Chameleon (8 page)

My English teacher surprised me with her reaction when I told her how much I enjoyed it. She said since it wasn’t on the list of books to read, I wouldn’t get credit for it. What’s that about? I didn’t care about the credit, because English is my best subject and I didn’t need it. What I did care about were the books we had to choose from. Most of them were written by dead white guys, and the rest were by dead white women. No Ralph Ellison or any other black writers. That killed me. How you gonna teach a class of blacks and Mexicans in Compton and not have one black or Mexican writer on the list? It’s not like they don’t exist. Then she tried to bring up
To Kill a Mockingbird.
“That’s a book that shows white people helping black people,” she said.

I wanted to tell her what she could do with Scout and her
To Kill a Mockingbird,
but instead I asked her, “Why can’t we ever read about black people helping themselves?” She had no answer. And she wonders why the kids in our class groan whenever she assigns us a book.

So, ever since then I read whatever Mama throws my way. The guys know she’s going to school, but that doesn’t keep them from busting on me once in a while about her working in a cafeteria.

“Yeah well, she’s still going to college,” I said, brushing off the sarcasm. “She said a lot of her classmates did all kinds of stuff in high school that helped them get into college. Some played sports; some were class president; some played a musical instrument . . . you know, stuff like that,” I said.

“He already plays a musical instrument, Shawn,” Trent said. “The skin flute!”

He doubled over in laughter and took us with him. I guess he couldn’t resist.

“That’s it! Now see what you did? You asked for it, Trent, that’s what you did. You had to make me bring out the bags, didn’t you? Well, I got something for you.”

Lorenzo stood and made his way to the trash can to deposit his mangled pomegranate shells.

“Ya mama so fat, she burped and took out a couple of trees!”

“OOOOOOOHHHHHH!” me and Andre shouted to let Trent know Lorenzo hit his target with a bull’s-eye. Like he always does.

“But you know what, Trent? You lucky. I’m a let you off with just one because these pomegranate seeds made my tongue hurt.”

My watch ticked closer to the witching hour, so I dusted my seeds away and stood.

“Speaking of Mama, I gotta get to steppin’.”

We exchanged handshakes before I took off. As I got up from the bench, Trent called out: “Shawn . . . what you gonna tell your mama about your ankle and sneakers?”

I shrugged and threw my hands up. “I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”

The park voices faded as I left DuBois and the guys behind. My sneakers, one of them half the sneaker it was a few hours ago, steered me back to Aunt Gertie’s.

Yeah, I’ll think of something, but what?

SNAPSHOTS from the day flipped by in my head to the rhythm of booming bass bumping out of a rainbow of cars parading down the streets.

Lorenzo bagging. Marisol in sunshine-yellow pedal pushers. Marisol laughing. Sigh. The fellas’ mouths pressed against the window. A pink fur coat dusted with broken green beer glass. The “pink slip.” Black Bruce Lee. Blades of green grass. Blue lint balls in empty pockets. A lime-green house. Faded lime-green doghouse. Silver dog chain. Yellow fangs. Bloodred sock. Torn white sneaker. Pink pomegranate seeds. Trent rushing Lorenzo. Lorenzo swimming. Laughter. Laughter. And still more laughter.

A smile slid across my face as I looked to the sky. Janine’s image snapped into my brain, so I painted her picture on a clear patch of blue. My imagined paintbrush sketched a close-up of the gold cross glowing against the crack of her honey-colored chest. I scratched that image and slid down to her legs, stroking the wide curves of her hips with brushes of bright yellow. Sigh.

“Heyyy, watch it, brutha man!” a steely-eyed, charcoal-colored man well past my age snapped at me. A stringy black goatee framed his words.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: mint-green colored him head to toe. From the snapped brim of his mint-green fedora tilted across his oil-slicked black hair to the bright green gem in his left ear, from the mint-green toothpick in his mouth to the tight mint-green collar squeezing his razor-bumped neck, from the wrinkles in his baggy mint-green suit draped over his rail-thin frame to his mirror-polished shoes, he was a minty-fresh sight.

