Out of the Madness

by Jerrold Ladd

  Sam would shout back at her occasionally, but mostly he tried to reason with her. I know he wanted to respond in kind sometimes. Yet he never chanced damaging his treasure, upsetting her enough to leave. She was worth the physical abuse he suffered.

  Again and again we moved, dotting the small Hispanic area on the outskirts, then back into the more densely populated areas. Our last move was into the Bottom, a section of twenties housing just below a stretch of the Trinity River, which also ran through Oak Cliff. Down there, Sam left us. My mother had poured hot cooking grease on him. I guess that shook him up. Wherever we moved, though, whether five or ten miles away, Junior kept his job. He would walk there through biting storms or freezing cold for the few dollars.

  While our escape from the projects had eased some problems, it had sprung others, like all this moving. The more we moved, the more we realized we could never get the family engine cranked. Education slipped farther away. My real mother, who was inside that woman, the person with the infallible wisdom, appeared less. I was stealing. We still had no guidance, had never had guidance. And each time we relocated physically, we became more entangled mentally. We had been away from the projects less than a mere two years. But all too soon, the confusion of our lives was being agitated greatly.

  8

  MARRIAGE

  In 1985, an Italian restaurant in glittering downtown Dallas hired me as a busboy. Being fifteen and still underage, I had to lie on the application; and the circumstances left few alternatives. Nothing would keep me from having my first job on the payroll. I went down to interview for the job after a friend had told me to rush over there because the restaurant was hiring. They were offering first-come, first-served jobs. So I had jogged straight to the restaurant, knowing the place would be stampeded once word spread among the anxious black teenagers. I had entered the quiet restaurant shortly after lunch hour. A white man gave the interview. The only question I remember him asking was my age, without even looking at me. I was hired on the spot with two other boys. It didn’t take much to qualify for these jobs.

  I was excited and naive about my new job. I walked out the front office believing that with my busboy position, I would provide all the clothes and things I needed and had been missing, especially food. My starting salary was $3.35 an hour, five hours a day ($100 per week), but I didn’t care. That was like a million dollars to me. I had been given rocks to eat all my life, so this sand was like steak.

  With this job, I also got to see the Dallas I wasn’t familiar with. Downtown had the big-city stores, expensive restaurants, and a wide variety of boutiques and shops. Each time I went there, I was overwhelmed by the sheer splendor of the skyscrapers and busy people walking up and down the crowded streets: the whites in their starch-stiff gray clothes, most of the blacks dressed casually or in work uniforms. I would hang at a corner or let my bus pass several times, so I could watch the crowds and gaze at the buildings.

  I also located the uniquely designed central library, which had several spacious floors with thousands of books. Before and after work, I would go there, grab several books, and glue myself to a chair in some corner. Later I applied for a library card and began taking my books home with me. Over the past two years, my reading had slackened, but at this library I regained the former pace.

  On the other end of downtown was the two-story restaurant. Pipes were exposed on the ceiling, and old artifacts decorated the lobby area: statues, telephone booths, coin games. Spacious bars were on both floors.

  “More bread at that table. This couple needs more water,” the mostly white, gay waiters would shout to us black and Hispanic busboys, dressed in our white T-shirts with the restaurant’s logo printed on the front. The busboys were responsible for keeping fresh bread and water on the tables, seeing that ice bins and water pitchers were filled at each workstation, and quickly cleaning the messy tables after customers left.

  I stayed busy at work and became friends only with the black dishwasher. I was so gratified to be working until I only had time for my job; besides, if a busboy worked very hard, within two years he could move up to five dollars an hour, I was told by the hiring manager.

  I was so happy to be receiving money, I sometimes would look at my check stub over and over. My family had been without steady money for so long that I believed I could make a living working at the restaurant the rest of my life, that the job was the jackpot, and not a stepping-stone or a means to an end. I was so desperate for money that the weekly mediocre checks seduced me. The stealing stopped. And the job became my life for several months.

