by Larry Elder
“You has yo’ daddy’s eyes,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Aunt Nita talked about the next rainfall and how long the one last month lasted. Dad’s mom continued staring.
She thanked my aunt and uncle for bringing me and said it was nice seeing Ola again.
“You the only grandbaby I ever met,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She kissed me on the cheek and hugged me hard.
“Nex’ time I wan’cha to spend a night or two, stay with me a spell,” she said. “Would you like that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Boy,” Aunt Nita asked me, “ain’t there anythin’ you want to ask yo’ grandmama? What you said in the car. Go ’head.”
There was so much I planned to ask her. My dad’s father? Where was he? Tell me about him? Why did you have only one child?
She seemed so tired, so sad. I just wanted to leave.
“What was my father like?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “I tell you. Dat boy worked hard. Dat’s the one thing ’bout him. He worked hard.”
Two gray cats wandered around.
“I have a cat,” I said.
“I like cats,” she said.
“Yes ma’am. So do I.”
I asked if I could take a picture of her.
“Yes, go out yonder. Right ’der is fine.” She patted her hair and pushed up her glasses.
I took a picture of her standing on the porch. She didn’t smile. She didn’t wave, just stood—arms to the side, looking straight ahead. We stayed about two hours, then drove back to Chattanooga.
“Well, that’s your daddy’s mama,” Mom said.
“That sounds like her,” Dad said when I finished the story. “Ain’t much for small talk. That’s my momma. Did the best she could.”
It was 9:15.
20
“NOBODY FUCKS WITH MY FAMILY”
“You weren’t like your brother. You gave us almost no trouble.”
“No, I just never got caught.”
Dad laughed.
“No, I’m serious, there was a lot of stuff going on that you didn’t know about.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Oh, some not so major, some major.”
“Like what?”
“Remember the red apartments up at the corner?” I said. “You told us to stay away from them because of the kind of people who rented them.”
“Yeah, weren’t there some shootin’s or wife beatin’s or some-thin’ over there?”
“Yes, that’s why you told us to stay away.”
There was a man who lived there by himself. He’d drink and stumble around outside and yell at us when we played baseball in the street. We’d gather around him and taunt him, which only made him angrier.
“You kids!” he screamed. “You damn kids! Ju—just le—leave me a—alone.”
We’d pretend to throw things at him. He’d flinch and we’d laugh some more.
Dad shook his head. “Larry, that’s just cruel.”
“I didn’t say I was proud of it, Dad. I’m just telling you I wasn’t a choir boy.”
One day I said to Dennis, “Let’s get that guy.”
“You know what Mom and Dad said.”
“Ah, c’mon. No one’s going to find out.”
We got a couple of peashooters, looked around, crept up to his door, and aimed the peashooters. Bap! Bap! Bap! We blew the hard little brown peas out of the straw-like shooters at his front door. We shot so many and so hard that from the inside, it must have sounded like machine gun fire. But even after shooting, reloading, and shooting again several times, he didn’t come out. He had probably fallen asleep so drunk that he didn’t hear the noise, or was in no condition to get up and do anything about it. We ran home.
About a half-hour later, the doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole and went numb.
“Who is it?” Mom yelled from the kitchen.
“Nobody,” I said.
The bell rang again. “Who is it?”
“Nobody.”
It rang again. “What’s the matter with you? I’ll get it myself.” Mom opened the door and there stood the man from the red apartments. He was not happy.
“Yur boys,” he said, steadying himself against the screen door. “Yur boys had these, these, I dunno whatcha call ’em—bean shooters and they went psssst, psssst.”
“They did what?”
“You know.” Putting his hand to his mouth to demonstrate, he held up an imaginary peashooter and blew through his thumb and index finger.
“Psssst, psssst. And my door went ping! ping! ping! And ah wuz tryin’ to sleep. But they kep’ on with that ping! ping! ping!”
He accurately described what we’d done, how we did it, and precisely the number of times we’d blasted his door.
Mom nodded, growing angrier by the second. “Yes. Okay. I understand…. Absolutely…. I certainly will take care of it. And you can be sure of that…. Yes, you’re right. No excuse for it. None…. Yes, they’re right here…. Yes, I guarantee you they will be punished. Their father will be home soon, and he’ll see to it.”
We were in for a hellacious whipping. Dad and Mom had told us to stay away from those apartments, and especially to leave that “crazy alcoholic” alone. This was a “wait for your father to come home” time if there was ever one. And this time, the punishment would probably fit the crime. I prayed for divine intervention, but I also made plans for my afterlife.
“Tha—than—thanksss. I ’preciate it if ya do sumptin’ ’bout it right ’way, right’ way. Tha—than—thanksss.” The man from the red apartments turned and staggered back down the stairs.
Mom slammed the door, walked back to the kitchen, and shook her head. “Drunk-ass liar. Are you two ready to eat?”
Dad laughed. “You were the ringleader.”
“Yup.”
