The Boy in the Black Suit (11 page)

“I don't know. I guess I've been waiting to show someone who would . . . get it,” Mr. Ray said. “And, well . . .” He didn't finish his sentence. He just took the last few gulps of his coffee, a little trickling down his chin, black like oil. He wiped it with the back of his hand and stared into the cup like it was a crystal ball.

I didn't say anything. I just kind of watched him take a few
more moments down memory lane, back when he could make the game-winning three-pointer, then kiss his girl after he came from the locker room. Days long gone.

“You play chess?” Mr. Ray suddenly snapped out of it and set his mug down. Seemed like such a random question.
Chess? Right now? In this dungeon?

“A little. I mean, I can play, but I'm not like a master or nothing like that,” I fumbled. Truth is, I just wasn't very good. But I knew some guys who were super good. Like three-move-checkmate good. Funny enough, Chris was one of them. It was a way he kind of got through a lot of things. Smacking heads in chess. And in the hood, if you can play chess, you get some respect.

“Good, 'cause I don't wanna play,” he said, relieved. Like I was going to ask him to play. “It's an overrated game that people, especially New Yorkers, think is the friggin' holy grail of games. Like you can learn all there is to know about life by playing chess. A bunch of bull.” He shook his head.

People did make it seem like chess was a game about life and that you have to always think out your next three moves and the moves of your opponent in order to win . . . at life. I always thought it was wild to see dudes you knew were hustlers playing chess for hours. Junkies come cop dope from them right in the middle of the game. Crazy. But Chris used to always tell me that drug dealers played to keep their minds sharp. To always know their next move and the move after that. I guess most of them weren't too good at chess, because they still got caught.

“What about I-
DEE
-clare War?” Mr. Ray leaned forward and
rested his arms on the old table. He looked me dead in the eye.

“What about it?” I leaned back a little.

“You play?”

“When I was, like, six.” I laughed.

Mr. Ray didn't laugh. At all. Not even a smile.

“Let's play,” he said, sliding his chair back from the table and reaching for a deck of cards on the shelf behind him. “This is a real game.”

Mr. Ray slid the cards out of their soggy box and attempted to shuffle them, but the cards were so old they kept sticking together. So he just laid them all on the table and mixed them up like a child would do before playing Go Fish.

“This is really the holy grail of games,” he said, dealing the cards one by one. “The game of life.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” He lifted his eyes from the cards and gave me a five-second stare down. “See, in chess, you plan everything. You strategize and all that. And even though we like to believe life goes that way, let me tell you, son, it don't.” He waved his hands around as if to say,
Look at this room. This is proof that life don't always go as planned.
But I didn't need to look at his walls to know that. All I had to do was look at my father. Or sit in my empty house at night. I was definitely with Mr. Ray on this one.

“But this game here, I-
DEE
-clare War, is how life really goes down.” Finally done dealing, he picked up his stack and held it in his hand, face down. Then, he flipped the first card.

“I flip a card, then you flip a card,” he explained, and waited for
me to turn my first card. A six. His was a ten. “Sometimes I win”—he raked the cards off to the side, close to him—“and sometimes I lose.” He flipped another card. An eight. This time I turned a queen and beat him.

“And sometimes,” he continued while flipping another one, “I can lose and lose and lose and I don't know why. But there's nothing I can do but just keep flipping the cards. Eventually, I'll win again. As long as you got cards to keep turning, you're fine. Now,
that's
life,” he said, pushing another hand I won over to me.

Chapter 7

AGAINST THE RULES

A
FTER ME AND
M
R.
R
AY
'
S
dungeon adventure, things kind of smoothed out for a while. Well, maybe not smoothed out, but at least there were no more surprises. And that was a good thing. Me feeling crazy about my mom dying was still there, bugging me the most at night when I was in bed, and Tupac probably wasn't helping, but even the pain was just becoming a part of me. The dreams of my mother sitting with me at her own funeral kept coming every night on schedule, and y'know, I started to look forward to them. It was like our time together for a few hours that felt only like a few minutes, making me happy to see her, but leaving me disappointed to wake up to an empty house in the morning. But at least I was sleeping through the night. And at least, when I woke up, I knew why my father wasn't home, and it wasn't because he was dead too.

