The Residue Years (11 page)

No, thank you, I say.

Not a good fit, eh? he says. Not to worry, we've got a car that's
right for you or I'm in the wrong business. We let him lead us farther and farther into a used car abyss: a Rabbit with a dented bumper, an Escort with stained cloth seats, a Pontiac built before power steering. Name your price, he says, and taps a hood. No reasonable offer will be refused. Unreasonable offers may be considered.

Champ stops him midway through another pitch. Thanks, he says. But we're going to check a few more spots. He grabs me by the arm. He's never had a tough time making choices, or not as tough a time as me.

Hey, don't leave, he says. Wait a sec. Wait a sec. We have more.

But my eldest has already made up his mind.

If not for me calling and calling Champ after shifts for a ride, we might not be here. It was a few shifts ago when he offered. He'd come to pick me up from a double and I was outside enjoying a smoke.

You ain't gone stop till there's a hole in your throat? he said.

Do we really have to start? I said.

Yes, he says. We do. So I've been thinking, and here's the deal. You quit that nasty habit and I'll buy you a ride.

You're just talkin? I said.

When am I just talking? he said.

Give me a month, he said.

That's it, just a month? I said.

Yes, he said. Have you made it a month before?

Guess not, I said.

Know not, he said.

They say the first one's the toughest, he said. That it takes at least a month to form habit.

Then what? I said.

Then you'll have a new car and a new chance at best health. So let's start soon, he said. No, let's start right now, he said, and stuck out his hand.

I fished out an old pack, the pack I'd just bought, the loosies I kept in the side pocket.

We stand alone in a lot for so long it feels flagrant. Champ trots off, checks sticker prices, peeks in windows, while I pop a stick of smoker's gum and slow-chew, waiting for my craving—how will I make it a month?—to die down. There's a stoplight a block off and bouts of traffic stop and go without anyone coming to help. When we turn to leave a man dashes out too late after us.

No such trouble at the next lot, where the salesman blurs to our side, tells us he has the perfect car, coerces us over to an electric-blue Honda. He raises the hood, shows us a small clean engine, and recites facts about pistons and horsepower and miles per gallon. He gets in and fires it up and the engine sounds like an engine. He asks if we'd like to take it for a test drive, and there isn't a hint of desperate in his voice.

We roll off the lot with the windows down and the music high. We're out in Southeast, but what I wouldn't give to be in the old neighborhood, sailing early mornings past crowds at the bus stop. What I wouldn't give to be seen zooming away from an NA meeting or pulling warm and dry up to my job.

The wheel shudders, and I let off the gas and check the mirror to see if Champ felt it too. You take care of this and it'll run for one-fifty, two hundred thousand miles easy, the sales guy says. I take 205 north for a ways. I get off and get on the southbound
side and head for the lot. We end up in the office, a mangy mobile home that smells of mildew. Our sales guy hunts the manager, and the manager—my first mind says he's lived for years off faux-pride—sits a slab of papers on the table. Looks like today is your day, he says. Let's talk numbers.

My credit score, these days, is slapstick. Who'd believe me about the brand-new rides I drove off lots—the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Taurus, the Datsun? Who'd believe the times they gave me low-interest loans, no-interest loans, incentives up the yang? Champ asks if I'm sure I want it. He flips through the top few sheets and slides them back to the manager and asks me to wait in the lounge. I hear him tell the manager he's paying in cash.

When you've got a new car and a full tank and nowhere to be, you ride. You ride the freeway, ride local streets; you roam, hoping for witnesses, with your windows cracked and the heat blasting; you whip by the same bus stops where most days you can't stand more than a few heartbeats without someone you know tooting their horn. Time on my hands, so I wheel by the Alberta market and the mall, ride past the parks; I cruise Ainsworth, Dekum, Lombard, dying to be seen. But there isn't anyone out today but strangers, and I refuse to share this feeling with strangers. This is why it's time to find Pat. My brother Pat is in one of a few places always: either at one of his kids' mother's house or the tavern. I stop at the house where his boys stay, and tap the horn. Someone cracks the curtains and fast shuts them closed. I toot another time and Pat's youngest boy shuffles onto the porch in pajamas. He stops at the top of the steps and squints to see who's in the car.

Where your mama at? I say.

Who that, Aunt Grace? he says.

