by Dale Peck
In her pocket her fingers rub back and forth and round and round, unconsciously, round and round and back and forth. There’s a connection there, between the package in her pocket and the thoughts in her head. Not the obvious one: Parker, like most crackheads, couldn’t stand junkies. No, what Claudia’s thinking is that, like genies, memories are called forth by simple friction, but, also like genies, once called forth they have a curious way of bending their summoner’s wishes to their own ends. But like I was saying about Parker (she tells me, in her head): I mean, he wasn’t what you’d call a slouch, but he was far from perfect. B’s mostly, sometimes an A but just as often a C. He made all the teams he tried out for but he was never, like, a star. And so on down the line. When he was in third or fourth grade, I remember (Claudia remembers), one of Parker’s teachers wrote on his report card that “Parker’s work is consistently above average” and I think that just about drove a stake through his heart. Do you know what I’m saying? If he’d’ve just been a flop I think Dad would’ve let up on him, but Dad always seemed to think that with a little application Parker could turn that “above average” to “excellent.” He wanted his boy to climb all those rungs of the ladder he never managed himself. He never realized that Parker was sweating bullets just to get by.
Now Ellis, Ellis didn’t have the same kind of pressure on him, you know what I’m saying. But I don’t think it would’ve mattered if he had. Ellis was just naturally a star. Even in baby pictures, there’s Ellis, eight months old and standing, with Parker at a year and a half still crawling next to him. The joke was that Parker had waited around for Ellis to be born and ended up playing catch-up ever after. Like I said, a lot of folks thought they was twins, but just as many thought Ellis was the oldest, especially after Parker broke his femur and more or less flunked first grade. I say more or less cause, you know, wasn’t his head that was broken, just his leg, and he told me he was glad when he got the report card with all them incompletes on it cause now he’d get to go all the way through school with Ellis. Cause that was the thing. Parker, you know what I’m saying to you, Parker, he loved Ellis more than anything else in the world, he lived and died for that boy and never once blamed him for getting the better deal outta life, at least early on. He blamed Dad for that.
Me, I was kind of the witness, kind of. Like when Parker said he’d flunked first grade so he could be in the same class as Ellis—which by the way didn’t quite work out, since after the fourth grade Ellis got put in the accelerated classes and Parker, like, didn’t. Anyways I remember I asked Parker if he and Ellis would both fail again. What was I, five, six years old? I asked Parker if we could all three be in the same class together and what Parker said to me was, This is between Ellis and me, little girl. You best stand back. Parker may’ve been slow in some things but he sure as shit learned how to be a man fast. But I tell you what, I wasn’t down with that shit even at that age. I was on it, you know what I’m saying, I was a girl-child with two older brothers and the way I figured it they was my personal servants and soldiers. Got to be some benefits come with this ridiculous body and I tell you what: I never wanted for anything except later on for a boyfriend, cause Parker and Ellis had a pretty rigorous screening policy. They sister was too good for anyone except maybe Elijah Mohammed himself, but whatever, I think they had this vision of me as some kind of vestal virgin when what I really was was your classic little slut. Making out with boys when I was ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. I played show ‘n’ tell so many times I could’ve practically identified every boy in the hood through a glory hole. But of course once Parker and Ellis found out some boy was messing with me—which is how they always thought of it and I never did nothing to disabuse them of the notion, you know what I’m saying, the average boy like to think that a girl don’t get turned on by but one man in her life which theory he can find a way to believe in even as he’s swapping stories about the same girl with his best friend, or his brother—and anyway once they heard some boy talking about getting with Claudia MacTeer they was all up in his shit, they was all like Claudia a good girl and if you don’t give her her propers we’ll cut your dick off and use it as a hood ornament. Dumb-ass Negroes. They always thought the problem was with the boys, but it was me me me. I don’t know, maybe it come from having two such fine brothers, but for as long as I can remember I just liked men’s bodies. The look-a them, the feel-a them. Truth be told I think I wanted one for myself, the muscles and the dick and like a beard and shit. I don’t mean I wanted to be a boy or some whacked-out shit like that. I just wanted to have the body every once in a while. I wanted to be able to kick some ass on my own stead-a having to bat my eyes at Parker and Ellis. Cause you know it’s like that. Womanly wiles is womanly wiles, whether you be using them on a stranger or on your brother or your daddy—or a gayboy for that matter. But whatever. It don’t matter. This ain’t about me. It’s about Parker and Ellis. Right?
