Out of the Madness (12 page)

Co-Chief also introduced me to Mary, an old white lady in the area. She lived in a brick house where vines grew wildly. Her
backyard was fenced and her front porch had several old couches. The woman was clearly over seventy and lived with her ancient
mother. Mary bought almost anything, old coffee makers, tires, dogs, and dishes. Co-Chief and I would find someone’s valuable—at
least valuable to us—and sell it to her. I even stole—or caught—dogs and was able to get ten or twenty bucks. Wrinkled Mary
would barely open her front door, looking ghostly white and smelling old, and reach out with her spotty crumbling hand. Sometimes
she would talk in her trembling voice. “I don’t think it’s worth what you’re asking.” And she always kept one hand behind
the door when she handed me the money, as though she held an ax or something. The money, just about every time, went on food
or was given to my mother.

After a few months, we moved into another apartment complex down the street. Mildewed, it had a broken frame, old wood, compact
rooms. We stayed only two weeks. My mother took the rent money—and pushed Sam from our second-story window when he complained.

She did things like that to that man all the time, like busting him in the face with her fist or kicking him. I would hear
her say later how she took after her own mother, who didn’t take nothing from no man.

Sam would shout back at her occasionally, but mostly he tried to reason with her. I know he wanted to respond in kind sometimes.
Yet he never chanced damaging his treasure, upsetting her enough to leave. She was worth the physical abuse he suffered.

Again and again we moved, dotting the small Hispanic area on the outskirts, then back into the more densely populated areas.
Our last move was into the Bottom, a section of twenties housing just below a stretch of the Trinity River, which also ran
through Oak Cliff. Down there, Sam left us. My mother had poured hot cooking grease on him. I guess that shook him up. Wherever
we moved, though, whether five or ten miles away, Junior kept his job. He would walk there through biting storms or freezing
cold for the few dollars.

While our escape from the projects had eased some problems, it had sprung others, like all this moving. The more we moved,
the more we realized we could never get the family engine cranked. Education slipped farther away. My real mother, who was
inside that woman, the person with the infallible wisdom, appeared less. I was stealing. We still had no guidance, had never
had guidance. And each time we relocated physically, we became more entangled mentally. We had been away from the projects
less than a mere two years. But all too soon, the confusion of our lives was being agitated greatly.

I
n 1985, an Italian restaurant in glittering downtown Dallas hired me as a busboy. Being fifteen and still underage, I had
to lie on the application; and the circumstances left few alternatives. Nothing would keep me from having my first job on
the payroll. I went down to interview for the job after a friend had told me to rush over there because the restaurant was
hiring. They were offering first-come, first-served jobs. So I had jogged straight to the restaurant, knowing the place would
be stampeded once word spread among the anxious black teenagers. I had entered the quiet restaurant shortly after lunch hour.
A white man gave the interview. The only question I remember him asking was my age, without even looking at me. I was hired
on the spot with two other boys. It didn’t take much to qualify for these jobs.

I was excited and naive about my new job. I walked out the front office believing that with my busboy position, I would provide
all the clothes and things I needed and had been missing, especially food. My starting salary was $3.35 an hour, five hours
a day ($100 per week), but I didn’t care. That was like a million dollars to me. I had been given rocks to eat all my life,
so this sand was like steak.

With this job, I also got to see the Dallas I wasn’t familiar with. Downtown had the big-city stores, expensive restaurants,
and a wide variety of boutiques and shops. Each time I went there, I was overwhelmed by the sheer splendor of the skyscrapers
and busy people walking up and down the crowded streets: the whites in their starch-stiff gray clothes, most of the blacks
dressed casually or in work uniforms. I would hang at a corner or let my bus pass several times, so I could watch the crowds
and gaze at the buildings.

I also located the uniquely designed central library, which had several spacious floors with thousands of books. Before and
after work, I would go there, grab several books, and glue myself to a chair in some corner. Later I applied for a library
card and began taking my books home with me. Over the past two years, my reading had slackened, but at this library I regained
the former pace.

