by H. M. Mann
“Haven’t I been telling you how rough the winter was, Emmanuel? And you weren’t around to plug up all the drafts, now were you?”
“I was working.”
“So you say. Anyway, I’m going to need fifty, okay?”
“Oh, no, uh, they had some payroll problems, maybe Monday, they said.”
Auntie June, though, has ESP. She knows me too well. “I don’t have any extra, especially for any birthday gifts, and even if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you. Your great-great uncle Terrence was in a bad way once, only his demon was hooch, and—”
“I don’t need no history lesson right now, Auntie June,” I interrupted. “I need a hundred for a gift for Mary.” And maybe a little extra for some flowers.
“A gift for Mary. Emmanuel, about the only thing you haven’t given that girl is a baby, and I am praying hard against that day.”
Her prayers hadn’t been answered, but I was not about to tell her that. Not then. Not when I needed a fix and some flowers. “Auntie June, you know I’m clean. I been working steady for over a year, right? I haven’t had time to do that stuff.”
“You come in here smelling like a brewery expecting me to believe …”
Auntie June wandered to the TV, the top covered by all sorts of religious stuff, like praying hands that light up and little statues of black Jesus. She buys them from every preacher that comes out of that TV and keeps The 700 Club on twenty-four hours a day since the day she got cable. She’s worse than any Catholic, let me tell you, when it comes to praying and going to church.
“You need healing, Emmanuel,” she said, “so come over here and put your hands on the TV.”
“No.”
Auntie June thinks God can heal even brain cancer if you put your hands on her TV just right.
Auntie June looked at the screen. “It might just be Pat Robertson right now, but if you just believe, you’ll be healed.”
No white preacher can heal me. “Give me a hundred, and I’ll be healed.”
“For a few hours. You need a permanent fix this time, Emmanuel, now come over here.”
She grabbed at me with her claws, and I tore away. “It won’t work no more, Auntie June. I’m a grown man. No radiation or whatever comes out of that old set will heal me.”
She grabbed me harder then.
“What are you doing?” I howled.
“Trying to love the badness out of you, Emmanuel, just trying to love all the—”
I pushed her back. “It won’t work.”
“It might if you let it. You have a spiritual heritage, Emmanuel. Your great-great-great grandpa was a great spiritual man—”
“I’m tired of your stories, Auntie June. Give me some money!”
That’s when I started feeling it in my mouth. It’s getting to be like clockwork, this feeling. My mouth was as dry as the Alabama cotton Kazula was supposed to have picked, and my feet were feeling as heavy as the Alabama swamp mud Kazula lived in.
Auntie June did as she’s always done, and she gave me the money. She didn’t let go of it right away, though. “If you take this money, I’m done with you. You can’t come back. I’m closing accounts with you right now.”
“Right.” I snatched the money and went to kiss her, but she turned her head.
“I’m not kidding, Emmanuel. This is it. The locks will be changed by morning.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t have enough for the rent, but she was going to have enough to change all those locks?
“I’m not kidding, Emmanuel. You’re bad news. You weren’t always this way.”
Here we go. Now I get to hear my history thrown back in my face.
“You were such a good little boy. Remember when you were over at Grace Memorial? Remember Project Success? And that gardening project? You were so good with all those flowers. Remember Camp Allequippa?”
“I remember, Auntie June, I remember.”
“And that time you were in the Steel City Sprinters? I was so proud of you, out there running and winning that race.”
“I never won a race, Auntie June.” I came in third once or twice. I just had too much white in me to be a sprinter, I guess.
“But at least you belonged somewhere, somewhere good, Emmanuel. At least you were fighting for something. Whenever you fight for your life, it praises God.”
Here we go again.
“You fight and keep on fighting so God can know that you appreciate Him creating you. Now look at you. You belong nowhere but the street. Your mama would be so ashamed of you.”
I headed for the door and unlocked the locks. “She should be the one who’s ashamed for leaving me.”
