Sister Speedball could brag to me because she had something pretty big on me. My mother blamed herself because she hadn’t kept the funds in the bank. Miss Speedball laughed, as if to say she’d got over on that social worker and she didn’t care that I knew it.
The runner was back. Lady Speedball got in his car. The laundrymat seemed to heat up, though nearly empty, a few dryers going. The connect himself, the semi–big man, was outside. He wanted everyone to see him ordering runners around. He wasn’t going to last long. Yet I took my turn speaking to the blood who whispered to him. As revenge on this sad junky, I copped more than her usual dose. I showed them to her when she came back. I wouldn’t let her have the bags until she had sex with me.
I could not say, “I’m going to fuck you,” or “Give me some pussy.” I said, “Take off your clothes first, bitch.” She was a mess to look at, scarred, sagging, and puffy all at once, at forty years old. I hadn’t thought this through sufficiently.
She eased herself up onto the filthy sink in the laundrymat bathroom. “Why do I get myself into these situations?”
That was my line, but it was this woman who’d said it. I was amazed she even knew a word like “situations.” Her claim to be a victim got me hard. She was merely in a hurry to do the drugs she had. Up close, that pachyderm’s ear between her thighs raised alarm. Moreover, there was no mistaking the semen leaking from her folds. She had been in negotiations with her runner. I called the whole thing off and gave her the bags, wishing her an overdose.
The low point of my drug life was not the speedball, and not those few minutes in the laundrymat bathroom. It was afterward, knowing what Dad and Mom thought of guys like me in our neighborhood. I forgot my dry cleaning and didn’t go back for it. Two of Mom’s other crazies had seen the junky thief woman with free amounts of cash. I kept quiet. I wanted to get to Berlin, the chance to be another me.
In my dream, I have boned a clean version of this junky silly and we are doing powdery lines of cocaine on a glass coffee table. However, I am not soaring from the cocaine; instead, I am slumped over and jerking like Manfred’s car, as after a speedball. She is about to cut off my tongue with a pair of secateurs, but as she leans in—I wake up, greatly relieved it was a dream.
Someone at the back of the meeting was talking about her Resentment Issues, a young white girl, a redhead in a lot of knitted layers. She did not look out of place among the older black workers, but then no one looks out of place at an AA meeting. I thought about getting up to wash my hands, but dozed off instead. It was so snug, even with the lights turned back up for “sharing” after the speaker, the “qualifier,” had finished. A few old guys were asleep. I turned over under the covers, safe in my father’s house, with Mom downstairs trying to decide if she really believed that grapefruit juice caused baldness, as she had read in the latest issue of her alternative medicine newsletter.
* * *
In the more than ninety days since I pulled up in the taxi and saw Dad and Mom at the front door, I had dried out. Dad had brought Ralston Jr. over on Christmas Eve, as usual. But that was it. Things were so quiet all over town. I did not go to my dive bars in the Loop or my sober coffeehouses in New Town. I did not cruise anyone, not even white boys sitting with college hockey bags in Union Station. I went about my business and then went back to my parents’ house. They saw no one; I saw no one. I liked the way snow lowered the city’s decibel level.
I walked past the homeless and did not take off my glove in order to dig into my pocket for an inflationary dollar. I stayed away from the laundrymats and bars on Garfield that had always been in my peripheral vision, whether I was using or not. And I stayed far away from the upstairs of the German-run student pizza parlor in the neighborhood where I first learned to score weed. I was going to unattractive neighborhoods, waiting with soggy envelopes of court papers in front of super-locked doors and windowless last-known addresses. I stayed wrapped up, hooded, silent. It was too cold to smoke outside for long, but I didn’t shirk from assignments. I stood on the train back to the Fifty-Fifth Street station in Hyde Park.
