Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (27 page)

Marko reached his hand across Moesha and I shook it. “John, you need to get off these streets. If you ain’t burned your bridges with your peeps, go home.”

I watched the Ford Explorer zip into traffic, almost causing a wreck, thinking I had burned my bridges.

Chapter 24

Gray stubble covering his dome and lower face, Alfred answered the door in green knit slacks and a white long johns top painted with his last meal. His bottom lip was puffy with snuff. He looked me up and down, deep wrinkles bunching up between his eyes.

“Mama home?” I said.

He took a long time to answer. “She asleep, just got off work.”

I sat down on the ceramic bench on the porch and said, “She wakes up let her know I’m out here.”

“What do you want?”

“Uh, let’s see. She’s my mother, I’m her son. You can say we’re related and I’ve come to see her.”

Alfred slammed the door. Later, Mama came out in pink pajamas. She took one look at me and grabbed her side as if she’d been hit. She screamed, collapsed onto the porch, wailing. Alfred came out and tried to help her up. She beat the concrete with her fist, begged Jesus to help her.

I knew she would be hurt seeing me, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.

Alfred said, “Boy, help me get your mother in the house.”

I noticed the gray streaking her hair as we directed her to the bedroom. I started to leave when she grabbed me, held me for a long time, begged Jesus and pleaded with God to save me.

Alfred eased out of the room. I assisted her to bed and held her hand. Closed my eyes, though unable to erase the image of her anguished face out of my mind. She looked older, more lines in her face, especially in her forehead. Triple bags under her eyes. And that damn gray in her hair.

She fell asleep, whimpering, as if she were in physical pain. It was a bad idea coming here.

Alfred stood in the hallway when I closed the door softly behind me. “You satisfied now?”

An urge to hit him passed over me. “I’m leaving.”

He caught my arm as I was passing. “You’re not leaving. You’re gonna stay here and deal with this. Your mother been tore up for weeks. I’ve dealt with it, you can too. You the one started it.”

Ignoring him I went to the front door and looked out at the quaint single-story house across the street. Dokes’ mother still lived there. He and I and a few other guys played touch football and softball in the street.

Alfred said, “You leave, don’t come back!”

* * * * *

I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom, shocked, understanding now why Mama had collapsed upon seeing me. Teeth missing. My hair needed cutting, an uneven afro. Razor bumps poked out of peach fuzz along my chin and neck. Moustache was too long, covering my top lip, which was dry and chapped just like Zelda’s. Yet the most shocking thing was my eyes. They looked sunk in. Haunted. Cadaverous.

I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Shaved. Trimmed my moustache with scissors. Found a set of clippers and cut my head clean, using a hand mirror and vanity mirror to see the back of my head. Another shock when I stepped onto the scale behind the door: the arrow quivered near 142. That couldn’t be right. Last time I weighed I totaled a hundred and ninety-two pounds. Where the hell did fifty pounds go?

AIDS crossed my mind when I stepped into the shower. Aunt Jean said Zelda was HIV positive, and our only safe sex precaution occurred when Zelda threw my clothes out. Letting Spanky apply a condom orally wasn’t a great idea either.

Naw, that wasn’t it. I hadn’t eaten much, worrying about Doreen. Some days I didn’t eat anything at all. I didn’t have AIDS.

All the clothes from my high school days were a tad too big, even the underwear. In jeans and a wife beater T-shirt I looked in the mirror: much better, but my eyes still had that vacant look.

Alfred and I sat in the living room watching
Court TV
, the novelist Michael Petersen on trial for murder, his attorney explaining how an intoxicated Mrs. Petersen had fallen down a flight of stairs and splattered blood on the wall almost to the ceiling.

Mama shuffled out of her bedroom around noon. I couldn’t look her in the face. She watched TV with us a few minutes and then went into the kitchen. Not long after the smell of rolls, baked chicken, and creamed corn filled the house.

Mama segued blessing the food into a tearful prayer, once again begging for my salvation. I almost lost my appetite. Almost. Alfred took his plate into the living room. Mama, a hand covering her eyes, didn’t eat anything. As usual the food was delicious.

Not once had I told my mother I loved her. I couldn’t remember the last time I hugged her. Now seemed a good time to do both and tell her everything would be all right. But I couldn’t.

