Excerpts from Free Burning
But death can be a saving thing, too. That’s how I heard it from the folks at Granny Allen’s church; of course, none of them talking about the end really know it one way or the other. Their speculation just makes damn good sense running through my head with the granddaughter's spinning words.
“Ten years you known me.” I only recognize that I’m yelling watching Ta’s face cringe at every third syllable. “Shoulda come to figure I ain’t the type to be about no half-ass bullshit. I look like a blue collar factory nigga? Ain’t bout to be one to pay your rent.”
“My rent?” She laughs this spiteful laugh. “Didn’t figure you as the type to stand on a corner dealing dime bags neither. Takes a special kinda genius, I guess…”
“Shhh!” I point to the apartment’s thin plaster. “Wasn’t standing on no corner. Are you sick?”
“Are you?” Ta laughs from the vulva, amused this time. “What the hell were you doing?”
I sit in the reclining chair. “Not a damn thing more than what we talked bout me doing already. Talked in circles, here, there, then talked it here again. Round and round. But if it’s all right over here, girl, it can’t suddenly be all criminal when the conversation comes back around. Makes you out to be a phony hypocrite in the circle. You’re talking like I was out there slinging crack.”
“First of all, the shit was never okay with me. Don’t insult me. You said you were doing it for a minute to take care of what was standing overdue, nothing more.”
“Ain’t been no longer than that. Nothing but a minute passed here—”
The roll of her eyes hypnotizes. “I’m talking,” she pierces my ears, and the walls, and my trance too. “Second of all, you might as well been dealing crack. Ain’t gonna have mercy on you no ways.”
“Who? You?”
“Them—they ain’t got mercy for you. Them peoples don’t care nothing bout the substance, long as they found it sitting snug against your ass.”
I smile, mean for it to show full of wickedness. “If I’d been moving rocks instead of a little smoke, I wouldn’t look so useless in those eyes, I bet. You woulda liked that cash, no? If I gotta go down, might as well get myself good and filthy dirty on the way, phat paid, do it right. That’s how y’all think over on Oglesby. Fuckin niggas.”
“What the hell are you rambling?” Ta sits on the love seat to my right, blue suit cringing around her waist and skirt riding to her knees. “Shut up talking garbage to me. I’m done with you.”
I laugh, nowhere near spiteful as her, not in my ears. “For good?”
“That what you want?” Dawn cries in the kitchen high chair. “Keep talking. It’s hard out here on your own, goddamnit.”
Threat, plea, or warning, I don’t know. These are my wife’s feelings, not mine. Years joined at a tin band covered in twinkling paint, and she could mean all three at the same time. “Yeah,” I blink long, “You would’ve had mercy on me if I’d gotten real dirty paid.”
She jogs off to the kitchen to tend to Dawn’s afternoon hunger, true mama that she is. I recline my chair and turn off this five o’clock news and its long-forgotten blare.
While I was in Carbondale, Ta finished schooling at Chicago State’s commuter campus on 95th and King Drive. No shame in that place; Chicago State is not much different than Southern Illinois from what I’ve seen. But I went away from the Corners to get a degree, and that means a lot of something special to those who never left. I’ve thrown her for some kind of a loop here. So I can’t blame Ta for the rage spewing from those thick lips. In the Four Corners, commuter school honeys are supposed to go wrong before us campus town clowns. Maybe they end up with three illegitimate babies running around a one-bedroom apartment, or sucking on a pipe over on the East End, or stripping and hooking for some down low pimp. Those that do make it survive on noble, low-end scraps, head held barely above the water’s surface to allow proud, bare air.
My wife came up over on Oglesby, the Seventies blocks of Oglesby where weeds grow from cracks in the concrete, and they’ve got as many cardboard box-tops covering window holes as they’ve got glass. A Chicago State honey’s Oglesby Avenue, where tire rubber rips and screeches and sirens whirr and wail and that pop-crack sounds one after the other come summertime, until you pray to Lord Jesus that it’s just the noise of cheap firecrackers some knucklehead set off in celebration of America’s independence, though the Fourth is still almost a month away.
Never told Ta about how I sat in a white Uptown room with fiends just to the left of my testifying mother and her blue book. If I had, at least the woman might understand where I went wrong, and she could figure some kind of sense out of this. Maybe. But her Granny Allen was a good Baptist—the rock of old Oglesby Ave—whose deadly vice was Hostess snacks, and I was their good negro and Ta was so fine and thick and sweet to the eye. Never told the child a damn thing that would’ve made her think twice about letting me lose myself in chestnut eyes or between bare hips as she swallowed with thighs wet and warm. Maybe Mama was only on Step Five, but she didn’t raise no fools.
Been different since I came to understand our togetherness as a trade-off. Took five, six years, but it’s just like everything else: I look at her and I love her, and she loves me back, and we loved each other for years and it feels good and she keeps looking so good and sounding sweet and pure. No matter—can’t keep loving another soul in this place, then get love in return, without the question of payback rearing. That’s the only way you know it’s real in the Four Corners:
“I love you, so let’s buy rings,”
“I love you, baby, so let’s sign these papers,”
“I love you, let’s get jobs and cars and, one day, a house in the South Burbs.”
