by Xenia Ruiz
After work I drove toward home with thoughts of relaxation and working on my screenplay, listening to the soulful sounds of Floetry, Common, or Abdullah Ibrahim in the background; then I remembered I had something to do. As part of the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, I mentored two brothers and I had promised the mother, Nikki Miller, that I would stop by and talk to the eldest, Justin. Since his high school graduation a couple of months ago, she didn’t like the changes he was undergoing in his quest for independence. She didn’t like that he had started locking his hair, even if he was emulating me, or that he wasn’t coming straight home after his part-time job, or that he was dating a girl she didn’t particularly like. Lately, his attitude was getting worse, so she had called earlier to tell me that she couldn’t be held responsible for whatever she might do to him if he continued. Reluctantly, but resolutely, I made a U-turn and drove to the West Side.
Ms. Miller came to the door with a scowl on her face, but it quickly disappeared when she saw me through the glass security door. Grinning, she fixed her hair with her hands and promptly unlocked the door. Dressed in her office work clothes—a form-fitting skirt and a low-cut blouse—she looked way too young to have a seventeen-year-old son, and I had to remind myself of her displaced attraction to me because of my relationship with her sons. I had promised myself I would avoid going into the house if possible, careful what I said to her, or the way I looked at her, at all times.
“How you doin’, Ms. Miller?” I asked civilly.
“I told you, you can call me Nikki, Mr. Black.”
I ignored her reprimand politely by changing the subject. “Where’s Justin?”
“Justin!” she yelled irritably over her shoulder, then smiled back at me. “Come in. Sit down, sit down. I just finished cooking. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, corn. I know you must be hungry after working all day.”
“No thanks. I’m supposed to have dinner at my sister’s.” I wasn’t going but it was the truth, and I could tell from the look on her face that she didn’t believe me. Ever since my sister, Jade, had moved out to the suburb of Carol Stream, I visited her less and less. I sat on the edge of the sofa and waited.
Ricky, the nine-year-old, came charging down the hall. He plopped down next to me and leaned against my arm. I palmed his close-shaven head.
“Didn’t I tell you to stop running through my house?” Ms. Miller scolded.
“How you doin’? You been doing okay?” I asked him.
He nodded in a frenzied manner.
“Stop lying,” Ms. Miller interjected. “You know you were almost suspended this week. Tell Mr. Black what you did.”
Ricky shook his head.
“He spit on the floor in the middle of class,” she answered for him.
“’Cause teacher wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom,” Ricky cried out in his defense. “I told her I had to spit, but she wouldn’t let me go.” Ricky had been diagnosed with what a lot of boys were being labeled with recently: ADD—attention deficit disorder. He was an intelligent boy, but the lack of resources at his neighborhood school and the impatience of school officials dictated the quickest solution: transferring him to a different school, into Special Ed, then putting him on the newest antistimulant medication.
Justin came sauntering down the carpeted stairs, a sullen look on his face. He leaned against the wall, running his hand over the baby locks on his head. Unlike the semi-hard-core young men I saw at work, he was a good kid who missed his deceased father and resented the fact that his mother was still trying to run his life. He had come a long way from when I first met him, graduating with honors while juggling a part-time job and volunteering as a tutor for grade school kids. I liked to think that I had something to do with his success, that my influence had so far kept him from becoming a statistic.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” I asked.
“’Sup.”
“Speak coherently, boy,” his mother scolded, glaring at him. Justin cut his eyes at her. “You see how he looks at me. You better talk to him.”
“You want to go for a ride?” I asked Justin.
“You can talk here,” Ms. Miller said, getting up. “I’ll leave the room.”
I stood up. “That’s okay. I have some errands to run. C’mon, man.” Justin’s face brightened up as he dashed out the door like a pet who had been chained up all day.
“You sure you don’t want to eat? I made enough for you. For all of us,” Ms. Miller said eagerly.
“Thanks. Maybe some other time.”
As she smiled, I realized I made a mistake implying there would be a future dinner.
“I swear I’ma explode if I don’t move out,” Justin told me, as we drove down the street. “She’s gettin’ on my nerves!”
“Where you gonna go, huh? You’re seventeen, you got a high school education and a part-time job at Old Navy,” I reminded him calmly.
“I’ll be eighteen in two months. I’ll go to the army, the Job Corps, anywhere.”
“I thought you wanted to go to college. I thought you were going to work for six months to save some money and then you were going to college.”
He shrugged. “My counselor said I wasn’t college material. He said my SAT scores weren’t high enough.”
“But your GPA is good. You had a three-point-three, didn’t you? Do you want to go to college?”
“Yeah, I want to go.”
“Then you’re going. There are some schools that’ll take your scores. They’ll accept you as a ‘special admissions’ student for the first year. You got to take advantage of this opportunity now. The government’s trying to get rid of affirmative action. I can’t believe that counselor said that.”
“They don’t care about us at that school. They try to push us into the trades and food service, or community college.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “If you want to go to college, away to a university, you can do it. As long as you’re willing to work hard, you can do it. I’ll see what I can do.”
Justin looked out the window quietly. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what I had said or just ignoring me.