  This was in 1986. My mother and I were living with an elder named Wayne*, whom my mother and I had been with for several months. She had wasted no time after Sam packed his bags and went home to west Dallas. She had told us to gather our belongings and had a man take us to Oak Cliff, to the house of a man in his late sixties. When I first walked through the door, Wayne had given me that all-too-familiar glare, the kind that said “If it weren’t for your mother, boy, you wouldn’t step a foot inside my house.”

  Wayne was a gray man, the stubborn kind who would argue with you all night about anything he thought was true. Each Sunday morning he performed his deacon service at some church, and each evening he drank wine with his old buddies at the corner house. Wayne, in the beginning, was like the men in the past, in that he had no interest in me but was tolerant because of my mother.

  And I was aware of the sacrifices my mother made, staying and sleeping with men like him so that her children would have a place to stay. I knew she still had her womanly desires, to be loved and held by a man she really loved. But most of the ones who accepted us were unattractive, drunkards, elders, freeloaders, or dope fiends. If not for her children, she could have gotten into better situations. Many of the high shakers would have loved to have her. Wherever she went, though, no matter how lucrative the offer, she would never accept unless her children were included. This motherly responsibility, thank God, was still a part of her.

  We moved into a damp wooden house on Denley Street, near the Veterans Hospital. Here, our living environment went down another level, for the house was in terrible condition. There was little insulation and no heat, so cold seeped easily through the walls. When we first moved in, the toilet didn’t work, forcing us to use a bucket instead. The house smelled constantly of dead rats, rotten food, and body waste from the bucket in the bathroom. Cooking was done on a small hot plate, and since we had no refrigerator, food was kept in an ice chest. But my meticulous mother attacked the dirt and smell in that house until it was tolerable.

  I slept in the small back room on a mattress filthier than the one I used in the projects. Since my room was closest to the bathroom, the grotesque smell stayed back there, even after the waste bucket had been emptied. My body fevers, which had stopped for a while, came back. The sickening smell nauseated my soul.

  My mother and Wayne slept in the front room, where a small electric heater gave them warmth. She and I rarely talked. Our relationship was just one of toleration. That person wasn’t my real mother anyway. She stayed gone with her dope fiend friends for days, in the neighborhoods where heroin was more concentrated. She drained Wayne of his money. But, of course, he didn’t care, as long as his fine young woman was with him.

  Shortly after we moved in with old man Wayne, Junior left. He dropped out of school and enrolled in the Job Corps. While waiting on his eighteenth birthday, the qualifying age to join the Job Corps, he stayed impatient, having heard all the wonders of the government’s advertisements about Job Corps, the real chance. On the day after he turned eighteen, he was on a Greyhound bus to San Marcos, Texas, hastily wanting to find this opportunity. My sister, whom I seldom saw, still lived with my aunt Cheryl. So I was the only one of my mother’s children still with her.

  I became a slave to the restaurant. Since I was required to punch in at a designated time, I would begin without punching my time sheet, giving the business free labor, hoping to impress them. Onc
e the regular time began, I would work feverishly without taking breaks, bringing water to the mostly white customers, keeping bread on the ten or fifteen varied tables (which could hold from two to ten people). If a busboy could clean the tables rapidly and help the waiters satisfy the customers, the waiters would tip him. To stay ahead, I tried to have the tables cleaned before the customers left. Eventually I was deemed an exceptional busboy. The waiters would try to get me into their stations, which meant happier customers and, therefore, more tips.

  The gay waiters there despised us blacks, the way I had seen whites do in the past. They would turn their noses up at us busboys, even if they were gay, and flirt with other races. I foolishly had believed gay men did not have enough people to choose from to be that selective. I remember my conversation with one waiter in particular, the first person to tell me that I was a minority. I was baffled to learn that we did not represent at least half the American population. He told me that his preference for white males had nothing to do with race, but more with his view that few black men were middle class, his social class, and he wanted to date someone with the same background. Several weeks later, a new busboy, a Hispanic who was not middle class, let us all know one day in the kitchen that this same white waiter had propositioned him. His problems with blacks, whatever they were, proved stronger than his sexual desires.