“I love you always, Love. Let’s drop a seedling, so it’s not just you and me loving, and let’s buy our offspring new clothes and cornered playpens of mesh bars and let’s buy her factory milk and diplomas and degrees so she knows to grow into a carrot in this world, not an apple, and let’s give her the office you once used to make a living for us, let’s turn that space into a baby room as you won’t be needing it now. Our life is made already.”
Loving ain’t real around here until you go to the loan shark and accept his points to barter yourself some trinkets to make the love shine. Funny, I didn’t figure this out until after I’d used up all of my credit with Primo the Shark from 51st Street; this band on the ring finger is all faded and dull now, while I’m still paying on his points.
Let my mother tell it, this is what she stayed drunk and high on an assembly line for anyway, to numb the pain of eyes crying bloody tears just to clean her seed of four corner muck. I was supposed to come back to this place different and better than this, me and Cousin Remi both, degreed to the hilt. Educated and offering salvation to the hustling dark masses in civilized, golden chalices. Not weed smoke. And then to get caught on these corners, getting down, dirty, and more broke than paid, just the same as all the rest of the limping souls? Embarrassing my mother and shaming souls full of hope, no different than a couple of 79th Street thugs—“hoodlums,” like Granny Allen called them. After that old Oglesby Avenue woman went and convinced her girl child that I was a good negro, and the Downstate folk exiled Remi just so one of us could finish up right. All this trouble borne, just for me.
My own bones should be full of as much shame as Ta’s and Mama’s are of purple rage. But to be honest, I ain’t hurting at all inside this skin. Reclined in my good nineteen-inch babble box chair, these bones aren’t shamed or angry or even aching from a night spent propped against a cracked cell wall. Mama and Ta can stay mad all they want then, and swim in shame on my behalf if it makes them feel righteous about how I drown—all I know is what’s reflected on a television screen, these tales babbled about how I ain’t the one who had it all wrong for so long.
8
We lived in a first floor crib off 71st and Merrill for a bit, just outside the Corners. Auntie De would come by to watch over me while Mama was working at the plant, leaving Remi with his uncles to learn their East End hustle.
Auntie De’s time was always free come June time, see, because Blackbird couldn’t keep a job once summer heat hit good. She’d sit with me until her attention wandered from the TV screen, or until the phone rang with one of those guitar-strumming, jive-humming cats calling after her love. Once that wanderlust hit, De’d take her a walk to the corner store—a full hour’s walk, though the Asian’s rotten joint wasn’t but four blocks from our place.
“Just goin to smoke on me some squares, and get a fresh pack,” she’d say, though our living room’s walls and couch pillows and Montgomery Wards drapes already stunk with the burning funk of Camels and Cools, left by uncles from the plant floor and the lounges’ mack-daddy booths. Mama’d never uttered a cross word to those fools as they lit fire to our air.
“Why you gotta go, Auntie?”
“Just bout to take me a walk real quick. Catch some air. Sides, don’t wanna smoke up you all’s place. You know how your Mama be. Don’t be telling her I left you when she come home neither. Promise to be good and I’ll bring you something back. You want something brung back, don’t you?”
“No—you got two more cigarettes in your box. I see um. Mama don’t care about you smoking up in here. Why you gotta go, Auntie? How come I can’t walk with you?”
“Just getting me some air, Tommie,” she’d say with this smile juking and hiding across ruby lips, and freckles lighting at the tip of her nose. “Sure you don’t want nothing brung, my love?”
“Just come back home, Auntie love.” Then De’d leave for her hour walk, that not quite empty box of Newports pressed against her pokey left nipple.
Once Tennessee Tuxedo ended on Channel 60, I’d know thirty minutes had already passed; and because I didn’t care for punk-ass Underdog afterwards, I’d prop myself at the front window and count each minute slow. Time passing in pasty clouds floating high, until the silver and red IC train shot by on the 71st Street tracks in my left eye, headed from Indiana to Downtown through Stony Island then back again to the Sticks. Every summer day, minutes raced with the Four Corner fools to catch up to that sleek caboose headed northwest. Folks running past, but never fast enough, for the midday train always left a few fools puffing dust on the tracks. IC rode on without explaining why I couldn’t walk with Auntie De either.
I pressed my head against hot glass this one June day back then. Counted ten trains passing, and Underdog and Woody Woodpecker and Popeye and the Avengers, all of them had finished screaming about saving my world from the UHF dial (destroying or saving—maybe both at once, destroying mine and saving their own) and the sun tilted just a little bit from the lake so Merrill Avenue’s brownstone buildings cast enough shade to cool the forehead. Auntie De still wasn’t nowhere to be seen, and Mama wouldn’t be home from South Chicago Heights for another two hours.
My eyes strained from sun beating against the dome magnified by window glass, and thoughts spun dizzy up inside my skull. Mama always told me to wear a hat in the summer months especially, to protect my head from that dizzy heat stroke pain brought by high hanging sun; then again, that dizziness could’ve been brung by the bloody breath churning between chest and thighs, panting to see Auntie’s De’s nipples poke from the thin T-shirts and Woolworths bras she wore come June-time. Sharp and high on her body those triangles, and so unlike her big sister’s mounds rounded dull from pressing against assembly line levers.
