Leaving: A Novel (45 page)

SANTA RITA JAIL

TODAY I READ
from Claude Brown’s narrative,
Manchild in the Promised Land:

Most of the time, I would go up to Harlem on the weekends, because this was the only place I knew to go when I wanted some fun. It seemed that if I stayed away two weeks, Harlem had changed a lot. I wasn’t certain about how it was changing or what was happening, but I knew it had a lot to do with duji, heroin.

Heroin had just about taken over Harlem. It seemed to be a kind of plague. Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out. People talked about them as if they were dead. You’d ask about an old friend, and they’d say, “Oh, well, he’s strung out.” It wasn’t just a comment or an answer to a question. It was a eulogy for someone. He was just dead, through.

At that time, I didn’t know anybody who had kicked it. Heroin had been the thing in Harlem for about five years, and I don’t think anybody knew anyone who had kicked it. They knew a lot of guys who were going away, getting cures, and coming back, but never kicking it. Cats were even going into the Army or jail, coming back, and getting strung out again. I guess this was why everybody felt that when somebody was strung out on drugs, he was through. It was almost the same as saying he was dying. And a lot of cats were dying.

I was afraid to ask about someone I hadn’t seen in a while, especially if it was someone who was once a good friend of mine. There was always a chance somebody would say, “Well, he died. The cat took an O.D.,” an overdose of heroin; or he was pushed out of a window trying to rob somebody’s apartment, or shot five times trying to stick up a place to get some money for drugs. Drugs were killing just about everybody off in one way or another. It had taken over the neighborhood, the entire community. I didn’t know of one family in Harlem with three or more kids between the ages of fourteen and nineteen in which at least one of them wasn’t on drugs. This was just how it was.

It was like a plague, and the plague usually afflicted the eldest child of every family, like the one of the firstborn with Pharaoh’s people in the Bible. Sometimes it was even worse than the biblical plague. In Danny Rogers’ family, it had everybody. There were four boys, and it had all of them. It was a disheartening thing for a mother and father to see all their sons strung out on drugs at the same time. It was as though drugs were a ghost, a big ghost, haunting the community.

People were more afraid than they’d ever been before. Everybody was afraid of this drug thing, even the older people who would never use it. They were afraid to go out of their houses with just one lock on the door. They had two, three and four locks. People had guns in their houses because of the junkies. The junkies were committing almost all the crimes in Harlem. They were snatching pocketbooks. A truck couldn’t come into the community to unload anything any more. Even if it was toilet paper or soap powder, the junkies would clean it out if the driver left it for a second.

The cats who weren’t strung out couldn’t see where they were heading. If they were just snorting some horse, they seemed to feel that it wouldn’t get to them. It’s as though cats would say, “Well, damn, I’m slicker than everybody else,” even though some slick cats and some strong guys had fallen into the clutches of heroin. Everybody could see that nobody was getting away from it once they had started dabbling in it, but still some people seemed to feel, “Shit, I’m not gon get caught. I can use it, and I can use it and not be caught.”

Guys who were already strung out were trying to keep younger brothers away from stuff. They were trying feebly, and necessarily so, because guys who were strung out on drugs didn’t have too much time to worry about anybody but themselves. It was practically a twenty-four-hour-a-day job trying to get some money to get some stuff to keep the habit from fucking with you.

There was a time when I’d come uptown on the weekend and cats would say things like, “Man, let’s have a drink,” or “Let’s get some pot,” or “Let’s get some liquor.” But after a while, about 1955, duji became the thing. I’d go uptown and cats would say, “Hey, man, how you doin’? It’s nice to see you. Look here, I got some shit,” meaning heroin. “Let’s get high.” They would say it so casually, the way somebody in another community might say, “C’mon, let’s have a drink.”

I’d tell them, “No, man, I don’t dabble in stuff like that.” They’d look at me and smile, feeling somewhat superior, more hip than I was because they were into drugs. I just had to accept this, because I couldn’t understand why people were still using drugs when they saw that cats were getting strung out day after day after day. It just didn’t make too much sense to me, but that was how things were, and it wasn’t likely that anybody was going to change it for some time to come.