Beneath her fingers and inside the plastic the drug is turning to dust now. Her rubbing’s acquired a spasming quality: it’s as if she’s rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. Certainly a lot of heat’s being generated. She’s practically cooking that shit right there in her pocket. Her thoughts are on two levels now, her front brain all caught up with Parker and Ellis but the back of her head wondering if along with everything else her father never threw away, he never threw away her mother’s insulin needles. Which reminds her: I guess the next thing what went wrong was Momma. I mean, that wasn’t never really right, Momma, or Momma and Daddy I should say. It’s funny, thinking bout that that shit now. I mean, Momma was around till I was like, what, eleven, twelve? But in my mind I always kind of write her out the picture from the get-go. I mean, I’m sure she was probably right there next to Daddy when he was on one of his as-long-as-you-live-under-this-roof-young-lady kicks but that ain’t the way I remember it. In my mind Momma’s always in the other room. You want me I’ll be in the other room. Just a minute dear I have to get something out the other room. You seen Momma I think she in the other room. In the kitchen cooking something for lunch when we was sitting down to breakfast, gone to bed early when we sat down to watch TV, taking a long bath while Daddy was hustling us off to church. And well anyway, Momma believed in hard work but she drew the line at what she called striving, which striving she defined as doing something you don’t like doing in order so that later on you can do something you do like. When Daddy was still working elevators she used to call him a foot soldier in Mr. Otis’s personal army, you know what I’m saying, and then, when he got that doorman’s uniform—red velvet, gold braids, one-a them hats like the Elks wear with the little tassel—I mean, talk about a monkey suit. Not that she mentioned any of that when she left. She just said she didn’t like a New York winter. Said she didn’t much like snow at all but she liked her snow to be white, and then she went back home to Missouri.
I don’t think Parker and Ellis even missed her. They was two black boys trying to make it in the ghetto—trying to make it out the ghetto—and the appearance or disappearance of one more frigid white woman didn’t mean much. At least that’s what it felt like. But the icing on the cake was college. I mean, there’s Ellis, straight A’s, 15-something on the SATs, every Ivy in the country sending personal invitations to this fine upstanding example of the African-American race to come and boost they multicultural rating without pulling down they GPA, and Parker just wasn’t on that level. They wanted to go to Columbia together so they could live at home and save on room and board and Ellis got in, no prob, scholarship even, of course you can live on campus, we’ll pay for that too. But Parker was wait-listed. They called the school, they said the chances Parker would get in was good if he’d made it that far, I don’t think they ever used the word quota but then they didn’t use the word nigger either, and so anyway Ellis went ahead and accepted, and as a show of support to Parker he even pulled his applications to every other school that wanted him. I guess this was sometime in they senior year, I was kinda there and n
ot there if you know what I mean, I mean between the boys and worrying about my own test scores and shit—and shit in this case meaning that I was recovering from my first pregnancy, or my first abortion I guess I should say—but even so I could see the wait just drove Parker outta his skull. I mean, they string you along for months, these fucking universities, to them black people are like pepper if you know what I’m saying, they don’t wanna add too little but they don’t wanna add too much either. Meanwhile Parker started drinking—drinking more, I guess you could say, since if they was one thing he, Parker, took to, it was booze. He’d come home drunk in the middle-a the night and get in these crazy-ass fights with Dad. I mean crazy. Ain’t nobody hates they Christian daddy more than a black boy drunk on malt liquor, I’ll tell you that much—except maybe herself, she’s thinking, cause she’s home by then, she’s looking in the medicine cabinet in her father’s bathroom and: no needles. She still has his coat on, it’s still buttoned up, it feels like it’s eighty degrees in the house and even hotter in the cabinet under his sink, damn if she didn’t have to stick her head way the fuck back there to find that box, and talk about dusty. But inside the needles are individually wrapped and clean, their surgical steel points undulled by time. Golf course; lightning, she’s thinking, Cora’s Kitchen; lemon meringue pie. She uses one of the nice spoons, solid silver with a fleur-de-lis crest and nearly black with tarnish. What she’s thinking as she cooks up one great big shot is that if the junk don’t kill her maybe the oxidized silver will. And to Divine she says: it’s better this way.