Maybe my sweet Auntie had just caught the Jeffrey line bus to pick up her social security check at the fed office (all Remi’s old man’d left De with, let Mama tell it. “May be all,” Auntie’d screech back, “but it’s a hell-a-bit more than you…”). De had such trifling ways, like they used to say between our blocks. Mama claimed the reason I’d turned out such a bright baby boy and Cousin Remi came up such an alley thug was that my old girl was kind enough to prop her nipples between my lips to suck milk dripping from mounds that were once sharp, too. While Auntie Denise was always too happy and selfish to stop running and wining and smoking with crap shooters and gray-haired slicksters to think of cleaning herself up for cuz to sip his good nurturing. That’s what Mama’d tell me whenever I’d start talking that ungrateful nonsense of mine.
So I knew at twelve years old that it was mostly my doing, that I brought the sag to Doreen’s chest; as much as slaving to build those Escorts. Remi, he got the Mama who wandered about cracked streets but kept her nipples primed and pointed and let him hustle the Four Corners with the real players because it freed her to do her thing. Me, I got the lady all dull and scarred from struggling in the fields and returning everyday to this cracked smoke and wine and muthafuckin living over here. This nurturing Mama who left me pinned to the window glass watching trains and folks running in vain and waiting for some sign to point out love’s return, but finding only shade trailing behind a faded sun.
Sounds shook the window, any sounds, didn’t have to be that pop-crack from the blocks behind, could’ve been tires tearing concrete or steel against steel or ambulances racing to Jackson Park Hospital—or the echo between a fading cartoon and an Apple Jacks commercial, maybe. Sounds shook, and I’d know their quaking as the noises of love’s end. Mama and De were all gone from this place, I knew—dead and gone to me somehow. My head pressed harder against that window, and I was alone, sweat dripping the forehead, skin tingling the crotch, feet tapping hardwood, all alone in body. But if there wasn’t love for me to wait out in that window, just speeding trains, shifting sun, and hopeless souls, all headed far away, would I at least never feel so alone again?
Another train passed north, and it wasn’t three o’clock just yet, so the floor supervisor had yet to find Mama overdosed in front of the catalytic converter belt, and Auntie De had wandered her pointy nipples too near the train tracks somewhere out there. Such a death only came for Auntie, of course, because I’d wasted seed the night before dreaming of her pointy points, spilling creamy incest all over my He-Man/She-Ra pajama bottoms and navy blue sheets to stain. Death’d snatched auntie love as she walked to the Asians’ store after I‘d violated her—and she had to pay for my sin. She was the grown soul, after all, the one who should’ve known better than wearing see-through shirts with menthol boxes pressed against tits full of un-sipped milk, tingling in between a boy’s legs till a bloody boner popped out of my drawers to match her perfection, almost match sweet perfection.
I lit a match from the booklet Auntie’d left on the cocktail table. Lit it to see, or to pay honor to my fallen nurturing life-giver and my afternoon protector. Lit that match to shine them a clear path to escape death and come back to the Corners. Or maybe I raised the flame looking for an answer to my questions, “Why you gotta go? How come I can’t walk with you?”
So much time gone by now, how do I know what dreams a boy conjured in the shade passing on Merrill Avenue? I do remember watching that flame stroll down to my fingertip, where, just before heat blackened yellow palm skin, fire laughed at me—wicked, knowing, and low—and jumped off its match stem, freed itself all on our living room wall.
Soon as mocking heat touched plaster surface, a million more laughing, dancing flames shook flickering asses against white plaster, and the room went up. I ran to the kitchen, fire chasing at my tail, coughing and still hard for my lost love and eyes wide as sun-shaming heat grew and spread to full life in the apartment. I took a safe watching place in the kitchen, far enough away that black smoke hadn’t swallowed air just yet. Stood on top of my favorite eating chair to see the burning through that doorway; I watched our lamp shade melting and plaster peeling down from the ceiling, saw how those white walls turned gray and then black as sky over the nighttime lake, just before paint crinkled and smoke swirled without choking my corner just yet. Close enough to let me see the bristles of Mama’s shag rug float from the floor, before flames paused their mocking to gulp away the debris. Hard-nut wilted only as fire jumped up to the living room window so the IC tracks and Merrill Avenue and the neighborhood folks chasing after trains were gone from eye.
I stood on tiptoes, gagging and slobbering by then, as the legs to the side table where I’d propped myself melted and its glass top crashed. Fire didn’t dare touch our color TV screen though. Smoke swirled all about its brown cabinet and flames marched up to chomp away the rest of the living room carpet, then stopped right before the last of the afternoon cartoons, The Amazing Spiderman. Flaming, mock laughter quieted long enough to let the intro play:
Spiderman, Spiderman… does whatever a spider can… spins a web… any size… catches thieves… just like flies… Lookout… Here comes the Spiderman.
I never thought of dying on top of my favorite eating chair. Not even as the lead smoke got to choking me. Death may be a muthafucka in a white hood, but he don’t come for twelve-year old knuckleheads, not when they’re dreaming, and definitely not when they sing the Spiderman song.
Auntie De and her new sugar daddy busted in just as the living room couch disappeared and I’d hopped up to the counter-top as the chair cushions’d turned hot to the soles. Sugar daddy ran through that smoke with his head down—all I saw coming at me was a black bald-spot rimmed in gray and his forearm shielding the face from smoke. Snatched me off the counter and wrapped my ass in his leather trench coat, he did. Why was sugar daddy wearing a trench in hot June daytime? Cause he was a true player, pimping South Shore’s Four Corners, ready to do anything—live or die, run or burn—to get between the thick legs of my auntie love. That’s why.