On the other end of downtown was the two-story restaurant. Pipes were exposed on the ceiling, and old artifacts decorated
the lobby area: statues, telephone booths, coin games. Spacious bars were on both floors.

“More bread at that table. This couple needs more water,” the mostly white, gay waiters would shout to us black and Hispanic
busboys, dressed in our white T-shirts with the restaurant’s logo printed on the front. The busboys were responsible for keeping
fresh bread and water on the tables, seeing that ice bins and water pitchers were filled at each workstation, and quickly
cleaning the messy tables after customers left.

I stayed busy at work and became friends only with the black dishwasher. I was so gratified to be working until I only had
time for my job; besides, if a busboy worked very hard, within two years he could move up to five dollars an hour, I was told
by the hiring manager.

I was so happy to be receiving money, I sometimes would look at my check stub over and over. My family had been without steady
money for so long that I believed I could make a living working at the restaurant the rest of my life, that the job was the
jackpot, and not a stepping-stone or a means to an end. I was so desperate for money that the weekly mediocre checks seduced
me. The stealing stopped. And the job became my life for several months.

This was in 1986. My mother and I were living with an elder named Wayne*, whom my mother and I had been with for several months.
She had wasted no time after Sam packed his bags and went home to west Dallas. She had told us to gather our belongings and
had a man take us to Oak Cliff, to the house of a man in his late sixties. When I first walked through the door, Wayne had
given me that all-too-familiar glare, the kind that said “If it weren’t for your mother, boy, you wouldn’t step a foot inside
my house.”

Wayne was a gray man, the stubborn kind who would argue with you all night about anything he thought was true. Each Sunday
morning he performed his deacon service at some church, and each evening he drank wine with his old buddies at the corner
house. Wayne, in the beginning, was like the men in the past, in that he had no interest in me but was tolerant because of
my mother.

And I was aware of the sacrifices my mother made, staying and sleeping with men like him so that her children would have a
place to stay. I knew she still had her womanly desires, to be loved and held by a man she really loved. But most of the ones
who accepted us were unattractive, drunkards, elders, freeloaders, or dope fiends. If not for her children, she could have
gotten into better situations. Many of the high shakers would have loved to have her. Wherever she went, though, no matter
how lucrative the offer, she would never accept unless her children were included. This motherly responsibility, thank God,
was still a part of her.

We moved into a damp wooden house on Denley Street, near the Veterans Hospital. Here, our living environment went down another
level, for the house was in terrible condition. There was little insulation and no heat, so cold seeped easily through the
walls. When we first moved in, the toilet didn’t work, forcing us to use a bucket instead. The house smelled constantly of
dead rats, rotten food, and body waste from the bucket in the bathroom. Cooking was done on a small hot plate, and since we
had no refrigerator, food was kept in an ice chest. But my meticulous mother attacked the dirt and smell in that house until
it was tolerable.

I slept in the small back room on a mattress filthier than the one I used in the projects. Since my room was closest to the
bathroom, the grotesque smell stayed back there, even after the waste bucket had been emptied. My body fevers, which had stopped
for a while, came back. The sickening smell nauseated my soul.

My mother and Wayne slept in the front room, where a small electric heater gave them warmth. She and I rarely talked. Our
relationship was just one of toleration. That person wasn’t my real mother anyway. She stayed gone with her dope fiend friends
for days, in the neighborhoods where heroin was more concentrated. She drained Wayne of his money. But, of course, he didn’t
care, as long as his fine young woman was with him.

Shortly after we moved in with old man Wayne, Junior left. He dropped out of school and enrolled in the Job Corps. While waiting
on his eighteenth birthday, the qualifying age to join the Job Corps, he stayed impatient, having heard all the wonders of
the government’s advertisements about Job Corps, the real chance. On the day after he turned eighteen, he was on a Greyhound
bus to San Marcos, Texas, hastily wanting to find this opportunity. My sister, whom I seldom saw, still lived with my aunt
Cheryl. So I was the only one of my mother’s children still with her.

