When I ran into Pedro and Sheila on the Ave I hadn’t been feeling great, but I wasn’t feeling terrible, either.
“What you out here doing?” Sheila asked.
“Picked up a ball for my kid,” I said, taking the ball out of the bag. “This Saturday’s his birthday.”
“How old is he going to be?” Sheila asked.
“Two,” I said. “Seems like he was just born yesterday.”
“And all you going to show with is a fifty-nine-cents ball?” Sheila asked. “Eddie, you got to do better than that, man.”
That’s when Pedro said that a day wasn’t nothing but a day. Sheila wasn’t that serious about what she was saying, but it still made me feel bad.
I remembered being little, older than two but little enough to think a birthday was special. My father had never showed for my birthday. He and Moms had never been married and he didn’t treat me like somebody he cared for. But for some reason I used to always imagine him showing up with a wonderful present. It never happened. When I got older it didn’t matter anymore. I dug my son big-time, and I wanted him to know it.
I knew Jeannie, Little Eddie’s mama, would be cool with anything I did. She was good like that, but I still wanted to do the right thing. She had a smile in her voice when I called her and told her I’d be by for his birthday. Knowing her she would probably make a big deal over it.
Sheila walked over to a shop window and was looking at some hair products. That’s when I told Pedro that she was not correct in what she had said.
“Why you going to let a woman mess with your head?” he asked.
“Her saying it wasn’t correct because I don’t need to be faced down,” I said. “I would like to show with more than a ball but I’m running on empty.”
“The kid’s going to have a lot more birthdays.” Pedro scratched at his little stubble of a beard. “Three weeks from now he won’t even remember this one.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But it’s not really about Sheila or even Little Eddie. It’s like a man thing. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” He nodded and looked down the street. “But check this out. You got all your life to be there for him.”
Me and Pedro go back a long way. We went to school together back in the day when everything was about the future and what was going to happen. We were going to be ballplayers and astronauts and whatever and we couldn’t wait to get started with the real stuff of life. I had hooked up with Jeannie in my sophomore year and she shared those dreams with me.
Jeannie was special. She made me feel that way too. When I’m around her I just want to do more than I usually do and be more and even have a different look. We started hanging out and having fun. I liked to run my mouth and she liked to listen. That was important to me, her listening with that little smile and asking me questions about how I was going to do this or that. When Jeannie got pregnant it hit me hard because I wasn’t ready to get married. When Little Eddie came I went to the hospital and seen him. I felt proud and happy but at the same time I felt small.
There were some other fathers in the hospital and they were all talking back and forth and congratulating each other. A nurse asked who was Mr. Baker, and nobody spoke up.
“Aren’t you Mr. Baker?” She turned to me.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing where she was coming from. The other men started laughing, saying I was so shook up I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
Baker is Jeannie’s last name, and since that was the name on the baby’s tag the nurse thought it was my name, too. I hadn’t married Jeannie because I didn’t have money for a place to stay or even to feed her. We talked about her coming to live with me and Moms, but we couldn’t get help from the city if we lived together, so we decided to wait for a while and see what happened.
“It’s a man thing,” I told Pedro.
“I hear you,” he said.
“Look, Pedro, you got any heat I can borrow?”
Pedro rolled his eyes toward me, looked away, and then turned to me and put his hand on my arm. “Eddie, you’re not hard enough for nothing that heavy.”
“I need to get paid,” I answered. “If I’m not that hard then I got to get hard.”
I tried to lay down a rap and it sounded lame, even to me. I heard myself telling Pedro about how I felt sick and needed some healing. In a way it was true. I was seeing myself fitting in with all the other dudes on the block standing around with nothing to do except waiting for their turn to fail. Some were hustling, some were dealing, and some were just giving up and copping whatever they could to ease the pain.
“Look, homey, I don’t want you holding my piece because I don’t think you’re ready to go down that road and I don’t want to have to take Noah’s Ark to visit you on weekends.”
Noah’s Ark was what Pedro called the bus that went out to the jail on Rikers Island.
I knew he was just looking out, and when I pushed it he would let me hold it. I pushed, and he did.
I got the gun out of the closet and sat on the edge of the bed. I put the piece on my thigh. It seemed small, silver gray, dull. Dull like business. The thoughts kept running through my head, crowding each other trying to get my attention.
I thought of all the bad stuff that could happen. Somebody getting hurt, me getting arrested, a cop pinning me to the sidewalk while kids gathered around and pointed their fingers at me. I had seen this a hundred times. I didn’t know anybody who did stickups that was successful. They all went down, if not the first time, then the next, or the next. Or the cops knew who they were and they had to get out of the city.
I’d never been in jail but I knew a dozen guys who had been. They tried to hype it like it was no big thing, but I knew it was. If life hanging on the corner was bad, then I figured what life must be like behind bars.
All the reasons to walk away from using the gun came flooding through me, including the fact that I was scared. Running into a joint with a piece in your hand wasn’t easy. I thought of a dude I knew, I didn’t like him but I had seen him on the block for years. He had gone into an appliance store and shot the place up. He killed the owner and a young brother working part-time. They caught him two days later hiding under his mama’s bed.
