The Comedown

  “Big Fry,” Daevon said, rubbing some thick something that smelled like his mother’s aloe gel in the curls at his ears. Usually Aaron told him to skip this part, but he felt too dumb to do anything about it. “I know you’re having a hard time, but you can’t take it out on my kid.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. We’re all going through what we’re going through.”

  And then he was outside Smitty’s feeling much smaller than he’d felt when he came in. He looked behind him, through the glass door: the clock on the back wall said it was a little past eleven. If he was right about how his mom’s day was going to go, she was probably just waking up. He got mad again, and then at Caleb—everything he’d been through in this fucking day already and their lazy asses were just waking up—and biked, little-feeling, east on Hough, across MLK Drive. He was supposed to meet Meeches in front of the Museum of Natural History at noon, but she was nowhere. It’d make sense if she stood him up. He imagined her waking up and thinking about him, another neighborhood dumbass without a father, another in probably a long line of them who’d tried to get with her. He sat down on the grass, holding his ankles. He did what he usually did whenever he felt like this, which was to start thinking of all the ways he could get rich. He could become a landlord. He could make music like Run-D.M.C., except he didn’t have any talent or rhymes. Used-car dealership. Find Sunny’s boss and get a job—his boss was probably dead, but maybe there’d be someone else who had taken over. And then when he was rich he could buy a car and buy a house for his mother and Caleb to keep them both away from the ofay. He could give Daevon a gold watch.

  “Ay,” a girl’s voice said.

  He looked up: Meeches. She was standing leaning back on one leg, her chest out, her arms crossed. Her hair was short and blond. He wanted to touch it but he knew she’d never let him.

  He stood up. “Hey,” he said, then corrected the pitch of his voice. “Hey.”

  She laughed. “Hey.”

  Things might get better, he realized. At the very least the day could get better. She had said she liked all the tapes he gave her, “It’s Like That” and the Wild Style tracks. She let him hold her hand. And when they sat in the little gazebo house right in front of the museum, she told him all her friends said he really liked her. He could feel his cheeks heating up.

  “I do,” he said. Then, remembering what Daevon had said: “And I’d buy shit for you.”

  She laughed and drummed her chest with her fingers. “You’d buy shit for me!”

  Why was she laughing? Now he was thinking about Smitty’s again, about Priscilla. How many times was he going to fail in a single day? There should be a fucking limit.

  “Yeah, I would,” he said.

  “With what money, A? Your momma work at the grocery store.”

  Now his cheeks felt this-can’t-be-happening hot. He’d spent weeks asking about her, trying to get friends of friends to give him information. What he knew was her dad and mom were married, they owned a house in Central, her dad worked as a manager at Macy’s. That’s how come she had the good hair. He was just the tallest kid in their grade. That was why she was sitting here with him. He ran his elbow, hard, into a beam of the gazebo. She jumped back from him like he was about to detonate.

  “I gave you all my tapes already!” he said. “What the fuck more you want?”

  Now she was clutching pearls she wasn’t even wearing. She stood up, backed out of the gazebo. “You insane,” she said. “My friends told me you’d be like this.”

  He thumped the beam again. The roof of the gazebo shook. Meeches was walking away from him, holding her hands out in front of her. “I’m telling everyone about you,” she said.

  “Go tell them!” He almost added “bitch” to the end, but knew it would make him feel bad later. She was too beautiful anyway. He wanted his tapes back. He wanted them back so bad; it hurt in his head like he was holding a deep cut open to zero-degree wind. She walked, then ran away from him. He folded his hands across his stomach and then folded over them like he was trying to keep warm. He hated her so much. Why couldn’t he stop watching as she ran, thinking about how her calves moved and thighs clapped and how her shoulder blades shifted back and forth under her sweatshirt?

  He got on his bike and dragged himself back up Hough, not really seeing where he was going. The hill was more punishment, and he didn’t even know what he did to deserve it. Be born? Miss his dad? Hate his dad for not writing to them, for leaving them and not caring? What the fuck was he supposed to do? He biked fast as he could past Smitty’s, back onto Fifty-Fifth, down to the liquor store where the two old drunks, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned, were sitting as they always did, talking about Cab Calloway and the war and whatever the fuck else Aaron didn’t have the time to listen to. He threw his bike down so hard it shook them out of their conversation. They wanted to know what he wanted. He pulled ten dollars from his pocket and asked if either of them wanted to get him a bottle of bourbon.

