by Melvin Dixon
“I don’t like you talking to me.”
“Why do they call it Indian summer?”
“I don’t like—shit, man. I don’t know. ’Cause it’s red. That’s it. It’s red.”
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“Scared of what?”
“Me.”
“Shit, man. You the one fucked up. What I got to be scared of?”
“Everything.”
“Shit,” I said, trying to walk away.
He kept looking at me. He wanted me to say something more. I didn’t like him talking to me like that. I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s hot as hell out here,” he said.
“You ought to know.”
“Like I said. It’s hot as hell out here.”
“Don’t talk to me no more. I got nothing to say to you.”
“You can call me Metro. You can use my name, at least.”
“Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“Say ‘Metro.’ ”
“Leave me alone, Metro.”
“Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“I’m waiting for my friends. Cuddles works around here.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
“Suit yourself. I’m going somewhere else.”
“You’ll come back. Someday, all in leather and denim.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?”
“Shit.”
He was crazy. But I didn’t kill him. And when that black guy in the visitors’ room started yelling at me and the pounding in my head got louder than I could stand, all I could do was hold my head with both hands and find my way back inside. His words were metal. My head ached. My lips was swollen so bad I couldn’t say nothing back, only curl them up and grunt. This place makes you an animal. Then Moms’ yelling and crying and his yelling and cursing. Nothing would go away. Shit. Shit. Shit. What the fuck’s gonna happen to me now? Someone asked me later why I was there, inside, and I told him. He was in for a long time, too. Maybe longer than I was. I didn’t know his name and when he looked at me, he acted surprised that I could be one of the guys ’cause I was so young-looking maybe. I didn’t talk to him again. Not after what he said when he asked me, “You in for murder?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
“You gonna fry for it, baby,” he said.
My stomach suddenly went empty, the muscles got loose and watery. “Then again, maybe you won’t,” he said, acting like he had all the answers. Shit. I hated even more him saying “baby” like that. Like he was sorry. Who the fuck was he having pity on me? I didn’t need it. Not like that anyway. I didn’t know his name. Maybe what he said wouldn’t even matter.
“Metro wasn’t nothing to you. Why’d you kill him? Why?” the black guy yelled.
“Jesse, shut up. Calm down,” she said, reaching for him and yanking him into the seat.
The two black guys from the inside just looked. At me.
“Leave me alone, Ruella. That guy’s the one. Him and his friends. Why’d you have to kill him? You think you a man now? You think you a fucking man now?”
“Jesse, Jesse.”
“Leave me alone, Rooms.”
I got back inside. The guard closed the door loud and tight. The echo made me want to laugh. My lips were too swollen to move.
Naw, it wasn’t ’cause I wanted to be a man. I was a man already. My head kept aching and I held it in both hands. I was a man already. That faggot Metro had nothing to do with it. But I couldn’t say anything. Not even to Moms, who’d want to know how I was feeling. She was the one that counted for me. I wanted to tell her about Pops, why he built so many goddamn things. He built them good, to stand for a long time. But he could never visit the houses after he painted them or fixed them up. He must have known about the free fall of leaves and branches in a storm, the storm now repeating in my head. I wish I could’ve told Pops just how it felt being on the inside. I looked for him and saw only Moms and Patty.
“Moms,” I tried to say.
“Christ Jesus! Christ Jesus!”
The black guy was some maniac. Yelling at the top of his lungs. The guard hustled him back to his seat. The girl tried holding him. My head still pounded with the echo of what he was saying and what Moms was saying and the guard trying to lock the door between us and that guy trying to jump all in my face screaming “Murderer! Killer!” like I was the only one feeling Metro’s ass or making him go under. Ain’t that what Metro told me himself? That he goes under? What the fuck was that guy trying to prove? That he’s a man even though he fucks another man? Shit. Who wants to know that? The guards caught him, though. And I watched, smiling. I saw the girl again and the two black guys from the inside watching me watch her. They was all watching me. The black guys staring like they could tear off my skin. My head pounded again. I bit my lip to stop it. They kept looking at me. I tried to say something. Something to show that I never called them nigger. That was Cuddles and the others. I never called them nigger, so why don’t they leave me alone. My swollen lips just grunted, made me feel like I was the animal they said I was. “Murderer! Killer!” Shit.
