Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction

by James Henderson

  “Are we going in?” Lewis said.

  He was the reason why I was in this situation. “Yeah, we’re going in.”

  Inside, Mama and Doreen were sitting in the front pew, Doreen looking back, beckoning us to come sit with her and Mama. Uh-uh! I took a seat in back, thankful the congregation was small.

  Up front I saw enough musical instruments for a concert. The commotion started when a heavyset woman tottered up to the microphone and starting bellowing I’m Going Up Yonder.

  Her voice was loud, husky, almost drowning out the musical instruments. Before long she got most of the congregation up on their feet, some singing along, some clapping, and some jumping up and down, waving, getting cranked up for some serious flopping and wailing.

  Up on the dais, Reverend Wilson appeared behind the pulpit and jumped on the song just as the big woman, drenched with sweat now, was tiring. His voice scratchy, hard on the ears, he cranked the commotion up several notches.

  I noticed when he squealed, trying unsuccessfully to hit a high note, some of the women wailed even louder. They obviously felt his pain. And each time I thought he was bringing the song to a close, he cranked it up yet again.

  I looked over to where Lewis was sitting. Gone. Probably walked up front to his mother. Time to go. Loud as the service was I could sit in the car and be able to give a play-by-play if Doreen asked what happened.

  “The spirit told me to go outside and wait,” that’s what I’d say if she pushed the issue.

  So intent on working my way past the people blocking the aisle I didn’t notice that Reverend Wilson had stepped down and was now standing before me.

  “Excuse me,” I told him a split second before recognizing who he was.

  Instead of moving out of my way he threw an arm around my shoulder, still singing, and started in the opposite direction I was headed. The cheap cologne he had on was overwhelming, smelled like castor oil.

  Reverend Wilson, fifty-something, salt-and-pepper mini afro, pudgy in the middle, stopped every two steps and hollered the words to the song in that painful voice of his. Then he stopped, stopped singing, stopped walking, and that’s when I got shocked, got real nervous, felt sweat dripping down my armpit.

  We were standing in front, in front of everybody, his arm around me like we were old buddies who decided to meet up in church.

  Staring at my shoes, I heard him say, “Ain’t God all right!” Someone in back shouted Yes, He’s all right! “Young man, young man,” and then Reverend Wilson squeezed my shoulder. “Young man?”

  Looking at a set of expensive dentures, the front four silver-capped, I almost said, “What?”

  “We’re glad you came,” Reverend Wilson said. “Y’all, ain’t we glad he came?”

  A hearty exclamation from the congregation that they were glad I came, and that’s when perspiration started itching my testicles.

  “Your wife,” Reverend Wilson said, “she came to my office just a few hours ago, said she was concerned about her marriage, her family, her husband, and we prayed together, prayed for God to touch her husband’s heart, set him on the path of righteousness.” Nodding, he shouted, “Ain’t God all right! Ain’t He all right!” Again someone in the congregation affirmed that Yes, He’s all right!

  Reverend Wilson said, “Not three hours later God answered her prayer, led you here…” He segued into a long story about what led him to preaching, something about going to buy a jug of Wild Irish Rose and ending up in church, something like that, but I wasn’t exactly paying attention, too angry and embarrassed.

  Doreen had waylaid me. Another quick glance at the congregation I saw Mama standing up, tears of joy streaming down her face. No sight of Doreen, though.

  Reverend Wilson couldn’t get off my standing up there with him, as if it were a true miracle instead of his incidentally catching me before going out the door.

  Looking down I noticed Reverend Wilson was wearing black patented-leather shoes. To his left was a pair of off-white pumps connected to silk stockings under a white dress. Doreen stood there, not able to keep still, nervously clapping her hands, crying.

  Face beaming, his arms wrapped around Doreen and me, Reverend Wilson waxed prophetically on and on and on…Then he asked Doreen if she wanted to try Jesus, get baptized.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Doreen said.

  Scope, or mint Schnapps, on his breath, he turned to me and asked the same.