“In the meantime, you got to stop giving your mama a hard time,” I told him, getting to the matter at hand. “You know she loves you and she only wants what’s best for you. It’s not easy raising two boys by herself.”
“I know, but she’s always in my business.”
“That’s what mamas do. If you go away to college, at least she’ll be out of your business for most of the year.”
“She’s just mad ’cause she caught me alone in the house with Diane.”
“And what were you doing in the house with Diane?”
“Nothing. Just kissing. And stuff.” I looked at him doubtfully and he smirked. “I swear. We were just kissing. I’m not a virgin but she is. I like her. A lot.”
“Don’t do anything to mess up your future.”
“I’m not. I know how to take care of business.”
“You do know no birth control is one hundred percent effective?”
He made a dismissive sucking-of-the-teeth noise. “Man, please don’t tell me abstinence is the only effective birth control. I already hear that at church. Do you practice abstinence?”
“We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”
“Ahhh!” he whooped. “Double standard.”
Again, he got quiet and stared out the window. I debated whether to tell him that I hadn’t been with a woman in over a year, without giving him the extenuating circumstances. But I remembered what I was like when I was his age and I knew he probably thought I was too old to care about sex.
“Hey Adam?”
“Yeah, man?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Of course,” I said without hesitation.
“’Cause I don’t think I do.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I just think about all the things going on in this city, you know. People killing each other, d
rug dealing. If there was a God, why doesn’t He stop it?”
“Well, He gave man free will. Everybody has the power to decide between right and wrong. God doesn’t interfere with that.”
“My mama said He does. She said when you think about doing good, that’s God; when you get bad thoughts, it’s the devil. You think that’s true?”
“Yeah, I believe that. To some extent.” I started to head back toward his house.
“Hey, Adam?”
“Yeah, man?”
“Can we go to Burger King?”
“Your mom cooked dinner,” I reminded him, amused at how suddenly he switched subjects.
“Man, I can not eat her meat loaf.”
“You shouldn’t talk about your mom’s cooking like that,” I said, trying not to laugh.
He laughed. “You know you want to laugh. I’m serious, Dawg. I love her and everything but her meat loaf is too dry. It gets all stuck in your throat and stuff.”
I couldn’t remember when I decided I didn’t want children. Growing up, there always seemed to be an exorbitant number of kids on my block, many without fathers at home. It always seemed to me that there were just too many children in the world as a whole. Maybe it was meeting my father’s children nineteen years ago at his funeral when I was seventeen. Or perhaps when the doctor diagnosed my cancer and I learned I was sterile and couldn’t have kids, rather than I didn’t want them. But Justin and Ricky, and the boys I came in contact with at work, not to mention my niece and nephew whom I adored, were all like my children. I enjoyed going to their parties and school plays and graduations just like I was their father. They were enough for me.
When I got home, the loft was quiet and I was grateful Luciano wasn’t there yet. Lately he had been beating me home and I’d find him sitting in my favorite chair, simultaneously listening to my Afro-Cuban jazz records and watching ESPN. Without his constant interruptions, I would at least be able to get some writing done. I changed out of my suit and into Bermuda shorts, then briefly shuffled through my CD collection before settling on a mix of Parliament-Funkadelic and Frankie Beverly and Maze.
The idea of writing my latest screenplay grew out of my estrangement from my father. For the past nineteen years, I had been trying to come to terms with his betrayal. I never got a chance to tell him how I felt since his secrets didn’t come to light until after his death. I spent my last two teenaged years lashing out at everyone because he wasn’t around to take my blows. Then, in my twenties, I pretended he had never existed, acting like a boy who had never known his father. In college, whenever I had to write a sociology research paper, or an assignment for my elective creative writing classes, I would always focus on Black children without fathers, even though I had never been one of those children. My father had been the kind of father who had tossed the ball in the backyard and taught me how to fix cars. He had been the kind of clichéd father who seemed to exist only in sitcoms, not to the extreme of The Cosby Show, but pretty close. By my early thirties, my attitude had become somewhat ambiguous; I couldn’t decide what he had meant to me. Writing was the only way I could sort it out. But even in my writing, I couldn’t be truly honest. Unable to write a nonfiction piece, I gravitated toward fiction, in the form of a screenplay, a film that would eventually be glamorized with Hollywood lights, cameras, and special effects because all good fiction contained some truth.
CHAPTER 5
EVA
SIMONE’S SCREENING PARTY for her film, Two Many Men, was in her apartment, which she referred to as “the Penthouse.” It was really two one-bedroom apartments combined into one, located on the top floor of her father’s four-story multi-unit apartment building. It had double the number of rooms, including two bathrooms, and every inch was occupied with the cast and crew of the film, including Zephyr—her filmmaker-director-producer lover—and a bunch of her model friends as well as some mutual friends. The plastic people—the models and actors—stayed in the front end of the first apartment, which included the balcony, while the real people—everyone else—kept to the back apartment, which extended to the porch.
