A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  I walked to the playground area and rested my forearms on top of the four-foot-high chain-link fence that ran directly along the men’s benches. Omari began to play behind me, pushing Angela higher and higher, the empty swing faintly squeaking. I tried not to cry about the Knicks cap. On the other side of the fence Mr. Boone, the ringleader, held forth. The sun leaned west—it was past four already—so his perspiring face appeared blue in the shadow of a large tree.

  “Nah, I ain’t imagining it and you ain’t either. It’s real, and there’s a reason you got little girls out here looking like Pam Grier. It’s the chicken.” He paused dramatically and wiped points of sweat from his nose. “They injecting those birds with so many damn chemicals, got our girls all thicksome while their breath still smelling like milk.”

  “What you mean, Boone? What they do that for?” said a younger, unfamiliar man. He wore a straw trilby pushed back on his head.

  “What you mean what I mean? They do it to drive the black man out his mind. So he don’t know up from down or right from wrong when he see these girls. All buxom but still got doll babies in their hands. Then you got babies making babies. Then you got black families good and fucked-up. That’s why they do it.”

  “Experiments,” said a third man, Sidney, as though he hated everything about science. He sat closest to me. A rum-scent of cologne rose to me from the back of his neck.

  “Yeah, but I heard it was from those perms they get in their hair. The chemicals.”

  “You heard that?” said the man in the trilby. “Who told you, Boris or Natasha?” He pronounced each burst of his laughter like a word, his voice a little destroyed around the edges. “Y’all sound like some jive motherfuckers is what you sound like. Paranoid.”

  “And you just sound plain stupid,” Boone said. “Tuskegee. Ever heard of it? Holmesburg. And shit like that’s still happening. What you know about it, you ignorant son of a bitch?”

  At this, all the men, including the one in the trilby, broke out in raucous laughter. I laughed too, and Boone’s gaze fell on me. “You calling me a lie, Cuffy,” he said. “Let’s ask Ali Baba over here what’s what.” They all turned to me. Omari came up and claimed a place just to my right, leaning heavily on the fence, but I ignored him. Boone said, “You notice anything different about the girls in your class last year, little man?”

  “Why you asking me?”

  “Don’t be shy about it,” Sidney said. “You know what we talking about.” His hands made exaggerated curves in the air.

  I looked each of them in the face. They were being serious. “Mister, I’m almost eighteen years old.”

  The men broke into hysterics. Hands slapped the tables, and a can that fell from a bench filled cracks in the ground with rivulets of foam.

  “Goddamn, boy, you need to order ten buckets of that chicken Boone talking about.”

  The laughter continued until Boone interrupted. “Don’t work that way,” he said, suddenly thoughtful again. “Nope. Those chemicals only grow the females. Look how scrawny Ali Baba is. His chest look like the cage that there Tweety Bird flew out from. Matter fact, this got me thinking they trying to stunt our boys. Keep ’em from becoming men.”

  “Oh, here we go,” Cuffy said. “Can’t leave well enough alone.”

  Boone scoffed. “Leave well enough alone? This jackass acting like he ain’t heard of COINTELPRO. Start there and go back, and keep on going. You tell me if you can think of a time when war wasn’t declared on us. Same as it ever was. At least we used to have the good sense to know.”

  The men fell silent. I was still stinging from being laughed at, but Sidney leaned closer to me and held his can of beer out over the fence. “Go on,” he said. “This’ll get you right.”

  “Man, this diluted piss won’t add a solitary hair to that boy’s stones. Much less spring him up any.”

  I ignored that comment and bit my lip to keep from smiling. Over by the rusted monkey bars, a group of kids played a rough game of tag. A young father with braided hair was trying to coax his son off the swings. The boy poked his lips out in protest until his dad promised ice cream and pie after dinner. I took the beer. Beside me Omari stuck his hand under his beak. His widened eyes watched me.

  “Go on,” Sidney repeated.

  The wet can, nearly full, had soaked through the paper bag and softened it into a flimsy brown skin. I tilted my head back and drank deeply. Though watery and tepid, the beer was the best thing I’d tasted in a long time.