I almost had the last chain unhooked when Auntie June spun me around. “What did you say?”
“I don’t want to argue with you, Auntie June. I’m tired of arguing tonight.”
“Did you say that your mama left you?” Her eyes were fierce. “And she should be ashamed?”
“I didn’t mean it.”
She squeezed my arm. “You better not mean it. She didn’t ask anyone to kill her.”
I didn’t want to think of any of that. “I know, I know.” I flipped the last chain. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Emmanuel, you aren’t seeing me anywhere but church. Your clothes will be outside the door.”
Auntie June is stubborn, but she has always backed down before. “So I’ll see you at Ebenezer on Sunday.” I don’t know why she goes to Ebenezer. The choir only has maybe twelve bodies, and the only song they sing with any feeling is “He’s My Rock.”
“Don’t come into God’s house looking like that.”
I opened the door. “I thought God accepted everyone as they are. Besides, how am I gonna get cleaned up if you change the lock and leave my clothes out in the rain?”
“You have Mary for all of that, right?”
I wasn’t going there, so I left and took the money first to Centre and Kirkpatrick, hanging with some old crows until the “word” said go to Wylie and Elmore. Then I migrated with the crows, spinning like human ashes past graffiti shouting “Street drugs are bad luck.”
At least it’s some kind of luck.
I blew Aunt Junie’s hundred for a bundle and some fairly new works and went to the old Ellis Hotel. Folks call it Heroin Hotel now, and it’s kind of like the place in that old Elvis song, a place full of heartbreak and heartache, where skin peels off junkies like layers of onions, where it’s obvious that we’re all reddish orange just under our skin. You have to watch your step in the Ellis. Everywhere is a bathroom, and syringes can bite your feet.
I went up some rickety stairs past orange caps, red and green balloons, empty stamp bags, and bloody walls. I saw four guys huddled around a table in the darkness, cooking, four orange flames waving under bottle caps. I didn’t say anything. “How you been?” isn’t something you ask at the Ellis, and no one would answer you anyway. They were all focused on the business in their hands.
I found a spot near them next to an old radiator and slid down the wall, the old wallpaper flaking off like an old scab. I examined the works for any signs of blood. You can never tell if someone has been using it. “You just gotta have faith,” an old-timer used to tell me. I think he died a few months ago, but it couldn’t have been AIDS.
Or it could have been.
While I waited for one of the others to finish with his hose, I looked more closely at their table, and it, I mean, he stared back at me with glassy eyes.
“What the—” I shouted.
A couple lazy eyes drifted my way then returned to their work.
“Is that dude—”
“Yeah, he’s dead,” a gray old-timer said. He finished his shot and stuck the needle into the dead guy’s back. “He was here when we got here.”
My blood ran colder than the icy rain outside. “He died … like that?”
“On all fours, probably puking,” he said, his voice trailing away to a whisper. “Or praying. Don’t worry about it, young blood. It ain�
��t nothing to him.”
A man died and froze on his hands and knees for junkies to use as a table and a pincushion, and I’m not supposed to worry?
Another junkie stuck the man with his needle, and the man’s glassy eyes never flinched.
That’s when I got out of there and fell against every wall in the place until I was near a side door and fell over another old-timer.
“Watch yourself,” he said.
I jumped to my feet, but the old-timer grabbed my ankle.
“Let me go!” I screamed.
“Manny, it’s me, Flake.”
I looked down at a familiar face. “I gotta go, Flake!”
He let go. “You look like you seen a ghost, Manny.”
Yeah, I thought, my own in about ten years. I looked up at the ceiling and stepped toward the door.
“You seen Spence up there, huh?”
I stopped. “That was Spence?” Spence and I were in the same grade once upon a time. He was in the Steel City Sprinters, too, and he actually won a few races. And now he’ll be stuck in the starting position for all eternity on the third floor of Heroin Hotel.
“Yeah. We finally found a use for him.” He squinted. “You don’t look so good.”