It had been a bad week for me and I almost didn’t come. My headaches had been so severe that I called my doctor to request a new medication. The old one didn’t alleviate my nausea and had too many side effects, including hallucinations, the most recent being the Oak Tree Man in my backyard. In addition, I called my pastor who offered me a healing prayer. The new medication, combined with a cold towel on my forehead and a nap in the dark, had worked on the latest headache that I had had earlier that morning.
“Come on, guys, you’re supposed to mingle,” Simone begged Maya and me and the rest of the group on the porch. Simone was decked out in seventies’ wear that included a Cleopatra Afro wig over her own ’fro, bell-bottom slacks, and platforms. Two Many Men was set in the 1970s, so she had asked everyone to come dressed as their favorite pop-culture character from that decade. Not everyone complied, including me, with the exception of my bell sleeves and flared slacks. The seventies was not my favorite decade for fashion. I could have used a wig though. Because of the earlier humidity, it had taken more than the usual amount of water and gel to quell my frizzy hair.
“They don’t want to mingle with us,” Maya said, patting her nurse’s hat. She had come as “Julia,” and with her recent pixie haircut, she didn’t require a wig. “Their ca-ca doesn’t stink, ours does.” Maya struck a model’s pouty face and strolled across the porch in her best imitation of a supermodel’s walk. We all laughed.
“Stop it. They’re nice people,” Simone insisted.
“Then you go hang out with them,” I told her.
Simone clicked her tongue and left the porch, walking away in her trademark supermodel walk. The porch crowd burst out laughing. When people first met Simone, they thought she was phony, but she was really a good person with a lot of displaced love.
Despite Maya’s request that I not confront Simone, I had called her anyway and demanded that she come clean about the man she was presumably setting me up with. She denied it so vehemently that I almost believed her. I eyed her suspiciously all night, waiting for the loser to approach me. But no one stepped up or made inquiries. Earlier, when I was waiting in one of the bathroom lines, the guy in front of me offered to let me cut in and struck up a conversation. I thought he was Simone’s set-up guy since no one had so much as asked my name. Simone had designated a bathroom for each of the sexes, but no one paid attention to the homemade computer-generated gender signs on the doors.
“So, what’s your name?” Mr. Model-Actor asked after I stepped in front of him.
“Eve,” I answered, giving the short Anglicized version I had used during my clubbing days.
“Eve, huh? Like the ‘Garden of Eden’ Eve?” Even heathens knew the story about the fall of man.
I rolled my eyes and didn’t bother to acknowledge his comment. He didn’t say anything for a while and as I was surveying the scene around me, I caught him looking down my blouse. Although nothing was showing, I crossed my arms.
“You here alone?” he asked.
“I’m celibate,” I told him, a comment that always threw men off.
“Huh?”
I turned toward him. “I’m celibate. I don’t have sex.”
He held up his hands. “Okay, whatever. I didn’t ask.”
After that incident, I stopped being so defensive and tried to enjoy myself. Maya and I attempted to mingle with the Two Many Men clique but failed, since they were so self-absorbed. We returned to the porch crowd just as it began to drizzle; the temperature was dropping, normal for Chicago’s late-summer nights. The gusts of mist that intermittently blew my way felt good after the sweltering summer day.
The front door, located in the middle of the apartment, opened and everyone on the porch glanced curiously through the open kitchen window at the two men who walked in. Maya jumped up excitedly and I knew one of them was the infamous Luciano. I felt nervous, like I was meeting my son’s gir
lfriend for the first time.
“This is Luciano, everybody,” Maya said, hanging on to the arm of the dark-haired one. “My friend” she stressed. Because some people who knew Maya knew she was married, there were a few awkward glances, and muffled “hellos.” He was olive skinned and striking, with wavy black hair slicked back with gel or mousse, and a killer, crooked smile that read: That’s right, we’re together and we’re both married, and I don’t care who knows it. I was surprised because Luciano did not look like her type, and knowing her all my life, I knew her type. And pale, pretty-boys were not her type. Like me, Maya had always been attracted to Black men. Alex was biracial, but he identified more with his African American side because he had more contact with them.
The other man had been accosted by Simone’s co-star, an anorexic woman wearing a feathered Farrah Fawcett wig. Through the window, I saw her slip him a card, which he glanced at briefly before sticking it in his back pants pocket.
“And this is Adam,” Maya introduced the other man. “His friend.”
Adam stepped onto the porch half smiling, half waving, and squinting through the darkness at all of us from behind amber shades. I guess someone forgot to tell him that the sun had set several hours earlier. Under better light, on another day, he might have been good looking. It was hard to tell what he looked like through his five o’clock shadow and goatee. Long, thin, golden-brown dreadlocks poked out from under a crocheted cap in the colors of the African American flag. He looked like a ganja-smoking Rastafarian, the kind who frequented Rites of Passage, a reggae club where Maya, Simone, and I used to party back in the old days. He wore a shirt, cargo pants, and vest, all in different shades of tan, and all in need of some serious ironing. He looked very ill-at-ease, like he had just been dragged out of bed. Of course, being the person that I am, I tried to guess his ethnicity. African American and Irish. Or some kind of Afro-Caribbean, old-world mix. In another time, when I was in the world, I might have been interested in someone like him.