by Casey Gerald
So it meant a great deal back in the year 2000 that every Saturday after Showtime at the Apollo ended and Flava TV came on, I could crouch in the dark for four and a half minutes and know that there was a home out there somewhere: a place that, even when it’s gone, I could still feel inside; a place that, as wrong as it might be, was still worth going to. At least a place where D’Angelo stood stark naked and offered to take me away—I was a thirteen-year-old boy, not a saint.
* * *
—
Instead of D’Angelo, it was my father who took me away after Tashia left for New Orleans. He had paid his debt to society, had spent his time in a halfway house with great moral vigor—read the Bible and went to church so much that he was called to preach the gospel like his father, in his father’s church that was now being ruled and ruined by his older brother. Even sang the lead for one of the male chorus’s most popular songs. The legend was now also a living testimony to the Lord’s redemptive power.
I doubt Granny asked him to take me away, because she has never liked my daddy, as far as I can tell, and has surely never put anybody out of her house. So I figure he and some other wise adults felt that a boy’s home was with his father.
At Clarice’s house now, where Daddy moved upon his release, there was far more space to live. The front room was all mine, and it came with a door that locked, a full-size mattress on actual rails, a black dresser and walk-in closet to put my clothes, and a small brown mouse that sometimes ran across the pillow that I slept on, until BB and I caught it and set it on fire in the backyard, which was almost as large as the practice football field at my middle school. The school itself I could tolerate only because I was in the eighth grade and would soon leave it forever. I’m pretty sure middle school was awful for everyone, and I’ve come to believe that the general role of school in American life is to introduce young boys and girls to inescapable misery at an early age so they won’t complain too much when they reach the workforce.
Long before I heard of Yale or Harvard, W. H. Atwell was the best school I had known, according to the Dallas Independent School District pamphlets, the Texas Education Agency (which had not put it on probation), and the people who taught in the building. Tashia had gone to Atwell when we first moved back to Dallas in 1995, and her then-boyfriend Roderick (no joke) was the prototypical Atwell Archer—with his baby-blue-and-scarlet letterman’s jacket, his perfectly creased Girbaud jeans and spotless Nike Air Max, his hair full of waves like Puerto Ricans I’d come to know, his two-story home in a neighborhood where being a black person in a two-story home was nothing to take note of whatsoever, his mother and father who owned this home and lived in it together, and his nauseating sense that he was well on his way to becoming a Strong Black Man.
Much of this sense came from the head football, basketball, and track coach at Atwell: Fred Walton, who trained Roderick years after he had the honor of training Michael Johnson, who went on to be a great Olympian, and years before he had the misfortune of training me.
Coach Walton was at least six-foot-three and that was just the start of him—that belly firm but hanging over the gym shorts he always wore when he wasn’t in a suit . . . those hands that seemed made solely to hold a wooden paddle . . . that afro that didn’t look large but might have been larger without all the grease and sweat therein. The sweat rested in the hair or on his forehead until it ran when he began to bark orders and reprimands, which was damn near all the time, since he came to work each day determined to make us men.
Every practice ended with conditioning—twelve to sixteen wind sprints down the practice field and back, forty thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys near death before we reached the halfway mark, standing along the goal line, panting, hawking spit, the big boys throwing up, clasping our hands behind our heads to beckon even the smallest poof of air.
Goddamn it, men! Get your hands from behind your heads. Don’t you know that’s how the police are gonna make you stand when they arrest you?! You did not come to my practice to get arrested! Put your hands on your knees if you need some air!
I’m almost positive there’s science that says you should put your hands behind your head to open your lungs. That meant nothing to Coach Walton.