I worked on Rosen-Montag’s pages, shuffled through photographs and drawings, making sure Mom and Dad saw them when I came to the dinner table. But Rosen-Montag’s people had let me know that they were printing the book in Italy. Apparently he’d sat down and rewritten every page placed before him. Then an editor I’d not heard from earlier announced that they would keep my page about Mary Cassatt’s murals for the Chicago World’s Fair, something irrelevant I’d thrown in for fun because it showed women laboring together. Otherwise, my sentences on various subjects had become blocks of text to help fill up a page or add to the design. Most of what I’d done wasn’t used even as captions for the numerous illustrations. The cost of the printing was what occupied everyone. I thought about confiding this to Dad, as if to bond with him over a work problem.
I sometimes thought Dad would have preferred that I had not told them about my alcohol and drug problems, at least not all of them. I hadn’t. But I could believe that he wished I had gone away someplace, cleaned up, and come back without mentioning anything. Ralston Jr. couldn’t help himself. I could have. Instead, I’d introduced this story into Dad’s life. It hadn’t remained confined to the magazines he read. I pulled it out of the newsprint and set it walking around his house. This was what I had become to him, an embodiment of a social problem, the old slander of what black men were like, and I took his conversation, no matter the subject, to be in the end about the stuff he wished I hadn’t told them.
It was their job not to forget, his tone let me know. It was one thing to be a lost youth who drank and quite another to be a black drug user. One night Dad brought up a new law, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which had taken effect just before the holidays. I would get five years in prison for having even small amounts of “the crack” in my pockets. That is, if the police searched me. Dad was being brave, facing my past, schooling me on the new American reality.
“The crack” and I had not met. The speedball had been warning enough to me about seeking the big bang. It was altitude I looked for, sustained flight. But every drug I’d ever tried I had done so without thought, in an instant, so I wasn’t going to let myself think I could not fall that way, too. This law offended me, as did Dad’s approval of it. I would escape. Because my future was in Berlin, my future had not in my mind been criminalized.
Social policy made for unpredictable temperatures between Mom and Dad. The movement of history influenced their union, the way the stars unsettled the fates of others. Dad held that the law helped Chicago’s first black mayor by taking the responsibility for the War on Crimes from his shoulders. The mayor and his police force were obliged to enforce federal law. But Mom interpreted policy according to how it affected people she knew or could see. A lot of her crazies were plain gone, among the disappeared, methadone survivors who’d bent over and eaten the ground somewhere.
The threat of “the crack” was a ways off, in the boarded-up streets of Woodlawn and Englewood, streets where dead branches speared through burned-out box springs that had not yet been collected by the Department of Sanitation. But it was still Mayor Daley’s police force, not Harold Washington’s. Mom refused to wear the blue ribbons of the War Against Crime Week sponsored by the police department; she wouldn’t keep the porch light burning, in spite of what radio and TV said the black community was doing.
It wasn’t like Mom not to have any sympathy for the cop they’d found burned up in the trunk of a car a while back, and just because that man they chased from Cabrini-Green to the railroad tracks out on Western Avenue had a record didn’t mean that the cops were justified in shooting him. Dad countered that he had stolen a car and kidnapped a girl and brandished a gun at the squad car in pursuit so what else were the police going to do other than what the police tended to do in the first place. Mom said that was her point.
I said that Uncle Ralston would call a meeting in order to draft a statement of support fo
r the police department’s Office of Professional Standards. Mom said Uncle Ralston would call a meeting about the need to establish a commission to investigate why petrified dog shit, those white turds, were no longer to be seen on our city’s streets. Uncle Ralston came to his office at the Eagle every day, but he didn’t say much, Dad said.
The Eagle had always been on the side of the Chicago police, even during the infamous Democratic Convention, when Dad physically restrained Mom, tackled her in order to keep her from reaching the front door. Solomon had jumped on Dad’s back, screaming that he was hurting Mom. That was when Mom gave up and stayed home. We’d never seen Dad like that. Rhonda came out of her hiding place and sat with him. Ronald found excuses to be around Solomon. Mom hugged Cello and me and cried at the reports of teargassed demonstrators. She might have had friends among them. Dad said again that her place was with her children, in one piece.
