Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (3 page)

Despite the plugs, the noise was deafening, the sound still ringing in my ears hours after getting off. Lysol-smelling sawdust spewed from the heads and holes in the aluminum chutes that led out of the Quonset building to a trailer out back.

Berry, a short four-eyed white man, the supervisor, whose main job was reading
Playboy
in the office, came out and waved his hands. The noise faded when both molding machines were shut off, but the two men operating the ripsaw machine kept working. Berry got their attention and they stopped; then he pointed toward the ceiling, which meant that the trailer was overfilled with sawdust.

Of the six-man crew only Hank and I were not work-release, and we were the only ones allowed outside to shovel the sawdust and roll the tarpaulin back so the truck driver could replace it with an empty trailer.

Without instruction the four work-release men picked up brooms and started sweeping the floor. Hank and I, grinning, headed for the back door. If done properly it wouldn’t take ten minutes to complete the job, but Hank and I, as usual, milked it, taking several minutes just to climb the ladder to the catwalk that spanned the trailer.

Standing knee-deep in sawdust inside the trailer, we could see the rooftops of Goldenwood, the county jail, and the Bryant Meat factory. But we focused on the back door, to avoid Berry looking out and catching us, as he called it, screwing the duck.

Hank lighted a cigarette. “What’s up, bro? You look like you suffered a malodorous discharge. What did it, cootchie or slobber?”

The back door opened and Hank and I immediately started shoveling sawdust.

Berry shouted, “Take all damn day, will ya!” and slammed the door.

We stopped. “Fuck him!” Hector said.

“You gonna start a fire one day,” I said, noticing his cigarette smoldering in the sawdust.

“Ain’t my shit. Burn up what they gon’ do, fire me? I make more money collecting unemployment. I asked Berry The Fairy for a raise, guess what he gave me? A damn dime! Come up to me, patted me on the back. ‘I got you the raise you asked for.’ I stopped calling him Fairy. I got my check, didn’t see no raise. Asked him and he said a dime. Sumbitch smiling like he did me a favor.”

“Yeah, I know. I got a quarter back in March and he did the same to me.”

“A quarter? No shit?”

“Let’s finish this up, man. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

* * * * *

After work I stopped at a liquor store on Twelfth and Woodrow, gave a panhandler fifty cents and bought a forty ounce of Old Milwaukee. Back in the car I remembered I was supposed to be saved, then walked across the street to 7/11 and got an empty Big Gulp cup.

At the apartment Doreen was in the kitchen cooking while Lewis watched Pokemon in the living room. Smoke reeking of burnt pasta drifted from the kitchen.

“Honey,” Doreen said, “how was your day?”

“Okay. How was yours?” Doreen kept calling me honey I could get used to being saved.

“Not too bad,” Doreen said, and then launched into a long complaint about one of her fifth-grade students acting up in class. Sitting next to me on the couch was her spoiled, overfed son whom she had to bribe to pick up his clothes. Yet let one of her students move too slowly going to the blackboard--that child was, in her words, the product of lazy, immature parents.

Lewis gave me a look. “What you drinking?”

“Water.”

He sniffed the air. “Don’t smell like water. Smells like beer.”

That brought Doreen into the living room. Frowning, she pointed a wooden spoon at me. “I know you’re not drinking beer.” Again, more incredulous: “I
know
you’re not drinking beer!”

“Smells like beer to me,” Lewis said.

“Root beer,” I lied. “Beer don’t come in Big Gulps cup.”

Doreen moved toward me. “Let me see it,” reaching for my cup. “Give it here,” grabbing my arm, spilling foam in my lap.

Shaking her head: “Just last night you turned your life over to the Lord. Didn’t that mean anything to you?”

I didn’t respond. What could I say?

Doreen sighed and went back into the kitchen.

It took all my willpower not to pour the cup on Bigmouth’s fat head, who now was laughing at Pokemon without a care he’d blown my cover.

At the dinner table Doreen asked me to bless the half-burnt spaghetti and scorched Texas toast on our plates. Lewis couldn’t wait, his fat cheeks already swollen with spaghetti.

“Thank You for this food, Lord,” I said.
And give our stomachs the constitution to digest it.

“Is that the best you can do?” Doreen said.