He demanded that we wear a suit and tie on the day of every football game or track meet, because men had to know how to be professional. Fine with me—I could borrow Daddy’s jackets, put extra cuffs in his pants and tie my belt super tight once a week for most of fall and spring, which was easier than trying to create new outfits from the few clothes I had. When school ended, we forty would file into the gym and sit against the wall to wait. Coach Walton would appear suddenly, mysteriously, from behind his office door, two or three times, catching us mid-grab-ass, which we’d cease immediately, backs to the wall again, while he paced the gym floor, looking down at us.
Listen, men, he’d let out after a long silence. When a man’s yard isn’t cut, you know there’s trouble in the home. You hear me?
Yes, sir!
He’d return to his office and close the door until the next revelation, and the next, until finally he’d order us to change into our uniforms.
Coach Walton was full of those kinds of insights, whatever they meant, but he offered specific guidance to me only one time. It was during the single game I played in (I was the third-string running back), when the Atwell Archers were up by some ungodly amount and Coach Walton decided that my time had come.
It was night. The crowd was still thickly sprinkled throughout the stands under the lights at Sprague Stadium, which sat right across the street from Community First on Westmoreland. Coach Walton made a signal with his hands from the sidelines, and the quarterback yelled out 42 Trap (or something like that) in the huddle. The name sounds like nonsense, but it’s pretty straightforward: the first number told us what running back should get the ball; the second number told that back what gap in the offensive line to run through; and the trap told the offensive line how to block—trap a particular defender so the running back could slip through the hole.
The only problem was that I kept getting trapped. I ran the play once and was clotheslined as soon as the football plopped in my breadbasket. Ran it again and fumbled before my second step. Coach Walton’s hands motioned for a timeout, then one hand motioned for me. I loped over to him. His other hand grabbed my face mask. I could hardly see him for that giant hand over the face mask bars, but could feel him towering over me. Could hear his voice bearing down.
Goddamn it, son! Listen to me. You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re embarrassing your family. Get your ass low, keep your eyes open, and run for your life!
And wouldn’t you know it, the very next play—42 Trap for the third time in a row, to show how much faith Coach Walton had in his men and how little imagination he had in his playbook—I scored my first and last touchdown as an Atwell Archer. It wasn’t the thought of embarrassing myself that did it, as I was no more or less ashamed than usual. It wasn’t the fear of embarrassing my family, none of whom came to any of my games, which I knew because I spent most of my time on the sidelines looking up into the stands to see if anybody was there to watch. I really just needed a little instruction, that’s all: get your ass low, keep your eyes open, and run for your life. I ran like that all the way through my life, right up until I couldn’t run anymore.
The next day at school was my best, if only because one of the lunch ladies had come to the game and told me as I walked through the lunch line that she was so happy I’d finally put that ball in the end zone. She gave me an extra slice of pizza for free even though I already didn’t have to pay for my lunch thanks to some program the state or somebody had.
Aside from having one fan and a free slice of pizza, this triumph changed much of nothing. I still didn’t have any Nikes. I was still one of only two students in advanced English class sitting next to Ms. G’s desk putting intonation marks over words I could already p
ronounce but didn’t understand while she paid me no mind. I still watched the door at the eighth-grade athletic banquet to see if Daddy would walk through. And I was still a faggot. The girls reminded me of this on the playground when they heard my voice, which sometimes sounded like my sister’s, and pointed out Mmm it’s always the cute ones ain’t it? My coach reminded me when he saw even the slightest limp in my wrist or ankle as I horsed around in practice, and mumbled ole fruity ass boy as he shook his head. And in the middle of the biggest track meet of the year, Jeremy and Brandon Scott (no relation), the most beautiful boys and most gifted athletes in my class, reminded me when they yelled down from the stands while I warmed up—Say, Casey, look! We’re gay like you!—pretending to hug each other while the crowd around them laughed, which would have been worth all my free lunch had it been real.
I do owe Jeremy eternal thanks for ending the worst thing that happened to me in middle school: my relationship with Naomi Watts. Naomi was one of the most popular girls at Atwell, the daughter of the best high school football coach in the city, and looked like the skinny, pin-curled version of a bad attitude that nobody complained about. One day in the spring of eighth grade, Naomi’s best friend cornered me in the hallway after school.
