Futureproof (26 page)

September

We're driving down to this new ghetto Jonas discovered, ready to rip off the first unsuspecting nigger we find. Jonas tells me about one of the last times he went down to the Bluff with Karen.

“We didn't have a car, y'know,” he says. “So we took MARTA down there, actually got off the bus right at the corner of Northside and North and walked the rest of the way.”

“You walked around down there?”

“Yeah, man. What else were we gonna do? We didn't have any other way and we needed dope. We were sick as fuck. Plus we'd gone through all kinds of hell just getting the money, so there was no way I was turning back. Take a right here.”

I turn into some projects and Jonas keeps talking. They are already running up to the car. The ghetto's the same everywhere. If
you're white and you're down there, they know you're only there to score.

“Anyway, we find Alex and he sets us up right and we're walking away when that motherfucker Pooky comes up with four or five other niggers and they don't say shit to us, just start whaling on me.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah, man. I'm like ‘FUCK!' So I grab Karen's hand and just start running and Pooky or one of them niggers grabs my hoodie and yanks me backward, drags me to the ground so hard the wind gets knocked out of me and I can feel myself blacking out and Karen's screaming and shit. It's really fucked up, right? Turn left here. And then, wouldn't you know it, out of nowhere comes Paul and he's got this massive fucking tree trunk of a staff or some shit and he just starts smacking these niggers off me like they were flies.”

“Fuck yeah! Paul's my man!”

“He's good people. I mean—hold up. Pull up to this fucker.”

I stop at the corner and Jonas tells the guy he wants seven boy and three girl.

“Circle the block, niggas,” the guy says.

This is a huge heist. Brazen as fuck. We've got like three bucks on us, nothing. As I circle the block I can feel the urge to shit and puke coming up on me but having Jonas here, orchestrating this, has a calming effect on me. He makes it seem easy, just keeps talking.

“If Paul hadn't stomped them niggers, I don't know if we'da made it outta there that day. I was totally getting killed down there.…Alright look, there he is. Just pull up next to him and let me handle it. When I say ‘Hit it' you fucking mash the gas as hard as you can and don't stop until you see the fucking highway, got it?”

I slowly come to a stop next to the guy and Jonas tells him he wants to taste it.

“You got some kind of fucking speech impediment?” the nigger says, laughing.

“I got half a fucking tongue. My stepfather cut it off with a pair of rusty scissors one night when he was drunk. You writing a fuckin' book?” Jonas says.

Possibly shaken by touching such a testy nerve with a self-consciously disabled junkie, the guy puts
all
the bags into his hand, if you can believe that. Easy as pie. I can't believe how fucking easy it is. In fact, I'm so stoked about the easiness of it that I just sit there when Jonas says ‘Hit it,' and then the nigger's onto us and he's reaching in the window with both hands, grabbing Jonas around the throat with one hand, trying to wrench the bags out of his hand with the other.

That's when I hit it. But the guy doesn't let go and then I'm going twenty-five, thirty miles an hour and he's still holding on to the door frame with one hand and attempting to retrieve his soon-to-be-stolen bags with the other. These guys don't fuck around when it comes to getting ripped off. I can see his legs bouncing off the ground as he tries to hang on and Jonas is yelling at me not to stop. “Don't stop!” he screams. And then, right before we get to the next corner, Jonas yanks his hand back hard and the guy falls.

I keep driving. I'm going fifty when we turn the corner. I can see the dealer flipping down the street in the rearview, all haphazard and broken, a paper doll in a whirlwind. He won't be walking away from this transaction.

We make straight for the Lizard Lounge, shoot away the guilt.

October

It's 2:30 in the morning when Andie wakes me and says that she's in severe pain, that the baby is flipping out inside her, that she's afraid he's going to die.

I call Animal Mother. I never paid him back that rent money, but fuck it, this is life and death. He's my friend. I need him. He will come.

I lay it all out, that this isn't just some kind of drug-addict scam. He's at the house in ten minutes and then we're speeding down the highway, making the twenty-mile journey to the hospital in twelve minutes. The nurses say we should have called earlier. They say Andie has gone into severe withdrawal because we couldn't get her to the clinic for three days straight (no gas) and now the baby is going into withdrawal. They give her some methadone and tell me all
we can do now is wait and hope that the baby will calm down, that everything will get back to normal. That's what they say. They say that everything will get back to normal.

Animal Mother waits with me in the lobby until about 4 a.m. and then says he has to go, he has to work in a few hours. I check back in with Andie and the nurses say that the baby appears to have stabilized. I tell Andie I'm going to get a ride home with Mother and have Corey bring me back in the morning.

Mother loans me a twenty. I put ten in the gas tank and immediately head down to the Bluff.

It's like five o'clock in the morning and nobody's out. I wait.

 

I'm high when I see my baby for the first time.

Andie's no longer pregnant by the time I get back to the hospital. She's sleeping, knocked out by powerful tranquilizers. The nurse tells me she had to have an emergency C-section a couple of hours earlier because they couldn't get the baby's vital signs to stabilize again. Because of the traumatic nature of the delivery, the baby inhaled some of its own feces, a phenomenon known as meconium aspiration. Before they let me into the ICU, where my child now sleeps, they warn me that he doesn't look good, that he has tubes going down his nose and throat, that he has wires running from him to machines that monitor his vital signs to make sure he doesn't stop breathing, that he has tubes in his lungs to suck out the meconium he inhaled as he was being pulled out of Andie's belly.

“He's a boy?” I feel like crying but I don't.

“Yes. He's a very fragile, sick little boy,” the nurse says. I don't know if she's being a bitch or what. I don't care. I just want to see my son.

I walk into the nursery preparing myself for the worst and as I pass all the tiny babies, row after row of them, I feel the full weight of my
life and the choices I've made. Some of these kids are simply victims of their mothers' bodies' inability to maintain a full-term pregnancy, but most of them, I know, are in this darkened room because this is Atlanta, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get knocked up and stay on drugs than it is to do the right thing.

I am high when I see him for the first time. This is the ultimate failure.

I am worse than my parents ever were. At least they brought me into the world in one healthy piece. I fucked around and fucked around and now—look at this, my own flesh and blood, my own son. He is trapped in his body, doesn't know why any of this is happening to him, doesn't know why he can't scream, that the tubes running down his throat are cutting off the possibility of oxygen passing over his vocal cords.

In the hours that I sit there looking at my son with the sky-blue blinders over his little eyes, touching his tiny six-pound body as he quivers in discomfort, his red hair made redder by the burgundy hue of his scalp as he works himself into skin-reddening panic, I realize that this is it.

This will be the turning point, one way or the other.

I will not reside in limbo any longer. I will die or get better, but there will be no in-betweens. My son will know that his father tried
some
thing.

Because, my God, how beautiful he is, with his perfect fingers and toes, his tiny mouth, his seashell ears, his unmarked skin. He is everything I want to be. To try again. Start over with a clean slate.

He is the voice of God.

And when the nurse slowly, gently scoops him from the clear plastic bassinet, slides him into the crooks of my bruised arms, and I sit in that rocking chair listening to him breathe, feeling the warmth of his skin, watching his chest rise and fall with each breath, I know we have not been forsaken.

November

Today we go to court to determine who gets custody of little Ben. Every day for a month we found a way to get up to the hospital to see him, called everyone we knew to get rides or gas money, and all of our friends were there for us when we truly needed them. Then, one afternoon after work (I now lay floor with this straight-edge guy), I went to the hospital and his crib was empty.

I panicked, started grabbing anyone who would listen to ask what happened to my boy. A nurse finally told me he'd been placed in state custody, would be living with a foster family until a court could decide if Andie and I were fit parents.

There's no question that
I'm
fit. I haven't shot dope since the day he was born. Except for today, my last hurrah. There are always final shots but this time I feel in my heart that it's real. I went cold turkey, endured all the sweating and aching and shitting and puking with
unbendable resolve, a full week of that shit. But this time it was easier to do than it ever has been before because what the State doesn't understand is that Ben is my fuel. I hurt him, the most innocent and helpless of creatures, because of my selfishness and disregard for everything but the needle and now I must make it up to him. He has made it possible for me to do
any
thing. I will not be stopped. I have dedicated my life to my son, I have dedicated my everything to him. I will not be deterred.

This is something the State cannot begin to comprehend.

As a show of my determination, I cut off my dreads, one at a time, the night before the hearing. They will not be able to evaluate me based on my appearance. I will be well-spoken. I will appear as normal as anyone else, though maybe a little more sunken-cheeked and sallow.

Dreads or not, though, it doesn't matter. I'm not even given a chance to speak during the hearing save for replying in the affirmative when the judge asks me if the child is mine. The caseworker asks for full custody to be granted to the state until such time that it can be proven that we will be fit parents. Then five or six different caseworkers get on the stand and tell how, in their professional opinions, Andie and I are both fucked up and they tried to get us into treatment but we wouldn't go. I try to defend myself but the old bastard of a judge tells me that if I speak out of turn again he'll have me ejected from the courtroom.

We are demonized for twenty minutes or so until, with a bang of the gavel, full custody is granted to the state, with no visitation for the parents until such time that we have enrolled in long-term treatment centers and have successfully completed said treatment. Our state-appointed attorney tells us afterward that these kinds of cases are pretty much open-and-shut, that he didn't have much to work with because both Andie and I admitted to caseworkers that we struggled with Heroin addiction.

“But when do I get to see my son again?” I ask.

“The judge said that you have to be enrolled in a treatment center before he'll even entertain the idea of visitation.”

“Where the fuck are we supposed to get the money for fucking treatment centers?” Andie asks.

“Please don't use that tone with me, ma'am. You got
yourself
into this predicament, not me,” he says as he puts his yellow legal pad in his leather briefcase. “You'll just have to look in the phone book and see what's available.”

It's all a scam. They knew it was going to be like this all along, and if not for the fact that my son had to be in intensive care that first month of his life, we
never
would have had a chance to see him.

Andie is in tears by the time we make it back to the car, the reality of the situation hitting her full force. But this isn't in the least bit complicated. I will not falter. Everything has changed.

But nobody gets that.

When I pull out the phonebook and start calling treatment centers, they all act like I'll just be another soup-minded junkie trying to reserve a temporary bed in their revolving-door in-patient addiction counseling services. Most of them won't even talk to me because I don't have insurance. But then I get in contact with a place named after a Catholic saint, located in downtown Atlanta. It's named after the patron saint of lost causes, the woman says.

Their waiting list is two months long. They say I will be given a piss test to make sure I'm clean when I first come in, otherwise I have to go through a detox first. I assure them that I am clean.

“Now that I have a child,” I say, “I don't need drugs. I don't even want to get high. The compulsion has been lifted. I'm—”

“Sir, I don't want to sound jaded,” the woman says, “but everybody that calls us says the same things you're saying. Just make sure you're here at 10 a.m. on January fourth, and we'll go from there.”

“I will. Thank you so much for this chance. I won't let you down.”

“Well, I hope not.”

Andie's excitement over my securing a place in treatment is less than palpable. She's still out on a limb as to where she's going to go for her treatment and she's really upset about the fact that we'll be separated for so long.

She wants us to be a family.

But I'm not there anymore.

My head is shaved.