Lewis slid his empty plate toward Doreen. “More, please.”

Doreen took his plate to the stove and piled enough spaghetti on it to feed the Jolly Green Giant.

Making loud sucking and slurping noises, his head lowered a few inches above the plate, Lewis wolfed down the spaghetti as though he was in a race.

I shook my head and Doreen said, “Lewis…Lewis!”

He looked up, spaghetti sauce all over his mouth, his shirt. “Huh?”

“Slow down, baby,” Doreen said. “There’s plenty of food.”

Lewis nodded and went back to stuffing his face.

“Honey,” Doreen said, “how’d it go at the bank?”

“I went there, the woman told me to go to the employment office, put in an application there. I did. If they call, they call. They don’t, no big deal.”

“They’ll call,” Doreen said. “I feel it. I sorta told my students about it. You don’t mind do you?”

Lewis drank a cup of Kool-Aid in one gulp and then burped.

“Doreen, how do you sorta tell someone? I don’t get the job, you’ll look foolish.”

Lewis said, “Thanks, mama. That was delicious.”

Doreen told him thanks and to go wash up. When he left she said, “Last night, at church, I felt the Holy Spirit. I thought you did, too.”

“You fainted, I didn’t. You mighta hit your head.”

“Don’t joke about this, please. God is going to allow good things to happen to us. Honey, you start drinking and acting up again…it will not happen. A new job, a house, those blessings are ours if you don’t mess it up.”

That spoiled what little appetite I had. Instead of feeling angry, I felt sad for Doreen. While I compared my life to third world inhabitants who got excited over a bowl of grits, Doreen compared hers to celebrities showcasing their mansions and expensive cars on
Cribs.
Bank job or no, I couldn’t see us affording that lifestyle.

“Put three hundred dollars in the bank today,” Doreen said. “That put our balance over thirteen thousand.” Then she started talking about Lewis: his dislike of staying over to his grandmother’s after school; her brother, Oscar, Lewis’ uncle, teasing him about his weight; one of his cousins who took his toys and broke them--petty stuff. Nothing about his paternity or the fact that when he ate it sounded like a hog at a slop trough.

She said something about a house with Lewis upstairs and she and I downstairs. That got my attention. Living the good life: living with Lewis without actually seeing him. Too good to be true, a fantasy; Doreen would still bring him to our bed when he overloaded his stomach.

I watched Doreen clear the table and put the dishes in the sink. From behind, her hair tapered near the neckline, long legs slightly bowlegged, she could have been mistaken for a man. Yet she was all woman, graceful, delicate, gentle; taking her time washing each dish. She turned and caught me staring at her.

“What?”

I shook my head. That was the first word she’d spoken to me.
What?
At a house party--can’t remember where--embolden by three fingers of Bacardi Rum, I touched her on the shoulder and tried to shout over Roger Troutman’s
Computer Love
blaring from two speakers on the wall.

“You wanna dance?”

“What?” she said, loud and clear for everyone to hear, as if I’d asked for a suppository. Quick, I got out of her face, moved onto a heavyset woman standing near the buffet table eating meatballs with a toothpick.

She said yes and carried her plate onto the dance floor, made the same hog noises that Lewis made as we slow danced, and apologized each time the plate touched the back of my head.

An hour later, over another plate of meatballs, she asked if I would take her home, way out in the East End. Sure, what better way of sobering up than driving ten miles out your way. It was raining when we stepped outside, my car a block away. She told me to drive back and pick her up. One car down from mine stood the uptight woman who’d embarrassed me, her black sequin dress soaking wet, looking under the hood of a Ford Escort.

Before I could get my keys out she said, “Excuse me, you got cables?”

Nice-like, the get-outta-my-face attitude gone.

“What?” Doreen asked again, bringing me back.

“Nothing. I was just thinking about the first time we met.”

“Yeah, you and Louisiana were kicking it then.”

“I wasn’t kicking it with her. Just willing to give her a ride home. It was raining, remember? Louisiana, was that her name?”

“No, at first it was Tallulah, you know, the city? East of Monroe? She gained weight, changed it to cover the state.”

“Was your battery really dead? I touched the cables together, got a big spark.”