  Silence fell over the church. This thing didn’t feel right to me, didn’t feel right at all. I wondered if the devil was working on me, preventing me from feeling whatever I was supposed to be feeling, tempting me to say Hell no, I’m going home.

  Feeling her eyes on me I looked up into my mother’s face, her eyes pleading me to say yes. Still I hesitated.

  Reverend Wilson asked me again.

  That look on Mama’s face, worry lines in her brow now and half circles under her eyes, but the same look twenty years ago when I got off at the wrong bus stop, got lost, stayed with a nice white man who gave me apple juice…That same look when she came to the door, saw me, and started crying.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Amen!” Reverend Wilson said. A small number of the congregation stood up, applauded. Mama shouted in joy. Doreen fainted.

  * * * * *

  Monday morning I felt no more saved than before, though Doreen told me I was a new man now. Still she’d slept on the couch last night. She got Lewis ready for school and then got herself ready for work. I put on the same suit I wore yesterday.

  When Doreen saw me she said, “Dress up day at the mill?”

  “Not exactly. Going to apply for a new job.” She asked where and I told her about the bank job Dokes had mentioned.

  Her face lit up. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “See? You see? You put Jesus in your life good things are happening already.”

  “Doreen, it’s not guaranteed I get the job.”

  “You’ll get it. I can feel it.” She hugged me, kissed me on the cheek. “This is so wonderful. Wait till I tell Vida. My husband works at a bank. Honey, wear your other suit, more professional looking.”

  Prying her arms loose I said, “Corduroy, Doreen? In the middle of August?”

  Smiling. “I just think it looks better.” Humming a gospel tune she went into the bathroom.

  She was a little too excited for my liking. I knocked on the bathroom door. “Doreen, let me ask you something.” She opened the door and sat back down on the commode. I quickly closed it. “You got a problem with my job at the mill?”

  “No, honey, I don’t have a problem with it. I just think you can do better, a lot better. You want to move up, don’t you?” She answered for me. “Sure you do. Vida said…” She drifted off and then I heard the commode flush.

  “What? What did Vida say?”

  The door opened and Doreen came out brushing her hair. “She said the mill you work at pay schoolboy wages, employ illegal aliens and those work-release people.”

  True, Goldenwood, where I worked, had an obsession with minimum wage, and there were a few Latinos there needing a green card, and a gray bus dropped off a group of work-release inmates every morning, but the way Doreen said it made my head hot.

  In the bedroom she was putting on a dark-blue skirt. “What does Vida know?” I said. “Her husband drives a truck, so what?”

  Doreen looked in the mirror above the dresser and applied scarlet-red lipstick. “He makes good money driving a truck, plus benefits. Four-o-one-K, too. Honey, you deserve more than what that dirty mill has to offer.”

  I stared at her, not quite knowing how to respond, the words dirty mill and schoolboy wages clouding my thoughts. How the hell a mill not be dirty?

  She noticed me staring at her. “Honey, don’t get upset. It’s in God’s hand now. I’m running late, gotta go.”

  * * * * *

  SouthFirst Bank was on Main Street, in the hear
t of downtown Little Rock, one of the five tallest buildings in the city, smoked-brownish-black tinted glass that reached thirty floors.

  After dropping a nickel in the meter, I strolled up the black marble steps, crossed the red-carpet balcony to the elevators, and then, just when a bell rang and the door opened, realized I didn’t know where I was going.

  Human Resources, a teller told me, fifth floor. Once there, a white woman with blond hair that looked sprayed on her head told me the bank only hired through the state employment office and other agencies. You couldn’t just walk in and fill out an application.

  Driving to the employment office I thought the hell with this, go home, change, and go to the mill that paid schoolboy wages. Then I saw Doreen’s face, her eyes bright, grinning from ear to ear, excited at the prospect of my applying for a new job. Until this morning I didn’t know she held my job in such low regard.

  Later, after telling the receptionist my intentions, I had an application with the bank’s letterhead in hand. An extensive application, five pages, one asking for a complete work history dating back to high school. Simple enough, but then it said explain periods of unemployment.