Thank God for nigganess that burning day. Sugar daddy grabbed me up from that counter and ran down the three-flat entry steps, out to freedom on Merrill Avenue.
By the time Mama showed up from the plant, the fire department trucks clogged our block between the tracks and 72nd Street; more swirling, mocking lights to dim the damning sun almost completely gone for the day. Our potbelly landlord leaned against the busted light post in his front yard, smacking tobacco against his right side teeth, one eyeball watching me hide snug under Auntie De’s arms, while the other peeled on my mother crying to the cops at curbside.
The top of my nappy afro nudged against perky heaven, right there next to sugar daddy in his smoky trench coat. Nigga hadn’t shed a lick of sweat yet, not running into those flames, not running out, and not even standing in the late day funk of our burnt blocks. He was still doing whatever a sugar daddy had to do to make my love into his own—where’s the sweat to that for a sugar daddy pimp in a long leather coat?
Mama stood with us finally, took me by the hand and pulled me from her trifling—as they called such women in the Corners—sister, just so slightly, but not strong enough. Leave it to me, nothing would ever take me from second heaven, not even knowing that my true, true love had resurrected off the factory floor and come back home to me. I wouldn’t let go of De until tears streaked from Mama’s eyes, and the gu-ug sound whimpered from rust-chapped lips. Then the city firemen crashed out the living room window, that hole where I’d propped and pressed my forehead to wait—their black hero bats shattering glass to let smoke free to swallow the sun left over our home.
The 3:54 IC train did run Auntie De over not six months later. Auntie and sugar daddy’d gone and gotten lit at the Soft Steppin, then took a walk along the tracks. Drunk fools stumbling along so bubbly, half a block from the next odd-numbered IC stops; and that silver and red steel train came speeding along its southeast bound way, as they do midday, ripping through the streets fast enough to sideswipe Auntie into the wig shop just past Clyde Avenue.
Mama blamed my sugar daddy hero, rambled on about how he’d slap auntie upside the skull whenever she’d get to spitting her fool back talk. Maybe De’d started flapping her sassy-ass mouth out on 71st after sugar daddy’d covered for all her drinks at the Steppin, and he’d got his full of that nonsense. That was how Mama’s teary speculation went: sugar daddy, fed up and floating high off that free-base while swimming low off sauce wine all at once, pushed my love into the IC, timing its approach just right.
I didn’t buy it first off, not at all, not the hero who’d saved me from flames just because he wanted to impress Auntie De. Why would he hurt her? Steal those sweet, pointy nipples full of fresh love from me, sure, but just to leave her mangled and chopped in window glass? Never. Mama rolled eyes full of salty water and crust at my foolish-ass argument. Haha, she laughed in her breath-choking way. You never underestimate the doings of a sugar daddy nigga, she said, especially when he’s already gotten all he truly wanted. They’re beasts, she told me, all of them.
And after he didn’t show for Auntie’s homegoing, what could I say? That’s what Mama and them called De’s services, just like folks would call Granny Allen’s burial years later—high-low holy rollers dropped Ta’s grandmother under dirt and had the nerve to name it a “homegoing” party. Bunch of fools full of pain pretending it ain’t right to cry at the sight of an old woman’s cancerous bones sinking down deep in the ground.
Homegoing at least seemed a proper name for Auntie's services. Love never seemed like she belonged to this place no ways. Maybe wherever the IC train took her off to really was something more like home for Auntie. Still couldn’t blame sugar daddy, not my hero—sugar daddy knew to save me from the flames and push De into that train. It’s a rare thing, for a soul to understand the difference between one who belongs in these four corners and one looking to go on to their rightful home.
Most dark daddies spend their time either saving or killing all they come across, either/or without pausing to ask the question who belongs where—how could he join her homegoing party after making that mighty call? Sugar daddy sat at the Soft Steppin bar instead, filling himself with wine and waiting for something like that moment of clarity to grace him. And it was true clarity that pushed love into a train speeding south and east. Sugar daddies ain’t all beasts, Mama’s wrong about this. They’re drunk and high off that base, true, but when they run into flames to save an idiot boy, some dark daddies are heroes and saviors all at once. Even if they did just get fed-up of all that sassy backtalk from love’s fine, twisted bones.
This lawyer Ta sent to the 63rd Street precinct house reminds me of the claims adjustor who filed that phony paper work to cover-up Mama and De’s negligence, saving me from DCFS’s clutches just in time. Punked that fat-ass landlord out of the suit for damages he was all ready to file against us, too. Insurance player conned his bosses into replacing our burnt-out possessions floated into the dusk, though Mama’d stopped paying their premiums regular. That hustler adjustor, he was a true savior—Mama went ahead and gave him some, I know.
I thought of becoming a lawyer as a child because it sounded like something she would’ve found worth all her mound-sucking sacrifice. All that so her baby boy seed grew into a legit hustler, an attorney at law. Sounded good and worthy. Then I hit thirteen years-old and came to figure that lawyers wasn’t nothing but the middlemen between us and the true saving we needed in this tragedy. No matter how noble the job sounded, what kind of punk made a living jiving in the middle for somebody else’s benefit? The real true scam at the end of our salvation back in `84 lay in the con an insurance man ran on his bosses, all to benefit poor fools, and for the happy moaning place found between my mother’s legs—so that’s what I became in life, an insurance man.