“You sure as hell dodged one that time. If there’s anythin’ your mother hates, it’s a drunk.”
We were the second black family to move onto Haas Avenue. Soon there were more. And there was a lot of friction between the growing number of black kids and the dwindling number of white kids. My second-grade class had a “paper drive.” The teacher asked students to go door to door and collect old papers. I don’t remember what the school did with all the bundles of papers, but I assumed it had to do with recycling.
Dennis and I went together, and he pulled the wagon that we used to stack the papers. The homeowners, usually housewives, were friendly and warm, quite happy to rid themselves of old newspapers they’d accumulated over several days.
“Hello,” I said. “I go to 74th Street School, and we’re asking for old newspapers for our paper drive.”
“Certainly, young man. Step around to the back.”
Dennis and I would often walk around the “For Sale” sign, and head to the garage where we loaded the papers onto the wagon.
“Thank you,” we said.
“Anytime.”
Every other house seemed to have a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. And I didn’t know why.
“Mom, people around here sure move a lot,” I said, after my first day of door-to-door.
“Yes, they do.”
“Are we going to move again, too?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not for a while.”
My new elementary school was changing from a majority white student body to a majority black one. The school population took longer to “convert” than the neighborhood. Even after the white families moved away—and they did in waves—they still drove the kids to 74th Street School until sixth-grade graduation. I never had a black teacher until the seventh grade, although I later found out that my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dunne, was actually an extremely light-skinned woman whom I falsely assumed was white.
At my first elementary school, the one near the old house on Valencia, I once had a black substitute teacher. I had never seen a blac
k teacher, and I was riveted. She was pretty, forceful, and totally in charge. Usually substitute teachers seemed nervous in front of a class that was used to their regular teacher. And the kids knew that a sub teacher would be there for only one day, so the class tried her patience by “acting out.” What is a one-day sub teacher going to do to you? But this teacher didn’t take any crap. The first time a kid spoke without being asked, she sent him down to the principal’s office.
“Who’s next?” she said. There was no more trouble after that. She was, I guess, an early “role model.”
Dad shook his head. “I never had a white teacher.”
I made friends with the kids in the other families just moving in. My closest friend, David, lived one house away on the same side of the street. Dietrich, another friend, lived one block up. He was a likeable, slightly overweight kid who always wore shiny black Spanish boots, rather than tennis shoes like the rest of us.
One day, when we were in high school, I needed to go to the public library on Crenshaw Boulevard for a homework assignment. David and Dietrich wanted to play basketball.
“Naw, I gotta go to the library.”
“All right, fuck it,” David said. “We’ll go with you.”
David was half a grade behind me, but way ahead of the curve in his coolness quotient. His father was black and his mother Japanese. When David’s father was in the military, he was stationed in Japan where he met David’s mother. David was “fine,” according to the girls in school, and he smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and occasionally smoked dope. He had grown a big, round, fluffy Afro—well before the rest of us could overcome our parents’ objections to ’fros.
As we walked down Crenshaw, two white kids around our age were walking toward us.
“Got a cigarette?” David asked them.
The taller one reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He opened the top and held it out. David reached for a cigarette, but the guy closed the box and pulled it away.
“No, man,” he said, “I was just showing you I only got two left. Sorry.”
“Aw, c’mon,” David said. “Gimme one.”
“Sorry. Only got two left.” They walked away.
“Fuck you, then!” David shouted, and thrust his right fist in the air. “Black power!”
The whites guys stopped, said something to each other, likely deciding whether to do something about this disrespect. They decided against it and kept walking.
“Leave it alone,” I said.
“Yeah,” Dietrich said, “the dude only had two left. Let it slide.”
“Black power!” David shouted again.
At the library, I found what I needed and sat down. David and Dietrich picked out something to read. A half-hour later, the white guy, the tall one with the cigarettes, tapped David hard on the shoulder.
“You still got something to say?”
Startled, but defiant, David said, “Damn right!”
“Okay, then step outside.”
“You got it.”
David got up, followed the guy, and then turned around to see that neither Dietrich nor I had budged. “David’s mouth got him here,” Dietrich and I thought, “let him talk his way out of it.”
“What? You guys aren’t coming? You’re just going to leave me hangin’? Aw, c’mon!”
“Let’s go,” I said.
It was like a Hell’s Angel convention outside. At least twenty white guys, some sitting on motorcycles, waited for us.
“Now, motherfucker,” the white kid said, “what was all this shit?” He put his fist in the air.
Shaking, David said, “Aw, man, it was just, you know, a black power salute.”
“Fuck black power, motherfucker, white power!”
“Yeah,” David said, “well, you know, that’s cool, too.”
Several guys got off their bikes and headed toward us.
“Look,” I said, “This is stupid. It was just a misunderstanding. He wanted a cigarette and we thought this dude was giving him one, that’s all. No point in fighting over something like this.”
No one said anything to us. They mumbled to each other for about a minute. Some stared at us and revved their motorcycles.
