The cops must’ve been called from the inside, because the whole place was soundproof. Somebody could’ve started shooting in there and no one would hear it outside, which now, when I think about it, is pretty scary. The lights flicked on and everybody panicked, running like roaches. Big guy jumped off me and started scrambling, and I ran after him and hit him straight across the teeth. I pulled the punch from a special place, a place I didn’t even know I had in me. I really wanted him to remember me every time he saw his gappy smile. It brought him to one knee, and I was good with that. I ran over to Needles and almost backed away again—he was lying there in a spreading puddle of his own blood. Oh my God. Oh my God. He was hurt bad. He wasn’t moving. Oh my God. I fell to my knees.
“Come on, man! We gotta go!” I yelled to him. “Come on!” He rolled his head from one side to the other, and all I could think was, at least he’s not dead. At least that.
Somehow I got Needles up and threw his arm around my shoulder.
“Nood, come on!” I shouted. He looked like he was drifting somewhere, having some sort of out-of-body experience. “Noodles!” I shrieked.
This snapped him out of it. He ran to his brother’s side and swung Needles’s free arm over his own, and together we propped Needles up, practically running him back across Lewis Ave, where we felt safe.
“You’re gonna be okay, man. You’re gonna be okay,” I repeated over and over again. Needles kept trying to talk, but he couldn’t get the words out. He kept spitting blood and grunting in pain. I kept looking to make sure his eyes were open—make sure he stayed conscious. He was barely moving his legs. We were practically dragging him.
Once we got to their house, we had a helluva time getting him up the steps. He could hardly move any part of his body. First we tried to drag him. He moaned in pain. No good. Then we tried carrying him, Noodles gripping under his arms, and me at his feet. Too awkward, and I was afraid Noodles would let go and Needles would bust his head on the steps. So I ended up just carrying him over my shoulder, like men always carry their wives in the old-time movies when they first get married. Needles was heavier than he looked, and I could feel his blood seep through my shirt as I took the steps, one by one. And judging from the smell coming from him, he had also pissed his pants.
After what seemed like forever, we got into their apartment. We took Needles straight to his room and laid him down.
“Help me get his clothes off,” I ordered Noodles, who was just standing there looking at his broken-up brother with teary eyes. “Everything we do is gonna hurt him, so try to take it easy.”
I leaned over Needles and slid his blood-soaked shirt up, wiggling it up his back slowly, and gently pulling it over his head.
“You get his pants, Nood.”
Noodles looked at me like I asked him to kiss Needles on the mouth.
My hands started sweating. My mouth got dry. I was going to explode.
“Noodles! Take off his damn pants!” I barked.
Noodles jumped, now afraid of me, and started gingerly unbuckling Needles’s belt. He looked so uncomfortable, as if this weren’t his brother, his family, that I nudged him to one side and helped him shimmy Needles’s jeans down. The blood made them look tie-dyed.
Needles twitched and grunted, as if his clothes had become full of tiny, invisible knives, shanking him with every tug of a pant leg. Expensive clothes should protect you from pain. They should be bulletproof, and bully proof, I thought, looking at all the gear John gave us, now a pile of damaged goods.
I told Noodles to get a wet towel so we could wipe the blood off Needles and I could see where the damage was.
“And y’all got some alcohol?” I asked as he started to run out of the room.
“Alcohol, like liquor?” Noodles responded.
“Naw, man. Alcohol like, the kind you clean stuff with. The kind you put on a cut.”
Why the hell would I be asking for liquor?
“I don’t know, let me look.”
Somehow I knew they didn’t have it, but while Noodles went to look for it, I spoke as encouragingly as I could to Needles.
“You gonna be good, man. We’ll take care of you,” I said, my voice starting to crack and slip into a cry. Needles opened his eyes for a moment, and then the lids fluttered closed again. “I’m so sorry. I swear. This shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have left you alone.” I felt so damned guilty. I was so ashamed. I felt like I had let my own brother down. I should’ve stayed close. I should’ve protected him. Instead I was off kissing some random girl.