“I’m all right,” I said, though I wasn’t. So what if Spence was upstairs dead. He was in a better place.
“You still interested in hearing about that cure?” Flake asked.
Flake, who had to be fifty going on a hundred, was always hinting about some special cure, but I never stuck around to hear him all the way through.
“I don’t need a cure, Flake,” I said.
“Yeah, you do.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re looking like you do. You’re acting like you do. All you gotta do is say you do, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you? You’re in The Life, Flake. You telling me about a cure is like a dead man telling me how to live.”
He started counting on his fingers. “One, your daddy’s gone.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“I ain’t finished. Two, your mama’s dead. Three, you’ve been arrested more times than I have fingers. Four, you’re working for scraps in them houses that will put us all out on the curb eventually. Five, you ain’t married and are still living with your aunt. Six, you’re looking like you seen a ghost. Seven—”
I slumped down beside him. “All right, all right, I need the cure.” If only to be able to see my child. “What clinic I gotta go to?”
“Ain’t no clinic,” he said. “You just need a bridge.”
“A bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one?”
Flake laughed. “One over a river, Manny.”
“We got three rivers, Flake.”
“It doesn’t matter which one, just make sure it’s a bridge over water going south.”
The man was talking gibberish. “Don’t they all go south?”
“Eventually. The Mon goes north for a spell before it hits the Ohio, and even the Ohio goes north a spell before crossing the Mason Dixon Line.”
My works started burning a hole in my pocket, like the syringe was on fire. “So, what’s the cure?”
“Find yourself a bridge. Get up under it if you can, because it’s a long way down.”
“What?”
“It has to be near a hundred feet or more.”
“I gotta jump?”
“Yeah.”
“And the water’s gonna cure me?” I doubted it as soon as I said it. There’s nothing but floating dogs, oil slicks, and garbage in those rivers.
“No, Manny, the water ain’t gonna cure nothing. The jump is.”
An old junkie was telling me to kill myself. I started to get up, but Flake grabbed my sleeve and pulled me down.
“It ain’t no baptism, boy. You’re aiming for a barge going south, and make sure that barge is going south or you’ll be right back here.”
“I gotta jump from a bridge into a barge?”
“You can’t miss it unless you don’t time your jump right. Now the barge is most likely gonna be full of coal, so it’ll be a hard landing. If you miss the barge, you’ll drown. If you land wrong, you’ll break your neck, probably die instantly, or you might just shatter a leg and have your bone come out the skin. If you land in between them coal cars, you’ll be crushed to death.”
“How is all this a cure?”
“This ain’t even the cure part, Manny. If you land just right and aren’t hurt too bad, you’re on your way to the cure. Them fools at the clinic told me it’d only be a week, ten days tops to quit because heroin isn’t as addictive as nicotine, which we both know is a lie. I’ve only been able to go a day or two without myself, but I had a buddy jump from some bridge and I haven’t heard from him since. I hope he made it, and even if he didn’t, he’s cured either way, right?”
“This is crazy.”
“So’s The Life, so’s The Life, Manny. You’re on the edge of getting into The Life, and I don’t want you going over that edge.”
“It’s still crazy.”
“Gotta fight crazy with crazy sometimes.”
Which made sense. Curing something that will kill you with something that might kill you made sense. “You really think he made it?”
“No. He was an old junkie, think he was fifty or so.” Flake was looking every bit of seventy in that half-light. “And if the jump didn’t kill him, the withdrawal probably did.” He smiled at me with only a few jagged teeth. “Find yourself a bridge, Manny.”
“Why don’t you come with me, Flake?”
“Misery loves company, huh?”
“Yeah. That’s all misery is good for. Nah, Manny. I messed up so much in life I’d probably mess up my own suicide. Besides, I can’t travel too well nowadays.” He pulled up his pants leg, revealing a plastic leg just below the knee. “Had me this little bad patch of skin down there once.”
I rose on shaky legs. “Gotta go.”