  Drunk, he biked back home feeling tilted so close to the ground that he was basically riding sideways. A church somewhere chimed two thirty, then three o’clock. He hated himself. There was no person on earth he hated more than himself. He biked past a car wash playing “I Want You Back,” biked past an old woman yanking on the arm of a little boy who screamed. Maybe if he hadn’t said what he said to Meeches, they’d be sitting there in the gazebo still. Maybe he’d have his hand up her shirt by now. If he hadn’t gone to Smitty’s, he wouldn’t have thought about his dad buying shit for his mom, he wouldn’t have said what he said. But then he would’ve had busted edges, so there really was no winning. Caleb was probably still asleep. He pushed one pedal, then the other, his feet thick and numb like they’d been dipped in cement. Fuck if he was ever talking to her—ever looking at her—again.

  He threw his bike down in front of the complex and stalked around to the back, the first floor. His mother’s bedroom window faced east; he’d see it first when he turned the corner. At least he wasn’t going to be taking shit from her anymore.

  May 8, 2009

  Los Angeles

  He’d met his wife, Netta, at a protest in Chicago. He had been almost thirty then, and he’d decided to be done with Cleveland for good: his mother had gotten a teaching job somewhere in Canada and his brother was finally living out his messiah dream as Lawyer for the Poor and his dad hadn’t come back from the presumed-dead, so Aaron saw no reason to rot in Cleveland with all the other kids from the block. He hustled enough to get a car, cheap but not humiliatingly cheap, packed a bag, and left. The only person he told was Andre—none of the girls he was seeing, not his manager or coworkers—and that was just because they lived together. He left a note on his dresser that said, “I left and I’m trying to never come back, good luck, A.” He’d had a straight job working as a fry cook at a place called Hotwater Kitchen, and on his off time he and Andre sold kind bud to their friends and shake to their enemies. He made enough money doing both to live independently of his mother, to pretend he wasn’t thinking about what could have been in that damn yellow briefcase.

  Even now, rising from his bed as Netta remained asleep beside him, setting his watch to remind him about a game of golf he’d promised Ted Schulman, brushing his teeth and looking at the bougainvillea dripping like heavy eyelashes over the window, he was thinking about the briefcase. He was thinking about it because his mother’s sixty-first birthday had been roughly two months ago. He had no intention of calling her—he hadn’t spoken to her since he was eighteen—but every year he found himself wanting a little more to hear her voice. He was curious how it had changed. Maybe she’d get on the phone sounding old and cigarette-hoarse, like that friend of hers Demetra who had that weird giant-eared kid who tried to play with him and Caleb, or she’d get on sounding all rich with a Canadian accent, and he’d get to match up the woman she was with the woman she used to be and see how quickly her fakery crumbled. She’d want an apology. He didn’t w
ant to apologize for anything—didn’t think he needed to.

  Ted Schulman wanted to talk to him about buying up a bunch of public housing in Lynwood and turning the buildings into single-unit dwellings. Aaron would try to steer him toward a property in Inglewood, an abandoned warehouse adjacent to a weedy lot, but knowing Ted, Aaron figured he’d probably laugh and shake his head. He called Aaron “Boy Scout” a lot, as in, “Boy Scout here’s trying to save the neighborhood. Is it your liberal wife? Does she realize you’re part of the problem?” In this case, he’d make the argument that luxury condominiums in any failing neighborhood will just attract the kind of businesses white renters like to frequent, and then United Colors of Benetton will be replacing Mom & Pop’s Fried Chicken and some other developers will get their hands on the public housing and make the killing Ted could be making. “It’s the way of the world!” he’d probably say today on the golf course. “So why not cut out the middleman and just make happen what you know’s gonna happen anyway?” Aaron always tried to put up a fight, but he knew Ted had a point. It was the way of the world, and he was a part of that way.