Mr. Ray, who became like a big brother to me—well, maybe more like an uncle—was worried about me staying in the house by myself. But I assured him that I was fine. I mean, it's not like I was a kid. Not to mention, I was at school for the first part of every day, and with him for most of the rest of the day, so I was actually only alone in the house at night. And all I would do is look through my mom's old cookbooks—not that I was cooking anything—and try my best to go to sleep.

Mr. Ray took me to see my father every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before school. While I went in to see my broken-up pop, Mr. Ray usually stayed out in the lobby and talked to the receptionist who'd helped us the first night. Looked like Mr. Ray hadn't lost all his cool yet, and that lady was getting a healthy dose three times a week.

The first two weeks of Dad being in the hospital were the roughest, mostly because his mouth was wired shut, and there was a skinny tube shoved down his throat, which I learned was how they were feeding him since he couldn't chew. You ever seen liquid food pumped through a tube, straight down a man's throat into his belly? Not cool.

They also were giving him less pain medication, so at least he was able to keep his eyes open long enough to know I was there. I remember the third morning I showed up, it was the first time he was all there and not doped up on medicine—he looked at me and squeezed his eyes into little slits as if he was trying to make sure it was really me, standing there. I was dressed in my funeral suit. All black. I could tell he was confused.

“No, you ain't dead yet,” I said. “This ain't your funeral.”

He grunted and I could see his stomach bouncing a little under the white sheet from him wanting to laugh but trying not to because of his broken ribs. He couldn't smile, but I could tell by the look in his eyes he was happy to see me. And probably happier that I wasn't the grim reaper.

By the third week they had transferred him to the rehabilitation center next door, which was good. Even though recovery was going to take some time, it was better than sitting in that hospital. Nobody likes hospitals. He probably would've been in rehab sooner if it wasn't for all the other injuries. They finally pulled that hose out of his throat so he was able to talk again. So glad I wasn't there to see that. Gross. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.

“Man, it was terrible,” he said, his voice hoarse and muffled. “I mean, I really thought it was gonna choke me to death before they got it out.” He used the back of his tongue to scratch the inside of his throat, ribbitting like a frog.

Whenever I would go see him, he spent most of the time asking me questions. It felt like he missed a lot of my life, even though it had only been about three weeks since he'd been out getting wasted every night with Cork. The first thing he wanted to know was what was up with the suit.

“It's for work. Remember I told you I'm working for Mr. Ray? Ray's Funeral Home?”

My father bugged his eyes out. “I don't remember you telling me that.” Of course he didn't. The morning I told him he was too
busy pretending he wasn't hungover. He looked skeptical. “Well, how is it? I mean, you gotta touch dead people?”

I thought of doing to him what I did to Chris when he asked that question, but my father might've flinched and thrown all his broken bones out of whack even more.

“Naw, man. I just help out with the stuff like flowers, and ushering, making sure the cars are clean”—yes, Mr. Ray had me washing the hearses—“and stuff like that. Sometimes I have to be a pallbearer, too.”

My father tried to shift around in bed, squinting his eyes closed in pain at the effort. His legs, still in their big white casts, looked like two albino elephant legs. When he finally got comfortable, he asked, “Well, do you like it?”

“It's cool.”

“Is it paying?”

“Yeah.”

My dad nodded. “Well then, you like it.”

Yeah. I liked it. Man, I
loved
it. And I would've still done it even if Mr. Ray didn't pay me the thirty bucks. But I couldn't tell my dad that. I couldn't tell him that school was boring and pretty much a big blur every day, where I daydreamed about dead people and their brokenhearted family members most of the morning, and was still managing to pass with nothing lower than a B. No way would he have understood that. No one would've.

