Dope Sick (8 page)

I didn't dig the smell as I breathed it in deep, and my throat was feeling bad in a heartbeat.

I was saying something to Lauryn, but she didn't answer. Sitting with Kelly, I didn't remember what I had said.

I told myself I was going to be cool as the dragon found a comfortable place in my body. I could feel it shifting and moving and finding places that needed chilling out. I put the foil down in a cigarette tray when it was done.

Kelly turned the sound back up and I told him to shut it off. He said no.

“So tell me about this great love you feeling for me,” Lauryn said. “Now that you're not tense anymore.”

“It's true,” I said. “You're like a bridge in my life.”

“That is so tired, Lil J,” Lauryn said. “Men have
been talking about women being bridges in their lives for umpteen years. Far as I'm concerned, a bridge is just something you walk on to get someplace else. Is that what I am to you? Something you can walk on as you move to your next high?”

“No, I mean, like—there's two worlds. There's the world you see in the newspaper. You know, important stuff going on. People in their business suits rushing around to meetings or talking about how this thing or that thing is going to affect the world,” I said. “They're like the real people, because that's all you be reading about in the papers or seeing on television. When they kick out the news every night, that's who they're talking about. And then there's…”

The hit was rising fast and I was holding on, trying to pay attention.

“Then there's the world I live in,” I said. “People ain't doing nothing. Walk down the street and brothers just standing and leaning against whatever. Passing time. Or maybe time passing them. I don't know.”

“I think I'm pregnant,” she said.

“What?”

“That wasn't the right answer,” she said.

My mouth was fuzzy dry and my brain was running around trying to find a landing place.

“Yo, I love you, and I'm going to be there for you….” The words didn't have any weight. They were just coming out my mouth and floating away.

Lauryn was crying.

Me and Kelly sitting in the dark, the room getting cold, and on the screen was this picture of Lauryn looking all alone. And then there was the sound of her crying. The crying filled the screen, and filled the corners of the room with me and Kelly, and filled all the dark places in the world.

The camera was on my face. My lips were moving.

“I love you, Lauryn,” I said.

“You left the burner on,” she said.

“
SO YOU CUT LAURYN LOOSE
?”
Kelly asked.

“In a way, because I was still using,” I said. “But she didn't cut me loose. She's good that way. I wanted to get straight, but I needed some time. You know, when you getting ready to have a kid, you want to get your act together. I guess I just needed more time.”

“Seem to me all you got is time,” Kelly said. “What you need more time for?”

“I can't explain it, man,” I said. “You got to live it to give it. You ain't been in my shoes, you don't know where I'm coming from.”

“No, I know where you coming from.” Kelly
sniffed, then cleared his throat. “You just got some stink on yourself and don't want to deal with it. You got a woman. You got a baby. You breathing twenty-four/seven, but you needing something different to deal with.”

“You don't know that.”

“Then why don't you run it by me so I can understand it,” Kelly said.

“Maybe I don't feel like it,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe you don't. But you know what? You seen yourself upstairs on the roof with the piece in your hand,” Kelly said. “You going to unknow that? Like you unknowing what's going down with Lauryn? Like you unknowing what's going down with Brian?”

“Run what by you?”

“Run down what dope doing for you,” Kelly said.

“Maybe you said it right the first time,” I said. “Maybe what it's about is, I don't want to know what I'm about. I don't see nothing ahead for me. I don't see nothing coming down the road—no car saying,
Get on in, I'll give you a lift
. Maybe I don't
want to deal with that. You know, I ain't the first guy like me I've seen. You see guys like me all the time in the 'hood. Nodding out and feeling the same way I feel. Going from day to day until it's over and somebody making chalk marks around their bodies or they're sitting in a cell someplace. What about that I need to know more than I know now?”

“How about the rap group?” Kelly asked. “You weren't that bad.”

“Omar, Victor, and Deon went on with it and I laid low,” I said. “There was going to be an assembly and they were supposed to do a presentation. It was like jive from the get-go and everybody knew it was going to be. Maurice hooked me up with a portable amplifier and a speaker and I had an idea I was going to let them do their thing on the stage and then I was going to come from the back and make a challenge. I figured I would blow the place up with my rhymes because they were tough and they weren't pulling any punches.

“I know this white boy named Ryan who hung out with the brothers, and he had his own amp
and stuff. He was kind of lame, but he knew all the jams and he could lay down a beat with his mouth. You know, he would make sounds like he was scratching and then throw in some scat with it. If you just heard him and didn't see him, you would think he was from Jamaica or someplace. Anyway, he was going to come down the side while I came down the middle aisle. We figured everybody would turn and check us out and then the guys onstage would have to deal with it.

