by Marcus Burke
I could already hear the words “Church Boy” ringing in my head.
That’s what everyone is going to call me, fucking “Church Boy.” I ripped that sign off the pole and rode home, promising myself that the first person to clown me to my face would get an unholy beat down. There were so many signs. I wanted to pull them all down but the last thing I wanted was to run into Ma and for her to see me touching the signs.
When I got home I dropped my munchies off in the kitchen and headed out to the backyard and ducked off into my burning bush to blaze a little before Ma got home. After Papa Tanks yoked me up inside his toolshed I didn’t smoke in there anymore. On the other side of our backyard there are some tall pea-green hedges, they’re hollow in the middle and at the base there’s smooth dirt. The bush hid me from most of the daylight. It makes a good spot to smoke and chill.
I sat in the cool dirt and rolled my blunt. I could hear the weedwhacker buzz of Reggie and the Team Seven niggas on the corner running dirt bikes and four-wheelers up and down the street, playing cat and mouse with the jakes. I was bumping to my favorite Outkast album, ATLiens, on my headphones. I finished rolling my blunt and “Wheelz of Steel” came on. I sparked up, inhaled, and blew my smoke up in the air. Andre 3000 sang the chorus,
Touched by the wheelz of steel …
Now show me how you feel …
For whatever reason the words made me think about Tunnetta. The chorus reminded me of that “Feeling Good” song she sang to me before the first time I kissed her. I still remember it’s by Nina Simone, though I’ve never actually heard it.
No matter how loud I turned up my headphones the buzz from the corner seemed to keep getting louder. I wiggled the cord of my headphones, trying to get the full sound to come through to my right ear, and a fly started bopping in and out of my face. I swung a few times and it went away.
As I smoked, my mind started doing Hula-Hoops. With all these urges boiling up inside me it’s been hard to act decent. There’s so much I used to say I’d never do that I’ve done. Smoke weed. Smack Nina. Play bitches out like I ain’t got a sister of my own. Back then I thought I’d really grow up to be one of the “good niggas” running shit, but I guess we all gotta learn to deal with regrets, don’t we? It’s like the urges consume me and I don’t trust myself not to just act the way I feel. It’s all I’ve been doing lately. No matter how much I tell myself I know better or I’m not going to do something, it’s like in the heat of the moment the urges take over. I know it’s me doing these things, not them, the urges, but sometimes I wonder who or what’s to blame, ’cause what the hell is wrong with me then?
I guess all I’m saying is, I just ain’t been too proud of myself these days.
It’s funny, ’cause Pop and all my ain’t-shit uncles been crossing my mind a lot lately. I wonder if they regret the way they all done fucked over any twinkle of brightness in their dark-ass worlds or if they really just don’t give a damn. For me it’s a mixture of both, because it’s not like I don’t know right from wrong, it’s just when it really comes down to it I feel powerless over myself sometimes. In the heat of the moment I don’t think too straight and it’s not like I don’t know I been fucking up lately.
I blew a few smoke rings and watched them spin. The fly came back, but there were a couple of them this time, flying in circles around my head. I swung a few times and missed, but finally I smacked one to the ground and it landed in a ray of light breaking through the hedges. I watched the fly’s little legs kicking up at me, begging for a mercy kill. I leaned in closer and wound up my hand to squash it. At this point it sounded like the buzz from the corner was starting to overtake the Outkast. In the little spot of daylight I looked and realized it wasn’t a fly in agony, it was a pissed-off bumblebee. It turned over on its side and darted up and stung my neck. I jumped to my feet and head-butted the entire hive to the ground, gaining the whole swarm’s attention. I dropped the blunt and started running away and swatting at them but they were everywhere.
I tossed my whole hoodie off as I ran through the backyard. When I got inside the bathroom I swatted at the air making sure all the bees were gone, and they were. In the mirror it looked like I was getting the chicken pox. My whole upper half throbbed. I ran some cold water and sat in the tub letting it wash over me until I didn’t feel like I was sitting on a cactus.