  “Boy tryna get polluted.”

  “He already polluted. Look at him.”

  “He grown folks now.”

  “Even got a little bitty mustache.”

  “Hey Baba, what about your friend? Tweety Bird, you want some too?”

  I wiped the smear of moisture from the groove of my upper lip and raised my eyebrows at Omari. Pop must have felt like this at the parade when he told me it was okay to look at those half-naked women. He’d wanted me to look, so I did. I couldn’t disappoint him. “How ’bout it, dork? I won’t tell.”

  Omari shook his head vigorously, no, and kicked the fence so that the links shimmied. “I’m not a Tweety,” he said. “I’m not a dork. And I’m not a fag.” He raised himself from the fence and went back to the swings.

  “Guess he don’t give a hoot,” Sidney said. The rest of us jeered, and Boone threw a fistful of crumbled oatmeal cookies at him.

  Soon Omari was the only kid by the swings. The young father and his son had long since left for dinner and ice cream and pie. One boy from the game of tag remained, hanging from the middle of the monkey bars. He swayed almost imperceptibly and scowled at his own dirt-hardened face. As the sun rolled down and marked the slope of the sky, a slight breeze picked up, but the air was still thick and hot. The men had invited me to sit with them, to take the place of a homebound man the others said was hopelessly pussy-whipped. It was a bit past six o’clock—we were already late—but I walked around the fence and sat. Pop was never whipped and I wouldn’t be either.

  The men showed no signs of slowing down. They kept calling me “Ali Baba” or “Grown Folks,” and they gave me more to drink. Finally I got my own can, and then another, and I tried to imitate their pace in sipping, the unselfconscious way they hid the beer between their thighs. For a while they talked about the president, mandatory minimums, and “three strikes.” They traded quips about O. J. Simpson. Then they were on about the number of black men in prison and how everything was out of balance. Sidney had taken the lead.

  “Y’all know Portia Brown?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “Nope.”

  “The megastructure. Need a special license to operate that kind of machinery.”

  “Man, that could be anybody.”

  “You mean Paula Brown.”

  “No, man, not her. Paula’s good from afar, but far from a good.”

  “I know who you mean. Portia. Live over on Vernon Ave.”

  “Yeah, I’m with you.”

  “Caboose on the loose. That’s a fine woman.”

  “A good woman,” Sidney continued. “But you know her man’s doing a twenty-year bid for some petty shit. Portia’s, what, forty? From where I’m sitting that’s young stuff. So what’s she supposed to do?”

  The men shrugged and sipped.

  “I’ll tell you what she is doing. Wednesday night I was over at the Lowdown, having me a quick taste, and who do I see creeping in the corner but Portia, lit up like a Christmas tree, eyes rolling around in her head. She got some Joe standing between her knees, dragging her skirt up. Ugly motherfucker. Cockroach-looking motherfucker. And guess what? Portia Brown wasn’t wearing no drawers.”

  “Damn.”

  “I know. And on a Wednesday too.”

  “Damn.”

  “I know,” Sidney said, “I know. But hell, man, what’s she supposed to do?”

  “Maybe she could stop acting like a skank,” I said. I didn’t
like the way my voice sounded, broken in places. In the quiet, as the men watched me, I took another sip of beer and held the warm, bitter liquid in my mouth for a long time before swallowing. I set the can, nearly empty now, on the concrete chess table. It was my third one.

  “What you say now, Grown Folks?” someone said. I wasn’t sure who.

  “When I get locked up,” I said, “I don’t want my woman acting up like that, no matter how many years I get. Not if she supposed to love me.”

  Cuffy set his hat farther back on his head. “So, you planning on going to jail?”

  “Might as well. If it’s in the cards like you say. If everybody’s there.”

  He looked around. Sidney cleared his throat and said, “Every black man don’t go to prison, son.” His tone had changed. “I mean, we ain’t there.” He spoke as if I was very small and sitting on his lap.

  “Lucky you,” I spat. I realized I was standing.