Hey, Casey. So um, Naomi wanna go with you.
Oh cool aight . . . I’ll think about it.
Well I already told her you said yeah, so here’s her number. Call her, boy.
I truly could have died right there in that hallway, a satisfied still-single boy. But I had no choice, so I called Naomi that afternoon from Luke’s house, on a cordless phone that I kept walking with into empty rooms, half hoping that Luke would hear me talking to a girl, half hoping the phone’s battery would go out.
There was something about her voice that made me feel I was going to be sick. I think it was that she sounded like a girl, but after about ten minutes, the conversation was about as pleasant as the worst thing that’s happened to you could be. She was a nice girl, I thought, even though I look back now and realize that she was the Oak Cliff version of a rich uptown girl who takes the subway out to Bed-Stuy to slum it up at house parties with boys who will never meet her parents.
For a whole week, I’d get off the bus in the morning and find Naomi, who was always dropped off by somebody, standing there waiting for me to escort her into the building. I had never up till then, and have never since, found so many reasons to scratch myself as I did on the mornings Naomi demanded that we hold hands. If God really destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, he should have done it for this kind of nonsense, not for staring at some pretty angel boys.
Anyway, the coup de grace came on the eighth-grade class field trip to Medieval Times—quite possibly the dumbest amusement venue in America (even dumber than the Henry Ford outside of Detroit). All afternoon, I had to sit in a dark stadium pit, watching two grown men in cheap costumes pretend to joust on shitting horses in a field of straw that, combined with Naomi hanging all over me as we shared a dry medieval rotisserie chicken, sparked my worst allergy attack of the year 2001. There I was, nearly crying, eating my tasteless chicken and watching the hay fly and Naomi’s smile glow, and wondering whether I would have a rash after it all.
In the locker room before track practice the next day, Jeremy asked if I had kissed Naomi yet.
Nah, man.
Nigga, c’mon you gotta get that. She wants you to.
Uhh have you seen her lips? Man, they crusty.
That was the best excuse I could come up with on the spot, and it seemed good or funny enough for Jeremy to drop the interrogation. But the next morning Naomi was not waiting at the bus depot. She was standing outside the door of my first period class. Arms folded.
What did you say to Jeremy about me?
Huh? I didn’t say nothing ’bout you.
She rolled her eyes and left. By the time I sat at my desk, her consigliere had appeared.
So, uh. Naomi said she don’t wanna go with you no more. We still cool, though, right?
Oh yeah. We cool.
Rarely have I felt the deep relief I felt the day my weeklong love affair with Naomi Watts ended. Home was clearly not in the hands of girls and surely not at school, but that was nothing new. Aside from the sanctuary I found with Ms. Davis and Ms. Vance, I’d never liked school much anyhow—the rush of bodies, the stench of hallways full of fascist monitors, the heavy books, the invisible voice pouring on me from the intercom. As early as kindergarten, during the year Tashia and I were sent to Dallas, I began most mornings with a wailing fit, thrashing about, ripping at Granny’s shag carpet, hoping to get out of the ordeal. Granny brought those tantrums to an end the day she grabbed my wrist and walked me, still crying, up the street and right to Ms. McLemore’s classroom, where, worst of all, in the middle of each afternoon, we were told to take out mats and spread them across the floor. It was nap time.
If I hadn’t been so disoriented by the cartoon animals smiling down from the walls in the dim crowded room, I might have made a run for it. Instead I sat there on my mat and scanned the scene, all those thumb-sucking, snot-dribbling fools littering the floor around me. Didn’t they understand how little sense this made? Why would I leave my house, which I did not want to do, come to this school, where I did not want to be, and then be forced to do something there that I without question did better at my house? I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the American education cabal, but very few school rituals baffle me more than this one.
