Single Mom (31 page)

“Yeah, Mom, you won’t have to watch Jamal today. My friend Jay is gonna watch him,” Kim told her mother. “They get along good together. I think Jamal needs a man in his life,” she said, looking toward me with a grin.

Jamal was all over me. I was sitting there feeling like a turkey on Thanksgiving, ready to be carved the hell up!

“I like how you just ran with things like that,” I told Kim after she hung up the phone. I didn’t think the shit was cute, either! “But since I’ll be watching Jamal,” I said, “we could use this extra time that you have now to make it to work to talk about things.”

Kim nodded her head like an eager Girl Scout. “Okay. Let’s talk.” She walked over and sat down next to me and her son. With all three of us sitting on the couch like that, I couldn’t help noticing that we appeared to be like an average American family.

Suddenly, I had problems getting my words together. “Ah,” I mumbled. “What I wanted to talk about is, um, you know, where we, ah, see ourselves.”

Kim hunched her shoulders. “Like I said before, I can’t force you to do anything.”

“And that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” I responded. “I mean, what is it that you want me to do? What do you really want from me?”

Kim slowed down and looked right at me. “If I have to ask, then can I
have what I want from you?” she questioned. She looked sexy as hell when she asked me that! I wanted to do her in a heartbeat, but her son was in the way. Besides, she had to be to work soon, and since I had been staying with her, I had gotten used to getting the long treatment instead of those wham-bam quickies expected by uncommitted visitor types.

I said, “That’s what I’m still trying to ask you. What is it that you want? I mean, I’m already here as much as I can be. You know I still have other things to do.”

“Yeah, but it just seems like I don’t have your full attention when you’re here. It’s like a piece of you is always missing. I want to have
all
of you.”

Kim was dead serious. In the past, whenever women talked about men not giving their all, I used to act as if it was an alien philosophy. In my immature years, maybe it was. But I had done a lot of growing up over the last couple of months of being with my son again, and I realized that women knew what the hell they were talking about. I
wasn’t
giving my all. I wasn’t quite ready for that last hurrah. I was still wondering if a wedge would come between Kim and me to make things unbearable for a long-standing relationship. I was holding on to my last boat of freedom, and at the same time, I realized that my ship was sinking. I was getting too old to keep playing them same old games. I was tired of feeling detached from shit, like how Neecy had me feeling toward my son. I was tired of feeling detached from a job, and counting down the days before I would be laid off or fired again. I knew exactly what Kim was saying, because I wanted the same thing. I wanted to feel that I was a part of something too, and not just a temporary component that wasn’t always needed. I was tired of living that way.

I stepped up to the plate and asked, “So how are we gonna do this? Do we start all over and lay down the rules? I mean, there’s just a whole lot that we need to discuss.”

Kim said, “Well, we don’t have to rush it. We have time.”

I shook my head. “Time is just getting in the way. Now either we’re gonna settle this or we’re not. Because you’re not
acting
like we have any more time, especially with the way you’ve been going off lately. You said it yourself, you don’t know what to expect from me. So let’s get to the bottom of it.”

It occurred to me at that moment that Kim was just as paranoid as I was. When you’re not used to having things go your way, you don’t know how to have any faith in your future. Kim was actually giving me room to squirm my way out of anything serious, because she was afraid of
things breaking down again. How many relationships had broken down on her before? It was the same predicament that made Neecy so tough to handle. They had a lack of confidence in others, particularly in black men, and I honestly couldn’t blame them for that.

I realized just how difficult a situation single mothers were in. They couldn’t just lock on to a guy, and since they couldn’t, they had no confidence in continuing any relationship with a man. A steady man for Kim was like a dream where you always wake up just to find out that you’ve been bullshitted. I knew those dreams well. I had them when I was in prison. But after the first year inside, they just faded away from my consciousness. From then on, the only dreams I had were about protecting the pieces of myself that I had left. That only makes you skeptical of every situation you find yourself in while you’re awake. It seemed as if someone was always after you, and you’re forever feeling guilty about shit, while just waiting for things to fuck up again. It was an ugly way to live.