Anyways (she thinks after she’s done it, when she’s waiting for the, for the, for—oh fuck yeah) anyways it just got worse after Parker and Ellis graduated high school. Ellis had hisself a what-do-you-call-it. A internship with some law firm down to D.C., all very prestigious, and like the best offer Parker had was assistant manager of the Foot Locker where he worked after school, which he ended up getting fired from when his boss seen him sharing a joint with Rolando Santiago. Lando wasn’t no big deal then, I mean he ain’t all that right now, he ain’t like Mr. Big Shit no matter what O.G. line of bullshit he try to feed you, although he is still alive, I’ll give him that much. Sonofabitch is still in the game and still kicking it. But back then he was known up and down 1-2-5 as your basic sort of lowlife thug, always on the make, never in too much trouble but more through dumb luck than lack of trying. He and Parker and Ellis all knew each other at school, they didn’t exactly run with the same crew, Lando went off on this whole I-ain’t-black-I’m-Dominican trip when he was a teenager, but they knew each other’s names and shit, and who knows, maybe Parker really was smoking a joint with him. But it ain’t like facts matter shit. Parker got hisself canned from Foot Locker and he never heard nothing back from Columbia, and then like before you could say gangbanger he was spending all day hanging with a bunch-a lowlifes and no-accounts and wannabe bad boys and big shots, passing around the 40s and shaving they initials into each other’s heads. Dad like to scalp Parker the first time he come home with that shit going on. Kicked his ass right out the house. After that I didn’t see too much-a him, and then when I did it was always crib this and bitch that, Crips and Bloods and gold chains and the Lexus, you know what I’m saying, never mind the Lexus ain’t got no hubcaps and has a garbage bag taped over one-a the back windows, Parker was making it, word up, he was running with the devil, he was criminal and fuck Columbia and fuck Dad and fuck Ellis too while you at it, being a good boy like his brown-nose ass-kissing goody-two-shoes fucking two-faced baby brother never got Parker nothing but grief and goddamn anyone who thought he was gonna spend his whole life working for the man like Daddy did, wearing some stripy-ass polyester shit with a nametag on it that said Hi my name is Parker and I am your personal nigger, stick your foot in my ass and I will lick it clean. He even asked me to call him Park Place like that was his handle or some shit, and even though I figured he was mostly talking out the side-a his throat I was still a little concerned like any sister would be. Talk is cheap downtown, but up here you go around calling someone like Lando your ese you best be able to back it up. So like I called Ellis. I told him if he cared about his big brother he best take off the tie and haul ass up here and get on the situation. Probably the dumbest shit I ever pulled. Why? Well listen, Jamie, life ain’t no movie. It ain’t no Good Times where everybody gets together and makes a plan and it all works out. Parker was just going through his own personal shit same as we all do, growing pains, life’s a bitch and I guess it’s time you learned it, you know what I’m saying, he had to work out his deal for hisself and if his deal was gone be pushing crack or smoking it they wasn’t shit anybody was gone do to change that and there I go calling up Ellis who was dumb-ass enough to drive up from D.C. in his own goddamn Lexus. I guess it wasn’t his own, one-a the lawyers he worked with let him borrow it or it was like a company car or some shit. Not like that made any fucking difference to Parker. All he saw was the paint job, baby, all he heard was that goddamn beep-beep one-touch remote-control your-car-alarm-is-now-armed-against-any-and-all-wannabe-jacking-niggers shit. How do you spell success? L-E-X-U-S, baby, tinted windows, leather interior, and fourteen-karat-gold accents.