“Omar and them went on first, and they put out some garbage that was even worse than I thought it was going to be. They couldn't even keep a beat. When they went through their first set, Miss Oglivie stood up and started talking about giving them a big hand. That's when me and Ryan started up. Just like I thought, everybody got into what we were doing right away. They were showing us instant love, but Miss Oglivie stopped the whole show. ‘Everybody sit down! Everybody sit down!' Then she told me and Ryan to leave the auditorium. That was it. A lot of people came over to me later and said we were on the money, but it didn't
make no never-mind. Miss Oglivie threw away our thing.

“We got called down to the principal's office and everything, but it didn't matter. Nobody really cared about anything. They didn't care about what me and Ryan did, they didn't care about Omar and them. They were just talking about ordering sandwiches for a meeting.”

There was the sound of a siren outside the window. I looked toward the window and then pointed at the screen. Kelly looked over at me and then clicked the remote, and we were looking at a different view of the street. Another black-and-white had pulled up. Its lights were flashing and the siren was going.

“Something's up!” I said.

“I don't think so,” Kelly said. “They're just sounding their siren to see who comes to the window.”

I was almost at the window and stopped. “You ever run from the police?” I asked.

“No, but I'm not scared,” Kelly said. “I'm thinking straight. You scared and you're hurting.”

“You ever been hurt?” I asked. “I mean, really hurt?”

Kelly put his head down and glanced at me out the corner of his eye. “Yeah, I've been hurt.”

“Shot?”

“No.”

“You ain't been hurt unless you been shot,” I said.

“Yeah, you're all world now, huh?” Kelly said. “You can go around bragging on being shot. But pain isn't all that bad. People learn to deal with pain. People get cancer. People get shot up in wars and blown up a lot worse than you. They learn to deal with it.”

I wanted to go back to the window. I asked Kelly if he was sure there wasn't anything happening outside. He said he wasn't sure.

“You think I'm going to be okay?” I asked him.

“I guess it depends on what you mean by okay,” he said. “Everything you telling me sounds like you haven't been okay in a long time. You don't know what to go back and change.”

“How you going to
change
something that happened in the past anyway?” I asked. “That don't make any sense.”

“So let's go on to the future,” Kelly said.

I saw the screen flicker and there I was, sliding up the stairs to the roof landing. I knew what was going to come next.

“Hey, Kelly, stop it,” I said. “Yo, man, what's wrong with you?”

He stopped the screen image, but I couldn't take my eyes off the still picture. I was half standing, half crouched over. I saw the Nine still in my hand. I looked up at my face. My eyes were like something wild.

I thought I saw the image move and I started to ask Kelly not to let it run, but then I saw it wasn't moving. It was the image in my head that was still going. I was remembering what I had seen before. It was like a nightmare I could see with my eyes open.

“Breathe,” Kelly said.

I didn't notice I had been holding my breath.
The pain in my arm was getting worse.

“Kelly, I ain't doing too good getting rid of this pain,” I said.

“Yeah, I see that,” Kelly said.

“You know, the worst pain I ever had, I didn't even feel it?” I said. “I woke up in the middle of the night and I was like—all crying and shit—and I don't know why. I didn't have a bad dream and I hadn't even gone to bed sad. But I woke up crying like anything. That got me so down, I didn't want to get out of bed. I still don't know why that happened.”

“You deeper into your jones than you want to talk about?” Kelly said. “How long you been tracking?”

“Too long.”

“Thought you were scared of needles?”

“It moves you away from yourself quick,” I said. “I know it's foul, but that's where I'm at. Can you get the picture back on the street?”

Kelly clicked the picture, and we were looking at the street again. It had started to rain. One police car was still parked under the streetlight.
Through the glass I could see two figures. They weren't clear, just sitting in the front seat. Every so often the wiper swept across the windshield, and for a tiny moment I could see the policemen inside. I wondered what they were talking about, if they were hating me.

“You think that cop is going to live?” I asked.

“How I know?”

“What you think?”

Kelly just shrugged.

I wanted to hear me talking or Kelly talking or even a car passing on the street. Anything but the silence. I tried to think of what I wanted to change in my life, to go back and get something that Kelly could dig on. That's what I wanted to do. It was like he had a way of understanding me and looking inside of me that made me feel good. No, not good, just that he understood. He was right in saying I was trying to unknow things about myself, things that I hadn't told anybody before. Some of the things I had heard people say about me. Lauryn had said some of them. But there were things that I wasn't sure about. Like if I liked
myself the way I hoped other people would like me, like I was trying to get Kelly to like me.

“Hey, Kelly, you ever hide what you doing?” I asked. “Like you don't want anybody to peep your hole card?”

“I guess so,” Kelly said. “Sometimes. You hiding something?”

“You were talking about me not wanting to know things, but I got more things I don't want other people knowing,” I said. “I got some stuff in me that I don't even tell Lauryn.”

“Sometimes you don't have to tell people,” Kelly said. “They already understand where you coming from.”

“No, she don't know how scared I get sometimes. You know I'm up in here and I'm scared because the police are looking for me,” I said. “But sometimes I'm just scared to walk down the street. I ain't afraid of being shot or anything, I'm just afraid. You understand that?”

“I understand you feeling it,” Kelly said. “You see what you doing to yourself, you figure you got
to be afraid of something.”

“I think my moms is scared too. When I was thirteen things really got bad for us. She started hitting the bottle hard. At first she would go out and get her a bottle of rum and bring it home. I didn't like that because we didn't have money for anything. We'd get some money on our family card and she would cash part of it in for money to buy liquor. That's a street hustle.

“Then she started hanging out half the night. One time I was home and a neighbor came to the door and said my moms was downstairs in the hallway. She said she looked sick. I rushed downstairs and she wasn't sick, just drunk. When she wasn't drinking, she was depressed. Sometimes she said she had pains in her stomach, but I think mostly she was depressed. If I got up late at night to go to the bathroom, I would find her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. I'd ask her what she was thinking about and she'd say, ‘Nothing.' When I started messing up in school and they asked me what was wrong, I said the same thing. ‘Nothing.'”

“
SO YOU WANT TO CHANGE
what happened to you in school?” Kelly asked.

“It wasn't real enough to change,” I said. “School is like a dream that's going on, and it's good and everything, but it ain't going on about you. That's the way it was for me, anyway. I was supposed to be filling my head up with what they were teaching, but it didn't go down that way.”

“Nobody gave you the right information?”

“They give me the right information, or it was right as far as I was concerned, but I wasn't hopping around passing out high fives or nothing,”
I said. “It was like I was knowing two different things. One was like school is smoking and your trip to the big time, but the other thing was that hey, it didn't do nothing for people I knew. Can you get my school on the television?”

“Is it strong enough in your mind?” Kelly asked.

“It got to be strong in my mind to get it on television? You never said that before.”

“Is it strong enough?”

“I think so,” I said. “Check it out.”

Kelly started with his remote again and had me thinking about how strong school was on my mind. I was wondering if he really meant that it had to be strong or if he was just messing with me.

I watched as the television focused on the hallway in the first floor of Carver High. Then I saw me sitting in the office, but I was younger. I leaned forward and took a look at myself. My face was rounder on the bottom. I had on my light brown sweater and my fly Nikes and I was looking good.

“How old are you again, Jeremy?” All the kids
at Carver High knew that when Mr. Lyons took off his jacket, he was serious. He had his jacket off as I sat in his office.

“Thirteen,” I said.

“Jeremy, why don't you look over your test scores and tell me what you think about them.” He pushed a long sheet of paper in front of me.

Why didn't he just go ahead and tell me I messed up? That's what the meeting was all about. He knew what the scores were like. Why did we have to go through all the gaming?

“You were doing fairly well in math before,” he said. “I think you were at grade level, weren't you?”

“Yes.”

“So what's been happening this year?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He leaned back in his chair like he was expecting a different answer.

He was talking and I was looking down at the sheet with the test scores. They had circles around the bad marks. Almost all the kids in my class have been called down for this same jive talk. What
happened? Why didn't you do better?

I was sitting in the classroom and my head was filled up and I couldn't get no more in it.

“What's going on in your life to make your test scores fall like this?” His voice was okay, like he wasn't trying to put me down.

Yesterday—was it yesterday or the day before yesterday? The days run together—I was home and Mrs. Burnett came to my door and said my mother was down in the hallway and she looked sick. I ran downstairs and saw her lying in the hallway. Her dress was up around her thighs and I pulled it down.

“Mama! Mama!” I called to her and she moved a little. I could smell her breath and it was stinking. “Mama! Get up!”

She was heavy, but I pulled her up. No, she wasn't heavy, just kind of limp. I didn't want nobody else to see her like this. When we got to the stairs, I tried to get her arm over the banister. Mr. Alston came out his house, and when he saw us on the stairway he just stood there a minute and
looked. He asked me if I needed any help, and I told him to get the hell back into his own apartment.

He didn't move and I kept trying to get Mama up the stairs.

Mr. Alston told me to get on the inside and put one arm around her waist and hold on to the banister to pull myself up. He steadied her while I changed positions. I was crying a little because I was ashamed for him to see us like this. Two more people passed us on the stairway. One woman said something about wasn't it a shame the way people carried themselves. I wanted to punch her in her face.

I got Mama up to our floor and then put my hands under her shoulders and dragged her down the hall. Once I got her into the apartment, I just left her there, lying on the kitchen floor. I started thinking about who she had been drinking with, and what she had been doing. I felt mad and sorry at the same time. I wasn't sorry for her, either. I was sorry for me.

“You know there aren't a lot of young black men
with good math skills.” Mr. Lyons was still talking. Still saying what I should be doing and how important school was.

What did I look like to him? Did I look like I was just a retard who couldn't figure out what school was about? He could shut up and I could give his whole rap right back to him the same as he was giving it to me. What would I say?

“Jeremy, school is the most important thing in your life. If you don't go to school, you're just going to be like all those other black guys hanging around wasting your time and getting in trouble. You can't get a good job without a good education. You need to read to succeed. You can be anything you want to be. You just need to make up your mind that you want to be somebody. Your future is in your hands! Jeremy, if you don't get yourself together you will be sorry.”

I watched television in my room for a while. There was a movie on, but all I could see in my head was Mama drinking with some men on the corner. Even though I hadn't seen her do that, I
knew what some of the men did to women when they were high.

There wasn't anything in the refrigerator that looked good. Some leftover stew. Some franks and beans we had had the night before. I knew she hadn't eaten anything. I remembered a program I had seen about a man choking on a hot dog. I didn't want her to choke, so I ate the franks and beans. I was going to warm them up, but cold was just as good.

I had to step over her to get to my bedroom.

When I got up in the morning, she was in the bathroom. I saw she had made tea and the water was still warm. I had tea and oatmeal. She came out the bathroom and asked me why I hadn't left for school.

I looked at the clock and it was still early. Then she asked me why I wasn't home when she got home last night.

She didn't remember! She didn't even remember lying in the hallway, nothing! I wanted her to feel bad, to say she was sorry. I wanted her to look
away when I walked into the room. Instead, she didn't remember a thing.

She asked me where I had been again, and I said I had been out playing ball.

“You win?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I lost.”

My Sunday shirt was the only clean one, and I wore that. She said I looked good. She smiled when she said it. She had a nice smile when she was sober.

I went to the bathroom and saw her pills on the sink. One bottle was for her rash and the other one was for her nerves. I took two of her nerve pills.

English was my first class and the teacher didn't call on me.

Math was my second class. Miss Callie was talking about square roots. Her mouth was moving and words were coming out and I could hear them as they floated across the classroom, but none of them was sticking in my head. It was like Miss Callie was talking English but I wasn't understanding it. Or maybe like calling your friend and
he's not home and having the voicemail say that there was no room for messages. That's what my head was like, no room for messages.

“Is there something bothering you, Jeremy?”

What was I going to say? Tell him the best way to carry your mother up the stairs was to put one arm around her waist and pull yourself up along the banister? The best way to get her up off the floor was to pull her by her shoulders until you got her sitting up, then get behind her and lift her and hope she didn't fall on her face?
Uhn-uhn.
I ain't going there. You can't do nothing about it, so why do I need to go there? So you can feel sorry for me or go home and tell your wife what you heard in school today? And nothing we were talking about was going to change the test scores, and we both knew that was true.

Then I was standing up and he had his arm around me saying something about how disappointed he was in me because he felt I could do so much better. I guess that meant he thought there was more to me than he was seeing.

I thought there was more to me than he was seeing, too.

I left Mr. Lyons's office feeling bad like I knew I would and thinking he's feeling just like he knew he would. Maybe he was frustrated and wishing something else would happen, but it didn't.

I didn't want to go straight home after school, so I hung out for a while in the school yard until they started closing the gates. Mr. Lyons was okay, but I was mad at him. Nothing that was happening was his fault and it didn't make any sense, but I still felt mad at him because I wanted him to know what was going on in my life and I didn't know how to tell him.