“Hey, uh, you got a shot for an old man, Manny?”
“You ain’t that old, Flake.”
Flake laughed. “I’m only thirty-two. Yeah, thirty-two is old around here, huh?”
2: Bridges
Flake is only three years older than I am, missing part of his leg, slumped in a doorway of Heroin Hotel, and I’m here in the pouring rain at Freedom Corner, a monument to black people here in the ‘hood.
And I don’t know a single name on this plaque.
The names sound familiar, like I’m supposed to know them, but I don’t. Twenty-five “Fallen Heroes” in a Circle of Honor, names like Frankie Pace, Matthew Moore, Sr., Margaret Milliones, and Robert L. Vann. Heroes of what? Who are they heroes for? What have they ever done for me? And why are they on a plaque here at the corner of Crawford and Centre just up the hill from Mellon Arena, under the shadow of St. Benedict the Moor, in the Lower Hill, the most dirty, run-down, forgotten armpit of Pittsburgh?
My Pittsburgh is black and white and gray, is roaming dogs floating through sooty smog amid elegant decadence, is seedy and weedy, upscale and downscale, is banks and cranks, loans and moans, outcasts and Everlast, upper class, working-class, and broke-ass. Trash or cash, pickles and ketchup, my Pittsburgh is a city of broken sidewalks and hearts, dealers at Wylie and Elmore breaking people along with twenties, fifties, and hundreds, a place where Recovering Mothers and Children does big business and folks unite against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while a war rages all around them.
In a city that once banned Beethoven, a school can suspend a five-year-old for bringing a plastic axe to go with his firefighter costume on Halloween, and the Statue of Liberty can float downtown on Liberty Avenue with an IV-drip in her arm. And in the blackest part of my Pittsburgh, some white folks put up a billboard that reads, “It’s never too late to give up your prejudices.”
Our prejudices? What about theirs?
And here’s Freedom Corner, a patch of pol
ished granite, and me standing in center of a bunch of circles as spring rain tumbles down, puddles everywhere. Surprised they let us have this much space. I mean, they tore down every other place to live, like Allequippa Terrace and the Bedford Dwellings. Of course, not many folks like to sleep on polished granite.
Behind me is a Freedom Marchers’ Ring with a line of fools marching somewhere. I’m standing on the Negative Ring, men and women with shackled, empty hands getting a beat-down by the police. And dead center in front of me is this Circle of Honor with twenty-five names of nobodies nobody ever heard of.
This monument will never last. Nah, some junkie will be passed out on the Prayer Circle before ripping off one of the Pages of History to sell for a bundle, and bottle caps and syringes and little bags of “Death Wish” will be scattered like the leaves that used to fall off trees here. Even the pigeons will stay away after that.
I bet the pigeons will even stay away from St. Benedict’s across the street. Skinny pleading statue, arms up like he’s being eternally arrested, like he’s giving up on the Hill, his white head standing out against the rainy black sky. How much of a Moor could he be with all that white in him? And he ain’t looking down on the Hill, oh no. He’s focused on downtown Pittsburgh, checking out the neon and the culture there, culture that exists thanks to the destruction of the Hill. Guess he doesn’t like his vow of poverty, and the dude ain’t praying either. How can you pray with your arms spread out like that? I’m surprised no sniper has used him for target practice.
One last shot and I’m out of here to find the cure.
Or die.
Either way, I’m cured.
I could go out like Dante Taylor, a man not much older than I am who blazed a trail of lead through Wilkinsburg a while back. He didn’t hurt black people, though. He killed three white folks, and the police charged him with “ethnic intimidation.” There’s a loaded phrase. The Hill’s been a victim of ethnic intimidation from day one. They say Dante was a racist, but how could he be? How can a minority be a racist? He was just trying to get the white monkey off his back. And what about me, a half-white, half-black man? How can I ever be a racist? And my monkey sure ain’t a monkey. It’s an elephant, and it’s fat, gray, and hungry.