This lawyer blocks the sliver of precinct house light as he walks into the interrogation room, and he has the same acorn-shaped head as our adjustor from back in the day. He bounds as he walks, too, moving on his tip toes as if dropping soles to the ground will force whatever stick that straightens his back deep into the crack of his ass. Damn near leaves the earth with each step, knees springing his body high so the eyes peer and shift over and above the rest of this room, over me most of all. When I was a child, Mama took me to Great America with cousin Remi and one of my factory floor uncles. Soon as canvas souls touched hot funhouse concrete, I bounced as Tory B. Moore bounces now, gazing at roller-coasters and merry-go-rounds without paying mind to the world around as I came near glee up high.
Tory Moore is short and slight, too, a wisp blown into this place by the breeze—wicked or clean breeze, can’t say, for I’m locked inside airless space just now. So slight that he wouldn’t be here for my eyes to see, what with his orange skin swallowed by this ceiling lamp light. Wouldn’t notice him at all not for this obvious, bounding walk.
The only difference between that old claims adjustor and this cracked orange nut is the lawyer’s eyes. His pupils shift about the interrogation room, left, right, and through me as he drops his briefcase across fake marbel, into this very same chair where Officer Weidmann sat a week ago. He’s hiding his reasons for coming to this 63rd Street cop house, thinks he’s hiding them from me, at least. The insurance man from 1984, he looked straight into my little eyes, and I saw him looking and understood for certain that once he’d finish with his jive hustle, silence at the end would make everything all right.
But this new savior is a fool—either he’s a fool, or he takes me for one, which my pride tags as a sort of foolishness—for he should know that I fully grasp what brings him here. Tory B. Moore is a contracts consultant at Ta’s firm. Twice a month, he visits her Loop office for meetings with the single-breasted suits up high and, while waiting to ply his jive trade, he strikes up friendly conversations with the office ladies. So impressively thoughtful and provocative this lawyer, or so Ta gushes, for such a gold-shitting machine figure. Even asks about the baby’s well-being, always remembering my child’s name, no matter the weeks passed and attention divided—
“… is Dawn walking yet? …talking, too? …no, I don’t know what she said this morning… what a genius child… takes after her mother surely—”
Tory fakes this pitiful, temporary blindness at the .4 karat diamond hiding between the skin of Ta’s left ring finger and the dim of the waiting room light. Talks more phony jive just before asking about Ta’s husband—the giver of this dull gem life—always sure to ask about me, because he’s a mighty slick acorn-headed muthafucka.
She doesn’t have to say the word, but listening to my wife speak of him, I know Tory’s morning visits and his deep questions are the highlight of her days in the tower. He probes her, then listens so intensely to her answers: how else to explain these gushes as she recalls? No matter his business in the tower or his life’s station relative to our own, or because of it, I know the meaning to my wife’s words.
Although Tory Moore remains astute enough of the female ego to balance the interest he affords every one of the office ladies, his eyes only stop shifting to fix on the slice of lap peeped just over the top of Ta’s desk computer. Meanwhile, he reminds them all, if they or their families ever find themselves in need of legal assistance of any sort, his ribbed business cards are posted at the main reception desk. His Dearborn Street firm is stocked with an army of attorneys available for pro-bono or reduced-rate work, and his primary concern is forever the community, and will remain so, no matter how high he climbs. And he’s already sixty-six stories up, see, pretty goddamned high. He’ll never forget from whence he came, he reminds as he cranes that acorn just over Ta’s computer monitor.
So Ta left our bed to take herself to the Loop last Monday morning, just as handcuff marks started to fade from my wrists. Got herself good and ready to share with this acorn the tale of my shame:
“What can you do to save my family, Mr. Moore?” she whimpered, just like she begged cousin Remi on Soft Steppin Saturday nights. “If the authorities want to pursue this case, maybe they’ll come to take my daughter away, and my life—my husband. You told us you care so much about the community, cause you’re one of the good ones. And I seen you speechifying on the cable access channels and marching next to Jesse Jr. and the preachers, not even next to them really, but a few steps in front, power signs raised to the sky, haberdasher hats crowning heads to hide cracked nut peaks like it’s still 1964. You claim by any means necessary you’ll do what must be done on behalf of a colored family in South Shore, there in the projects, over on the West Side. Wherever. You say you started out in the Reagan era representing the poor and trapped from these streets, fighting in the PD’s office for folk who didn’t possess the crumbs to afford a proper fucking—excuse my foul language, Mr. Moore, sir, I’m from Oglesby Avenue, this’s how we speak with our own—a proper muthafuckin-over by Cook County-style justice. So please, Mr. Moore, save me, save us. In return, whatever it is you peep down here, it is all yours.”
The sound of lovely tears melts a heart beating from worlds trapped by pavement blocks. Any four-cornered block, I’m here to tell you. I know, for Ta once whimpered like this for me, sometimes when we’d got done loving, sometimes during.
Tory peeped enough of what it was that he wanted over the computer monitor, and here his corporate monkey ass sits in this 63rd Street precinct question-asking room, across the table from a fellow South Shore—or some trapped place—fool whose handcuff cuts healed a week ago only to reappear today. I see them now, at the same place where ivory cotton decorated with shimmering links drape on Tory Moore’s wrists. And I do hear what Ta says, and doesn’t say, about him. I’ve always listened. No different than the leather trench-coated sugar daddy and even that saving insurance adjustor, and completely opposite of our potbellied Merrill Avenue landlord, this hero has come to save my life, all for the price of taking love from me: Auntie De, Mama, Ta. Dawn, too—yes, one day some hustler will slither near to save me for the price of my child’s soul.