Then money became more of a temptation. The young people out in the streets were desperate for it. If a cat took out a twenty-dollar bill on Eighth Avenue in broad daylight, he could be killed. Cats were starving for drugs; their habit was down on them, and they were getting sick. They were out of their minds, so money for drugs became the big thing.

I remember that around 1952 and 1953, when cats first started getting strung out good, people were saying, “Dam, man, that cat went and robbed his own family. He stole his father’s suits, stole his mother’s money,” and all this kinda shit. It was still something unusual back then. In some cases, the lack of money had already killed most family life. Miss Jamie and her family, the Willards, were always up tight for money because she spent the food money for playing the numbers and stuff like that. This was the sort of family that had never had any family life to speak of. But now, since drugs demanded so much money and since drugs had afflicted just about every family with young people in it, this desire for money was wrecking almost all family life.

Fathers were picking up guns and saying, “Now, look, if you fuck wit that rent money, I’m gon kill you,” and they meant it. Cats were taking butcher knives and going at their fathers because they had to have money to get drugs. Anybody who was standing in the way of a drug addict when his habit was down on him—from mother or father on down—was risking his life.…

CHAPTER 3

JULY 1986   •   LIDA 26, LOVE 7, LI’L PIT 2

OVER THE NEXT
few years, Lida’s habit grew worse. She was in a deep nod most of the day, scratching her arms and staring at parts of her body for hours. When she wasn’t nodding, she was turning tricks to make a quick buck. Her habit cost her seventy dollars a day, and usually she found the money. David had introduced her to a few of his friends, and she didn’t need to go on the street to sell herself. At first, she always knew a man willing to give her ten dollars for a blow job, even in the last months of her pregnancy. She had felt pride in that aspect of her life, that she was not some street whore, but more of an in-house friend of friends. When she called on her customers, it was an implicit rule that they talk to her nicely, offer her a beer, ask her about Ronald and Paul. But word had gotten around and the wives and girlfriends of the male tenants gave her nasty looks. Even Gina, who’d come back to live with David, wouldn’t talk to her in the hallways. Her in-house clientele slowly dwindled while her habit increased.

When he came home from practice, Marcus could see Lida was ill, sweating and grabbing at her stomach, but he didn’t talk about dope in front of the kids. Paul was asleep in the bedroom, and Love was in the living room sitting on a pillow in front of the wall where the TV used to be, the one Lida had pawned the night before. He had his legs stretched out in a triangle, his feet against the wall as a trap for a cockroach. He used a butter knife to flip the bug over every time it got close to the perimeter of the world he’d made for it. But the cockroach was fast, and he ended up smashing its back legs and tail by mistake.

“What you doin over there, Ronald?” Marcus asked. “Where’s our TV at?”

“I’m real bad, baby,” Lida whispered.

“Sweetheart, why don’t you go on up to seventeen?” he asked her. “See Sammy.” Marcus always had something on him, but he couldn’t afford his own habit if he gave it to her.

“I’ve been there, baby. I’ve been to everyone, and they’re not home or they wives is in. Just give me a small taste.”

Marcus knew better than to let her get beyond begging. Soon there wouldn’t be anything left to lose and she’d do what she had to.

“Ronald,” Marcus called out. Love didn’t turn his head. “Stop that banging and get me some p-e-a-n-u-t b-u-t-t-e-r.” Love spelled it back to himself and then dashed for the refrigerator. Inside was a stick of butter, jam, and old bread. He knew there wouldn’t be any peanut butter but he had to find the empty jar. The jar was on the counter from lunch and he brought it to his father.

“You are the smartest little nigger I know,” Marcus said. Love bowed his head and Marcus scrubbed him on the back of the neck. “Here. I’m gonna give you this and you get us more peanut butter and get a g-r-a-p-e-f-r-u-i-t too. You understand?” Marcus took out his wallet and pulled a ten from the rows of cash inside.

Lida wiped her lips with her arm and swallowed. “Baby…” she said to Love, but she didn’t continue.

“Get on outta here, Ronald,” Marcus yelled. Love pushed the money down into his pocket and opened the front door. He turned down the hallway and headed for the stairs, then realized that he didn’t have his shoes on. He went back to the apartment, but the door was closed and he thought better of knocking. He had a key of his own, but he heard his father yelling.