A lightning-bolt-shaped scar struck from the gem in his ear down to the left side of his goatee and crackled as he spoke: “Get yo’ head out the clouds, brutha man, and pay attention to where you going.”

I served up a “sorry.” The toothpick plucked a reply from his gold-toothed mouth: “You lucky Larry Luck in a good mood today.”

Larry Luck? OK. My eyes followed his peacock strut down the block. Past the barbecue shack. Past the check-cashing place. Past the liquor store. Past the beauty salon to the end of the block, where his green heels stopped. Hot pink heels met him at the light. A dingy pink fur coat rested on top of the pink heels.

Wait . . . is that . . . ? Nah . . . it couldn’t be. Shoot . . . it is.

The coat belonged to none other than the behind-the-liquor-store squatter we saw earlier. I didn’t need to see her again. Or want to. Especially in that nasty coat. It reminded me of all the nasty stuff that was on it: Fatburger wrappers and broken pieces of glass.

I continued on my way. My ankle tingled when I stepped off the curb.

What am I gonna tell Mama? I’ll be at Auntie’s soon.

I gotta think of a story. Fast.

Let’s see . . . I hopped a fence to get our ball and my shoe got caught.

Nah. Which fence was I hopping? And why was I hopping it? That won’t work.

Think, Shawn. Think.

Maybe she won’t notice the shoe. I mean, it’s on my
foot.
It’s not like it’s my shirt or something real obvious.

Doesn’t matter. I gotta come up with something. She’ll notice it. She always does.

How about . . . I let Lorenzo borrow my shoes ’cause he didn’t have any b-ball shoes and he busted them?

That’s funny, but that won’t work either. What shoes would I play in?

Shoot. One more block after the liquor store on the corner.

Think. What did we do today? Hang out. Shoot the breeze. Play ball. Or as Passion would say, “A whole lotta nothing!”

Just like every other day.

All right. Where do we spend most of our time? Walking. On the streets. Anything can happen on the streets.

Wait . . . instead of it being an accident, maybe I did it on purpose.

Mama’s always getting on my case because I want the latest styles and stuff, so what if this was a new style for sneakers? What if I cut them down like this on my own to be in style?

Yeah. That’s good. That could work.

What about the shorts? She probably doesn’t even remember what color shorts I had on this morning anyway. Doesn’t matter, I still need an excuse just in case.

Let me see. Ummm . . . we were at the Tamale Hut and Lorenzo spilled a soda on my shorts so Trent let me borrow a pair of his that I changed into at his house. His mom is gonna wash them, and he’ll get them back to me later.

Sounds good to me. Yeah . . . while I was at Trent’s, the fellas busted on me about my Stars not being “in style,” so I trimmed them while I was there.

I ran through the story a bunch more times and couldn’t find any holes. Looking at it now, you would never know the sneaker was ripped apart by an angry pit bull. Thank goodness. If she found out we were stealing pomegranates . . .

She already gets on my case about hanging out with the fellas, because she thinks they’re in some kind of gang. She’s only met Lorenzo, and that was a few years ago. It didn’t help that he was wearing his big brother’s jacket that day with
D-Bone
printed on the back in Old English lettering; like some of the gangbangers wear. Or that the jacket was blue, the color of the Crips.

Back then we didn’t know what gangs did, but we knew they existed. Lorenzo’s older brother Dayshaun was friends with a few ’bangers, so we thought it was a cool thing to do. That’s why he “borrowed” his brother’s jacket that day. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that we learned what being in a gang meant.

We had been on our way home from school one day, walking past the back entrance of Carver Park, when we saw five guys in creased blue jeans and assorted blue shirts. Their black faces were hidden by blue bandannas, like outlaws in the old West. Crips. Cut-down golf clubs and garden hose cut into short pipes were their weapons of choice as they took turns inflicting pain on a red-clad body sprawled on the ground. Each swing got a different response: a whack on muscle with the hose pulled out an “unnnh” like a hard punch to the gut, and a swing of the club on bone yanked out a horror-movie scream. That’s probably what it felt like for the guy on the ground: a horror movie.