I went back to the cell and laid down. There was nothing else to do until they took me someplace else. Some other room far away from Moms and the falling leaves. Some other window to look out from and laugh ’cause you was away from all of them. But then you start remembering things again. Things you need to forget. You remember what got you here as if it was just yesterday. The only other thing to do is think about little things and wait for them to happen, like eating food or washing up. Some guys exercise alone or with others out in the yards. I’d go out, but I don’t want to run into Cuddles and the others before they can get me out of here and somewhere safe upstate. They ain’t alone, though, like me. And I wouldn’t be alone if it hadn’t been for the fight, which is all I got on my mind. But I remembered he called her Rooms once. Something like that. A funny name. Like Metro. Maybe it means something I’m supposed to know about. See how you get to thinking about stupid shit when you’re inside? You hear me, Pops? Being inside ain’t shit. There ain’t nothing to do but wait. And all you can do is wait.
Then you start asking yourself silly shit. Like, would things have turned out this way if you was someone different? Or would you do it the same if you could start all over? We all want changes, I guess. Sometimes we think we could have done things differently. ’Cause we really think we can be different people than who we are. Would I have gone with that guy Metro and let him suck me or even fucked him since that’s what he wanted? Would I have taken over Pop’s work after he died and lived somewhere different? Could you imagine me getting a truck and painting a sign on it saying Antonio Russo and Son: Painting, Carpentry, Home Repairs? And maybe he wouldn’t have worked himself so hard if I had shown some interest. At least not worked himself to death building things away from us. Saved up some money ’cause I was helping, see, and he could get us a house out there in Westchester like the ones he painted and repaired, and Moms could join the Garden Club and subscribe to Newsweek and House Beautiful. My sister Patty could take the yellow school bus and even graduate from a high school that had a swim team and cheerleaders and Saturday football games. And I’d be in school too, even playing on the teams and working with Pops for the summer like I did once, and we’d all be together.
Like the time he asked me to help him out on Saturday. Just go out with him to clean up after a job. It was ten dollars. I had nothing else to do. I went, but instead of helping like he wanted, I roamed all over that house. All ten rooms. And Pops had painted the whole inside. I imagined how we’d live there, me playing ball in front of the garage, running down the quarter-mile driveway to get the mail out of a gray metal mailbox with a flag. I’d have a dog, no, two dogs. Maybe pretend to go hunting in the woods out back. And Moms would call me in around six for supper. Pops would come home from the office with the evening paper and we’d sit around the fireplace and sing Christmas carols
with hot apple cider or chocolate to drink and the snow storming outside, away from us. Out there. Outside. Out of that fucking room and out of my fucking mind. Shit. What the fuck was happening to me? No snow at the window. Just gray December. Early nightfall. Streets smelling like asphalt and fresh dog shit. Gasoline fumes. Roach spray. And Pops’ angry voice telling me, “Stop dreaming, kid. Clean up. That’s what you’re here for, ain’t it?” Cleaning up. In a few hours, time to go home. My ten dollars. Throw out the empty paint cans, the scraps of dingy wallpaper. It’s time to go home. Time to go inside to the greasy hallway and a window view of bricks and soot and night as thick as nigger hair. That’s when I woke up. Pops. You hear me? We never went back there. We never even had a place close to what that was. A house. A simple, goddamn house. We never went back for tea or tennis, never for Halloween trick-or-treat or Sunday dinner, except once when we drove through White Plains and you pointed to houses on both sides of the road— it was a winding country road—saying, “I painted that pink house there,” and “See that garage? I fixed that,” and for another one, “Last year. Outside job.” And I asked you, “What about the inside, Pops?” And you wouldn’t say nothing. Nothing. ’Cause we couldn’t go back there. You couldn’t get back inside to show us what you’d done. Could you? Naw. We saw only the outside of the houses, Pops. From the inside of the