After the trial and him being sentenced to twenty-five years to life, which is what you get in New York on a capital beef, some people from the hood asked why he had started shooting in the first place. He spit out some story but what they came back with was the dude had smoked a blunt to calm his nerves and it had blown his cool instead. This came to my mind because of the way I was thinking—scared big-time. I didn’t want to hurt nobody. I just needed some paper bad.
After all the thinking and lining up all the bad things in my mind that could happen I was ready just to give the gun back to Pedro. Then I thought about what I would do for the rest of the day if I didn’t do the get-over. I would just find my place on the block with all the other losers, like I always did. Maybe I would check down the street every once in a while to see if I saw Jeannie and Little Eddie so I could walk away.
When I was young and saw all the older men standing around, doing nothing, I used to look at their eyes. Empty. Nothing. Their eyes were empty. No “let’s get ready to do something, to go somewhere.” Just standing or sitting and waiting for whatever came stumbling their way. That wasn’t what being a man was supposed to be about. You were supposed to be doing busy. Making something or working on some deal. Building a family and buying toys for your kids.
I started thinking about places I could knock off, places that had some paper around. The check-cashing place was fat, but I knew the brother who worked there was carrying a gun, and probably the owner, too.
I thought about the Curl-E-Que, but Noee might be there and she knew me.
The Arab store on the corner did good business but that was too close to where I lived. Somebody might come in who knew me. Anyway, there were always three or four of them in the store, and I never dealt with Arabs before,
so I didn’t know what they might do. They might try to rush me or something and it would get into a shooting thing.
Once I heard two guys talking about the tailor shop on 132nd Street. The old lady there made curtains, put cuffs in pants. One guy was guessing that she had some money, the other one said he didn’t think so because she didn’t make that much, but he had never seen her go to the bank, so maybe she kept her money in the store somewhere.
I knew what the deal was. It was me figuring the old woman didn’t have a gun and there wouldn’t be any danger. It was me being scared. But I was weighing being scared, and maybe not getting too much money against fading away into nothing.
I looked out the window and saw that the day was bright. A few guys were in their shirtsleeves, some had on jackets. I put my jacket on and the gun in my belt. It felt uncomfortable. I hunched my shoulders and twisted a few times to see if it would move. It didn’t, but I still worried about it falling out.
Vogue Tailors & Dressmakers used to be a barbershop. Outside there was a round plate in the ground where a barber’s pole used to be. It was three doors down from the corner. Across the street was an empty building. The windows had been boarded up and a tin sign had been nailed to the front door saying that it was for sale. The only people buying old houses in this part of Harlem were white people, and they were still downtown around 121st and 122nd Street. They hadn’t got up to the thirties yet. I bought a soda and sat on the steps and checked the place out. The old lady inside worked at a sewing machine that was right up against the window. When I had passed by I could see she had a hot plate by her side and was drinking tea or coffee. I sat there for ten minutes, still feeling scared, touching my thumb against the handle of the gun in my belt, while I thought of how I was going to pull it off.
I would walk in and ask her if she put cuffs on pants and how much did it cost. Maybe I would say something about the weather. All the time I would be scoping the place out, making sure there wasn’t anybody else there. Then, as calmly as I could and while I was sitting down so people on the street wouldn’t see me standing over her, I would show her the gun, and tell her to give me the money and nobody would be hurt. Then I would make her lie down behind the counter and count to a hundred while I split.
Two brothers walked by. One was talking on his cell and I thought I would ask the lady in the shop if she had a cell phone. If she did I’d take it. I didn’t need her calling the police before I got to the corner.
I was thinking about waiting until I saw a black-and-white pass on patrol. First I figured that if they passed once they wouldn’t be back for a while, and then I realized I was stalling.
I walked across the street with the soda still in my hand. I wished I had left it on the stoop, but it was too late once I reached the shop.
A little bell rang when I opened the door. The woman was at the machine. She wasn’t as old as I thought, maybe late forties, and small. She had light brown skin and dark hair with touches of gray around the temple. The kettle was still on the hot plate and I could see the electric burner glowing.
“Good morning,” I said. There was a back room but I didn’t see anybody through the open door.
“Good morning,” she answered. “It looks like winter is waiting to come in.”
“Yeah. Do you do pants?”
“Do you mean make them or put cuffs on them?”
“Either.” Stupid answer. I sat on the chair next to the machine. “How much would it cost to have two pairs of pants made?”
She put her head down. At first I thought she was thinking, but after a while I wasn’t sure.
“You hear me?” I asked.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she said. Her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her.
“I’ve got a gun.”
“Yes, you have.” She didn’t lift her head.
I felt sick. I wanted to say something hard, to make her give me the money, but I was afraid to have her move. Suddenly my plans seemed stupid. If somebody looked into the store and saw her going behind the counter and getting down on the floor they would know she was being robbed.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. My hand was trembling and I put it against my side to steady it.