Working at the funeral home was the best thing I had going for me. It was my golden ticket, almost like a
VIP
pass to any funeral I wanted to go to. Each one was different. Different people,
different places. But the one thing that was always the same was how the closest person to whoever the funeral was for reacted. Day after day, week after week, funeral after funeral, I searched for that person—almost always sitting in the front—and watched them deal. Saw them rock back and forth, the sound of their hearts breaking, weeping, sobbing, all in the pitch of pain. Desperately begging for help in a room full of uncomfortable people who want to be helpful, but just don't know how. Because they can't help. Nothing helps. I knew that. Every time I saw them, the closest ones, bent over in tears, it felt like a warm rain came down inside me. Even though I knew that I couldn't help them and they couldn't help me, just knowing that we were all struggling with this thing . . .
that
helped.

And you wouldn't believe how many different kinds of funerals there are. Hood funerals, like Dante Brown's, where all of his friends showed up in all red, and dropped red bandanas, big heavy gold chains that looked fake, and crew pictures in his casket. It's weird to know when people have guns in church. Makes it hard to close your eyes when it's time to pray. The Bloods stood all along the back wall of Cornerstone Baptist. Each one wore sunglasses, tattoos peeking from under the collars of their T-shirts, permanent frowns on their faces. I stood along the side wall. I mean, I didn't think anything would happen to me if I stood in the back with them, but I wasn't going to take any chances. Plus, the side wall gave a better view of Dante's mother and girlfriend, sitting in the first pew, holding each other face-to-face, their tears mixing. The sound of them crying and shushing the
cries of Dante's newborn baby boy at the same time is one I'll never forget.

Or the funeral of Marie Rogers, a happy funeral. Marie passed away in her sleep three days after her hundredth birthday. She was a New York City school teacher for forty years, and after she retired, decided to travel the world with her husband. Then, once Donald died, she decided to become a painter, and had a pretty good career the last thirty years of her life, as an artist. So her funeral was pretty cool. A lot of people got up to say how she influenced them. Even some of her old students, who were now almost eighty years old. That was wild. To hear an eighty-year-old talk about how he had been affected by this woman seventy years ago was amazing. She outlived all of her family, including her only child, Bernard, who didn't have any kids himself. So as you can imagine, the church wasn't too full.

Of all the people who got up to talk about Mrs. Rogers, there was one person who got up there and then couldn't say anything, who just couldn't get the words out—Mrs. Rogers's helper. Her name was Ola. And Ola, out of everyone who was there, was the only person crying. She had spent the last ten years with Mrs. Rogers, looking after her, talking to her, driving her around. She was the closest to her. And though this wasn't a sad funeral, what Ola was feeling, nobody else could.

And, yeah, there were funny funerals. The funniest was Glendale Price's. Mr. Ray told me that Mr. Price was a friend of his from way back. He said my mom might've even known him, because he was an actor who mainly did theater work on Broadway,
and had gone to the same school as my mother when she was chasing her acting dream. Mr. Ray said Mr. Price was pretty successful, but refused to leave the hood. He said Mr. Price used to always say, “I was born here, and I'm gonna be buried here.”

He had lung cancer, something else Mr. Ray made it a point to say.

“Yeah, he was my buddy. He'd invite me and Ella to his shows—this is before he was doing Broadway—and we'd all go out afterward and run through a pack of smokes like it was nothing.” Mr. Ray half-smiled and half-frowned, probably thinking about his own cigarette habit that he couldn't kick, even after cancer. Twice.

Mr. Ray went on to tell me that when Mr. Price found out his lung cancer was terminal, he started working on what he thought would be his best role ever. To play himself, at his own funeral. The only catch was, he only wanted the play to be seen
at
his own funeral.

