The Fight Within (47 page)

“I don’t know.” He laughed without joy, staring down at his sparkling white Nike tennis shoes, the kind most kids his age adored. “I said I came down here to thank you, and I did. But, honestly, I don’t even know why I’m here… That shit coulda waited until I saw you at my house tonight.”

“Yeah, well, stop playing games, please. You know why you’re here. What’s going on, Brian? What’s the problem?”

They were quiet for a moment or two…

“I really ain’t got nobody to talk to.” The boy kept his head down and pushed his feet off on their sides, back and forth, back and forth, nervously moving about in the cheap orange plastic chair. “I mean, I got friends…but I don’t want to talk to them about this stuff. I don’t like everybody knowin’ my business. That’s where people mess up…running off at the mouth, and then they can use that shit against you. It’s best…” He paused, seemingly trying to talk himself out of releasing his demons. “It’s best most times just to be quiet, keep that to yourself.”

Sean leaned in a bit closer and wrapped his arm around the back of the boy’s chair.

Brian gradually raised his head and stared into his eyes…

The intensity…the hurt was written all over his poor, wretched face.

He has his mother’s eyes…nothing but soul…

“My mother really likes you. She trusts you and uh,” he looked away once again, rumpling up the material of his jeans, playing with the stiff wrinkles he’d created in the dark denim, “that made me want to stop messin’ around, making things hard for you and try to see what you were all about. Plus, when I confronted you when we first met, you ain’t backed down. I had mad respect for you after that. On top of that, I could see you loved my mama, and you wasn’t a bad guy… I figured you ain’t deserve all of that. Even after how I treated you, you did this for me, told your friend about my dream. At the studio, the way you acted with me, like…like you’d known me forever. And just like, I don’t know,” he shrugged, then looked back at him, “how you treat Asia and everything, it made me miss my father even more… I wish—I wish my dad acted like
you
.” He swallowed and stared down at the floor, his body hunched over a trifle, putting distance between them. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.” Sean nodded.

“Are your father and mother married? Are they together?” the boy questioned, keeping his gaze fixed to the floor.

“Yeah. Yeah they are. Happily married, actually.”

The boy sniffed and nodded, as if the revelation pleased him and elicited jealousy all at once.

“Asia and I are not really on my dad’s radar right about now.” He grinned…a sad grin, the kind that made Sean’s heart beat a bit slower, fall a bit and flip with anxiety. “I call him and he always acts like he’s too busy to talk. He’s been real angry lately, more so than usual. I don’t know what’s goin’ on.” His shoulders slumped. At that moment, Brian sounded like the child that he actually was. Instead of hearing sixteen-year-old style bravado, a boy pretending to be a man, the truth was revealed. Brian had dropped the mask of protection, allowed vulnerably, inviting Sean inside once and for all. He accepted his fate and fell into his natural role of a hurt child.

“He talks to my mother all crazy sometimes, but she comes right back for him even more now, and that just makes him more pissed. What really got me fucked up is that uh…” he ran his finger against the inside of his palm, fidgeting like mad, “he called me the other night, not to see about me or Asia, you know, ask how we was doin’… he ain’t ask about us at all. All he wanted to know was about you and my mama. He ain’t even know I’d been in a fight that day, got suspended for two days.” The boy scratched the side of his nose with his left pointer finger, and hunched over a tad bit more.

“You were in a fight?” Sean smirked. “That must’ve been what your mother was upset about the other day but told me she’d talk to me about it later. All I knew was that it concerned you and school.”

“Yeah.” Brian shrugged. “Probably. It wasn’t even my fault, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t say hi or nothing. He called me on my cell and asked if you be spending the night at the house and asked what you two do, where you go together, all kinds of shit like that.”

Sean took a couple of seconds to roll the information around in his mind then asked, “And how did you respond?”

“I told him I didn’t know. I lied to him, and I ain’t even care that I had. He jealous I guess…who fuckin’ cares?” He shrugged. “I know one thing though.” Laughing, he sat back in his chair and crossed his ankles, taking a slow gander at him. “I know he isn’t shit and I hate his guts…I know
that
.” The tension in the room grew tenfold. Brian sucked his teeth as he grinned, the kind of smile a motherfucker gives right before he punches a bastard’s lights out. “I know he only cares about his goddamn himself. He ain’t even want kids, man. He think I don’t know that, but I do.” He nodded a time or two, as if he hadn’t said anything too important.

