Out of the Madness

by Jerrold Ladd

  Several girls walked past us. They exchanged frowns with Jackie. She dropped the conversation and asked me if I wanted anything from the store. but on the way back she started again.

  “I’m gonna see what you’re all about tonight.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, already knowing exactly what she meant.

  “I’m gonna be the first to have you.”

  We ate a small dinner, then got ready for bed. Later that night, Jackie began to work her womanly magic, fulfilling her prediction. She decided to sleep in the living room. Since there were only two couches, she would have to share a couch with someone. She chose the one I slept on, the one close to the window. Sister Hill and my mother, after staying in the hot apartment all day, dozed quickly. My brother soon joined them.

  Jackie squeezed her slim body onto the couch and snuggled herself close to my private parts. Then, after a while, she began to move back and forth. Not wanting to seem soft, I moved along with her. She moved and moved, as if she were being satisfied.

  She then etched words into my memory that I have never forgotten, that I would hear again from another who would also take advantage of a child. “Jerrold, I know you can do it good. I’m gonna go back in the room. You wait awhile, then come back there with me.” Before rising, she said, “Do it for me, baby.” I watched her walk to the back room. After her warm words, which made something deep inside me respond, I followed her into the room and shut the door behind me.

  * * *

  When that summer came to an end in 1984, we returned to our old unit, where the tension still dwelled. Things quickly went back to normal—washing sinks full of pots and pans, cleaning up bathrooms, mopping tile floors. My mom made us do everything. I began to think we were slaves. She would send us to a neighbor’s house to buy her pain pills for a dollar fifty each. If the neighbor was out, we were told to walk miles to other places, even if it was three o’clock in the morning. She started smoking more cigarettes. And we were sent to buy or steal them. I hated it, hated the cigarette smoke, hated the slave work. But the cool words “Do it for Momma” did me in every time. Kindness was so rare.

  “Bring Momma’s house shoes, wash out Momma’s panties.” And I hardly ever objected, because if I did, I would receive one of those terrible beatings with an extension cord or get slapped across the face. One time, before one of her blows landed, I darted out the door and called her a bitch. I climbed a tree until I thought the action had cooled down. Wash out Momma’s panties, do this for Momma, do that for Momma. My brother and I continued to leave the house early so we wouldn’t have to slave for Momma all day.

  Then it finally happened. One day in autumn, the mailman delivered the notice that we had thirty days to vacate our project unit. We had no money. The gorilla workers would soon come. During that time, my mother stayed depressed and finally broke.

  Two days later she screamed my name. Pain was in her voice: “Jerrold!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I responded, while hurrying up the stairs.

  I came into the bathroom, where she sat on the toilet. Her face was twisted worry. A stocking was tied around her arm. She brought a syringe up to it and said, “Jerrold, I’m too nervous to hit myself. I’ll put the needle to my arm. All you’ll have to do is squeeze it.”

  I was in a trance. I quietly came into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. She placed my hand on the needle with her nervous, shaking hand and said, “Do it for Momma.” A little kid, I understood her torment, her complete dependence. I held her shaking arm still while squeezing the clear liquid into her. I did it for Momma.

  7

  STRUGGLE

  Days after the incident with my mother, Junior was sent to the store for aspirin again. My mother sent him with a fifty-dollar bill given to her by a stranger. He returned promptly, as usual, and gave her the aspirin and change. She disappeared. A half hour later, a tall, angry man came by looking for her. He asked Junior, who was standing in our backyard, for the money. Surprised, Junior told him he had given our mother the change. “She told me you never gave it to her,” the man said. Our mother had taken this man’s money and left him expecting something in return.

  He was angry, angry enough that he hit my gentle brother across the face. Junior cried out as he staggered back against the wire clothesline. Sherrie, who had been looking from our back door, dashed past the man, who grabbed for her, and ran next door to the bootleg to call the police. The man stood in the bootleg door, screaming and cursing at the top of his lungs. I stood peering around the side of the project building with Little Mark.

  As we watched, our fight-or-flight mechanism clicked. Which one would we choose to do, aid Junior or run like cheetahs? Sudden fear came over Mark. He dashed for his house. I decided to run also and darted through the Deadman units. I felt guilty for leaving my brother and angry because I was too skinny to do anything. But too many people had been killed by men like that. Besides, I had decided this was my last run. I headed to a friend’s house to call the police. I would send them for Junior. But I was never going back.

  Alone in an empty Deadman unit after making the call, I played until the sunset. Never in there after dark, I headed to the redneck store. For the first night, I planned to stay awake and roam the streets, watching all the depressed, noisy people.

  But as I played a video game in the store with a feeling of dread, a man tapped on my shoulder. I spun around in a whirl of fear and saw a short, smiling black man. He was my uncle James, my mother’s brother. “She said I would find you here,” he said. He turned and walked out the store. Without question, I followed. As soon as we stepped through the door, a hard rain began to fall.

  In the car on the stormy highway I talked with my sister, who had called our uncle, then showed him where to find me. She said the police, who she had called also, came hours later. Our mother never came back. But Junior was safe at our uncle James’s house.