No matter, I hear my wife. I should stop acting like an ingrate, appreciate the saving, she says, show gratitude for Tory’s kindness and ignore his price, this steep price, just to leave me “freed” with shackle welts at the wrist.
“How’re they treating you, Tommie?” Tory Moore’s voice is a pierce whine, the noise of an orange-faced man from the South Side faking a Dershowitz Brooklyn accent through nasal passages.
“Since I came in today? Just fine.” I rub my left wrist, then the right. I’m soothing these nerves clenching and running up to the messy weight found inside my head. “Last week, I wasn’t nothing but a piece of shit jailbird. They change it up on you once they peep you got the loot to post bail and family looking out for you and a lawyer to stand in. They know you’re not out here like a crumb-less bum now, and they ain’t getting away with their bullshit, so they straighten theirselves out, you know?”
Tory sneers as he spreads his briefcase open. “No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I.” Under the interrogation room door, this crack of gray light blinks. I see it as I stretch my neck to peek over his left shoulder. “I was just saying.”
Spit gurgles in his throat. “None of them touched you, threatened to touch you,” Tory croons, “raised a hand as if they thought about touching you, then changed their minds. Tortured you or told you to imagine the torture they’d exact upon you. Think carefully, Tommie.”
His eyes dart about the room’s corners, then along the two-way mirror at my left. “I didn’t fess to anything,” I hum. His brown eyes switch to me for a bit, shining satisfaction, and I feel proud of myself because my savior approves. Until he looks to the corner again. “Only thing they told me to imagine was the harm I’m doing the community. Only thing hurt was those cuffs slapping my wrists to stop the blood flow. See—”
I drop my arms to the fake marble, pulling my sleeve back to expose wounds, but three fingers rise to the lawyer’s lips. He wears a diamond crusted, platinum-gold wedding band squeezed to the ring finger’s hilt.
“I want you to think carefully, Tommie. I understand some time has passed since the arrest, almost two weeks. You’ve gone through quite a bit, my friend, definite trauma. The mind tends to deal with such experiences by burying the particulars, even in the short term. But I want you to think. Remember that pain on your wrists. Seeing those marks, I feel you hurting. That pain and how you were blasted with light as they surrounded and hounded you on—79th Street.” He reads from a crumbled sheet long enough for the bottom margin to dangle from the table. The lawyer spreads the document’s top ends with the same fingers he used to shut me up. “You remember every word these police spoke to you, take your time going over the nature of these conversations. Each curse and every lying promise, every hateful bit of hypocrisy. You don’t forgive them for nothing. Bubbling gratitude and easy mercy is the fool African-American man’s great weakness, you know. Remember over these next few days, so we can clear you of this nonsense.”
Lies? Yes, this lawyer is hitting it right on with his speechifying—I see why Ta worships him once or twice a month—acorn head is tearing the mask off their lies. Even if Tory only reveals truth to me so that my wife will thank him by twirling about on his face, he’s breaking it down for a brother. Lies and plots conceived from on high by the empires—like the tie-dyed Saluki taught on campus—then executed by their flying pigs. Years passed, funk air breathed, tears wept behind monkey bars with steel scars slicing just beneath the palms.
Not for Tory, I would’ve gone away peacefully like so, bowed down in gracious deference if that script had damned me for life for dealing weed on 79th Street. “Good police you is,” I would’ve slobbered, not for my hero. Maybe I would’ve sung a Down Home chitlin song for Officer Wee Man and his birds and his law, and the judge who’d send me away. Because I need to see the light creeping from Tory Moore’s back and forget the shift of his eyes to remember that it don’t matter this acorn has thoughts only of the gap between my wife’s legs or that he’s been there and done that (as the Soft Steppin pimps say), up high in the executive bathroom’s last stall. I see this in his eyes for sure: the fact that my wife is but a toilet fuck to Tory Moore only means is he down for my corner cause.
Left up to me, I’d made my mind to follow the script watching IC trains leave Merrill Avenue folk in track dust. Souls losing the race, cursing at this latest insult, the loneliness of a fading caboose that dare twinkle in sunset. I called it back then as I sang the Spidey song, that when Act II started and the flying pigs came to slap steel on my wrists, I’d go on to my cage in peaceful contentment. Who was I to fight it? Hell, Jesus didn’t fight script—Jesus knew better, cause he had God and the Holy Ghost representing for him in the interrogation room.
Eyes shifting with this gray light’s blink, my lawyer empowers a fool with brilliant, churchy words, and he at least tells me the real deal here in the interrogation room. Tory’s to be believed, too, for only a true savior from some place just inside four corners appreciates beauty like my wife’s trapped beauty.
“When they come in here,” the lawyer says before bringing three fingers to his mouth again. “You shhhh. Don’t say a word. Let me do the talking. You just listen to every word spoken. Carefully, use your best, good mind. You listen, and you remember.”
This Tory Moore, is he Spiderman or just another dressed-up jive hustler, shooting his sticky web about the place and running through flames in long leather without shedding sweat? Or is he Jesus the insurance man peddling security and salvation? Or Underdog? I haven’t completely figured out this hero who’s hustled my love away from me, but I vow to do as he says as Officer Weidmann and Phil the flatfoot slip through this interrogation room light. I vow this and I do say “thank you” to my middleman savior.