The Eagle had also been on the side of the cops when the gangs took over everything soon after the riots. Dad got some friends from the university police to escort Mom around town when there was a possibility that a grand jury might call her to testify in the case of a gang leader who’d stolen the money nobody could believe the federal government had granted him for youth training programs. But the Eagle got nothing back from the police, or even from the mayor’s office of the time. Nothing happened when the Eagle championed the elderly; nothing happened when the Eagle criticized black youth.
“There’s nothing morally wrong with sulking,” I heard Dad tell Mom. She hit him, lightly, and the debate was over. He was her comfort. Her shelters for battered women had closed; so much had been rolled back, defunded. Mom’s crazies weren’t family, but they were her philosophy.
Dad was happiest when taking care of Mom, she who took care of the known world. She let him remove her calendars, her schedules, from the refrigerator and from inside the front hall closet. I didn’t go down to the basement to look at the calendars over her desk. The house was devoid of activity. Usually Mom would be on the phone, arranging a ride for an elderly person, looking around for a juvenile defender, advising a fledgling women’s group on how to apply for grants, willing to sit on hold with Cook County agencies. At the same time, there’d be someone trying to work off a loan by repairing the furnace he knew nothing about or someone repaying a favor by washing windows he was too worn out to do properly.
Her fellow committeewomen came and went throughout the day, soldiers for the Coleman Report. Around teatime, chubby white clergymen of a certain age or scrawny movement types would drop in. Now, as if overnight, there was none of that. Dad would come in early and sit with Mom. They liked to say that they first saw each other as small children at the 1933 World’s Fair and they never forgot. She’d get up and make dinner for us. I noticed that I talked more as the weeks went by. I stressed the importance of Rosen-Montag’s ideas to urban policy around the globe. Mom listened, but she didn’t know what to say. I’d given a made-up full description of what my life at Cello’s had been like. Mom listened, but didn’t answer.
Mom used to shed tears of pride over André Watts. She was confused when Cello turned seventeen and confessed that Watts didn’t send her the way he did Mom. They’d always been as one on such matters. Mom slowly went back to playing after Cello was gone. It had been years. She wasn’t ashamed of being rusty, she said. She did a little at a time. Dad said he could have exploded with pride the first time he came home and realized that it was Mom at the piano. Now he would go so far as to suggest a piece she might want to play for him, but she would hug her shoulders and look away. They were together a lot in their basement.
I knew that if Solomon had seen Mom taking pills, he would have asked questions. Instead, I let her sit with Dad and his games, leaning against him on the sofa, not reading. It really frightened me when I saw her race out to the front steps one frigid evening in order to cool her body down. Dad was up and after her. He caught her and fanned her with his U.S. News & World Report until she stopped wrestling and his magazine fell apart. Only other people seemed to find that kind of love.
* * *
I couldn’t believe that Mrs. Williams was alive. She’d been flunky to Cello’s grandmother since Cello’s grandmother got married. Mrs. Williams cooked for her, ironed for her, and at the end watched episode after episode of The Love Boat with her. Cello’s grandmother had not left her a penny, but Uncle Ralston—Dad, really, signing Uncle Ralston’s checks—looked after her. If Uncle Ralston had mistresses, then Cello’s grandmother had Mrs. Williams.
“Loretta Shay wanted to be Miss Anne so badly,” Mom said. She didn’t like to explain “black” things to her white friends. They would just have to catch on somehow that black women called white women Miss Anne, the way black men called white men Mr. Charlie. “Bossing that Williams woman made her feel like Miss Anne. Beulah, peel me a grape.”
Nobody had cozy stories about Mrs. Williams. She didn’t bake. She didn’t care about the rest of the family. She didn’t even look after Ralston Jr. She sided with the neglectful Loretta Shay. They both ignored him. Who knew that “Mrs.” Williams had a son of her own, brought up by her parents in Alabama, and maybe he was an illegitimate cousin—or half brother—to Ralston Jr. Now here was that son’s son, in our living room, clearly suffering from AIDS, brought over by Mrs. Williams to play for Mom.
