The Residue Years (4 page)

Back in my ride with window cracked, it's Northeast in concert: tires whirring over slick streets, water rushing down a sewer, a dog barking in somebody's backyard. It's Northeast on stage: a stray cat rummaging through a curbside recycling bin, a small black thing darting into the lot across the street. This is the same lot where years ago, I'm talking back when we were living in the house on Sixth (our home then and now though we don't own it), me and my homeboy Half Man and a couple of my patnas from King Elementary would play stickball or football or kickball against dudes from another neighborhood. On days when everyone showed we had enough for six-on-six, but attrition is a motherfucker. It'd be slim pickings for our reunion squad: Half Man, my boy with the lazy eye, and maybe my wannabe pimp patna, but only if we could coax him away from the beefy white broad he brags to anyone who'll listen is paying what she weighs.

Bam!
From nowhere a basehead appears at my window. Say, boss, I'm doing bad out here, he says. Let me get a little bump to set me straight.

Dude's a veteran smoker. Used to see him my second go-round
at curb-serving. Good sense says I shouldn't speak one word, but I speak two: Beat it.

Aw, boss, don't do me like that, he says. I'm not askin for no handout. He waves his arms, fans a noxious funk of mildew, smoke, and highgrade piss and backs into a snatch of light. In that snatch you can see he has a nappy beard that runs all the way down his throat and yellow eyes, my alcoholic uncle Pat's yellow eyes. Right after we'd left for the first time the house on Sixth, back when my moms kept the family level, balanced like the weight you use to zero a digi scale, my always-soused uncle Pat would pop up unannounced plying at her with sob-ass drag: Grace, I just need a place to lay my head a few nights, he'd say, and parlay that few nights into a week, into a month, into a year of living rent-free, drinking the last of the 2%, and spending whole days beached in front of our TV.

I ask dude if he's police cause back in my crucible days an old head told me asking the question would protect me against police entrapment. Dude scratches his head and bores into me with spangled I-get-zooted marbles. C'mon, boss. I'm fucked up out here, he says, as if the shit isn't explicit. I raise the window and shoot him a glare that's the same as thorough ass-whooping.

This veteran basehead, nappy beard, my drunk uncle Pat's yellow eyes, he drags to the other side of the street. He stops, plucks a small bit off the ground, and, with the rain slapping his skull something vicious, holds it to the sky and cocks his head. He leaves his arm up until it tremors. Then he drops his arm and shakes his head and tosses his find aside. He turns his back to me, slugs off, and in the distance, a shadow swallows him whole.

It won't be an issue at all.
—Grace

The counselor—she wears her hair short as a man's and handmade clothes—glances from a desk messy with papers and pens and a multicolored coffee mug. Hey there, she says. Just finishing. When I sit, my feet won't keep still, so I fold my hands in my lap and dig my heels in the floor and don't let the clock tick off but a few seconds before I get around to what's most important: Where? She picks up my file and runs her finger along the top sheet, her bookish frames free-falling down the slope of her nose. She tells me my housing assignment, the Piedmonts, and you couldn't pick a place with more addicts and dealers, a place with more to tempt. Oh my, I say. Is there any place else?

I'm afraid not, she says, and tweaks her frames. She goes on about denied grants and budget cuts and program closures—excuses she must think consoling, but aren't in the least—and takes out a triplicate-copy contract and asks me to read it.

She tells me that my caseworker will have the details, but that the gist is I give them nine months to a year clean as an outpatient, and they set me free and clear, clean slate. She flashes teeth coffee-stained to light ocher. Here's my best advice, she says. Affirm, affirm, affirm, and do it every day. Find a new group of friends if the old ones are users. Choose new places to hang out
if the old places are triggers. You should also do yourself a huge huge favor and take up a hobby, she says. Reading, drawing, cooking, sewing. She leans over her desk and points at the sheet and explains the penalties for breaking rules. She claims she's confident I won't. She waits for a response that isn't forthcoming. Let me be the first to congratulate you, she says. Don't mistake today for anything but progress. For the next nine months you're pretty much free to do as you please save breach the contract or break a law. Just nine more months and we cut you loose.

They tell us in times like these to affirm.

I am a child of God
.

I place my life in the care of God
.

