Pipe Dream

by Solomon Jones

  “Why can’t you just respect that she doesn’t want you to call her Patricia?” Clarisse said. “Why does everything always have to be a constant battle with you?”

  “Look, I can respect all that, but—”

  “No, you know what I think your problem is?” Clarisse said. “I think you just don’t have any respect for women. I think you look at every woman as a bitch or a ho, something to have, to possess, like . . . like a toy or something.”

  Black hoped his face didn’t betray what he thought. He hoped that he was standing there wearing the same expression he’d worn every day for the last six months, ever since the day he’d walked away from his life. He hoped that the contempt he felt for Clarisse didn’t show through, as he wondered how she could possibly try to pass judgment on him. And then, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he heard a small voice tell him that she was right.

  She’d said it so calmly, in a voice that was like a lullaby. And she’d said it in a way that left little room for question. She’d said, in so many words, that he hated all women; hated them for not being the woman he’d left behind, and for being the woman he’d left behind, and for being—period. He hated them and he hated himself for hating them, and for loving them, and for wanting them, and for needing them.

  So he told himself that they were nothing. And he told himself that he would never let them hurt him again. Perhaps that’s why he could never let them be important to him. And it was obviously apparent to Clarisse. Because she had looked right through him and seen it.

  “Don’t stand there and act like you don’t hear me, Everett,” Clarisse said, stirring him from his reverie.

  Black gave her a blank stare in response.

  “You’re just like the rest of them,” she said.

  “Just like the rest of who?”

  “Just like every man I know,” Clarisse said, looking at Pookie, who was asleep in her lap. “You feel threatened by women. You know you can’t control us because we don’t need you. And to tell you the truth, you probably wouldn’t know how to bring home the bacon if somebody sliced it up and put it in a bag for you. So you try to make us into nothing. You try to tell us we’re nobody. You try to act like we can’t make it without you, when you know for a fact that you can’t make it without us.

  “And then you want us to respect you,” she said, spitting the words as if they left a foul taste in her mouth. “Respect you for what? You don’t even respect yourself. If you respected yourself, if you respected anybody, you wouldn’t be out here doin’ what you’re doin’.”

  “Oh, so you better than me?” Black said, becoming angry. “You don’t need no man and you don’t need nobody to help you do nothin’, right? All you need is that pipe to make it all right, huh, Clarisse?

  “Well, dig this here. It ain’t all right. ’Cause you know what’s gon’ happen if you keep smokin’ that dope? After a while you gon’ run outta caps, and the only thing you gon’ have left to put in that straight shooter is your life. And once you put that in there, everything goes up in smoke and disappears. Just like it was never there.”

  Clarisse looked down at Pookie and continued to rock back and forth as if she couldn’t hear him. But he knew she could, so he went on.

  “If you wanna blame men for everything that ever went wrong in your life, that’s on you. But I think you need to look at yourself, too. ’Cause you got yourself out here smokin’. Not me. I ain’t do nothin’ to you.”

  She looked up with rage and hurt pouring from her eyes. “You call getting me mixed up in a murder nothing? You call holding me here against my will nothing?”

  “Look . . . ,” Black said.

  “No, you look. I’m tired of people screwing me around and then telling me it’s nothing. Do you know what that feels like, Everett?”

  Clarisse got up, carefully moving Pookie’s head from her lap to the bed. Black moved from his spot by the window and sat on the desk, but said nothing.

  “Can you answer me, Everett?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, making the words sound like something slimy. “You can’t answer anything like that, because somebody might find out you actually have feelings, right? No, don’t tell me. You really don’t have feelings. Feelings are for suckers, right? In the place where everybody else has feelings, you have nothing.”

  She swept one hand through the air and placed the other hand on her hip in an utterly female gesture.

  “Well, I’m tired of nothing, Everett. I’m tired of people offering me the moon and stars and leaving me with nothing. I’m tired of looking at men like they’re the knights in shining armor Mommy told me about and then finding out that they’re nothing. I’m tired of waiting for something and then finding out that it’s nothing. I’m just tired.”

  “Well, shut up, then,” Leroy said from the seat in the corner that he hadn’t left for the last hour. “I ain’t tryin’ to hear that One Life to Live shit anyway.”

  Clarisse looked over at him and twisted her lips into a look of disgust.

  “I just want to leave here,” she said. “It’s not fun anymore.”

  Black looked her in the eye and asked a question that he had always contemplated, but never answered.

  “When was it ever fun?”

  Clarisse couldn’t think back that far, so she changed the subject.

  “You know what the strangest part of all this is for me?” she said. “The strangest part is knowing that nobody’s going to miss me anyway. I mean, I’m a private-duty nurse, and I was just going to start with a new patient today. So it’s not like I have a supervisor or coworkers who’ll be like, ‘Where’s Clarisse?’

  “I don’t have any friends. So nobody’s going to wonder why I didn’t show up for lunch or dinner tonight. I don’t have any family. Not unless you count Mr. and Mrs. Scott, the people next door.”

  Clarisse stopped, like something had just struck her. “Come to think of it, they’re probably the ones who told the police about my car.”