Needles lifted his head just a little, maybe a half of a half of an inch off the pillow. His body jerked every few minutes, the syndrome, which seemed to be sending him into even more pain. Then I realized he was trying to tell me something. Tears were coming from his eyes. His head fell back down to the pillow, exhausted.
“It’s okay, man. Just rest.”
“Yo, he aight, Ali?” Noodles came running with a dripping towel. He stood by the door, too afraid to come any closer.
“Yeah. Get the alcohol?”
“Naw, man,” Noodles said, defeated. “Not that kind.”
I thought for a second as I looked over Needles’s body, now starting to blue and purple up, the bruises looked like they were made with bats, not fists. Like tattoos of inkblots all over him. The cuts were mostly flesh wounds, but they still needed to be cleaned, or they would get infected and then who knows what could happen. I saw on TV once, a guy had to get his whole leg cut off just because he never treated a wound he got from a bike accident.
“Man, just get whatever alcohol you have. It’ll have to do,” I said to Noodles.
A few minutes later we were ready to baptize Needles in Johnnie Walker. I took the towel and covered the mouth of the bottle. Then I turned it up, and back down, just to dampen it.
“This is gonna sting just a little, but I promise you, it’ll help.”
Needles wouldn’t take his eyes off me. He never glanced at his brother, once. It was like Noodles wasn’t even in the room anymore. Like he didn’t exist. Looking Needles in the eye, I dabbed the rag on the first cut. He made a painful sizzling noise with his mouth. I knew the feeling—I did this every time I got a cut, but I always hollered. But my boy Needles took it like a man.
Then I checked to see if any bones were broken.
“Look, man, we can’t take him to the hospital,” Noodles said as I felt up and down Needles’s arms and legs, searching for fractures or anything that seemed out of place. He was right. Nobody in our neighborhood could go to the hospital. A trip to the hospital could mean the end to a roof over your head. Can’t pay hospital bills and rent. One time, this girl who used to live down the block, Sasha Lee, got hit by a car. I think I was around ten. The car hit her so hard, she flew up in the air and landed on the other side of the street. Everybody knew she was dead. She had to be. Her mother came flying down the block. We all ran over to help. By the time I got down the block, Ms. Lee had Sasha up and was half carrying, half dragging her aimlessly down the block, toward Lewis Ave. Somebody shouted, “Call the ambulance!” Ms. Lee quickly shouted, “No! No ambulance! She’ll be okay. We’ll catch a cab to the clinic tomorrow.”
So, yeah, I was praying that none of Needles’s bones were broken, because like Noodles said, we couldn’t take him to the hospital.
“I know that. But we still gotta check,” I explained.
I kept pinching at his joints, asking if this hurt or if that hurt, to all of which Needles shook his head no, until I got to his wrist. I pinched the two bones on the sides of his wrist. The ones that feel like marbles under the skin.
“Ah!” Needles cried out. He hissed and snatched his wrist away, that fast.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Nood, you got anything we can wrap his wrist with?”
At this point I didn’t even know why I was asking. I knew he wouldn’t be able to find anything, and I wouldn’t be able to find anything either.
Still, Noodles
ran out of the room to go search for something we could use as bandage.
Needles lay there cradling his wrist with his other hand. His eyes were swollen. He looked sad, angry, and uncomfortable all at the same time. But at least he looked a little more alert. “Needles, good news is, I don’t think it’s broken,” I told him. “Probably just sprained. We’ll just ice it.” I forced a smile.
“Noodles, just get some ice!” I yelled.
He came back in the room with nothing but a frown on his face.
“No ice, Ali.”
No ice. The house didn’t even have frozen water. So I yanked one of Needles’s socks off his foot, and wrapped it tight around his wrist. I didn’t know what it would do, or if it would do anything at all, but it was all I could think of. “Can you at least find some aspirin?”