I'll tell you, it was like no other funeral I had ever been to. People filed in and were handed a program as they took seats. On the cover there was a picture of Mr. Price, and it read:
THE FUNERAL OF G
LENDALE PRICE, A COMEDY
. The program listed a cast of characters, and of course when it got to his name it said,
GLENDALE PRICE, AS HIMSELF.

So you'd think it'd be all sad, especially since they left the casket open the whole time, but actually the play was pretty funny. It was about this guy, Glendale, who spent his whole life playing different characters on stage, and how when he died, all those characters showed up at his funeral to talk trash about him. It was like one
of those roast things celebrities have, but better. It was like clowning on the block. The only character I recognized was Hamlet, who went off on Mr. Price in Shakespearean talk. Hilarious. Mr. Grovenor probably would've loved it.

Everyone was laughing, holding their guts and their sides as these actors gave Mr. Price his final wish, and acted out his funeral play, a comedy, at his funeral. At the end of it all his wife got up to speak. Her smile was big and you could tell that she had had quite a laugh herself.

“And the award for best actor goes to,” she called out, then she looked down at the casket, “Glendale Price!” Everyone laughed and stood and clapped for Mr. Price, lying there stiff as a board in his burial box. There was no smile on his face. No final bow. Nothing. Mrs. Price's smile faded a little. Just a little. Most people probably didn't catch it because they were too busy clapping. But I caught it. She never broke down, but that split second when the truth of the matter flashed across her face was all I needed to know it was there.

Besides the happy, sad, and funny funerals, there were the super quick in-and-out funerals, or as Robbie Ray called them, drive-bys. There was also what they called “reunerals”—funerals where people showed up who the rest of the family hadn't seen in years. A reunion. And not only did long-lost members of the family show up, but they usually turned the whole service out with screaming and hollering. One time I even saw a woman try to climb in the casket with the dead person. One of her family members damn near had to put her in a headlock to get her to sit down.
Mr. Ray said it's always when people die that we start thinking about the wrong things we did to them, and that reunerals were the funerals where the guilty came to apologize.

Then there were the disorganized funerals. These were the worst, only because they usually lasted the longest for no reason at all. Nobody ever knows who's supposed to read the obituary. The little girl they chose to read the scripture can't read. The old choir members are having a hard time remembering what song to sing. Nobody knows who the pallbearers are. Just a mess. During these funerals Mr. Ray would usually just take charge and get it done. No matter how crazy or boring the funeral was, it didn't matter. As long as I could spot the person hurting the most, I could feel the warm buzz filling me up inside, like a hit to a junkie. And to be honest, I didn't feel like such a creep about it all like I did when I first started sitting in. Don't get me wrong, I still knew it was weird, but as long as I got out of there before the repast—as long as I could disappear before anyone started asking questions—I was cool. No repasts. Ever. That was the rule.

But of course, like all rules, there was one time—and one time only—that I broke it. November twenty-fourth. Two days before Thanksgiving, three months after my mother's death, and two months after my father's accident. I went to the rehab place to see him early that morning. His jaw was all back to normal by then, the wires out, his ribs were healed, and the casts were off, but the leg exercises they had him doing—the ones I saw—looked painful as hell. He basically had to learn how to walk again. Dr. Winston was there as usual, even though he wasn't the rehab doctor. The
rehab doctor was Dr. Fisher, who wasn't really as funny as Dr. Winston, but she was nice. Dr. Winston was just there to make sure everything was going smooth—and to crack some early-morning jokes.

“Okay, Mr. Miller, we gotta work out these legs. But listen here”—Dr. Winston leaned in a little—“today it's not gonna just be machines. Today we're going to actually get you upright, and I'm not gonna lie, it's gonna hurt like hell. And to top it off, you're going to have on a hospital gown, which means your ass is gonna be out. And I say this to add, don't cry. No one wants to see a grown man with his ass out, crying like a baby. Trust me.” Dr. Winston smiled.