The screams had gotten louder as we got closer. A pair of eyes peeking over one of the blue bandannas caught me and Lorenzo staring and snapped a picture with narrowed eyes. We turned away as he raised his club and were gone before it came down.

By the time we had huffed and puffed our way to the Tamale Hut a couple of blocks away, I knew red and blue didn’t mix. So did Lorenzo. Now we knew the difference between the two. They were different, but the same: two colors to be avoided whenever possible.

Aunt Gertie’s street was now under my feet as I walked past all the familiar houses on the block. For the most part, it was a quiet and clean street: nice lawns with trimmed green grass, nice cars here and there in each driveway, lots of trees, lots of old folks, and lots of porches.

Miss Johnston, her neighbor a couple of houses down, could always be found on her porch in her chair enjoying the fresh air. Most days she’d be waving “hello” to anyone who drove or walked by. For me, she always had a “Whatchu say there, Mr. Shawn?”

Then there was Mr. and Mrs. Wright, who lived next door to Auntie. They were older and only spoke to me once in a blue moon. Most of the time they just eyeballed me like I’d stolen something or was about to.

On the other side was Miss Bricknell, Aunt Gertie’s sworn enemy. I hated seeing her. She was always telling me something like: “That auntie of yours needs to turn down her TV. I can’t hear my stories.”

It looked like she was sucking on a lemon when she spoke.

By late afternoon, when Aunt Gertie’s bottle had taken full effect, she could usually be found in front of the TV cursing Miss Bricknell. “What that old hag really needs is a man in her sorry life. Thas what she needs. Uh-huh. Thas right. She need somebody to warm up that big ole, cold empty bed of hers. Uh-huh. Thas what she needs. She need a man to take the chill off them cold bones of hers. Uh-huh. Shooooot . . . talking to me about . . . my stories and all that other foolishnesh. It’s jus foolishnesh is what it is. Uh-huh.” The end of her sentence was punctuated with a wave of her glass and a taste of the contents inside.

Miss Johnston was out front as usual. A white housedress with orange flowers covered her body, and white house shoes covered her feet. Her reading glasses hung on a chain around her neck as she did a crossword puzzle. She was way up there in years, but that didn’t keep her from sitting outside every day. She always seemed to have a smile on her face, and a day never went by that she didn’t have a visitor.

“Whatchu say there, Mr. Shawn?” came the familiar call. “My, my, my, you are getting big, huh, chile?”

“How you doing, Miss Johnston?”

“Oh, you know, just enjoying the light of the Lord on another glorious day” came her familiar answer. “You tell that auntie of yours I said hey and that the Lord is watching over her, ya hear?”

Said with a smile on her face and love in her heart. As always. Maybe that’s why she had so many visitors.

“All right, Miss Johnston. I will.”

Miss Bricknell, on the other hand, was the flip side of that coin; she never had any visitors. Aw man . . . is that her? Yup, the sourpuss herself. I caught a glimpse of her in her garden and tried to hurry inside.

The hat on her head spun around as I stepped through the gate. “Shawn? Shawn! I know you see me, boy. I don’t know what your auntie is doing in there, but she got all kind of racket coming from inside — the TV, music, and Lord knows what else. I can’t even hear myself think. My rosebushes need my full attention, and that auntie of yours ain’t helping. You tell her I said . . .”

I didn’t wait for the end. I ran up the steps and into the house to run through my story again. I still had time before Mama came to pick me up, which meant I had time to eat something. Those pomegranates were good, but I needed real food.

The “racket” Miss Bricknell mentioned hit me as I stepped through the door. Two talking heads on TV argued while the radio blasted a mix of music and static. It
was
hard to think. My stomach did the thinking for me. Food. I need food.

Where’s Auntie?

“Auntie, I’m home!” I shouted.

I searched the house. She wasn’t on her regular spot on the couch in the living room, so I checked the kitchen. My nostrils twitched as I recognized the smell. My aching feet stepped from the stained brown carpet to the faded white kitchen floor where, stretched across the dirty tiles, lay Auntie, her bottle on the counter towering over her.