After I helped Needles swallow the aspirin, I stepped back and took one good look at him. He lay there like some sort of insect, maybe a slug with fresh salt poured on him, disintegrating slowly. Totally weird, but I couldn’t help but think that his face looked like some kind of jigsaw puzzle, the pieces not quite in the right place. Lip swollen. Nose bloody. His eyes just starting to blacken and puff up. It was gonna be a long, hard night for Needles, which sucked because it had started so good.
I sat with him as he started to drift off, and began looking around his room. He never let anyone in it, and it was a total surprise—it was nothing like the rest of the house. It was bright, and the walls were covered in posters of old-school rappers from the nineties, and pictures of him and Noodles, and their mother looking a lot less tired than I’m used to seeing her, and a man I had never seen before, who I figured was their father, judging from how much they all looked alike. The place in the pictures definitely wasn’t this apartment, that’s for sure. Everybody looked happy. On top of all that, Needles’s room was neat. Every shoe, every shirt, every little thing was in its place.
I glanced over at Noodles and thought about whether or not I should talk to him about what happened at the party. Then I realized I had to. But I didn’t want to do it with Needles right there, even though I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for Needles to get some stuff off his own chest, if he only had the energy to talk. Shoot, all he really had to do was drop an F-bomb. Noodles would’ve got the message loud and clear. But Needles looked like he was falling asleep and was refusing to acknowledge his brother at all. It wasn’t for me to force it. But it was my place to speak up about why I had to jump in and risk my own life when me and Needles ain’t got no blood between us.
“Let’s let him sleep,” I whispered to Noodles, pointing toward the bedroom door. After softly closing it behind me, we went into the living room, where I sat down on the same nasty chair, with the stuffing on the seat part. I don’t know why I even sat down. I should’ve been going home. My work was done. Needles was safe and almost asleep. But I sat, because if I walked out of that apartment, we would most likely never discuss what happened. It would never come up. It would get swept under the rug like so many of the other weird and strained parts of our friendship.
“Yo, man, what was all that about?” I said at last, assuming he would be able to pick up from the tone of my voice that I was talking about him not defending his brother at the party.
Noodles was leaning against the kitchen counter. The tired on his face was almost as bad as the sadness. I waited to see if he would get all cocky, let his ego take control of his tongue. I was ready for whatever “You don’t know about me and my brother” trash he was about to try to kick to me.
“What was what about?” he said stupidly.
I sat there for a second to collect my thoughts. I didn’t want to blow up.
“Hmmm. Let me think. Your brother was getting the crap beat out of him—four against ONE—and you were off in the corner, doing JACK! You moused up, man!”
Noodles’s eyes welled up, and he hung his head. It was the first time I had ever seen him do that.
“I don’t know what happened, man,” he said finally.
Wrong answer. Think a little harder, I wanted to say.
“Aight. Well, let’s start from the beginning. Why did they jump Needles? Last I checked, he was chilling in the corner, out of the way. So get me from point A to point Z, Noodles, because I’m really having a hard time understanding what the hell went wrong.” Man, I sounded just like Doris. Point A to point Z. That was definitely Doris. Every time something happened in the house and neither Jazz or I wanted to rat the other person out, we would stall as best we could. That’s when Doris would pull out the A to Z thing, and the way she said it made it seem like if we didn’t get to point Z quickly, she was going to B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J all up and down our butts. I wanted Noodles to feel that same threat. The threat of a Doris whooping, through the hands of her firstborn. Me.
Noodles stared at the floor, which I didn’t like. I did like the fact that he was now humble, but I didn’t like the fact that he was acting like a chump. I wasn’t his father or the police. I was his friend. Look me in my eye, so that I know whatever you are about to say is the truth.
“It was me,” he said. His words came out like the squeak of a mouse caught on one of those nasty sticky pads.
“What was you?” God, Doris was all over me.
He raised his head, finally, like a man.
