The Children of Häm
by Doug Cooper Spencer
Life in the magazines and on tv are alluring, but at what cost for a woman and her twin brother? The Children of Häm a story about family, race, and identity.
“And Häm, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father … And Noah awoke … And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” (Biblical story)
PART 1: Renee stood on the platform in the 14th Street Station waiting on her train. It was a warm muggy morning made even more uncomfortable by the crush of people on the platform. Her husband had suggested she take a car to work but she found that to be unnecessary and a bit excessive so she told him she would take the train. That was the way their conversations usually went; she was used to cutting corners to save money while he was used to having money and had no problem spending it. He had shaken his head in disbelief, “You’re carrying a child, Renee,” he said before dismissively waving his hand to cut the conversation short. He kissed her and went out to the car that had arrived for him. She really had no problem riding the train or buses; and as for her being pregnant, she and Justin had only found out three weeks earlier.
The platform was crowded with morning riders who shuffled impatiently from side to side and craned their necks to look into the tunnels for whatever train they were waiting on. On the other side of the platform Renee saw a #2 train that was headed out to Flatbush Ave and she thought about her brother, Vaughn. They hadn’t spoken to each other as much in the past week as they usually did. Vaughn had left her a message the other day: Hey Netta, gimme a call when you can. He had called her by the name she had been known most of her life growing up in East New York. It was short for Vonetta, but to everyone in the old neighborhood it was understood to mean: ‘Vonetta, Vaughn’s twin’; however, she stopped using her first name and began using her middle name when she moved to Manhattan.
She watched the #2 load up and move down the track, disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel. Brooklyn seemed so far away to her these days, like a distant land with distant people that had faces and language and mannerisms that were almost foreign to her were it not for memory. She had grown up in Brooklyn in the East New York section, but she hadn’t lived there since she moved to Manhattan after she graduated from college. Vaughn still lived in East New York in the house their parents left them when they passed away. She and Vaughn had been the only children their parents had at the age most black folk would’ve have said ‘been there, done that’, but their parents had held off until they built a good life before deciding to have at least one child, and what they got were twins. Both of their parents were fortunate enough to see the twins grow to their early twenties before the parents passed away, first the father, then the mother. Visiting her parents for Sunday dinner had been the main reason that Renee had for going back to East New York, but once her parents died, she found less reason to go back home. She did make it her business to visit her brother and spend time with him every now and then, but the trek there was long, and the neighborhood was distant to where she was now.
A man with soiled clothes and offensive body odor limped along the platform muttering to himself and each person he came near calmly stepped aside to let him pass and to not make contact with him. The man talked to someone in his head and walked on down the platform. The sight made Renee shiver and a knot formed in her stomach. ‘I have to call Vaughn’, she said to herself.
Renee and Vaughn normally talked at least twice a week. He gave her updates on what was going on back in the neighborhood and other parts of Brooklyn because he knew that these days his sister went only as far into Brooklyn as Fort Greene with her husband before deciding they were traveling too far from where the outdoor cafes trailed off. This new Renee bothered Vaughn, yet he knew she had always wanted to live in Manhattan— or ‘the city’, as it is known to most New Yorkers. It was only a one-hour ride on the #3 and Renee knew she’d be there one day.
When she was growing up Renee even had photos of Manhattan on her wall and a photo album of apartments in which she wanted to live and of the type of people she wanted to be with in the city, though very few of the photos were of men and women who looked like Vaughn or herself.
Special occasions were the only times when Renee would visit the old neighborhood, a birthday celebration for a cherished family member was the usual. There were a few times that she went back just to visit, very few, and those were the times when she picked up on the frustration of Vaughn or those cherished family members. Other than that, she had put East New York away in the farthest place in her mind.
On the flip side, Vaughn hated Manhattan. And whenever he did visit he went to Harlem. He was a busy man, so he rarely went into the city. He worked in the post office during the day and at night he painted in his studio as well as worked on the house their parents had left them, but he always found time to call his sister. However, he hadn’t had a chance to really talk with her because these days she was busy, so they sent texts to each other. The last time they talked was when she told him she was pregnant. Vaughn said he was happy for her, but Renee didn’t believe him because she knew how he felt about her marrying Justin. In spite of that, they kept in touch, so she knew she would have to call him.
Renee was fortunate enough to get a seat on the train and she settled back for the ride to work. She put in her earphones and listened to music as she read her phone. The train stopped at the next station and riders debarking and those that were embarking traded places before the doors closed and the train moved on to the next station on the local track. She imagined she would most likely start taking a car to work like Justin wanted her to, but only when she was months along with the pregnancy.
PART 2 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee and Justin decided to not learn of the sex of the baby, but they had already begun running through names, ones they had carried in their heads long before they even met each other.
“Marcus or Tyler if it’s a boy,” Renee said when she and Justin were starting to go over names. “I’ve always liked those two names.”
“Tyler, yeah, but Marcus sounds kind of out of place. Don’t you think? We have to name them for the world they’ll be living in,” Justin said.
“Maybe I’ll move Marcus farther down on the list,” Renee said.
“Or maybe use it as a middle name,” Justin suggested.
Sometimes when they spoke of the baby they used ‘them’ so as to not say ‘it’, but supposed it was twins? What if ‘them’ was correct. Renee felt warm inside as she thought of another set of twins in her family. Naming a set of twins after she and her brother would be nice and could pull Vaughn closer to she and Justin if that happened, but Justin was right, they had to think of the world the baby or babies would be coming into. At any rate, she had already envisioned what the child would look like with a head full of shiny soft locks, if not sandy colored like Justin’s hair, then brown; and her or his— or her and his— complexions would be the color of honey. Renee tried not to have such complete thoughts about the skin tone and the hair of the baby, and she scolded herself for having the thoughts, reminding herself how inappropriate such thinking was but the thoughts came often because there was a place in her for them.
Justin called her as she was going to lunch. He usually called her during the day but since news of the pregnancy he called her twice during the workday, that was how much the news of her pregnancy excited him. Renee’s co-workers knew it was Justin who was on the phone because he called Renee the same time every day. “Tell Justin we said hi, but you have to keep walking, girl. We only have an hour for lunch,” one of the women in the lunch party said.
Justin heard them. “Tell them hi. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Aww… thanks Babe.” Renee spoke quietly into her phone. “I’m fine. I’ll call you when we get to lunch.”
“You don’t have to. I just wanted to tell you I love you.”
“I love you, too. See you tonight.”
The women in Renee’s lunch group were proud and at least one, maybe two of them were even a bit envious of her that had she found someone like Justin, so out of respect of their circumstances Renee usually kept her conversations short and low with her husband when she was with them. She also made it her responsibility to let them know that one day someone will come their way just like that special someone came her way.
PART 3 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee believed what she told her co-workers about she and Justin finding each other because her luck with men hadn’t always been within reach. After she moved to the city she went through a dry spell with men. She did meet one man she liked out of the number that she had met and that either she had lost interest in or they in her; that was a guy named Ben.
When Renee met Ben she was working in a bookstore on the Upper East Side and Ben was a delivery driver. They saw each other almost every day since the store was in Ben’s delivery area. The first time she saw Ben she was struck by how good-looking he was; it was summer, and he wore shorts that showed off his dark colored, slightly bowed legs. That was where her eyes had traveled after they left his broad shoulders and slim waist as he climbed out of his truck. He didn’t see Renee the first day he came in to the store as she was near the back of the store and that he turned over his delivery to the store manager who was at the front counter, then he politely thanked her and hurried back out to his truck, his black work boots moving swiftly across the floor in long strides and out the door where he climbed back in his truck and drove off.
It took a few deliveries before he saw Renee who happened to be at the counter one day when he made a delivery. When they saw each other, they immediately knew each other. Ben politely smiled in a businesslike manner and the two of them made quick reference to the heat before Renee signed the scanner. “Name?” he asked for his log. “Renee.” He typed her name into the scanner. “Ok. Thanks. Take care.” “You too.” Ben smiled and hurried back out to his truck, but before he pulled off he looked back into the store at Renee.
The time Renee spent with Ben was exciting. He was into music, especially jazz and had a special love for Miles Davis, Woody Shaw and Ahmad Jamal. He played their music a lot. Renee spent a lot of time with Ben. Every Saturday morning, they woke to ‘Saturday Morning’ by Ahmad Jamal, and they would lie in bed and talk about any and everything until Ben would on roll on top of her and they would spend the rest of the morning making slow, deliberate love. She really cared for Ben.
Vaughn liked Ben too, even to the point of Vaughn choosing to travel outside of Brooklyn into Manhattan on a few occasions to have dinner with Renee and Ben at Ben’s apartment on West 129th Street. Vaughn was also impressed that Ben owned the apartment building he lived in. On those evenings the three of them would have dinner and sit around drinking, talking and watching movies.
But Ben was too familiar to Renee and in about a year Renee had to let him go.
When Renee told Vaughn that she had broken up with Ben, Vaughn was surprised but he wasn’t shocked.
“I want more,” Renee told her brother who had his back to her as he patched up the walls on one of the floors of the house. Vaughn didn’t say anything but kept at the work he was doing. “I don’t want to end up living on a hundred and twenty-ninth,” Renee continued.
“In an apartment building he owns,” Vaughn said facetiously.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s… he’s just not the one,” Renee said.
“Nah, we can’t have that, can we,” Vaughn said finally, his back still to her. “And lord knows we can’t have any more dark-skin babies in this world.”
Renee didn’t respond to Vaughn’s remark so they argued about her right to make her decision before she put down the spatula and left, but not before telling her brother, “If you like him so much, you can have him.”
After that period in her life Ben was never spoken of again.
But sometimes Ben did cross Renee’s mind, like whenever she heard ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’, by Thelma Houston— every now and then she pulled the song up on her playlist just so she could hold onto that brief time with Ben; but before thoughts of him could settle Renee would push them aside because she knew she made the right decision with Justin. And though Justin and Ben were far from each other in so many ways, it was Justin who was right for Renee. The color of his eyes and the color of his hair reminded her of sea and sand in places far from East New York, or Harlem.
So even when Renee saw someone or something that reminded her of Ben, or she became concerned about running into him (she always wondered what she would say) she thought about the love she had for Justin and the life they had together and any warranted thoughts of Ben or any apprehension waned.
PART 4 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee sat in Madison Square Park and waited for Justin. It was a warm evening and not as humid as many New York City summers go. People were beginning to gather in the park and sit under the large trees that shaded the benches along the winding walkways while some played in the open space of the lawn with their children. In the distance dogs ran around in the dog park, kicking up dust that rose like thin beige clouds.
A bit away from the bench Renee had secured for she and Justin, Justin stood in line at the takeout restaurant in the park. The line was always long but it didn’t make sense to avoid it if you wanted to get a meal there; they were grabbing a snack before going to the movies with friends and he had insisted she feed the child that was growing inside of her. She looked over at Justin to see how far he’d gotten to the front of the line. He rubbed his hand impatiently through his hair, ruffling it and turning to look at Renee. He had gotten near the front, and he smiled and gave her a thumbs up.
On days like this, Madison Square Park held its procession of parents who pushed carriages with their newborns. Earlier in the day it would have been mostly nannies pushing the carriages or walking with the kids. Often the nannies stood out from the children they cared for, their brown or cocoa skin in stark relief to the pink and pale complexions of the children in their charge who seemed not to notice the difference. Sometimes when Renee saw the black or brown women walking with the children she wondered if they had their own children and how they felt towards their own children after caring for ones with privileges their own might never have. But those were thoughts Renee had come to call her ‘Vaughn moments’, and she would disabuse herself from thinking any more of it.
Justin came over with their sandwiches and drinks and they ate and talked while watching the people in the park.
“That’ll be us in nine months,” Justin said proudly as he looked at some of the new moms and dads.
“I know. I can’t wait.”
“Yeah,” Justin said before kissing Renee lightly on the mouth.
As they were finishing their meals a couple passed by with their child. The woman was white, and the man was black. Renee and Justin looked at the tan boy with the curly hair who ran ahead of the couple, and they smiled. Soon that would be their family.
After the movies Renee, Justin and their friends went to dinner. Going out with her husband was a self-imposed duty that Renee had taken upon herself in the early years of their relationship. Keeping other women from pulling Justin’s attention from her had been pretty much a constant thought in those days. She would be out with him, and she would watch women as they laughed and engaged in conversation. She saw how their skin lighted the room and how they tossed their hair, hair that swayed and settled, trained to the wishes the women had, and it made Renee all the more determined to hold onto Justin. She was never sure if one day he would think choosing her was a mistake.
But now she was comfortable with being married to him and she enjoyed going out with her husband. The child inside of her solidified her life with Justin. He was fun to be with and the people who came in contact with them were pleasant as well. They were more attentive to her and looked at her with a pleasantness in their eyes that made the nights out memorable events. The couple who was with them was so excited for Renee and Justin; they had intended on trying for a child after they made it back from a trip to Barcelona.
“Or maybe during the trip,” the husband said. Everyone at the table laughed.
“So you guys think you can really wait until the baby is born to know the sex?” The wife asked with mild astonishment as she could never imagine doing the same.
“Yep,” Renee answered. “At least we’re going to try to.”
“Yeah, that’s the plan,” Justin said.
“Think we could ever do that,” the woman asked her husband.
He shrugged his shoulders, then, “Nahh. I don’t think so,” he said upon more thought.
“I know,” the woman agreed. “There’s so much to be concerned with, like if they’re going to come along with no physical deformities that doesn’t show up on a sonogram. God knows, wondering about the sex of the child— that would be too much.”
Justin glanced at Renee in discomfort.
The woman’s husband noticed and stopped his wife. “Stop being so morbid. We would love our child no matter what, just like Renee and Justin will.”
“Yeah, and he or she,” Justin said, looking again at Renee, “will have a good life.”
Renee watched her husband and their friends around the table and appreciated the chances that the baby would have a good life.
PART 5 ~ The Children of Ham ~
That night Renee called her brother. It was late, but not too late, and that it was on a Friday night when neither of them had to get up for work the next morning, she called him. It took a few rings before he answered.
“Netta.” He answered suddenly and with caution. His voice was loud to speak over the music that played in the background of the bar he was at.
“I told you I was going to call.” Renee spoke equally as loud so he could hear her.
“Yeah, you did. I didn’t know when, though,” Vaughn said. “Let me step outside.”
Renee heard the music and voices fade and heard the sounds of a busy street come about.
“You okay?” Vaughn asked Renee.
“Everything’s fine. I wanted to call you.”
Vaughn listened as she spoke and a beat afterwards.
“Sounds like you’re hanging out,” Renee continued. “We just got back in, ourselves.”
“Yeah, me and Austin are hanging out,” Vaughn said.
“Y’all are getting close. How is he doing as a renter?” Talking to her brother was comforting.
“He’s really good. Always there to make sure things go right when I’m not there. How are you doing? Where did you go?”
“I’m fine. We went to the movies with friends, then to dinner, and now back here. I didn’t know it was so late. I should’ve waited until tomorrow morning to call you.”
“Nah, it’s cool. You can still call me tomorrow morning too, you know.”
Renee heard the music flood from the bar onto the street and someone who came up to Vaughn, “Everything okay?”, and Vaughn answering, “Yeah, just talking with Netta.” “Oh, tell her I said, ‘what’s up’.”
“Austin says what’s up.”
“What’s up, Austin,” she replied.
Renee and Vaughn talked for a while longer before she told him that she would let him get back to his night out and that she would call him again the next morning. Vaughn made her promise she would call, and they hung up.
Vaughn had always been there for his sister, no matter what. Even after she moved away, he sent her money to help her out even though he didn’t agree with her choices and even though they sometimes argued over the decisions she made, he knew he would always be there for her.
It was four in the morning and Vaughn sat in a diner with Austin. There weren’t many people in the diner yet but would soon be since many of the clubs were closing. There was a couple, a handsome Asian man and a white woman who sat a bit away from Vaughn and Austin, and they held each other’s hand and talked quietly to each other. Vaughn listened to Austin as Austin went on about someone they knew and something the guy was doing. That was pretty much the extent of what Vaughn heard. His attention was on the man and the woman at the table and his mind was on Renee’s pregnancy.
“So how is Netta doing?” Austin saw that Vaughn’s mind was somewhere else, and he had noticed Vaughn’s attention on the couple.
“Good. She’s good. She just found out she’s pregnant,” Vaughn spoke as he looked out onto the streets. It was now after four a.m. and people straggled from the bars and clubs, some on their way home or to someone else’s apartment and others to all night joints where they wouldn’t leave until late that morning when the sun arced towards noon.
“That’s good, right?” Austin said. “For her- - for them… I mean, in spite of knowing how you feel about everything an’ all.”
“Yeah.” Vaughn sighed and began eating. “How can it not be?”
“Hmh,” Austin cautiously agreed.
“I just wish it was with someone else.”
“Well. Man you know your sister,” Austin said. “She’s been eyeing that life for as long as any of us can remember. That magazine life.”
“Yeah. Well,” Vaughn replied.
“The dude is good to her though, right? He ain’t knocking her around or no shit like that is he?”
“Hell nah. I’d be over there in a heartbeat.”
“And they are definitely living life in Manhattan,” Austin continued. “So be happy for her.”
“Everybody puts them on a pedestal.” Vaughn spoke suddenly while looking at the couple in the booth near them. “It’s like everybody’s gotta have somebody white.”
Austin turned and looked at the man and woman. “Yeah, you’re right. But ain’t nothing gonna change though, so just be happy for her and him.”
Vaughn drank his coffee and continued eating.
Vaughn and Renee talked a long time later that morning. Justin came into the room where Renee was and kissed her on her forehead but didn’t say anything since he knew she was talking to Vaughn. Justin and Vaughn rarely engaged in more than acknowledging each other’s presence and that was that. Justin tried to reach out to his brother-in-law, but Vaughn hadn’t shown any interest in getting to know him. “Tell Vaughn I said, ‘hey’,” Justin whispered before he left the room. He wasn’t sure if Renee would tell Vaughn because they both knew Vaughn wouldn’t care.
PART 6 ~ The Children of Ham ~
“You’re making something out of nothing. People walk around each other all the time.” That was how Renee saw it that day as she and Vaughn walked down the street, but Vaughn saw something else. The two of them were teenagers at the time and were spending a day in the city.
“I dare you to not step aside,” Vaughn had challenged.
“That’s crazy,” Renee said.
“I dare you,” he persisted.
At that moment two white women came towards them. One of the women was on her phone while the other walked alongside her. They seemed to pay no attention to Renee as they headed in a straight path towards Renee causing Renee to step out of their path. They didn't seem to notice Renee at all.
“See? Told you,” Vaughn said. “We always step aside for them.”
“Stop making something out of nothing,” she repeated.
Renee had written her brother off that day because it was always best to write him off than to get into an argument with him. He was always making a scene about things like that, things she felt weren’t much of a big deal to get bent out of shape about. She understood that sometimes things were messy like someone looking at you and suddenly that someone becoming mindful to lock their car; or things could get out of hand like the day the man accused Vaughn of stealing his own bag.
Vaughn had set his shoulder bag on the ground while he and Renee waited for the bus. As the bus approached the stop Vaughn reached down to pick the bag up. A man in a restaurant saw Vaughn reach down to pick up his bag and rushed out of the restaurant to confront Vaughn.
“Is that your bag!” The man, a young man with bright red hair and with a tag on his shirt that read ‘Manager Craig’ came up to Vaughn, pointing his finger and yelling at him. “You’re trying to take someone’s bag!” the man said as he reached for Vaughn’s bag.
Renee told the man the bag belonged to Vaughn, but the man didn’t believe her. The other people at the bus stop gasped.
“Hey,” someone yelled at the man.
Vaughn looked at the man and coldly said, “Touch my bag, and I’m gonna fuck you up.”
The man didn’t listen, and Vaughn hit him square in the face sending the man against the window of the restaurant, shaking the glass and causing the people inside to jump from their tables. The man rushed Vaughn and they began to fight. All the while Renee and the people were shouting that the bag was Vaughn’s bag.
The police arrived and they separated Vaughn and the man. They wrestled Vaughn to the ground and cuffed him.
Renee told the police the story and one of the persons at the bus stop who had stayed behind to help out told the police the same. The two officers looked at each other. One of them had Vaughn face down on the sidewalk with her knee in Vaughn’s back while the other made sense of what had taken place.
The officer scolded Manager Craig and told him to go back to his business. The officer asked Vaughn what was in the bag and Vaughn told him. The officer looked and saw that Vaughn was telling the truth. He gave the bag to Renee, but they put Vaughn in the back of the cop car while they ran a check on him. He was cleared so they released him.
Vaughn was quiet the entire way home and when they got home, he went to his room and didn’t come out the rest of the day.
Renee remembered how she heard her parents sitting in his room talking with him and how the sun set that evening with Vaughn in his room. She understood the things that happen but while they seeped into Vaughn’s skin, she used them to justify looking for a new life.
Even now, years later, she was able to overlook things, things like people not paying any attention to her when Justin wasn’t with her — unless with suspicion when she was in a place that made people uncomfortable — or how genuinely people engaged in conversation with her only when she was with Justin.
She had learned that things like that were likely to happen and that she would address some things if the affront was brazened enough because she had gained a certain amount of self-importance from being an adult. She and Justin and their friends didn’t hold back in addressing behavior they saw as a slight against her whenever such behavior arose, but in all, against the likes of her brother she preferred to see such things as things that happen. She had taught herself to label them incidents.
PART 7 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Vaughn had asked his sister that morning if she started making plans for the baby.
“Of course,” Renee laughed. “You think I haven’t?”
“Of course,” he reminded himself. “Make sure you don’t make her too ‘girly’ if it’s a girl. Or dress him up in clothes to make him look like ‘a little man’ if it’s a boy. That always looks so weird.”
“I know, don’t it, though? But I will have her wearing one of those cute little head bands with a flower on it.”
“Oh my god.”
They laughed.
“If only Momma and Daddy were still here. They would be so ecstatic over becoming grandparents,” Renee said.
“Especially Momma.”
“Both of them,” Renee reminded. “Momma would have a reading room all set up just so she could read to him.”
“Yeah, and Daddy would take him around with him everywhere he went and school him- - ‘now this is how it was when I was growing up’,” Vaughn said, imitating their father.
“Too soon,” Renee said. “They left too soon.”
“Yeah.”
Renee and Vaughn fell silent from memories before Vaughn spoke. “Are we going to see much of the baby?”
“Of course.”
“There’s family here in Brooklyn too.”
“I know.”
The conversation they had that morning ended with Vaughn telling Renee that he would come over to Manhattan to spend time with she and Justin. Renee had pulled herself out of her shock and told him how nice that would be. But in her heart and her head she didn’t feel that way. He told her he was for real and even set a date.
“Okay, I’m gonna hold you to it,” she uttered with complete emptiness.
“Bet,” he said.
However, the day he was supposed to have come he got a ticket for jaywalking, and it messed up his day. “You know how many people jaywalk in this fuckin’ city!” He was angry as he spoke with Renee over the phone. “And the cops focus on the hood to give out tickets. They don’t fuckin’ give ‘em in Chelsea or Soho. Nah, they gonna fuck with us!”
“I know, Vaughn, but just pay the ticket. It’ll make matters worse if you don’t,” Renee said.
“Fuck that. I ain’t payin’ shit. Not a goddamn thing!”
Eventually Renee called Austin and had him pay the ticket and she reimbursed Austin. She knew Vaughn would be angry, and he was at both she and Austin, but it was done. The ticket was paid, and she and Austin spent the rest of that week dealing with Vaughn.
PART 8 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee’s stomach had grown, and she felt the extra weight as the months went on, so she began to take a car when she went out from their neighborhood. She and Justin got out of a taxi and walked around the Upper East Side looking in stores for things to buy for the nursery. They looked in a window of a shop and decided to go inside.
They looked at the cribs and accessories and took photos of them to send to the woman they had hired to design the room. She was a childhood friend of Renee who Renee had wanted to design their apartment when she and Justin bought it, but Justin didn’t feel confident about her, so they went with someone Justin knew. But this time Renee insisted on giving the job to her friend.
It was a sunny afternoon. Lexington Avenue was busy with people out for Saturday shopping or just hanging out. It was late Fall and Vaughn still hadn’t visited them. Renee didn’t think he would, and part of her was relieved, but Justin had looked forward to him coming over and he asked her about it.
“I like Vaughn,” Justin said. “He keeps it real.”
“A bit too real,” Renee said. They talked while having lunch.
“I can never, ever forget how he turned things up at our wedding,” Justin said.
“Oh god. Don’t remind me.”
“No, it was cool… the way he was listening to my parents go on and on about our family ‘being an old New York family’- - I get so tired of that shit. He let them finish and then he leaned in and told them that your family had been here since the early seventeen hundreds- - a lot longer than my family.” Justin grinned as he recalled the day. “He even knew where your family lived back then… ‘along a stream in the black part of the city that’s now The Village’,” Justin said, imitating Vaughn. Justin burst into laughter. “And then he asked my parents if they knew that that stream was paved over and is now Minetta Street. ‘It’s got an Italian name because black people weren’t allowed to own land,’ he said. And I was like, ‘oooh’, but totally enjoying it all.”
Renee shook her head. “It was embarrassing.”
“No it wasn’t,” Justin said.
“You like telling this story, don’t you?” Renee said.
“Yeah. I do.” Justin went on, “And the part that got me was when he said: Imagine how my people felt when they saw all of you comin’ over later on. They musta thought, ‘damn, some more of them? We ain’t never gonna get our due!’ Boy, I thought my parents were going to die! They just looked at him. And then he smiled right back at them and said, ‘Lady Liberty wasn’t for everybody.”
“That’s when I came over and got him,” Renee said.
“It was priceless!” Justin shook his head and laughed again.
“Yeah but he didn’t have to come off like that.”
“The way I see it, those are things they need to know.”
“He was being selfish. He’s always been that way. It was my special day, but he had no problem messing it up.”
“Aw, c’mon honey. He didn’t mess it up.”
“I just wish he wasn’t so angry,” Renee said.
“Well, he has a right to be. I just hope he puts it to good use.” Then, “Call him and tell him we want him to come over.”
“No, I think it’s best for us to go over there,” Renee said.
PART 9 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Months went by. Renee and Justin never went to visit Vaughn and Vaughn never visited them. But every week Renee and Vaughn talked like they always had, and Justin suggested they invite him over like he always he did. It went that way until the baby came.
They named the baby Maya, and she was the color of honey like Renee had dreamed. Renee called her family to let them know about the baby and her family was happy; all the while they wondered if they would ever see the child, and if they did would the child want to be around them when she grew up. Vaughn told Renee he would come to see the baby and this time Renee believed him because he had even congratulated Justin on Maya’s arrival.
Vaughn would sleep in the guest room which was down the hall from the nursery. Anticipation of Vaughn’s visit caused butterflies in Renee’s stomach even though it was still almost a week until the visit. She made the room up for him, then changed it and redid it before changing it and redoing it again.
After she made up the room for the fourth time she went to the nursery and stood over her daughter who was awake and looked at her with the awareness a child has of the person that brought it comfort. Maya joyously waved her tiny fists and Renee lifted her from the bassinet.
The designer had done a great job putting the room together. Even Justin had to move past her name (which was Kameisha) and admit to the wonderful job she had done. Renee sat with Maya in her arms in the quiet afternoon and looked out across the city. She thought about her parents, and of Vaughn and in sudden awe of her arrival, she looked down at her daughter. “Here we are,” she whispered.
PART 10 ~ The Children of Ham ~
It was a cold rainy day the day Vaughn was to come over. He had just gotten on the train and would be there in a little over an hour. He was excited to see Maya and had gifts for her. “A few things from home.”
Renee heard the sound of the doors closing on the train.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” Vaughn said.
Two hours had passed when Renee decided to check on her brother. She called his phone, but he didn’t pick up. She figured he was still underground on a delayed train. After a while she became concerned. She called again and again there was no answer.
Justin came in from the store, shaking the rain and cold from his umbrella and his limbs. “No Vaughn?” He spoke as he watched Renee standing at the window.
“No,” she whispered.
He put the groceries on the counter and walked to her. “He probably stopped off somewhere,” Justin said. “You know how random he can be.”
Renee continued to look out the window down onto the streets. From fifteen floors up she would still be able to spot her brother, but he wasn’t among the forms that rushed up and down the sidewalks and cross the streets.
“He doesn’t like this city and this city doesn’t like him,” she whispered. Then she spoke louder. “He doesn’t like this city because this city doesn’t like him.” She turned and looked at her husband who searched for words. “Because it doesn't like us,” she added.
“Honey…” Justin said.
Suddenly Renee’s phone rang and she immediately picked it up.
“Netta? You heard from Vaughn?” Austin’s voice was heavy with concern as it came over the phone.
“No.”
“We need to start callin’ around. I was just headed to the house and saw this message he sent earlier. He said he can’t keep movin’ out of their way.”
Renee sucked in her breath.
“This doesn’t sound good, Netta.”
PART 11 ~ The Children of Ham ~
They said he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, just stopped, and sat on his suitcase along West 14th Street. When the police came, they found him staring straight ahead, just sitting.
Renee watched her brother in the hospital. He was handcuffed to the bed and lay motionless, curled in a ball and his eyes were closed. There was a peacefulness to him. The nurse said he might be asleep or that he might have taken refuge behind his eyes.
Renee sat in a chair by her brother’s bed and held his hand. It was warm, and large and strong just like she recalled when he used to take her hand whenever they crossed a street. She spoke to him, softly speaking his name, and she called herself Netta, but he continued to lie in the quiet he had found somewhere behind his eyes.
“The doctor said he’s gonna be okay.” Austin spoke from the corner of the room where he sat in a large recliner chair. He was going to spend the night with Vaughn.
“Here,” Justin handed Maya to Renee. “Let him know she’s here.”
Renee took Maya and held her close to Vaughn’s face. “Maya’s here.”
Her words caused Vaughn’s eyelids to lightly flutter.
“From Ham were descended the … Negro race. Their inheritance, according to prophecy, has been and will continue to be slavery . . . [and] so long as we have the Bible . . . we expect to maintain it.” (1844, Patrick Hues Mell, President of University of Georgia, Athens and President of Southern Baptist Convention)
When she left that night, Renee took Vaughn’s suitcase with her so she could make sure he had things he might need. Austin told her that Vaughn had a gift for Maya in the suitcase.
The gift Vaughn made for his niece was a book, and it began with the words, ‘They say God kept one of Queen Amanirenas’s eyes so He and the queen could share the same vision. And this was the queen’s vision…’ That was how the story began and how Vaughn went on to tell the story of the Queen of Nubia and other stories from African history. He had carefully scripted the writing in the book and had hand drawn the pages in brilliant colors that caught Maya’s attention as Renee turned the pages and tucked in the book between pages was a note from Vaughn to his sister: ‘This is not a book where the heroes have blue eyes’. Renee thought of the gift Vaughn had made and of the many books and things her parents had left. Vaughn wanted to carry on the tradition.
It was two weeks before Vaughn opened his eyes, though he didn’t keep them open for any long length of time before closing them again. On some days Renee sat beside him while his eyes were open, and she saw the half emptiness in them. He responded briefly with words before closing his eyes, turning his back to whomever was beside him and going to sleep. Still, he seemed to be getting better, and in time Renee knew he would.
One day of that second week, as she left the hospital, Renee called her husband and told him she would be late getting home. It was cold and the ground sparkled with crystals of ice under a late noon sun. After talking with her husband for a while she told him to make sure Maya was fed, and she went down to the station to catch the #3 to East New York.
“… Some say it’s a part of it, we’ve got to fulfill the book … Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind…” (1979, Redemption Song, Bob Marley, musician, singer/songwriter, activist)
(Artwork- Àsikò, Instagram: Asiko_artist, Website: https://www.asiko.co.uk/ ; 'The Children of Ham', originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
The platform was crowded with morning riders who shuffled impatiently from side to side and craned their necks to look into the tunnels for whatever train they were waiting on. On the other side of the platform Renee saw a #2 train that was headed out to Flatbush Ave and she thought about her brother, Vaughn. They hadn’t spoken to each other as much in the past week as they usually did. Vaughn had left her a message the other day: Hey Netta, gimme a call when you can. He had called her by the name she had been known most of her life growing up in East New York. It was short for Vonetta, but to everyone in the old neighborhood it was understood to mean: ‘Vonetta, Vaughn’s twin’; however, she stopped using her first name and began using her middle name when she moved to Manhattan.
She watched the #2 load up and move down the track, disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel. Brooklyn seemed so far away to her these days, like a distant land with distant people that had faces and language and mannerisms that were almost foreign to her were it not for memory. She had grown up in Brooklyn in the East New York section, but she hadn’t lived there since she moved to Manhattan after she graduated from college. Vaughn still lived in East New York in the house their parents left them when they passed away. She and Vaughn had been the only children their parents had at the age most black folk would’ve have said ‘been there, done that’, but their parents had held off until they built a good life before deciding to have at least one child, and what they got were twins. Both of their parents were fortunate enough to see the twins grow to their early twenties before the parents passed away, first the father, then the mother. Visiting her parents for Sunday dinner had been the main reason that Renee had for going back to East New York, but once her parents died, she found less reason to go back home. She did make it her business to visit her brother and spend time with him every now and then, but the trek there was long, and the neighborhood was distant to where she was now.
A man with soiled clothes and offensive body odor limped along the platform muttering to himself and each person he came near calmly stepped aside to let him pass and to not make contact with him. The man talked to someone in his head and walked on down the platform. The sight made Renee shiver and a knot formed in her stomach. ‘I have to call Vaughn’, she said to herself.
Renee and Vaughn normally talked at least twice a week. He gave her updates on what was going on back in the neighborhood and other parts of Brooklyn because he knew that these days his sister went only as far into Brooklyn as Fort Greene with her husband before deciding they were traveling too far from where the outdoor cafes trailed off. This new Renee bothered Vaughn, yet he knew she had always wanted to live in Manhattan— or ‘the city’, as it is known to most New Yorkers. It was only a one-hour ride on the #3 and Renee knew she’d be there one day.
When she was growing up Renee even had photos of Manhattan on her wall and a photo album of apartments in which she wanted to live and of the type of people she wanted to be with in the city, though very few of the photos were of men and women who looked like Vaughn or herself.
Special occasions were the only times when Renee would visit the old neighborhood, a birthday celebration for a cherished family member was the usual. There were a few times that she went back just to visit, very few, and those were the times when she picked up on the frustration of Vaughn or those cherished family members. Other than that, she had put East New York away in the farthest place in her mind.
On the flip side, Vaughn hated Manhattan. And whenever he did visit he went to Harlem. He was a busy man, so he rarely went into the city. He worked in the post office during the day and at night he painted in his studio as well as worked on the house their parents had left them, but he always found time to call his sister. However, he hadn’t had a chance to really talk with her because these days she was busy, so they sent texts to each other. The last time they talked was when she told him she was pregnant. Vaughn said he was happy for her, but Renee didn’t believe him because she knew how he felt about her marrying Justin. In spite of that, they kept in touch, so she knew she would have to call him.
Renee was fortunate enough to get a seat on the train and she settled back for the ride to work. She put in her earphones and listened to music as she read her phone. The train stopped at the next station and riders debarking and those that were embarking traded places before the doors closed and the train moved on to the next station on the local track. She imagined she would most likely start taking a car to work like Justin wanted her to, but only when she was months along with the pregnancy.
PART 2 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee and Justin decided to not learn of the sex of the baby, but they had already begun running through names, ones they had carried in their heads long before they even met each other.
“Marcus or Tyler if it’s a boy,” Renee said when she and Justin were starting to go over names. “I’ve always liked those two names.”
“Tyler, yeah, but Marcus sounds kind of out of place. Don’t you think? We have to name them for the world they’ll be living in,” Justin said.
“Maybe I’ll move Marcus farther down on the list,” Renee said.
“Or maybe use it as a middle name,” Justin suggested.
Sometimes when they spoke of the baby they used ‘them’ so as to not say ‘it’, but supposed it was twins? What if ‘them’ was correct. Renee felt warm inside as she thought of another set of twins in her family. Naming a set of twins after she and her brother would be nice and could pull Vaughn closer to she and Justin if that happened, but Justin was right, they had to think of the world the baby or babies would be coming into. At any rate, she had already envisioned what the child would look like with a head full of shiny soft locks, if not sandy colored like Justin’s hair, then brown; and her or his— or her and his— complexions would be the color of honey. Renee tried not to have such complete thoughts about the skin tone and the hair of the baby, and she scolded herself for having the thoughts, reminding herself how inappropriate such thinking was but the thoughts came often because there was a place in her for them.
Justin called her as she was going to lunch. He usually called her during the day but since news of the pregnancy he called her twice during the workday, that was how much the news of her pregnancy excited him. Renee’s co-workers knew it was Justin who was on the phone because he called Renee the same time every day. “Tell Justin we said hi, but you have to keep walking, girl. We only have an hour for lunch,” one of the women in the lunch party said.
Justin heard them. “Tell them hi. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Aww… thanks Babe.” Renee spoke quietly into her phone. “I’m fine. I’ll call you when we get to lunch.”
“You don’t have to. I just wanted to tell you I love you.”
“I love you, too. See you tonight.”
The women in Renee’s lunch group were proud and at least one, maybe two of them were even a bit envious of her that had she found someone like Justin, so out of respect of their circumstances Renee usually kept her conversations short and low with her husband when she was with them. She also made it her responsibility to let them know that one day someone will come their way just like that special someone came her way.
PART 3 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee believed what she told her co-workers about she and Justin finding each other because her luck with men hadn’t always been within reach. After she moved to the city she went through a dry spell with men. She did meet one man she liked out of the number that she had met and that either she had lost interest in or they in her; that was a guy named Ben.
When Renee met Ben she was working in a bookstore on the Upper East Side and Ben was a delivery driver. They saw each other almost every day since the store was in Ben’s delivery area. The first time she saw Ben she was struck by how good-looking he was; it was summer, and he wore shorts that showed off his dark colored, slightly bowed legs. That was where her eyes had traveled after they left his broad shoulders and slim waist as he climbed out of his truck. He didn’t see Renee the first day he came in to the store as she was near the back of the store and that he turned over his delivery to the store manager who was at the front counter, then he politely thanked her and hurried back out to his truck, his black work boots moving swiftly across the floor in long strides and out the door where he climbed back in his truck and drove off.
It took a few deliveries before he saw Renee who happened to be at the counter one day when he made a delivery. When they saw each other, they immediately knew each other. Ben politely smiled in a businesslike manner and the two of them made quick reference to the heat before Renee signed the scanner. “Name?” he asked for his log. “Renee.” He typed her name into the scanner. “Ok. Thanks. Take care.” “You too.” Ben smiled and hurried back out to his truck, but before he pulled off he looked back into the store at Renee.
The time Renee spent with Ben was exciting. He was into music, especially jazz and had a special love for Miles Davis, Woody Shaw and Ahmad Jamal. He played their music a lot. Renee spent a lot of time with Ben. Every Saturday morning, they woke to ‘Saturday Morning’ by Ahmad Jamal, and they would lie in bed and talk about any and everything until Ben would on roll on top of her and they would spend the rest of the morning making slow, deliberate love. She really cared for Ben.
Vaughn liked Ben too, even to the point of Vaughn choosing to travel outside of Brooklyn into Manhattan on a few occasions to have dinner with Renee and Ben at Ben’s apartment on West 129th Street. Vaughn was also impressed that Ben owned the apartment building he lived in. On those evenings the three of them would have dinner and sit around drinking, talking and watching movies.
But Ben was too familiar to Renee and in about a year Renee had to let him go.
When Renee told Vaughn that she had broken up with Ben, Vaughn was surprised but he wasn’t shocked.
“I want more,” Renee told her brother who had his back to her as he patched up the walls on one of the floors of the house. Vaughn didn’t say anything but kept at the work he was doing. “I don’t want to end up living on a hundred and twenty-ninth,” Renee continued.
“In an apartment building he owns,” Vaughn said facetiously.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s… he’s just not the one,” Renee said.
“Nah, we can’t have that, can we,” Vaughn said finally, his back still to her. “And lord knows we can’t have any more dark-skin babies in this world.”
Renee didn’t respond to Vaughn’s remark so they argued about her right to make her decision before she put down the spatula and left, but not before telling her brother, “If you like him so much, you can have him.”
After that period in her life Ben was never spoken of again.
But sometimes Ben did cross Renee’s mind, like whenever she heard ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’, by Thelma Houston— every now and then she pulled the song up on her playlist just so she could hold onto that brief time with Ben; but before thoughts of him could settle Renee would push them aside because she knew she made the right decision with Justin. And though Justin and Ben were far from each other in so many ways, it was Justin who was right for Renee. The color of his eyes and the color of his hair reminded her of sea and sand in places far from East New York, or Harlem.
So even when Renee saw someone or something that reminded her of Ben, or she became concerned about running into him (she always wondered what she would say) she thought about the love she had for Justin and the life they had together and any warranted thoughts of Ben or any apprehension waned.
PART 4 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee sat in Madison Square Park and waited for Justin. It was a warm evening and not as humid as many New York City summers go. People were beginning to gather in the park and sit under the large trees that shaded the benches along the winding walkways while some played in the open space of the lawn with their children. In the distance dogs ran around in the dog park, kicking up dust that rose like thin beige clouds.
A bit away from the bench Renee had secured for she and Justin, Justin stood in line at the takeout restaurant in the park. The line was always long but it didn’t make sense to avoid it if you wanted to get a meal there; they were grabbing a snack before going to the movies with friends and he had insisted she feed the child that was growing inside of her. She looked over at Justin to see how far he’d gotten to the front of the line. He rubbed his hand impatiently through his hair, ruffling it and turning to look at Renee. He had gotten near the front, and he smiled and gave her a thumbs up.
On days like this, Madison Square Park held its procession of parents who pushed carriages with their newborns. Earlier in the day it would have been mostly nannies pushing the carriages or walking with the kids. Often the nannies stood out from the children they cared for, their brown or cocoa skin in stark relief to the pink and pale complexions of the children in their charge who seemed not to notice the difference. Sometimes when Renee saw the black or brown women walking with the children she wondered if they had their own children and how they felt towards their own children after caring for ones with privileges their own might never have. But those were thoughts Renee had come to call her ‘Vaughn moments’, and she would disabuse herself from thinking any more of it.
Justin came over with their sandwiches and drinks and they ate and talked while watching the people in the park.
“That’ll be us in nine months,” Justin said proudly as he looked at some of the new moms and dads.
“I know. I can’t wait.”
“Yeah,” Justin said before kissing Renee lightly on the mouth.
As they were finishing their meals a couple passed by with their child. The woman was white, and the man was black. Renee and Justin looked at the tan boy with the curly hair who ran ahead of the couple, and they smiled. Soon that would be their family.
After the movies Renee, Justin and their friends went to dinner. Going out with her husband was a self-imposed duty that Renee had taken upon herself in the early years of their relationship. Keeping other women from pulling Justin’s attention from her had been pretty much a constant thought in those days. She would be out with him, and she would watch women as they laughed and engaged in conversation. She saw how their skin lighted the room and how they tossed their hair, hair that swayed and settled, trained to the wishes the women had, and it made Renee all the more determined to hold onto Justin. She was never sure if one day he would think choosing her was a mistake.
But now she was comfortable with being married to him and she enjoyed going out with her husband. The child inside of her solidified her life with Justin. He was fun to be with and the people who came in contact with them were pleasant as well. They were more attentive to her and looked at her with a pleasantness in their eyes that made the nights out memorable events. The couple who was with them was so excited for Renee and Justin; they had intended on trying for a child after they made it back from a trip to Barcelona.
“Or maybe during the trip,” the husband said. Everyone at the table laughed.
“So you guys think you can really wait until the baby is born to know the sex?” The wife asked with mild astonishment as she could never imagine doing the same.
“Yep,” Renee answered. “At least we’re going to try to.”
“Yeah, that’s the plan,” Justin said.
“Think we could ever do that,” the woman asked her husband.
He shrugged his shoulders, then, “Nahh. I don’t think so,” he said upon more thought.
“I know,” the woman agreed. “There’s so much to be concerned with, like if they’re going to come along with no physical deformities that doesn’t show up on a sonogram. God knows, wondering about the sex of the child— that would be too much.”
Justin glanced at Renee in discomfort.
The woman’s husband noticed and stopped his wife. “Stop being so morbid. We would love our child no matter what, just like Renee and Justin will.”
“Yeah, and he or she,” Justin said, looking again at Renee, “will have a good life.”
Renee watched her husband and their friends around the table and appreciated the chances that the baby would have a good life.
PART 5 ~ The Children of Ham ~
That night Renee called her brother. It was late, but not too late, and that it was on a Friday night when neither of them had to get up for work the next morning, she called him. It took a few rings before he answered.
“Netta.” He answered suddenly and with caution. His voice was loud to speak over the music that played in the background of the bar he was at.
“I told you I was going to call.” Renee spoke equally as loud so he could hear her.
“Yeah, you did. I didn’t know when, though,” Vaughn said. “Let me step outside.”
Renee heard the music and voices fade and heard the sounds of a busy street come about.
“You okay?” Vaughn asked Renee.
“Everything’s fine. I wanted to call you.”
Vaughn listened as she spoke and a beat afterwards.
“Sounds like you’re hanging out,” Renee continued. “We just got back in, ourselves.”
“Yeah, me and Austin are hanging out,” Vaughn said.
“Y’all are getting close. How is he doing as a renter?” Talking to her brother was comforting.
“He’s really good. Always there to make sure things go right when I’m not there. How are you doing? Where did you go?”
“I’m fine. We went to the movies with friends, then to dinner, and now back here. I didn’t know it was so late. I should’ve waited until tomorrow morning to call you.”
“Nah, it’s cool. You can still call me tomorrow morning too, you know.”
Renee heard the music flood from the bar onto the street and someone who came up to Vaughn, “Everything okay?”, and Vaughn answering, “Yeah, just talking with Netta.” “Oh, tell her I said, ‘what’s up’.”
“Austin says what’s up.”
“What’s up, Austin,” she replied.
Renee and Vaughn talked for a while longer before she told him that she would let him get back to his night out and that she would call him again the next morning. Vaughn made her promise she would call, and they hung up.
Vaughn had always been there for his sister, no matter what. Even after she moved away, he sent her money to help her out even though he didn’t agree with her choices and even though they sometimes argued over the decisions she made, he knew he would always be there for her.
It was four in the morning and Vaughn sat in a diner with Austin. There weren’t many people in the diner yet but would soon be since many of the clubs were closing. There was a couple, a handsome Asian man and a white woman who sat a bit away from Vaughn and Austin, and they held each other’s hand and talked quietly to each other. Vaughn listened to Austin as Austin went on about someone they knew and something the guy was doing. That was pretty much the extent of what Vaughn heard. His attention was on the man and the woman at the table and his mind was on Renee’s pregnancy.
“So how is Netta doing?” Austin saw that Vaughn’s mind was somewhere else, and he had noticed Vaughn’s attention on the couple.
“Good. She’s good. She just found out she’s pregnant,” Vaughn spoke as he looked out onto the streets. It was now after four a.m. and people straggled from the bars and clubs, some on their way home or to someone else’s apartment and others to all night joints where they wouldn’t leave until late that morning when the sun arced towards noon.
“That’s good, right?” Austin said. “For her- - for them… I mean, in spite of knowing how you feel about everything an’ all.”
“Yeah.” Vaughn sighed and began eating. “How can it not be?”
“Hmh,” Austin cautiously agreed.
“I just wish it was with someone else.”
“Well. Man you know your sister,” Austin said. “She’s been eyeing that life for as long as any of us can remember. That magazine life.”
“Yeah. Well,” Vaughn replied.
“The dude is good to her though, right? He ain’t knocking her around or no shit like that is he?”
“Hell nah. I’d be over there in a heartbeat.”
“And they are definitely living life in Manhattan,” Austin continued. “So be happy for her.”
“Everybody puts them on a pedestal.” Vaughn spoke suddenly while looking at the couple in the booth near them. “It’s like everybody’s gotta have somebody white.”
Austin turned and looked at the man and woman. “Yeah, you’re right. But ain’t nothing gonna change though, so just be happy for her and him.”
Vaughn drank his coffee and continued eating.
Vaughn and Renee talked a long time later that morning. Justin came into the room where Renee was and kissed her on her forehead but didn’t say anything since he knew she was talking to Vaughn. Justin and Vaughn rarely engaged in more than acknowledging each other’s presence and that was that. Justin tried to reach out to his brother-in-law, but Vaughn hadn’t shown any interest in getting to know him. “Tell Vaughn I said, ‘hey’,” Justin whispered before he left the room. He wasn’t sure if Renee would tell Vaughn because they both knew Vaughn wouldn’t care.
PART 6 ~ The Children of Ham ~
“You’re making something out of nothing. People walk around each other all the time.” That was how Renee saw it that day as she and Vaughn walked down the street, but Vaughn saw something else. The two of them were teenagers at the time and were spending a day in the city.
“I dare you to not step aside,” Vaughn had challenged.
“That’s crazy,” Renee said.
“I dare you,” he persisted.
At that moment two white women came towards them. One of the women was on her phone while the other walked alongside her. They seemed to pay no attention to Renee as they headed in a straight path towards Renee causing Renee to step out of their path. They didn't seem to notice Renee at all.
“See? Told you,” Vaughn said. “We always step aside for them.”
“Stop making something out of nothing,” she repeated.
Renee had written her brother off that day because it was always best to write him off than to get into an argument with him. He was always making a scene about things like that, things she felt weren’t much of a big deal to get bent out of shape about. She understood that sometimes things were messy like someone looking at you and suddenly that someone becoming mindful to lock their car; or things could get out of hand like the day the man accused Vaughn of stealing his own bag.
Vaughn had set his shoulder bag on the ground while he and Renee waited for the bus. As the bus approached the stop Vaughn reached down to pick the bag up. A man in a restaurant saw Vaughn reach down to pick up his bag and rushed out of the restaurant to confront Vaughn.
“Is that your bag!” The man, a young man with bright red hair and with a tag on his shirt that read ‘Manager Craig’ came up to Vaughn, pointing his finger and yelling at him. “You’re trying to take someone’s bag!” the man said as he reached for Vaughn’s bag.
Renee told the man the bag belonged to Vaughn, but the man didn’t believe her. The other people at the bus stop gasped.
“Hey,” someone yelled at the man.
Vaughn looked at the man and coldly said, “Touch my bag, and I’m gonna fuck you up.”
The man didn’t listen, and Vaughn hit him square in the face sending the man against the window of the restaurant, shaking the glass and causing the people inside to jump from their tables. The man rushed Vaughn and they began to fight. All the while Renee and the people were shouting that the bag was Vaughn’s bag.
The police arrived and they separated Vaughn and the man. They wrestled Vaughn to the ground and cuffed him.
Renee told the police the story and one of the persons at the bus stop who had stayed behind to help out told the police the same. The two officers looked at each other. One of them had Vaughn face down on the sidewalk with her knee in Vaughn’s back while the other made sense of what had taken place.
The officer scolded Manager Craig and told him to go back to his business. The officer asked Vaughn what was in the bag and Vaughn told him. The officer looked and saw that Vaughn was telling the truth. He gave the bag to Renee, but they put Vaughn in the back of the cop car while they ran a check on him. He was cleared so they released him.
Vaughn was quiet the entire way home and when they got home, he went to his room and didn’t come out the rest of the day.
Renee remembered how she heard her parents sitting in his room talking with him and how the sun set that evening with Vaughn in his room. She understood the things that happen but while they seeped into Vaughn’s skin, she used them to justify looking for a new life.
Even now, years later, she was able to overlook things, things like people not paying any attention to her when Justin wasn’t with her — unless with suspicion when she was in a place that made people uncomfortable — or how genuinely people engaged in conversation with her only when she was with Justin.
She had learned that things like that were likely to happen and that she would address some things if the affront was brazened enough because she had gained a certain amount of self-importance from being an adult. She and Justin and their friends didn’t hold back in addressing behavior they saw as a slight against her whenever such behavior arose, but in all, against the likes of her brother she preferred to see such things as things that happen. She had taught herself to label them incidents.
PART 7 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Vaughn had asked his sister that morning if she started making plans for the baby.
“Of course,” Renee laughed. “You think I haven’t?”
“Of course,” he reminded himself. “Make sure you don’t make her too ‘girly’ if it’s a girl. Or dress him up in clothes to make him look like ‘a little man’ if it’s a boy. That always looks so weird.”
“I know, don’t it, though? But I will have her wearing one of those cute little head bands with a flower on it.”
“Oh my god.”
They laughed.
“If only Momma and Daddy were still here. They would be so ecstatic over becoming grandparents,” Renee said.
“Especially Momma.”
“Both of them,” Renee reminded. “Momma would have a reading room all set up just so she could read to him.”
“Yeah, and Daddy would take him around with him everywhere he went and school him- - ‘now this is how it was when I was growing up’,” Vaughn said, imitating their father.
“Too soon,” Renee said. “They left too soon.”
“Yeah.”
Renee and Vaughn fell silent from memories before Vaughn spoke. “Are we going to see much of the baby?”
“Of course.”
“There’s family here in Brooklyn too.”
“I know.”
The conversation they had that morning ended with Vaughn telling Renee that he would come over to Manhattan to spend time with she and Justin. Renee had pulled herself out of her shock and told him how nice that would be. But in her heart and her head she didn’t feel that way. He told her he was for real and even set a date.
“Okay, I’m gonna hold you to it,” she uttered with complete emptiness.
“Bet,” he said.
However, the day he was supposed to have come he got a ticket for jaywalking, and it messed up his day. “You know how many people jaywalk in this fuckin’ city!” He was angry as he spoke with Renee over the phone. “And the cops focus on the hood to give out tickets. They don’t fuckin’ give ‘em in Chelsea or Soho. Nah, they gonna fuck with us!”
“I know, Vaughn, but just pay the ticket. It’ll make matters worse if you don’t,” Renee said.
“Fuck that. I ain’t payin’ shit. Not a goddamn thing!”
Eventually Renee called Austin and had him pay the ticket and she reimbursed Austin. She knew Vaughn would be angry, and he was at both she and Austin, but it was done. The ticket was paid, and she and Austin spent the rest of that week dealing with Vaughn.
PART 8 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Renee’s stomach had grown, and she felt the extra weight as the months went on, so she began to take a car when she went out from their neighborhood. She and Justin got out of a taxi and walked around the Upper East Side looking in stores for things to buy for the nursery. They looked in a window of a shop and decided to go inside.
They looked at the cribs and accessories and took photos of them to send to the woman they had hired to design the room. She was a childhood friend of Renee who Renee had wanted to design their apartment when she and Justin bought it, but Justin didn’t feel confident about her, so they went with someone Justin knew. But this time Renee insisted on giving the job to her friend.
It was a sunny afternoon. Lexington Avenue was busy with people out for Saturday shopping or just hanging out. It was late Fall and Vaughn still hadn’t visited them. Renee didn’t think he would, and part of her was relieved, but Justin had looked forward to him coming over and he asked her about it.
“I like Vaughn,” Justin said. “He keeps it real.”
“A bit too real,” Renee said. They talked while having lunch.
“I can never, ever forget how he turned things up at our wedding,” Justin said.
“Oh god. Don’t remind me.”
“No, it was cool… the way he was listening to my parents go on and on about our family ‘being an old New York family’- - I get so tired of that shit. He let them finish and then he leaned in and told them that your family had been here since the early seventeen hundreds- - a lot longer than my family.” Justin grinned as he recalled the day. “He even knew where your family lived back then… ‘along a stream in the black part of the city that’s now The Village’,” Justin said, imitating Vaughn. Justin burst into laughter. “And then he asked my parents if they knew that that stream was paved over and is now Minetta Street. ‘It’s got an Italian name because black people weren’t allowed to own land,’ he said. And I was like, ‘oooh’, but totally enjoying it all.”
Renee shook her head. “It was embarrassing.”
“No it wasn’t,” Justin said.
“You like telling this story, don’t you?” Renee said.
“Yeah. I do.” Justin went on, “And the part that got me was when he said: Imagine how my people felt when they saw all of you comin’ over later on. They musta thought, ‘damn, some more of them? We ain’t never gonna get our due!’ Boy, I thought my parents were going to die! They just looked at him. And then he smiled right back at them and said, ‘Lady Liberty wasn’t for everybody.”
“That’s when I came over and got him,” Renee said.
“It was priceless!” Justin shook his head and laughed again.
“Yeah but he didn’t have to come off like that.”
“The way I see it, those are things they need to know.”
“He was being selfish. He’s always been that way. It was my special day, but he had no problem messing it up.”
“Aw, c’mon honey. He didn’t mess it up.”
“I just wish he wasn’t so angry,” Renee said.
“Well, he has a right to be. I just hope he puts it to good use.” Then, “Call him and tell him we want him to come over.”
“No, I think it’s best for us to go over there,” Renee said.
PART 9 ~ The Children of Ham ~
Months went by. Renee and Justin never went to visit Vaughn and Vaughn never visited them. But every week Renee and Vaughn talked like they always had, and Justin suggested they invite him over like he always he did. It went that way until the baby came.
They named the baby Maya, and she was the color of honey like Renee had dreamed. Renee called her family to let them know about the baby and her family was happy; all the while they wondered if they would ever see the child, and if they did would the child want to be around them when she grew up. Vaughn told Renee he would come to see the baby and this time Renee believed him because he had even congratulated Justin on Maya’s arrival.
Vaughn would sleep in the guest room which was down the hall from the nursery. Anticipation of Vaughn’s visit caused butterflies in Renee’s stomach even though it was still almost a week until the visit. She made the room up for him, then changed it and redid it before changing it and redoing it again.
After she made up the room for the fourth time she went to the nursery and stood over her daughter who was awake and looked at her with the awareness a child has of the person that brought it comfort. Maya joyously waved her tiny fists and Renee lifted her from the bassinet.
The designer had done a great job putting the room together. Even Justin had to move past her name (which was Kameisha) and admit to the wonderful job she had done. Renee sat with Maya in her arms in the quiet afternoon and looked out across the city. She thought about her parents, and of Vaughn and in sudden awe of her arrival, she looked down at her daughter. “Here we are,” she whispered.
PART 10 ~ The Children of Ham ~
It was a cold rainy day the day Vaughn was to come over. He had just gotten on the train and would be there in a little over an hour. He was excited to see Maya and had gifts for her. “A few things from home.”
Renee heard the sound of the doors closing on the train.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” Vaughn said.
Two hours had passed when Renee decided to check on her brother. She called his phone, but he didn’t pick up. She figured he was still underground on a delayed train. After a while she became concerned. She called again and again there was no answer.
Justin came in from the store, shaking the rain and cold from his umbrella and his limbs. “No Vaughn?” He spoke as he watched Renee standing at the window.
“No,” she whispered.
He put the groceries on the counter and walked to her. “He probably stopped off somewhere,” Justin said. “You know how random he can be.”
Renee continued to look out the window down onto the streets. From fifteen floors up she would still be able to spot her brother, but he wasn’t among the forms that rushed up and down the sidewalks and cross the streets.
“He doesn’t like this city and this city doesn’t like him,” she whispered. Then she spoke louder. “He doesn’t like this city because this city doesn’t like him.” She turned and looked at her husband who searched for words. “Because it doesn't like us,” she added.
“Honey…” Justin said.
Suddenly Renee’s phone rang and she immediately picked it up.
“Netta? You heard from Vaughn?” Austin’s voice was heavy with concern as it came over the phone.
“No.”
“We need to start callin’ around. I was just headed to the house and saw this message he sent earlier. He said he can’t keep movin’ out of their way.”
Renee sucked in her breath.
“This doesn’t sound good, Netta.”
PART 11 ~ The Children of Ham ~
They said he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, just stopped, and sat on his suitcase along West 14th Street. When the police came, they found him staring straight ahead, just sitting.
Renee watched her brother in the hospital. He was handcuffed to the bed and lay motionless, curled in a ball and his eyes were closed. There was a peacefulness to him. The nurse said he might be asleep or that he might have taken refuge behind his eyes.
Renee sat in a chair by her brother’s bed and held his hand. It was warm, and large and strong just like she recalled when he used to take her hand whenever they crossed a street. She spoke to him, softly speaking his name, and she called herself Netta, but he continued to lie in the quiet he had found somewhere behind his eyes.
“The doctor said he’s gonna be okay.” Austin spoke from the corner of the room where he sat in a large recliner chair. He was going to spend the night with Vaughn.
“Here,” Justin handed Maya to Renee. “Let him know she’s here.”
Renee took Maya and held her close to Vaughn’s face. “Maya’s here.”
Her words caused Vaughn’s eyelids to lightly flutter.
“From Ham were descended the … Negro race. Their inheritance, according to prophecy, has been and will continue to be slavery . . . [and] so long as we have the Bible . . . we expect to maintain it.” (1844, Patrick Hues Mell, President of University of Georgia, Athens and President of Southern Baptist Convention)
When she left that night, Renee took Vaughn’s suitcase with her so she could make sure he had things he might need. Austin told her that Vaughn had a gift for Maya in the suitcase.
The gift Vaughn made for his niece was a book, and it began with the words, ‘They say God kept one of Queen Amanirenas’s eyes so He and the queen could share the same vision. And this was the queen’s vision…’ That was how the story began and how Vaughn went on to tell the story of the Queen of Nubia and other stories from African history. He had carefully scripted the writing in the book and had hand drawn the pages in brilliant colors that caught Maya’s attention as Renee turned the pages and tucked in the book between pages was a note from Vaughn to his sister: ‘This is not a book where the heroes have blue eyes’. Renee thought of the gift Vaughn had made and of the many books and things her parents had left. Vaughn wanted to carry on the tradition.
It was two weeks before Vaughn opened his eyes, though he didn’t keep them open for any long length of time before closing them again. On some days Renee sat beside him while his eyes were open, and she saw the half emptiness in them. He responded briefly with words before closing his eyes, turning his back to whomever was beside him and going to sleep. Still, he seemed to be getting better, and in time Renee knew he would.
One day of that second week, as she left the hospital, Renee called her husband and told him she would be late getting home. It was cold and the ground sparkled with crystals of ice under a late noon sun. After talking with her husband for a while she told him to make sure Maya was fed, and she went down to the station to catch the #3 to East New York.
“… Some say it’s a part of it, we’ve got to fulfill the book … Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind…” (1979, Redemption Song, Bob Marley, musician, singer/songwriter, activist)
(Artwork- Àsikò, Instagram: Asiko_artist, Website: https://www.asiko.co.uk/ ; 'The Children of Ham', originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
Young Monster
by Doug Cooper Spencer
Are monsters born? Or do we create them?
PART 1: “You gotta start gettin’ here on time.” Lonnie’s sister called out over the music playing on the radio as Lonnie came through the front door.
“I’m here, ain’t I?” Lonnie closed the door and walked to the closet to hang up his jacket.
“Not at the last minute, though,” his mother scolded as she rushed from the bathroom. “The kids’ll be gettin’ up soon. We can’t have none of that last minute stuff where we don’t know if you gonna be here on time or not.”
“Or at all, like that one time,” his sister remarked as she gave one last spray of Afro Sheen to her hair.
‘Fuck you,’ Lonnie quietly mouthed to his sister.
“Yeah babies. That was Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway for you. And in case you done lost touch, it’s six a.m. on the AM dial. So for all of you who’s supposed to be headed out to work, you gotta step up yo’ game!” the d.j. on the radio said.
Lonnie’s mother and his sister hurried out of the door to catch the bus. Lonnie stood at the window and watched them walk down the sidewalk to the corner and join the group of riders who languished in various states of weariness along the curb. He left the window after he saw his mother and sister get on the bus. He went over to the stereo where he looked through the albums and put one on. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and smoked a cigarette and stared out across the room at nothing in particular. Just staring.
At seven o’clock he went into his nieces’ bedroom and woke them for school. He fixed them breakfast and sat it on the table.
“Look at my hair,” one of his nieces whined.
“What?”
“My hair. Keisha did it.”
Lonnie studied his niece’s hair.
“Why you do that, Keisha?”
“I was tryin’ to fix it.”
“Your momma already had it fixed.”
“But it came loose overnight.”
“No it didn’t,” the younger niece declared.
“Yes it did. You just didn’t see it.”
“C’mon. Eat in here,” Lonnie said to his younger niece as she sat on the floor of the living room between his legs.
“You don’t know how to do no hair!” Keisha called out from the kitchen table as she ate her breakfast.
“Shut up. I know somethin’ about it. You just keep eatin’,” Lonnie said as he combed his niece’s hair and plaited it the way he figured his sister had done the night before. After he finished doing his niece’s hair and breakfast was done, he walked them to school with his niece’s plait standing straight up, wavering under the pink clip that was in the shape of a bow that he had attached at its end.
“She look like a unicorn,” the older niece said with a laugh.
Lonnie pushed the plait on his niece’s head down, but it stood back up. ‘Fuck it’ he thought.
“I’ll see y’all at two,” Lonnie said as his nieces ran across the schoolyard.
When Lonnie got back to the apartment, he ate something then turned on music, putting an album on the stereo and lifting the holding arm so the album would repeat. Then he filled the bathtub, rolled a joint and set an ashtray alongside the tub and climbed in. The water was hot and it relaxed him as he settled in. Suddenly he lifted his arm because of a stinging sensation he felt on his forearm. It was a scratch. He must have gotten scratched last night and hadn’t noticed it until the hot water caused it to sting. He lowered his arm back in the water and relaxed as his thoughts drifted to the previous night in the man’s car and the way the light from the streetlamp fell through the dirty windshield and onto the back of the man’s head as Lonnie watched him:
“That’s what you wanted, ain’t it?”
The man raised his head from Lonnie’s crotch. “Yeah,” he said before going back down.
“I’ma need more than ten, man.”
“That’s all I got.”
“Nah it ain’t. I seen what you got when you opened your wallet. C’mon man, let me have another ten. I know you got another ten.”
“No,” the man said, suddenly raising his head. “No. If you can’t take ten, then let’s call it off.”
“Ok,” Lonnie said as he looked around the dark empty lot beneath the bridge where they had parked. “Ok,” he said again before suddenly hitting the man in the face. The man fell back against the door of the car and began swinging on Lonnie, but Lonnie was over him, hitting him, watching the blood jump from the man’s mouth and nose. Pressing down on the man he held the man’s head down between the steering wheel and the floor of the car and took what he needed and jumped out of the car, fixing his pants as he ran across the lot.
The album on the stereo played from the living room and Lonnie sang along, ‘You got the lovin’ I need’. He pitched his voice to match the tenor’s voice on the record.
Somewhere along the third track of the album he drifted off to sleep. He had a weird dream. He dreamt that he was suffocating, and he couldn’t move his hands to uncover his face. He woke suddenly as the water reached his nose. He got out of the tub and dried off. He wouldn’t want to go out like that-- his mother or his sister finding him dead and naked like his father. His father died when he was found crouching naked in the closet of his best friend’s bedroom, lamenting that he had just done it with the man’s wife. Lonnie wouldn’t go out like that.
Lonnie‘s family tended to die with sadness or anger or a combination of both. His grandmother died with a lot of regret that she was never pretty, his brother made it home from ‘Nam in one piece but died in a fit of rage once he returned and his mother and his sister, well, they was probably going to go out with regret too. His mother because she would see that her religion didn’t do nothing for her but made her cry over her pain and his sister for not finding the good husband she had always wanted. No, Lonnie was determined that he would never go out with sadness, anger or regret.
He went into his mother’s room where he kept some of his clothes in a box, he had clothes in boxes in each of the three bedrooms where his mother, his sister and his sister’s two daughters slept, the one with his underwear was in his mother’s room. He pulled out a pair of shorts and began to pull them on when he caught himself in the full mirror of his mother’s bedroom. He smiled as he watched himself naked. He understood why they wanted it. ‘Shit. Yeah,’ he thought as he put on his boxers.
After he got dressed, he pulled a ball of crumpled green paper from his pant pocket and laid it on the table, separating the bills of money and began counting. Forty-eight dollars he got off the man. Then he went to his jacket and pulled out the watch he had taken off the man’s wrist and one of the eight-track cartridges that was in the man’s car. The watch was nice. He would get at least twenty-five, thirty dollars from that even though he knew it was worth a lot more, and the eight-track would probably only get a dollar. If he could’ve gotten the one with Isaac Hayes on it he knew he would be able to get more, but he ended up with the one with Stanley Turrentine on it. He’ll just have to sell it to somebody who liked jazz, like one of them brothas who live around the university.
PART 2 ~ Young Monster ~
“You know you need to get a job.” Saeedith walked across the room with a plate. Lonnie had picked up his nieces and waited for his sister to come home before he went over to Saeedith’s place. “It’s more than being about a job, but work,” Saeedith said as she sat the plate on the table. “Something to fill your time and give you pride.”
“I have pride.”
“The type you had when you were working.”
Lonnie knew what Saaedith was saying was right. Everything she said was right. It was why he liked her. She was older. Not like the women his age. That was why he liked her. Older women knew what to do in bed and they knew when to give you things to think about. Saaedith did that even though her son and her daughter didn’t like that she was sleeping with someone who wasn’t much older than them. The way Lonnie saw it though, Saaedith being forty-four and getting good love like he gave her and him getting the good love she gave him was both of their blessings so both of her kids could fuck off. He told them that once before.
He listened to Saaedith as she lectured him. He didn’t have anything to say. He was tired of looking for work and not finding any. Tired of the way people looked at him whenever he walked in to fill out an application. White faces with eyes that would stare at him before disappearing back into that place in their faces where they could make him invisible, or eyes that looked past him as they slid the application across the desk to him or simply told him there were no openings. He knew the fact that he had been locked up for possession didn’t help and he hadn’t figured out a way to leave it off of the applications. If only he hadn’t taken that ride with his co-workers that day. Or if he hadn’t had that weed on him when they got pulled over. Or maybe, as Saaedith said, if he wasn’t the only black one in the car. After all, they all had weed on them, but he was the only one that got locked up. When he got out, he went back to his former employer but was told there wasn’t no place for drug addicts there. He remembered walking out past the other guys he had been with that day in the car. None of them looked at him.
“You can’t give up, Lonnie,” Saaedith said.
“I know.”
That evening Lonnie and Saaedith looked through the classifieds as they sat in bed. In a while they had circled a few of the job listings, then Saaedith looked at him once more before turning out the lights. “You have to keep going.”
“Whaaat? You here early,” Lonnie’s sister said as he came through the door the next morning. “She musta let you up earlier than usual, either that or you weren’t takin’ care of business like you were supposed to,” his sister said.
“I just can’t get a break with you, can I?” Lonnie replied to his sister, but he did it all while he was smiling and who wouldn’t? He was feeling good that day. Waking up in the morning with his woman lying next to him, her fixing him a good breakfast and telling him that she felt things were about to change for the better for him. Who wouldn’t feel good?
“Boy I don’t know where you be spendin’ your nights,” Lonnie’s mother said as she ironed her blouse. “You have to understand. You are the last man in this household. And you have to act like it. The last one,” she whispered to herself as she continued to iron.
The day was long and hot, and by the end Lonnie felt like he did all the other days, like he wasn’t a part of anything. The feeling he had that morning when he left Saaedith’s apartment was gone. The narrow eyes and averted glances had taken its toll on him so by the end of the day he felt no more than he usually felt. Maybe even a little less. He had told Saaedith that he would stop by later on that day, but he didn’t. He didn’t feel like looking in her face while she tried to cheer him on so instead he decided to hang out with his best friend.
“Let me have a quarter so I can call Saaedith,” he said as he and Marcus walked to the liquor store. He called Saaedith while Marcus was inside the store.
“It went good.”
“You’re not coming over?”
“… Nah. I need to get home and get outta these clothes, then my mother said she wants me and her to spend some time together.”
Saaedith listened, quietly taking in what Lonnie was laying on her.
“Don’t forget about temp work,” Saaedith said. “It might not be permanent but it’s something. Who knows? It could become permanent.”
“Yeah.”
“Ok,” Saaedith said. “I’ll see you later on this week.”
“Yeah. We can do something Saturday. Take in a movie.”
“Alright now, I’m gonna to hold you to that.”
“Bet.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Marcus came out of the liquor store. “Everything good?”
“Yeah,” Lonnie said as he hung up the phone.
PART 3 ~ Young Monster ~
They headed over to another friend’s apartment where they sat around for the rest of the evening smoking and drinking and talking over the voices and the sound of cars rolling down the block and music coming from everywhere it seemed. Lonnie was beginning to feel better. Being with his friends, doing what he knew best that would fill him up once again made him feel good again. He listened to all of their voices, talking about big assed girls, brothas who couldn’t handle their shit on the streets and ended up kicked out on the streets or locked up or both. They talked about the things they knew they would have one day, “’ey y’all checked out the ’78 Deuce?” “Yeah, but I like that Coupe DeVille though. They’ll be out ‘round September.” The eyes that made him feel small and disconnected were gone. He drank and laughed and talked and enjoyed watching his buddies, especially Marcus because Marcus was good-looking. Everybody knew that. The women loved him. Even the brothas knew he was good-looking. Shit if there was any guy, he would kick it with if it ever came down to it, Marcus would be the one. That evening with his buddies made up for the day.
It was after ten o’clock when Lonnie and Marcus left their friend’s apartment. Lonnie walked to Marcus’s apartment since it was on the way to his mother’s apartment. They said their goodbyes and Lonnie continued on. A few blocks away he saw someone walking down the street, a form half masked by the dark. He could tell it was a woman by the way she moved. He watched her as she made her way down the street, appearing briefly in the light of a streetlamp before half-fading into the darkness, so alone, so open. It would be clean. Take it and run. The thoughts came to him so convincingly that he found himself trailing the woman. He wasn’t sure if he should do it, but he did, he trailed her, walking carefully and measuring his breathing. It was after ten o’clock, so she was probably coming home from cleaning offices. He breathed easily and walked carefully until he was upon the woman. Suddenly he grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming. The woman fought back but she couldn’t overcome him. He pushed the woman to the ground and yanked her purse. The woman fought back as she attempted to hold onto her purse. Then, before he knew it, he hit her in the face, knocking her back against the street. The woman’s hand came loose from the purse and Lonnie took the purse and ran off into the night as the woman tried to run after him, limping and yelling for help.
He had never hit a woman before. Lonnie kept thinking that later as he walked down the street. He was sweating and hoping no one saw him before he calmed down. He thought about the woman, and of his mother and his sister and he wanted to do something. To go back and help the woman. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t go back. And the fourteen dollars she had in her wallet… it didn’t mean as much to him like he thought it would. He stopped and leaned against a building in an alley and took in a deep breath. He needed the money. He just wished he didn’t have to hit her. She should have let go of the purse the way other women did when he walked up on them.
Lonnie’s mother was surprised the next morning when she came out from her bedroom to get ready for work and found him asleep on the couch. The clothes he used to go job-hunting lay in a heap at the foot of the couch. She smiled and picked them up and laid them across a chair.
Two days passed before Lonnie was able to push out of his head what he had done to the woman. He told himself it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a dope fiend that might’ve killed her over her purse. She shouldn’t’ve fought back. At any rate, it was over. By that Thursday he was able to hang out with his buddies without giving it any more thought.
Maybe Saaedith was right. Maybe he should do temp work. He hated working for temp agencies. They usually sent him on crazy ass jobs, and he hated the way he felt when they got on the bus to go out to work. They loaded the workers all up on one of them old buses with their company name on it and dropped them off at the job. Jobs way out in places where he knew he wasn’t allowed to walk around. He hated it all. Riding through town with a bunch of folks that looked all lost and shit, or like losers, bunched up in a bus, paraded through the streets. And the jobs. They were usually bottom of the barrel, hard work, and ones where there was no respect. Bosses yelling at you, calling you names and there was nothing you could do about it because you needed the money. And besides, to whup the boss’s ass would only land you back in jail. Lonnie hated those jobs, but maybe Saaedith was right, so Monday he would get up early and go down to one of the offices. He would look into it, but for now he just needed to make it through the week.
PART 4 ~ Young Monster ~
Friday. Payday. Lonnie liked payday. His mother and his sister always complained before giving him a few dollars, but they always gave in. That way he could have fun like everybody else did on the weekend. Marcus got paid and with the little money Lonnie had they decided to bar hop. It was mostly dives, but at least they were having fun.
Before long Lonnie noticed that his money was pretty much gone. He had spent more than he had expected on buying drinks for women to entertain them in exchange for them sidling up to him, laughing and falling back in his arms where he could hold them and feel the plumpness of their bodies, the fullness of their titties, and them dancing with him, turning their backs to him every now and then to give him a glimpse of their behinds. Before long, his money was almost gone. Marcus had bought Lonnie a few drinks that night, so Lonnie couldn’t expect more from him because even though Marcus had a job, he made just enough to make it through the week himself, with child support and all. By the time the last bar closed Lonnie was broke and the young lady that he spent much of his money on had ditched him for somebody else when she found out Lonnie had spent his money for the night and worse, he didn’t even have his own place where they could go.
Lonnie walked out a little ahead of Marcus as the lights went on in the bar to signal closing. He didn’t want to be in Marcus’ way with the young lady Marcus had picked up for the night and he wanted to avoid looking defeated by circumstance, so he walked ahead of Marcus and the young lady and waited for them outside.
“Whatcha gonna do,” Marcus asked. His eyes studied Lonnie’s eyes. He knew Lonnie had no place to go now that he couldn’t spend the night at his apartment. They had started out together, and now he was concerned that he would have to dump Lonnie for the night.
“I’ma head on home. Me and Saaedith hangin’ out tomorrow so I have to get some sleep.”
Marcus nodded. He understood. “A’ight,” Marcus said. “I’ll catch you later.” They embraced and Marcus whispered in his ear. “Don’t do no crazy shit, man.”
Lonnie walked down the street. Away from the direction Marcus and his date was headed. Shit, he could go to Saaedith’s place and spend the night. He knew where his woman was. He could always get good pussy there. But he needed money. He couldn’t look Saaedith in the face and say he was broke. He just couldn’t. He was tired of that. So he walked on down the street past darkened bars whose beer signs glowed against the night, and past people who were getting in their cars or hopping in cabs headed to late hour clubs or home.
After walking for a while Lonnie found himself leaning against a building on a corner near a late hours club. He didn’t go too close to the club, but he stood a little away from it and watched the men standing around outside. The men were in a group laughing and talking loud as they smoked their cigarettes. They hugged each other and some of them danced just like the young lady Lonnie had been with earlier. From inside of the club he could hear the music, ‘Ooohh, It’s so good, It’s so good, It’s so good, It’s so good, It’s so-o-o go-o-od …’ the men standing outside waved their hands, ‘I feel lo-o-o-ve, I feel lo-o-o-ve…’
He watched them and took in a short breath as the thought of getting with one of them crossed his mind. He knew he had what they wanted. So he waited.
One of the guys saw him. He made a remark to the others in the group and they all looked at Lonnie. One of the men made a quick comment and waved his hand dismissively Lonnie’s way while a few of the others looked at Lonnie.
The man who saw Lonnie first left the group and walked over to the corner.
“I just wanted to get a better look at you,” he said to Lonnie, as he motioned with his cigarette and released smoke from his mouth.
“Well now you got it,” Lonnie replied.
“Hm. Sure do,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“Raphael.”
The man looked at Lonnie and laughed, “Raphael? Child you can do better than that! Well, ok ‘Raphael’.”
Lonnie hated the man for laughing at him. “So what’s up with you,” Lonnie went on.
“Well, I was gonna go back in the club, bu-u-t, now I got other thoughts on my mind.”
Lonnie looked into the man’s eyes the way he did when he made women melt under him. “Then let’s do it.”
The man studied Lonnie for a second. “Wait here,” he said.
As the man turned to walk away Lonnie slapped the man’s behind. “All that ass in them pants.”
The man laughed and went over to his buddies. Then the man came back to Lonnie. “Let’s go.”
“You got someplace?”
“Yeah,” the man said as he hailed a cab.
PART 5 ~ Conclusion of Young Monster ~
The apartment the man lived in was along a strip of abandoned warehouses and factories. Lonnie looked around as the taxi came to a stop. He saw the new streetlamps and the buildings that were being worked on. ‘Must be one of them up and coming places he had been hearing about,’ he thought as the guy paid the driver. A lot of folks with money were moving back into the hood. He had mentioned that to Saaedith once, how white folks were trying to take away the hood and she reminded him that it was once their neighborhood and that they were simply reclaiming it. But they were always doing that, he thought to himself. She must’ve seen the thought in his head because she had said “Until we start owning the land we don’t have any say in the matter. And we can if we worked together. White people do that. We don’t.” She always have blackness on her mind. And as usual, she was right. That’s why they were moving back in, Lonnie thought as he looked around. But this guy wasn’t white. He was black. Wonder what she would say about that? Nevertheless, this impressed Lonnie, and he nodded his head with assuredness as he followed the man into the building. He wanted to ask the man what he did for a living, but he didn’t want to seem too anxious.
When they walked into the man’s loft it was dark except for the light of the moon that came though large paned windows. Lonnie’s eyes moved about the dark space. It was large and crowded with things Lonnie couldn’t quite make out in the half-light. The things looked like frozen figures of human forms which caused Lonnie to suddenly stop in his tracks. “Yo’ bruh, you gotta turn on some lights.” He demanded this as he stood near the door.
The man laughed. “I am. What’re you scared of? I’m the one who should be concerned. Pickin’ up trade I don’t know,” the man said as he turned on the lights that brought the forms into view with a suddenness that caused Lonnie to blink in surprise as he looked at dozens of mannequins in the room. “See? They’re just mannequins. I collect them.”
Lonnie stepped further into the space. “Why?”
“Part work, part passion.”
There were also large worktables and dozens of bolsters of fabric throughout the workspace.
“You make clothes?”
“I’m a designer.”
“Wow. I ain’t never met no designer before. Who you make clothes for?”
“A lot of people,” the man answered as he closed the door.
“Anybody famous?”
“Some.”
“Like?”
“We didn’t come here to talk about all of that.”
“Yeah, I know. Maybe you can make somethin’ for me.”
The man laughed as they walked to the far side of the loft to a kitchen. “I don’t know. It’s kinda expensive. I have to be able to buy the material. Can you afford to buy all of that?”
Lonnie took a drink from the man and leaned against a counter. “I’m sure you got enough,” he said. “We could work somethin’ out.”
“We’ll see, after tonight,” the man said as he took Lonnie’s hand and walked him to the sofa.
“You got some big hands. Strong and masculine.” The man traced the veins on Lonnie’s hand with his thumb. Then he looked down at Lonnie’s feet. “Average size feet though. You know what they say about men with big feet and large hands.”
“My hands tell the story,” Lonnie said with a smile.
“This too.” The man grinned as he caressed Lonnie’s dick through his pants. “And it ain’t even hard.”
Lonnie laughed softly and nodded his head. He was feeling like someone. Not like he felt a lot of days, invisible or not worth the time. He watched the man’s hand as it squeezed Lonnie’s dick, kneading it.
“Yeah. I see you like that,” Lonnie said with a smug drawl. In his mind he measured in little ticks and clicks just how much he could get out of the man. How to make the most of this night. He could take what he could and split or maybe he could keep the man around. Longterm. Get money from him whenever he wanted it. Shit, looks like the man got money and he really seemed to be into Lonnie. That might be best. Depending on how tonight went.
“Let me see it,” the man said.
Lonnie looked at the windows. “People might see us.”
“Nobody lives in that building yet,” the man said waving towards the building across the street.
“Still. You ain’t go not curtains?”
The man sighed. “Child. Here.” He went to the windows and let down the blinds. “Better?” he asked as he walked back to the sofa.
“Yeah,” Lonnie said as he lifted himself and slid his jeans and shorts down.
“Oh fuck,” the man exclaimed. “Oh fuck,” he repeated with a whisper as he took Lonnie by the hand and started to walk him upstairs to an overlook that served as a bedroom.
“Let me pull up my pants.”
“No. I like seeing you walk with your pants down. I like seeing it swing when you walk.”
It didn’t take long for Lonnie to finish his business with the man. They had finished a bottle of wine and the man fell asleep in the bed beside Lonnie. Lonnie had dozed off for a few minutes, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes and he woke up. The apartment was quiet, and the man slept silently beside him.
Lonnie got up and went to the bathroom to take a piss. As he came back into the room, he saw the man was still asleep. Lonnie walked quietly over to the dresser and opened a box. He hoped it was a jewelry box. It was and Lonnie took one of the man’s watches and put it in his pants pocket before lying back down.
He touched the man on the arm. “‘ey man. I gotta go.”
The man woke up. “Oh. Ok.”
“You still gonna give me forty like you said?”
“Yeah.”
The man turned on the light and sat on the side of the bed and began counting the money he had in his wallet. Lonnie sat on the side of the bed and watched him count.
“Forty,” the man said as he turned to give Lonnie the money.
“Thanks,” Lonnie said.
Suddenly the man got up and looked across the room at the dresser. Lonnie had forgotten to close the jewelry box.
“You been in my shit!” the man yelled as he jumped up and ran across the room to the dresser. “You been in my shit,” he exclaimed as he looked at the box.
Lonnie jumped up from the bed. “Man, I ain’t took nothin’ from that damn box!”
“You a muthafuckin’ lie,” the man said.
The two of them stood, naked in the room glaring at each other.
Suddenly Lonnie rushed the man and hit him. The man stumbled back against the dresser then lunged at Lonnie and they wrestled and punched each other. They fought until Lonnie bested the man. He hit the man over and over until the man fell back onto the floor. The man was still, and Lonnie became scared. He didn’t know if he had knocked the man out or had killed him. Lonnie gathered up his clothes and began putting on his shorts and his pants. He ran down the stairs to the living room with his shoes and his shirt in his hands. He had to get out of the building. Good thing nobody else lived there. He was unlocking the door when he saw the man come at with him a large pair of scissors. It was all Lonnie saw before he felt the pain and he lost consciousness.
It was quiet. Dark and quiet as Lonnie opened his eyes. A sharp pain radiated from where the scissor had entered his chest tearing open flesh and muscle and the pain moved through his body, but he couldn’t address it. He couldn’t touch where the flesh was torn. He couldn’t move his hands at all. Or his arms. Or his feet. Or his back. Even his head was bound. His heart began to race, and he thought about his mother, and he wanted to call out to her, but he couldn’t, and he felt, even if he could, it wouldn’t matter. Then he thought about Saaedith. He saw her, but knew as well, that there was no reason to call out to her even if he could. And his breath. Short. Shallow. There was no sound except the pounding of his heart and the sound of the trunk he was in being pushed across the floor. Then the sound of things being put on top of the trunk. Then silence. Fear rushed through Lonnie, but it was replaced with sadness. A heart-deadening sadness. And he took in one last short, shallow breath as his eyes closed.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
“I’m here, ain’t I?” Lonnie closed the door and walked to the closet to hang up his jacket.
“Not at the last minute, though,” his mother scolded as she rushed from the bathroom. “The kids’ll be gettin’ up soon. We can’t have none of that last minute stuff where we don’t know if you gonna be here on time or not.”
“Or at all, like that one time,” his sister remarked as she gave one last spray of Afro Sheen to her hair.
‘Fuck you,’ Lonnie quietly mouthed to his sister.
“Yeah babies. That was Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway for you. And in case you done lost touch, it’s six a.m. on the AM dial. So for all of you who’s supposed to be headed out to work, you gotta step up yo’ game!” the d.j. on the radio said.
Lonnie’s mother and his sister hurried out of the door to catch the bus. Lonnie stood at the window and watched them walk down the sidewalk to the corner and join the group of riders who languished in various states of weariness along the curb. He left the window after he saw his mother and sister get on the bus. He went over to the stereo where he looked through the albums and put one on. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and smoked a cigarette and stared out across the room at nothing in particular. Just staring.
At seven o’clock he went into his nieces’ bedroom and woke them for school. He fixed them breakfast and sat it on the table.
“Look at my hair,” one of his nieces whined.
“What?”
“My hair. Keisha did it.”
Lonnie studied his niece’s hair.
“Why you do that, Keisha?”
“I was tryin’ to fix it.”
“Your momma already had it fixed.”
“But it came loose overnight.”
“No it didn’t,” the younger niece declared.
“Yes it did. You just didn’t see it.”
“C’mon. Eat in here,” Lonnie said to his younger niece as she sat on the floor of the living room between his legs.
“You don’t know how to do no hair!” Keisha called out from the kitchen table as she ate her breakfast.
“Shut up. I know somethin’ about it. You just keep eatin’,” Lonnie said as he combed his niece’s hair and plaited it the way he figured his sister had done the night before. After he finished doing his niece’s hair and breakfast was done, he walked them to school with his niece’s plait standing straight up, wavering under the pink clip that was in the shape of a bow that he had attached at its end.
“She look like a unicorn,” the older niece said with a laugh.
Lonnie pushed the plait on his niece’s head down, but it stood back up. ‘Fuck it’ he thought.
“I’ll see y’all at two,” Lonnie said as his nieces ran across the schoolyard.
When Lonnie got back to the apartment, he ate something then turned on music, putting an album on the stereo and lifting the holding arm so the album would repeat. Then he filled the bathtub, rolled a joint and set an ashtray alongside the tub and climbed in. The water was hot and it relaxed him as he settled in. Suddenly he lifted his arm because of a stinging sensation he felt on his forearm. It was a scratch. He must have gotten scratched last night and hadn’t noticed it until the hot water caused it to sting. He lowered his arm back in the water and relaxed as his thoughts drifted to the previous night in the man’s car and the way the light from the streetlamp fell through the dirty windshield and onto the back of the man’s head as Lonnie watched him:
“That’s what you wanted, ain’t it?”
The man raised his head from Lonnie’s crotch. “Yeah,” he said before going back down.
“I’ma need more than ten, man.”
“That’s all I got.”
“Nah it ain’t. I seen what you got when you opened your wallet. C’mon man, let me have another ten. I know you got another ten.”
“No,” the man said, suddenly raising his head. “No. If you can’t take ten, then let’s call it off.”
“Ok,” Lonnie said as he looked around the dark empty lot beneath the bridge where they had parked. “Ok,” he said again before suddenly hitting the man in the face. The man fell back against the door of the car and began swinging on Lonnie, but Lonnie was over him, hitting him, watching the blood jump from the man’s mouth and nose. Pressing down on the man he held the man’s head down between the steering wheel and the floor of the car and took what he needed and jumped out of the car, fixing his pants as he ran across the lot.
The album on the stereo played from the living room and Lonnie sang along, ‘You got the lovin’ I need’. He pitched his voice to match the tenor’s voice on the record.
Somewhere along the third track of the album he drifted off to sleep. He had a weird dream. He dreamt that he was suffocating, and he couldn’t move his hands to uncover his face. He woke suddenly as the water reached his nose. He got out of the tub and dried off. He wouldn’t want to go out like that-- his mother or his sister finding him dead and naked like his father. His father died when he was found crouching naked in the closet of his best friend’s bedroom, lamenting that he had just done it with the man’s wife. Lonnie wouldn’t go out like that.
Lonnie‘s family tended to die with sadness or anger or a combination of both. His grandmother died with a lot of regret that she was never pretty, his brother made it home from ‘Nam in one piece but died in a fit of rage once he returned and his mother and his sister, well, they was probably going to go out with regret too. His mother because she would see that her religion didn’t do nothing for her but made her cry over her pain and his sister for not finding the good husband she had always wanted. No, Lonnie was determined that he would never go out with sadness, anger or regret.
He went into his mother’s room where he kept some of his clothes in a box, he had clothes in boxes in each of the three bedrooms where his mother, his sister and his sister’s two daughters slept, the one with his underwear was in his mother’s room. He pulled out a pair of shorts and began to pull them on when he caught himself in the full mirror of his mother’s bedroom. He smiled as he watched himself naked. He understood why they wanted it. ‘Shit. Yeah,’ he thought as he put on his boxers.
After he got dressed, he pulled a ball of crumpled green paper from his pant pocket and laid it on the table, separating the bills of money and began counting. Forty-eight dollars he got off the man. Then he went to his jacket and pulled out the watch he had taken off the man’s wrist and one of the eight-track cartridges that was in the man’s car. The watch was nice. He would get at least twenty-five, thirty dollars from that even though he knew it was worth a lot more, and the eight-track would probably only get a dollar. If he could’ve gotten the one with Isaac Hayes on it he knew he would be able to get more, but he ended up with the one with Stanley Turrentine on it. He’ll just have to sell it to somebody who liked jazz, like one of them brothas who live around the university.
PART 2 ~ Young Monster ~
“You know you need to get a job.” Saeedith walked across the room with a plate. Lonnie had picked up his nieces and waited for his sister to come home before he went over to Saeedith’s place. “It’s more than being about a job, but work,” Saeedith said as she sat the plate on the table. “Something to fill your time and give you pride.”
“I have pride.”
“The type you had when you were working.”
Lonnie knew what Saaedith was saying was right. Everything she said was right. It was why he liked her. She was older. Not like the women his age. That was why he liked her. Older women knew what to do in bed and they knew when to give you things to think about. Saaedith did that even though her son and her daughter didn’t like that she was sleeping with someone who wasn’t much older than them. The way Lonnie saw it though, Saaedith being forty-four and getting good love like he gave her and him getting the good love she gave him was both of their blessings so both of her kids could fuck off. He told them that once before.
He listened to Saaedith as she lectured him. He didn’t have anything to say. He was tired of looking for work and not finding any. Tired of the way people looked at him whenever he walked in to fill out an application. White faces with eyes that would stare at him before disappearing back into that place in their faces where they could make him invisible, or eyes that looked past him as they slid the application across the desk to him or simply told him there were no openings. He knew the fact that he had been locked up for possession didn’t help and he hadn’t figured out a way to leave it off of the applications. If only he hadn’t taken that ride with his co-workers that day. Or if he hadn’t had that weed on him when they got pulled over. Or maybe, as Saaedith said, if he wasn’t the only black one in the car. After all, they all had weed on them, but he was the only one that got locked up. When he got out, he went back to his former employer but was told there wasn’t no place for drug addicts there. He remembered walking out past the other guys he had been with that day in the car. None of them looked at him.
“You can’t give up, Lonnie,” Saaedith said.
“I know.”
That evening Lonnie and Saaedith looked through the classifieds as they sat in bed. In a while they had circled a few of the job listings, then Saaedith looked at him once more before turning out the lights. “You have to keep going.”
“Whaaat? You here early,” Lonnie’s sister said as he came through the door the next morning. “She musta let you up earlier than usual, either that or you weren’t takin’ care of business like you were supposed to,” his sister said.
“I just can’t get a break with you, can I?” Lonnie replied to his sister, but he did it all while he was smiling and who wouldn’t? He was feeling good that day. Waking up in the morning with his woman lying next to him, her fixing him a good breakfast and telling him that she felt things were about to change for the better for him. Who wouldn’t feel good?
“Boy I don’t know where you be spendin’ your nights,” Lonnie’s mother said as she ironed her blouse. “You have to understand. You are the last man in this household. And you have to act like it. The last one,” she whispered to herself as she continued to iron.
The day was long and hot, and by the end Lonnie felt like he did all the other days, like he wasn’t a part of anything. The feeling he had that morning when he left Saaedith’s apartment was gone. The narrow eyes and averted glances had taken its toll on him so by the end of the day he felt no more than he usually felt. Maybe even a little less. He had told Saaedith that he would stop by later on that day, but he didn’t. He didn’t feel like looking in her face while she tried to cheer him on so instead he decided to hang out with his best friend.
“Let me have a quarter so I can call Saaedith,” he said as he and Marcus walked to the liquor store. He called Saaedith while Marcus was inside the store.
“It went good.”
“You’re not coming over?”
“… Nah. I need to get home and get outta these clothes, then my mother said she wants me and her to spend some time together.”
Saaedith listened, quietly taking in what Lonnie was laying on her.
“Don’t forget about temp work,” Saaedith said. “It might not be permanent but it’s something. Who knows? It could become permanent.”
“Yeah.”
“Ok,” Saaedith said. “I’ll see you later on this week.”
“Yeah. We can do something Saturday. Take in a movie.”
“Alright now, I’m gonna to hold you to that.”
“Bet.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Marcus came out of the liquor store. “Everything good?”
“Yeah,” Lonnie said as he hung up the phone.
PART 3 ~ Young Monster ~
They headed over to another friend’s apartment where they sat around for the rest of the evening smoking and drinking and talking over the voices and the sound of cars rolling down the block and music coming from everywhere it seemed. Lonnie was beginning to feel better. Being with his friends, doing what he knew best that would fill him up once again made him feel good again. He listened to all of their voices, talking about big assed girls, brothas who couldn’t handle their shit on the streets and ended up kicked out on the streets or locked up or both. They talked about the things they knew they would have one day, “’ey y’all checked out the ’78 Deuce?” “Yeah, but I like that Coupe DeVille though. They’ll be out ‘round September.” The eyes that made him feel small and disconnected were gone. He drank and laughed and talked and enjoyed watching his buddies, especially Marcus because Marcus was good-looking. Everybody knew that. The women loved him. Even the brothas knew he was good-looking. Shit if there was any guy, he would kick it with if it ever came down to it, Marcus would be the one. That evening with his buddies made up for the day.
It was after ten o’clock when Lonnie and Marcus left their friend’s apartment. Lonnie walked to Marcus’s apartment since it was on the way to his mother’s apartment. They said their goodbyes and Lonnie continued on. A few blocks away he saw someone walking down the street, a form half masked by the dark. He could tell it was a woman by the way she moved. He watched her as she made her way down the street, appearing briefly in the light of a streetlamp before half-fading into the darkness, so alone, so open. It would be clean. Take it and run. The thoughts came to him so convincingly that he found himself trailing the woman. He wasn’t sure if he should do it, but he did, he trailed her, walking carefully and measuring his breathing. It was after ten o’clock, so she was probably coming home from cleaning offices. He breathed easily and walked carefully until he was upon the woman. Suddenly he grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming. The woman fought back but she couldn’t overcome him. He pushed the woman to the ground and yanked her purse. The woman fought back as she attempted to hold onto her purse. Then, before he knew it, he hit her in the face, knocking her back against the street. The woman’s hand came loose from the purse and Lonnie took the purse and ran off into the night as the woman tried to run after him, limping and yelling for help.
He had never hit a woman before. Lonnie kept thinking that later as he walked down the street. He was sweating and hoping no one saw him before he calmed down. He thought about the woman, and of his mother and his sister and he wanted to do something. To go back and help the woman. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t go back. And the fourteen dollars she had in her wallet… it didn’t mean as much to him like he thought it would. He stopped and leaned against a building in an alley and took in a deep breath. He needed the money. He just wished he didn’t have to hit her. She should have let go of the purse the way other women did when he walked up on them.
Lonnie’s mother was surprised the next morning when she came out from her bedroom to get ready for work and found him asleep on the couch. The clothes he used to go job-hunting lay in a heap at the foot of the couch. She smiled and picked them up and laid them across a chair.
Two days passed before Lonnie was able to push out of his head what he had done to the woman. He told himself it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a dope fiend that might’ve killed her over her purse. She shouldn’t’ve fought back. At any rate, it was over. By that Thursday he was able to hang out with his buddies without giving it any more thought.
Maybe Saaedith was right. Maybe he should do temp work. He hated working for temp agencies. They usually sent him on crazy ass jobs, and he hated the way he felt when they got on the bus to go out to work. They loaded the workers all up on one of them old buses with their company name on it and dropped them off at the job. Jobs way out in places where he knew he wasn’t allowed to walk around. He hated it all. Riding through town with a bunch of folks that looked all lost and shit, or like losers, bunched up in a bus, paraded through the streets. And the jobs. They were usually bottom of the barrel, hard work, and ones where there was no respect. Bosses yelling at you, calling you names and there was nothing you could do about it because you needed the money. And besides, to whup the boss’s ass would only land you back in jail. Lonnie hated those jobs, but maybe Saaedith was right, so Monday he would get up early and go down to one of the offices. He would look into it, but for now he just needed to make it through the week.
PART 4 ~ Young Monster ~
Friday. Payday. Lonnie liked payday. His mother and his sister always complained before giving him a few dollars, but they always gave in. That way he could have fun like everybody else did on the weekend. Marcus got paid and with the little money Lonnie had they decided to bar hop. It was mostly dives, but at least they were having fun.
Before long Lonnie noticed that his money was pretty much gone. He had spent more than he had expected on buying drinks for women to entertain them in exchange for them sidling up to him, laughing and falling back in his arms where he could hold them and feel the plumpness of their bodies, the fullness of their titties, and them dancing with him, turning their backs to him every now and then to give him a glimpse of their behinds. Before long, his money was almost gone. Marcus had bought Lonnie a few drinks that night, so Lonnie couldn’t expect more from him because even though Marcus had a job, he made just enough to make it through the week himself, with child support and all. By the time the last bar closed Lonnie was broke and the young lady that he spent much of his money on had ditched him for somebody else when she found out Lonnie had spent his money for the night and worse, he didn’t even have his own place where they could go.
Lonnie walked out a little ahead of Marcus as the lights went on in the bar to signal closing. He didn’t want to be in Marcus’ way with the young lady Marcus had picked up for the night and he wanted to avoid looking defeated by circumstance, so he walked ahead of Marcus and the young lady and waited for them outside.
“Whatcha gonna do,” Marcus asked. His eyes studied Lonnie’s eyes. He knew Lonnie had no place to go now that he couldn’t spend the night at his apartment. They had started out together, and now he was concerned that he would have to dump Lonnie for the night.
“I’ma head on home. Me and Saaedith hangin’ out tomorrow so I have to get some sleep.”
Marcus nodded. He understood. “A’ight,” Marcus said. “I’ll catch you later.” They embraced and Marcus whispered in his ear. “Don’t do no crazy shit, man.”
Lonnie walked down the street. Away from the direction Marcus and his date was headed. Shit, he could go to Saaedith’s place and spend the night. He knew where his woman was. He could always get good pussy there. But he needed money. He couldn’t look Saaedith in the face and say he was broke. He just couldn’t. He was tired of that. So he walked on down the street past darkened bars whose beer signs glowed against the night, and past people who were getting in their cars or hopping in cabs headed to late hour clubs or home.
After walking for a while Lonnie found himself leaning against a building on a corner near a late hours club. He didn’t go too close to the club, but he stood a little away from it and watched the men standing around outside. The men were in a group laughing and talking loud as they smoked their cigarettes. They hugged each other and some of them danced just like the young lady Lonnie had been with earlier. From inside of the club he could hear the music, ‘Ooohh, It’s so good, It’s so good, It’s so good, It’s so good, It’s so-o-o go-o-od …’ the men standing outside waved their hands, ‘I feel lo-o-o-ve, I feel lo-o-o-ve…’
He watched them and took in a short breath as the thought of getting with one of them crossed his mind. He knew he had what they wanted. So he waited.
One of the guys saw him. He made a remark to the others in the group and they all looked at Lonnie. One of the men made a quick comment and waved his hand dismissively Lonnie’s way while a few of the others looked at Lonnie.
The man who saw Lonnie first left the group and walked over to the corner.
“I just wanted to get a better look at you,” he said to Lonnie, as he motioned with his cigarette and released smoke from his mouth.
“Well now you got it,” Lonnie replied.
“Hm. Sure do,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“Raphael.”
The man looked at Lonnie and laughed, “Raphael? Child you can do better than that! Well, ok ‘Raphael’.”
Lonnie hated the man for laughing at him. “So what’s up with you,” Lonnie went on.
“Well, I was gonna go back in the club, bu-u-t, now I got other thoughts on my mind.”
Lonnie looked into the man’s eyes the way he did when he made women melt under him. “Then let’s do it.”
The man studied Lonnie for a second. “Wait here,” he said.
As the man turned to walk away Lonnie slapped the man’s behind. “All that ass in them pants.”
The man laughed and went over to his buddies. Then the man came back to Lonnie. “Let’s go.”
“You got someplace?”
“Yeah,” the man said as he hailed a cab.
PART 5 ~ Conclusion of Young Monster ~
The apartment the man lived in was along a strip of abandoned warehouses and factories. Lonnie looked around as the taxi came to a stop. He saw the new streetlamps and the buildings that were being worked on. ‘Must be one of them up and coming places he had been hearing about,’ he thought as the guy paid the driver. A lot of folks with money were moving back into the hood. He had mentioned that to Saaedith once, how white folks were trying to take away the hood and she reminded him that it was once their neighborhood and that they were simply reclaiming it. But they were always doing that, he thought to himself. She must’ve seen the thought in his head because she had said “Until we start owning the land we don’t have any say in the matter. And we can if we worked together. White people do that. We don’t.” She always have blackness on her mind. And as usual, she was right. That’s why they were moving back in, Lonnie thought as he looked around. But this guy wasn’t white. He was black. Wonder what she would say about that? Nevertheless, this impressed Lonnie, and he nodded his head with assuredness as he followed the man into the building. He wanted to ask the man what he did for a living, but he didn’t want to seem too anxious.
When they walked into the man’s loft it was dark except for the light of the moon that came though large paned windows. Lonnie’s eyes moved about the dark space. It was large and crowded with things Lonnie couldn’t quite make out in the half-light. The things looked like frozen figures of human forms which caused Lonnie to suddenly stop in his tracks. “Yo’ bruh, you gotta turn on some lights.” He demanded this as he stood near the door.
The man laughed. “I am. What’re you scared of? I’m the one who should be concerned. Pickin’ up trade I don’t know,” the man said as he turned on the lights that brought the forms into view with a suddenness that caused Lonnie to blink in surprise as he looked at dozens of mannequins in the room. “See? They’re just mannequins. I collect them.”
Lonnie stepped further into the space. “Why?”
“Part work, part passion.”
There were also large worktables and dozens of bolsters of fabric throughout the workspace.
“You make clothes?”
“I’m a designer.”
“Wow. I ain’t never met no designer before. Who you make clothes for?”
“A lot of people,” the man answered as he closed the door.
“Anybody famous?”
“Some.”
“Like?”
“We didn’t come here to talk about all of that.”
“Yeah, I know. Maybe you can make somethin’ for me.”
The man laughed as they walked to the far side of the loft to a kitchen. “I don’t know. It’s kinda expensive. I have to be able to buy the material. Can you afford to buy all of that?”
Lonnie took a drink from the man and leaned against a counter. “I’m sure you got enough,” he said. “We could work somethin’ out.”
“We’ll see, after tonight,” the man said as he took Lonnie’s hand and walked him to the sofa.
“You got some big hands. Strong and masculine.” The man traced the veins on Lonnie’s hand with his thumb. Then he looked down at Lonnie’s feet. “Average size feet though. You know what they say about men with big feet and large hands.”
“My hands tell the story,” Lonnie said with a smile.
“This too.” The man grinned as he caressed Lonnie’s dick through his pants. “And it ain’t even hard.”
Lonnie laughed softly and nodded his head. He was feeling like someone. Not like he felt a lot of days, invisible or not worth the time. He watched the man’s hand as it squeezed Lonnie’s dick, kneading it.
“Yeah. I see you like that,” Lonnie said with a smug drawl. In his mind he measured in little ticks and clicks just how much he could get out of the man. How to make the most of this night. He could take what he could and split or maybe he could keep the man around. Longterm. Get money from him whenever he wanted it. Shit, looks like the man got money and he really seemed to be into Lonnie. That might be best. Depending on how tonight went.
“Let me see it,” the man said.
Lonnie looked at the windows. “People might see us.”
“Nobody lives in that building yet,” the man said waving towards the building across the street.
“Still. You ain’t go not curtains?”
The man sighed. “Child. Here.” He went to the windows and let down the blinds. “Better?” he asked as he walked back to the sofa.
“Yeah,” Lonnie said as he lifted himself and slid his jeans and shorts down.
“Oh fuck,” the man exclaimed. “Oh fuck,” he repeated with a whisper as he took Lonnie by the hand and started to walk him upstairs to an overlook that served as a bedroom.
“Let me pull up my pants.”
“No. I like seeing you walk with your pants down. I like seeing it swing when you walk.”
It didn’t take long for Lonnie to finish his business with the man. They had finished a bottle of wine and the man fell asleep in the bed beside Lonnie. Lonnie had dozed off for a few minutes, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes and he woke up. The apartment was quiet, and the man slept silently beside him.
Lonnie got up and went to the bathroom to take a piss. As he came back into the room, he saw the man was still asleep. Lonnie walked quietly over to the dresser and opened a box. He hoped it was a jewelry box. It was and Lonnie took one of the man’s watches and put it in his pants pocket before lying back down.
He touched the man on the arm. “‘ey man. I gotta go.”
The man woke up. “Oh. Ok.”
“You still gonna give me forty like you said?”
“Yeah.”
The man turned on the light and sat on the side of the bed and began counting the money he had in his wallet. Lonnie sat on the side of the bed and watched him count.
“Forty,” the man said as he turned to give Lonnie the money.
“Thanks,” Lonnie said.
Suddenly the man got up and looked across the room at the dresser. Lonnie had forgotten to close the jewelry box.
“You been in my shit!” the man yelled as he jumped up and ran across the room to the dresser. “You been in my shit,” he exclaimed as he looked at the box.
Lonnie jumped up from the bed. “Man, I ain’t took nothin’ from that damn box!”
“You a muthafuckin’ lie,” the man said.
The two of them stood, naked in the room glaring at each other.
Suddenly Lonnie rushed the man and hit him. The man stumbled back against the dresser then lunged at Lonnie and they wrestled and punched each other. They fought until Lonnie bested the man. He hit the man over and over until the man fell back onto the floor. The man was still, and Lonnie became scared. He didn’t know if he had knocked the man out or had killed him. Lonnie gathered up his clothes and began putting on his shorts and his pants. He ran down the stairs to the living room with his shoes and his shirt in his hands. He had to get out of the building. Good thing nobody else lived there. He was unlocking the door when he saw the man come at with him a large pair of scissors. It was all Lonnie saw before he felt the pain and he lost consciousness.
It was quiet. Dark and quiet as Lonnie opened his eyes. A sharp pain radiated from where the scissor had entered his chest tearing open flesh and muscle and the pain moved through his body, but he couldn’t address it. He couldn’t touch where the flesh was torn. He couldn’t move his hands at all. Or his arms. Or his feet. Or his back. Even his head was bound. His heart began to race, and he thought about his mother, and he wanted to call out to her, but he couldn’t, and he felt, even if he could, it wouldn’t matter. Then he thought about Saaedith. He saw her, but knew as well, that there was no reason to call out to her even if he could. And his breath. Short. Shallow. There was no sound except the pounding of his heart and the sound of the trunk he was in being pushed across the floor. Then the sound of things being put on top of the trunk. Then silence. Fear rushed through Lonnie, but it was replaced with sadness. A heart-deadening sadness. And he took in one last short, shallow breath as his eyes closed.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
The Wounded Gardener
by Doug Cooper Spencer
Home isn’t always what it should be
PART 1: Calvin stood behind the store during his break. He sipped his coffee and studied the trees in the near distance; their leaves moved crimson red against a deep blue sky. Autumn was heading towards winter, and he wondered if spring would be kind to Roosevelt this year. The last few years the season had been less than gracious to his hometown, unlike the town of Campton where he worked. But more than anything, he worried about his garden. No matter how much he cared for it, every plant that tried to grow eventually died leaving sorrowful strings of brown along the rows of soil. If he had a way of moving his garden to Campton where it would survive, he would because his garden was the only thing that lived for him.
When his break was over, he went back inside and started to arrange the cans on the shelf. He knew by day’s end they would be knocked over once again by his co-workers just so they could mess with his head but for now he did what he could do. He looked at his watch; it was a little more than an hour and forty-five minutes before he got off work.
“I don't know why you lookin' at your watch. It ain't like you got shit to do.” It was Broderick, one of the ringleaders. The other workers laughed.
“You don't know what I got goin' on,” Calvin snapped.
“Probably one ‘a them gay hotlines,” Broderick scoffed as the laughter turned into howls.
Five o’clock. Calvin zipped up his jacket and tucked his hands deep into his pockets as he walked across the lot to the bus stop. He always hid his hands. He sat on the bench and raised his face to feel the last warm rays of the late autumn sun before it lowered itself beyond the trees.
His co-workers tore out of the lot and sped past him. No one looked his way. If only the bus would get there before the sun was gone and the chill set in. He leaned forward and looked down the road. There were only a few buses that came to their town so he knew he had a while to wait; but that would all end once he got his car out of the shop. The last car drove out of the lot.
Just as the sun started to disappear, the bus came up the road. 'Finally,' he whispered as if this was an unexpected event. After all, the bus came the same time every day. He got on the bus and paid his fare. He looked for a seat near the front so he wouldn’t have to walk past the curious eyes of the riders as they dissected him, probably making up tales in their heads about what he did when he was out of their sight. There were no seats at the front of the bus, so he began to search for one that was empty or at least one that held an unconcerned rider. There was only one. An elderly woman sat with a bag. She smiled at him and let him slide in beside her. He put his hands back in his jacket pockets and looked out the window as the bus headed down the road.
By the time he got home the few streetlamps that dotted his street had come on. They lighted the ragged asphalt of the road until they stopped just short of the house he lived in. It was as if the town had suddenly run out of money two homes from the one in which he lived, but at least the porch light was on as the only friend that greeted him each night.
It was good to be home away from the smart-ass remarks and the stares. Some of the stares were from those who mocked him, but most of the stares were from people who pitied him or simply wanted to understand him: why was he ‘that way’? After all the years you'd think either they would have gotten used to him or at least he would have grown thicker skin, but neither had happened so he simply endured.
He fixed dinner and sat down in the living room to eat. Every once in a while, he looked over at the desk in front of the window. It was covered with papers stacked neatly in small piles and beside each pile were envelopes. He would be sending out his story once again this weekend, then wait for the rejections to come.
It was a Friday night without his car, so he had no way of going up to Breckfield which was the nearest town with a black gay bar. Even though the ride was a two-and-a-half-hour drive, just being around people who didn't gawk at him was worth it. At 'Mama's' he could dance, talk and laugh with people who knew him. After the bar closed, he would sleep over at a friend's house instead of making the long drive back. He didn't go often but when the people of Roosevelt got on his last nerve he would jump in his car and head up there. Other than that, he spent his weekends in the house and visiting his parents. He had no real friends in Roosevelt.
It was late, and after having dozed off twice while watching a movie, he decided to go to bed. Later, he was awakened by a knock at the door. He looked at the clock by his bed. Three fifty-two. He got up and walked down the hall to the living room, looked out the window then opened the door.
PART 2 ~ The Wounded Gardener ~
“You sleep already?” Broderick leaned against the doorjamb.
“Yeah.”
“It's Friday, man.”
Calvin stepped aside as Broderick came in trailing a smell of alcohol as he passed.
“You want somethin' to eat?” Calvin asked.
“Yeah. Whatcha got?”
“I got some cold cuts.”
“Nah.” Broderick shook his head. “Make me some eggs and bacon.”
“I don't feel like cookin'.”
“Man, just do it.”
After Broderick mauled his way through the food, he got up and walked down the hall towards Calvin's bedroom. Calvin turned off the lights and followed him. He undressed and climbed back in bed and watched Broderick as he stumbled out his of shorts and fell back onto the bed.
“Gimme some head.”
Calvin moved down, his face sliding along Broderick's stomach and began to take care of him. Soon Broderick was on top of him moving inside him calling him 'baby' and telling him how good it is.
Calvin held onto him. He felt safe under Broderick’s weight. Being under Broderick, holding onto his large back and hearing his breath made Calvin happy. No, it brought him joy because someone wanted him, even desired him. Broderick needed him and Calvin knew it even though Broderick would never admit it.
Sometimes, when Broderick would stay longer—usually from dusk to dusk so no one would see him come or go—they would sit around and talk, eat, drink, watch tv and have sex throughout the day. Their relationship had been going on for the better part of three years. Calvin liked to say ‘the better part’ because the first few months they fought almost as much as they had sex. Back then Calvin couldn’t understand why Broderick would spend time with him, then make fun of him at work. They would argue and settle, and then they would argue again the next time Broderick came over.
In truth, Broderick couldn’t answer Calvin’s question. He couldn’t answer it, but he knew the answer. He had always had a curiosity over what people like Calvin did in bed. His curiosity was strong even when he dated women, and when he and Calvin began working at the store his curiosity turned to opportunity. He would watch Calvin and his curiosity would rise until one day he decided to approach him. They were in the stock room, and he managed his way to where he was close to Calvin.
“Man, why do you do what you do?”
Calvin told him it was none of his business, but Broderick pressed on because it really was his business. Finally, Calvin told him to leave him alone and Broderick laughed.
“You just want some of this,” he said, as he exposed himself. He knew Calvin would like what he saw, and he knew Calvin wouldn’t report him because Calvin was the one people disliked, not him. He watched Calvin’s face which held an expression of awe. Finally, Broderick laughed and covered himself. That night, after the bars closed, he took it upon himself to go over to Calvin’s house. Calvin was surprised when he saw him standing there half drunk, but he didn’t resist the offer. Both of them would become locked into this secret and they would go on with their lives as if nothing ever happened. That was the way things went with Calvin.
But one night eventually became another and soon, many more. And in spite of their arguments over why he came over and continued to deny Calvin at work, they both knew the answer: It was the way things were. It was the way things had always been. In time Calvin stopped arguing and accepted what was, in the same way a person might find something ugly, but eventually find a kind of beauty in it, or at least find it less unattractive because so many others had come to embrace the ugliness. Broderick told him it was all in fun and to not get so worked up. Calvin settled for his answer. It was the way things had always been.
In a moment Broderick was done. Grabbing Calvin in his arms and calling him 'ooh baby', it was over and he pulled out and fell asleep. Calvin turned on the tv in the bedroom and continued watching the movie he had been watching earlier. At five thirty, just before the sun rose and the neighbors began to stir, he woke Broderick and walked him to the door.
“A'ight,” Broderick said.
“Okay.”
“You still writin' stories?” Broderick glanced over at the desk.
“Yeah.”
“Oh. A'ight. I'll catch you later.”
“Okay.”
Calvin shut the door and went to bed. It was the way things had always been.
PART 3 ~ The Wounded Gardener ~
The garden was brown year-round. Calvin stood in back of the house and looked at the dark, ragged shoots that leaned forth from the crumbling soil. He used to grow things there. He'd gotten permission from ol’man Aiken to let him plant a garden out back.
There was a time when the garden was green, a deep verdant of collards and mustard with shocks of orange carrots and yellow bell peppers. Once all of Roosevelt was that same green, but now, little by little, patches of brown were collecting as if to form its own community of death.
Some people said the residents of Roosevelt had lost their African roots, that they had forgotten the earth and now the earth was forgetting them, but Calvin didn't believe that. He saw the tankers that came in from out of town and left empty. He figured that had something to do with it and that became the story of his novel.
Looking out over the fields that lay beyond the small brick and wood frame houses the memories came back; he and Kerry used to stroll through the fields imagining they were movie stars. They would take turns playing the role of the starlet and then they would relax in the shade of the large tree beside the brook that ran along the southern edge of town.
Now the brook was gone and all that was left was a gray scar along the earth where the brook once flowed. Even Kerry was gone. He told Calvin Roosevelt had nothing to offer and that if he wanted to be abused, he’d rather have it done in a city he liked.
Calvin understood what Kerry meant, but he had no plans of ever leaving Roosevelt. It wasn’t that he was endeared to the little community; it was simply the only place he knew well. And though there was much pain and hatred inflicted on him in Roosevelt, the idea of moving on to something unknown, something which he couldn’t even imagine, frightened him more than anything Roosevelt could toss his way. At least he knew Roosevelt. Yet, deep inside a seedling of a voice spoke every now and then of leaving.
That last evening together Calvin and Kerry sat under the tree by the brook and talked for hours.
“Let’s leave together,” Kerry said.
Calvin had shaken his head. “Nah, I can't.”
“How come? Ain’t nothing gonna happen here. It’s just a town full of ignorant black folks.”
“Somethin’ might happen. They might change.”
“Boy you sound crazy. People been sayin’ nasty things to us all our lives.”
“Times change though. It might change here too.”
“Well I ain’t got time to wait. I’m outta here.”
Kerry moved away to Atlanta. They kept in touch for a while but over time the correspondences died away. Calvin prayed that Kerry hadn’t done the same.
He had told Kerry that times would change, but change was always slow to make it to Roosevelt. Ever since the 1.2 square miles were allotted for the black folks in order to keep them near the factories but out of nearby Campton, the citizens of Roosevelt had worked hard to make their town the model of progress. But that progress didn’t include welcoming men who liked men, or women who liked women; they said it worked against the advancement of black folks to be that way.
So while some ‘sweet’ men and ‘bullin’ women moved away, others stayed on and solemnly made due with what was expected of them. But Calvin, on the other hand, was something else. He had no way of hiding who he was; it was that walk he tried to correct, and that voice he tried to change, they were parts of him that just wouldn't go away. Even his hands; they were long and thin. His father hated them. When Calvin was a boy his father would smack him on the head whenever Calvin’s wrists ‘went soft’. Some of the citizens of Roosevelt wondered in that case why Calvin wouldn't just hurry up and leave town. But he stayed on, inviting the ire of the residents of Roosevelt.
The rest of the weekend went as any weekend would without a car. Calvin visited his parents for Sunday dinner where he fought with his father who said his jeans were too tight, and he tried to infuse happiness into his mother’s eyes that had gone dim from years of trying to change him. By Sunday night he was done.
He walked home from his parents’ house that night. As he came to the corner of Ward and Hempler, he heard a car coming up behind him. It slowed a bit and went around the block. He recognized the car. It belonged to Big Bug.
‘Shit’, he thought to himself. He knew Big Bug would circle the block to see if anyone was looking and come back.
A second time around, Big Bug slowed alongside him.
“’ey.”
Calvin didn’t answer.
“Nigga you hear me talkin’ to you.”
“What?”
“Why don’t you let me come over?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“’Cause I don’t wanna be bothered.”
Without another word, Big Bug drove off.
Calvin knew it wasn’t over. He didn’t want to be with Big Bug because he liked to make Calvin get on his knees while he did it to him hard from behind. Calvin didn’t like that because it didn’t make him feel wanted. Stepping up his stride, Calvin tried to make it to his house before the car circled again, but it was too late. Big Bug had returned.
“You don’t git in this car, I’mma git out and whup yo’ ass.”
Calvin continued to walk.
They were now in a darkened part of the block and Big Bug pulled the car in front of him, blocking Calvin’s path. He opened the car door and started to get out.
“Nigga you think I’m playin’?”
Standing in the darkness, Calvin felt his stomach knot. Slowly he went around and got in.
That night he undressed to take a shower. He pulled off his shorts and threw them in the trash can in the bathroom. The blood had soaked through. He looked into his jeans and only a light pink was there. He put the jeans in the laundry hamper and climbed into the shower.
The letter came that Thursday. Thursday night he took out the mail and went through it. Mostly bills and advertisements as usual, but tonight there was something different. The envelope had the name: Balfore Productions and was followed by a flowing logo in the top left corner. Calvin slit open the envelope and unfolded the letter. It was from a Randal Balfore.
‘Dear Mr. Preston,
As President of Balfore Productions…’
Calvin stood stone still. It was happening. A company called Balfore Productions wanted the option to buy his story. It was happening, yet he had been unprepared for it. The letter allowed Calvin time to ‘discuss it further with his attorney’, but shit, he didn’t have one.
He waited a day and a half so as not to look too needy then he sent his reply. A few months later the check came along with an agreement to give him screen credit. He walked through the house reading the letter over and over trying to form a way to discredit it. Standing at the back door he looked out over what used to be the garden and the tops of trees that moved in the wind. There was nothing to discredit anymore.
The next day at work went as usual: the cans on the shelves had been scrambled, his cart had been hidden, and his co-workers made disparaging remarks to him; but now Calvin didn’t care. He straightened the cans, and hummed while doing it.
“What the fuck you singin’ about?” One of his male co-workers asked. He stood with Broderick and a young lady and they all frowned as they demanded an answer.
“Yeah, why you singin’ an’ shit,” the young lady asked.
“I’m workin’. What does it look like?”
One of the managers called his name and demanded to know why he left his cart in the middle of the store. His co-workers began to laugh. Calvin told him he didn’t put it there, but that he would move it for the third time that day, hoping his boss would gain a clue about what was really going on. He figured he did, but Calvin knew he was at his disposal.
That Friday night, Broderick came over as usual. As he sat in the kitchen and ate, Calvin pulled up a chair. “I sold my story.”
Broderick raised his head from his plate and looked at him. “You did?”
“Yeah,” Calvin grinned, shaking his head.
“That’s alright. What now? They gonna pay you?”
“Already got the check.”
“How much?”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“I ain’t man. Shit. How much?”
PART 4 ~ Conclusion of The Wounded Gardener ~
“Thirty thousand.”
Broderick dropped his fork. “Fuck! You fulla shit.”
Calvin shook his head. “Here’s the receipt.” He pulled it out of his pocket and slid it across the table.
Broderick looked at it and his mouth dropped. “Damn…” he whispered. “So whatcha gonna do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You cashed it yet? Is it good?”
“Hell yeah.”
“So whatcha gonna do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Broderick held Calvin in his arms that night. They lay in bed and talked about what to do with the money. They talked about Calvin getting his car out of the shop, and Broderick getting a 60” flat screen and sound system. He said he would also need some tires for his car soon. Then he kissed Calvin and cradled him as he made love to him, slow, long and sweet. Then they slept with Calvin’s head on Broderick’s chest until it was time for Broderick to go.
“I’m proud of you man,” Broderick said as he stood in the living room. He looked over at the desk, and nodded his head. “Yeah,” he whispered before kissing Calvin and leaving.
After he left Calvin watched Broderick walk to his car. That body, that walk… he smiled and went back to bed.
His mother’s eyes lighted for the first time in many years when Calvin told her. She was happy to see something good happen to her son. She had all but given up on him ever becoming a man, but with a mother’s love she held onto hope that something or someone good would come his way. It was the least she could pray for. Maybe this was that something. She wasn’t sure, but it was something nonetheless. When he told his father, his father looked confused. He didn’t see how it would help him become a man, but he acknowledged his pride anyway. He did grin though when Calvin bought him the same tv he had bought Broderick.
As the weeks went on, Calvin got his car out of the shop, but instead of going to Breckfield, he and Broderick would go up to Carlisle for the weekend and spend their time partying, shopping and making love before coming back to Roosevelt Sunday night in time to get up for work Monday morning. Even at work, Broderick cooled on harassing him though the others didn't. But Calvin didn’t care because he was beginning to feel unlike himself. He was becoming aware of things that were outside of who he was and the effect he now had on those things.
One night, after he had gotten in from work he looked at his bank statement and saw how much of the money he had gone through. There was still a nice amount, but suddenly he realized how fleeting it could all be.
That Friday he pulled Broderick to the side so the other employees wouldn’t see them and told him they shouldn’t go out of town for the weekend. Broderick asked why and Calvin told him the money was going too fast. Broderick told him that was what money did and all he had to do was write another story. Calvin said they could talk about it that night. And that night they did. They argued most of the time and Broderick closed down, only getting his dick sucked, getting some ass and leaving. The next weekend Calvin took them out of town again.
This time they rented a car and stayed in the best hotel they could afford, ate at the best restaurant they could afford and partied and made love all weekend long. They even took that Monday off so they could spend an extra day in Carlisle.
That Monday night after they came back, Broderick pulled up a block from where he stayed so no one might see him with Calvin. “That was a nice time, baby’, he said, as he rubbed Calvin’s thigh.”
Calvin grinned. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Broderick looked around to see if anyone was looking then leaned over and gave Calvin a kiss. “I’ll see you.”
“Okay.”
Calvin watched Broderick hurry out of the car and gather up his bags then rush down the street and disappear into his building. It was a chilly winter night under a deep starry sky. Inside the car the stereo was playing. A soft song came on. Calvin smiled as he thought of his mother and his father. Finally he slid behind the wheel, turned the car around and headed away from Roosevelt, far, far from Roosevelt under the stars and the nighttime sky.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
Andrew Rivera
by Doug Cooper Spencer
The voice within him spoke. It took sixty years for him to speak it aloud.
PART 1:
Andrew Rivera got up the same time every morning, at five-thirty just as he had done for the last forty-six years. Forty of those years had been when he worked for the city where he worked until he retired a few years ago.
Each morning he awoke, he went through the same routine of washing his face, brushing his teeth with baking soda and gargling with Listerine — the brown kind — and taking his dog, Celia, who he named after his favorite singer, out to do her business.
Now that Celia was older Andrew had to rush through his routine before she pooped on the floor. He had a pee pad for her since she couldn’t hold her pee, but her doing a number two would be something else. The walk with Celia was always slow since Celia was old, pretty much blind and had arthritis, also she wanted to pause and sniff everything she came upon.
After walking his dog, Andrew would come back to his apartment and fix food and water first for Celia, then he would make breakfast for himself: two egg whites scrambled with red and green peppers and turkey ham, two slices of buttered high fiber toast and a cup of black coffee, the same breakfast every morning like he had done for the last fifteen years since his doctor told him he had high cholesterol. After breakfast he would turn on the tv and watch the local morning news then one of the morning talk shows before doing what little cleaning needed to be done around his apartment.
One of the things Andrew cleaned every day were the photos of his family, not only dusting each photo but dampening a cloth and wiping each frame, each glass cover until the dark brown faces within the frames shone like diamonds.
Andrew had photos in every room of his apartment, even in the kitchen.
In the collection of photos were portraits of his parents, his grandparents, his siblings and their kids and ones in which Andrew posed alongside family members. He even had a photo of a drawing of Juan Garrido, the black explorer who set foot on the island of Puerto Rico in 1509, he had the drawing because his grandparents told him they could trace their heritage back to the explorer. Even though Andrew had no proof of that fact, it was truth. With all of the photos Andrew had there were none in which he posed alone. He was never comfortable posing alone for photos.
After cleaning the photos, he would make a few phone calls to members of his family, something that was important to do since there weren’t many of them left- - at least the ones he knew well, or he sometimes made phone calls to former co-workers before taking a nap.
Andrew didn’t have any photos of his own kids because he never had any. He had never married, nor had he ever sired any children so there were no photos like the ones he saw in the homes of his friends, and no one ever asked him about it. After all, why should they? Everyone had gotten used to Andrew being single, or ‘alone’, as they would describe his situation whenever they tried to fix him up with someone: the sister of a cousin of a co-worker, a widower in The Bronx, or Hamilton Heights.
He did come close to thinking about marrying once. It was when he was a younger man, in his early twenties. He had met a young lady at a cookout. It was the day of the Puerto Rican Day Parade.
The young lady’s name was Marguerite and she and Andrew took a liking to each other, but after a year or so of dating she began to drift away from him and it was then he found out that her family said he had no profession and that he was too dark-skinned, “more black than anything else”. To his thinking he really wasn’t that way at all, more brazil nut colored than anything, but Marguerite’s family was the color of cream, so even his brazil nut color was more than they wanted to show in any offspring.
After Marguerite Andrew never found the right woman. Every now and then he would pull out a photo of he and Marguerite that had been taken at Coney Island, Marguerite with her hair long and black and he with his big Afro. Then he would put the photo back in the box of photos he kept in his living room closet.
Sometimes he and Marguerite still visited each other. Marguerite’s husband passed away several years ago. She had done what her family wanted and married a doctor with lighter skin than Andrew’s complexion. Andrew had heard about Marguerite’s husband’s passing by word on the streets and he called her to give her his condolences. After that they decided to keep in touch.
Now, at least once a month the two of them met to go shopping and to have lunch together. They still enjoyed each other’s company, but not the way they did years ago. Now they walked side by side and chattered and laughed and gossiped and reminisced about the old days and the people they knew, and they mourned that New York City wasn’t the way it used to be. Then Andrew would walk her to her car, they would hug each other tight then go their separate ways until the next month. He never once told her how she tore a hole in him where his heart used to be the day she dropped him, and he wouldn’t because a friend had warned him against it. “Who knows? She might still have somethin’ in there for you,” his friend had said as he patted Andrew’s chest. “That is… unless you want that.” Andrew had quickly replied ‘No’. He felt he and Marguerite were better off as friends. Much better.
PART 2 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
With the housework done, it was usually around eleven o’clock when Andrew took his nap. He would sleep until noon then get up, watch the news once again, make a shopping list- - today it was only a bottle of wine he needed as he had finished the last one the previous night- - then he would take a shower and go out for the day.
Going out for the day for Andrew always started with a walk through the courtyard of the apartment complex he lived in to see if there was anyone he could have conversation with. He enjoyed getting to know people and learning about them. It was important to him.
Most of the time he found someone, a neighbor or one of the maintenance men to talk to. He set a bowl of food and only a bit of water out for Celia who hobbled over to the food, sniffed it, then hobbled back to her bed and dozed off to sleep. Andrew took the flight of stairs down to the lobby of his building, foregoing the elevator, and walked out into the courtyard where he stood for a moment to see if there was anyone he knew. Many of the people who had lived there when he bought his apartment had either moved away, moving in with their adult children to places like Westchester or Jersey, or they had simply passed away. The younger folk moving in to the complex were different. They walked through the courtyard with a smugness about them. It was as if each one thought that any and everything that might happen depended on their individual selves. And they thought their kids, spoiled brats, were God’s gift to the world- - but only their child. They didn’t even tell them to stand on the trains or buses to let senior citizens have a seat. Andrew had little time for this new bunch who were grabbing up the homes in his complex.
Besides, he had attempted to be neighborly but quit it because they would look at him as he if had violated their space. It wasn’t like that back in the day, so Andrew rarely spoke to these younger people.
He saw Mica, one of the maintenance men walking up one of the walkways that meandered through the tree shaded courtyard and he knew he would have someone to talk with before he left for the city. Mica was much younger than Andrew, but he had been in the complex for a while and had been working there since his father had gotten him on when his father was living in the complex, before his father moved in with Mica’s sister. So Mica knew the way things used to be and not what he thought should be to gratify his notions of himself.
Mica waved at Andrew as he approached him.
“Hey, Mr. Rivera!”
“Hey, Mica.”
They stood in front of Andrew’s building and talked for a while in the shaded courtyard that was dappled with brilliant sunlight. Andrew started the conversation the way he usually did, with words about the weather. It was his usual opening before enticing a person to tell him things about themselves or things they knew that were going on. He stood with his arms crossed listening to Mica talk about the neighborhood and the Starbucks that was about to open around the block.
Andrew had wondered what the spot was going to be. As they continued to talk two men came through the gate into the courtyard. They were new faces to Andrew.
“Another new set of neighbors, huh,” Andrew said as the two men came towards them. Both of the men were black men and appeared to be in their mid to late sixties, around Andrew’s age. The men greeted Andrew and Mica as they passed, and Mica and Andrew returned the greeting. Andrew watched the men as they walked away.
There was something different about them. Though they simply walked alongside each other there was a comfort of intimacy they had with one another, as if they were more than just friends. “They’re, kinda different,” he said as he fished for information from Mica whom he felt might have that information.
“I think they’re a gay couple,” Mica said matter-of-factly.
Andrew stiffened a bit. “How do you know?”
Mica hunched his shoulders slightly, “I dunno. Just a strong feeling.”
Andrew watched the men go into their building, “Oh,” he said as he watched them disappear into the building.
“They seem like good people,” Mica said.
“Oh.”
That bit of gossip out of the way Andrew and Mica talked a little longer before Mica had to get back to work.
When his conversation with Mica was done Andrew continued with his routine where he walked around the neighborhood, stopping by the usual deli and grabbing an empanada and a diet soda while he talked with Evelina, the owner of the deli, then on to the grocery store owned by Mr. Singh, where Andrew purchased something for the excuse of chatting with Mr. Singh, then on to the bus where he boarded and went into the city.
He preferred riding the bus over the train because the train went underground and didn’t allow him to see the cityscape and people as they interacted with each other on the streets. When he worked in the city, he spent all of those years cursing it and after work he would rush back to the quiet of Morris Park in the Bronx where he lived, but now that he had retired he found he missed the city and went there every day.
PART 3 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Andrew never knew just where in the city he would go for the day, sometimes he would even end up in Brooklyn, or Queens, or when he felt like doing something really different, he would take the ferry over to Staten Island. He just played it by heart as he rode the bus.
On this particular day, Andrew decided to go over to Long Island City where he walked along the piers and sat and ate ice cream while he watched people playing with their kids or their dogs against the Manhattan skyline and the East River. He didn’t have to be home until six-thirty to take Celia out so he figured he would start his trip back around four o’clock. At just that time he boarded a water taxi back over to Manhattan where he went to one of his favorite delis.
It was on Second Avenue, and he fixed a nice meal to take back home. He made sure he got a little something that Celia would like so she wouldn’t hobble up to him and stand by him and give her sad face, then grumble under her breath and walk away like she did whenever he refused to share his food.
After he got his food he headed to his bus stop. The streets were busy with the beginning of rush hour so he navigated his way through the rush of people.
As he stood at a cross walk waiting for the light to change, he overheard a conversation between two men. One of the men was telling the other that he might have to move in with his mother since he and girlfriend broke up. “Rent so damn expensive.”
“Yeah man. I know,” the other man responded. The man’s voice sounded older than someone who should talk about moving in with his mother, so Andrew turned his head slightly to look at the two men.
They weren’t old, but they certainly weren't kids. Maybe thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Both men were black and by the way they were dressed, hard hats hanging from their work belts and the tools they had with them Andrew could tell they were in the construction trade.
Andrew wasn’t sure which man said what until they continued their conversation and he saw that it was the one with twists in his hair. The man went on talking as he twisted his hair in a manner absence of the thought that he was twisting his hair. The light changed and Andrew continued across the street hearing the man’s complaints fade in the distance.
Times were certainly harder for the younger generation, Andrew said to himself. He heard about it on one of the morning news and talk shows. Even harder for young black men. The two young men were fortunate to have jobs- - though they might be temps. He knew that was often the case when companies hired black people in skilled trade jobs. It was why he made sure he got on with the city. Any government job, because the chances of being treated fair was at least possible. In his mind he wished the guy the best of luck.
Andrew made it through the door just in time to see poor old Celia shaking as a stream of water came from her onto her pee pad. “Ah!” Andrew said. “C’mon Celia, before you do something else.”
The evening walk with Celia was slow as it usually was, but Andrew enjoyed it more than in the morning because by that time most people would be home from work or would be coming through the gate into the courtyard and he would have someone to talk to. It was especially nice when the weather was as nice as it was on this particular summer’s day, so he walked slowly through the courtyard, stopping and chatting with residents he knew.
He had just finished talking with Mr. Arroyo and was about to continue the last leg of his trek through the courtyard and of cleaning up after Celia when he saw one of the new neighbors he had seen that morning.
PART 4 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Andrew called out to Mr. Arroyo to hold up for a minute. Mr. Arroyo slowed down, showing annoyance, then he brought a smile to his face as he turned to Andrew.
“That guy over there.” Andrew spoke while pointing in the direction of the man by nodding his head. “He’s new, huh?”
Mr. Arroyo looked across the flowers and the shrubbery of the courtyard to where the man was. “I think so. Yeah. Kinda new.”
“I had never seen him before this morning, so I was just wondering.”
Mr. Arroyo stared blankly at Andrew. “Oh.”
“Somebody said he was gay. Him and his… partner.”
“That’s what I hear. Margie lives next door to them. She said they were, and that they were married.”
“Married.” Andrew uttered the word as if he were attempting to unravel it.
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Yeah,” Andrew quickly agreed. “They probably been together a long time, so why not?”
“Well. I better get in here before my wife starts calling for me. Dinner time, y’know.”
“Yep. Know what you mean,” Andrew said with a smile. “Talk to you later.”
Andrew and Celia rounded the courtyard and started back towards home.
“What the fuck! … Oh you like that, huh…”
The words came suddenly to Andrew’s mind. He was slightly startled by them but moved on through them and headed back to his apartment where he fed Celia and changed her pad and watched her slowly walk back to her bed and doze off to sleep.
With the evening still new Andrew decided to order take out and pick it up himself. He walked up the street listening to music coming from cars rolling down the avenues like chariots in the orange glow of evening, and to voices and laughter of people having dinner al fresco at restaurants, and in the distance, the roar of trains along the overhead subway lines was heard every now and then as a train pulled into one of the stations.
Andrew enjoyed days like this; the day with all of its goings on surely beat the long quiet nights sitting alone in his apartment.
“Sesame chicken, white rice,” the woman said as Andrew came through the door. Andrew nodded, ‘yep’ and smiled. He ate often from this restaurant but had never gotten to know the people who worked there. They had gotten to know his face and his usual order and had exchanged pleasantries with him but rarely extended conversation beyond pleasantry. Andrew thanked the woman behind the counter as she took his money and gave him his order.
On the way back to his apartment he stopped by and got the bottle of wine he had reminded himself to get, and he went home.
Celia met him at the door and followed him around before settling down at Andrew’s feet as Andrew sat in his recliner with the tray of food and a glass of wine in his lap. He watched tv as he ate, turning the channel from one show to another after one ended. His dinner done, he set the tray on the table beside his chair and sat staring at the tv. He wondered what happened to Freddie Thurman? Probably in prison.
Andrew poured another glass of wine and continued to stare at the tv. Celia looked up at him as best as she could then lowered her head back to the floor. By eleven-thirty Andrew went to bed.
PART 5 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
The first thing Andrew did the next morning was tell himself to find out whatever happened to Freddie Thurman.
Before going to bed that night he told himself not to dig out the old photos of Freddie, but by morning his mind made a decision for him, so right after eating breakfast and before he began his house-cleaning he took down the photo album with photos of Freddie in it, and there they were, he and Freddie chummed up together outside The Lenox Cafe, both of them cheesing for the photo, their large afros and Freddie’s even-darker-than-Andrew complexion. They were two good looking men back in the day, Andrew thought to himself.
There were photos of them double dating on an evening out on City Island.
One of the photos was of Freddie and a really hot young lady all huddled up, another one was of Andrew and his date- - what was her name- - she was also hot, and there was another one with just he and Freddie.
There were many photos, from the boardwalks, hanging out in Fort Greene, Prospect Park, Times Square, and one of Freddie just before he went inside Macy’s and stole a shirt. He was just that crazy, and fun.
It wasn’t often that Andrew used social media, he had signed up to a site but used it sparingly, but that morning he went online to see what he could find about his old buddy. He found Freddie’s page, ‘Fredrick Thurman’. The profile photo of Freddie was one taken after he and Andrew had drifted apart. In the photo, Freddie looked to be in his mid-forties. The photo had been shot in a pool hall and Freddie stood holding a cue and showing a huge grin. Even in his middle years he was sharking the pool halls. He looked pretty much as Andrew remembered him, only slightly older.
Under the photo on Freddie’s wall was an almost contiguous line of ‘R.I.P’s’ and condolences. Andrew felt his heart fill with sadness and fear and drop from the weight of it. It was why he didn’t like looking up old friends.
The photos in Freddie’s online album were ones of moments and times Andrew remembered well. There was even one with Andrew in it.
Looking through the list of mutual friends he and Freddie had, Andrew came across someone whose number he had somewhere in his phone book. It took him the rest of the morning doing all of this, but it had to be done. He found the phone number and called the old friend, all the while hoping she was still above the ground.
“Hey Nadine. This is Andrew.” He spoke joyously and with much relief.
“Andrew who.”
“Rivera.”
“Andrew Rivera…” he could tell she was sifting through her memories. Then, “Andrew Rivera. Hi! How are you?”
“I’m good. It’s been a long time.”
“Got that right. A looong time.”
“Yeah.”
“So why you callin’ me now?”
“I was just looking through some old photos and saw you and thought I’d give you a call.”
“Well, I’m fine.”
The two of them talked for a few minutes before Andrew brought up Freddie’s name.
“He passed away.”
Andrew acted as if he hadn’t gotten the news. “Oh no!”
“Yeah. ‘bout… almost nine, ten years ago.”
“What happened?” Andrew asked the question expecting to hear something along the lines of Freddie dying while in prison or being killed in a bar or in the streets.
“Cancer.”
“Aw man…”
“Yep. He died peacefully surrounded by his family. Wife, kids, and grandkids.”
It wasn’t the legacy Andrew had expected to hear but he was pleased, nonetheless.
Nadine had gone to the funeral and told Andrew where Freddie was buried and that afternoon he went to the gravesite. It took him a while to decide to visit the grave. He walked around mid-town looking into store windows then down to the Village where he sat at a cafe and had a cup of coffee and a pastry. He began to walk towards the river and as he looked across the Hudson the memory of his friend had risen so much in him that he went down to the train and headed to the gravesite.
Andrew leaned forward to get a better look at the square of granite on the ground and knew the person beneath it, cold and hard. He knew him. He read the inscription: ‘Frederick Douglass Thurman, March 24, 1947 — June 7, 2008’. Andrew blew a slight breath through his nose that created a soft ‘hnh’ sound. He knew him. Then he straightened back up and stood for a few minutes more, sighed and walked away and far into the city until it was time to go home.
Celia wasn’t in the mood that evening to go out for a walk, but Andrew gave her no choice. He put the leash on her and pulled her out the door. Once outside Celia walked a bit, pooped, and waited for him to clean it up then she sat and went no further. Neither of them was in the mood so Andrew went back inside with her where he spent the rest of the evening watching tv and drinking wine as Celia lay at his feet. ‘If only he and Freddie hadn’t ended their friendship on such a bad note,’ was the last thought Andrew had before he fell asleep that night.
PART 6 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Places like The Starlite Lounge were gone. Andrew awoke in the night thinking of the places he used to go and how things were back then. These days he didn’t go to bars like he used to. People nowadays like to carry guns and seemed to relish taking other people’s lives. Times had gotten too scary for him. That was why, other than people he knew, Andrew found it better to see and hear people than to really get to know them. But when he was a young man, he knew all the spots to go to and then some. The Starlite Lounge was one of the ‘then some’ places.
During those times Andrew was living in Harlem, but he occasionally made the trip to Crown Heights to go to the Starlite because it was far enough from Harlem and the Bronx for him to relax. That was what he told himself whenever he went there. He always went alone, and he would get half drunk and watch the crowd and then he would leave and go back to Harlem, always alone. It wasn’t until he got enough nerves to take Freddie with him that the last peg in their friendship came loose. To this day he still was unsure if it was Freddie who pulled that peg or if it was he who pushed it from the inside.
The night he let Freddie go with him Freddie had hit him up to see what was happening for the night. They weren’t supposed to hang together because Freddie had a cutie he had been trying to set up for the night and it gave Andrew the time he needed to relax at The Starlite. The cutie decided she wasn’t ready for Freddie- - that was just how Freddie put it- - so he decided to call Andrew.
By the time Freddie called Andrew had made up his mind that he needed The Starlite, so he attempted to make up an excuse, but Freddie being Freddie, excuses were only challenges to conquer so he insisted he go with Andrew, and Andrew being Andrew dealing with Freddie he gave in because he knew Freddie would show up at his apartment anyway before he left. It was a few months after Freddie caught Andrew looking at Freddie’s dick when the two of them were taking a piss in an alley.
“What the fuck!” Freddie had exclaimed with surprise when he saw Andrew checking him out. Andrew quickly averted his eyes to look down at his own dick. “Oh, you like that, huh.” Freddie laughed and stood wide legged and shook his dick. Andrew didn’t say anything.
“It’s cool,” Freddie said as he put his dick back in his pants. Andrew wanted to tell Freddie that it wasn’t what Freddie thought. He wanted to tell Freddie that he was only curious. That was all. But when the explanation went through Andrew’s head, he knew how ineffective it would be. Nothing more was said about that night and Andrew and Freddie went on as friends.
Freddie and Andrew ended up having a nice time at The Starlite. Freddie didn’t comment on the number of homosexuals there and even talked to some of the guys at the bar who might have been homosexual or not, or maybe something in between, as Andrew called them. But that was Freddie. He was always ready to laugh and have a good time.
As the night went on, he even got up and danced with a few young ladies on the dance floor and eventually with a few guys. Andrew smiled as he watched him, and he shook his head in awe of his buddy.
After the bar closed the two of them walked to catch the train. They walked in silence for a bit before Freddie spoke. “You didn’t tell it was a gay bar.” He spoke calmly as he walked with his hands in pockets. Andrew didn’t know how to respond. “I had a nice time though. Hey, it’s a first time for everything,” Freddie said. And they walked on with Freddie laughing and joking around like he usually did. When they got back to Harlem Freddie suggested they head over to a late hours joint on 118th.
“Okay. Cool,” Andrew said as they headed in that direction. “And then what,” Freddie asked. Andrew broke his stride a bit. “What?”
“Then what,” Freddie repeated.
“I don’t know what’chou talkin’ about,” Andrew felt his heart speed up.
They were crossing the street and Freddie stopped in the middle of the street. “C’mon, man. You know what’s up.” Freddie’s words and the calmness and surety of them landed on Andrew so hard that Andrew exploded with fury. “Nah man. I don’t know what’s up. I don’t know what’s up!” He yelled at Freddie as the two of them stood in the middle of the street. “Man, you got me mixed up with somebody else! I ain’t about that shit!” He stormed away leaving Freddie calling his name, “Andrew! Andrew! Man, what the fuck… Andrew!”, alone, in the moonlight that fell onto St. Nicholas Ave.
PART 7 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Celia’s attitude hadn’t changed the next morning when Andrew woke to take her out, in fact it had gotten worse with her whining and struggling to stay in her bed.
“Look, if I have to get my ass up to take you out, you’re going,” Andrew said, and he lifted her from her bed and took her outside. “Now piss or do whatever the hell you’re gonna do so we can go back in.”
Andrew’s mood was in no better state than Celia’s. He hadn’t slept well that night and the thought of how he had ended his friendship with Freddie wore on him as the night went on. He did less walking that day, sitting more, dredging the feelings that were taking place in him.
The trip to the city ended up with a trip to Brooklyn with Andrew sitting on a bench along Eastern Parkway watching people and cars pass by. He knew he was near the last place he and Freddie hung out that night because he had walked past it earlier. But it was no longer there. In place of The Starlite Lounge there was now a cell phone store.
Andrew sat on the bench along the parkway until it was time to go home. He caught the #2 train back over to Manhattan and walked to where he could catch the bus so he could watch the streets and remove the sadness and the growing hole in his chest.
He waited at the bus stop, seeing faces that he had become familiar with only in passing as people walked by or of ones gathered at the bus stop.
As he watched the people, he noticed the guys he had seen at a bus stop a few days earlier. He saw them across the busy avenue talking as they headed towards a train station, then disappear down the stairs into the station. ‘Well, I guess he got somebody to finish twisting his hair,’ Andrew thought as he watched the man’s crown of magnificent black locks move against the late afternoon light.
Andrew was a bit late getting back home that day due to traffic so he prepared himself to clean up any mess Celia might have caused due to his tardiness. But when he came through the door, he found Celia lying in her bed. She was still, there was no rise and fall of her chest, and when Andrew bent down and touched her, she was cold. Andrew moaned as he called her name, then he sat on the floor beside her bed and cried.
He slept on the sofa that night to be near Celia. He had wrapped her in her favorite blanket and covered her head and throughout the night he awoke to look over at her in her basket at her still body under the blanket before falling back to sleep.
That evening he had contacted her vet who put him in touch with a service that would come for her remains. She told Andrew that they would treat Celia with care. She asked him if he wanted to bury her, and he told her burial or cremation was fine; he just didn’t want to have any knowledge of her being mishandled. He had his memories of Celia and that was what mattered. The service came late morning and took Celia away and Andrew spent the rest of that morning looking over at her basket.
Not long after Celia was taken away Andrew had a knock on his door. It was his neighbor, Jessie. He was hesitant to answer but he did so.
“Andrew? Is everything okay? I didn’t see you and Celia walking around today. Is Celia okay?” Jessie stood with her arms crossed and peered through her glasses as she looked up at Andrew.
“They had to take her away. She passed away yesterday.”
“Oh, baby, I’m so, so, sorry,” Jessie said as she reached up and hugged Andrew. Her skin smelled like roses.
“Thank you, Miss Jessie. I’m gonna miss her.”
After Jessie left Andrew sat longer, and then made his phone calls. He wasn’t in a mood to do housework, so he watched tv until he lost interest in it and turned on the radio. It took him a while before he decided to walk outside and when he did it didn’t look the same, the courtyard seemed empty. No one was there for him to talk to, and it seemed as if no one would ever be there for him.
He walked out of the gate and just walked: along Morris Park Avenue, and Williamsbridge Road until he got to Pelham Parkway, and he then walked as far as he could through the park along the parkway until he came to the end, then he sat for a spell under the canopy of trees in the green shade and rested before going back home.
Andrew had just come through the gate to the courtyard when he was met by Mica and Cesar, one of Mica’s co-workers. They were on their way to one of the buildings when they saw him come into the courtyard; they came up to him with their condolences.
“Andrew, man. We heard about Celia,” Cesar said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, I’m so sorry,” Mica added.
“It was time,” Andrew said. “She was old.”
“How old was she,” Cesar asked.
“Fourteen.”
Cesar and Mica whistled through their teeth.
“That was old,” Mica said.
At that moment one of the new neighbors came into the courtyard carrying a bag of groceries. He stopped when he got to Andrew, Mica and Cesar and offered his condolences as well. “I’m sorry to hear about your dog. I used to see the two of you every day.”
Andrew nodded his head with sadness.
“She’s fine now.”
“Yeah,” the remaining men in the group agreed.
“By the way, my name’s Purnell and my husband’s name is Joseph.” He and Andrew shook hands.
“Andrew,” Andrew said. “Nice to meet you.”
“We know how it is with your loss. We’ve had to bury three pets over the years. Each one lived twelve, thirteen… and I think the last one made it to fifteen. So we know how it is. You plan on getting another one?”
“Oh. No, gettin’ too old to be chasing round after a dog… Maybe a cat.”
The men in the group nodded their heads awkwardly as words began to wear thin.
“Well,” Purnell said as he shifted his packages, “nice to meet you, and again, sorry for your loss. Hang in there.”
“I will,” Andrew said.
“That’s forty years,” Cesar whispered as Purnell walked away.
They watched Purnell go through the courtyard and into his building.
“A long time,” Mica said.
Andrew hesitated a beat before quietly adding, “A long time…”
Each step Andrew took after he got off the elevator did little to get him closer to his apartment. The door to his unit seemed farther from the elevator than it actually was, and the hall seemed longer; it was as if everything conspired to delay the singularity that awaited him on the other side of the door to his unit. He had accepted all of the condolences of the morning and when there were no more “sorries” or “I. Am. Sooo sorry” left he found himself alone along the winding shaded paths of the courtyard so he decided to go back in where he sat around watching more tv and listening to more radio and noticing things in his apartment until he dozed off to sleep while lying across his bed
PART 8 ~ Conclusion of Andrew Rivera ~
It was late in the afternoon when Andrew awoke from a sudden thrust of realization. The thing that Andrew was aware of had actually flickered days before as a notion but was extinguished by Andrew; but then, as he slept it came to him again, only this time much stronger. It was a thought that was at once engaging and discomfiting. He continued to lie across his bed for a while until the possibility of this realization felt real. Then he looked at the clock, jumped up and began to get ready. In about half an hour he was out the door.
A few people stood at the bus stop, and some sat on the bench beside Andrew. He was feeling a bit peeved at himself for being there and had been attempting to dissuade himself from what he was thinking, he did this all while he rode the bus into the city, yet he never once seriously thought about getting off the bus and heading back to the Bronx.
A bus came and riders boarded. Then another one came and the riders who had since gathered boarded that bus as well. The more he waited the more ridiculous he felt, but something in him wouldn’t let his legs straighten themselves and walk themselves away. Maybe he was too late, was the thought that had just entered his head when he heard the voices.
The guy with the twists and his co-worker came to the bus stop. Andrew felt his heart thump and his breath shorten and he almost cussed at having such a sensation if it had not been for the laughter that came to him, so he contained himself and continued sitting. The two men went on talking about something, but Andrew wasn’t sure what because all he could do was measure the movement of his head and his eyes as he took furtive glances at the man with the licorice skin and crown of twisted hair. He was what Andrew had not allowed himself to think the first few times he had seen him, and that was how utterly handsome the man was. Andrew felt his skin warm while at the same time reprimanding himself for what he saw as juvenile behavior as he considered the man’s beauty and the gravelly sound of the man’s voice.
The men continued talking and when their bus came, they stood back to allow Andrew to go ahead of them. Andrew smiled and shook his head, so the men walked to the bus. As they boarded, the man with the twists looked back at Andrew then boarded. The bus moved out into the sea of traffic and continued its way until it disappeared into the city. Andrew stood up to walk to his bus stop, and as he did so he reminded himself to wear his best shirt tomorrow.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
Andrew Rivera got up the same time every morning, at five-thirty just as he had done for the last forty-six years. Forty of those years had been when he worked for the city where he worked until he retired a few years ago.
Each morning he awoke, he went through the same routine of washing his face, brushing his teeth with baking soda and gargling with Listerine — the brown kind — and taking his dog, Celia, who he named after his favorite singer, out to do her business.
Now that Celia was older Andrew had to rush through his routine before she pooped on the floor. He had a pee pad for her since she couldn’t hold her pee, but her doing a number two would be something else. The walk with Celia was always slow since Celia was old, pretty much blind and had arthritis, also she wanted to pause and sniff everything she came upon.
After walking his dog, Andrew would come back to his apartment and fix food and water first for Celia, then he would make breakfast for himself: two egg whites scrambled with red and green peppers and turkey ham, two slices of buttered high fiber toast and a cup of black coffee, the same breakfast every morning like he had done for the last fifteen years since his doctor told him he had high cholesterol. After breakfast he would turn on the tv and watch the local morning news then one of the morning talk shows before doing what little cleaning needed to be done around his apartment.
One of the things Andrew cleaned every day were the photos of his family, not only dusting each photo but dampening a cloth and wiping each frame, each glass cover until the dark brown faces within the frames shone like diamonds.
Andrew had photos in every room of his apartment, even in the kitchen.
In the collection of photos were portraits of his parents, his grandparents, his siblings and their kids and ones in which Andrew posed alongside family members. He even had a photo of a drawing of Juan Garrido, the black explorer who set foot on the island of Puerto Rico in 1509, he had the drawing because his grandparents told him they could trace their heritage back to the explorer. Even though Andrew had no proof of that fact, it was truth. With all of the photos Andrew had there were none in which he posed alone. He was never comfortable posing alone for photos.
After cleaning the photos, he would make a few phone calls to members of his family, something that was important to do since there weren’t many of them left- - at least the ones he knew well, or he sometimes made phone calls to former co-workers before taking a nap.
Andrew didn’t have any photos of his own kids because he never had any. He had never married, nor had he ever sired any children so there were no photos like the ones he saw in the homes of his friends, and no one ever asked him about it. After all, why should they? Everyone had gotten used to Andrew being single, or ‘alone’, as they would describe his situation whenever they tried to fix him up with someone: the sister of a cousin of a co-worker, a widower in The Bronx, or Hamilton Heights.
He did come close to thinking about marrying once. It was when he was a younger man, in his early twenties. He had met a young lady at a cookout. It was the day of the Puerto Rican Day Parade.
The young lady’s name was Marguerite and she and Andrew took a liking to each other, but after a year or so of dating she began to drift away from him and it was then he found out that her family said he had no profession and that he was too dark-skinned, “more black than anything else”. To his thinking he really wasn’t that way at all, more brazil nut colored than anything, but Marguerite’s family was the color of cream, so even his brazil nut color was more than they wanted to show in any offspring.
After Marguerite Andrew never found the right woman. Every now and then he would pull out a photo of he and Marguerite that had been taken at Coney Island, Marguerite with her hair long and black and he with his big Afro. Then he would put the photo back in the box of photos he kept in his living room closet.
Sometimes he and Marguerite still visited each other. Marguerite’s husband passed away several years ago. She had done what her family wanted and married a doctor with lighter skin than Andrew’s complexion. Andrew had heard about Marguerite’s husband’s passing by word on the streets and he called her to give her his condolences. After that they decided to keep in touch.
Now, at least once a month the two of them met to go shopping and to have lunch together. They still enjoyed each other’s company, but not the way they did years ago. Now they walked side by side and chattered and laughed and gossiped and reminisced about the old days and the people they knew, and they mourned that New York City wasn’t the way it used to be. Then Andrew would walk her to her car, they would hug each other tight then go their separate ways until the next month. He never once told her how she tore a hole in him where his heart used to be the day she dropped him, and he wouldn’t because a friend had warned him against it. “Who knows? She might still have somethin’ in there for you,” his friend had said as he patted Andrew’s chest. “That is… unless you want that.” Andrew had quickly replied ‘No’. He felt he and Marguerite were better off as friends. Much better.
PART 2 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
With the housework done, it was usually around eleven o’clock when Andrew took his nap. He would sleep until noon then get up, watch the news once again, make a shopping list- - today it was only a bottle of wine he needed as he had finished the last one the previous night- - then he would take a shower and go out for the day.
Going out for the day for Andrew always started with a walk through the courtyard of the apartment complex he lived in to see if there was anyone he could have conversation with. He enjoyed getting to know people and learning about them. It was important to him.
Most of the time he found someone, a neighbor or one of the maintenance men to talk to. He set a bowl of food and only a bit of water out for Celia who hobbled over to the food, sniffed it, then hobbled back to her bed and dozed off to sleep. Andrew took the flight of stairs down to the lobby of his building, foregoing the elevator, and walked out into the courtyard where he stood for a moment to see if there was anyone he knew. Many of the people who had lived there when he bought his apartment had either moved away, moving in with their adult children to places like Westchester or Jersey, or they had simply passed away. The younger folk moving in to the complex were different. They walked through the courtyard with a smugness about them. It was as if each one thought that any and everything that might happen depended on their individual selves. And they thought their kids, spoiled brats, were God’s gift to the world- - but only their child. They didn’t even tell them to stand on the trains or buses to let senior citizens have a seat. Andrew had little time for this new bunch who were grabbing up the homes in his complex.
Besides, he had attempted to be neighborly but quit it because they would look at him as he if had violated their space. It wasn’t like that back in the day, so Andrew rarely spoke to these younger people.
He saw Mica, one of the maintenance men walking up one of the walkways that meandered through the tree shaded courtyard and he knew he would have someone to talk with before he left for the city. Mica was much younger than Andrew, but he had been in the complex for a while and had been working there since his father had gotten him on when his father was living in the complex, before his father moved in with Mica’s sister. So Mica knew the way things used to be and not what he thought should be to gratify his notions of himself.
Mica waved at Andrew as he approached him.
“Hey, Mr. Rivera!”
