Dope Sick (4 page)

“Like what?”

“I don't know
like what
!”

“Okay, like how?”

“Look, Kelly, you might be okay, or you might be some kind of nut,” I said. “I don't know. I know I'm tired of talking to your ass. I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway? I want the same thing as you want—no, not like you want, because I don't
want to live in no abandoned building watching television and being spooky. You know what I would like to be doing?”

“What?”

“I'd like to be living in a regular house doing something with Lauryn. She's my son's mama.”

“You got a son?”

KELLY LIFTED THE REMOTE
and my eyes automatically went to the television. The screen was full of bright, jagged lines that slanted one way and then the other. Then the picture cleared and I saw some guys in loose white outfits. They were doing karate or jujitsu or something like that. There was a figure up front—I could only see the side of his head. The camera seemed to turn to him, and at first I didn't know who it was. Then I saw it was my boy Maurice. Just like before, I was seeing the scene and thinking about it in my head at the same time.

“Why you holding your breath?” Kelly asked.
I didn't answer him. I was thinking that every time I told Kelly a lie, he could turn and see the truth on his television. I didn't want to lie to him, but sometimes I couldn't help myself. I watched as the camera zoomed in on Maurice. When he spoke, I knew exactly what he was going to say.

“Why she gotta sound like that?” Maurice asked me. We were at St. John's in Brooklyn watching some tae kwon do guys work out.

“Yo, man, Lauryn's mother is just one of those chicks who come off dead wrong and don't give a damn,” I said. “She know she got me in a bind, and she's working it.”

“Yeah, but saying you can't even go see your own baby…” Maurice shook his head. “Everybody's talking about how guys walk away from their baby mama, and you're stepping up to the plate and she's still talking that ugly talk.”

“You don't know the half of it,” I said. “Hey, Mo, check out this brother with the dreads.”

Me and Maurice had both taken some lessons in tae kwon do. Maurice had lived in Jersey City
for a while and took lessons with some Korean guy named Park. I had taken some lessons at Milbank, but I wasn't sweet with it like Maurice.

“They call him Rasta Jesus,” Maurice said. “He's supposed to be trying out for the World Games.”

“Rasta Jesus? That's a tough name.”

Rasta Jesus was smooth and quick and about six seven, maybe even six eight. I wondered why anybody that big would even get into tae kwon do. Me and Maurice were thinking about taking some more lessons, but the guys we saw in the class at St. John's looked way too good. We'd be doing catch-up for three years.

“You want to start back?” Maurice asked.

“Yeah.”

We copped the A for the long ride back from Brooklyn, mostly talking about Rasta Jesus and the class we had just seen. I was talking on the tae kwon do, but my mind was on Lauryn and how her mama wouldn't let me come to the apartment.

“This is my apartment and I'm going to say who
comes in and who don't come in and I don't care who likes it and who don't!” she said, shaking her fat finger in front of my face and wiggling her ugly head. “You want to see Brian, then you get your own apartment, and if she want to raise him up there, she can. But she ain't bringing him to your mama's house, because I don't like what's going on, and you know what I mean!”

I felt like punching her in her face, but I knew that wouldn't do any good. Really, I thought she wanted me to hit her. A lot of people do that, try to sucker you into doing a hurry-up so you come off looking stupid. I wasn't going for it, but she had me feeling bad.

Me and Moms was living in Section 8 housing, and I thought that if Lauryn and me got married, we could get our own place. A week after Lauryn had Brian, we had went down to the welfare office and talked to some punk interviewer who ran us through a lot of garbage about the rules of Section 8 and how I had to be working and earning a minimum wage and all that.

“If I had all that hooked up, I wouldn't be down here talking to you,” I said.

Lauryn said I shouldn't have lost my temper.

“Why you getting mad all the time?” she asked me outside the dingy-looking building on 14th Street. “He's got to say what he's got to say because that's his job.”

“Hey, girl, this is supposed to be a place where you can catch a break, right?” I answered. “You see all them junkies and guys who just got out of jail and stuff? They running up, signing for their checks, and getting into the wind. We trying to make it as a family and we got to hear his mouth.”

“Lil J, you need to have an attitude check, baby,” Lauryn said. “There's just two things going down. You either walk away when people get into your face or you don't. If you got the cash to walk away, then you don't have to take nothing. But if you ain't got the cash to dash, you got to take their stuff. You know that, so why are you tripping over what he had to say?”

“Don't go white on me, Lauryn,” I said.

“Don't do
what
?” Lauryn turned and looked at me. “Don't go
white
on you?”

She sucked her teeth and picked up her stride as we walked toward Sixth Avenue. I caught up with her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.

“Hey, I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean nothing.”

“If you didn't mean
nothing
, you'd better inform your mouth, because evidently your lips were meaning
something
!” she said.

I took Lauryn home, or at least to the door, and that's when her mama ran the whole thing about how I couldn't come into her house. Normally, Lauryn would have been in my corner, but she was mad and didn't speak up.

What I believed was that Lauryn's mama was trying to bust us up. The first thing she had done was to get Lauryn to name the baby Brian, after Lauryn's father. Brian Alexander had died when Lauryn was four years old, and she hardly remembered him at all. I didn't want the baby named Jeremy, after me, because I don't like “Juniors,”
but I thought he could have a name starting with a
J
, which would be like saying that he was my kid and everything.

Me and Lauryn had talked about raising a family. She's sweet and she's smart. When I first met her, I didn't think I could even come close to pulling her. In the first place she was fine. She was five six, almost five seven, with a cute face and full lips that looked like somebody should be kissing them all the time. But mostly it was how she carried herself. She didn't come off like no round-the-way girl but more like somebody leaving where they were expected to be and heading for where they needed to get to and was steady on her way. It didn't take me but two times going out with her to know she had my heart. Plus we been through some stuff together. Things were getting heavy for me, and when I slipped from dibbing and dabbing into drugs, from weekend parties to really getting wired up, she helped me do a serious pullback. What she said was the same old same old about how drugs mess you up. I knew that like
everybody else. But I knew she meant it just for me and it was coming from way inside her, and that meant something. I cut back some. I wasn't completely correct, and she knew it, but I wasn't sleeping with King Kong every day either.

Sometimes when things got real bad, when I was dope sick like a mother, she would just hold me and ask me to dream with her.

“What you want to dream about?” I asked.

“Let's dream about you going out to work in the morning and me being home taking care of our two-point-two children—they say that's the average among black people—and then you come home and we can have dinner and talk or maybe watch television,” Lauryn said. “Then I'll read a story to the children and put them to bed and then we'll go to bed. You want to know what our bedroom is going to look like?”

“How we going to have two-point-two children?” I asked. “We're either going to have two or three. You can't have a
point-two
child.”

“So you want to have three kids?”

“Two's enough,” I said.

She would go on about how the bedroom would look, and sometimes she would cut out pictures from magazines showing how somebody had fixed up their living room or playroom. She picked out some nice-looking rooms, too.

All that was so good. The dreaming, the talking way past midnight. It was like she was putting those dreams up against the dope. The dope was making holes in me. I knew that, and Lauryn was plugging them up. She could make me feel like I was somebody. Maurice, my main man, said that when I was with Lauryn, I used to even look like I was in love.

Then she told me she was pregnant. When she was saying it, I was smiling, like I was happy. I
was
happy too, because I thought about all the things we had said, about how I was going to be coming home at night and her reading to the children, and all. But Lauryn was serious as she talked. I could see the worry in her face.

All those dreams we had talked about were like
clouds floating high in the sky, far above Real. It wasn't that we didn't know that—we knew it good. But together we could just look at each other and not look down to where Real was waiting. Being pregnant changed that in a minute. Real jumped up, grabbed me, and started shaking hard. It was like Real was saying,
Let's see you sit on your cloud and dream now.

We talked about getting rid of the baby, but she couldn't, and I was real glad.

Brian Dance Alexander was born in Mount Sinai hospital on a cold-ass day in February. Lauryn's mother was so against me, she hadn't bothered to learn my last name was Dance, so when Lauryn slipped it in, her mom didn't even know what it meant. When I first saw him, all little with his skinny fingers spread out like he was showing off that he had five on each hand, I could feel my love for him swelling up inside of me. Lauryn was lying in the bed, her hair making a halo around her face against the pillow, smiling at me.

“If you're going to pick him up with your clumsy self,” she said, “make sure you hold him over the bed.”

I picked up my son, and it was like picking up what my life was supposed to be about. I really wanted to say something cool, something we would talk about down the road, but nothing came. I just held him and breathed in his smell and felt him moving in my arms as he was stretching himself out.

“Hey, little man,” I said.

“Hey, Daddy,” Lauryn said in a baby voice.

God, I loved that woman so much.

Then we slipped into a kind of dream, not a complete thing with pictures from magazines or talking about if the curtains in the living room should be the same color as the walls—not that kind of dream—but just talking to each other about what we were going to be doing. Like doing it was a done deal. Then her mama started talking to her about what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

“She said I got to think about the baby too,” Lauryn said.

I didn't talk on the fact that her mama wasn't putting me in the picture. I was still hoping that things would come around somehow. Then her mama brought this older guy around and tried to hook him up with Lauryn. Her mom said he was a friend of hers from where she worked at the supermarket. But Lauryn peeped her program right away. She ran the whole thing down to me as we sat in Mickey D's down from the Magic Johnson theater on 125th Street.

“He's thirty-eight years old!” Lauryn was teary eyed and her lips were tight. “He come telling me he's from Barbados. As if I'm supposed to be impressed.”

But Lauryn wasn't just mad, she was crying, and I knew that as foul as the crap her mother was putting out was, it made some kind of sense to her. The thing was that I didn't have no comeback except saying that the dude was old and that he had to be lame if he was wanting to hook up with
a woman he didn't even know who had just had somebody else's baby. What I couldn't say was that I would take care of her better than he would.

What he had going on was he had a job. He managed the produce section in the supermarket.

I think, in my heart, that if Barbados boy had asked Lauryn to marry him right then and there, her mother would have said no. What that witch really wanted to do was to get me out of the picture.

“Hey, let's you and me get married and just see what happens,” I said.

“Did you bring the ring?” she asked. She looked away.

I started to say that I didn't have a ring with me, but I knew she wasn't listening. She had thought it all through before we had met this time. She figured I might ask her to marry me, and knew I didn't have the money to buy a ring or hook up an apartment.

“So what you going to do?” I asked her when we reached her apartment.

“Keep on keeping on,” she said. “Nothing else to do.”

She was crying when she was going into the building. I remember saying good-bye to her after the door was closed.

I didn't want to do no dope. I just wanted to get myself together and take care of my business, but the shit was calling me again. When I hit the block, I knew what I was going to do. I copped two hits and took them home.

“You were good with Lauryn's crying?” Kelly asked.

“Yeah. I knew she was on edge, but I thought I could handle it,” I said.

It used to be just when bad things happened that I needed some light, but it was getting to where when I seen good things going down, it was the life I wanted happening around me and me not getting to it that weighed on me, pushing me down into the dark hole that seemed like the only place I knew—sitting on the toilet cooking the hit and feeling sorry for myself.

“How you handle it?” Kelly asked.

I didn't like to shoot in my thigh because sometime it didn't take if you wasn't right in the line. I told myself
I needed some time to think, to clear the funk out my head so I could make a plan that was righteous for me and for Lauryn and the baby.

“How you handle it?” Kelly asked again.

How I'm going to tell you something when you can't understand it, man? You ain't been down where I live, how you gonna know what trying to get up means? How you gonna know that?

“How you handle it?” Kelly asked.

“I went to 125th Street and looked at some bassinets, because Lauryn said she wanted one for Brian. She said it had to be either white or blue.