“Forget it. Let’s go,” said one of them. “Get on my bike and let’s get out of here.” The kid with the cigarette hopped on his seat and raised his fist.
“You got lucky this time, motherfucker.”
Dad shook his head. “You could have been killed. What I’d tell you about writin’ a check your ass can’t cash?”
“Well, there’s more. Remember we were talking about my friend Perry?”
Months later, Perry and I saw the cigarette kid walk down the street and into a house. I told Perry about the library.
“Let’s fuck him up,” Perry said.
That night, I got Mom’s car, and Perry picked up a cinder-block. We cut off the headlights. Perry got out and threw the cinderblock through the kid’s big picture window. Smash! We drove away, waited about a half hour, and drove back. Two squad cars with flashing lights were there and police officers were talking to his parents and taking notes. Perry and I laughed. The kid’s family moved a few months later.
“That don’t make no sense for you to pull somethin’ like that. And you wonder why those folks moved away after we moved in.”
I admitted it was wrong and stupid, but I wanted him to know I wasn’t any angel—far from it.
“Well, at least you guys never shot anybody.”
“Funny you should say that.”
“Uh-oh.”
There was the matter of Douglas.
He was big, tall, and muscular, and dressed better than anyone—a “player,” with a demonic little moustache. Where he got the money nobody knew because he didn’t have a job, but Douglas always drove sports cars. He’d drive a Triumph for a while, the car would break down, and he’d scrape together the money to fix it. Later, he’d suddenly show up in a Spyder. It would break down, and he’d fix it and trade it in for a Jensen-Healy. They were used, but when he rumbled up the street—nice and slow so everybody could look—he turned heads.
“What an asshole,” we all thought.
He lived several blocks away, but dated a girl on my street so he was always near.
He was always pushing me around. Dennis even noticed.
“You better do something to get that motherfucker off your back,” he said.
Then, during gym class, Douglas turned the shower water to cold, cupped his hands around the showerhead, and directed a stream of ice-cold water on my back. Douglas and the other kids laughed, and he dared me to do anything about it. I didn’t.
I played gin rummy, and was good at it. A bunch of guys in the neighborhood got up a game, and I was winning. Douglas kept losing, and would double down each time. Each time he lost.
“You owe me eighteen dollars, Douglas,” I said.
“I’m good for it.” He promised to pay the next day.
But the next day he put me off. Then again, and again. So I went to Bruce, a tough guy in the neighborhood, and told him that Douglas refused to pay.
“If you get my money, I’ll give you ten percent.”
“Bet on it,” Bruce said. “I’ll get your money from that motherfucker.”
I went to Douglas’s house.
“Bruce said he was going to kick your ass if you don’t pay me my money.”
“Oh, really. Meet me at Bruce’s house,” he said.
“All right.” I couldn’t wait for Bruce to beat the shit out of him. It was worth not getting my eighteen bucks to see that.
He drove to Bruce’s house and knocked on the door.
“Larry said you going to kick my ass. All right, do it. Let’s get it on.”
“Oh, man,” Bruce said. “Naw, I was just bullshitting. Me and you’s cool.”
“No, motherfucker,” Douglas said. “If you said you’re going to kick my ass, let me see you do it.”
Bruce completely
backed down and denied ever promising to collect my money.
“I don’t know where Larry got that shit from,” Bruce said.
Douglas then turned to me.
“Now, motherfucker. You ain’t never getting your money.”
I was completely humiliated.
Everybody knew he owed me the money, and now everybody knew he was never going to pay. My reputation as something less than a tough guy slid even lower. And once you get a reputation as a poot-butt, more abuse and ridicule will surely follow.
I had to do something.
A few days later, while driving Mom’s car, I passed Douglas’s latest sports car, a blue Triumph, parked in front of a house nowhere near his or his girlfriend’s house. The car had broken down and Douglas was nowhere to be seen.
I waited until night and rounded up a few kids from the neighborhood, including Dietrich from the cigarette incident. They all hated Douglas. We got green paint, tomatoes, and eggs. I shut off the headlights, and after making sure that nobody was watching, our three-man posse got out and destroyed his car. We splattered paint all over it and pelted it with eggs and tomatoes.
“I think that’s at least eighteen dollars worth of damage,” I said to the guys as we slapped hands and laughed.
The next day, Douglas rang the doorbell.
“You fucked up my car,” he said.
I denied it.
“Yes you did. I know you did. One of the neighbors saw you. I have a witness.”
He was bluffing. I decided to pull a Douglas.
“Really? Then let’s go. Let’s go and see your witness. I didn’t do it. You got somebody who says I did, let’s go see him.”
He backed down a little, still not quite certain I had done it. I had been adamant. And as long as nobody in my posse broke confidence, I knew I would get away with it. Well, he threatened Ernie, one of the guys with me that night. Douglas told him he knew Ernie was involved because someone else ratted. It was a good bluff, and it scared Ernie into admitting that Dietrich and I had trashed the car.