My after-school at the St. Nick community center would sometimes take us on skate outings to Wollman Rink. It was always a big deal, and at least a dozen kids would get yelled at for acting up on those trips.
Darrell Buckney was always one of them.
We had Darrell Buckney and also a Daryl Reynolds. Though their first names were spelled different, you said them just the same.
Ms. Jen had been confused when she had started here. She even tried to tell Darrell that based on how his name was spelled, it should actually be pronounced different than Daryl’s name. Darrell’s mother wasn’t happy that Lady Bug had been trying to convince Darrell that his name wasn’t right, so she stomped down here and cursed out Ms. Jen in front of the whole class.
After that we all said Darrell’s name like his ma wanted us to.
Ms. Jen started calling them Darrell B. or Daryl R. to tell them apart.
The center was okay, but I didn’t really like having Mr. Ali call me into his office to talk about my brother. It seemed like he was only trying to make me feel worse.
But a week after our first talk, here I was again, sitting across from his ugly face in his office. I tried to fix my eyeballs on something else to distract me. I sighed and read another one of his wall plaques to myself.
“That’s from City College,” Ali said, pointing at the plaque I was eyeing. “I got my MS in psychotherapy there. Way back.” He laughed, but I didn’t find anything funny. “I trained in counseling youth in particular.”
I squinted at him. I was beginning to wonder if I should trust him as much as I had been.
“You got kind of excited the last time you were in here,” Ali said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” He pointed at the front of his old desk. “That dent ain’t coming out, brother. Trashing up my furniture…”
I looked away. Mr. Ali grinned, all crooked.
“You got very angry, sir.” He pulled out a desk drawer and offered me some gum. I declined. “I used to be angry like that. You gotta deal with anger, or anger will deal with you.” Ali pointed at his face and grinned some more. He shoved a stick of gum into his mouth.
I watched him chew. “Your face, you mean?” I asked.
“Apert syndrome,” Mr. Ali answered. “Type of birth defect. When I was younger, about your age, I used to be angry. At my father in particular.”
I nodded, but didn’t know what he meant.
“Why are you so angry?” Mr. Ali asked. “I understand how much you miss Jermaine. But are you mad at him?”
“No!” I shouted. “Man…”
Hearing him say that made me boil. But I tried to control myself this time. I stuffed it back down inside of me.
And I forced a smile.
“I loved my brother,” I told him.
Ali looked suspicious.
“Jermaine was the only person I could talk to in the world and not have to use words,” I said. “Sometimes, if we were walking down the street and somebody crazy would walk by or something funny would happen, me and Jermaine wouldn’t have to say nothing to one another. Just one look and he knew exactly how I was thinking.”
Remembering this made me feel even worse. I hated coming here.
Mr. Ali leaned back in his swivel chair and bumped his head against his wall. He stared at the ceiling, then closed his eyes.
“Deal with these emotions, Mr. Rachpaul,” he said. “If we don’t distinguish our heartache—don’t at least attempt to work through it, you understand—it tends to pop up later. In different ways, aberrant ways.” He frowned. “This gum is stale.”
The metal trash can gonged as he spat the gum inside.
“Aberrant,” he said again. “Bad behavior, bad things, man. So you’re not gonna tell me who—or what—you’re mad at?”
I thought about what I had done to Jermaine. I hadn’t told anybody what had gone down between us before he had died. It upset my stomach thinking about it.
And yeah—it was bad.
The House of Moneekrom had devoured most of the living room. That was what I had named my Lego castle. I was afraid Ma was gonna blow up and make me tear it down any day now.
She’d better not. This was one of the best things I’d ever done.
Working on it made me feel better than any stupid talk with Mr. Ali.
Moneekrom was made up of all different colors of blocks, stacked right beside one another like rainbow walls. I had built round turrets all along the walls. And there were little arched bridges coming out of three sides of the castle.
In the center on top I had started building a huge dome that would cover the king’s throne. As I built, I made up stories.
I had decided that it was where the aliens King Blaze and Queen Misteria lived. They had a son too. His name was Prince Stellar.
The House of Moneekrom had been handed down from one member of the Moneekrom family to the next. For over thousands of years, it had. And every time a new king was crowned, they added on a new wing to the alien castle, which was why I had to build it so enormous.
But over those thousands of years none of the Moneekrom kings or queens had been able to solve one big problem….
I needed to write all this down somewhere.
Just then, I heard keys jingling in the front door and Ma came slumping in from work. She eyed me while hanging up her coat. I knew then she was about to start in again. I tensed my shoulders and started rearranging blocks on one of the castle’s towers.
Her eyes sizzled the rear of my neck.
“You know I tripped over your lil’ buildings last night?” she told the back of my head.
“I know,” I said. “It took me an hour to fix your damage.”
I heard her suck her teeth. My mother could slurp her teeth louder than anybody I knew. I kept working on my castle tower.
“Sugar,” she started, “your buildings—”
“House of Moneekrom, Ma.”
“Right,” she said. “Mo-nee-krom needs to come down. It’s took over the whole blangdang room. And I ain’t tripping over it again. You can’t see?”
I didn’t say nothing. She sighed and stamped into her bedroom.