  Since my mother had not stayed in contact with her three brothers and four sisters across town, Uncle James was unaware of his sister’s life. We let him know how bad things had gotten. He shook his head in disbelief. Later he postponed conversations for the night, and after we ate a small meal, everyone went to bed.

  Plans were made the next day. My sister was sent to my aunt Cheryl’s house. Junior and I remained with my uncle James. In a few days, he had moved our clothes and furniture from the Hitler camp. And we began to settle down.

  James lived in East Ledbetter Apartments on Ledbetter, one of many apartment complexes scattered throughout Oak Cliff. The complexes were a grade above the project units, slightly larger, and had central air and heat.

  A shopping center, barbecue shacks, and other restaurants were located at the busy intersection of Ledbetter and Bonnie View, just before the school. Most everyone around there, it seemed, tended to his own business.

  My uncle James was the oldest of the boys, maybe three years behind my mother, the oldest of her family. He had shared the same family environment as my mother and had settled into hard, unrewarding labor to feed and clothe his family—although this clearly was not his ambition or the extent of his potential. He had a job doing office cleaning. He didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. And he seemed to care about us. He had married in his early twenties but was divorced and the possessor of his three young children, two girls and a small boy. He had since remarried.

  The noise and violence was less in Oak Cliff. It seemed a vast colony of minimum-wage workers, and I realized I finally had moved up to the minimum-wage group. I hoped my sturdy uncle would adopt me. But, at the same time, I wanted my mother to be here also. She could do better away from the projects.

  Junior stayed for only a short time with Uncle James, then was sent to live with another aunt close by. I grew closer to my three cousins, all preschoolers, often riding them on the back of their bike in the scarcely populated apartments, the way Bad Baby had done for me in the projects. We played nonsense kid games all the time. Or watched TV!
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br />   In the near distance, the neighborhood had a small middle and high school, surrounded by better-quality housing than the ones near Robin Village. After several weeks passed, I enrolled into James Bowie Elementary and found a white candy man in Oak Cliff. I quickly joined his sales team, again selling candy in the white neighborhoods after school and on weekends.

  I only stayed in the all-black elementary school for several months, but I still liked it more than going to white schools. It felt right being with people who looked, acted, and thought like me. There was no constant humiliation, most everybody ate free lunches, and I made a lot of friends, something I never did at Pershing. I became more talkative at school, learned to play games, shoot marbles, talk about girls, and clown around with other black boys. Eventually I would begin to feel relief in the mornings, on the way to school, and pressure in the evenings.

  At first I hardly missed my mother, but later I wondered how she was doing, wanted to see her in person. I had become very quiet and secretive about my feelings and thoughts. Despite this, I asked my uncle one evening about my mother’s whereabouts. He told me he had found and encouraged her to admit herself into a drug rehabilitation center. We would go see her soon, he said.

  If she does well, we even would be reunited with her.

  In preparation for our reunion, I began to save the money from my candy sells. Each night I would give my uncle the eight, eleven or thirteen dollars I had earned. He promised he would put it away for me. Every night I also kept accurate figures on the money in a small notepad. In a few weeks I had earned sixty-seven dollars.

  Meanwhile I found the complex where Junior lived, following my uncle’s direction. My aunt Felisa, a real short lady, had four children and was not married. Although she didn’t work, she tried to share what she had with Junior.

  Junior was doing okay. He missed our mother more than I and was taking the change hard. He didn’t have much to do since all his friends were gone, and he thought the future looked bleak. So I spent more time around there with him, trying to cheer him up. Then my own problems flared up.

  On the day I was supposed to visit my mother, my uncle called me into his room. His usual solid demeanor was replaced by a look similar to my mother’s twisted worry. “Jerrold, I have some bad news to confess to you.” I just sat quietly. “All the money you had been giving me I spent on food to feed us.”

  I was outraged. “I want my money, I was saving that for my mother.”

  His wife intervened. “We’re sorry we didn’t tell you, but everyone had to eat. You have been helping to feed us,” she said.

  No explanation would do. He had no right to spend my money without my permission. I had planned to help my family rebuild. I wanted to show my mother that I could help. But I entered the car on my way to see her with empty pockets and with broken trust.

  We drove only a few minutes, so the rehab must have been in another part of Oak Cliff. The two-story center was a remodeled, old wooden house. We pulled into the driveway. Inside, my mother sat in the living room area, watching TV with other addicts. Somebody escorted her and us to a private part of the place. She had gained weight, and her once fair, clear skin had been restored. Neither of us had anything to say. We just sat there going through the formalities. I was too upset at my uncle James. She was probably tired of being there. After James and his wife left, I told her what they had done with my money. She told me not to worry. But, obviously, she was worried and anxious to leave.

  Back in East Ledbetter, I began to see things differently. What first had seemed like some real success for my uncle turned out to be nothing. James had depended on my modest earnings to help hold his family together, income I knew would not last long; white candy men spent only so much time in one area. James’s needs answered many questions for me, mainly that he could barely support his own family. And even though he had boldly retrieved us, he was just as stricken as my mother. Taken together, these observations meant only one thing: I was a burden to him.