I became a slave to the restaurant. Since I was required to punch in at a designated time, I would begin without punching
my time sheet, giving the business free labor, hoping to impress them. Once the regular time began, I would work feverishly
without taking breaks, bringing water to the mostly white customers, keeping bread on the ten or fifteen varied tables (which
could hold from two to ten people). If a busboy could clean the tables rapidly and help the waiters satisfy the customers,
the waiters would tip him. To stay ahead, I tried to have the tables cleaned before the customers left. Eventually I was deemed
an exceptional busboy. The waiters would try to get me into their stations, which meant happier customers and, therefore,
more tips.

The gay waiters there despised us blacks, the way I had seen whites do in the past. They would turn their noses up at us busboys,
even if they were gay, and flirt with other races. I foolishly had believed gay men did not have enough people to choose from
to be that selective. I remember my conversation with one waiter in particular, the first person to tell me that I was a minority.
I was baffled to learn that we did not represent at least half the American population. He told me that his preference for
white males had nothing to do with race, but more with his view that few black men were middle class, his social class, and
he wanted to date someone with the same background. Several weeks later, a new busboy, a Hispanic who was not middle class,
let us all know one day in the kitchen that this same white waiter had propositioned him. His problems with blacks, whatever
they were, proved stronger than his sexual desires.

I became so skilled at being a busboy that on Sundays the managers would let me bus the entire ground floor of the restaurant—covering
an area that usually required three or four bus-boys—all alone. I think the management also had plans of making me a porter
because they made me receive maintenance training from the Hispanic porter. But before I got that far, they found out my age.

After the manager fired me, I was disappointed for a few days. Being able to buy food, give my mother money, and catch the
bus downtown were the things I would miss the most. After I lost my job, and since I had quit school, I hung around the house
more. Now all I did was read, clean up around the house and in the front yard, or watch my mother.

She was becoming very secretive about her activities. On the days when we were at home together, she would get dressed in
some of her better clothes and walk down the street. I watched her do this for several weeks but thought nothing of it. I
figured some man was showing her a good time. But while she was somewhere out there, something had moved her once again to
give her religion another try.

She had joined another church. As I have mentioned, the church had revolving doors, and the constant promises of peace and
happiness preached by the ministers always drew people like her back for another dispirited tangle with the religion. But
whenever she was inspired to try to redeem herself, whether a member of a church or not, she became caring and sweet.

I believed these infrequent times of closeness between her and me always made up for the weeks and months of neglect. During
them, she would talk to me about my childhood, about as a baby how curious and mischievous I was.

“You would keep somebody up all night with your questions, if they let you. You wanted to know everything,” she said. On Denley
Street, I still had questions.

“Momma, why can’t you get off drugs?” No longer attempting to hide the problem from me, figuring I was mature enough, she
would explain how heroin affected her.

“It’s a physical sickness unlike other dope,” she would say. “That’s the reason it’s hard to kick, because of the sickness
it gives you.” She said how important it was that the person stay around positive people if they ever did kick. “If you go
back into the same neighborhood, into the same situation with the same people, you get right back on drugs. I have left heroin
alone plenty of times,” she told me. “I know I’m wrong for what I’ve put my children through. I try and try, baby, but I just
can’t do it all by myself. I hope my children can one day forgive me.”

Over the next few weeks, perhaps inspired by this growing relationship with her son, maybe stirred enough to try to bring
respect to herself, to heal her gaping wound, she continued going to church and staying home more, pacing the floor at night,
sweaty and sick. Something I thought I would never live to see was happening. One day at a time, week by week, she was leaving
the dope alone. I was encouraging her and buying her womanly things like stockings and perfumes with the little money I had.
But I think she knew her death was imminent if she did not change soon; knew she would either succeed in freeing herself or
die.