Once I gathered myself I moved to the kitchen table with a bag of frozen peaches snugged to the back of my neck, two value-sized packs of pork chops freezing over my chest, and a family-sized bag of steak fries cooling my back.
I was about to read my favorite comic in the Sunday funny papers, Family Circus, when Ma got back from her walk and barged straight into the kitchen. She took off her sunglasses and tossed the staple gun on the table. She looked at me and I looked at her. She was sweating, with that look in her eye like she’s not even inside of herself.
“Fix your face. What happened to you?” I looked away and didn’t answer her. She laughed. “Well, the neighborhood’s covered in prayer.” She chuckled again. “It is done. They’ll come and you will see.”
I kept looking away and didn’t answer.
I rustled the paper and got back into my bag of Doritos and dropped a few Skittles in my mouth. I head-nodded yes, and didn’t speak. She sucked her teeth and walked off to her room. I finished my chips and opened a pack of coffee cakes. Ma called out to me from her room but I didn’t hear what she said.
“Huh?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Ma?”
She said something again but I couldn’t hear her, so I ate the rest of my coffee cakes, then opened up a Mounds and a Twix bar. If you eat them together they taste like them caramel Girl Scout cookies in the purple box.
“Andre, get up from the table and clean your room. And take all that food off your chest and stop being ridiculous.” I heard her this time but I was chewing and opening my Mountain Dew when she said it so I didn’t answer her.
“Andre!” I rustled free some gummy bears.
“Huh?”
“You gon’ stop ignoring me. Now get up from the table and clean your room. Your father gets home soon and we need to start keeping the house clean. And put my damn pork, peaches, and French fries away. What’s wrong with you?”
I said okay and put the food back in the freezer and walked into the hallway feeling the stings pulsing on my neck and chest. Nina stepped back out of her room in a red skirt and a black tank top.
“Bye, Ma. I’m going to have dinner up at Stanley’s.”
She stepped out in front of me and turned on a dime so her long-weave ponytail could smack me as she walked toward the door. I wanted to snatch it off, but didn’t with Ma nearby.
“Tell Miss Myra I say hello,” Ma said as Nina slammed the door, yelling back, “Okay.”
I walked into my room to take a nap.
That Sunday the Bible and the bees marked the start of a really bad period, only darkness to come.
12
Nothing Forgotten
Lately every day feels the same. I wake up hazy-headed, still riding last night’s high with a clamp of pressure weighing down my eyes. It only takes a few seconds for the gut punch of cloudy-belly to cramp and bite at my sides, forcing me to hold still. My munchies-soured stomach burps and gurgles. It’s always in this lull that I find myself wondering: Andre, who the hell are you becoming? Soon enough the cramps start to loosen and I ask God to help me. I swear to Him that once I get myself out of this mess with Smoke and Reggie I’ll quit everything. I’ll quit smoking, hustling, and even fucking Tunnetta behind Beezy’s back. Not that I feel bad, I’m just saying. Beezy did it to himself.
Tunnetta and I ain’t talked for the rest of that school year and that whole summer. In the months we stopped talking I took Reggie’s advice and focused more on ball. I heard Tunnetta got around plenty over the summer. Her name was starting to ring bells with niggas in the hallways and in the locker rooms. The word was that she turned into a
real community ho jump-off type. Now she don’t know how to break it to Beezy that he’s nothin’ more than a long rebound she don’t know how to drop.
After I watched Sade Fulton beat her ass, I tried to act like there was nothing between us, but I felt horrible about how I just walked away from her. As much as I distanced myself and kept away, I couldn’t get her out of my head. We were pretty close and I missed talking to her on the phone. Even with all the rumbles about her gettin’ around, I still felt like things weren’t finished with us. So in the fall when school started back up, I slipped a note in her locker that said, “I’m having Mary & Jane over for an afterschool study session at 4:20, we need your help with math homework. We miss you.”
