by Tom Macher
Well, Program finally said. Life ain’t for everyone.
And though we started pools, gave new brothers Three Dog or any of the Andys a couple of days or a week, tops, from the beginning, no one questioned Sweet Daddy. I’ve told you how rules didn’t bother him. He had willingness. He wanted. He was so meticulous in his area that from nine p.m. on, you’d never see him without 409 and rag in hand. He spoke lovingly of our cook, could never get enough red beans and rice and buttered rolls, and though Sweet Daddy’s availability wasn’t unusual, the tenacity of his openness alarmed us. He needed no prodding to share his experience, strength, and hope; his words didn’t feel like bullshit, weren’t false, not a game or smoke. I couldn’t figure it out—none of us could. Was it his age? The weariness of surviving so long? Maybe he just wore out.
His humility disarmed even our most fervent dickbags. To see him walk the way he walked, all slow, ass out, back curved in pain, how long it took him to reach down and wipe a toilet’s rim or pull weeds from the cracked parking lot, or get on his arthritic, crackling knees and run a wet finger along the edge of the crown molding, was to believe.
All he wanted, he explained, was to get right so he could get back to Slidell and see her one more time.
Slidell? a guy asked, astonished. Slidell is in Louisiana, of course, and Gary in Indiana, and this brother, a real jackass, I suppose, leaped from his chair. Is that where you’re from?
No, Sweet Daddy said. I am not.
But that’s where your woman is, I prompted him, but Sweet Daddy did not respond. He just sat there, rolling his cigarette back and forth in his fingers, his memories and secrets so beautiful and reckless and troubling that he had no space left, no capacity, to answer a question like that.
He’d arrived on the scene late one Friday night with a man named Darryl, who was forty and a crackhead, in a long white passenger van coming from some other place. They got out and set their bags by the office and sauntered over to Room Four, where some of the guys were Group Funking war stories and whatnot. We were on Super Flats.
They were both so damn old. Retirement home is on Main, one of the brothers explained.
Sweet Daddy smiled. Like I said: he gave not fuck one.
Darryl, on the other hand, hunched over and wrinkled his nose at the Property. His eyes fell on our dilapidated basketball hoop, and he scowled contemptuously. He took in the group room, dumpster, Coke machine, and apartments. His face grew sad, full of regret.
Guys were blowing O-rings, waving at gnats and mosquitoes. I watched one moth after another slow its wings, land on the lantern above, buzz crisply, and die. One more thing to clean.
Then a noise like gunplay erupted on West, and a 1965 Lincoln Continental coasted onto the Property. This was the height of the hooptie era, and in Los Angeles, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were probably bumping down Sunset in a hybridized version of this exact model, but pop culture comes slowly to southeastern Louisiana, and this Continental hadn’t been restored, lifted or lowered, or outfitted with any twenty-four-inch spinners. Utilitarian rather than flashy, an old man’s ride, a once-things-were-good-but-all-good-things-end kind of car, it turned in to a parking space and idled just long enough for a suicide door to pop open and for Timmy D. to tumble out, followed by a suitcase. He staggered in the back-draft of his disappearing ride as the Continental reversed off the Property and into the night. I’m already on record about Timmy D., how frail he seemed, how hesitant in the wind. He staggered forward as if weighed down by chains.
Don’t get your hopes up, Darryl told him right off. It’s not what I expected. Again, he scanned the Property, as if looking for something more.
I admit the place wasn’t pretty. It looked like a place where you might find drugs or a dead hooker, not sobriety.
They said over the phone my wife can’t visit, Timmy D. told Darryl, and then looked at us. Is this true?
Guys shrugged. We didn’t know. There were different rules for everyone. Probably. Then someone mentioned an awful truth. Was that your wife, this dick asked, who dropped you off?
No, Timmy D. said. That was not my wife. His tone straightforward, intelligent, he understood the implication.
Darryl wanted to know what we did, like for recreation and so forth.
Now we wrinkled our noses. Someone laughed. Clean. Therapy. Group. Our one-word answers a collective accept it or die, get bent, fuck off. Clean. Clean again. Clean and clean. Clean some more.
What all, he asked, could y’all possibly clean?
Everything!