  However, before I could pull him down completely, my mother was released. Before a month passed, she found her another man, who rented an apartment in a small, Hispanic part of Oak Cliff. I don’t know if she came to get Junior and me because she wanted to or was legally obligated. She wasn’t looking too happy to see us, two kids who were unwanted expenses. She wouldn’t have to worry with my sister, who remained with our aunt.

  On the rainy evening we departed, her eyes were sunk and crossed. She was high, which didn’t surprise me. Junior and I walked back and forth to Uncle James’s car, loading our few belongings, while trying to stay dry. It was raining as though Noah had come from the dead and resurrected the great rains.

  I quickly saw that my mother was not affected by the drug treatment, which I had learned little about. But I believed it was not medical treatment, just a bunch of counseling by a lot of people who knew nothing about the forces that drove people like my mother to drugs. Once free, she used dope more vigorously. The treatment seemed only to have irritated her.

  For the next two years, Junior, my mother, and I dotted the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, moving every few months. We first moved into a duplex house in another part of Oak Cliff on Lancaster Street, a Mexican neighborhood. Trash and other litter were left far too long on the street curbs and alleys, because the city trucks used an erratic schedule in this community. Most of these people spoke broken English and were buried under layer after layer of odds, like us. The state vans would come and the state men would storm the Mexicans’ houses, seeking illegal aliens.

  Often and throughout the day, dozens of Mexicans drank beer and listened to Spanish songs from portable radios. Among the hundreds of Mexican families were a handful of black families. Here, too, everyone minded his own business.

  My mother had a new boyfriend, Sam*, who reminded me of Henry, in that he was kind and worked but had a serious drug habit. He had grown up in the west Dallas housing projects, where his mother still lived. A small man, perhaps 160 pounds, he consumed daily more alcohol than the amount of water both Junior and I drank daily. He, like many others, was content just to share the same house with my lovely, gorgeous mother, regardless of the demands.

  While living in the lime-painted duplex on Lancaster, which had one bedroom, Junior and I slept on the living room floor without blankets, where we vomited and experienced diarrhea because of our hunger. My mother cared nothing for food and quickly lost the weight she had gained. She had an unspoken rule: All money except for rent, in some instances, goes for my drugs. Sometimes we didn’t have electricity or water. Sam complied with her rules, as if he were her servant, even if this meant he himself went hungry. But my mother, regardless, stayed fed and full, from dope.

  Driven by the hunger, Junior and I sought work again. We roamed up and down Jefferson Boulevard, a mile-long street full of merchant shops, asking for work. Junior, sixteen, was hired at a DAV thrift store. But I, only fifteen, still did not meet the legal age requirement for work.

  So I stole food from the convenience store near our house. I met an Indian, Co-Chief, who had a key to video games, one day when we were stealing on the same aisle. After we became friends, we burglarized several games, gaining sixty dollars in quarters each. But the merchants caught on, so we had to diversify. Since neither of us attended school, we would get together early each morning to find something to pass the time. Co-Chief taught me several neat tricks about small-time thievery. To get some pocket change, we burglarized the newspaper machines. Co-Chief would take a clothes wire and stick putty on the end of it. He would put a quarter into a paper machine to open the door. This exposed the slot in which the quarters fell. He then would stick his clothes wire into the hole and fish out quarters. Once I learned how, either he or I would stand watch for the police while the other fished out quarters.

  In the back of his house, we would bang and sand nickels into the shape of quarters. We used the tokens to buy sodas and snacks from vending machines and also to play video games.


  Another trick we developed to play free video games required a quarter, some Scotch tape, and a piece of thread. The thread would be taped to the center of the quarter, so that it would balance vertically if you let it dangle from the end of the thread. We would then lower the quarter into the video game. When a quarter passes a certain point inside a video game, it triggers a switch that gives the customer credit for that quarter—if you drop three quarters into a game, the game will award you three credits. Once our rigged quarter touched the credit device, we would pull it gently, back and forth, until we had one hundred or so credits.

  Co-Chief also introduced me to Mary, an old white lady in the area. She lived in a brick house where vines grew wildly. Her backyard was fenced and her front porch had several old couches. The woman was clearly over seventy and lived with her ancient mother. Mary bought almost anything, old coffee makers, tires, dogs, and dishes. Co-Chief and I would find someone’s valuable—at least valuable to us—and sell it to her. I even stole—or caught—dogs and was able to get ten or twenty bucks. Wrinkled Mary would barely open her front door, looking ghostly white and smelling old, and reach out with her spotty crumbling hand. Sometimes she would talk in her trembling voice. “I don’t think it’s worth what you’re asking.” And she always kept one hand behind the door when she handed me the money, as though she held an ax or something. The money, just about every time, went on food or was given to my mother.

  After a few months, we moved into another apartment complex down the street. Mildewed, it had a broken frame, old wood, compact rooms. We stayed only two weeks. My mother took the rent money—and pushed Sam from our second-story window when he complained.

  She did things like that to that man all the time, like busting him in the face with her fist or kicking him. I would hear her say later how she took after her own mother, who didn’t take nothing from no man.