As I was getting up to rinse my plate, Mama said, “I want you to stay here for a while, get your weight up.” Alfred cleared his throat. Mama raised her voice: “He’s my son, Alfred! No child of mine starving to death!” He cleared his throat again. “John, you think you and Alfred can get along while I’m at work?” I nodded. “Alfred is putting up a fence in the backyard. You can help him.”

Alfred, in the living room in an A and B conversation, said, “I don’t need no help.”

He and Mama got to arguing about the fence, Mama saying he’d been working on it for years, Alfred saying he liked to to take his time, get it right the first time. I escaped to my old bedroom.

Before going to work, Mama came to my room. Her hair in a bun, she was wearing green scrubs and white tennis shoes. “Alfred tell you to do something, do it. He lives here too.”

I said okay and she started to leave, but stopped at the door, her back to me.

“My daddy was a mean drunk,” she said, her voice low. “He hated CJ, beat him every day. Every day! One time I saw him beat CJ with an extension cord. All I could do was cry and hope he wouldn’t beat me. You beat a child like my daddy beat CJ, you’d expect that child to grow up and be mean and ornery. Not my brother, he’s the nicest man you’ll ever meet.” She paused and I could tell she was crying again. “CJ found a dog somebody mistreated and left on the side of the road. A pitiful-looking, mangy dog.

“CJ loved it, though. It wouldn’t let nobody but him come near it. One day it got loose while CJ was at school. Daddy told CJ if the dog got loose and killed one of his chickens he was going to kill him. I didn’t want that to happen so I tried to catch it and tie it up. It attacked me, bit a plug out my arm, scratched my face. CJ came home and asked what happened. I told him I fell down. Jean told him the truth. I watched him walk down the road with that dog on his heels. He came back by himself. He was crying.

“Daddy asked CJ what happened to the dog. CJ said, ‘I love my sister more than I love a dog.’” Another pause, and I knew what was coming next. “God knows I would never do anything to hurt my brother. I asked him to take you in…and he did, as a favor to me. You went down there and…Why did you do that, John? Why?”

There was nothing I could say.

Mama told me again about the dream where I was in a nursing home, said she was dreaming it almost every day now, said she didn’t want that to happen but couldn’t think of a way to stop it. “All I can do is pray for you, son.”

She left, and I wondered if the rod in the closet would support my weight.

Alfred woke me up. “A white girl at the door looking for you. This shit ain’t working.”

It was Cindy, looking like a spy, brown trench coat, large sunglasses, a tan fedora on her head. It was still dark out.

“How you know I was here?”

Cindy said, “Get some clothes,” and stepped inside and closed the door. Alfred cleared his throat. “Please!” Cindy added.

In the bedroom, after putting my shoes on, I looked out the window and saw a white Lexus parked in front of the house next door.
Spanky!
Cindy was setting me up.

In the living room, Cindy and Albert were talking about slavery of all things, and I wondered who brought that up. I told Cindy it was time for her to leave. But for Alfred sitting there I would’ve kicked her out.

Cindy stopped at the door and said, “You’re going with me, John.”

“No, I’m not. I see Spanky’s car out there.” I asked Albert to give me a minute and he cleared his throat. To Cindy: “ I asked you nicely to leave.”

Cindy said, “That’s his car, but he’s not with me,” and told Alfred it was nice talking to him. “Can we talk outside, John? Please.”

It was too dark to see anyone inside the Lexus. Cindy caught me staring that way and said, “Trust me, John. I’ve never lied to you before, have I?”

“What you want, Cindy?”

“I want you to go get some clothes and ride with me.”

“Where?”

“To the bus station.” I gave her a look saying that’s not happening. “Listen to me, John. Batman and Spanky are fighting over who gets to kill you. You don’t have a choice. They know you’re here. Let’s go, John, before the sun comes up.”

“How do they know I’m here?”

A car drove down the street, moving slow, and Cindy and I both sighed in relief when a newspaper flew out of it and landed in a neighbor’s yard.

“Let’s talk in the car,” Cindy said, and started that way. I looked in the back seat before getting in. “Spanky’s in another car--I don’t know which. He told me I could drive this. You know why? Soon he’ll ask me to lure you out so he can do something to you.” She started the engine and drove away. “He catch me with you in his car, I’m dead too.” She steered the Lexus onto the interstate.