“Take it down, Wallace!” I heard her yell. “Or I’ll take it down!”
She slammed her bedroom door.
“Daddy!” I shouted, and hugged him before he could even step through our doorway.
He laughed. “How is my warrior?” Daddy asked me.
“Good,” I said.
“Here you go,” he said, and tossed me a gift wrapped in snowflake Christmas paper.
“Late Christmas?” I asked him, and grinned.
“Late Christmas!” he answered.
Late Christmas was a holiday that only me and my father celebrated. The date changed every year. It happened on the day that he finally rolled through to give me my holiday gifts.
Though this year I was disappointed that it was only one gift. Usually the old dude came through with lots of them for me and at least one for Ma.
I tore open my present with him still standing in the doorway. It was a computer tablet with a wireless mouse. I liked it, but wasn’t as excited as I guess I should’a been.
“Uh, Sir Wallace, sir, may we come indoors?” Daddy asked me, looking exasperated.
Just then, I realized two things: I had been blocking his way into our apartment, and he had somebody with him, what he called his doux-doux, or new girlfriend.
Her name was Heike and she was a funny-looking white German lady. My father could’a done better. He was a handsome man, even if he was old; he was almost forty.
People said I resembled him. We had the same curvy hair and noses with high bridges. I hoped I would get as diesel as he was. But doing construction helped him stay in shape.
“Wallace,” he would say to me, “never couch at home watching TV when you could be doing something fruitful. Get out, boy. Jog. Go to the gym! Lift a barbell!”
Suddenly Ma shoved me to t
he side so Daddy and his girl could step in. I almost fell over. Ma didn’t need to lift no barbells.
“Sue-ellen,” Daddy said to Ma. “You done lost weight, eh, girl?”
“Stress” was all Ma said. Daddy nodded gloomily.
In the living room Daddy made a big fuss over my castle. He said he’d never seen nothing like it. Ma grunted.
“Sir Wallace, you have impressed me, sir,” he said.
“It’s brilliant,” Heike agreed.
Daddy and her carefully stepped over one of my small towers and slid down onto our living room couch. Ma served Daddy a fat plate of pastelles, despite him and Heike saying they wouldn’t consume any “junk.” Pastelles were Daddy’s favorite.
While he gobbled, Heike gawked at Daddy like he was somebody she didn’t recognize. Between bites Daddy handed Ma a fat envelope and wished her a merry Christmas.
He opened my Christmas gift to him and loved it. I had bought him two bottles of cologne: buy one, get one free!
Then Heike started peeking around the living room.
My mother and her friend Mr. Jonathan never had nothing positive to say about any of Benny Rachpaul’s latest sweethearts. He did have a lot of them. Maybe too many different ones.
“Are those Pez candy?” Heike asked. She had this funny accent. Ma nodded. Heike laughed. “Have you eaten all of these candies on the wall, Sue-ellen?”
Daddy’s head was buried in pastelles.
“Actually,” Ma said, “I just collect the dispensers.”
Heike nodded. “They’re beautiful. You have the atman of a child.”
“Uh-huh,” Ma grunted. “So you and Benjamin met at work?”
“Yes!” Heike said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” She squeezed his knee.
“Not my construction job,” Daddy added. “We met at a party. Out in Jersey. She and I was both hired to entertain.”
Uh, I should’a said—my father was a clown.
No, he actually was a real clown. At least, on weekends.
His main job was construction work. He installed toilets and hand dryers in buildings all around the city even though he had lived in this country illegal for years.
My father was born in Trinidad. A while back, though, he started working part-time as a clown for children’s birthday parties.
He went by the name Rocky the Clown.
Last year I rode with him in his old dinged-up van to a kid’s birthday party waaaay out in Long Island. I remember standing there in that family’s gigantic backyard with their grass more green than any color green I had seen before and watching Rocky the Clown run and chase and laugh with them kids.
He hadn’t been any kind of clown toward me and my brother. I always remember him being real quiet and kind of irritated.
Not fun.
This Heike lady was a professional fire-breather, Daddy told us. She would go to parties and shoot flames out of her mouth to entertain everybody. Sitting next to her on our couch, I studied her lips, searching for burns.
“Lolly, you want some?” Ma asked. “I’m ’bout to put this rice and peas back in the Frigidaire.”
“Sue, will you stop calling the boy that?” Daddy complained. “We gave him Wallace as a name. That’s a solid man’s style. This ‘Lolly’ sounds like you’re talking to your daughter.”
“I think ‘Lolly’ is delightful,” said Heike.
“Quit trying to make him into a female,” Daddy told Ma.
Heike smiled at me with these big light-blue eyes and I suddenly wanted to smack her upside her head. Instead, I made my own eyes all wide and pointed toward the floor near her foot.
“Mouse,” I whispered.
It took her a minute to understand, but when she got it, man, she screamed and flew into Daddy’s arms. The only thing was, he was still sucking down his pastelles, which wound up all over his lap.
Ma was hot and made me clean the couch. When Rocky the Clown found out what I had told Heike, he glared at me.
“But I did see a mouse, Daddy,” I said.