She showed up that day after school in my backyard blushing, but she was a little awkward and standoffish at first. She told me not to get any ideas and that she didn’t want to smoke inside the toolshed, so we went off into the woods behind Decker Street. We sat on a big boulder, and as we blazed I apologized for not doing something to help her. She accepted my apology but said she wasn’t going to break up with Beezy because he was nice to her. Still, she agreed we could be how we were if I promised not to tell, and just like that we been creeping ever since.
They officially became boyfriend and girlfriend at the end of the summer before the school year started and I got home from a basketball tournament in New York. Since I got back, I been wanting to smack him in his big mouth. He’s been stomping around the block and the hallways at school like he’s King Ding-a-Ling XL and shit, looking like a damn fool. He be acting like he was shitting on somebody, bagging Tunnetta. Like he can control that cageless bird. I wasn’t the only one enjoying her in her free time and I grew to accept that. She ain’t my girl and I don’t question her about the things I hear about her, same way she don’t question me.
In school, ever since Ma made them damn flyers I been trying to lie low and blend into the scene. I sit with the other cats from the basketball team at lunch and avoid any set of eyes that lingers on me too long. I act like I don’t know what they’re laughing about. Beezy and Tunnetta sit across the cafeteria from the basketball players’ table and I be watching this cup-caking motherfucker Beezy kissing her on the mouth, holding her hand under the table like a little bitch. He’d even buy her lunch and let her get a second slice on pizza day for an extra $1.25. It’s weird watching how Beezy is for her. When he looks at her it’s like she’s the only person in the cafeteria, but only it’s sicker than that ’cause he looks at her like in her eyes he sees the honey-sweet version of his dreams.
But I don’t know what the hell he really sees when he looks at her ’cause how can’t he see her flashing the fuck-me eyes to half the niggas sitting at my table? When the bell would ring and we all worked our way back to class Beezy would toss his hand over Tunnetta’s shoulder and they’d stroll away, seesawing off to class together. It looked funny how Beezy would damn near be walking on his tiptoes trying to cuff her, and for whatever reason he just didn’t seem to see anybody laughing at him. I just be shaking my head and wondering to myself, How do you get like that?
I don’t even know why God even bothers blessing me anymore. After the high school basketball season I got ranked seventeenth out of the top twenty-five players in my class in the state of Massachusetts. So now I stay late after school doing workouts in the gym. Basketball’s been the only thing that helps ease up all the pressure that’s been building up inside me. It’s also the only thing I can do right. The weed ain’t strong enough anymore to affect how I play. It just don’t get me high like it used to. I get out on the court and play off pure instinct and it works. The weed just makes me eat and want to smoke more. Well, I guess that’s another reason I been doing extra workouts, ’cause I been sucking wind at practice and Coach said I’m getting bitch-tits and chipmunk cheeks, but when the summer comes I’ll be ready. Talent always wins out, and bitch-tits or not I’m going to make Coach eat his words. Plus, I like the walk home better when everyone’s cleared out. That way, if Smoke or anyone tries to run up at least I’ll see them coming.
While I do my thing at the gym, if anyone comes around looking for trees, I get whatever bags off that I can, then I walk straight home looking at the fallen leaves on the ground while ignoring Ma’s Bible study flyers. I been trying to stick close to Reggie, really getting deep on my Team Seven shit. It’s starting to feel like a pressure cooker out there on the corner. Sometimes Smoke rides up the street all slow playing his music loud with his tinted windows half cracked like he’s ’bout to stop and do something. I love it when Smoke pulls dumb-ass tough-guy moves like this because I ain’t scared when I’m with Reggie. I never seen Reggie run from a fight in my life. He’s a laid-back cat, but when he gets going he’s another kind of animal. The day Reggie put me on with some work, he told me not to worry ’bout Smoke. The way Reggie called it was: me and Smoke have a low-level disagreement about some money. This is, he says, not his business. Reggie and I getting money is his business. If Smoke fucks up my getting the money, then that would force things to become Reggie’s business.