Yup. He turned to Sweet Daddy. I was expecting something else.
A Newport appeared in Sweet Daddy’s hand, and he tapped its butt against his thumbnail. His grin cool as cool is, he’d been around before and knew what we meant. Leave, if you want, we don’t care.
Y’all be kind. Ray smirked. Sometimes we go to the store.
The store?
Sure. Cigs n’ Suds. Circle K. You know.
They told me there was a pool, Darryl said.
It was an old, cruel joke and Ray mentioned this now, laughing.
And a gym?
There’s a weight bench behind the group room.
Y’all are all so young, Darryl said, which was what people often said of us in a disparaging way, though we could tell he didn’t mean it like this. He was just scared.
Timmy D. stretched and yawned. Well, he said. I guess I’ll turn in. I’ve had quite a long day. So if one of y’all will show me to my room—
Can’t, we said.
Why not?
Flats, Ray said, grabbing Mike O. by the neck and roughhousing him about. Someone suggested Group Funking an ass-whooping, and a few of us pushed Ray over the railing into the mud, where we wrestled at him until he grew tired of it all, turned us on our bellies, and dry-humped us triumphantly into the ground.
Fuck this, Darryl said, and began walking toward the road.
Where you going? Sweet Daddy asked.
Darryl waved his hand. I’m leaving.
Man. Sweet Daddy pointed at the office. Don’t you want your bag?
Darryl eyed his suitcase, still upright by the office door. No, he said, considering it. I don’t think I do. He walked into the middle of the road, looked east toward downtown and then west toward the familiar crack houses, where men circled strawberries slinging snatch a ten-rock a pop, and twittered along the gullies or emerged zombie-like from the woods, and babies cried on front porches, and preteens took up sticks and shards of plywood and beat each other in gravel drives.
Dud, from Plano, heroin, who always wore jeans, used to get so angry his pimples turned white. He did terrible things in the House, bullying things, stuff so mean I felt bad for him—what kind of childhood must a man have to turn out this way? Many years later, in fact, he came after me one night with a tire iron, but despite his temper, when we were in the House, when I’d cry, he’d hold me in his arms. Years passed in the usual way. Eventually, Dud stuck a .32 in his mouth and swallowed a bullet.
Ditto Tim S., thirty, an alcoholic.
We didn’t consider ourselves anything other than trapped. Not by the Property or circumstance but deluge of fact. Still, if what they said was true, we were relatively safe here, as long as we followed rules. A stillness emerged, patterns, routines. And yet in this stillness, we longed for the sudden and grotesque. Guys bounced basketballs off one another’s faces, threw plates of food at each other, and wrestled about like dogs, but if we actually laid violent hands on one another, we got arrested, jailed, prosecuted.
A Johnny R., who was local, showed up. Thirty, a crackhead, he possessed a self-will run so riot he wouldn’t clean his area, do dyads, or take meds. He skipped one-on-ones and group. He didn’t like being here, hated the counselors, the food and bedding, all of us brothers. The feeling was mutual. He had sun-reddened skin, a widow’s peak, always scowled. Rehab loved confronting him, always face-to-face, always with his Say, bra, that ain’t how we do it. Eventually, red-assed Johnny
got violent with Rehab in the mud between the group room and the office, and we all jumped the railing and piled Johnny, scrummed him, tugged his ears, pushed his eyeballs into his brain. The police found him half-naked, covered in blood and spit, and yet he’d started it, so they arrested him. Good. Johnny was gone, we thought, but he was from here, and we saw him many times at meetings after that, picking up one desire chip after another as if trying to fill an entire drawer with them.
Joe Morning Wood was a twenty-two-year-old heroin junkie who’d many times OD’d and died. He had long eyelashes, freckles, what people might call a “button” nose. He seemed quiet at first, shy: all the times he’d OD’d and died, he’d been brought back, but then one day he sat down in a shooting parlor next to a teenage girl who’d never shot dope, and so Wood cooked some dope, tapped her vein, stuck the needle, hit the plunger, and this girl, the virgin, OD’d and died. She did not get brought back.
Nob was from North Carolina and a speedball junkie.
Hymen, Florida, cocaine.
