“I came East to go to school. I’m a newspaper reporter now.”
“I never read the papers.”
“You want to come up for a drink? Some coffee? Coke? It’s pretty hot out here.”
“Naw.”
“Is this what you call Indian summer?”
“October? Guess so. Sometimes, anyway. Why do you ask me these things?”
“I want to know about them. Why do they call it Indian summer?”