Kim and I were both silent for a minute. In fact, Jamal was doing the talking.

“Are you gonna take me to get a haircut?” he asked me.

I smiled and nodded to him. “Yeah, it does look like you need one.” I ran my hand through his hair. Jamal had hair growing down his neck. “When was the last time you had a haircut?” I asked him.

“He got it cut three weeks ago,” Kim answered.

I was surprised. “And it grew this much already?”

Jamal had really thick kinky hair. He could have grown a hell of an Afro! His baby pictures proved it. I guess I hadn’t been noticing too many things in my detachment from him. A man who was planning on staying around would have noticed.

I gave my attention back to Jamal’s mother. “Well, have you thought about it? How are we gonna work this out?”

Kim took a deep breath and stood up. She seemed more hesitant about the state of our relationship than I was. “Look, let’s just talk about this later on. I mean, you just caught me off guard, and now is not the time for it. I have to be to work soon.”

I began to smile. I had called her bluff, and Kim was backing down, but I wasn’t bluffing anymore.

I said, “When is gonna be the right time to talk about this? I mean, you said you wanted all of me, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to force you to do nothin’.”

She kept repeating that as if she really could
force me
to do anything. If that was the case, it would be a lot less single mothers walking around.

I said, “Trust me, Kim. You’re not forcing me to do anything. I’ve been
forced
to do things before, and I
know
the difference.”

She calmed down and asked, “Was it tough being in there?” She was referring to my prison time without using the word around her son.

I said, “Now, you know I don’t have to answer that. We’ve talked about this a hundred times.”

She looked at her son and said, “Well, could you make sure that he knows. I don’t want him
ever
to go in a place like that.”

When she mentioned that, I thought about my own mother. You had to be strong and consistent with your boys, leading by example, like Neecy was doing with both of her sons. You could never be passive while
sounding
like you’re on the job. Kids always notice the inconsistencies. Maybe my mother’s fussing while overprotecting her boys was not the right way to go, because in the end, she couldn’t protect us, and all of her fussing fell on deaf ears.

I thought about Jamal, Little Jay, and Neecy’s other son, Walter. “Oh, he won’t be in there,” I answered Kim. “Not if
I
have anything to say about it.” And I meant that! It was too many black boys being sent away from society already. I guess that’s because society didn’t want to make room for them in the first place.

I went with a sudden urge to wrestle Jamal down to the couch, where I held him tightly. Of course, he thought I was only playing with him, so he wrestled me back. In actuality, I was telling him, as well as myself, that I would take on the job of trying to secure him a healthier future than the past that I had.

Kim smiled at us and said, “Well, I have to get ready to go. We’ll talk about this over the weekend. Okay? I’m just really surprised right now, that’s all. I have to get all of my thoughts in order.”

I smiled back at her. I knew exactly how she felt. I had dodged many bullets the same way. I said, “All right, you do that then. That’ll give me a chance to get my thoughts in order, too.”

Kim looked at me and nodded. “Okay. So that’s how we’ll do it then. We’ll both think it over.”

After she walked out the door, it was just me and Jamal, face-to-face and all alone for the first time. I immediately thought about his future as a black man in America. Black men were not ready-made mules to the workforce like many women had become. It was in the average man’s nature to have a say in his livelihood, and without it, most men went to self-destruction, like my father and his health, and Neecy’s father with his drinking. Men have an innate desire to feel as if they are in control
of something. In America, few black men had control over anything. So how in the hell could black boys survive without going to jail and joining in the madness of feeling caged? We felt caged whether we had freedom or not, because we had no control over anything. I thought about how difficult it would be to save Jamal from that terrible fate of powerlessness with no real power of my own. Yet I had to try anyway, and see if I could make a difference.

“So what do you want to do first, little man?” I asked him.

“Um, we can go get my haircut, and then we can go to the movies?”

“The movies? To see what?”

“I want to see that dinosaur movie again. I saw it with my mom. It was scary.”