  I became so skilled at being a busboy that on Sundays the managers would let me bus the entire ground floor of the restaurant—covering an area that usually required three or four bus-boys—all alone. I think the management also had plans of making me a porter because they made me receive maintenance training from the Hispanic porter. But before I got that far, they found out my age.

  After the manager fired me, I was disappointed for a few days. Being able to buy food, give my mother money, and catch the bus downtown were the things I would miss the most. After I lost my job, and since I had quit school, I hung around the house more. Now all I did was read, clean up around the house and in the front yard, or watch my mother.

  She was becoming very secretive about her activities. On the days when we were at home together, she would get dressed in some of her better clothes and walk down the street. I watched her do this for several weeks but thought nothing of it. I figured some man was showing her a good time. But while she was somewhere out there, something had moved her once again to give her religion another try.

  She had joined another church. As I have mentioned, the church had revolving doors, and the constant promises of peace and happiness preached by the ministers always drew people like her back for another dispirited tangle with the religion. But whenever she was inspired to try to redeem herself, whether a member of a church or not, she became caring and sweet.

  I believed these infrequent times of closeness between her and me always made up for the weeks and months of neglect. During them, she would talk to me about my childhood, about as a baby how curious and mischievous I was.

  “You would keep somebody up all night with your questions, if they let you. You wanted to know everything,” she said. On Denley Street, I still had questions.

  “Momma, why can’t you get off drugs?” No longer attempting to hide the problem from me, figuring I was mature enough, she would explain how heroin affected her.

  “It’s a physical sickness unlike other dope,” she would say. “That’s the reason it’s hard to kick, because of the sickness it gives you.” She said how important it was that the person stay around positive people if they ever did kick. “If you go back into the same neighborhood, into the same situation with the same people, you get right back on drugs. I have left heroin alone plenty of times,” she told me. “I know I’m wrong for what I’ve put my children through. I try and try, baby, but I just can’t do it all by myself. I hope my children can one day forgive me.”

  Over the next few weeks, perhaps inspired by this growing relationship with her son, maybe stirred enough to try to bring respect to herself, to heal her gaping wound, she continued going to church and staying home more, pacing the floor at night, sweaty and sick. Something I thought I would never live to see was happening. One day at a time, week by week, she was leaving the dope alone. I was encouraging her and buying her womanly things like stockings and perfumes with the little money I had. But I think she knew her death was imminent if she did not change soon; knew she would either succeed in freeing herself or die.

  Perhaps compelled by this desperation, she took her efforts farther than I had imagined she would. She came home from church one day and shook up the shack house on Denley. “Wayne,” she said, “I can no longer continue in this adulterous relationship with you. I’ll be moving out soon. I’m getting married.”

  9

  FORGED

  The city bus maneuvered its way through the rush-hour traffic of downtown as I sat on the backseat, holding the trash bag filled with my clothes. Normally passengers were required to transfer to another bus to reach their destination. But this one was going straight through town and into south Dallas, where my mother and her new husband lived. So I remained on the 44 Oakland route, on my way to my new home.

  I had thought I would remain with Wayne and begin my adult life from there. After his heart-wrenching separation from my mother, he had deemed me a good kid, told me I could stay with him as long as I wanted. But my mother moved in with her aunt-in-law until she was married and called two weeks later to tell me I could come and live with her; evidently, even while she was at the church, she and her new husband had been planning. With the passion of Romeo and Juliet, my mother and the deacon of the church had eloped, I was told. They had attended church more than usual, sitting there eyeing each other.

  The church, if it could be called a church, had only four members: a preacher up and coming, who had just begun to build his flock, his wife, and the deacon, the preacher’s friend. My mother’s choices were rather narrow. The minister’s wife was my mother’s aunt-in-law, the sister of her father, information I didn’t learn about until after the marriage. She had been picking my mother up sometimes from the Denley house; the deacon had come, too.