  Other than I sat at home and watched television, how do you explain periods of unemployment? The next difficulty was providing the names and addresses of five non-family personal references. Off the top of my head I could only think of three, one being Vida Maines, Doreen’s friend, the skank who got Doreen riled up about my wages.

  I returned the application and the receptionist flipped through it and told me the bank would call if interested. “Next.”

  Within the hour I was at Goldenwood, in jeans and a flannel shirt, ear plugs in, goggles on, feeding ten-foot-long two-by-fours into a Wernig molding machine with six rotating heads that trimmed the wood into picture frame molding.

  Despite the plugs, the noise was deafening, the sound still ringing in my ears hours after getting off. Lysol-smelling sawdust spewed from the heads and holes in the aluminum chutes that led out of the Quonset building to a trailer out back.

  Berry, a short four-eyed white man, the supervisor, whose main job was reading Playboy in the office, came out and waved his hands. The noise faded when both molding machines were shut off, but the two men operating the ripsaw machine kept working. Berry got their attention and they stopped; then he pointed toward the ceiling, which meant that the trailer was overfilled with sawdust.

  Of the six-man crew only Hank and I were not work-release, and we were the only ones allowed outside to shovel the sawdust and roll the tarpaulin back so the truck driver could replace it with an empty trailer.

  Without instruction the four work-release men picked up brooms and started sweeping the floor. Hank and I, grinning, headed for the back door. If done properly it wouldn’t take ten minutes to complete the job, but Hank and I, as usual, milked it, taking several minutes just to climb the ladder to the catwalk that spanned the trailer.

  Standing knee-deep in sawdust inside the trailer, we could see the rooftops of Goldenwood, the county jail, and the Bryant Meat factory. But we focused on the back door, to avoid Berry looking out and catching us, as he called it, screwing the duck.

  Hank lighted a cigarette. “What’s up, bro? You look like you suffered a malodorous discharge. What did it, cootchie or slobber?”

  The back door opened and Hank and I immediately started shoveling sawdust.

  Berry shouted, “Take all damn day, will ya!” and slammed the door.

  We stopped. “Fuck him!” Hector said.

  “You gonna start a fire one day,” I said, noticing his cigarette smoldering in the sawdust.

  “Ain’t my shit. Burn up what they gon’ do, fire me? I make more money collecting unemployment. I asked Berry The Fairy for a raise, guess what he gave me? A damn dime! Come up to me, patted me on the back. ‘I got you the raise you asked for.’ I stopped calling him Fairy. I got my check, didn’t see no raise. Asked him and he said a dime. Sumbitch smiling like he did me a favor.”

  “Yeah, I know. I got a quarter back in March and he did the same to me.”

  “A quarter? No shit?”

  “Let’s finish this up, man. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  * * * * *

  After work I stopped at a liquor store on Twelfth and Woodrow, gave a panhandler fifty cents and bought a forty ounce of Old Milwaukee. Back in the car I remembered I was supposed to be saved, then walked across the street to 7/11 and got an empty Big Gulp cup.

  At the apartment Doreen was in the kitchen cooking while Lewis watched Pokemon in the living room. Smoke reeking of burnt pasta drifted from the kitchen.

  “Honey,” Doreen said, “how was your day?”

  “Okay. How was yours?” Doreen kept calling me honey I could get used to being saved.

  “Not too bad,” Doreen said, and then launched into a long complaint about one of her fifth-grade students acting up in class. Sitting next to me on the couch was her spoiled, overfed son whom she had to bribe to pick up his clothes. Yet let one of her students move too slowly going to the blackboard--that child was, in her words, the product of lazy, immature parents.

  Lewis gave me a look. “What you drinking?”

  “Water.”

  He sniffed the air. “Don’t smell like water. Smells like beer.”

  That brought Doreen into the living room. Frowning, she pointed a wooden spoon at me. “I know you’re not drinking beer.” Again, more incredulous: “I know you’re not drinking beer!”

  “Smells like beer to me,” Lewis said.

  “Root beer,” I lied. “Beer don’t come in Big Gulps cup.”