  Netta was the reason he was trying to save public housing anyway. Having grown up in public housing, he hated it—hated how it felt living there, how people treated him for living there, how the other people there were always trying to beat him up and rip him off. Netta hadn’t come from money either, but her parents had at least been able to afford a small apartment on what seemed like the white side of Chicago. He’d stayed there with her for about a year, working a job he didn’t care about, meeting her college friends, eating her father’s cooking. She had told her parents Aaron was the son of immigrants trying to pay for college and they bought it. Sometimes her father even came in to check on him in the cot he was supposed to be sleeping on in the study room across from Netta’s. He always spent the first part of the night there and then a little bit of the morning. He met Ray, an acquaintance of hers from her high school days, at a party after one of her gallery openings. She was getting famous in the Chicago art scene by then, even had a little blurb and a profile in the Sun-Times. Ray, light-skinned and goofy-faced, had made it out of Chicago on a scholarship to Howard, was a loyal Omega Psi Phi who liked to get high and show Aaron his old step routines. He called Aaron Biscuits ’n’ Gravy, Biscuits for short. Aaron never knew why Ray liked him so much, but he counted it as one of the biggest blessings of his life: Ray was a real estate agent and he gave Aaron all his old exam study books, even showed him a copy of his old exam results that he’d managed to shake down some lady at the testing office for. Aaron took the Illinois exam without stepping foot in a classroom—without even getting his GED—and passed and he and Ray started showing houses together, mostly middle-income places to young couples looking to start families in Albany Park or Ukrainian Village. They worked for a real estate office called Blanicks LLC, then started their own team when they could afford the office space. Then Ray got poached by a development company in LA called Onyx and asked if Aaron wanted to go, too.

  Netta had never been a booster of the real estate career, but she hadn’t exactly been complaining about the money: they had their own place now in the kind of neighborhood where white people with office jobs picked up their dogs’ shit in little plastic bags. But it took some time to get her there. He had caught her one night in her office, drawing hands on a gigantic sketch of an old woman. She was obsessed with this old Dionne Warwick song her mom had on vinyl, “I’ll Never Love This Way Again”—he’d set it on the record player her father had given her and started it playing. She’d turned around, looked him up and down, and smirked. “What does your fool ass want now?” That’s when he had kneeled down and opened his hands to show her the candy ring he’d bought at the pharmacy. “I love you,” he had said—he said it almost every day now. “Will you marry me and move to LA?” She put her charcoal down and stood up from her desk, approaching him. “I’ll marry you,” she’d said, “but I can’t promise you anything about moving to LA.” It took him a year, but he had managed to convince her.

  Now he was stepping in the shower, staring into its giant buffed brass showerhead as the mineral-tasting water rained down. He’d gotten used to all kinds of things in his life just to fit in at Onyx. He had to ask Ray for a “cigarette” instead of a square, had to pretend he knew what a cheese plate was and that it didn’t give him indigestion, had to go golfing and jogging with Ted Schulman in parks full of people who didn’t look like him. He had to spend hours in a sauna on a corporate retreat and nod when Ray and Ted asked him, “Are you sweating out all your inflammatory toxins?” He had to pretend that nothing made him lonely, but he’d always been good at that. He could pretend anything if he was getting paid enough. The shower water was pelting him in the forehead, too cold, but he needed to wake up. He scrubbed himself with a loofah, something Netta knew about before he did. Sometimes she rubbed her temples and told him she felt like a sellout because she was making art for the very people Aaron was displacing from their homes, and he should seriously consider leaving Onyx. She’d been doing this more and more in the months since she’d gotten pregnant—when they’d first moved there, she was in love with him and confident he was going to bring down the system from the inside. He hadn’t wanted to tell her that nobody could bring down the system because you can’t “bring down” something you’re a part of. She’d gone to a fancy college, gotten a bunch of people telling her how good she was at drawing, gotten gallery shows where rich people bought her art. It’s easier to think you’re going to be a revolutionary when everything’s going your way. But she was beautiful and patient and compassionate, and his kid was growing inside her, so he wasn’t exactly going to sit around lecturing her on who she was and who he was and why she should just stop bothering him about it all.