“Hey, Mica.”
They stood in front of Andrew’s building and talked for a while in the shaded courtyard that was dappled with brilliant sunlight. Andrew started the conversation the way he usually did, with words about the weather. It was his usual opening before enticing a person to tell him things about themselves or things they knew that were going on. He stood with his arms crossed listening to Mica talk about the neighborhood and the Starbucks that was about to open around the block.
Andrew had wondered what the spot was going to be. As they continued to talk two men came through the gate into the courtyard. They were new faces to Andrew.
“Another new set of neighbors, huh,” Andrew said as the two men came towards them. Both of the men were black men and appeared to be in their mid to late sixties, around Andrew’s age. The men greeted Andrew and Mica as they passed, and Mica and Andrew returned the greeting. Andrew watched the men as they walked away.
There was something different about them. Though they simply walked alongside each other there was a comfort of intimacy they had with one another, as if they were more than just friends. “They’re, kinda different,” he said as he fished for information from Mica whom he felt might have that information.
“I think they’re a gay couple,” Mica said matter-of-factly.
Andrew stiffened a bit. “How do you know?”
Mica hunched his shoulders slightly, “I dunno. Just a strong feeling.”
Andrew watched the men go into their building, “Oh,” he said as he watched them disappear into the building.
“They seem like good people,” Mica said.
“Oh.”
That bit of gossip out of the way Andrew and Mica talked a little longer before Mica had to get back to work.
When his conversation with Mica was done Andrew continued with his routine where he walked around the neighborhood, stopping by the usual deli and grabbing an empanada and a diet soda while he talked with Evelina, the owner of the deli, then on to the grocery store owned by Mr. Singh, where Andrew purchased something for the excuse of chatting with Mr. Singh, then on to the bus where he boarded and went into the city.
He preferred riding the bus over the train because the train went underground and didn’t allow him to see the cityscape and people as they interacted with each other on the streets. When he worked in the city, he spent all of those years cursing it and after work he would rush back to the quiet of Morris Park in the Bronx where he lived, but now that he had retired he found he missed the city and went there every day.
PART 3 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Andrew never knew just where in the city he would go for the day, sometimes he would even end up in Brooklyn, or Queens, or when he felt like doing something really different, he would take the ferry over to Staten Island. He just played it by heart as he rode the bus.
On this particular day, Andrew decided to go over to Long Island City where he walked along the piers and sat and ate ice cream while he watched people playing with their kids or their dogs against the Manhattan skyline and the East River. He didn’t have to be home until six-thirty to take Celia out so he figured he would start his trip back around four o’clock. At just that time he boarded a water taxi back over to Manhattan where he went to one of his favorite delis.
It was on Second Avenue, and he fixed a nice meal to take back home. He made sure he got a little something that Celia would like so she wouldn’t hobble up to him and stand by him and give her sad face, then grumble under her breath and walk away like she did whenever he refused to share his food.
After he got his food he headed to his bus stop. The streets were busy with the beginning of rush hour so he navigated his way through the rush of people.
As he stood at a cross walk waiting for the light to change, he overheard a conversation between two men. One of the men was telling the other that he might have to move in with his mother since he and girlfriend broke up. “Rent so damn expensive.”
“Yeah man. I know,” the other man responded. The man’s voice sounded older than someone who should talk about moving in with his mother, so Andrew turned his head slightly to look at the two men.
They weren’t old, but they certainly weren't kids. Maybe thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Both men were black and by the way they were dressed, hard hats hanging from their work belts and the tools they had with them Andrew could tell they were in the construction trade.
Andrew wasn’t sure which man said what until they continued their conversation and he saw that it was the one with twists in his hair. The man went on talking as he twisted his hair in a manner absence of the thought that he was twisting his hair. The light changed and Andrew continued across the street hearing the man’s complaints fade in the distance.
Times were certainly harder for the younger generation, Andrew said to himself. He heard about it on one of the morning news and talk shows. Even harder for young black men. The two young men were fortunate to have jobs- - though they might be temps. He knew that was often the case when companies hired black people in skilled trade jobs. It was why he made sure he got on with the city. Any government job, because the chances of being treated fair was at least possible. In his mind he wished the guy the best of luck.
Andrew made it through the door just in time to see poor old Celia shaking as a stream of water came from her onto her pee pad. “Ah!” Andrew said. “C’mon Celia, before you do something else.”
The evening walk with Celia was slow as it usually was, but Andrew enjoyed it more than in the morning because by that time most people would be home from work or would be coming through the gate into the courtyard and he would have someone to talk to. It was especially nice when the weather was as nice as it was on this particular summer’s day, so he walked slowly through the courtyard, stopping and chatting with residents he knew.
He had just finished talking with Mr. Arroyo and was about to continue the last leg of his trek through the courtyard and of cleaning up after Celia when he saw one of the new neighbors he had seen that morning.
PART 4 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Andrew called out to Mr. Arroyo to hold up for a minute. Mr. Arroyo slowed down, showing annoyance, then he brought a smile to his face as he turned to Andrew.
“That guy over there.” Andrew spoke while pointing in the direction of the man by nodding his head. “He’s new, huh?”
Mr. Arroyo looked across the flowers and the shrubbery of the courtyard to where the man was. “I think so. Yeah. Kinda new.”
“I had never seen him before this morning, so I was just wondering.”
Mr. Arroyo stared blankly at Andrew. “Oh.”
“Somebody said he was gay. Him and his… partner.”
“That’s what I hear. Margie lives next door to them. She said they were, and that they were married.”
“Married.” Andrew uttered the word as if he were attempting to unravel it.
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Yeah,” Andrew quickly agreed. “They probably been together a long time, so why not?”
“Well. I better get in here before my wife starts calling for me. Dinner time, y’know.”
“Yep. Know what you mean,” Andrew said with a smile. “Talk to you later.”
Andrew and Celia rounded the courtyard and started back towards home.
“What the fuck! … Oh you like that, huh…”
The words came suddenly to Andrew’s mind. He was slightly startled by them but moved on through them and headed back to his apartment where he fed Celia and changed her pad and watched her slowly walk back to her bed and doze off to sleep.
With the evening still new Andrew decided to order take out and pick it up himself. He walked up the street listening to music coming from cars rolling down the avenues like chariots in the orange glow of evening, and to voices and laughter of people having dinner al fresco at restaurants, and in the distance, the roar of trains along the overhead subway lines was heard every now and then as a train pulled into one of the stations.
Andrew enjoyed days like this; the day with all of its goings on surely beat the long quiet nights sitting alone in his apartment.
“Sesame chicken, white rice,” the woman said as Andrew came through the door. Andrew nodded, ‘yep’ and smiled. He ate often from this restaurant but had never gotten to know the people who worked there. They had gotten to know his face and his usual order and had exchanged pleasantries with him but rarely extended conversation beyond pleasantry. Andrew thanked the woman behind the counter as she took his money and gave him his order.
On the way back to his apartment he stopped by and got the bottle of wine he had reminded himself to get, and he went home.
Celia met him at the door and followed him around before settling down at Andrew’s feet as Andrew sat in his recliner with the tray of food and a glass of wine in his lap. He watched tv as he ate, turning the channel from one show to another after one ended. His dinner done, he set the tray on the table beside his chair and sat staring at the tv. He wondered what happened to Freddie Thurman? Probably in prison.
Andrew poured another glass of wine and continued to stare at the tv. Celia looked up at him as best as she could then lowered her head back to the floor. By eleven-thirty Andrew went to bed.
PART 5 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
The first thing Andrew did the next morning was tell himself to find out whatever happened to Freddie Thurman.
Before going to bed that night he told himself not to dig out the old photos of Freddie, but by morning his mind made a decision for him, so right after eating breakfast and before he began his house-cleaning he took down the photo album with photos of Freddie in it, and there they were, he and Freddie chummed up together outside The Lenox Cafe, both of them cheesing for the photo, their large afros and Freddie’s even-darker-than-Andrew complexion. They were two good looking men back in the day, Andrew thought to himself.
There were photos of them double dating on an evening out on City Island.
One of the photos was of Freddie and a really hot young lady all huddled up, another one was of Andrew and his date- - what was her name- - she was also hot, and there was another one with just he and Freddie.
There were many photos, from the boardwalks, hanging out in Fort Greene, Prospect Park, Times Square, and one of Freddie just before he went inside Macy’s and stole a shirt. He was just that crazy, and fun.
It wasn’t often that Andrew used social media, he had signed up to a site but used it sparingly, but that morning he went online to see what he could find about his old buddy. He found Freddie’s page, ‘Fredrick Thurman’. The profile photo of Freddie was one taken after he and Andrew had drifted apart. In the photo, Freddie looked to be in his mid-forties. The photo had been shot in a pool hall and Freddie stood holding a cue and showing a huge grin. Even in his middle years he was sharking the pool halls. He looked pretty much as Andrew remembered him, only slightly older.
Under the photo on Freddie’s wall was an almost contiguous line of ‘R.I.P’s’ and condolences. Andrew felt his heart fill with sadness and fear and drop from the weight of it. It was why he didn’t like looking up old friends.
The photos in Freddie’s online album were ones of moments and times Andrew remembered well. There was even one with Andrew in it.
Looking through the list of mutual friends he and Freddie had, Andrew came across someone whose number he had somewhere in his phone book. It took him the rest of the morning doing all of this, but it had to be done. He found the phone number and called the old friend, all the while hoping she was still above the ground.
“Hey Nadine. This is Andrew.” He spoke joyously and with much relief.
“Andrew who.”
“Rivera.”
“Andrew Rivera…” he could tell she was sifting through her memories. Then, “Andrew Rivera. Hi! How are you?”
“I’m good. It’s been a long time.”
“Got that right. A looong time.”
“Yeah.”
“So why you callin’ me now?”
“I was just looking through some old photos and saw you and thought I’d give you a call.”
“Well, I’m fine.”
The two of them talked for a few minutes before Andrew brought up Freddie’s name.
“He passed away.”
Andrew acted as if he hadn’t gotten the news. “Oh no!”
“Yeah. ‘bout… almost nine, ten years ago.”
“What happened?” Andrew asked the question expecting to hear something along the lines of Freddie dying while in prison or being killed in a bar or in the streets.
“Cancer.”
“Aw man…”
“Yep. He died peacefully surrounded by his family. Wife, kids, and grandkids.”
It wasn’t the legacy Andrew had expected to hear but he was pleased, nonetheless.
Nadine had gone to the funeral and told Andrew where Freddie was buried and that afternoon he went to the gravesite. It took him a while to decide to visit the grave. He walked around mid-town looking into store windows then down to the Village where he sat at a cafe and had a cup of coffee and a pastry. He began to walk towards the river and as he looked across the Hudson the memory of his friend had risen so much in him that he went down to the train and headed to the gravesite.
Andrew leaned forward to get a better look at the square of granite on the ground and knew the person beneath it, cold and hard. He knew him. He read the inscription: ‘Frederick Douglass Thurman, March 24, 1947 — June 7, 2008’. Andrew blew a slight breath through his nose that created a soft ‘hnh’ sound. He knew him. Then he straightened back up and stood for a few minutes more, sighed and walked away and far into the city until it was time to go home.
Celia wasn’t in the mood that evening to go out for a walk, but Andrew gave her no choice. He put the leash on her and pulled her out the door. Once outside Celia walked a bit, pooped, and waited for him to clean it up then she sat and went no further. Neither of them was in the mood so Andrew went back inside with her where he spent the rest of the evening watching tv and drinking wine as Celia lay at his feet. ‘If only he and Freddie hadn’t ended their friendship on such a bad note,’ was the last thought Andrew had before he fell asleep that night.
PART 6 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Places like The Starlite Lounge were gone. Andrew awoke in the night thinking of the places he used to go and how things were back then. These days he didn’t go to bars like he used to. People nowadays like to carry guns and seemed to relish taking other people’s lives. Times had gotten too scary for him. That was why, other than people he knew, Andrew found it better to see and hear people than to really get to know them. But when he was a young man, he knew all the spots to go to and then some. The Starlite Lounge was one of the ‘then some’ places.
During those times Andrew was living in Harlem, but he occasionally made the trip to Crown Heights to go to the Starlite because it was far enough from Harlem and the Bronx for him to relax. That was what he told himself whenever he went there. He always went alone, and he would get half drunk and watch the crowd and then he would leave and go back to Harlem, always alone. It wasn’t until he got enough nerves to take Freddie with him that the last peg in their friendship came loose. To this day he still was unsure if it was Freddie who pulled that peg or if it was he who pushed it from the inside.
The night he let Freddie go with him Freddie had hit him up to see what was happening for the night. They weren’t supposed to hang together because Freddie had a cutie he had been trying to set up for the night and it gave Andrew the time he needed to relax at The Starlite. The cutie decided she wasn’t ready for Freddie- - that was just how Freddie put it- - so he decided to call Andrew.
By the time Freddie called Andrew had made up his mind that he needed The Starlite, so he attempted to make up an excuse, but Freddie being Freddie, excuses were only challenges to conquer so he insisted he go with Andrew, and Andrew being Andrew dealing with Freddie he gave in because he knew Freddie would show up at his apartment anyway before he left. It was a few months after Freddie caught Andrew looking at Freddie’s dick when the two of them were taking a piss in an alley.
“What the fuck!” Freddie had exclaimed with surprise when he saw Andrew checking him out. Andrew quickly averted his eyes to look down at his own dick. “Oh, you like that, huh.” Freddie laughed and stood wide legged and shook his dick. Andrew didn’t say anything.
“It’s cool,” Freddie said as he put his dick back in his pants. Andrew wanted to tell Freddie that it wasn’t what Freddie thought. He wanted to tell Freddie that he was only curious. That was all. But when the explanation went through Andrew’s head, he knew how ineffective it would be. Nothing more was said about that night and Andrew and Freddie went on as friends.
Freddie and Andrew ended up having a nice time at The Starlite. Freddie didn’t comment on the number of homosexuals there and even talked to some of the guys at the bar who might have been homosexual or not, or maybe something in between, as Andrew called them. But that was Freddie. He was always ready to laugh and have a good time.
As the night went on, he even got up and danced with a few young ladies on the dance floor and eventually with a few guys. Andrew smiled as he watched him, and he shook his head in awe of his buddy.
After the bar closed the two of them walked to catch the train. They walked in silence for a bit before Freddie spoke. “You didn’t tell it was a gay bar.” He spoke calmly as he walked with his hands in pockets. Andrew didn’t know how to respond. “I had a nice time though. Hey, it’s a first time for everything,” Freddie said. And they walked on with Freddie laughing and joking around like he usually did. When they got back to Harlem Freddie suggested they head over to a late hours joint on 118th.
“Okay. Cool,” Andrew said as they headed in that direction. “And then what,” Freddie asked. Andrew broke his stride a bit. “What?”
“Then what,” Freddie repeated.
“I don’t know what’chou talkin’ about,” Andrew felt his heart speed up.
They were crossing the street and Freddie stopped in the middle of the street. “C’mon, man. You know what’s up.” Freddie’s words and the calmness and surety of them landed on Andrew so hard that Andrew exploded with fury. “Nah man. I don’t know what’s up. I don’t know what’s up!” He yelled at Freddie as the two of them stood in the middle of the street. “Man, you got me mixed up with somebody else! I ain’t about that shit!” He stormed away leaving Freddie calling his name, “Andrew! Andrew! Man, what the fuck… Andrew!”, alone, in the moonlight that fell onto St. Nicholas Ave.
PART 7 ~ Andrew Rivera ~
Celia’s attitude hadn’t changed the next morning when Andrew woke to take her out, in fact it had gotten worse with her whining and struggling to stay in her bed.
“Look, if I have to get my ass up to take you out, you’re going,” Andrew said, and he lifted her from her bed and took her outside. “Now piss or do whatever the hell you’re gonna do so we can go back in.”
Andrew’s mood was in no better state than Celia’s. He hadn’t slept well that night and the thought of how he had ended his friendship with Freddie wore on him as the night went on. He did less walking that day, sitting more, dredging the feelings that were taking place in him.
The trip to the city ended up with a trip to Brooklyn with Andrew sitting on a bench along Eastern Parkway watching people and cars pass by. He knew he was near the last place he and Freddie hung out that night because he had walked past it earlier. But it was no longer there. In place of The Starlite Lounge there was now a cell phone store.
Andrew sat on the bench along the parkway until it was time to go home. He caught the #2 train back over to Manhattan and walked to where he could catch the bus so he could watch the streets and remove the sadness and the growing hole in his chest.
He waited at the bus stop, seeing faces that he had become familiar with only in passing as people walked by or of ones gathered at the bus stop.
As he watched the people, he noticed the guys he had seen at a bus stop a few days earlier. He saw them across the busy avenue talking as they headed towards a train station, then disappear down the stairs into the station. ‘Well, I guess he got somebody to finish twisting his hair,’ Andrew thought as he watched the man’s crown of magnificent black locks move against the late afternoon light.
Andrew was a bit late getting back home that day due to traffic so he prepared himself to clean up any mess Celia might have caused due to his tardiness. But when he came through the door, he found Celia lying in her bed. She was still, there was no rise and fall of her chest, and when Andrew bent down and touched her, she was cold. Andrew moaned as he called her name, then he sat on the floor beside her bed and cried.
He slept on the sofa that night to be near Celia. He had wrapped her in her favorite blanket and covered her head and throughout the night he awoke to look over at her in her basket at her still body under the blanket before falling back to sleep.
That evening he had contacted her vet who put him in touch with a service that would come for her remains. She told Andrew that they would treat Celia with care. She asked him if he wanted to bury her, and he told her burial or cremation was fine; he just didn’t want to have any knowledge of her being mishandled. He had his memories of Celia and that was what mattered. The service came late morning and took Celia away and Andrew spent the rest of that morning looking over at her basket.
Not long after Celia was taken away Andrew had a knock on his door. It was his neighbor, Jessie. He was hesitant to answer but he did so.
“Andrew? Is everything okay? I didn’t see you and Celia walking around today. Is Celia okay?” Jessie stood with her arms crossed and peered through her glasses as she looked up at Andrew.
“They had to take her away. She passed away yesterday.”
“Oh, baby, I’m so, so, sorry,” Jessie said as she reached up and hugged Andrew. Her skin smelled like roses.
“Thank you, Miss Jessie. I’m gonna miss her.”
After Jessie left Andrew sat longer, and then made his phone calls. He wasn’t in a mood to do housework, so he watched tv until he lost interest in it and turned on the radio. It took him a while before he decided to walk outside and when he did it didn’t look the same, the courtyard seemed empty. No one was there for him to talk to, and it seemed as if no one would ever be there for him.
He walked out of the gate and just walked: along Morris Park Avenue, and Williamsbridge Road until he got to Pelham Parkway, and he then walked as far as he could through the park along the parkway until he came to the end, then he sat for a spell under the canopy of trees in the green shade and rested before going back home.
Andrew had just come through the gate to the courtyard when he was met by Mica and Cesar, one of Mica’s co-workers. They were on their way to one of the buildings when they saw him come into the courtyard; they came up to him with their condolences.
“Andrew, man. We heard about Celia,” Cesar said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, I’m so sorry,” Mica added.
“It was time,” Andrew said. “She was old.”
“How old was she,” Cesar asked.
“Fourteen.”
Cesar and Mica whistled through their teeth.
“That was old,” Mica said.
At that moment one of the new neighbors came into the courtyard carrying a bag of groceries. He stopped when he got to Andrew, Mica and Cesar and offered his condolences as well. “I’m sorry to hear about your dog. I used to see the two of you every day.”
Andrew nodded his head with sadness.
“She’s fine now.”
“Yeah,” the remaining men in the group agreed.
“By the way, my name’s Purnell and my husband’s name is Joseph.” He and Andrew shook hands.
“Andrew,” Andrew said. “Nice to meet you.”
“We know how it is with your loss. We’ve had to bury three pets over the years. Each one lived twelve, thirteen… and I think the last one made it to fifteen. So we know how it is. You plan on getting another one?”
“Oh. No, gettin’ too old to be chasing round after a dog… Maybe a cat.”
The men in the group nodded their heads awkwardly as words began to wear thin.
“Well,” Purnell said as he shifted his packages, “nice to meet you, and again, sorry for your loss. Hang in there.”
“I will,” Andrew said.
“That’s forty years,” Cesar whispered as Purnell walked away.
They watched Purnell go through the courtyard and into his building.
“A long time,” Mica said.
Andrew hesitated a beat before quietly adding, “A long time…”
Each step Andrew took after he got off the elevator did little to get him closer to his apartment. The door to his unit seemed farther from the elevator than it actually was, and the hall seemed longer; it was as if everything conspired to delay the singularity that awaited him on the other side of the door to his unit. He had accepted all of the condolences of the morning and when there were no more “sorries” or “I. Am. Sooo sorry” left he found himself alone along the winding shaded paths of the courtyard so he decided to go back in where he sat around watching more tv and listening to more radio and noticing things in his apartment until he dozed off to sleep while lying across his bed
PART 8 ~ Conclusion of Andrew Rivera ~
It was late in the afternoon when Andrew awoke from a sudden thrust of realization. The thing that Andrew was aware of had actually flickered days before as a notion but was extinguished by Andrew; but then, as he slept it came to him again, only this time much stronger. It was a thought that was at once engaging and discomfiting. He continued to lie across his bed for a while until the possibility of this realization felt real. Then he looked at the clock, jumped up and began to get ready. In about half an hour he was out the door.
A few people stood at the bus stop, and some sat on the bench beside Andrew. He was feeling a bit peeved at himself for being there and had been attempting to dissuade himself from what he was thinking, he did this all while he rode the bus into the city, yet he never once seriously thought about getting off the bus and heading back to the Bronx.
A bus came and riders boarded. Then another one came and the riders who had since gathered boarded that bus as well. The more he waited the more ridiculous he felt, but something in him wouldn’t let his legs straighten themselves and walk themselves away. Maybe he was too late, was the thought that had just entered his head when he heard the voices.
The guy with the twists and his co-worker came to the bus stop. Andrew felt his heart thump and his breath shorten and he almost cussed at having such a sensation if it had not been for the laughter that came to him, so he contained himself and continued sitting. The two men went on talking about something, but Andrew wasn’t sure what because all he could do was measure the movement of his head and his eyes as he took furtive glances at the man with the licorice skin and crown of twisted hair. He was what Andrew had not allowed himself to think the first few times he had seen him, and that was how utterly handsome the man was. Andrew felt his skin warm while at the same time reprimanding himself for what he saw as juvenile behavior as he considered the man’s beauty and the gravelly sound of the man’s voice.
The men continued talking and when their bus came, they stood back to allow Andrew to go ahead of them. Andrew smiled and shook his head, so the men walked to the bus. As they boarded, the man with the twists looked back at Andrew then boarded. The bus moved out into the sea of traffic and continued its way until it disappeared into the city. Andrew stood up to walk to his bus stop, and as he did so he reminded himself to wear his best shirt tomorrow.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
A Question of Commitment
by Doug Cooper Spencer
PART 1: They had been standing on the platform waiting for a train the night they first met. The fragrance of the man’s cologne caught Cliff’s attention and he asked the man about it. The man’s name was Tye and he said the fragrance was called Vetiver.
The two of them continued to talk that night as they waited for the train and Cliff was drawn to Tye’s polite manner. Finally, the train arrived and they got on as they continued their conversation. It was small talk: the weather, the city, then back to Vetiver. Cliff asked where he could find the cologne and Tye told him it was an oil that he got from his barber.
The train arrived at Tye’s stop. “This is my stop,” Tye said. He and Cliff shook hands. “I’ll see you around.”
For days that followed, Tye stayed on Cliff’s mind. Some of those days Cliff was able to ward off any thought of him, but other days he saw Tye in his mind and heard him speak. The following week Cliff made it his business to be on the same platform at the same time. He looked around to see if he could find Tye, but he had no luck. For the next two nights he came to the platform but still he didn’t see him.
It wasn’t until later that spring, as he came down to catch a train that Cliff saw Tye again and he walked over to him. At first, Tye was caught off-guard when he saw Cliff, but he quickly recovered his composure, and he told Cliff he had been hoping to see him because he had purchased a bottle of the oil just for him. But he said now he didn’t have the oil with him.
“Well, maybe tomorrow? We can meet up someplace.”
Tye stiffened a bit. “Damn. Man, I started using it for myself.” He answered quickly but hearing how unconvincing his words were and seeing the openness of the expression on Cliff’s face, he went on, “But look. I’m going for a haircut Saturday. If you trust my barber, we can go together, and I’ll buy you a bottle.”
That Saturday they met up at the barbershop and then went out to lunch, and a few days later, another lunch, and another, after that. And that was when Tye told Cliff that he was living with HIV. He told Cliff he wanted him to know because he felt he should know and that it was the reason he tried to avoid getting to know him.
They were sitting in a cafe that day, when Tye told him, and Cliff moved his eyes away from Tye and stared out of the window of the cafe onto the street at the cars that went by and at people passing them at that moment. Then quietly, he looked at Tye once again. “I understand,” he said.
“I’ll let you think about it,” Tye said. “We can just be friends.”
“No,” Cliff said with a slight shake of his head. “No. I don’t care if you are.”
“That’s not realistic.”
“I just want to be with you. We’ll see how it goes, right? Like anything, we’ll see how it goes… but I do know I like you… I like you a lot.”
“I like you too.”
And that was how the two of them met seventeen and a half years ago, and when Cliff told himself that he would be there for Tye, no matter what.
Now Cliff raised his head as he remembered that night and that week. The fragrance from the garden came through the back window. Tye had planted the garden near the window just for him, just so Cliff would always remember the fragrance and the night they first met.
Mrs. Dunphy came into the room. “Are you hungry?”
Cliff took another deep breath and told her he was.
“Let’s change your bag first and clean you up,” she said as she moved his wheelchair from the window.
PART 2 ~ A Question of Commitment ~
Mrs. Dunphy washed his body. He felt the washcloth move across his face, the water cool on his skin…
She was texting! It was raining hard, and she was texting! It was the last thing he saw before the blackness. Then the rain woke him. He could feel it pouring onto his face as he lay in the street in front of the car. He saw the crowd around him and he heard the cries of the woman who had hit him. Then another woman leaned over him with her umbrella to shield him from the rain. He wanted to say ‘thank you’ but he couldn’t speak. He lay there, hearing the voices from the crowd, the roar of the rain against the woman’s umbrella and the cry of the woman who had hit him. And now, it was moments like this, having Tye or Mrs. Dunphy, or a family member, or friends do small things like wipe his face that reminded Cliff just how transient freedom can be. Once-simple acts like removing a piece of lint from his eyebrow, or scratching his nose were now dependent upon others.
The months in the hospital were trying, but they would have been insufferable if Tye hadn’t been there. He visited Cliff every day after he got off from work. He brought things from home: clean clothes and toiletries; and he updated the audio books. Then they would sit and talk, watch tv in his room until Cliff would tell him to go home and get some rest. Some nights Tye would sleep over because he said he didn’t want to sleep alone in their bed. The hospital staff understood and so did Cliff’s family. It’s why Cliff’s family agreed that when Cliff was able to leave, he should go home with the man who shared his life and to their home.