  They all stared. I had forgotten how I looked. They continued to stare, and it felt like a coordinated effort to humiliate me. The breeze warmed my bare chest. On my head the T-shirt felt bloated and heavy.

  “You ain’t no better than the ones who are,” I said.

  “Nobody said that, little dude. There’s no reason to be yelling.”

  My eyes found the man who had spoken. “Who’s yelling?”

  “You need to calm yourself down, boy.”

  “People need to quit telling me to calm down.” I slapped my beer can off the table and it flew off to my left, toward the entrance. Without another word I stomped after it. I began to kick it along and, with a sudden feeling of permission, followed it out of the park. Before I had gotten very far, someone called after me: “Boy! Hey, boy! Little man!” I turned. It was Cuffy, standing behind Omari, his hands on my brother’s shoulders.

  “Left your bird,” Cuffy said with an uneasy grin.

  Omari moved away from him and stood out of anyone’s reach.

  Cuffy’s gaze shifted back and forth between us before it settled on me. “Something ain’t right. Why you got that mess on your head?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, what’s the story?” he said.

  Why was he asking me? I thought about his question for a moment, but there was no good place to start and no good place to end, and every simple answer had a truer, more perplexing one coiled within it. It all seemed impossible to explain. My hands came up and found the T-shirt already half-collapsed, a soft loose crumple of cloth. I pulled it from my head and put it on.

  Cuffy’s eyes widened at the sight of my hair. Omari breathed openmouthed under his beak.

  “You got people locked up?” Cuffy said.

  I nodded.

  “Your daddy?”

  “He didn’t even do anything that wrong,” I said. It was true. Just possession of a little bit of stuff he shouldn’t have had.

  Cuffy didn’t respond. He knew better than to offer any words of sympathy.

  Abruptly I said, “Tell me what you know about J’ouvert.”

  “J’ouvert?” He scratched his nose. “Why?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Well, call me boring, but that ain’t my kind of party.” He removed his trilby and examined it. His creased shaven head was shaped like a peanut—Pop would have said so. After a moment Cuffy held the hat over me and slowly lowered it. The size wasn’t right so it drooped nearly past my eyes. An odor like mint and sweetened coconut oil emanated from its crown. “I got an agitated soul,” he said. “Most of us do, I think. Not from no conspiracy or nothing. Just from being black and alive. So what we need is rest. To relax and let shit slide.”

  He gripped my shoulder, told me to keep an eye on my bird, then walked away, but not into the park. I stood there, confused and a little drunk. He seemed to move in slow motion. What he’d said in his destroyed voice suggested he’d once been a very different man.

  “You not going back in?” I shouted.

  “I got family, little man. I’m going home,” he said. “And so should you. It’s time. Those fools in there? They ain’t got no place else better to be.”

  I knew home wasn’t an option, and it didn’t make sense to stay in the neighborhood, so we left and wandered into unfamiliar areas. I enjoyed feeling drunk. My arms slackened as we went, and my feet struck the pavement in a brutish, unpredictable way that made me smile. Cuffy’s hat didn’t make me forget about the Knicks cap, but I felt grateful, even though I had to tilt it back every few minutes to keep it out of my eyes. I marveled at some of the subtle differences I noticed as we walked. The way the buildings changed and the people also changed depending on whether they passed in and out of low-rises or high-rises, brownstones or houses.

  Ma and Pop had been so happy together once, hadn’t they? All of us had been, I was sure. Now she wouldn’t even take me to go visit him. From the minute he’d gone inside she had refused to take me, and she kept saying I could go one day on my own. The last time Pop wrote, almost a year ago, he ignored what I’d written in my most recent letter, about the big march in DC, a million black men strong, and how I wished we could go together. Instead, he told me to stop sending pictures of myself. Despite his efforts, all he could see when he read my letters or tried to reply was one of the versions of me he had taped up, “stuck there on your bed, on the couch, on the corner,” he wrote, “or stuck to the wall of my cell, not able to move at all.” He wrote that his mind was getting smaller, getting stingy, squeezed into the squares of the photos I sent, trapped in the patterns of whatever shirt I wore. “Trapped in the lines the photos make of your face,” he said at the end. He didn’t even sign the letter.

