Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (36 page)

When he exhaled the smoke I said, “Tell me something. I’m Baby Huey, Doreen’s Olive Oyle, and I guess Dokes is Bluto. Who the hell are you?”

His eyes blinking, he stared at the floor, as if the answer lie there.

“Tell me! Who the fuck are you?”

He looked up in my face, his eyes not smiling now but his lips pulled back in a big toothy grin, the candlelight flickering on the two gold teeth, presenting an irresistible target.

The gun exploded and Fifty’s head jerked back as he fell out of the chair. Moaning, both hands covering his nose and mouth, he got up on one knee and then stumbled back into the chair. The eyes looking at me over splayed fingers were smiling. His hands slid down his face. No blood. No hole. He was grinning, lips stretched wide, revealing pink gums, something silver between his teeth.

I stared at the gun, wondering what went wrong.

Fifty spit, and something pinged off the table and rolled onto the floor. A silver bullet.

Fifty said, “I’m the fox.”

A noise sounded to my right, and before I could react, a gun was pressed against my jaw. In my periphery I saw Spanky’s ugly face, but couldn’t tell what color wig he had on. I recognized his perfume though; it was the one Doreen favored. Obsession.

Spanky said, “Ask me who I am, motherfucker!”

Looking at Fifty reload the pipe I thought about the movie
Scarface.
The bathroom scene made sense to me now. Tony Montana had just watched his friend die, watched him get cut up with a chainsaw. Handcuffed to a shower rod he couldn’t stop it, but knew deep down that it was his fault: but for him his friend would’ve never been in that motel room; his friend would still be alive.

I said, “I
know
who you are…I’ll never forget it. You the cock
biter
in a dress!”

`

Epilogue

A guy that looks like Dokes walks past my room. A woman and a boy walk by soon after, the boy looking straight at me. I hear Lewis say, “Here he is, mama.” I close my eyes, and hear high-heel and hard-bottomed shoes enter the room.

My sense of smell acute now, I detect Doreen wearing a new perfume, a flowery smell to it. Dokes smells of Arid underarm deodorant, the kind you rub on with your fingers. Lewis, his scent the closest to me, smells of licorice. Black licorice. I remember he also likes black jelly beans.

Today is Easter Sunday.

They brought in another smell, one I can’t place right off. Talcum powder with a hint of milk?
A baby.
I’d forgotten they had a baby.

Lewis says, “John, it’s me, Lewis. You asleep?”

Deal with it, open your eyes!
No. Soon they will leave, and probably wouldn’t come back, leaving me with the look on their faces etched in my mind a long time.

“John, I got a baby sister,” Lewis says. “Her name is Jenin.”

Doreen, her voice sounding dry, says, “Lewis…” Her voice trails off.

Lewis says, “What’s that thing in his mouth?”

“A ventilator,” Doreen says. “It helps him breathe.”

“He got to keep it in his mouth forever?” Lewis sounds shocked.

No one responds.

No physical way could I convey to them that I’m okay. No matter what I look like, I’m okay in my mind.

Lewis says, “Who shot you, John?”

“Lewis!” Doreen snaps.

A long time I couldn’t recall what had happened. My last memory: driving an eighteen-wheeler at night, looking out for deer on the side of the road. I thought I’d been in a wreck.

Lewis says, “I’ll get him, John. You tell me who shot you, John, and I’ll get him.”

Doreen snaps at him again and Dokes says, “Lewis, he can’t talk.”

The sounds I’d grown accustomed to seem louder now: wheelchairs squeaking in the hallway; a nurse or CNA demanding that someone take meds; mumbling from Mr. Tubbs in the bed next to mine; a resident in the room at the far end of the hallway shouting obscenities.

Lewis says, “Never? He’ll never talk or walk again?”

After the first of many surgeries, a doctor told me I was lucky to be alive. Several surgeons had worked hours to save my life. “We almost lost you several times,” he’d said, and then explained that the bullet ricocheted off my jawbone and exited out the back of my neck, leaving a wake of shattered bones, leaving me what he called a C2 Complete.

Dokes breaks the silence: “Lewis, let’s you and I step outside for a minute.”

The more the doctor explained my condition, the more confused I got. He talked about nerve cells not able to regenerate in the brain and the spinal cord, talked about secondary damage caused by proteins invading the injured area.

Doreen and I are alone now, and again I consider opening my eyes, looking at her. I still love her. God, I pray my body doesn’t spasm.

Years ago I was sitting in McDonalds eating a Big Mac and fries when a woman parked her son at a table next to mine. He was strapped in a motorized wheelchair, neck and upper torso contorted, hands curled, drool leaking out of his mouth. His mother saw the look on my face when I abruptly got up and left.

In my mind I can see Doreen looking down at my atrophied body, my disfigured face, my hands clenched permanently into fists, the ventilator tube in my mouth, the bags collecting body fluids hanging below the bed, the same look on her face I had leaving McDonalds.

Doreen clears her throat, but her words still come out dry. “John, your mother told me to tell you she loves you. She was coming with us, but she couldn’t make it.”

Two times Mama had come to see me, and I was ready to give her the I’m-asleep treatment too, but she never made it into the room, collapsing out in the hallway, sobbing, calling Jesus, nurses talking to her as if she were a resident.

It’s best she didn’t come.

Doreen’s voice drops: “John, I was young and naïve when I met him. At eighteen I thought I knew everything, but I was clueless. He was a shyster in nice clothes, driving an expensive car. He told me he graduated from Morehouse College, was a business consultant. I believed him. His parole officer showed me his rap sheet. He didn’t even finish high school. He’d committed every crime but murder.

“No way could I allow my son near a man like him. The day Lewis asked me about his father I intended to tell him he was dead. He was, as far as I was concerned. You and I got married and, to me,
you
were Lewis’ father. His true father. Dokes treats him well, but Lewis will always regard you as his father. Not a week goes by he doesn’t talk about the barracuda you guys caught but let get away.” Her scent comes closer. “He loves you, John. I do, too.”

A year ago I would’ve snatched that up and run with it, thinking she and I had a chance to get back together. Now I want to tell her to go on with her life, don’t feel guilty about what happened to me, it isn’t your fault, enjoy yourself, take care of your family.

Dokes comes back and says, “Doreen, are you ready?”

Doreen says, “Good-bye, John,” and moments later I hear the sound of her heels grow faint down the hallway.

A fantasy starts playing in my mind.

When I fully realized that I would spend the rest of my life imprisoned in my own body, whenever I started feeling sorry for myself, each of the twelve times a nurse coded me and shipped me off to the hospital--three times for pneumonia, two times for blood clots, three times for dysreflexia, and four times for decubitus ulcers--the fantasy got me over the hump.

Fifty is sitting somewhere, usually at a bar, laughing and grinning, telling a group of people how he and his friend got away with attempted murder. Then I walk up. The laughing and grinning stop. Fifty looks at me in shock, wondering how I got there when I was supposed to be bedridden in a nursing home. I seize him by the throat, one hand, choking him. He takes a long time to die. A very long time…his eyes never leaving mine.

I open my eyes.

Several of the white tiles above look pissed on, a dingy-yellow. On the far wall, gray cinder blocks, there is a jagged hole the size of a man’s head, probably made by a mentally ill resident attempting an escape. To my right is a window showing the front of Dean’s Nursing Home: a circular driveway, picnic tables, a handful of smoking residents out there puffing away, a line of trees in the background, dark gray clouds threatening rain. To my left a faded, green privacy curtain blocks my view of the cantankerous Mr. Tubbs.

Lewis comes running into the room, holding something in his hand, something metallic that I lose sight of below the bed.

A hammer?

“John!” His voice panicky. Tears flowing freely.

The first time I notice he resembles Fifty. Same peanut-shaped head. Same nose, though Lewis’ is a little broader. Same mouth, thin lips. Same brown eyes that grin all on their own.

“John, I got something for you!”

Lewis removes a plastic tray from the stand near my bed. “John, you deserve this.”

Too frightened to close my eyes.

Lewis puts something on the stand. It isn’t a hammer, but the moment I realize what it is, my head feels like I’ve been hit with one.

“John, I haven’t used it much. It’s almost like new. I want you to have it.”

It’s a DVD/CD player, the exact same model I bought for him and later sold for crack.

Lewis pushes a button and a cartoon appears on the small screen.
Monster Inc.

“This the only movie I got. I got some CD’s I’ll bring you next time I come see you.” He wipes his nose with the collar of his white shirt. “I gotta go, John. Mama waiting for me.”

He turns to leave.

Blowing hard, I free my mouth of the vent, muster everything I have inside me and say, “Lewis…I’m…sorry!”

It’s more of a wheeze than actual speech, but he hears it, understands it.

Lewis moves to the bed and gently puts the vent back in my mouth. “It’s okay, John. You hang in there, okay? I’ll come back to see you.”

I watch him leave.

In the window lightning streaks across the sky. Seconds later thunder quakes. The lights flicker off and on. And then it starts raining, soaking the pillow behind my head.

The End