The Cruisers (4 page)

F
riday morning. I came out to breakfast and Mom was on the phone. She had her head back with slices of cucumber on her eyelids.

“No, I can’t have lunch with you tomorrow,” she said as the cucumber slices came off and she pointed toward the orange juice. “I’m busy. And beside, isn’t it time you and Zander had lunch? I mean, don’t you have some man-toman stuff to talk about?”

I poured her some orange juice, wondering who she was talking to.

“He’s busy tonight,” she said. “And anyway, he doesn’t eat in fast-food restaurants. Didn’t you know that?”

She put her hand over the telephone and mouthed the words “your father.”

“Okay, tomorrow, then. No, don’t come here,” she said. “Where do you want to meet Zander and at what time? On 135th Street? No, it burned down. The restaurant in Harlem Hospital? Just a minute.”

Mom covered the phone with her hand again.

“Your father’s in town,” she said. “He wants to have lunch with you tomorrow. He’s flying back to Seattle Sunday evening. Is one o’clock okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

She made arrangements for us to meet at the hospital cafeteria, which was way good because they had great burgers and okay fries. All the time she was talking to him she was looking at me. She was trying to keep her calm on, but her hands were actually shaking.

I wanted to say something smart to her, but I didn’t know what, so I just kept quiet.

Life with Mom was good. It was interesting but it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes we didn’t have money and sometimes I got mad at her because of it. Sometimes, I knew, she got mad at herself.

Mom was in a kissing mood but I got out of most of it. I asked her was she going to see my father this weekend
and she said no, that she was too busy. His being in New York always got her upset so it was okay with me.

“I don’t want you to be against your father,” she said.

“Not even a little?” I asked.

She smiled. We were cool that way.

All day in school I thought about meeting up with my father. Mom said he was trying too hard to be a good father.

“He wants to be too many good things,” she went on. “He wanted to be a good husband, a good American, a good weatherman. He even wanted to make perfect eggs Benedict. Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah, Mom, it’s Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted,” I said. “Not the Drifted. It’s when they make funky eggs and put them on English muffins.”

“Well, one time he made them and they came out really crappy, I mean
seriously
crappy, and I called them eggs Benedict Arnold and he was hurt,” she said. “He was really hurt.”

I thought he was trying, too, but Mom was right. He did things by the book even if you weren’t on the same page. It was like Jay-Z talking about Auto-Tune. You could
screech away and still come close to the right notes but it still didn’t make it.

Saturday came and I walked downtown.

“Hey, Zander! What you up to these days?” Mr. Watson, who lived on my block, was the cook at the restaurant in Harlem Hospital.

“Nothing much,” I said. “Having lunch with my father.”

“That’s good,” Mr. Watson said. “Especially if he’s paying. Order the steak.”

“I don’t want the steak,” I said.

I found a booth facing the door and parked in it. I knew my father was going to get there right on time. The dude was never late. I just hoped he didn’t bring me a stupid present that I was supposed to ooh and aah over.

“Alexander!”
Bam!
Right on time. “You’re looking good!” My father had on his best smile as he slid into the booth. Donald Scott, weatherman, had on a brown sport jacket, blue shirt, and dark slacks. I had on my New York Knicks sweatshirt.

“How you doing?” I asked.

“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “You order yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Hey, guy, brought you something,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s a rhyming dictionary.”

I didn’t know what he expected me to do with it but I took it from him and opened it up. It was kind of embarrassing because I knew I didn’t want it but I didn’t want to tell him that.

“ ’Case you’re thinking up a rap while you’re on the A train,” he said, “and needed some rhymes.”

That was so lame.

“Yeah, okay.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” I said.

“Your mother tells me that you’re studying the Civil War,” he said, picking up the menu to figure out what salad he was going to order. “That’s good stuff, the Civil War. Important American history. Few people understand that many of the issues we face today, the balance of powers between the federal government and the states, were hammered out in that bloody conflict.”

“If you say so.”

We sat there for a while and he ran through his checklist of the things to say to your kid when you live on the West Coast and your kid lives on the East Coast. How
pretty the girls were on the East Coast, how boating was a favorite sport in the Seattle area, and how many more people drove sports cars in Washington.

“More open highway,” he said. “Not in the SeaTac region itself but on the outskirts, as you head toward Mount Rainier. You got the pictures of Mount Rainier I sent you. Your mother said you liked them.”

He even started talking about how well the Seattle SuperSonics were going to do.

“The SuperSonics suck,” I said.

He looked a little hurt when I said that and I felt bad, but I didn’t take it back.

It was funny, because being around him always made me mad, but I wanted to be around him more. It made me mad because he was always trying too hard and I wished he wouldn’t. I wished he could just chill out and be whoever he was.

“So, tell me about the Civil War,” he said, still trying.

“It was a war, the Union won, end of story,” I said.

“Sometimes things are more complex than that,” he said. “Even with the weather. A rainy day is good weather for an umbrella salesman but bad weather for a lifeguard. It’s a matter of perspective.”

“Unless you’re a cloud,” I said. “Then your life is over.”

“That’s … very creative,” my father said. “But you need to see what the people were thinking were their reasons for the war, too.”

He always mumbled when he wasn’t sure of himself. In a way I liked that about him. And what I said about the cloud wasn’t creative. It was stupid and we both knew it but there we were. I was on the East Coast and he was on the West.

He ordered a tuna salad platter and I ordered a burger deluxe.

“By the way,” he said, holding up his fork with a piece of tomato on the end of it, “I called your school about two weeks ago. Just thought I’d see how you were doing.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” I said. “Or Mom.”

“Well, sometimes it’s good for the school to know that both parents are interested,” he said. The tomato disappeared into his mouth.

“And what did the school say?” I asked.

“Said that you were among the brightest and the best,” he said. He pronounced his
T
’s like he was announcing something. “But, somehow, your grades don’t reflect that.”

“I’m working on that,” I said.

“I’m wondering if you might be better off in a school in the Seattle area,” he said. “There are some great schools in the U district.”

“U district?”

“University district,” he said. “Lots of kids whose parents teach at the University of Washington or some of the other schools. Lots of competition. Think you could stand being around a lot of brainy young people?”

“Don’t want to go to no Seattle,” I said.

“You know, Alexander …” He had his fingers together in front of his nose as if he was going to say something deep. “Sometimes we don’t always know what’s best for us. You only get one chance at a good education and you have to take advantage of it. If you’re not doing well living here in Harlem then you have an obligation to yourself to be someplace else.”

“Mom is here in Harlem,” I said.

“Your education is not about your mother and it’s not about me, frankly,” he said. “It’s about you and your chances in life.”

“You got Mom really upset when you sent that thing—the subpoena,” I said. “Why you have to do that?”

“Because I care for you and I want answers, not promises,” he said. “As I said, it’s not about me or your mother. And I didn’t send it as just a guy who lives an awfully long way from a son he loves very much. I sent it as a father who would just hate to see that son throwing away his talent because he’s not being closely supervised. Did I tell you that Carrie is a teacher? She could really help you get back on track.”

“Who’s Carrie?”

“Oh, uh, your stepmother,” he said. “You didn’t remember her name?”

Her name was Carolyn and I did remember it. I also remembered what she looked like because he sent me a photograph of her. She was young looking with a round face and reddish-brown hair. Mom and I drew a mustache on her before we threw the photograph away.

“I’m not going to Seattle,” I said.

“We’ll explore all of our options,” he said.

He switched the conversation to basketball and asked me what position I was playing. I told him I was playing forward and he said I would be tall enough soon to play center.

“I don’t want to play center,” I said.

We didn’t talk much after that and I thought he was glad when the lunch was over. He asked me if I needed cab money to get home and I told him I was going to walk.

“I’m taking a cab downtown—corporate offices. I’ll drop you off first uptown,” he said, standing on the sidewalk.

“I’m walking.”

We did our firm handshake bit and I watched as he hailed a cab and started downtown.

I wished things were different, that he and Mom were together. But they weren’t, and that was the way it was. I thought about LaShonda. Her parents had been really young when they left her with an aunt one day and just never come back. At least I was living with Mom and knew my father was around someplace. Maybe if I was around him more I wouldn’t feel I had to put him down so much.

When I got to 145th Street there were police cars in front of the house. The cops had three teenagers lying across the hood of a patrol car. There was a crowd of people, mostly kids and women, standing around.

“I just seen it there!” one of the teenagers was yelling. “I didn’t even touch it.”

I saw Mr. Albert standing a little way off and went over to him.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“Them boys were walking down the street and a cop car pulled up on them real sudden like,” Mr. Albert said. “When they saw the cops getting out their car they looked like they wanted to run but the cops were on them too quick. The police found a paper bag with some dope in it and they all swearing it don’t belong to none of them.”

“Drugs ain’t even about me,” one of the kids was yelling. I saw his hands were cuffed behind him. “I ain’t no crackhead.”

“I hate drugs, man!” one of the other kids said.

The cops made the people watching move back onto the other sidewalk or down the street.

“Just another day on the streets,” Mr. Albert said. “Three more young men get to ride in the backseat of a police car.”

“They’re saying they don’t like drugs,” I said. “Maybe they’re innocent.”

“Could be,” Mr. Albert said. “And maybe they hate drugs and maybe they love drugs but it don’t make no never mind. The police are saying that if you got it you own it. They got the drugs and now they got to own it and pay the consequences. That’s the way life is. They should have thought about what they had when they were bopping down the street with it.”

Mr. Albert was right. They put them all in the patrol car and soon they were headed downtown to the 135th Street police station.

When I got home, Mom was there and she asked me how things went with my father.

“Bad,” I said.

“Why?” She put down the papers she was looking at and sat down at the table.

“Mostly because he was trying to be supercool and I was busy being a jerk,” I said.

She laughed at that and then I laughed and it was good. She said maybe we should send my father an apology.

We both said “nahh!” together.