“
Jurassic Park?
That’s not out anymore. We could see if they have it out on video.”

“Okay. And then we could make some popcorn,” he suggested.

I never liked popcorn. I hated it getting stuck in my teeth. “If we make popcorn, I’ll let you eat it all by yourself.”

Jamal was in love with that idea. “Oh, all right,” he told me.

“So what barbershop does your mom take you to?”

“My grandmom takes me to one on Madison Street.”

Madison Street ran straight through the West Side, and all the way out to the suburbs. There was plenty of activity going on, too, all night long on that street, and much of it was illegal. I knew that personally. I had been there. There had to be at least ten barbershops on Madison, but I had an idea of which one Jamal’s grandmother took him to. Kim had mentioned the place to me before.

I nodded. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was actually talking to a six-year-old. Jamal had seen a lot in his six years, and he seemed to know all of the answers. He spoke with a lot of clarity, too. When Little Jay was his age, I got a bunch of shoulder hunching and “I don’t knows.” Maybe Neecy was just as negligent with Little Jay in his earlier years as Kim was being with Jamal. It didn’t help much that I wasn’t there to do
my
part, or Jamal’s father not there to do his.
We
were definitely negligent! Yet some kids were much harder to ignore than others. Jamal Levore was the hard-to-ignore type. I wondered if his father had ever spent any quality time with him.

“You ever go to the movies with your father?” I asked him. It seemed real easy to talk to him.

He said, “No. I don’t like him. He’s mean. And he don’t buy me toys for Christmas, and for my birthday.”

I chuckled. “Buying toys isn’t the only thing that fathers do.”

“I know, but he’s just mean, and he always tells my mom that he don’t want to watch me.”

I felt like an iron crowbar had slapped me across my face. How could a kid talk so freely about his father’s negative attitude toward him? Jamal seemed unaffected by it. But I knew that he
had
to be affected. There was no way he couldn’t be. However, his willingness to talk about it would benefit him in the sense that someone could always reach him. All you had to do was ask and listen.

I thought about my own son and had to be honest with myself. With Little Jay’s passiveness, it was a damn good thing that he grew so tall and mastered the art of basketball. Otherwise, he would have been a really hard kid to reach. Basketball was bringing a lot of attention to him, even my own.

I went out on a limb and asked Jamal if he liked me.

He looked up at me and smiled. “Yeah,” he answered.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because you’re fun,” he told me. He didn’t miss a beat.

“What if I wasn’t fun?”

He finally paused and gave me the hunched shoulders. “Then I wouldn’t like you.”

I laughed and stood up to get ready to go. “Well, I’ll make sure that I’m fun so you’ll always like me. But you have to listen to me when I tell you to do something, too. Is that a deal?”

He nodded, standing up beside me. “Yeah.”

“All right then, let’s shake on it,” I told him. I extended my hand, and he shook it. “Now, let’s go get this haircut.”

As soon as I stepped outside with Jamal and rounded the corner for the bus stop, I spotted Barry, the weed man. He was cruising by in the passenger seat of a black Ford Explorer. He rolled down the window and smiled at us.

“I see you’re becoming a family man. How you like it?”

I thought about it. “It’s something we
all
need to get used to,” I said.

Barry nodded. “Tell me about it. I got three of ’em myself.”

“Do they know you?” I asked him. In the 1990s, it seemed like a sad but relevant question to ask a brother.

Barry said, “You damn right they know me.” He seemed offended by it. But I didn’t care about his feelings. Brothers had more ego than character
sometimes. Not to say that
I
had made a full turnaround, but at least I could see the difference in the two words.

I asked Barry, “Do they
really
know you, like on an everyday basis?”

Barry smiled and shook his head. “Man, I ain’t around them every day like that. I got business to take care of. But they
do
know me. I’ll see you around. Aw’ight?” he said in a hurry. Then his young driver pulled off. Barry caught me at the wrong time and had jumped on the wrong subject. I knew damn well he didn’t spend any time with his kids. The only reason he even mentioned them is because he saw me with Kim’s son.