  She paused again.

  “They might have even seen us leave,” she said, her face a portrait of anxiety.

  Leroy smiled a mirthless grin and said, “Or maybe they just two old nosy-ass niggers that’s all up in your business like that.”

  “You know what?” Clarisse said. “Why can’t you just have a little bit of respect for somebody? Damn! Those people have never done anything to you.”

  “Why should I respect them?” Leroy said, as if the idea of respecting his elders were impossibly far-fetched. “What they ever done for me? I ain’t never seen none o’ the old people in my family come around and do nothin’ for me, let alone say, ‘Here, Leroy, here go a toy for Christmas,’ or, ‘Here, Leroy, this how you throw a baseball.’ You know what I got from old people when I was comin’ up? I got my ass beat. I got my arm twisted. I got my head smacked. I got told I wasn’t gon’ be shit so many times I started believin’ it myself. That’s what old people did for me.”

  “Well,” Clarisse said, building a head of steam, “those same old people marched the soles off their shoes so you could have a voice, and got sprayed with fire hoses so you could walk with your head up.”

  “I ain’t tryin’ to hear that old ‘We Shall Overcome’ bullshit, either,” Leroy said. “That was thirty years ago. What they doin’ now?”

  “They’re waiting for you to stop trying to blame your problems on people whose only crime was loving you before there even was a you.”

  “Whatever,” Leroy said, pulling out his straight shooter and dumping a cap inside.

  He pulled two matches from a matchbook and lit the crack, the hiss and sizzle of the rocks echoing across the room like so many dreams exhaling for the last time.

  “So that’s the answer to everything, right, Leroy?” Clarisse said. “Is that supposed to make everything go away?”

  Leroy exhaled slowly through his nostrils.

  “Bitch,” he said, his jaw moving side to side as
he forced his words out between the smoke. “You must think it’s the answer to everything, too, ’cause you smokin’ it just like I am.”

  Clarisse fell silent as her thoughts traveled backward.

  “I used to think it was the answer to everything,” she said. “I guess I still do. Especially when those lonely nights roll around, when I’m sitting there wondering what happened to my life.”

  She walked across the room and sat on the floor next to Leroy, looking toward the ceiling as if she could find the answers there.

  “I guess that’s when I want to take a blast and just . . .” Clarisse leaned against the wall, looking wistfully at the ceiling as she drew little shapes in the air. “Just float up to nowhere and wonder if I’ll ever come back down.”

  Black watched her and thought of what a waste it was to chase after the cloud. Clarisse, he knew, realized that it was a waste, too. But she would keep chasing it anyway, like a dog that runs in circles, chasing its tail. And perhaps she would eventually catch it, even if catching it meant spending the rest of her life nursing the wounds.

  Black looked at her and imagined the cost of it all. He imagined it and a sadness fell over him, the kind of sadness that comes with watching a loved one hurt and knowing that only they themselves can stop the pain. His imagination was cut short by Clarisse’s, though. And his sadness was replaced by one that was infinitely deeper.

  “I wonder sometimes,” Clarisse said thoughtfully. “I sit back and I wonder what would have happened if my parents would’ve lived. I mean, I’ve seen all the psychiatrists on the talk shows, and they always try to make you believe that everything that happens to you when you grow up is your parents’ fault. I used to believe that, too. Maybe that’s why I hated my parents for so long after they died.

  “But I don’t believe it anymore. Now I just think your parents do the best they can, and then you make your own choices after that.”

  “So why did you hate them in the first place?” Black said, realizing that he was the only one listening to her.

  “I hated them because they died,” she said. “To me, when they died it was like they’d abandoned me.”

  She chuckled at the absurdity of her reasoning.

  “Can you imagine that? Can you imagine hating someone because they die? Like it’s their fault they got killed in a car accident, right? Or like it’s their fault that the only thing they had to leave me was a little bit of money and a house. Like it’s their fault I didn’t have any other family to take care of me except the two old people who lived next door.

  “But you know what?” she said haltingly. “I hated them anyway. And I guess I hated them for so long that I started hating myself, if that makes any sense. It’s like, when you start to hate yourself, you do stupid things. You put yourself through things that you wouldn’t put yourself through if you cared anything about yourself. You let people walk all over you because you think you’re not worth anything anyway. You know what I mean?”

  Black knew exactly what she meant. He had been hating himself for a lifetime, walking through a haze of feelings that he didn’t know he had and trying to find a way out of the cloud, only to end up trapped inside.

  “That’s why I don’t have any friends now,” Clarisse said, shaking him from his thoughts. “Because I’m afraid to allow anyone into my life again.”

  She looked up at the ceiling again, but this time there was no fantasy in her eyes. There was only hurt.

  “Every time I let someone in,” she said, pausing to look away from him, “they either abandon me, like my parents did when they died, or they hurt me so bad I wish they would just leave.

  “Like the last man I was seeing. The one whose clothes were in my closet.”

  Clarisse sighed and shook her head, as if even the memory were too much to bear.

