An American Story (23 page)

So my brother came to Maryland and I greeted him with a long list of rules and “things I will not tolerate.” It was basically the same spiel I used when my seven-year-old nephew visited. I was a benevolent prison warden; lots of rules, lot of low expectations. He just nodded and looked away.

He'd driven in at about 4:30
A.M.
By 8
A.M.
he was out job hunting, and by the end of the day, had not one but two.

It wouldn't last.

So I waited for him to fail. I waited for him to steal from my purse or tell me to kiss his ass so I could pass him on to the next sister in line. I waited for him to get arrested so I could
not
bail him out, as efficiently specified in my recitation of the house rules. But he never acknowledged or reacted to my disapproving scrutiny. He wouldn't play the Self-fulfilling Prophecy Game with me. He just took it.

He worked his two menial jobs, slipped off to smoke dope, and watched endless TV while I continued my bleak existence of studying, working out, and reading. It was as if he was waiting for his life to begin; it was as if I was training for some event that never took place. But I was watching him; I had no intention of letting him put anything over on me. As it turned out, he was watching me, too.

The first thing I noticed was that he broke things. He spent those first few weeks looking chagrined, apologizing for knocking over potted plants and knickknacks, upending drinks, dropping cups, burning pots.

“Everything's just so fragile here,” he apologized.

He was the only man I ever had in my apartment. Of the few women who'd been there, none encountered the problems he did. This is what it's like, I thought—living with men. Or maybe that's what it's like to live with a man you make nervous. Cups that seemed normal size to me looked dwarfed in his man's paw, doors that swung easily on their hinges for me came off in his hand. He knew he was on trial; he'd call me sheepishly to the site of his latest crash, eyes big as a worried child's, and point in helpless apology at the pile of smashed crockery or scorch marks on the wall above the stove. His regret was new; it silenced the reproof forming on my lips. Growing up, he'd simply leave his messes for us to stumble upon and curse us for chiding him. Now, he had no more physical grace but he had acquired a newfound respect for others. As for me, while my initial response was the black woman's ever-ready, all-purpose anger and martyrdom, one look at his face, girded to endure my latest tongue-lashing, confused and shamed me.

His effort to change was unignorable, though he made no big speeches. I saw admiration in his eyes when I set off for the gym or to class with a fever, in a blizzard, in a deluge, or on a beautiful sunny day. I never cut a class or skipped a workout, a fact that used to make him sneer, yet one day I heard him yell at a new associate who called me a Tom as I drove off to school. In my rearview, I saw him grab his new friend by the collar and shake him. Later, his friend said to me nastily, “Humph. Your brother think you walk on water.” I'd stopped being simply the schoolmarm to him and he stopped being an animalistic screwup to me. We became people to each other, not just two people involuntarily sharing DNA.

In a way that I cannot now re-create, my brother and I started over from scratch. Magically, we ended up at the kitchen table drinking beer and eating popcorn into the small hours. Talking, talking, talking, as my long-lost brother told me the story of his life. He introduced himself to me. We might have been two strangers chatting in a waiting room for all we'd known of each other. Two strangers who suddenly realize they are siblings, separated by tragedy long past, miraculously reunited by a twist of fate.

This is the story of his life:

——

A few months before my invitation, Bobby was just back from being kicked out of Dorothy's in Atlanta in near record time. Home on leave, I'd had to give him the money to get there; I'd tossed it at him and said, “Might as well be a bum there as here.”

He hadn't been there a week before he interceded in an argument Dorothy was having with her boyfriend. Eddie Dickerson's true son, he took Carl's side and told her she was a poor excuse for a woman. He would never use the specific rhetoric of hell and damnation, but there was no real difference between his line of reasoning and his father's. No woman should be all the time loud-talking a man the way she did Carl. Bobby put forth his arguments with such drunken vehemence and broken crockery, Atlanta's finest came to give him his first look at the new Southern lockups he'd be patronizing. When he got out next morning, he found his things on the porch and his door key inoperable. I was the first one he called. That was good, because that meant I got to be the first to hang up on him. I refused to help, though I knew Mama would and that I'd just have to give her that much more money, but I wanted him to know I did it for her, not for him. Because I didn't care enough to ask, I had no idea of the specifics of how he managed to get home. Dorothy threw him out on a Monday. Mama didn't get paid until Friday. Bobby was homeless and nearly penniless in the interim. He lived in his car, refused admission by every family member in Atlanta, though one offered to let Bobby park out front so he could at least sleep close to kin. You can't blame them; every working-class family has to deal with some variation on this basic theme and every one has been burned. Somewhere, some family member is always between addresses and moving in with you “just for a few days.” Then the squatter starts sleeping later and later, his or her lover starts staying over, and the phone bill reaches triple digits.

Bobby passed on the offer of the driveway and spent three days reviewing his life from behind the wheel of a car with a broken gas gauge.

Just like the protagonists in all the
It's a Wonderful Life
rip-offs, Bobby got to see what it would be like to get his wish. For years he'd brayed his frustration at being part of such a cloying family. For years he'd told his sisters he couldn't wait to be away from us, and now it had happened. For three days, he was all alone. No meals cooked to order, no handmaidens to right his messes, no well-kept home with corny family photos on the wall to smoke his dope in, no mama to baby him. As it turned out, however, there were still plenty of people to call him a bum.

Filthy, hungry, and scared of what he was becoming, Bobby picked up a day's work at a construction site by loitering where hard-nosed job bosses came to find men like him. By night, he loaded and unloaded crates at a dairy, supervised by permanent employees who made no effort to hide their contempt. “Bum” work, as it was called, at the dairy came with the perk of a shed to crash in while the cohort was finalized. Exhausted but too wary to sleep, Bobby watched as his comrades pilfered the belongings of a man who kept what was left of his life in the bag he used for a pillow. His pockets turned out, his head on bare earth, the man woke to rut in a hysterical rage about the shed. Bobby was ordered to help throw him out, the man's calls for justice met only with “Shut the fuck up, hobo!”

Ever Eddie Dickerson's son, he made a little extra giving dollar rides to shiftless coworkers. He refused to charge more. As he drove them about, a carful of fetid wretches sour with drink and failure, men sometimes old enough to be his grandfather, each would point out the homes of former friends and relatives they passed. Momentarily sobered or cackling with alcoholic glee, they'd tell the story of the final misdeed that closed that particular door to them forever. One somber junkie asked to be driven past the same house every day, slowly. After the first day, Bobby learned not to offer to stop and wait while they knocked. Instead, Bobby tried to get these men to pool their meager pay so they could buy cold cuts, bread, milk, soap, rent a room. But to no avail; their destination was always the drug dealer or the liquor store, which conveniently cashed their paychecks without ID. This time, he'd waited for them outside in the getaway car not wondering nihilistically whether the police would come and arrest them all, as he had in high school, but whether this life he saw passing before his eyes was inevitable.

The next day, there was no work to be had and the car ran out of gas, so Bobby and a newfound friend from the dairy pushed the car onto a lot and hoofed it all day. Bobby shared his remaining dope with his new friend as they walked, and my brother learned what it really meant to be a bum. The first stop was the blood bank.

“This just till my moms get paid Friday,” he told the nurse. “It's just a big misunderstandin. See, my sister and I fell out . . .”

“Sure, honey,” the nurse said, and patted his hand.

The second stop, a mission and free food. His stomach rumbling, his head aching from dehydration, nonetheless, he couldn't do it. The workers called out to his new friend by name but Bobby couldn't make himself eat. He says he couldn't eat because those around him looked so much worse off. I don't believe him. I think he couldn't eat because he's a Dickerson; it's better to starve than to take a handout. Instead, he helped unload donations.