I decided to boycott nap time. Didn’t call it that. Didn’t say anything, really, just sat there and tried to keep my eyes on Ms. McLemore, the smiling animals, and the sleepers simultaneously. But my nonconformity was not acceptable.
First came the threat of violence: twelve strikes in my palm with Ms. McLemore’s ruler. I still refused to sleep, which gives me some hope that someday, should the time come, I might have deep down what it takes to give my life for a worthy cause.
Next came bribes: Ms. McLemore announced that everyone who slept could have a piece of candy when nap time ended. Lord knows how I loved candy, and this clever move got me at least to lie down. But still I would not sleep. I just halfway closed my eyes and let a little drool trickle to seem more believable. This didn’t work and I got tired of pretending for once in my life, so I gave up on the candy and sat back up on my mat. To this day, a burning suspicion rises within me anytime I am offered—lured with—performance-based compensation. There’s always something hiding behind the gumdrop and the annual bonus, and I will not fall for it.
Finally, perhaps because I really had not bothered anybody during my protest, Ms. McLemore called me to her desk and asked what I wanted to do instead of sleep. I might have shrugged or simply stared at her, but I didn’t know.
She reached in her big metal drawer and pulled out an unwrapped pack of blank index cards along with a black plastic filing box.
If you’re not going to sleep, Casey, I want you to take these and write every word you see on the wall. One word on each card. This will be your little word bank, okay?
Yes, ma’am.
For the rest of kindergarten, while my classmates lay under the spell of tyranny, I sat cross-legged, eyes bulging in the no-light of nap time as I strained to make out the words on the wall. And if I could find Ms. McLemore again, that stocky, sweater-vested woman with the incredible gray-blonde Dallas hair and the ruler hand that struck like a jackhammer, I would thank her for not forcing me to sleep and for teaching me that home is what you think about when you don’t want to be where you are—like Clarice’s house, not least because she did not want me there herself.
Let me be very clear: Clarice Gerald is one of the highest-performing Christians I have ever known—Pope-esque, actually, especially in public: from the fact that she would never touch a car door, would always wait for you to open it and shut it behind her once she was seated; to the vestments that filled three large clos
ets which we were not supposed to enter; to the time it took to run errands with her because of all the people who stopped to kiss her as we moved through the bank and the Salvation Army and the grocery store—Oh, Mother Gerald, it’s so good to see you!
Clarice never missed a birthday, never was at a loss for words when it was time to pray, and, as she told the family at Christmas a few years ago, she never was a whore. Y’all know what that is: W-H-O-R-E.
I’m nobody’s shrink, but I know from personal experience that sometimes tireless service for others is a perfect way to keep them very far from you, so I wonder whether this is why, even as I knew Clarice would give me her last dime, I overheard her telling one of her many visitors I don’t know why he can’t go stay with Ms. West. Which was a fair complaint, when I think about it.
She and her baby son made a terrific pair amongst the people and at their residence. By early 2001, Daddy was juggling three girlfriends, and one night while he was occupied with one, BB and I heard a knock at Clarice’s front door. Thinking it was Aunt Carla, we opened the door and were pushed out of the way by another, who had come—informed by whom, I wonder!—to levy justice.
The tawdry details are not worth my ink or your time, but I will say that when the melee died down, it was me and BB who received Clarice’s talking-to: Y’all know better! Don’t let nobody in my house this time of night, I don’t care who it is or what somebody’s doing. She shuffled off back to bed, the sweet melody of her morning hymn—What are you gonna do when the world is on fire?—just a few hours off.
There was no talking-to for Crow, of course. He was on his way to Winner once again, going from strength to strength in his love life, at work (he was now a code enforcement officer for Dallas County), and in the pulpit, where his preaching schedule had increased to about once every other month.
The last sermon of his that I remember was preached during a night service. A word had been laid on his heart, to encourage the congregation to put their tragedies into perspective and trust that God has a plan, no matter how bad things might be: