Authors: M.K. Asante
Buck (13 page)
“These all from your dad?” he asks, thumbing through the envelopes.
“Yeah.”
“You ain’t open none of ’em?” he says, face scrunched in confusion.
“I don’t fuck with him like that. Not after what he did.” Every time I think about my dad, I see him leaving, hear my mom crying, and feel Uzi screaming in the cage.
“Man, at least you got a pop. At least he’s trying. Nobody’s perfect but at least you can talk to him, at least he wants to talk to you.” He stares through me, his eyes burning into mine. Amir has never met his dad even though they live in the same neighborhood. “You know what I’d do to get a letter from my dad? A phone call? An acknowledgment? Anything, anything!”
Amir takes off his chain.
“See this?” He flashes it, then throws it to me. The chain is silver and flat with a charm on the end.
“That was my dad’s. It’s the only thing he left.” The charm is a symbol I’ve seen somewhere before but can’t place it. It kind of looks like a
W
with too many loops and arrow points at the top. Maybe it’s another language?
The next time my pop calls, I pick up. I don’t know what the fuck to say. I want to hang up.
“Come stay with your father a few nights … in Levittown.”
“Levittown?” I say after a while.
Where the hell is that?
There is so much I want to say but I don’t want to show him how hurt I am. “That sounds far.”
“It’s not that far from Philly, depending on traffic. About forty-five minutes.”
“Forty-five minutes? Might as well live in Jersey.”
“Well, it’s actually right on the border. This area was built after the war by Levitt and Sons. They wouldn’t sell to black people. The first black people to move into this neighborhood, Bill and Daisy Myers, in 1957 … I think it was ’57 … they moved to Dogwood Hollow. People threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at their house, drove by and screamed ‘nigger’ and ‘porch monkey,’ bomb threats. They stayed in Levittown, though, stuck it out. They called Daisy Myers the Rosa Parks of the North.”
“You moved out there because of all that?”
“No. I thought I should get out of the city … and this is all I could afford. But let’s talk about this face-to-face. I want to see you.”
“Nah, I gotta stay here. Somebody’s gotta watch after Mom. She’s sick, remember?”
“Let me come pick you up. We can talk.”
“Nah,” I say, ice cold.
“Why?” he asks.
“You made your bed. Lie in it.”
Dear Carole,
I am sure that Malo is selling weed or something! How can I say that so calmly? My calm is actually tenuously sitting on a very stormy sea and one more huge wave can knock the two of us into the water, never to come up again. I tried to give Malo some money and he told me not to worry—he had money, and if I needed money, he would give me some. I just looked at him. I heard what he was saying and I could see his mouth move but I couldn’t comprehend that this child had his own money. He is fiercely independent.
I’m not afraid for him just as I wasn’t afraid for myself when at a younger age than Malo I rolled a drunk’s pocket in the hallway of my apartment building on Cooper Street in Brooklyn. He was there for the taking and I with no money saw him lying there and I could hear the jingle of coins in his pockets. He would mumble a few words every now and then but he was basically out of commission. Where did I even get the notion to roll him? I honestly don’t know. But I did just that. I was able to get a few dollars and thought no more about it.
I never asked Malo if he was selling weed but I know and I also know that the ground beneath us has gone asunder.
Malo doesn’t know what tomorrow will bring now that his father has left. He doesn’t trust the state that I am in
or will be in. And why should he? His father was a constant. Not because he was always at home but because he had always been on the road, and when he wasn’t on the road he was always at the office, and when he wasn’t at the office he was always cheerful. “Wake up in joy” was his expression in the morning. He didn’t have to be hospitalized and he wasn’t sad and he didn’t take medicine for depression, so despite his chronic absences from Malo’s childhood, he was a known equation.
I, on the other hand, represented the mercurial, the artiste, the reclusive, and the unknown. Perhaps Chaka had spoken to Malo about my “condition.” I don’t know. I am the parent that is there but not there. Chaka was away but he wasn’t away. At least that is what everyone likes to think.
My mother called me a thief. She said if there was one thing that she couldn’t stand, it was a “thief and a liar.” I was both. I stole because I had to. My mother seemed oblivious to our plight, so I had to do something about it. My mother felt that honesty somehow trumped poverty and that we could hold on to honesty even when we were hungry. I didn’t buy that line and was angry with my mother for a long time because of that.
I stole food from the corner store until they caught me and told me never to come in the store again. I stole food. After Ben and Irving (that was the name of the store owners) banned me from the store, I sent my brother to go “get” food for us. I stole from my aunt. I would wait for her to go to sleep and then I would roll her. She snored heavily and that was my signal to go into her purse and take some money. Unlike my mother, she always had a little
money on her. During the day she carried her money in her bra but there was always a few dollars in her purse. I never took everything and tried to take an amount that she wouldn’t miss. Eventually I was caught and had to pay my aunt back but the worst part was my mother’s scorn: “I don’t care how smart you are, if you are a liar and a thief, you will never be any good.” The ironic part is that my aunt took advantage of my mother and our situation for years. She didn’t have a problem cheating us and there wasn’t anyone to call her out on this.
There was a time when I stole the rent money from a family that lived right behind us. I can still see them. There was a mother and father in that apartment so that stuck out. I was back there playing with the kids and somehow I noticed the envelope with the rent money. Now this was a lot of money. It was around ninety dollars. I took the entire envelope. This was serious business and I felt it. I remember their grief at “losing” the money and how everyone was looking for the money. They never suspected me and I don’t know why they didn’t. This was a terrible move on my part. First of all, it was really more money than I could handle. It took me forever to spend it and I ended up giving some of it away and my aunt cheated me out of the rest. Secondly, they moved shortly afterward and I always felt responsible for that.
My mother got wind that I had some money and of course she asked me about it. I wasn’t going to tell her where the money came from. A constant threat in my home was the juvenile detention center, where liars and thieves were sent if they continued to misbehave. My aunt stepped up to the plate and said that the money was hers.
Now I knew that was a lie but there was nothing that I could say. So my aunt was the lucky recipient of my ill-gotten goods and I was on punishment once again. Things are never what they seem. I believe that my mother knew that my aunt was a liar and a cheat but she depended on my aunt emotionally and in some ways financially. I think that my mother’s super-piousness stemmed from an imaginary place that placed an extraordinary value on being “good.”
Malo isn’t in the exact place that I was but he is in a place that has him thinking for the first time in his life about survival. I understand that and I trust him but I don’t want him selling weed.
God, give me strength.
Amina
*
“Poppa Was a Playa,” Nas, 1998.
Trouble in Paradise
I hit up Twin Gold on Fifth Street to buy a fourteen-karat white gold tennis bracelet for Nia. She didn’t ask for it. It’s not her birthday or anything, I just want to do something nice for her. I give it to her and her eyes light up. Then they get dim. She puts two and two together and asks me straight up if I’m selling.
“Don’t ask too many questions and I won’t tell you no lies,” I say, laughing. I forget where I heard that. She’s not laughing, though.
“I’m getting money.” I pull out a knot as thick as a pocket Bible, trying to impress her. “That’s all that matters.”
“That’s not all that matters, Malo! You know where you’re going to end up doing that.”
“Where?”
“Dead or in jail.”
“Look,” putting my money away, “I need a girl to blow my mind, not my high. You know how many—”
“What? How many girls are easily impressed? I’m not them. Money doesn’t impress me. Everything isn’t about money.” There’s something refreshing about that but I’m not trying to hear that right now.
“Yeah? Like what isn’t?”
“Love, my love for you … do you know what that means? Love?” I think about love. I do love Nia but haven’t told her yet. I shrug.
“Love is learning the song in someone’s heart and singing it to them when they forget, forget who they are, forget where their brother already is.”
I try to kiss her—
“Don’t.”
She gives me an ultimatum: her or hustlin.
My palms itch, I can feel the money coming.
My heart hurts, I can feel Nia leaving.
My soul cries, I feel death calling.
I choose the hustle.
Dear Carole,
The people who were always around during my marriage left without a goodbye. They didn’t leave really, they disappeared. One day they were there and then they were gone. In their absence, I survive. In their absence, I pull in the night and walk with the day. In their absence, I don’t suffer fools and prophets. Instead, I listen to the silence. In their absence, the silence whispers and then shouts and I listen. In their absence, I learn the meaning of one. In their absence, I cry without tears and sound but cry just the same. In their absence, I stand for fear of what would happen
if I lie down. In their absence, I remember how I used to play.
Double Dutch was my game and I was good at it. I loved the competitive nature of it and winning brought me great pleasure and attention. The older girls let me jump with them, and the rope became a safe haven for me. “All, all, all in together now, how do you like the weather now …” I knew how to play. I could remember “scaling” fences and how exhilarated it made me feel to be able to go over the fence without touching it with my legs. I knew how to play. I knew how to play stoopball. I loved handball although my brother always beat me at it. I drove my sister’s bike until I almost ran over a little girl and the father said to me, “You are too big to be riding a bike!” Is that what he meant to say? I was thirteen or fourteen. I lived on Georgia Avenue then. I stopped riding Maggie’s bike after that and it was stolen shortly after that. Who told me I couldn’t have fun? I know how to play.
God, give me strength.
Amina
The Greek
Ryan’s gun in my grill.
“Don’t point that shit at me,” I say, pushing him away. He tilts the piece in my direction—this way, that way, like he’s selling it to me. Morning light bounces off black steel.
“Fuck you say about my mama?” he says like O-Dog from the opening scene in
Menace II Society
. He stands, points the tool in the air, and flashes a smirk.
“You feel sorry for who?” he says, and moves closer.
“I don’t want any trouble,” I say like the Korean shopkeeper. “Just get out!”
Blal! Blal! Blal!
He punches the gun sideways and I can almost hear gunshots.
Blal! Blal! Blal!
“Where’s the motherfuckin videotape? Give me the motherfuckin videotape … Stop, bring yo …”
Blal! Blal!
“Hey, ngh. Clean the cash register. Come on,” he says, and sprints out of my room laughing. He comes back in with a big
smile on his face. “Today is the day,” he says. “The Greek. Get up! Time to ride out.”
The Greek is this festival where everybody goes buck. A Carolina-blue sky hangs over West Phil. The thermometer above the PSFS bank on Girard Ave. says it’s 101 degrees. We pull up to the Greek like Mad Max, zooming over cobblestones and trolley tracks on ATVs.
I’m on a black Yamaha Banshee four-wheeler with chrome pipes, hitting the throttle and making it growl like a Harley.
Vhm-vhm-vhm-vhm-vhm-vhm-vhmmmmm
. Ryan is on a Banshee too, blue and yellow, with a cocaine-white T-shirt wrapped around his head like some Saudi oil sheik. Amir and Kam are on dirt bikes. Then there’s the extended fam, other crews on all types of off-road shit. Big tees flapping in the wind as we weave up Girard Ave. through parking-lot-pace traffic. We ride into the Plateau and chill on a hill overlooking the festival.
Out in Philly we be up in the parks
A place called the Plateau is where everybody go
*
The park is jumping, the most people I’ve seen in one place since my pops took me to the Million Man March, the last place I remember chilling with my dad, just me and him, and a million other brothers. I remember Farrakhan saying: “We want to bring you back to Washington with your wives … because the new century must be the century of family. Without
out strong family you don’t have strong community or a strong nation. We must rebuild the black family.”
I guess we ain’t going back to Washington.
The Greek isn’t about black family, it’s about black freaks. Hot boys stuntin, fly girls struttin, everybody showin out. Girls, every shade of brown, colorful as feathers, brush by looking like queens, stars, models, video vixens, hood rats, and hot-ass messes. They cut across my sight with big phat donkey butts switching in every direction. Crayola hair colors. Daisy Dukes cut as tight as bikinis. D cups fall into the dope boy whips: 600 Benzes with AMG kits, 5-Series Beamers, Mazzies, Lambos, Rostas, Raris, Double R’s.
Banging girls with skin like shiny marble. Diesel dudes shove by with cobras and boa constrictors around their necks like gold chains. Shorts and Timbs. Polo sweats with one leg up. Jerseys: Iverson, Kidd, Bryant, Jordan. Mecca, FUBU, Maurice Malone, Pelle Pelle, Enyce, Ice Berg, Moschino, Versace, Lo. Lowriders with hydraulics and juicy paint jobs, cruising on three wheels, hitting switches like mad scientists. Dudes with canes, dancing with arms out. Pink, yellow, purple biker shorts. Herringbones. Bathing suits. Bandanas. Some girls dancing on top of cars. Washcloths on top of their domes. Drinking bottles of beer. Wet T-shirt contest. Junk trunks. Booty shake shake-offs. Hot dogs and burgers on the grill. Even white girls out here, the kind with wraps and gold chains, white chocolate.