  The shower lasted longer than he’d meant it to. He got out, the room still steamy as he shaved. His beard grew quickly; if he slept in he had stubble. He didn’t want to think about golf with Ted, so he looked at his reflection. He was taller than he’d once thought he’d end up being, darker than his mother, his features sharper than hers. He told himself this was all his dad’s genes. He was starting to look the way his dad used to look in those photo albums his mother made, sitting on the couch in jeans and no shirt, holding Caleb in one arm and Aaron in the other, his chest carpeted with hair, his smile huge and white. Aaron was sure he had his dad’s eyes and forehead now that he was done growing. And he definitely had his chest and biceps, there was no question about that. He was his father’s son. Somewhere there was an inheritance waiting for him. Somewhere they were celebrating his birthday.

  He couldn’t remember now if he’d been thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen. He’d been young, at the very least, and angry and drunk worse than he’d ever been since. He’d set a trap to catch his mother fucking the ofay. He could’ve just walked away—that would’ve been humiliating enough. But a drunk kid is going to run inside the apartment, inside the bedroom, and try to beat the shit out of that cowering ofay. And instead he’s going to get the shit beaten out of him, get restrained by his own mother, and when the ofay finally limps away, whining about how he was just trying to do good and he could call the cops if he wanted to, the drunk kid’s going to look his mother in the eye and say that she’s a disappointment to the family. And she’s going to tell him that if she’s such a disappointment, he can get by without his inheritance. And he’s going to ask what the fuck you mean “inheritance” and she’s going to make to open the yellow briefcase on the bed behind her, but he’s going to first, he’s going to stomp on it and kick through it because it’s soldered shut and flimsier than it looks, and when he finally does he’ll see that it’s just full of a bunch of books written in a weird scribble language she’ll angrily tell him is Hebrew. And then the drunk kid’s going to ask whether this is proof enough that the ofay is stupid and a murderer and how she feels fucking around with the ofay who murdered her husband and she’s going to say no son of hers w
ould talk to her like that and she’s going to throw him out of the house and he’ll slink back a week later and things will never be the same between them.

  But over time Aaron saw that the ofay couldn’t have been stupid, just insane—how else could he have gotten away with a crime like killing Aaron’s dad and then lying about it for decades? And even on the off chance it wasn’t the ofay himself but some other ofay—Sunny or Sunny’s boss—how could a pure dumbass get out of there alive? A lunatic maybe, but not a dumbass. Which explained Aaron’s feeling that there was a real briefcase somewhere, with real money. And maybe his dad was alive and had it. Or maybe it wasn’t a briefcase: maybe it was a house in Honolulu and his dad had been trying to reach them for decades. He had told Caleb his theory once, back when they were living in that house in East Cleveland with all of Caleb’s nerd friends. Caleb was probably high on benzos (he always was back then), and he’d said, “You a sucker if you think his body didn’t get ground up by a trash compactor. You know how them violent crackers work.” He said it with half-open eyes and a flat face, like Aaron was the dumbest student in second grade. Aaron couldn’t remember punching him, but he could remember crying alone in his room upstairs, flexing his aching hand, feeling embarrassed that he was who he was and would have to go on being who he was until he died. He thought about not waiting to die, but he remembered he wasn’t weak like Caleb—fuck if the world was going to make him hang himself. It sure as hell was giving him the rope, though.

  He got to the office early, and it was quiet; none of the interns were there, none of the secretaries. He sat in his corner office, looking over a few project proposals, proofing a few deeds, mostly playing blackjack on his computer. Around ten o’clock the office started filling, the junior agents taking their seats at their cubicles outside his office window, the secretaries adjusting their headsets, Ray meandering back and forth from the water cooler, waving at Aaron every time he passed. Aaron waved back, then stared at his screen, pretending to be busy. He was getting sick of Ray. He’d started cheating on his wife with a girl half his age who worked at the In-N-Out, and he kept on taking Aaron through the drive-thru there on lunch break to see her. And she was beautiful, disgustingly young, Puerto Rican, had baby deer eyes, and wore a choker. Aaron was sick of seeing her and sick of hearing about sex with her and especially sick of Ray telling him that if he wanted to tap that he could, just say the word. When his phone beeped right before lunch, he left out the back exit and drove to the golf course.