A lot of guys came in with a change of shoes, some socks and underwear, a few pairs of jeans, a Walkman, some ratty tees. Ray, on the other hand, showed up with only the clothes and shitkickers he wore, a flannel jacket folded over his shoulder, and a copy of the Big Book. Vic, Vic said, don’t you got a bag or something, but Ray did not.
Scott, thirty-four, Houston, cocaine, had been part of some unspeakable thing. No one knew what, exactly. I recall bits and pieces and sadness. Another hard-core Joe Sobriety type, Scott also carried 409 and a cleaning rag everywhere. He worked long hours cooking in a hotel and never stopped moving from job to Kitchen BBG to House chores, no complaints. It always seemed to be this way with unspeakable pasts.
Years later, I was sitting in the office with Vic when a social worker came in holding an envelope. I have no idea, she said, who this motherfucker is talking about. She handed me the letter. Any clue?
The letter was from Scott’s father. It thanked everyone. It was a death notice, I think. Scott had disappeared. He was using again when he did. This was sufficient.
Corey, seventeen, crack, relapsed with Pete D. (forty, an appliance or car salesman, claimed it didn’t matter—he could sell anything) on rock a few doors down from the Property.
This was SOP. We had a pay phone outside the group room, and Tree’s runners used to leave ten-rocks in the coin-return slot. We’d come home and find baseheads on our couches or shivering and fetal in our bathtubs. Strawberries pranced about our parking lot, wearing T-shirts and nothing else, and they’d spin on their bare feet, slowly lifting their shirts. It happened a lot.
When Corey and Pete D. relapsed, they blew a G on rock in a single afternoon. That night’s group was normal. For a minute. Guys talked one at a time. Then Pete spoke. He said something else. His tone quickened.
Program’s face got screwy. Hey, wait, he said. Motherfucker, have you been smoking rock?
I had to look myself.
Pete’s eyes were glazed over. His body shone with sweat. Normally, he wore a suit but tonight had on gym shorts, a white tee, flip-flops.
Yup, he said. Me and Corey. Been at it all afternoon. He smiled at Corey, who looked away. Whatever, bra, Pete said. You weren’t ashamed at the time.
Then he got ballsy, I admit, funny but not: he went into some detail over what had happened. Know what else? he said. Fuck you. I can’t wait to do it again. When he began talking about the smoke hitting his lungs and how it blew the crown off his head, blew it sky-high, Program lost it. There was no Take two brothers, no Pack your shit, no Ice, nothing, just Get the fuck out my house.
What about my stuff? Pete asked.
Naw, Program said. Get the fuck out.
Pete and Corey were gone.
Guys came and went. I can’t put names on all. Like Darryl, they showed up on a Friday, got the drift, and were gone by Monday. Mike W. Chad G. Doug. Brandon. One of the many Andys. At seventeen, I thought of them all as the coolest motherfuckers I’d ever met. Kyle, Will J., Dallas John. Even J-Dog, with his shades and backward hat, who’d once driven his car under the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler and had to have the top of his head sewed back on, is, last I heard, drinking again.
I remember their haircuts, the hats they wore and removed in Group, how they held these hats on their knees or in their laps, Jack Rehab working the brim of his Bulls hat between his thumb and index finger, his scuffed-up Jordans tapping. Andy C. leaned so far back in his chair that he was parallel to the floor, twenty-eyed Docs crossed, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Certain truths unfolded again and again. Carl, from Shreveport, was thirty-four and cocaine-thin, teeth rotted; DOC: crack. He’d been through the House once before, and it wouldn’t work this time, either. I have no memory of most brothers leaving. Mark stayed sober as long as I heard updates. Brad P., who once had more Hours than exist in a week, was kicked out for getting gay on another brother on Property. He relapsed, wound up in a psych ward, is dead. Rick K. smoked rock in Room Five and is dead somewhere as well. Some of this, as with the child actor, I don’t know for sure. Word of the dead can pile up, get taken on like news, weather, and sports. I know it more from feelings than hard specifics, recalling phone booths in exotic Elko, Nevada, or Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as I moved between here, there, and some other place, in wind, sleet, rain, snow, or sunshine, my coffee cooling on top of the phone booth, a cigarette in my mouth or hand, about to light up, should I light another, is there more news? Do you have more to say? I was very young when I entered the boys’ home and then—not three years later—not young at all.