car you drove. But Moms was smiling, saying, “See what nice work you father does,” and she was moving closer to him and like a teenager, snuggling her head under his free arm as he drove. Patty started asking for ice cream and a ride on the swings in the park. But I was asking about the inside I’d once seen. Nobody wanted to talk about that. And we never went back after my ten-dollar clean-up job, did we? Later, I heard Pops telling Moms how they let him in through the back door like he was some nigger and not the Italian home contractor he was. Shit, that man was an artist. Look at what he built. Look how many times people called him for free estimates on a neighbor’s recommendation. But he stayed on the outside, even when he painted or built things inside. And there I was remembering how he came home tired one night in the winter after fixing gutters outside all day. Moms put him right to bed. The next morning the ambulance took him away and he never came back. The new wall and countertop he made in our apartment was left unpainted. Like a fool, I waited for him to come back. I waited for the wall and countertop to get painted, until, as Moms told me later, I got the paint myself and brushed “Fuck you” in thick black letters all over the place. Moms was scared then for the first time. And she kept on being scared. She must have known then that I was lost somewheres. But all she said was, “Christ Jesus! My boy ain’t never had a chance.”
Then we moved to Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, where it was cheap. I had to take care of Patty while Moms worked. And when the guys in the neighborhood saw me and Patty playing, they’d call me a sissy and throw stuff at us. But then Patty started going to school and I went to school. By the time I was thirteen and had some hair under my arms and a dick getting thick as my voice changed, I put on track shoes and a leather jacket. Stole a switchblade and dared them to call me a sissy again. I told Moms I was doing things for myself from now on. “I’m self-employed,” I told her. “Like Pops. I’m gonna use myself.”
She looked at me. “You mean you gonna use yourself up.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Christ Jesus. If your father were—”
“He wouldn’t say nothing. He’d build another wall somewhere or paint the apartment again. That’s what he’d do.”
“We could have had a house,” she said. “He always wanted one.” And she looked away from me without a smile or nothing on her face. I knew I was gone from her mind. I was lost to her. Maybe lost to myself. But I was gonna work. I was gonna bring home some money. I just hated it when she asked me where it came from, that’s all. Why my pants leg was always bloody from the meat I’d stolen from the supermarket and left for her in the refrigerator. She always had the questions. She never wanted to hear the answers. Not the real ones, anyway. So I lied. I made up shit so she wouldn’t cross me off with that blank look and make me feel like I was some rotten asshole for trying to help out. Shit. So I started hanging out with guys I met. Cuddles and them. I wasn’t no Mama’s boy. No sissy. No faggot either. I just fucking missed my old man.
But you can’t keep thinking about the past. Naw. You can’t change it and you can’t keep feeling sorry for things you did or things you didn’t do. I mean even if Pops wouldn’t tell me things about the family, if he was silent all the time, it was probably ’cause he was keeping in all the anger from people he worked for and looking at the crummy neighborhood we lived in. I could have said stuff to him, told him things I was feeling. I could have started conversations or put my arms around his shoulders so he’d know I was thinking about him, that I cared how he felt coming back nights when Moms was just too tired to help him rest. I could have held his hand even and told him he didn’t have to work at home too. He didn’t have to build things for us. I loved him anyway. I could have told him that. Maybe then he wouldn’t have worked and worked himself so, or built so many walls and cabinets and shelves, then painted and repainted the same damn apartment so many times. I could have helped him. But shit, I was in the streets. More so after he died. It was all too late. And I didn’t have to build any walls, they just grew up inside me like a fucking cancer or the clap that wouldn’t go away. And Metro? He thought he could stop the cancer maybe. All he did was make it grow worse. ’Cause there was something inside me I couldn’t get rid of. Maybe I’m gonna die from it.