  Given the circumstances, I can see why they waited only two months after they met to get married. He was fifty, had three children, and was divorced from a nearly two-decade marriage. And he was another man compelled by the beauty of a fine woman, as so many men are, and insanely jealous. Having worked for over thirty years on the same job with a respectable salary, he could offer her everything she needed. He wrapped her up before some other older man did.

  At this stage of her life, my mother was at the climax of her battle with the heroin demon. Wayne, the man we had just lived with, didn’t have the resources to support my mother and her children. Furthermore, he didn’t attend church as much as was necessary for her. Alvin* was the best choice.

  As I sat thinking, the loud, crowded, dirty bus continued through town, then onto the overpass over Interstate 30, and finally to the Oakland bridge. I was nervous.

  What made my mother and her husband choose a house in south Dallas, I don’t know. Its notorious reputation as the toughest section of the city had even reached west Dallas—it was rumored that the men who had come for Shortleg Lee were from here. Surely it wasn’t the safest neighborhood they could have chosen. As the bus began descending, the dangerous beauty of south Dallas was laid out.

  Oakland stretched straight ahead to where its end could not be seen. It was busy, like a Hollywood boulevard. A liquor store and a club were on the right, where about thirty men were conversing. Across the short street, another ten or fifteen persons had gathered around a barrel in which a fire kindled. They lounged on thrown-away couches, among deserted clothes, bottles, hypodermic needles, and car tires. Farther down Oakland, the bus continued, passed Good Luck’s Hamburgers, the Martin Luther King Community Center, dance clubs, and endless rows of slum apartments, where small families and single mothers lived. Kids stayed out late at night around here—running, playing, looking. Liquor
stores and pawnshops were as plentiful as grass and trees. Some of the pawnshops had “Open Twenty-four Hours” signs on them, as if a law-abiding person would wake up at three A.M. and say, “Oh, I guess I’ll go pawn my TV.”

  I hopped off the bus at Oakland and Twyman, then walked swiftly down Twyman until it changed to Lenway. Finally, on a brown sign beneath the mailbox, I spotted the right address. In surprise, I double-checked the numbers. It looked more like an unoccupied church—it had glass, double doors, and monoliths upholding the front porch. But a small door with an air-conditioner unit was at the adjacent corner of the rectangle. I knocked on the door.

  I was beckoned in by my excited sister, whom I had not seen for nearly two years.

  “Hey, Jerrold!” she screamed out. “Come in, boy…. Look at how skinny you are. I thought you would have grown by now. I see you still got that thick hair, with your black self.”

  Sherrie had dropped out of school while living with my aunt Cheryl but had gotten her GED, or equivalency diploma. Afterward she had worked several jobs, paying our aunty Cheryl a monthly fee.

  Since my mother and her husband were not there, Sherrie showed me around the pleasantly decorated duplex. She, twenty, had matured into a young woman. We exchanged hugs, and she showed me where to place my trash bag. I had not expected to see her. She said our mother had told her all about Alvin, and she had known about the wedding plans from the beginning.

  Sherrie happily showed me the house, starting with the living room, which was in the front. It was decorated with two small couches, a lounge chair, and plenty of rugs, lamps, and pictures. In the middle of the room, a small door led to the next room, which had two beds on either side of the wall. Another small door led to my mother’s bedroom. The kitchen, bathroom, and back porch were beyond another door. It all felt very homey.

  My mother soon returned with her new husband. “Hey, baby,” she said as she grabbed and hugged me. I immediately noticed that she had gained weight and her worry had eased. She smiled broadly. I could tell she was no longer using drugs. She introduced her new husband, who also gave me a pleasant smile from his round head and fleshy face. He was short, his eyes small and his head bald. He stood back and looked at me, appearing humble, with his hands clasped together in front of him. Together, and with the impression of the house, they looked like two Quakers.