9
Weidmann hides in the alley’s shadow. The cop’s always somewhere he’s not supposed to be, wouldn’t be, if the world were right: flying about in dreamy sky, cruising down Boulevard blocks, popping out of garbage pile shadows. If he came at me face-to-face, I’d know good and well to turn the other way and run for dear life—not that I could save myself even then.
I catch his outline poking from the alleyway as I stumble from Tory Moore and the precinct house. I know this is the cop lurking before I hear his voice. “Quite a joker you got yourself there.”
“What?” Weidmann shows himself out of the alley and stands so that part of his body blocks this path to the 63rd Street bus stop. He leaves just enough paved curb for me to slide past, just enough covered by his east-leaning shadow to understand escape as a dare.
“Said that’s quite a joker you brought in here. Fancy joker of a mouthpiece.” Weidmann smiles, stretching the sloped outline of his head. “Where’d you get that guy from?”
I don’t move until the cop turns himself toward 63rd and we walk together. “Family friend,” I say.
“Mmh.” I hear the clicking of his boot heel trailing behind as we pass the gangway opening. “Didn’t call for all that showtime crap though—this situation doesn’t need to be as serious as a thousand dollar clown. That’s about how much fancy pants is running you a week, I know.”
Spite sneers through my lips, though I don’t even mean for it to show. “It’s covered. He’s a friend of the family, like I say.”
“Just mentioning for your sake, Tiny. Dealing weed’s not so serious in our world, is it? Unless somebody’s looking to make it serious. You were carrying a lot of the crap, but it’s a first offense on record. Better to save your big joker for a hand when you’ll really need um, I figure. Got a real war coming soon, gonna wish you still had a big joker to play on that bloody day.”
I peek over my left shoulder, searching for Phil—this has to be one of their bird-pig shake downs. No matter that we’re far north and west of the Corners, this cop is playing me for a corner fiend. “Are you supposed to be talking to me right now?”
“What?”
“After I execute my right to an attorney, doesn’t that attorney have to be here for you to even talk to me?”
“Mouthpiece charging you all that money for this sort of advice?”
“I didn’t need a lawyer to tell me that. Learned Miranda in my Criminal Justice class,” I say.
“Oh. Col-lege boy. That’s right.” The cop blushes and smiles. “Funny. You wanted to come into the business?”
“No,” I say because I can’t stop myself. I blink and the darkness behind my lids lies and tells me I’m not so scared of this bird-pig. “Wasn’t nothing but an elective.”
“Elective, execute. Those are fancy sounding words.” I recognize Weidmann isn’t wearing a uniform as his fingers pull at windbreaker Velcro and fiddle about the jacket’s insides. Swore I glanced a twinkling badge and nightstick slung from his hip in garbage pile shadows, not this orange Chicago Bears coat, half-faded blue jeans and K-Swiss sneakers cloaking the cop in Southwest Side sameness. “What’ve I said to you? Spoke not a word except to give you a compliment on the lawyer you chose, for what comes down to such a tic-tac-toe case.”
I chuckle. “Not my call to make—what this is and ain’t.”
Weidmann pulls a White Sox cap from his pocket and slides it over the forehead slope. “Whose is it?”
“I don’t know.” The 63rd Street bus tumbles east. “Like you say, this is my first time offending. Not sure how this’s supposed to work out. Guess it’s all on the judge.”
“Mmh.” Weidmann steps toward St. Louis Avenue and watches this bus fade as black smoke rises and circles. He squeezes both hands into his jeans pockets. “That supposed to be a smart-ass answer?”
Two Mexican women appear on the opposite side of the steel pole, their arms and backs drooping toward the sidewalk with the weight of plastic Aldi bags. Weidmann speaks his words barely above a mutter, but yellow rage flashes in his forehead before he pulls the cap low to cover his brow. I watch another bus tumble near, still blocks west of us. I wish it nearer, but traffic blocks the 63 underneath the viaduct just west of us.
“No. Ain’t meant to be.”
“Cause a smart guy with some true education like your big joker mouthpiece back there, he woulda asked me about the easy way out of this situation by now,” the cop coos at me like the factory floor players used to do Mama on our burned living room couch before they disappeared to her moaning place. “And I woulda explained to the smart guy what he already knows too well: there ain’t no court, no judges, no shiny jokers, no law here, just two fellahs standing on a street corner talking our way through a situation.”
The 63 eases through the viaduct as the streetlight turns, and a jet floats overhead toward Midway, its fuel tanks’ roar unheard as if the plane flies higher than it seems. Weidmann’s words are a hustle in my ears; for even near the airport, everybody scams to get by. Got no better choice than to roll with his game though. My bus is coming to take me home. “So what’s the easy way, Officer?”
Weidmann laughs and looks at the Mexican women. “Knew it from the first time we sat down together, you’re a different type.”
“What’s funny?”
The women drop their grocery bags to concrete and stare, nostrils furling at the burning fuel in our air as another jet passes silently, and the 63 rumbles in our front. “Just that most from over your way woulda snapped by now. Gone about putting me in my place for ‘dissin’ um. Ain’t that how you all say it? Called me, my partner, my country, all kinds of piece-of-shit motherfuckers. How do you all say it: ‘muthafucka?’ Snapped me up good for doing you like this, playing you for a soft mark. Anybody else woulda let me have it by now. Funny, you don’t see the need to dis my white ass. Must be the col-lege schooling.”