Can’t keep thinking about these things. Not on the inside where all you do is wait. Waiting for transfers, waiting for food, waiting for hot water to shower, waiting for visitors, waiting for any day that’s different from the day before. Waiting for your luck to change. Waiting for a trial and then a verdict. Waiting for the end of your bid. Waiting for the good times again. Waiting to get high off the memory of some pussy or herb. Waiting for night and the streets filling up with women strutting ass in jeans. Waiting for the right moment to say, “Hey, sweet Mama” and have her give the look that says, “I can give you something you ain’t had in a long time.” Waiting to get inside her. Waiting to see each other again. Waiting for a job that pays some money. Waiting in line for a movie and when you sit back all you see on the screen is the slow playback of all those years, and you feel like a fool for waiting this long, so you wait for the end. And you wait for the end.
Shit. I had to do something before I lost my mind. Exercises. Yeah. Sit-ups. Push-ups. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight. Inhale. Exhale. Sweat on the floor. Sweat on my hands now, pulling at the bars. Sweat making everything slippery, even my words sliding out on tears: “Let me out of here, please. Let me out of here. I wasn’t the only one. I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE.”
And the walls answer you back.
“Shut the fuck up. I’m trying to read.”
“Tell that white boy to shut his trap.”
Brrrrrrrrrriiinnnngggggg. A bell.
I got up from the bed. Must have been asleep. Cells opened automatically. People came by with towels and soap. Shower time. Not much hot water. My turn. Soap? Yes. Towel? Yes. Now lost in a single file moving toward steam and sweat. Hot water. A calm for sweaty arms and hands and legs and ass crack. Then a hand grabbing at my neck. A voice I suddenly knew. “That’s what you get for squealing, Lonny. We’d be free now if it wasn’t for you.”
“Don’t give me that shit. The cops had me, yeah. But they knew it wasn’t only me.”
“How?”
“By the way you fucked up Metro, that’s how. One person couldn’t have done all that. They knew it. I didn’t have to say anything.”
“But you told them where we was, Lonny. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“What do you care, Cuddles? You guys had gone when I looked around. You all left me right there. What would have happened to me? You didn’t c
are nothing about me.”
“Bet you won’t open your mouth no more.”
“Lay off me, man. I’m getting out of here, anyway.”
“You lying.”
“Naw, I ain’t. I’m getting transferred. I’m going to some juvenile home somewhere. You’ll see. You guys have a record. I don’t. They showed me your photographs when they brought me in. Before I even said anything they had you all nailed. The neighbors even knew who you was. Everybody knew something. Everybody except me.”
“You didn’t need to know.”
“I thought you was my friend, Cuddles.”
“Shit.”
“I thought we was tight.”
“Shit.”
“Now I’m the faggot, huh, Cuddles? I liked you, man. I trusted you.”
“Shit.”
“Now get the fuck out of my face.”
I lost him as the line of prisoners I was in approached the shower. Steam was everywhere, like a wall with four sides. Cuddles must have been in it somewhere. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw him talking with Maxie and Lou, or guys who looked just like Maxie and Lou. I couldn’t tell. The steam made everything look the same, but weird. But then I felt cold and empty inside right before I entered the steam and followed the sound of rushing water. I got chilled. And then I saw coming close to me those two black guys, both naked, that I remembered from the visitors’ room talking to that girl they called Rooms and the guy they called Jesse who was yelling at me, “Murderer! Killer!” and I remembered Moms’ voice in the background where I left her whining on Patty’s shoulder and shaking her head like none of this was true and really happening to her. The black guys looked at me like they knew who I was. They hurried away like I stank. Maybe they really didn’t see me. Who knows? But I was still cold as I got close to the shower and was already shivering when I entered the steam and the soft, hot water. I scrubbed myself clean, lathering soap everywhere, rinsing, lathering, rinsing. My skin squeaked ’cause all the shit was coming off me. I felt clean. Real clean. Locked away from the outside, enclosed in steam, naked of everything except some feeling you sometimes get standing with other naked men. The first thing you cover is your balls, then your eyes if you’re lucky enough to move that fast.