Yeah, your auntie, I say.

He disappears in the house and returns with his mother clomping behind him.

Hey, girl, how you been? I say. My brother there?

Girl, this the first week of the month which means that brother of yours is MIA. Liable he's somewhere guzzling up his half of the rent.

Well, when you see him, can you tell him I came by? I say.

As I said, Pat's at one of a few places always. One of his favorite's the tavern. The one tavern in all of the civilized world that sells 40-ouncers by the bottle. By car it's a hop-skip from his woman's place. To be true, too near for his whereabouts to be in question, but that's my brother. I haven't stopped in—why would I?—since forever, though forever ago this place was about what it is now. There's a man racking pool balls, another one playing a pinball machine, old men collected around a table slapping cards. Pat's among the cardplayers doing what he does best—running his mouth. His back is to me. He jumps when I touch him.

Say, sis, don't be creepin up on me like that, he says. You almost got fired on.

Boy, you ain't about to fire on nobody, I say. What you doing besides boozing away the rent?

Oh, I see you been by my lady's, he says, and swigs his 40. Well, I'll have you know this here ain't the rent. That gone yesterday. This here's the light bill.

Sometimes I think my brother's the happiest man alive—drunk, sober, or any state in between. Once, when he was staying with me—he's stayed with me off and on for years—I asked him his secret. He said he'd show me. Said to stand still and don't look ahead nor behind. Now feel, he said. Feel the right
now. That's all we have, he said. You wanna know what it is, that's it.

Pat's wearing a checkered shirt and jeans and combat boots and needs a haircut in the worst way. Waste not, want not, he says, and downs the last of his beer, and pushes away from the table.

What's the word, sis? he says. I know you ain't swung through to shit talk with me and the fellas.

Right, I say. Come.

Pat staggers out behind me and waits swaying while I open the car and climb in.

Who ride's this? he says.

Who you see in it? I say.

That right, he says. Thought you said they had you down there slaving for them nickels and dimes, he says.

They do. Champ bought it, I say.

Oh, he says. Well, I'll be good and gotdamned. Nephew gifting cars now, eh? He must be into some mighty sweet shit.

What you trying to say? I say. Why can't you let me have this?

Sis, have it, he says. Have it all you want. But you and I both know anything seem sweet as this got that bitter marching right behind it.

Pat, please, I say.

Say no more, say no more, he says. He climbs in and straightens his seat and fingers the upholstery and fiddles the disc player's controls.

Look like you and old neph picked a winner, he says. What this, bout an '86, '87? What the miles on it?

What miles matter? I say, and start the car—it starts easy; it should all be this easy—and lower the windows and crank my system. My music stomp into the street.

But maybe it's just here. In my city. Not yours.
—Champ

Peoples, You listening?

Bet.

This is how it go.

If you're cold enough they name you.

Clutch or Jack Knife or K-Dub or 3-D or Dead Eye or D-Reid or Big Third or Smooth or DaBell—score twenty or thirty a season, and
bam
, you're Stu or Pickle or Free or Fish or Big Blass or King Cole or Doc—they've christened you T-hop or B-hop or Pooh or Fluff or the Honey Bee or Houseguest or B-Moore or J. D. or Bookie. Handle your biz lugis luge and everywhere they'll say your name, call out T-Cage, T. T., Gumby, Banger, A-Train, Nickle, Action, P-Strick, JoJo, L. V., T-Jones, Blazer.

We're talking MVPs and state champs and first-team All-Everythings, dudes who any day you wanted it would kill your weak ass at the park.

In my city, hoop's the hegemony.

In the Rose City, the P, what the deal is, if they name you, you're anointed. And in the P that's what we cherish, what we love if nothing else: Year after year after year we harangue who's greatest of the ones who dropped 40s and 50s
pre
a three-pointer, which phenoms scored 60! 70! 80! Guys named J-Bird or
Zelly-Roo or T. B. or D-Stoud or Slash or T-Bone or T-Ross or T-Hamp or Juice or Ice or Silk—middle school man-childs who played not a lick beyond the eighth, or the luckier-than-thous who hangtimed off to college handcuffed by the city's collective hope. The General and 2-Ounce and Stretch and Big City and Slider and Truck and Duke and the one we named the GOAT: legends, a few of them, all-leaguers in every league they played.