“He did it for me, Ali,” Noodles blurted out, and then, to my horror, he started to whine. Not cry, just whine. “I was with Tasha almost the whole time, and everything was cool. So cool! I told her I would be right back because I had to run to the bathroom. So I started walking through the crowd, and some dude stepped on my foot. So—”
“Wait. Please don’t tell me this is gonna be one of those ‘Somebody stepped on my foot, so I had to fight him, because he smudged my shoe’ stories.”
“Just listen, man,” Noodles pleaded. I could tell he really felt bad, so I just shut up and let him finish. But still, I hoped it wasn’t one of those.
“So this dude, who was obviously wasted, stepped on my foot. Now, Ali, I knew what the deal was. You know that. I didn’t want no parts of nobody in there because they were all older than us, plus, Tasha let us in, and I wasn’t trying to get her in no trouble with MoMo. I promised her that. We all did. But Ali, my shoes were too small. My feet were killing me! So when that fool stepped on my foot, my reflex kicked in and I pushed him—just so that he would get off my foot—I swear! It hurt like crazy, my toes all bunched up in them shoes. And this fool wanna put his two-hundred-pound bear paw on it! It was like when you at the doctor’s and they hit your knee with that hammer, and your leg kick out. Reflex.”
I understood what Noodles was saying, but I wasn’t letting him off the hook.
“Aight, and then what?”
“The first thing I did was apologize to the dude. Me, Ali! I said I was sorry. But then the dude got all wild on me. I don’t know if he couldn’t make out that I was saying I was sorry for pushing him, because of all the music blasting and people shouting, but I was. Next thing I knew, he just started snapping on me out of nowhere. Like, just barking on me. And I couldn’t understand what he was saying exactly, but I knew he was mad. The people next to him were gassing him, telling him this and that, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying either, but I could tell they were pumping this dude up. It was almost like he was looking for trouble. Like he was just trying to find the right foot to step on, the one in the too-small shoes.
“While all this is happening, I’m steady trying to cool homeboy down. I’m screaming that I didn’t mean anything, and that it was a reflex and not personal. But his goons are all around him, still hyping the whole situation. Then he pushed me. I mean, it felt like he was trying to put both of his hands through my chest. I stumbled back and fell on some other drunk dude, who then started popping off at the mouth too. At me! I didn’t even do nothing to that dude, but he ain’t care. He was pissed at me for falling into him. I tried to explain that the other guy pushed me, but h
e wasn’t hearing it.
“So here I am between these two drunk beasts who look crazy enough to head-butt me, or bite me, or something wild like that. The kinda dudes who don’t play by no rules.”
“So why didn’t you just roll out?” I asked.
“I tried. But as soon as I was about to, Needles showed up to see what was going on. The dudes instantly assumed that Needles was there to back me up and that now we were ready to rumble or something. Like my scrawny brother had come to save me.”
“Maybe he did.”
Noodles huffed to himself.
“Yeah, maybe he did,” he conceded. “Anyway, so Needles is standing there with his yarn and all that, and I’m trying to explain to him what’s going on as quickly as possible, as well as turn him so that we can sort of start at least trying to walk away from them, but when we took a step, the first guy grabbed me and spun me around.” Here Noodles paused and looked me right in the eye. “Ali, as soon as I spun around, Needles had a tick.”
“Oh no. Don’t tell me . . .”
“Yep. He jerked, and jabbed one of his needles right into the dude’s side!”
“Did it go in?”
“Man, I don’t know. All I know is, dude started shouting something about Needles stabbing him, and then . . .”
Noodles stopped talking. It’s like he couldn’t say anything else. Like his throat closed up. And I felt a little bit bad for him . . . I really did. But then I kept seeing all those dudes beating poor Needles down, in my mind. And something bubbled up.
“And then you ran,” I said plainly. I wasn’t going to be easy on him with all this. I had been too easy for too long. I remembered what my mother had said about getting tired of bailing people out. People in this case, being Noodles. I was definitely tired, like I had been carrying him on my back for miles, and all he ever did was dig his heels into my ribs like a jockey on a horse.
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