“Why would you think that?”

“’Cause one time when I was like ten or somethin’, they were arguing in their bedroom late at night and I heard him say, ‘You wanted these damn kids, not me! Now you mad because I’m never home with them but that’s not my fault…’ Some shit like that.”

The tightness in his chest increased at the cruelty of the words the boy had overheard. He wrapped his arm around his back, hurting badly on his behalf. Brian looked away, yet kept on going…rolling in his pain.

“I don’t even think my dad love me, man. I think he
thinks
he does, but I don’t believe he truly does. My mother was the one who did everything for us. He always seemed to think since he was makin’ money and buying us shit, that made him a good father. That don’t make a you good dad, man. That make you a fuckin’ sponsor!” the boy roared. Sparkling tears made a show of themselves in the corners of his eyes.

Sean ran his hand slowly over the boy’s back, trying to soothe him, comfort him, as he spilled his guts.

No problem, he’d help him clean that up, too…

“Fuck the money, Sean! I’d rather have the man!” The words sank deep inside of Sean’s soul in a way that Brian could never in his wildest dreams comprehend. The very premise he wrestled with, fought with deep within his heart…the ol’ mighty dollar and what it meant—how it had changed his life and made him hate ten percent of the population—was the very thing that Brian hated too, but the boy detested it for all the
right
reasons…

WAKE.

UP.

CALL.

Dead presidents don’t love nobody…

“My mama think she can do it all, but I think she now realizin’ she can’t…and she mad. She mad that she can’t fix what she never broke in the first damn place. I used to think,” he said as a tear ran down his face; one slow tear against the boy’s smooth, mahogany skin, “that uh, I hated her too…that she was somehow responsible for how I feel. But that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, either. My mother gets on my nerves sometimes.” He laughed lightly and ran his hand over his knee. “But…I love her, and I know she loves me and Asia more than anything in this world. I never have to question that. I never have to worry about her not being there for me, taking care of me. We even joke sometimes and yeah, we go at it, argue at times, but I never questioned whether or not she is down for me, would go to bat for me. She a good mom but I don’t tell her often enough.”

Sean nodded in understanding but said nothing, instead allowing the boy to purge while he quietly listened.

“My mama is a good woman, period. I ain’t stupid, though I might seem like it to some people… I know what I got at home. A lot of these guys at my school, their mamas don’t pay attention to them at all. They too busy out shoppin’ ’nd shit, showing off and talking about designer purses. Their mamas don’t be at nothing, but my Mama do. Tired and all, she be there. But it ain’t enough, man! I’m just…I’m just so mad, Sean! She don’t understand!” The boy’s arms and hands shook and he moved them about, as if not completely certain what to do with his limbs. Another tear, then another, streamed down his face as his expression contorted with some deep-dish pain he’d buried in a trash heap within his heart.

The boy turned completely toward him, his face now fully exposed, showcasing the wet evidence of his grief.

“Brian, it’s okay to be mad.” He paused, grabbed a napkin from his bag, and handed it to him. He waited couple of seconds while the kid wiped his tears. “You just have to find constructive ways to get that all out, to release it. You could use music, you could use all sorts of things, but you have to stop self-destructing. Your mother is afraid you’ll be a statistic. She worries about you so much, and rightfully so. Your actions don’t only just hurt
you
, but your mother, too.”

“You had it good though, man! I can see it!” Brian glared at him, suddenly rearing back as if he were sitting next to an adversary. “Your parents still together and you had a good childhood. Mama even said so.”

“Yeah.” Sean nodded, not daring to try to act like it was rough and tough under his roof. “I did. I had two loving parents who, though a bit crazy,” he laughed lightly, “love me and my brother a whole heck of uh lot, and made a lot of sacrifices to ensure we ate every morning and night, had a roof over our heads, and felt loved. But, that doesn’t mean everything for me was peaches ’nd cream, Brian.” He leaned a bit forward and scratched his head. “Because it hasn’t been. I’ve had some problems along the way…my share of trouble.”