I could see my stricken smile on Mom’s face and I knew that Dad, in the kitchen mixing drinks, was wearing the same expression of being totally bugged out by our guests. My raisinette eyes were huge with the effort not to stare at dark oblongs the size of leeches on Clark’s neck and hands.
Dad returned with a tray. Mrs. Williams was disappointed. She hadn’t expected iced tea.
“How long have you been diagnosed?” I heard Mom ask, awkwardly, for her, who ordinarily dived in with no compunction, needing to get somebody’s story in the first twenty minutes of acquaintance.
“What do you mean?”
Silver bangles nearly slipped from his bony hands. He strung together popular tunes, the sort of music Mom had nothing to do with. His last job had been on a cruise ship out of Florida.
The pitcher of iced tea was for Mom. Dad decided we could all have some. Mrs. Williams said that that was a new one on her, iced tea in Chicago in February. I thought Dad wanted to tell the smiling skull that we had no room-temperature water. Mom hadn’t been able to say thank you when Clark finished playing. He went back to his seat. We smiled some more. Dad came back with a jelly glass of water.
Dad and Mom had inherited many chairs and tables, but nothing about the conglomeration was designed. Our house was storage space, a pack-rat outpost. One side of the hallway, between the living room and the kitchen, was lined with ribcage-high shelves of oversize illustrated books about black American history, Africa, television, the stockyards, and baseball, along with an encyclopedia from the year Solomon was born and a set from the year I was born. On the other side of the hallway were seven unmatched side chairs. We were the lobby of a bygone rooming house or the waiting room of some settlement charity.
“It’s so interesting here,” Clark cooed. My eyes had been following his.
Mom used a stepladder to dust the iconostasis of reproductions that my paternal grandmother had liked to razor from books and then frame. She vandalized volume after volume in that fashion. We had her small paintings of waterfalls and atolls in lots of places, as well as framed posters from Black Expos over the years. The plants were plastic.
Mom’s acoustic floor tiles were more than twenty years old. Three of the same kind of standing lamps grouped beside her piano, the mahogany companion that broke her young solitude. It had been her mother’s purchase. My grandfather’s creditors carted off everything, I’d always heard, but Champ would have murdered anyone who tried to take the Steinway. I like to think she knew how much Mom loved it.
“Have you read all these books?” Clark asked Dad.
“Now, your buddy Ralston there was a reading fool,�
�� Mrs. Williams began. “I don’t care for this,” she said, replacing the glass of iced tea on its coaster. “All that reading you all were trying to make people do stuffed up his head. His rag head burned clean through. I wish we could put something in this.” She shivered.
“We tried to shoot that chicken before the egg boiled, I’ll not argue with you there,” Dad said. He wouldn’t look at the glass she raised and peered into and put back down. He knew how to wait people out.
I ran to call them a taxi. It took forever to come. Mom did have an old Christmas present she’d not delivered to Mrs. Williams, a plastic container of decorative soaps. She could send her off with something. Mom took Clark’s right hand, lesions and all, into both of hers and said that the gift of music meant that we would never lose hope completely.
“I can dig that.”
Dad clapped Mrs. Williams’s shoulders after he helped her on with her coat. He handed Clark his gear item by item and slapped him heartily on the back. It was a test. I shook hands. But we didn’t come down the steps with Mrs. Williams. They picked their way, though there was no ice or snow. I’d read plenty of articles, but I washed my hands anyway. I saw the jelly glass in the kitchen trash. That freed me to take Windex to Mom’s piano keys.
When I was first back, Mom was going to let me talk, when I was ready, about the friend in Berlin I’d moved in with. But after Mrs. Willliams’s visit, she wrung her hands, tormented that that wasting away and denial could be my future. They’d seen a TV movie the summer before about a son coming home to tell his family he has AIDS.
I looked down at lamb chops. We were eating later than usual. Mom had called Solomon. She was in that kind of mood, Dad’s pleading eyes said.
“These are pancake days,” I said.
Dad filled the sink and Mom pushed him aside and plunged her face into the ice and water.
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