  For a long time Omari trailed behind me without complaint; now and then, as I sobered up, he would murmur to Angela. It was still hot, even after the sky started going dark, so when people weren’t looking I fanned myself with the trilby. Soon my feet began to hurt, so I’d stop to sit on stoops. Omari sat too, but always at a distance. He followed me into bodegas and watched me stick my head into the freezers and coolers. “He’s gonna get in trouble,” he told Angela, and sure enough, at the very next store, I was yelled at and told to leave. Outside, Omari sat on the curb, hunched over his belly. He looked like a sack of stuff waiting to be thrown away. It was way past time for us to be home.

  “Ma’s gonna kill us,” he said.

  “She ain’t even thinking about us.”

  “She said six.”

  “Mike’s still there.”

  “So what?”

  “He’s gonna stay over,” I said. “Ma don’t have work tomorrow, and I bet he don’t even have a job. Remember the first time he stayed? You want it to be like that again?”

  Omari looked up at me and then lowered his head, took a deep tremulous breath.

  “Let’s have an adventure,” I said. “Keep this thing going. You and me. And Angela too.” He’d be more persuaded if I included her.

  I extended my hand to help him up, but he stood without taking it. When we started walking again, he stayed a little closer behind me.

  “Sea horses don’t have legs, and mermaids don’t have legs,” he said at one point. “So if you got revenge and chopped off his legs but then felt bad about it after, you could throw him into the ocean.”

  Other than the occasional line like this, everything was quiet, dense and eerie and strange like the heat without the sun. I didn’t like it.

  “So, tell me about Angela,” I said.

  He thought hard about this. “I found her,” he replied.

  “She got lost?”

  “The paper keeps saying it. ‘Angela Adams is missing.’ But she’s not, you’re not. Found you,” he sang, “found you found you found you. And she found me too.”

  More questions, the vague shapes of them, spread like a rash in my mind. I searched for something, anything, to say. “Hey, have I told you about where we’re going, about J’ouvert?”

  “Oh,” he said. “No.”

  I began describing a fan
tastical version of the West Indian Day Parade, with floats that moved like clouds down the street, and music that caused you to dance as soon as you heard it. I said that there was food everywhere, any food you could think of, and that there were people like him, bird-people who had feathers and could fly. The feeling of being there, I said, was the best in the world. Someone would always look out for you and take care of you and let you know you could do anything.

  For a little while he got excited, and apparently Angela did too. But eventually he began to whine that they were hungry and thirsty and tired. I ignored his complaints. When it seemed late enough, long after midnight, we headed to Eastern Parkway. I’d convinced myself, even though it was just a thing I’d blurted out a few hours ago, that Pop actually had been at J’ouvert back when I was seven. I’d always known he must have had a good excuse to stay out that whole night. It was wrong for Ma to yell at him. I understood why his eyes were bleary when he came in to get me. He’d been out experiencing something even better than the parade itself, something I hadn’t been ready for back then.

  At the parkway, metal barriers lined the parade route, but there were no bursts of music, no floats, no smells of meat cooking on a grill, no crowd, no bird-people, hardly any people at all. We walked along the barriers and I felt more exhausted than I’d ever been. I had been sure this was where J’ouvert happened too.

  “We’re so hungry,” Omari said.

  I was already past that point, as if the part of the body that feels hunger had given up and just eaten itself. At the next bodega I used Mike’s quarter to buy a bag of potato chips, and we walked on. Every once in a while, from behind me came a sudden rustling of the bag followed by an unsettling crunch. Otherwise it was so damn quiet and lonely. Even Omari and Angela had run out of things to say.

  Finally I stopped an old woman clomping along in heavy boots, but I didn’t know what to say to her. Omari used a wet finger to get at the potato chip dust in the corners of the bag, watching me, and then he asked her where we were supposed to go for J’ouvert. The old woman squinted at us and laughed, showing her missing teeth, then said in a heavy Haitian accent, “Grand Army Plaza.”