“Told, you, I took Criminal Justice. I know my rights. I know how it works. Why would I curse you—so you can whip out your pistol butt or go up under your armpit for the billy club and bust my head open? Ain’t like I’m bout to fight back. Once I ball my fist to steal off you, you turn that butt around, and take me outta here. Legal execution, like you say. What place is anything out of my mouth about to put you in?”
His smile fades, and Weidmann peeks at the bag-ladies. He loosens the windbreaker, then stretches his arms to full span, and I swear he’s about to flap across these three feet of pavement; but I don’t run, no matter the pitchfork he hides in cotton feathers. No, I can’t run, and instead of chasing after me, Weidmann turns a slow one-hundred-eighty degrees with the jacket opened. The women laugh foreign laughter as he raises the windbreaker tail to reveal himself, raising the material at the low end of the spine for a glimpse at his ass. He twirls once again, slower, and there’s no nightsticks, no pistol butts, no pitchforks hidden on this cop—he’s clean in his brown shirt buttoned to the Adam’s apple rim. When his circle is done, he steps toward the steel pole and his whisper slices at my ear hole.
“I want this to be easy, Tiny.” An American Airlines jet flies above us now, and this bird does dive as it approaches Midway’s landing place. Its fuel lights my nose hairs. “We know you’re a guy trying to make some change in a chump’s hustle. Unlucky guy definitely, who got hemmed with a nice amount of illegal substance. But a down-on-his-luck-first-time-chump guy who a judge will look up and down, then hear the mouthpiece’s fancy rhyming pap about col-lege and getting laid-off from a good job with a family at home, and the judge is gonna see that hungry crow look in your eyes, hungry and sad like the one I see right here. He’s gonna cut you slack, seen it two thousand times. You’ll fuck up again: I know, the judge, he knows, and your mouthpiece knows, too. It’s just our calling to feel like mercy’ll give you the opportunity to do good and right. We ain’t fooling nobody but ourselves. Shit, deep down, you know you’re gonna fuck up again even. These times is hard, ain’t getting any softer soon. What can you do but keep hustling a chump’s game?”
The bus touches this curbside, unloading its final passengers. “Learned my lesson, Officer,” I slobber, “thank you. I don’t wanna go through this trouble no more. Got too much to live for.”
“Hold that bus,” the cop points at the 63 driver with his left hand, whips out his badge backed in black leather to flash against the bus’s windows. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t see any reason why we should sit around and wait for you to fuck up on a mick judge’s time. I say better to wipe this slate clean. The better and real easy way, I say.”
It’s me smiling now. Fool thing to do, I know, allowing this stretching at the bottom of my face where gratitude breaks into the jaw until the corners of Weidmann’s smirk dulls. On 79th Street, I know the players don’t smile until the crap’s bounce falls still on one side, and even then, their smiles won’t shine from the heart. Nothing but a half-cocked grin those players show, left-side turned up to the nose and the right fixed even with the jive. I bite my bottom lip. “How much?”
“Mmh,” Weidmann glances over his shoulders. “No real price. Everything really ain’t about dollars, Tiny. That’s another col-lege lie. All I want for us choosing to leave joker mouthpieces and judges and courts and the twisted system out of this business between two men, all I want is for you to set up a meeting between me and Remi Simms.”
“Trick out my family?” I laugh, can’t help it even as passengers’ eyes glare down from the bus windows, waiting on me. I pause as another jet floats north-to-south, taking off now, and I pray the cop forgets himself in its flight.
“There you go again,” Weidmann pushes the cap’s brim so that most of his forehead slope shows, “talking two steps ahead of the game. Who said anything about ‘trick’—that’s not a good college word, Tiny, that’s 79th Street jive. I’m just telling you to set up a conversation between me and your relative. You don’t gotta bring him over here to the station, I ain't looking to sit down over on Jeffery Boulevard. So we pick another spot, clean and neutral like: restaurant, bar, downtown, shopping mall in the burbs, whatever. You set the meeting up, and long as your dope dealer kin sees things the way how I see things and he’s willing to talk, you won’t have to worry about retaining that thousand-dollar mouthpiece and I won’t have to sit down with any big prick-sucking jokers anymore, cause we’re all squared away.”
My conscience whispers into the right ear, opposite the cop, advises me to ask for a guarantee, writing on paper to turn words burned and blown away in airport heat into promised scripture, but I blink as I listen. And by the time my eyelids rise, Weidmann’s gone from the corner of 63rd and St. Louis, returned to the shadows behind his cop house.
The passengers on the 63 still watch me, pent-up frowns bringing the red of lost patience to their cheeks. The bus driver stares my way, too, with his knuckles wrapped around the door lever. Walking the bus’ steps, I notice his is the darkest face on the bus besides mine, and I recognize him from some place. Maybe he drove the Jeffrey line when I was still riding to Grand Avenue. Or no, maybe he’s a wanna be player with his city paycheck cashed and rolled in silk pants pockets like the rest of the weekend pimps at the Soft Steppin Lounge.
“You riding, or what?” he asks.
I jog the two top steps before he bends the door shut, and his bus tilts up from the street pavement. I pay my fare with the last dollar-fifty in torn cotton pockets, before answering, “I’m riding.”
Otium