Brian looked at him for a bit, then swiped the soiled napkin across his face, removing a fresh layer of tears.

“Like what?”

“Well, like a lot of crap. For one, I walked around for the longest with a chip on my shoulder. I felt like the world somehow owed me something. There was other stuff too, but I got that bad attitude because sometimes, in school, people would say dumb shit, and my brother and I would react with violence. I don’t know what you got into a fight about the other day, but imagine that going on in your life on almost a daily basis, and no one gave a shit to try and help, intervene. That is what my brother and I knew, that’s how we grew up. There were no anti-bullying memorandums, laws and sign-up sheets. You got what you got. Boys will be boys. That was the code; it was how we dealt with problems—you’d fight. Nothing got examined or talked out. You just got jumped! End of discussion. This wasn’t a joke.”

Brian glared at him, holding on to each word he uttered.

“Everyone was like this. This is what our peers were doing—fighting. Not this candy shit you all do, where you knife and shoot people. We’d fight, beat somebody damn near to death because it helped relieve stress when in fact, we were both angry that we didn’t have what other people had…like the people on T.V. I didn’t live in the belly of poverty, don’t get me wrong, but I grew up in a time frame where people were real image conscious. The ‘80s and ‘90s were like that.”

“You had to
look
a certain way,
talk
a certain way,
be
a certain way. I was
none
of those things that people aspired to. I was a man of few words. My family didn’t have shit, I was broke and everyone knew it, but to make matters worse, I didn’t hustle, so I was looked at as not even cool enough. A lot of my peers were sellin’ drugs, running numbers, stealin’ cars, shit like that. Most of those same guys are in prison now. But at the time,” he shrugged, “that’s how you overcame it. I didn’t do any of that shit. Not because I was afraid of the police, but because I was afraid of my father and trust me, he was far worse than 5-O!” They both laughed.

“Anyway, I had one good friend and a few associates. My one good friend, who I’m still very close to, had a lot of money. He was born into it, and now he’s a big time Wall Street broker. His parents were both surgeons. He was a good guy, took a liking to me after I helped him one day when he was getting beat up. I’ll never forget it. I didn’t want to help him. He was one of the popular, rich kids that hung out with all the other rich kids that used to mess with me, talk shit…but he got into it with someone, fists flew, and he was getting fucked up. I couldn’t just stand there and keep watching it happen. I knew that wasn’t right. So I jumped in the fight and took care of it, and he and I have been friends ever since, but other than him,” Sean shrugged, “I really didn’t have nobody besides my brother for a while.”

Sympathy popped on Brian’s face. That wasn’t what Sean wanted. He felt a bit silly at telling these stories from his past, a little vulnerable, too. Nevertheless, he continued on.

“So, you know, I could fight pretty good and I liked it. I never lost a street or school fight once I hit high school,
ever
. I got a reputation of being the wrong guy to try to test in that way, but something really interesting happened, in the midst of that.”

“What?”

“I discovered I was funny.” Sean nodded and smirked, and noted the acknowledgement on Brian’s face.

“…You are. That’s the first thing she mentioned to me when she was telling me about you. Mama says you crack her up all the time, too.”

“I’m glad…I just want to make her smile.”

“Brian,” he said after a short pause. “I found this out by playing the dozens with some black and Hispanic kids in my class who were crackin’ on me. I thought up my insults on the fly, no rehearsed material, and soon enough, I got a reputation as being hilarious. And that made me feel
really
good. The people that used me as a human dartboard for their insults were now my friends. Suddenly, no one cared that I didn’t dress the best anymore. I had a lot more friends,
real
friends, and got respect, because I could make people laugh, ya know?” He smiled.

“I got that sense of humor from my parents, a gift from them to me, only it was just a byproduct of who they really were as people. My father never tried to be funny I don’t think, he just was that way inherently, and the same with my mom. They are two of the funniest people I know. I think that’s why they always got along so well. Humor was their medicine when times got rough…and I adopted that. It’s easier to smile than to fight.”