I believe in a power greater than me
.

Before I say I can't, I will say I try
.

Grace, Grace, she says. Are you here? Do you anticipate trouble?

No, I say. No issues, I say. None.

She tears apart the copies and hands me the bottom sheet and bullies me into a hug. Nerves are natural, she says, and steps back. But you have the tools to make it. You have the tools and you have us. So if ever you need, you stop by, she says. It's open-door and I mean it. She hands me a voucher for food and toiletries. We are a resource, she says. We are your partner. She takes out a camera and poses me against the wall and snaps a portrait. She tells me when I finish outpatient, she'll post it on her wall of champions.

In my room, I fold and smooth shirts, pants, blouses, my one skirt, audit socks for matches, check stockings for runs, couple bras to panties, and pack it all in my nylon suitcase and duffel. I
swipe ledges for dust, sweep and resweep the floor, inspect the desk drawer; I count empty hangers left in the closet, take apart my bunk, and turn my sheets and blanket into squares. I lie across my bunk and, for the umpteenth time, read old letters, greeting cards, my old intake papers, the last few months of progress memos.

I throw on my jacket and slide a picture into my front pocket, the only one I can find of all my boys, together. It was taken at Canaan's first birthday, ten years ago now, the year KJ started first grade, Champ finished junior high, the year Big Ken and I split for the last time. This was also the year my word, in ways that measured most, began weighing less than it should, a time before my case and the sentence that sent me down state and my boys, my precious loves, for a time with their father.

I loll in the hallways, peek into my friend's rooms, coax them into long-winded good-byes.

You wait so long to leave and when it's your turn you wait as long as you can to leave.

I am not alone
.

I am capable of change
.

I am the change I want to see
.

At last, I end up under a covered bus stop with my duffel slung and my suitcase squatting by my side and my cherished birthday picture tucked in the pocket over my heart. There's only one other person down here with me, a rugged-faced man wearing a stained work shirt and thick-soled boots. The man pats his pockets with an unlit filterless cigarette teethed between his lips. He asks for a light and I offer my Bic and he cups his hands against
a gusty wind. He gets it lit and takes a drag that must be Zen, and though it wasn't on my mind, I tamp out my slim menthol and light up myself. The bus arrives before long and I crush my cig under my foot and lug my duffel and suitcase on board and haul them to the back, where a boy—he got to be somewhere between the ages of my youngest two—with spiked green hair is slumped in a seat with a battered skateboard laid across his lap. It's fall, but the boy's wearing a T-shirt that, without even looking, you can see right through it, cutoff shorts, and dingy tenny shoes with no laces. He thumps his board and jerks his neck to what must be a song in his head, oblivious until we reach Northeast, where he signals his stop, leaps into the street, and skates off against traffic.

Stops later, a bad wind blows a familiar face on board—Michael. Well, well, well, I'll be gotdamned, he says, swaggering my way. Ms. Corporate America in the flesh. Fuck a month, ain't seen you in a year of Sundays.

Hello, Michael, I say. Please call me Grace. Those jobs were years ago.

Once in corporate America, always a corporate American, Michael says. You know how it is, most times it ain't where you at, but where you been and with who. Michael smiles, unveiling missing teeth and a wrong-colored tongue. He rubs an unshaven cheek and stabs his cake cutter deeper into his kinky afro. The man smells as if he should bathe in hot bleach.

Say, where you been hiding? he says.

Hiding, I say. Haven't been hiding nowhere. More like laying low.

Sheeit, ain't nothing wrong with that, he says. Come to think of it, somebody tell me, I forget who, that you was in diversion.
Judge sent my black ass there when I caught my first possession. But after living a coupla months with all them rules and regulations, I told em, fuck it, send me to the penitentiary. He picks something out of his teeth and flicks it on to the floor. He plops in the seat next to mine.

Now, they cuisine, he says. From what I recall, they cuisine wasn't all that bad. Indeed it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi, but every blue moon you'd close your eyes and that shit was damn near fine dining. Michael chuckles and scratches his head and checks the bed of black gunk under his jagged nails. You finish all them phases, or they still got you leashed on that paper? he says.

I give him my back and watch the blocks scroll—the apartments, the duplexes, the record store, Check Mart, a black-suited Muslim hocking papers outside the beauty supply.