“Cindy, I’m not leaving Little Rock. Spanky or Batman don’t scare me.”

“You’re not listening, John. You stay here you’re as good as dead. Spanky or Batman can’t get to you they’ll pay someone else to do it. Couple rocks, a crackhead kill you and that nice old man back there. You don’t have a choice, John.”

The seriousness of her tone unnerved me. “I don’t have money to leave town.”

We drove under the sign indicating North Little Rock. Cindy said, “I’ve got a little bit. Not much.”

“Why you doing this, Cindy? I knew if the police busted Batman, you were going down too.”

She took the Broadway exit. “That low I was telling you about? You’re starting to see it now, aren’t you?” I didn’t answer. “That was low down of Fifty turning you on. John, it only gets worse. You think it can’t get any worse than it already has, then it gets worse than that. Day-by-fucking-day. Next thing you know, you’ve no shame, no conscience, no remorse, no soul. Nothing.” Her voice cracked. “You just feel shitty. High, sober, even when you’re asleep, you just feel shitty.”

She made a right on Washington Street and parked in front of the Greyhound Bus Station.

“Shit keeps piling up, something got to give,” Cindy continued. “I sit by and do nothing knowing a friend of mine is fixin’ to get killed, that’s more shit, you know. I’ve got more than enough shit in my life already.”

Two winoes sat on a bench in front of a heavily barred pawn shop across the street. The sun was starting to come up.

Cindy reached inside her coat pocket and pulled out some money. “Nine hundred dollars, John. Not much, but that’s all I got.”

She gave it to me and I counted it. Yup, nine hundred dollars. “No, John. That’s not for recreation. That’s for you to get a bus ticket and get the hell outta Little Rock. Promise me, John. Promise me you’re getting on a bus and getting out of here.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the money. “Okay, I promise.”

“When you get where you’re going you can tell your folks to send your clothes.”

“Yeah. Thanks a million, Cindy.” I started to get out and then thought of something. “You remember Fifty wanting something from me? What was it?”

“It doesn’t matter now, John, does it?”

I watched her drive away before walking to a parked cab. The meter was already at three dollars and thirty cents. The cabbie, a big man with dark keloids blotting his nape, said, “Where to?”

“Oak Street,” I told him.

“Where ’bout on Oak Street?”

I handed him a twenty over the seat and said, “We get there I’ll show you.”

The way I saw it there was no rush leaving Little Rock. Hell, I hadn’t even told Mama good-bye. Besides, Batman was almost a midget and Spanky wore a flamboyant wig and women clothes--I could spot them a mile away. Oak Street made the cabbie nervous and he kept asking me where to. My man wasn’t standing on the corner.

“Park for a minute, okay?”

One rock, that’s all I would do. One measly little rock, and then I would leave town as I’d promised Cindy.

The cabbie said, “Man, you trying to buy drugs. I don’t use my cab to buy drugs. You need to get to stepping.”

It crossed my mind to tear a ten spot in half, tell him to wait. His expression looked too serious for that. I got out of his cab.

The walk back to Mama’s house took an hour and a half. A great day: the temp in the sixties, not a cloud in the sky. I had two hundred dollars worth of crack in my pocket--my last time getting high, might as well go out with a bang.

Alfred took his time opening the door. “This ain’t working,” he said.

“Is Mama asleep?”

“Uh, let’s see. Woman her age work all night. Guess she’d sleep in the day.”

I gave him a look.

In the bedroom I locked the door and opened the window. In the window next door I saw an elderly man and woman watching a soap opera. They would think I was smoking pipe tobacco.

In the brief sharpness I heard birds chirping and singing, dogs barking; I heard my heart thumping; I heard Alfred fumbling around in the kitchen; I heard my mama snoring; and I heard bells, faint at first and then getting louder, coming closer…Then everything went silent.

Later, Mama turned the doorknob and then knocked. “John, are you up?”

I didn’t answer.

Alfred knocked on the door. “Open this door. What you doing in there? Open this door.”

I told him to wait a minute and closed the window. In the mirror above the dresser I saw my image.
Shit!
Blotches of sweat covered my face and my eyes were bucked wide. He knocked again, harder.