I didn’t tell him the mouse had come with my new tablet. Afterward, I felt a little funny. I had been doing more and more stuff like this—mean stuff.
It was getting easier and easier.
Blam!
Us after-schoolers all jerked our heads toward the open door of our study room. We were sitting here, noses in our books, when we heard the sound of a gunshot. But there had been no gun shot.
The blast had been Big Rose.
She had forced the door to the room open by ramming her big butt into it. The slamming door had gone blam! and now we were all watching Big Rose’s wide shoulders as she stepped in backward to the community center’s study room.
“Dang, Big Rose!” Sunnshyne shouted. “You scared the crap out of me, girl!”
“Sunny, be quiet, please,” Ms. Jenna said. “Rosamund, find a seat. Quietly.”
When Big Rose—aka Rosamund Major—just stood there in the door of the study room, with her huge back to us all, not saying nothing, Ms. Jen sighed and got up to see what was going on.
It was a mouse outside in the hall.
A real one.
Big Rose was standing in the doorway, fascinated by that mouse. Ms. Jen shooed it away and tried to pat Big Rose’s shoulder, but that girl ducked away from her.
We all laughed.
Big Rose spun around and eyed all of us like she was surprised to see us sitting here. She just started coming to after-school in November. This girl had lived in St. Nick for a while, I think, and she’d been thrown out of too many after-schools to count.
Big Bad Rose liked to bang up other kids, we had heard.
And she was special too.
Big Rose stood there, surveying us all for a minute, then stomped to the chair that she usually sat in, all by itself, way on the other side of the room. I watched her and I traded grins with Sunnshyne and Vega.
Rosamund Major was the biggest and tallest kid in after-school. Maybe even the biggest and tallest kid in all of Harlem!
This girl had a watermelon head and this way of walking—or stomping—that looked like she was skipping rope on the moon; she kind of hopped into the air with every step she took. Her big ol’ eyes flashed straight ahead, and her upper lip was always tucked inside her bottom one.
She fell into her chair and plunged into one of the tiny books she always kept in her backpack. She would stay reading like that for most of after-school.
None of the other kids would say much, if anything, to her.
Ms. Jen would check in on her a couple of times.
Otherwise, it was like Big Rose wasn’t even in our room. Except you couldn’t help but watch her. Her head was like a dark planet that drew your eyes. I had never heard her speak.
I wasn’t sure she knew how.
A little after we had had our snack, the community center got froze out. This happened sometimes. A freeze-out just meant that the staff closed and locked the doors to the building and nobody could come in or go out until the director said so.
Usually it was because there was some trouble in the neighborhood. Some type of danger like a beef between dealers or a gang battle.
This time, it was a shooting.
Some fourteen-year-old dude was shot in front of a bodega nearby. Sunny heard it was because the dude had slapped some girl the day before who was the girlfriend of some dealer.
Because of this, nobody could enter or leave the center until Mr. Ali said it was safe.
Vega was leaning in one corner of the room, laughing about something with Darrell B. But I sat at a table by myself.
On the floor somebody had tracked in some slush from outside. When I left our place this morning, it had been snowing. Now, this evening, it had all turned from bright white flakes to grubby gray mush.
This winter the snowstorms and darkness had really got to me. I wondered if I ever would be happy again.
The only thing that seemed to help was building my castle. When I was building, I
forgot about everything else. But Ma was going to make me rip down the House of Moneekrom tonight, I knew it. And I didn’t know what I was going to do then.
Really did not know.
Like I was losing control.
“Why did you used to be angry at your father?” I asked.
“I told you,” Mr. Ali said. His voice got soft and lost inside his tiny office.
“No, you didn’t!”
“I think I did tell you,” Ali said. “And there’s no need to shout.”
“Look—” I started.
“Mr. Rachpaul, you are a brainy young man, but there’s some things you’re keeping to yourself. Which is very dumb. I want to help.”
I thought again about Jermaine and what had gone down between me and him before he passed. I guess it had been bothering me. It had been a bad way to end things with my brother.
“You tell me why you’re so angry now and I’ll tell you why I was so angry then.” He raised a crooked eyebrow. “Deal?”
I sucked my teeth. “I don’t got time for this….”
“How’s your father?” he asked.
“Aw, God! Why you bringing him up? He’s okay,” I said. “I guess.”
“It’s gotta be rough on him, losing a son. Parents aren’t meant to bury their children. Kids, we basically grow up knowing that one day our parents are gonna leave us. But parents aren’t conditioned to see their kids go on before them.”
I had never really thought about that.
Mr. Ali leaned in closer across his desk. “Wallace, this might be a good time to get to know your father a little better, you know. You don’t see him as much as you’d like.”
“Well, that’s on him, not me,” I said. Ali saying this made me angry. “He’s the father. He’s supposed to make time to see me!”
“I understand, man. Calm down, brother.”
I sat back in my seat and tried to look relaxed.
“Remember,” Ali said, “your dad is having just as difficult a time adjusting to Jermaine’s death as you are—mayhaps more. Consider that when you manage him. This could be a new, fortuitous opportunity for you and for your father to shape something better, adjust to a world without Jermaine.”
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 4