  “He was a doctor over at Jefferson when I worked there,” she said, looking at her hands. “Dr. Carl Bancroft was one of the few young black doctors I’d ever met. It wasn’t like he was so fine or anything like that. But with me just graduating nursing school and him doing his residency over at Jefferson, we were naturally attracted to each other, I guess. I think it was more fear and nerves at being two of the few young blacks on the job than a sexual attraction. But eventually, it turned into more than that. I thought we might even end up getting married.”

  Leroy lit another cap and released the smoke through his nose. As it wafted past Clarisse, it gave her face an almost surreal glow, lending a ghostly backdrop to her words.

  “I didn’t have a lot of friends even then,” she said, squinting against the smoke. “I guess it was because I was shy or whatever. But the one friend I did have was like everything to me. As a matter of fact, I think she came to Franklin right after you transferred to Dobbins, Everett. That was around tenth grade, right?”

  Black nodded.

  “Well, by the time me and my one little friend, Nicole, grew up and got jobs and everything,” she said, “we were more like sisters than friends. We laughed together, we cried together, we talked about everything under the sun together, from periods to pregnancy.

  “When my parents died, she was the one who helped me get through it. She was over at my house every day when all I could do was cry and wish I was dead, too. She made me eat when I didn’t want to. She made me bathe when I didn’t want to. She was with me when I finally got to the point where I could come outside again, and she walked me through getting back into everyday life when I couldn’t make it through by myself.

  “When she got married, I was the maid of honor. When she and her husband had a baby, I was the godmother. We had keys to each other’s houses and keys to each other’s cars. She was like everything I needed in a friend.

  “She knew the Scotts, I knew her parents. I knew her husband. And she knew all my boyfriends—all two of them—the one I had in high school and Carl.

  “When Carl and I started getting serious, we started hanging out with Nicole and her husband. We would meet each other for plays or dinner or football games or whatever. You know, I wanted Carl to know Nicole and I wanted Nicole to know him because they were both important to me.

  “So anyway, about a year after we met, Carl had a shift change, so I was working twelve to eight and he was working eight to four. We didn’t get to see each other as much as we used to, but we still made time for each other whenever we could. It was good for our relationship, in a way, because we weren’t together enough to get on each other’s nerves. At least that’s what I thought.”

  Clarisse sighed deeply before continuing.

  “Everything was working out,” she said, the pain evident in her voice. “We were starting to get kind of serious, and I was really happy about it. I used to call Nicole every night and tell her how I thought it was only a matter of time before he popped the question, and she seemed to be just as excited about it as I was. She used to tell me that I really deserved to be happy because I’d been through so much. And she was right. Nobody deserved happiness more than me. I mean, you couldn’t have told me that what Carl and I had wasn’t the best thing to ever happen to me. Well, I guess it wouldn’t have mattered what you told me, because I was just head over heels, nose wide open, whatever you want to call it. I loved that man.

  “So everything’s just flowing and I’m up on cloud nine until one day, when he was getting off and I was coming in, Carl told me he had something to ask me. So I’m all excited and I get on the phone and I call Nicole and I’m like: ‘Girrrl, Carl is getting ready to pop the question!’

  “You should’ve seen me in that nurses’ lounge. I’m jumping up and down screaming and she’s on the other end screaming and I’m just acting like a pure fool. Everybody was looking at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care. Because it was like, I felt like I was finally going to get something I wanted out of life instead of the leftovers life kept giving me.

  “So when I got off the phone with Nicole, I started calling around trying to see if I could get somebody to c
ome in and pick up the rest of my shift. Because there was no way I could stay there and give people needles and check I.V.’s and whatnot. As hyped up and nervous as I was, I probably would’ve messed around and killed somebody doing that mess.”

  Black imagined Clarisse repeatedly trying to jab a needle into someone’s arm—accidentally at first, and then in a deliberate stabbing motion. He grinned, thinking of how silly the whole thing would look, and then she was talking again, the story pouring out of her like so much water.

  “I wanted to go home,” she said. “I wanted to take a shower and put on something sexy. You can’t just be looking any kind of way when people are trying to propose to you, right?”

  Black shrugged.

  “Well, that’s what I was thinking,” she said. “So anyway, I kept calling people, going down the list of the nurses who were on call, telling them that I had an emergency at home and I needed someone to relieve me so I could go. All of them saw right through that, though, and I didn’t get anyone to come in until I broke down and told this girl Lynn the truth about why I wanted to go home. That was around three o’clock in the morning.

  “So I get myself together to go home, and when I get there the first thing I notice is that my bedroom light is on. Now, I knew I always kept my living room light on, because I didn’t want anybody to think the house was empty. But I never kept my bedroom light on, because I didn’t want to waste electricity like that. So when I saw the light like that, the first thing I’m thinking is somebody’s in my house robbing me blind. But then I was thinking that Carl might’ve been waiting for me there, because he had a key to my house, too. That didn’t make sense, though, because if he wanted me to meet him at his house in the morning, why would he be waiting for me at my house?

  “Now, all this is going through my mind, and I’m like reaching into my glove compartment to get my gun.”

  Black looked at her with what must have been total surprise because he just couldn’t imagine Clarisse with a gun. She noticed the look on his face and stopped to explain herself.