Doreen laughed. “No, sugar, I waited in the rain knowing you would come out and rescue me and forget all about your fat girlfriend. The battery wasn’t dead, the alternator was.”

Moving to her I said, “I’m glad it was,” and hugged her tight. “You remember our first real date? We hiked Pinnacle Mountain, took us all day to reach the top. That was the first time I held you in my arms.”

“I remember.” Her voiced dropped: “I want a good life for us, John. For Lewis, you, and me. That’s all I want. Lewis is not your child, I know that.” I loosened my grip on her. “You don’t like him, that’s what I don’t understand.”

I released her, stepped back and started to say, “He doesn’t like me,” but that sounded childish.

“He tries to be nice to you, but you shoot him down every time,” Doreen said. “He really tries hard. Last week he told me he had a bad dream, you were trying to hurt him and me, you’d gone crazy. It scared him. I promised him you wouldn’t hurt us and then you try to send us through the windshield. Told your mother about it and she said, ‘Nothing but the devil,’ and that we both needed Jesus. Okay, I thought, that’s the answer. Get you in church, we both stand up there with Reverend Wilson, the next day you’re drinking beer. I don’t know what to do.”

The defeated look in her eyes stopped me from saying what I wanted to say: Lewis was a spoiled brat whose bad dream resulted from overeating.

Doreen wiped a spot on the counter with a dishtowel. On my way out she said, “I love you and I would like to stay married…” She paused but kept wiping the same spot. “My son comes first. Myself, my marriage,
you
, all that is secondary. My son comes first.”

I said, “I hear you, Doreen,” and walked out of the kitchen and then came right back. “You know, I was thinking maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if Lewis spend some time with his real father. You never know, he hang around his old man, sees what he’s like, realizes he and I don’t get along so bad after all.”

She stopping wiping, stood straight to her full height, her eyes narrowed and locked on mine.

Something told me to drop it, but I didn’t. “By the way, who’s his real father?”

Her shoulders flinched. Calm, she said, “Does it matter? Far as Lewis is concerned he’s dead. Far as I’m concerned he’s dead.” Then, raising her voice a notch: “So why in the world does it matter to you?”

“Because it’s such a big mystery, Doreen. A mystery makes people curious. He’s in prison, what? The nuthouse? A sex offender? You tell me I’ll stop guessing.”

She glared at me but didn’t speak.

“Or…maybe, you’re still in love with him?”

That did it. She threw the dishtowel in the sink, brushed past me. Following her to the bedroom I said, “At least tell me the man’s name. Why can’t you tell me his name?”

Doreen responded by slamming the bedroom door and locking it.

My turn to sleep on the couch; the next night, too. Wednesday night the bedroom door wasn’t locked so I eased into bed beside her. Then I got cocky, thinking a little sex might patch things up, and squeezed her breast. That got her in a mood…to get up and go sleep on the couch.

Friday evening I drove home with one thought in mind: screw Doreen. Almost two weeks without sex, way too long, and perusing Berry’s
Playboy
magazines while he attended a meeting didn’t help matters at all.

My plan was to endure another Friday night with Lewis crunching and snorting in front of the television and then take Doreen into the bedroom and screw her before his stomach erupted.

First person I see upon entering the apartment was Vida, Doreen’s girlfriend, sitting in my recliner wearing a purple dress and matching shoes. On the couch was some guy I’d never seen before.

“Is that you, John?” Doreen said from the bedroom.

“Yeah.” I said hi to Vida and nodded at the guy. Vida smiled, but the guy kept watching television.
Jeopardy.
He answered a tough question before any of the contestants had a chance.

In the bedroom, Doreen, in the same dress as Vida’s, stood before the mirror applying lipstick. Man, she loved that stuff. “Lewis,” she shouted, “are you ready?”

“What’s up?”

“We’re going to a revival in Fort Smith. Reverend Robinson. You wanna come?” Before I could say yes indeed, she said, “We’ll get back late. Vida said around two, three.”

“When you decide this? I was thinking we’d watch a movie, spend quality time together.”
Do the horizontal boogie
.

“Reverend Robinson, Vida says he’s one of the best preachers in the state. Her brother, Mookie, he’s having problems with his wife, staying with her for a while. You mind him staying here with you till we get back?”