Oh, oh, I got it, Michael says. Cool, didn't mean no harm. You know me. Might get it fucked up every now and then, but a brother mostly means well.

There's a spotted run of days between this man and me. So many times of us stumbling into a plasma center at the end of a week run, and blowing, with no qualms whatsoever, the few dollars they paid, plus whatever change we had in our pockets, of us striking with smirks, buying from the nearest dealer, and racing to get loaded: in an alley or abandoned building or, in a bind sometimes, the unisex bathroom of a resturant in Old Town.

Michael looks at me and I look at him and we trade blame, pit against each other our past, strength, will, pride, faith.

By the way you looking, I say, about now, an in-patient program would do you good.

Cool, cool, I see you up there on your stallion, Michael says. But check it: make sure you hold them reins real, real tight.

He don't hazard my way again. He opens his window, and fake busies himself with emptying his pockets of junk. He gets off on Skidmore and waves good-bye at half-mast.

Stops later, when I get off, it seems as if I've stepped into a movie on pause the whole last year. I tug my things past a totaled car and yards of ankle-length grass, past a bent street pole and a pair of tagged stop signs, tug it up to the front gate of the Piedmonts, a weathered apartment complex enclosed by a tall wrought-iron fence. I buzz and smoke the next-to-last cig in my pack while I wait. The lady that shows clasps my hand in hers with strength. She leads me to a building in the back that houses an office furnished with an oak desk, lawn chairs, and a rack of color-coded keys. She hands me a sheet and tells me to read it with care. It's our rules, she says. Rules beyond your program contract. She tells me the complex is a drug-free zone, that any tenant caught on the premises with drugs or paraphernalia will be reported to the police and put out.

She leads me to my unit, offers a canned script of assurances, and skirts off the moment I turn the bolt. I drop my bags and kick my heels off by the front door. Someone has slapped fresh paint on the walls, shampooed streaks in the carpet, nice touches, but a front room won't tell you whether you can stand a place. To know that, you best get to checking the bathroom. How wide this bathroom is, if you stretch out your arms you can palm both walls, and how high, if I hadn't kicked off my heels, I could almost touch the fan.. The tile is mismatched and curls where it should lie down. The tub and toilet are scrubbed to off white. When I trust the faucet, it spits rusted water that takes a moment to stream clear.

You've been here before, I tell myself. Weaker and with less to lose.

I take a long breath in.

Let a big breath out.

Take a long breath in.

Exhale—enormous.

Air sucks through the fan. Cold tile bites through a hole in my stockings. I take out the picture of my boys and wedge it in a corner of the mirror and hit the light switch. The bulb flickers to a soft glow and I finger the photo's curled edges—see my three boys, my precious loves, in all the light there is.

… but it's tough when most years, most days,
she looks so vintage.
—Champ

Back when we were straight. When we were living with my great-grands in the house on Sixth, home, back when Mom's checks kept me and KJ laced in new shirts and laden with toys, back when she kept a corporate job that paid a bonus, back then Mom came home at the same time day in, day out. I'd sit at my window and watch her pull up (we kept a new ride back then), and would book to the top of the steps and damn near implode waiting for her to sway through the door dressed to impress the world in wool-blend pants and silk blouse or a skirt suit with a broach pinned to her lapel, plus jewels you could hock for a new self on her fingers and wrists. The routine. Mom would say my name the way only she could, the way only she can, and flash a smile that never seemed even infinitesimally fake. Then she'd call me down, doff the tenny shoes she wore to and from work but never anywhere else, bright white shoes she kept stitched with sparkling double-knotted laces yanked so tight it's a wonder her feet never fell off from lack of blood. My mother would grip me in one of her spine-bending-breath-stopping hugs, set me free, and, while I was working to catch my wind, would shuffle off towards the kitchen where my great-grandparents,
Mama Liza and Bubba, were waiting to hear of her day. My M.O. was I'd lag, wait till Mom was well out of sight, snatch up her tennies, untie her tight-ass knots, loosen the laces so she could slip them on the next morning no hassles. Set them side by side, and vanish before anyone in the house witnessed. It was the most I could do for her back then and may be the most I have done for her since.