“What’d you do with our TV?”

“That was our TV, Marcus! You took that TV from my mama, so I can sell it any time I want.”

“Now you gonna take your mother’s side after what I’ve done for you.”

“That ain’t what I’m saying. I’m just ill, that’s all.”

“You’d sell my own children if I didn’t come by to check on them. Look at this place.”

“Marcus, please, I can’t hear any of that right now.”

“I know, baby. I’m sorry. Listen. Here. I got some rock for you. Hold you over.”

There was silence for a little while. Love turned around and looked down the hallway. It wasn’t a large building, but to a seven-year-old, it seemed monstrous, especially the dark staircase that loomed ahead. He walked toward it silently, barefoot, listening for anyone who might be waiting to mug him.

He could afford to take his time. He knew better than to get the food right away and come back too soon. A year ago he’d done that and found his mother and Marcus sitting naked on their mattress, his mother nodding in the corner and Marcus playing guitar. Love had been sent out for cereal that day. He placed the box of Cocoa Puffs on the counter and then Lida called to him.

“Ronald, baby, come here to your mama.” Her voice was deep and lazy. Half of him wanted to go to her and half of him wanted to run out the door, but it wasn’t often that she asked him to be with her and his father, so he walked over slowly and stood in front of them. He looked down between his father’s legs but the guitar was covering him. Marcus sang, “‘Papa don’t take no mess, ha!’” and played three high chords over and over.

“Come sit here between us, Ronald,” she said. It wasn’t her nakedness that scared him, it was being so close to her and the way she held herself, her dark body curved forward, her legs spread open like forgotten toys. Lida patted the carpet once more, and Love squeezed between their bodies, his arms pressed into his sides. Marcus sang to himself and didn’t seem to notice or care that Love was there.

A few minutes went by this way. White towels hung over the windows and a faded gray light filtered into the room. There was one coffee table and a chair near the food counter and the bed mat on which they sat, and that was all the furniture they had.

Love felt his mother shake, and at first he thought she had hiccuped, but then she sniffled and he saw tears run down her face. Her body spasmed against his. He’d heard of a boy’s mother on his floor who’d died of an O.D., but he didn’t know what an O.D. looked like. Marcus didn’t seem concerned.

“What’s the matter, Mama?” She continued to cry, and her curved body shook even more as she stared forward, her breasts dripping milk over the folds of her stomach. Love took her hand and rubbed on the inside of her forearm, just below the track marks.

“Mama?” He began to cry also, and then Paul began crying in the other room.

They cried for ten minutes. It was like Lida’s whole body was filled with water and it leaked and leaked out over her. He got scared she might cry herself out of breath or that she was hurt somewhere inside and he couldn’t stop it. Love buried his face into her ribs and he heard her heart beat like a washing machine with shoes in it, but soon it sounded like it was slowing down.

Then she stopped crying all of a sudden, and that scared him even more. He stopped crying also, so he could hear if she was choking. There was a long silence, and then she spoke:

“Don’t hate me,” she said into the air.

“I don’t, Mama,” Love said. There was silence for a long while again. The wind blew the towel on the window a little and Love felt Lida’s skin rise in goose bumps all over.

“I hate you,” she said softly. Love looked up at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.

“Why?”

“I hate you,” she said even louder. “I hate you!”

“Why, Mama, why?”

But she didn’t answer him. She rolled onto her side and curled up in the corner with her back to him and closed her eyes.

This time he would stay out all evening and come back when he was sure they’d be asleep. When he saw the light from outside, he ran down the last dark steps and out onto the street. Ten dollars in your pocket wasn’t a bad thing to have, even if it was supposed to be spent on groceries. Marcus always let him keep the change anyway, and Love put his mind on figuring out how much might be left for himself. He couldn’t figure out complicated math yet, but it seemed everything cost one dollar and so one jar of peanut butter and one grapefruit would be two dollars, and he knew ten dollars was a lot more than two dollars. Then he could buy pizza for dinner with a Coke and have ice cream too, and maybe buy a water gun, but maybe that was too much.