It was hours before he could persuade his new friend to leave the mission to resume the quest for work. His friend chided him for his attitude. “All we need is some wine and a doorway,” he said, “and we got the money from the blood.” To Bobby's shock, he had no intention of working again until it was all gone. His friend was not even twenty-five and wanted nothing except a “big, fat woman with a lot of kids and a government job. Welfare aint enough.” His friend had several such women whom he moved among, except, as now, when he preferred his “freedom.” Bobby listened in fascinated horror, objecting only when his friend pushed him to demand payment from the mission staff for his labor.

Weaned in the tough but close-knit brotherhood of the St. Louis streets, Bobby wouldn't abandon his new friend. He fretted over the time as the day lengthened, but desertion was not an option. Finally, the staff required them all to leave, so Mr. X took Bobby to his favorite place to hang out, a nearby police station.

Mr. X's other ambition, it turned out, was jailhouse trustee. While Bobby washed his face in the jail's water fountain, Mr. X explained to him the crime he was designing to land him a protracted stay in the local jail but without sending him to prison to serve hard time. He knew how long it would take for the petty crime he envisioned to come to trial, and gambled that he'd get off with time served.

“Look at em,” he said, pointing to the white-clad trustees. “They warm, they eat regular, they come and go and they get to talk to folks. They can even use the phone. Shit, man, that's a promotion!”

Mr. X called a trustee with a mop over to expound on his theories of life and Bobby couldn't help moving away across the room. When he turned back, his friend was out of sight. He found him in an alcove smoking a joint and rifling Bobby's wallet.

Too lazy even to be afraid, he handed the wallet back with a shrug.

At a loss for words, Bobby could only note peripherals. “Man, you been smoking my weed since I met you. Thought you aint had none.”

Another shrug. “Give you a hit for fiddy cents,” Mr. X offered.

Bobby walked away.

When he couldn't find paid work, he carried grocery bags and did yard work gratis wherever he saw women or old people. No matter what else he was doing, he thought about his life.

On Friday, Mom wired him one hundred dollars from her meager paycheck. Desperate to leave Atlanta, Bobby headed at top speed for the pawnshop to retrieve the TV he'd left there. The customer before him gathered his things and left while the store owner went to the back to bring the set.

“Twenty dollars,” the pawnbroker said.

“I left it on the counter,” Bobby said, fidgeting and tense with the need to be gone.

“Aint no money here,” the man said.

In a flash, Bobby knew the previous customer had palmed his twenty dollars.

“Give me that motherfucker's address. Ima go to his house and Ima kill im. Then I be back for my TV.” Bobby was cold with fury, the way he always felt before he pulverized someone, now multiplied by the accumulated frustration of the previous three days.

The man took one look at him and opened his cash drawer. “Here's twenty dollars. Just go. Please.”

While fear flashed across the pawnbroker's face, my brother considered tracking the man down just on principle for treating him like a punk just to make someone pay for the pass his life had come to. But the wiser Bobby took the cash, the TV, and left. At his first gas stop, he found the bill he thought he'd placed on the counter stuck to the others in his wallet. For the first time since Monday, he laughed. The beginnings of a new person reemerged from skid row and made its way back to St. Louis. Back to his family.

He spent the next few months quietly sponging off Mama, distancing himself from his old friends, confining himself to moderate amounts of beer and reefer smoked in his car. I wonder if he prowled the house as I had, peering out the windows, trying to force a life worth living to appear before his bleary eyes.

His cronies worked their way up to “whack,” crack's virulent predecessor, but for the first time in his life, Bobby said no to the latest way to kill himself. He anchored the couch to the living room floor and made sure the TV would never be stolen. Now
he
was the Dickerson who never went outside, now he was the Dickerson who disapproved of his friends' activities.

——

He told me screamingly funny stories of taunting the cops, his misadventures with women, street-corner hoops. I was mesmerized. A good girl, I had never ever hung out on the streets, and this was a window onto a whole new world for me. Though I'd known there was trouble in the streets we'd grown up on, because I'd known, I'd made it my business not to know the specifics. Now, I howled with disbelief as Bobby told me which neighbor had been the pimp, which the five-dollar prostitute, which the cat burglar.