My word, a nickname is a christening, meaning you got a shot, meaning they think you can go, which is one chance more than most of us, so no wonder the chosen are all there is to speak of. No wonder when, for most, hoop's about our only shot to be better and bigger than the rest, to secure a life that counts.

But on the flip side, fall short and then what?

Best-case, you join a city league and/or wake early on the few weekends reprieved from rain to hit Wilshire or Irving or Laurel-hurst for full-court four-on-fours; you catch a rare weekend park run and on Monday semi-limp, half-swank onto your dronerific of a nine-to-five, fatmouthing to anyone with ears about who beat who by how much. You carry that same chatter to the shop or the grocery store or just outside the entrance of whatever club is crackin that month, carry it to the sidelines of an open gym or to a perch in the crowded bleachers of games between—the likely highlight of a nigger's week, month, winter—your old high school and an archrival.

Not a failed life for most, but fordamnsure not no dreamland neither.

Worse-case, you're addle-brained and haggard and wandering a main street with a decrepit semi-flat hoop rock tucked at your side or shooting air jumpers at a rim nobody but nobody but you can see. Worser, you're left plotting on a way to prolong the
cheers: you're peddling hard or soft, or gangbangin or dumping seeds in every used-to-be-sorta-bad who saw
your name
bolded on the front page of Prep Sports—BKA slipping raw dog in community pussy. Fall short, and what the fuck can you do? Catch a sex-abused-low-esteemed-runaway teen girl on a humbug and risk your heretofore faulty luck: first as the dude who strong-arms the paltry tips of an amateur stripper, then as a local pimp sending runaways, strippers, the de-esteemed on escort calls, then graduating to a road show, hitting Cali, Vegas, NY, and all ho-strolls in between.

Let them quit screaming your name, and worse-case you just might rob a bank (who gets away with that?), just might hatch a (hand to God this happened) a flawed murder-for-insurance plot.

But maybe it's just here. In my city. Not yours.

Canaan dickers for snack funds, leaps the bleachers, disappears out the gym. Next dead ball, the ref shoos youngsters too close to the baseline, too close by the sideline, most of them wearing team sweat suits and sandals with white socks peeking from their open toes—neophytes who I can't help but think right about now ain't lived near long enough to even earn a single real foe. A crowd of some fortunate-ass young bucks plus a few teenybopper chicks dressed for spring or summer, which I suppose ain't all that bad since, though it's cold and damp outside, inside this heat is cranked to Africa.

And before I forget (me hypermnesic? Yeah right) about enemies, let me say this: Fuck a sycophant. They way I see it, you ain't lived till somebody don't like you. Shit, a few somebodies.

Grown folks loitering by the door chomping on pencil hot dogs or oversalted chips, slurping pull-tab pops, all of them held captive by the sign: NO JUICE OR FOOD IN THE GYM NO EXCEPTIONS! The old man who runs this sweatbox roosting by the entrance, guarding against anybody who so much as looks as if they'd break a rule. Side note: I used to think this same old head was one of those ultra-fastidious, follow-all-the-rules-or-perish types till I saw him at an after-hours all by his lonesome gulping Cognacs.

KJ sluices hyperspeed through a press (even he handles it the way I never could), tries to split a three-man trap, and dribble-kicks the ball out of bounds. He boots the ball and watches rapt (a regular midcourt Madame Tussaud statue) while it scrawls its way to a stop, while the white-socked sideline crew soundtracks his gaffe with a loud-ass, Ooooooh!

Shake it off, shake it off, I yell from up top, and people below twist around to look.

Mom shows near the end of the first quarter. She's got her coat, not a winter coat, zipped to her throat and her cheeks are flushed. She searches the stands for so long I'm compelled to get up and wave. You can see it on her way up: either Mom's getting old or she's laying serious hot sauce on the trouble it takes to climb.

So, new wheels, but the same old on-CP clock, I say.

It wasn't me this time, it was them, she says. Caseworker popped up right when I was about to leave. Oh my gosh, these folks and their rules, she says. I'll be overjoyed, you hear me? Overjoyed when this is done. Mom's new 'do still looks proper, but her nails could use new paint. This is how I'd describe her to strangers: Perfect minus a touch or two. She unzips herself, snakes out her coat (it's thinner than I thought, with rips in the lining), and asks what she's missed.