  Doreen moved toward me. “Let me see it,” reaching for my cup. “Give it here,” grabbing my arm, spilling foam in my lap.

  Shaking her head: “Just last night you turned your life over to the Lord. Didn’t that mean anything to you?”

  I didn’t respond. What could I say?

  Doreen sighed and went back into the kitchen.

  It took all my willpower not to pour the cup on Bigmouth’s fat head, who now was laughing at Pokemon without a care he’d blown my cover.

  At the dinner table Doreen asked me to bless the half-burnt spaghetti and scorched Texas toast on our plates. Lewis couldn’t wait, his fat cheeks already swollen with spaghetti.

  “Thank You for this food, Lord,” I said. And give our stomachs the constitution to digest it.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Doreen said.

  Lewis slid his empty plate toward Doreen. “More, please.”

  Doreen took his plate to the stove and piled enough spaghetti on it to feed the Jolly Green Giant.

  Making loud sucking and slurping noises, his head lowered a few inches above the plate, Lewis wolfed down the spaghetti as though he was in a race.

  I shook my head and Doreen said, “Lewis…Lewis!”

  He looked up, spaghetti sauce all over his mouth, his shirt. “Huh?”

  “Slow down, baby,” Doreen said. “There’s plenty of food.”

  Lewis nodded and went back to stuffing his face.

  “Honey,” Doreen said, “how’d it go at the bank?”

  “I went there, the woman told me to go to the employment office, put in an application there. I did. If they call, they call. They don’t, no big deal.”

  “They’ll call,” Doreen said. “I feel it. I sorta told my students about it. You don’t mind do you?”

  Lewis drank a cup of Kool-Aid in one gulp and then burped.

  “Doreen, how do you sorta tell someone? I don’t get the job, you’ll look foolish.”

  Lewis said, “Thanks, mama. That was delicious.”

  Doreen told him thanks and to go wash up. When he left she said, “Last night, at church, I felt the Holy Spirit. I thought you did, too.”

  “You fainted, I didn’t. You mighta hit your head.”

  “Don’t joke about this, please. God is going to allow good things to happ
en to us. Honey, you start drinking and acting up again…it will not happen. A new job, a house, those blessings are ours if you don’t mess it up.”

  That spoiled what little appetite I had. Instead of feeling angry, I felt sad for Doreen. While I compared my life to third world inhabitants who got excited over a bowl of grits, Doreen compared hers to celebrities showcasing their mansions and expensive cars on Cribs. Bank job or no, I couldn’t see us affording that lifestyle.

  “Put three hundred dollars in the bank today,” Doreen said. “That put our balance over thirteen thousand.” Then she started talking about Lewis: his dislike of staying over to his grandmother’s after school; her brother, Oscar, Lewis’ uncle, teasing him about his weight; one of his cousins who took his toys and broke them--petty stuff. Nothing about his paternity or the fact that when he ate it sounded like a hog at a slop trough.

  She said something about a house with Lewis upstairs and she and I downstairs. That got my attention. Living the good life: living with Lewis without actually seeing him. Too good to be true, a fantasy; Doreen would still bring him to our bed when he overloaded his stomach.

  I watched Doreen clear the table and put the dishes in the sink. From behind, her hair tapered near the neckline, long legs slightly bowlegged, she could have been mistaken for a man. Yet she was all woman, graceful, delicate, gentle; taking her time washing each dish. She turned and caught me staring at her.

  “What?”

  I shook my head. That was the first word she’d spoken to me. What? At a house party--can’t remember where--embolden by three fingers of Bacardi Rum, I touched her on the shoulder and tried to shout over Roger Troutman’s Computer Love blaring from two speakers on the wall.

  “You wanna dance?”

  “What?” she said, loud and clear for everyone to hear, as if I’d asked for a suppository. Quick, I got out of her face, moved onto a heavyset woman standing near the buffet table eating meatballs with a toothpick.

  She said yes and carried her plate onto the dance floor, made the same hog noises that Lewis made as we slow danced, and apologized each time the plate touched the back of my head.