But at home Cliff felt even more helpless than when he was at the hospital. At home he lay in bed or sat in his chair unable to do anything more than watch Tye work around the house. Conversation to keep Tye company was about all he could do. Sometimes at night, after Tye put him to bed and had fallen asleep, Cliff would cry but he had learned to cry inside because he didn't want to wake Tye. He knew if Tye awoke that Tye would also feel sad and he would have to wipe the snot from Cliff’s nose and the tears from his face. It was something Cliff didn’t want.
Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy watched tv after they finished dinner.
It was Tye’s late night. He usually had two a week. Sometimes three.
“Ruth’ll be taking care of you while I’m on vacation,” Mrs. Dunphy said.
“That’s good. I like her.”
“Yeah. She’s good.”
“You and Tony got everything ready for your trip?”
“Pretty much.” Mrs. Dunphy flipped through a magazine and looked at the tv every few minutes.
“London is nice,” Cliff said.
“Hm. Rains a bit too much for me, but he has family there.” She continued reading the magazine. They didn’t talk much about vacations since the one the four of them took two years before.
Two years earlier Mrs. Dunphy and her husband, Tony invited Cliff and Tye down to Antigua while Mrs. Dunphy checked on the family house her grandmother had left.
It was Cliff and Tye's first vacation since the accident. Tye and Mrs. Dunphy had made arrangements for Cliff's comfort and the four of them headed down to the Caribbean.
The first night there, Cliff and Tye relaxed on the balcony of the hotel. A hammock had been set up and the two of them swayed together, relaxing under a large white moon that sat above the sea, the two of them resting in the beauty and the grace of being vulnerable; and they talked and ate and sipped on drinks until they drifted off to sleep.
PART 3 ~ A Question of Commitment ~
The next day they woke to a bright warm morning. Tye got them ready and soon they were on a boat floating in the warm waters just off the shore of St. John.
Tye and Tony went snorkeling while Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy watched. There were several people in the water being watched over by one of the instructors from the boat who darted in and out of the waves as if he had been born in the sea itself. He moved among the tourists making sure they were okay. He chatted and played with the tourists as he swam among them. The naps on his head caught drops of water forming a small crown of jewels that set off his dark complexion. He swam over to where Tony and Tye were and the three of them talked a bit before laughing and diving underwater. Suddenly the instructor dunked beneath the waters once again, and this time he came up with a starfish in his hand. He swam over to Tye and presented it to him. Tye shook his head and thanked him, but the man urged him on, showing him how harmless it was to hold it. Finally Tye took it from him and admired it and the two of them laughed at Tye's amazement.
"Get a shot of that," Cliff said. "The look on Tye's face is priceless."
Mrs. Dunphy agreed and took the shot. "Priceless," she seconded.
Later that afternoon Tony and Mrs. Dunphy dropped them back off at the hotel and made plans to meet for dinner. She told them what time they would pick them up and they drove off, leaving Cliff and Tye to take a nap.
During the afternoon Cliff awoke and he turned his head to watch Tye sleeping beside him with his arm across Cliff’s waist. He slept soundly with his face near Cliff’s, so close that Cliff could smell the sweetness of cane and coconut on his breath. Quietly he leaned in and kissed Tye on the forehead.
The bar was crowded that evening. Cliff and Tye sat at a table and watched Mrs. Dunphy and Tony with other dancers on the dance floor. Tye leaned against Cliff’s chair and drummed his fingers to the rhythm of the music.
“Why don’t you get out there?”
“Nah, I’m cool,” Tye said.
“C’mon, you know how you love to dance.”
“Man, just hush. I’m doing fine right here.” He raised a drink to Cliff’s mouth. “I’m just here to chill with my baby.”
The next day Tony and Mrs. Dunphy took them to see her grandmother’s house. The house was small and brightly colored and sat along a shaded side street.
“And here is where I spent a lot of my summers,” Mrs. Dunphy said.
“Really nice,” Tye said.
“Looks comfortable, like a place I wouldn’t mind having, Babe,” Cliff said to Tye who nodded in agreement.
“Her brother’s returning today,” Tony said. “He’s been watching the place.”
“He’s been doing a good job,” Tye said.
The sounds of women talking in front of the small houses and the children playing along the street rose in the warm shade.
“Frankly, I think he could be doing a better job,” Mrs. Dunphy replied. They got out of the van and went inside where Mrs. Dunphy showed them around. The rooms were small and cool, resting before the sun crossed over the roof of the house to warm them.
Mrs. Dunphy said her brother paid a cleaning woman to come in once a week. She said if she had stayed on the island she would come in once a week herself to clean the house even if she had chosen not to live in it.
After they left the house Mrs. Dunphy and her husband took them on a tour of the city. The congestion of traffic caused the van to trudge slowly through the streets.
“It’s always like this,” Tony said as he rested his arms on the steering wheel. They were at a stoplight. “But then you expect it. It’s all about the tourists.”
Their final stop was to be St. John’s Cathedral, but before going there they needed lunch. Tony found a parking space and he and Tye got out and went into a store while Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy waited in the van.
When Tye and Tony came out of the store they were talking with another man. Mrs. Dunphy saw him first and her stare pulled Cliff ‘s attention. It was the lifeguard from the boat. Cliff watched them as they stood in front of the store and talked. Finally, Tye waved good-bye as he and Tony came back to the van.
“That was the guy from the boat,” Tye said.
“I see,” Mrs. Dunphy replied.
Cliff didn’t say anything. He silently watched the radiance in Tye’s face as Tye looked once more at the man.
Tony glanced at his wife in the mirror and pulled off.
In all they encountered the man two more times that week. It might have been a third if Mrs. Dunphy hadn’t gone up to the man on the beach and spoken to him. She had decided he was probably nothing more than someone out to hustle tourists and she wasn’t having it.
Once they were home, life settled as usual: Tye put all of his attention on Cliff; feeding him, changing his clothes and adjusting him so he sat upright in his chair. But now Cliff watched Tye as he never had. The glow of something anticipated was gone from Tye replaced by duty and commitment. This is what Cliff saw in him.
PART 4 ~ A Question of Commitment ~
One night, as he lay in bed, he watched as Tye undressed and lower himself onto the bed. He heard an exhausted breath come from him as Tye finally relaxed after a long day. Tye moved close to Cliff and cuddled him.
“Babe.” Cliff spoke softly.
“Hm?”
“I’m ready to make some changes.”
“Let’s not have that conversation again.” Tye spoke, mumbling against Cliff’s face.
“Not that one. I know you don’t want me in a nursing home.”
“What is it, then?”
“You need to start taking more time out for yourself.” He listened for Tye’s response, but there was none. “I want you to start going out more like you used to.”
Tye sighed. “No.”
“I’ll be okay. We can see if Mrs. Dunphy would be willing to spend a little more time with me. And if not, we can get someone part-time, you know, for when you need to go out.”
“A babysitter,” Tye mumbled as he shook his head. “Cliff, you don’t need anyone to watch over you. Only when I’m at work. And Mrs. Dunphy is already doing that.”
“But you need more,” Cliff said. “You know you do, and so do I. And I’m pretty sure Mrs. Dunphy sees that. You need to go out and enjoy yourself.”
Tye rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling in silence.
“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around,” Cliff started.
“Neither do I. So let’s not get into all that.”
“You know it’s true, Tye. You got a whole life ahead of you, but—”
“Stop it,” Tye said.
“We need to be honest. It might one year--”
“Or twenty,” Tye interjected.
“Or twenty,” Cliff agreed. “And that’s why you need to take care of yourself as well. You need to live life. I’m living mine. You need to live yours.” Cliff turned his head to him. “You know you do. And I want that for you, too. Tye, I want you to be happy.”
“Man, you always say that. Damn. How happy do you want me to be? I am happy. I mean… how happy am I supposed to be?”
“Like when you were with the guy in Antigua.”
“What?”
“I saw how you were whenever you were near him.”
“C’mon, we can’t afford you getting on some self-pitying trip. If I don’t, you shouldn’t either. Go to sleep. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes I do… And you do, too. Tye, I understand. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we’ve been back and I look at you. The way you looked when you were with him was the way you used to look when we were out together.”
“I’m going to sleep,” Tye said. “If you need me to get you something to help you sleep, cool. If not, just lie there and be quiet.” Tye turned his back to him and went to sleep.
The next morning they were in the kitchen. Tye prepared Cliff’s medicines for the day. The sunlight coming through the window caught the line of small bottles on the counter. The radio that sat nearby played the morning news as Tye moved along the row of meds, the movement of his hands, exquisite from experience, removing tops off the bottles and taking out the pills before covering the bottles once again, creating a snapping sound with each effort. He did it all in silence as if something was on his mind.
“I want you to start seeing other people.” Cliff spoke up, his voice moving over the news anchor’s voice on the radio. He saw Tye slow a bit in what he was doing. “I thought about it and I just want you to know I’m fine with it. Promise me though,” he continued. “Promise me you won’t stop loving me.”
Tye leaned forward on the counter, his back still to his husband, and Cliff could see his shoulders heave as he began to cry. Tye turned around. “I won’t ever do that.” Then he pulled up a chair and sat in front of Cliff and laid his head in Cliff’s lap and cried.
PART 5 ~ Conclusion of A Question of Commitment ~
It was difficult the first time it happened. Tye told him he would be home late that night. He looked at Cliff to make his point. Cliff understood.
The rest of that day Cliff listened to Mrs. Dunphy and watched her move around the house. He watched tv and listened to the stereo, but his thoughts kept going to Tye and what was about to happen. He didn’t want to imagine Tye naked with another man, so every time that image came to his head he moved it aside. Yet his thoughts would always come back to Tye and the other man. He wondered who the man was. What was his name and how did he look? Was he of average height and build, like he, himself, once was? He had gotten smaller in the frame since he’d taken to the wheelchair. Was the man light skinned or dark skinned or just average brown skinned like himself. Tye never seemed to have too much of a preference when it came to that.
All he knew was Tye had told him he had met a friend, and that was all. No name, nothing. Not even what the man did for a living or where he lived. But Cliff understood. After all, he had long gotten past things like uncertainty and irony, so he really didn’t need to know much about the man— in fact, didn’t want to know much about the man. He wanted to know as little about the man as possible.
That first night after he came home and they had gone to bed Tye held onto Cliff, but not like he usually did; that was cuddling. But that night he clung to him, tight.
There had been no rules discussed because the rules had been set by love and respect so nothing was ever said about the man since Tye had announced him as a friend, and every late-night Tye came home at the same time.
One of the shows on tv went off and Mrs. Dunphy asked Cliff what he would like to see next. She understood the late nights and did all she could to ease Cliff’s mind.
“Doesn’t matter,” he answered.
Around ten o’clock, Mrs. Dunphy looked at her watch. “We’d better start getting you ready for bed,” she said. It was almost time for Tye to come in; he always made sure he was home by ten, and she knew he would rather have Cliff prepared for bed so they could relax before falling off to sleep.
When Tye came home, he sat for a bit and talked with Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy before her husband came to pick her up. They had a drink together (although Tye had had one or two already) and Tye walked Mrs. Dunphy out to the car, stood for a minute and chatted with Tony and came back inside.
“They really want us to go to London with them,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Sounds good to me. You know I could use some travel time,” Cliff said as Tye lifted him from his chair and laid him in bed.
“Yep.”
“Maybe we can take a train over to Paris.”
“You know how to speak French?” Tye asked as he walked to his side of the bed and began to undress.
“Yeah. Well, a little.”
“I guess that should be enough to get by,” Tye said as he climbed in bed.
“Then we should start planning our trip, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Tye cuddled Cliff and stroked his hair. “It’s time for you to get a haircut,” he said sleepily.
“Yeah, I know. And we need some more Vetiver.”
“More Vetiver,” Tye agreed.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
The two of them continued to talk that night as they waited for the train and Cliff was drawn to Tye’s polite manner. Finally, the train arrived and they got on as they continued their conversation. It was small talk: the weather, the city, then back to Vetiver. Cliff asked where he could find the cologne and Tye told him it was an oil that he got from his barber.
The train arrived at Tye’s stop. “This is my stop,” Tye said. He and Cliff shook hands. “I’ll see you around.”
For days that followed, Tye stayed on Cliff’s mind. Some of those days Cliff was able to ward off any thought of him, but other days he saw Tye in his mind and heard him speak. The following week Cliff made it his business to be on the same platform at the same time. He looked around to see if he could find Tye, but he had no luck. For the next two nights he came to the platform but still he didn’t see him.
It wasn’t until later that spring, as he came down to catch a train that Cliff saw Tye again and he walked over to him. At first, Tye was caught off-guard when he saw Cliff, but he quickly recovered his composure, and he told Cliff he had been hoping to see him because he had purchased a bottle of the oil just for him. But he said now he didn’t have the oil with him.
“Well, maybe tomorrow? We can meet up someplace.”
Tye stiffened a bit. “Damn. Man, I started using it for myself.” He answered quickly but hearing how unconvincing his words were and seeing the openness of the expression on Cliff’s face, he went on, “But look. I’m going for a haircut Saturday. If you trust my barber, we can go together, and I’ll buy you a bottle.”
That Saturday they met up at the barbershop and then went out to lunch, and a few days later, another lunch, and another, after that. And that was when Tye told Cliff that he was living with HIV. He told Cliff he wanted him to know because he felt he should know and that it was the reason he tried to avoid getting to know him.
They were sitting in a cafe that day, when Tye told him, and Cliff moved his eyes away from Tye and stared out of the window of the cafe onto the street at the cars that went by and at people passing them at that moment. Then quietly, he looked at Tye once again. “I understand,” he said.
“I’ll let you think about it,” Tye said. “We can just be friends.”
“No,” Cliff said with a slight shake of his head. “No. I don’t care if you are.”
“That’s not realistic.”
“I just want to be with you. We’ll see how it goes, right? Like anything, we’ll see how it goes… but I do know I like you… I like you a lot.”
“I like you too.”
And that was how the two of them met seventeen and a half years ago, and when Cliff told himself that he would be there for Tye, no matter what.
Now Cliff raised his head as he remembered that night and that week. The fragrance from the garden came through the back window. Tye had planted the garden near the window just for him, just so Cliff would always remember the fragrance and the night they first met.
Mrs. Dunphy came into the room. “Are you hungry?”
Cliff took another deep breath and told her he was.
“Let’s change your bag first and clean you up,” she said as she moved his wheelchair from the window.
PART 2 ~ A Question of Commitment ~
Mrs. Dunphy washed his body. He felt the washcloth move across his face, the water cool on his skin…
She was texting! It was raining hard, and she was texting! It was the last thing he saw before the blackness. Then the rain woke him. He could feel it pouring onto his face as he lay in the street in front of the car. He saw the crowd around him and he heard the cries of the woman who had hit him. Then another woman leaned over him with her umbrella to shield him from the rain. He wanted to say ‘thank you’ but he couldn’t speak. He lay there, hearing the voices from the crowd, the roar of the rain against the woman’s umbrella and the cry of the woman who had hit him. And now, it was moments like this, having Tye or Mrs. Dunphy, or a family member, or friends do small things like wipe his face that reminded Cliff just how transient freedom can be. Once-simple acts like removing a piece of lint from his eyebrow, or scratching his nose were now dependent upon others.
The months in the hospital were trying, but they would have been insufferable if Tye hadn’t been there. He visited Cliff every day after he got off from work. He brought things from home: clean clothes and toiletries; and he updated the audio books. Then they would sit and talk, watch tv in his room until Cliff would tell him to go home and get some rest. Some nights Tye would sleep over because he said he didn’t want to sleep alone in their bed. The hospital staff understood and so did Cliff’s family. It’s why Cliff’s family agreed that when Cliff was able to leave, he should go home with the man who shared his life and to their home.
But at home Cliff felt even more helpless than when he was at the hospital. At home he lay in bed or sat in his chair unable to do anything more than watch Tye work around the house. Conversation to keep Tye company was about all he could do. Sometimes at night, after Tye put him to bed and had fallen asleep, Cliff would cry but he had learned to cry inside because he didn't want to wake Tye. He knew if Tye awoke that Tye would also feel sad and he would have to wipe the snot from Cliff’s nose and the tears from his face. It was something Cliff didn’t want.
Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy watched tv after they finished dinner.
It was Tye’s late night. He usually had two a week. Sometimes three.
“Ruth’ll be taking care of you while I’m on vacation,” Mrs. Dunphy said.
“That’s good. I like her.”
“Yeah. She’s good.”
“You and Tony got everything ready for your trip?”
“Pretty much.” Mrs. Dunphy flipped through a magazine and looked at the tv every few minutes.
“London is nice,” Cliff said.
“Hm. Rains a bit too much for me, but he has family there.” She continued reading the magazine. They didn’t talk much about vacations since the one the four of them took two years before.
Two years earlier Mrs. Dunphy and her husband, Tony invited Cliff and Tye down to Antigua while Mrs. Dunphy checked on the family house her grandmother had left.
It was Cliff and Tye's first vacation since the accident. Tye and Mrs. Dunphy had made arrangements for Cliff's comfort and the four of them headed down to the Caribbean.
The first night there, Cliff and Tye relaxed on the balcony of the hotel. A hammock had been set up and the two of them swayed together, relaxing under a large white moon that sat above the sea, the two of them resting in the beauty and the grace of being vulnerable; and they talked and ate and sipped on drinks until they drifted off to sleep.
PART 3 ~ A Question of Commitment ~
The next day they woke to a bright warm morning. Tye got them ready and soon they were on a boat floating in the warm waters just off the shore of St. John.
Tye and Tony went snorkeling while Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy watched. There were several people in the water being watched over by one of the instructors from the boat who darted in and out of the waves as if he had been born in the sea itself. He moved among the tourists making sure they were okay. He chatted and played with the tourists as he swam among them. The naps on his head caught drops of water forming a small crown of jewels that set off his dark complexion. He swam over to where Tony and Tye were and the three of them talked a bit before laughing and diving underwater. Suddenly the instructor dunked beneath the waters once again, and this time he came up with a starfish in his hand. He swam over to Tye and presented it to him. Tye shook his head and thanked him, but the man urged him on, showing him how harmless it was to hold it. Finally Tye took it from him and admired it and the two of them laughed at Tye's amazement.
"Get a shot of that," Cliff said. "The look on Tye's face is priceless."
Mrs. Dunphy agreed and took the shot. "Priceless," she seconded.
Later that afternoon Tony and Mrs. Dunphy dropped them back off at the hotel and made plans to meet for dinner. She told them what time they would pick them up and they drove off, leaving Cliff and Tye to take a nap.
During the afternoon Cliff awoke and he turned his head to watch Tye sleeping beside him with his arm across Cliff’s waist. He slept soundly with his face near Cliff’s, so close that Cliff could smell the sweetness of cane and coconut on his breath. Quietly he leaned in and kissed Tye on the forehead.
The bar was crowded that evening. Cliff and Tye sat at a table and watched Mrs. Dunphy and Tony with other dancers on the dance floor. Tye leaned against Cliff’s chair and drummed his fingers to the rhythm of the music.
“Why don’t you get out there?”
“Nah, I’m cool,” Tye said.
“C’mon, you know how you love to dance.”
“Man, just hush. I’m doing fine right here.” He raised a drink to Cliff’s mouth. “I’m just here to chill with my baby.”
The next day Tony and Mrs. Dunphy took them to see her grandmother’s house. The house was small and brightly colored and sat along a shaded side street.
“And here is where I spent a lot of my summers,” Mrs. Dunphy said.
“Really nice,” Tye said.
“Looks comfortable, like a place I wouldn’t mind having, Babe,” Cliff said to Tye who nodded in agreement.
“Her brother’s returning today,” Tony said. “He’s been watching the place.”
“He’s been doing a good job,” Tye said.
The sounds of women talking in front of the small houses and the children playing along the street rose in the warm shade.
“Frankly, I think he could be doing a better job,” Mrs. Dunphy replied. They got out of the van and went inside where Mrs. Dunphy showed them around. The rooms were small and cool, resting before the sun crossed over the roof of the house to warm them.
Mrs. Dunphy said her brother paid a cleaning woman to come in once a week. She said if she had stayed on the island she would come in once a week herself to clean the house even if she had chosen not to live in it.
After they left the house Mrs. Dunphy and her husband took them on a tour of the city. The congestion of traffic caused the van to trudge slowly through the streets.
“It’s always like this,” Tony said as he rested his arms on the steering wheel. They were at a stoplight. “But then you expect it. It’s all about the tourists.”
Their final stop was to be St. John’s Cathedral, but before going there they needed lunch. Tony found a parking space and he and Tye got out and went into a store while Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy waited in the van.
When Tye and Tony came out of the store they were talking with another man. Mrs. Dunphy saw him first and her stare pulled Cliff ‘s attention. It was the lifeguard from the boat. Cliff watched them as they stood in front of the store and talked. Finally, Tye waved good-bye as he and Tony came back to the van.
“That was the guy from the boat,” Tye said.
“I see,” Mrs. Dunphy replied.
Cliff didn’t say anything. He silently watched the radiance in Tye’s face as Tye looked once more at the man.
Tony glanced at his wife in the mirror and pulled off.
In all they encountered the man two more times that week. It might have been a third if Mrs. Dunphy hadn’t gone up to the man on the beach and spoken to him. She had decided he was probably nothing more than someone out to hustle tourists and she wasn’t having it.
Once they were home, life settled as usual: Tye put all of his attention on Cliff; feeding him, changing his clothes and adjusting him so he sat upright in his chair. But now Cliff watched Tye as he never had. The glow of something anticipated was gone from Tye replaced by duty and commitment. This is what Cliff saw in him.
PART 4 ~ A Question of Commitment ~
One night, as he lay in bed, he watched as Tye undressed and lower himself onto the bed. He heard an exhausted breath come from him as Tye finally relaxed after a long day. Tye moved close to Cliff and cuddled him.
“Babe.” Cliff spoke softly.
“Hm?”
“I’m ready to make some changes.”
“Let’s not have that conversation again.” Tye spoke, mumbling against Cliff’s face.
“Not that one. I know you don’t want me in a nursing home.”
“What is it, then?”
“You need to start taking more time out for yourself.” He listened for Tye’s response, but there was none. “I want you to start going out more like you used to.”
Tye sighed. “No.”
“I’ll be okay. We can see if Mrs. Dunphy would be willing to spend a little more time with me. And if not, we can get someone part-time, you know, for when you need to go out.”
“A babysitter,” Tye mumbled as he shook his head. “Cliff, you don’t need anyone to watch over you. Only when I’m at work. And Mrs. Dunphy is already doing that.”
“But you need more,” Cliff said. “You know you do, and so do I. And I’m pretty sure Mrs. Dunphy sees that. You need to go out and enjoy yourself.”
Tye rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling in silence.
“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around,” Cliff started.
“Neither do I. So let’s not get into all that.”
“You know it’s true, Tye. You got a whole life ahead of you, but—”
“Stop it,” Tye said.
“We need to be honest. It might one year--”
“Or twenty,” Tye interjected.
“Or twenty,” Cliff agreed. “And that’s why you need to take care of yourself as well. You need to live life. I’m living mine. You need to live yours.” Cliff turned his head to him. “You know you do. And I want that for you, too. Tye, I want you to be happy.”
“Man, you always say that. Damn. How happy do you want me to be? I am happy. I mean… how happy am I supposed to be?”
“Like when you were with the guy in Antigua.”
“What?”
“I saw how you were whenever you were near him.”
“C’mon, we can’t afford you getting on some self-pitying trip. If I don’t, you shouldn’t either. Go to sleep. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes I do… And you do, too. Tye, I understand. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we’ve been back and I look at you. The way you looked when you were with him was the way you used to look when we were out together.”
“I’m going to sleep,” Tye said. “If you need me to get you something to help you sleep, cool. If not, just lie there and be quiet.” Tye turned his back to him and went to sleep.
The next morning they were in the kitchen. Tye prepared Cliff’s medicines for the day. The sunlight coming through the window caught the line of small bottles on the counter. The radio that sat nearby played the morning news as Tye moved along the row of meds, the movement of his hands, exquisite from experience, removing tops off the bottles and taking out the pills before covering the bottles once again, creating a snapping sound with each effort. He did it all in silence as if something was on his mind.
“I want you to start seeing other people.” Cliff spoke up, his voice moving over the news anchor’s voice on the radio. He saw Tye slow a bit in what he was doing. “I thought about it and I just want you to know I’m fine with it. Promise me though,” he continued. “Promise me you won’t stop loving me.”
Tye leaned forward on the counter, his back still to his husband, and Cliff could see his shoulders heave as he began to cry. Tye turned around. “I won’t ever do that.” Then he pulled up a chair and sat in front of Cliff and laid his head in Cliff’s lap and cried.
PART 5 ~ Conclusion of A Question of Commitment ~
It was difficult the first time it happened. Tye told him he would be home late that night. He looked at Cliff to make his point. Cliff understood.
The rest of that day Cliff listened to Mrs. Dunphy and watched her move around the house. He watched tv and listened to the stereo, but his thoughts kept going to Tye and what was about to happen. He didn’t want to imagine Tye naked with another man, so every time that image came to his head he moved it aside. Yet his thoughts would always come back to Tye and the other man. He wondered who the man was. What was his name and how did he look? Was he of average height and build, like he, himself, once was? He had gotten smaller in the frame since he’d taken to the wheelchair. Was the man light skinned or dark skinned or just average brown skinned like himself. Tye never seemed to have too much of a preference when it came to that.
All he knew was Tye had told him he had met a friend, and that was all. No name, nothing. Not even what the man did for a living or where he lived. But Cliff understood. After all, he had long gotten past things like uncertainty and irony, so he really didn’t need to know much about the man— in fact, didn’t want to know much about the man. He wanted to know as little about the man as possible.
That first night after he came home and they had gone to bed Tye held onto Cliff, but not like he usually did; that was cuddling. But that night he clung to him, tight.
There had been no rules discussed because the rules had been set by love and respect so nothing was ever said about the man since Tye had announced him as a friend, and every late-night Tye came home at the same time.
One of the shows on tv went off and Mrs. Dunphy asked Cliff what he would like to see next. She understood the late nights and did all she could to ease Cliff’s mind.
“Doesn’t matter,” he answered.
Around ten o’clock, Mrs. Dunphy looked at her watch. “We’d better start getting you ready for bed,” she said. It was almost time for Tye to come in; he always made sure he was home by ten, and she knew he would rather have Cliff prepared for bed so they could relax before falling off to sleep.
When Tye came home, he sat for a bit and talked with Cliff and Mrs. Dunphy before her husband came to pick her up. They had a drink together (although Tye had had one or two already) and Tye walked Mrs. Dunphy out to the car, stood for a minute and chatted with Tony and came back inside.
“They really want us to go to London with them,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Sounds good to me. You know I could use some travel time,” Cliff said as Tye lifted him from his chair and laid him in bed.
“Yep.”
“Maybe we can take a train over to Paris.”
“You know how to speak French?” Tye asked as he walked to his side of the bed and began to undress.
“Yeah. Well, a little.”
“I guess that should be enough to get by,” Tye said as he climbed in bed.
“Then we should start planning our trip, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Tye cuddled Cliff and stroked his hair. “It’s time for you to get a haircut,” he said sleepily.
“Yeah, I know. And we need some more Vetiver.”
“More Vetiver,” Tye agreed.
(Originally published in ‘Gather the Bones’, by Doug Cooper Spencer https://tinyurl.com/Gather-the-Bones also available at all book sellers worldwide)