“I’m not going …” I wanted to say that I wasn’t going to hurt her if I didn’t have to, that I wasn’t some kind of pervert. I felt myself getting a little panicky. How long had I been in the shop? A minute? Two? I should have been gone already.
“Are you all right?” she asked, looking up.
“Yeah.”
A moment of silence.
“Would you … would you like some tea?” There were tears in her eyes. Her bottom lip quivered. She put her head down again. “Please don’t hurt me.”
I stood and she flinched. It wasn’t what I wanted, what I had imagined. The door opened with the same tinkling bell. On the sidewalk two dark women, a shopping cart between them, spoke in West Indian accents. I took a long first step and started quickly down the street.
I crossed the avenue, looking behind me, looking for the woman from the shop to appear at the corner, her voice screeching like the wail of a police car as she pointed a long brown finger in my direction.
Pedro had been right. I wasn’t hard enough, wasn’t cold enough to do what had to be done. I hadn’t even asked her for money. I had just sat there, numb and scared and feeling sorry for myself.
The short walk to Pedro’s crib took longer than it should have. My legs were stiff. Sheila came to the door and showed me in. I gave Pedro the piece and he asked me what happened. I noticed he didn’t touch the gun.
“I chickened out,” I said. “The woman I was going to take off got so scared it blew me away.”
“Eddie, running steel is either you or it ain’t you,” Pedro said. He picked up the gun, sniffed it, then opened a drawer and put it away. “Carrying a gun is like hanging a sock full of cotton in your pants. It may make you feel good to show it off, but when the deal goes down, you can’t pee through it. But some cats need that. You just found out what they spend their lives trying to learn.”
As I left Pedro’s place I knew that everything I had been thinking before was real. I was still black and poor and didn’t have a thing to show for who I was except some empty pockets. I wanted to beat up on myself, or maybe get so high I couldn’t think about nothing except laying down and going to sleep.
I knew what I was about. It was being a fake man. One of them stick figures that little kids drew. Even with a gun it didn’t make any difference.
I went up to Jeannie’s house. She was still fine and she was only seventeen and didn’t have but one baby. I was going to tell her she needed to find her another man. Maybe, if I ever got my stuff together, I could help her take a course or something. She had more going for her than I did, and if anyone was going to help Little Eddie it was going to be her. Like all the other baby mamas around the hood she was going to have to carry the load on her own.
“Where were you yesterday?” She stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. “I’m telling your son you were going to show any minute and you don’t even have the decency to call me! What’s wrong with you?”
“Yo, Saturday’s his birthday, right?”
“Yesterday was his birthday, Eddie!” The anger was all over her face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Man, look—I thought—Jeannie, I didn’t have nothing to bring him and I don’t think I’m—”
“Later for that noise!” Jeannie stood aside so I could come in. “That’s your son. He’s not interested in what you got out some store. You supposed to be here for his birthday and stuff. What’s wrong with you? I’m trying to build you up so he can look up to you and you don’t even show!”
“Yo, I’m sorry.”
“He’s in the bedroom,” she said. “You go on in there and talk with him so he knows he got a daddy. And don’t even think you’re going to get next to me because you are not!”
I started to tell h
er that she couldn’t tell me what to do, but she brushed me off with a wave before I could even get the words out. I went into the bedroom Little Eddie shared with Jeannie. He was sitting on the floor at the end of the bed pretending he was talking into Jean-nie’s cell phone. When he saw me he put a finger to his lips, letting me know I should keep quiet.
“Who you whispering secrets to?” I got down on the floor with him. “You got a girlfriend?”
He handed me the phone and I put my arm around him. He still couldn’t talk too clear and I couldn’t understand what he was saying but I knew it had something to do with the cell phone. Jeannie came in and sat down on the bed and watched as I played with Little Eddie. Once in a while I looked up at her and she seemed happy to have me there. I wanted to say something to her, to lay out the way I felt about not having nothing to bring to Little Eddie, about not being able to get a place for the two of us. But it all seemed like same old same old.
I hung for a few hours, then said I had to split.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“I don’t know, to my moms’ house, I guess.”
“Lay here for a while.”
“Hey, look, girl, I really feel bad not to show with nothing,” I said. “No matter what you saying about how he wasn’t looking for me to bring him nothing from the store. It still messes with me. You know what I mean?”
“What you think?” she asked. “I don’t have a ring, I don’t have your name. You think it don’t mess with me? What I got is hoping that it gets better, that we’ll be a regular family one day. As long as I see you’re still acting like my man and Little Eddie’s father I still got that hope and that’s what keeps me going. Maybe you have to be a woman to understand that. What you think? You think a man can understand that, too?”
I sure as hell didn’t want to, but I was crying. I was thinking about the women I had been dealing with all day—Mama, the woman in the tailor shop, and Jeannie. They were trying to hold their worlds together the same way I was trying to make mine.
“Dada crying.” Little Eddie was standing, leaning against the edge of the bed.
What They Found Page 9