And so picture this. Eighteen-year-old Ellis MacTeer stepping outta some sixty-thousand-dollar black Lexus, beep-beep setting the car alarm and letting all the hoods and homies on the street know brother’s not only got the car, he intends to keep it. Wearing a thousand-dollar suit he bought with one-a the half dozen credit cards that more or less got handed to him when he got into Columbia, Armani that suit was, I read that in the paper, I had to learn from the newspaper of all places that my own brother was wearing head-to-toe Armani, sunglasses to socks tucked into Gucci loafers, and he had hisself a Rolex too, fake someone said but I didn’t buy that, Ellis always went for the real shit, and one gold ring with a big-ass rock that he turned in toward his palm as he stepped outta the Lexus, beep-beep, the ring and the car and everything else either borrowed or paid for on credit, a little advance on a limitless future, and then he walks into some piss-ant shoe store on 1-2-5 and throws it all away. Says he looking for his brother. Says it’s a emergency. Says it to this fucking A-rab shoe salesman—oh excuse me, branch manager—oh excuse me, Lesbianese—and what does this fucking one-step-up-from-a-camel-turd do but send him straight into the lion’s den. He been hangin with Lando’s crew, he say, like he all down with it and shit. They got a crib on 1-2-7 twixt Malcolm X and A.C.P. Right over there behind the St. Nicholas Houses, he say, just to be helpful, just to make sure Ellis don’t head over to some other 1-2-7, like say maybe 1-2-7 in Albany, or 1-2-7 in Buffalo, 1-2-7 in Rochester, punk-ass motherfucking camel jockey go on back to wherever it was you came from and meanwhile beep-beep with the car alarm and Ellis is gone. I swear to fucking Christ, if they’s anyone who should-a gone to jail in all this shit it’s that fucking wannabe gangbanger, Sheik Abu bin Foot Locker, goddamn hunchback towelhead without no towel and without no head either, far as I’m concerned, making up stories bout other people like it don’t make no difference when meanwhile who comes creaking up in his cheap-ass excuse for a automobile but Parker. I heard Ellis was in town and You seen him and Where he at. Lando’s crib, say the sand nigger in the prison stripes, still trying to help out, I kiss your feet, I suck your toes, Behind the St. Nicholas Houses, I ain’t got no oil well like the rest of my people America right or wrong, Right there on 1-2-7, suckie suckie real good man real good, and Parker is all like What the fuck you talking bout nigger, and you know, I don’t wanna go through the whole fucking scene but it turns out where that whacked out walk-on-my-back-I-am-your-personal-flying-carpet at the Foot Locker done sent Ellis off to was a crackhouse which the only thing Lando had to do with that joint was that once upon a time he used to deal outta there until one night somebody sliced off a piece-a his ear and he left street dealing behind for good. Well, Parker had the Lexus, piece-a shit that it was, he had the handle and the haircut and the track suit with one leg pushed up
to the knee and he even had a couple-a rocks in his pocket but what he didn’t have was a piece, you know what I’m saying. No, you don’t, cause you don’t know shit about life in the ghetto do you white boy, you can put words in my mouth, you can stick your hand up my goddamn ass and work my jaw but when someone says “the street” the first thing you think of is dot com. Well word associate this dot com motherfucker: Parker didn’t have no gun is what I am T-R-Y-ing to tell you, and a gun is what you need if you wanna walk your ass into a fucking crackhouse and even think about walking back out with it, and so what Parker did was he went out and found Lando and the two-a them hauled ass over to 1-2-7, yes sir, 1-2-7 in NYC, 1-2-7 right behind the goddamn St. Nicholas houses, and even before they got there they could hear the car alarm, no more-a that beep-beep shit, this was a serious-ass siren, goddamned Ellis’s goddamned borrowed car, back window busted out, radio gone, car phone, gold accents pried off the hubcaps and trunk and hood in less than a fucking hour. I swear to Christ if those fucking factory workers in Detroit worked half as hard as the average New York City crackhead wouldn’t be nobody driving a goddamn Japanese car, and you know you know what I’m saying.