Hostages
RAY suggested we take personal inventory. This was on Super Flats, after we’d performed Majors and Group Funked the Circle K, when we were smoking grits and flicking butts at the cans outside Room Four. Seriously, he said. What’s the worst thing y’all ever done? He didn’t care. He was just bored. Think it over, he said. Take your time. Ask a brother. He smiled. Why don’t you start, Tommy, you Georgia motherfucker. You’re probably one of these sheep fuckers, am I right? I hear it works best if they’re on a cliff. So they got nowhere to go but back. Or are you the type to put boots on their hooves, slide right in?
Is that how you do it? Jack Rehab asked Ray.
If I have to, Ray admitted. Now, go on, Tommy. I want real, fucked-up shit.
I was so green. What could I say—I stole shit? Christ. I thought of other things: taking that woman’s food, or a guy whose ass I’d whooped in Georgia who’d come looking for me with a gun and who got arrested and who scared me so much that when I thought of going back to Georgia, I knew I couldn’t—but I didn’t have an answer.
Like most fears, it didn’t matter.
Sweet Daddy said they used to live in a second-floor flat, and I pictured it above a run-down liquor store, bar, or auto supply place. I saw the grit of his past—dirty snow, barred windows, random trash, and smokeless smokestacks of Gary. I thought of his woman, her toes curled, hands upturned, her laugh. He’d said she chewed the inside of her cheek when deep in thought, and I imagined her this way now, in a coffin. One day he’d gotten home early, unlocked the front door, and walked up their narrow steps. A door on this landing opened into the kitchen, and when he opened this door and stepped inside, he found his woman getting fucked on the kitchen counter. He used hand, mouth, and leg gestures to illustrate the position—her teeth buried in the man’s neck, ankles crossed firmly at his lower back. She wore a cotton sundress. Her bare ass slid back and forth on the Formica counter. Panties dangled from her ankle. The man stood, his buttocks exposed, her freshly painted fingernails digging into his back.
What I did, Sweet Daddy said, was stab that motherfucker.
How many times? someone asked.
A lot. Fifteen? Twenty? I might have stabbed that motherfucker thirty times. He rolled the butt of a Newport across his lips, removed it from his mouth, packed it against his thumbnail. I stabbed him until I damn near passed out, I was so tired of stabbing.
/> When Sweet Daddy first began the stabbing, the man expressed outrage, then shock, and finally fear. Sweet Daddy saw it happen, this range of emotions. Dude pulled his dick out and began running around the apartment, trying, it seemed, to get hold of his bearings. Sweet Daddy kept stabbing him. Over and over. He stabbed this guy, he said, until the guy jumped through the living room window fifteen feet to the street below.
Now he stopped talking. He looked at Ray and Timmy D., then his cigarette. He knocked the collected ash into a butt can, touched the cherry to the aluminum, detailing it. He dragged now, chuckled, shaking his head, but it wasn’t a proud chuckle and instead seemed full of knowing and empathy. I’ve never seen a man, he said, run so fast in my damn life.
I wondered what kind of blade, how long, was it serrated? Stupid questions, even for me. The essential actions—the balling and shanking—had happened in a kitchen, a place of many stabbing utensils. He could’ve pricked this dude with a three-inch paring knife or hooked him with a shish kebab skewer; it didn’t matter. His words were measured, slow. He’d thought of the story many, many times. We could tell he’d been deeply affected by the event.
What did you do to your woman? I asked.
He just shook his head. Nothing, he said. I loved her.
Ray went next. It’s always this way, always the guy asking who wants to answer. One day he went to a bank, he said, to cash bad paper, but the teller stuck her hand up. Not happening. He gave her his best up from under, complimented her scarf and earrings, but no. She wasn’t nasty or mean, just dismissive. He didn’t like that. He snapped. He told her he was lying. Her earrings were ugly. Her scarf, too. He didn’t know where to begin about her hair. It made him want to puke. And Jesus, he said. Those eyes.
For a while he drove around, angry. And if I find something on that drive, he admitted, someone to roll, someone just scored, things end way different.