I’m probably two weeks away from having this nigga Smoke’s sixteen hundred dollars but I got a feeling he don’t really want it no more anyway. He wanted the money a long while ago, and Reggie’s trusting me on the re-ups now. I’ve seen Smoke plenty of times and he usually acts like I’m not there at all. He ain’t the passive-aggressive type, so I think he’s either plotting on me or maybe he wants blood now. Why else hasn’t he caught me coming out of school? For some reason, even though Nina’s moody and we don’t really get along, I don’t think she wants to see something happen to me. So I wonder if she’s asked him to chill, because when he does acknowledge me there’s a certain fire in his glare that says, “Ain’t nothin’ forgotten.”
By the time Ma gets home from work and dinner rolls around, I’m high like I promised God that I wouldn’t be. This is how it’s been lately. One moment I was riding on top of the softest part of cloud nine and I was so busy looking up that I didn’t notice the moment when everything evaporated. Now every day I’m just confused and constantly wondering how I got so caught up trying to be the man that I ended up drifting deeper and deeper into the storm, with the rest of the niggas who be fucking up. It burns me that Reggie was sort of right about what he said to me that day at Kelly Park. Other than hoopin’ and playing hopscotch around the block trying to avoid Smoke, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore these days.
Pop’s back living at the crib with us, which is another mind-fuck all by itself. He came home a couple of weeks ago and if anybody was styling on me it was Pop. Mr. Watson set his job up real proper and I know he’s making decent money. Just two weeks after he got home and started working he sold his Bronco and bought himself a white Chrysler LeBaron, a soft-top convertible too. It’s used but he cruises around the block with the top down, reggae music blaring, volume on asshole like can’t nobody tell him nothing. I be wanting to run my house key up the sides of that car so bad, but I got enough drama these days, not to say that I don’t get the urge.
When he first got home I was walking into my bedroom. Nina and Ma ushered him, huggin’ on him like he’d just come back from a war. I heard all the noise of him coming up the hallway, but I wasn’t fast enough. Ma was on some bullshit acting like I was a little kid and she could make peace between us. Pop’s always kept me at an arm’s length and the issues between us run deeper than she’ll ever understand. I’m off the porch now, she can play like she don’t know, but the window for that man to be a father to me been opened and closed and that was his choice. I was literally inches away from closing my bedroom door when Ma called out, “Andre!” I paused and heard footsteps coming toward my room.
A boot kicked into the crack of my door and I stepped back and opened it and it was like I was looking into a broken mirror. We were face-to-face, me and Pop. My heart sped up and my knees wobbled, but I kept it cool. Never let ’em see you sweat. I looked at the f
loor.
“Hey, Pop,” I coughed it out and didn’t look up at him.
“Hi, Andre.”
I turned back to close my door when I felt Ma’s hand on my shoulder. “Nuh-uh, Andre, give your father a hug.”
She stepped beside him and the face she made said she was serious and I looked up and over and Pop was searing a sober glow into my hazy red eyes. He reached out and bear-hugged me and started shaking me like he wanted to pick me up. He clasped his arms around my head and in the noose of his elbows it started feeling like I wanted to tap out. He squeezed my head up against his chin stubble and slowly grated it along the side of my face.
“Remember me? Your dad?” He slipped me into a headlock. “Did you miss me?”
He pulled me tighter and everything slow-motioned in front of me and it sounded like I had water in my ears. He rocked me back and forth and right before I felt like I was going to pass out I stomped on his foot and bucked my back against his ribs, threw a wild punch over my head at him, and he jumped. We looked at each other and I felt nothing for him. He flinched at me and I ran at him and we tangled like crabs in a pot and wrestled until I regained my balance and pushed him back off of me and he fell back against the front door. Nina and Ma were motionless, like statues or figurines. It felt like anything could have happened, and they’d never looked so small to me, huddled together in the kitchen door like that.