I have written books for
years that of course never saw the light of day. But the following are samples
of work that, we expect, will be published in 2007 and 2008. Again, all are
under copyright.
ELEMENTS OF SMILE ( a child-rearing
primer on the order of Strunk and White's Elements of Style)
BABY BORN BIG IN THE
HAPPY BIG SMALL WORLD
(An eight year old's advice on growing up and showing love, in verse)
"AFTER THE BOMB," A chapter
from THE MATTER WITH THEM (Nonfiction: Kids in trouble and how they
got that way)
Elements of Smile, ©2007 (back
to top)
TEENS
Girls Who Hate Themselves...
are conceited.
Which has nothing to do with liking
themselves. In fact, while we’re on the subject, defer to this loose rule
of thumb in matters of the heart, trust and communication: everything tends to
be the opposite of what it appears. Conceit and egoism are nothing but
insecurity. The “quiet type” can often enough be a potential danger to him or
her self and others, all the way to suicide. The plain spoken, blunt, no
bullshit person is often kind. We all hurt. Big deal. We need others to think
we don’t hurt and are hurt when they do.
Fill in your own dichotomy.
The point is, girls who hate
themselves privately and usually unconsciously want to be liked for thinking of
themselves as nothing. When that doesn’t work, they have trapped
themselves and the only choice is to be suitably tragic.
Overwhelmingly, mothers are to
blame, as you might already have suspected. I’m certainly not suggesting
we invoke the good old days - when it was legal to beat your wife and women
were better seen than heard - but today, these many years since the quaint
concept of a young woman practicing a becoming modesty and virtuous conduct,
common etiquette and so on, their misguided mothers exhibit timidity and
self-conscious inadequacy at a time when their girls need principle and
strength out of them.
Often, girls today report creeping
hopelessness about their mothers ever showing some maturity or express outright
disdain for their mothers’ selfish predisopositions. Though I am not
generalizing about female adults uniformly becoming pole-dancing, tarted up
gum-popping goofballs, it’s a plain fact that too many are little more than
superannuated teens themselves, and encourage or construct living versions of
their childhood Barbies by grooming their daughters to be self-obsessed even
before their delicate selves have had a chance to form. These girls are
schooled and loyally aspire to perfect their outer shells, joyfully decorating
until one day, delicate blown glass figurines, they implode because they have
not filled that inner chasm. With any luck, they can survive by joining
their fellow novelty daughters at school and acculturating a healthy hatred for
their clueless mothers, but in most cases they will either want to die or mate,
quickly and with scarce distinction. Almost any man will do, as long as
he can assign them a value.
Certainly not limited to women
alone, this is behavior emblematic of a narcissistic culture that annihilates
critical thought in the name of a commodified landscape that disparages work,
discipline, conviction, or character as so yesterday.
But remember, I am only referring in
this case to the kids with good looks, breeding, money and friends. The other
girls, the majority, emulate this hollow charade, which parents have a solemn
obligation to mediate, not incite, and their childrens’ neuroses has become a
publishing franchise. Shame on you if you’re perpetrating it without properly
protecting your children.
Yet I have also not mentioned the
ill-equipped, over-matched and unself-aware little boys who may feel lucky
enough to date Barbie-the-Time-Bomb.
Add into the bargain you, dad.
Overmatched, too, he is customarily
forgiven his responsibilities on some bankrupt cultural chestnut out of Life of
Riley or Father of the Bride that implies raising a girl is a mystery to
comically well-meaning fathers who are putty in their calculating daughters’
hands. Of course you dads seize on that, to the great peril of your offspring,
opening the door for Mommy Dearest. In fact, your wife may very well love you
primarily because of her own self-loathing. The sum effect though, which is all
we’re concerned about (because you forfeited your options when you decided to
have children), is to damage your kids.
Boys Who Hate Themselves
prey on girls who desire to fix them.
And most boys hate themselves again,
in that strange conundrum that is incidental parental intention, because they
are taught to like themselves for merely being, which ends up being a lot of
nothing - save the arcane modern virtue in aspiring to abject laziness,
carefree violence and remorseless turpitude.
BABY BORN BIG IN THE HAPPY BIG SMALL WORLD
© Timothy Jeffrey, 2006 (back to top)
There are children somewhere, some say, it is said
Born big as buses, or as elephants get.
They sleep on a barn roof or in pens by the cows,
one foot out a window, head stuck in the mow.
Yet, light as balloons, they breathe pretty music
and laugh happy tunes but forget how they do it,
floating careless overhead like cloud-shaped wonders
unaware of the lightning, rough wind, or the thunder.
And their parents tie strings to their waists in that sky
And walk them to school, weight them down, kiss goodbye.
Their teachers are kind (No child ever is bad);
Teaching each how to spell, how to sing, and to add.
Later pages...
And Acorn discovered she was now a big girl
and hers was again a happy big small world
where she protected her parents as they, too
guided her with advice as your parents do you.
So Acorn's days passed the way days always will
working her farm, where she planted and tilled,
helping her neighbors, friends, even strangers with theirs,
as her parents advised and spoke in her ears.
After The Bomb
©Timothy Jeffrey (back to top)
When I arrive in the morning a
message is waiting. In seconds, I have made it down the long hallway to the
classroom.
The air as I swing open the door is
pungent, a humid cloying odor cut with chalk dust. A brawl has taken place:
desks are kicked aside, pieces of a broken vase made by a student inmate lay
scattered near the wall of windows. Papers, books, folders, an eraser, the odd
tennis shoe strewn in roughly radiating arcs from the epicenter of the blast: a
youngster on his back on the floor, arms and legs akimbo. On each outstretched
limb rests a boy about the same age, on hands and knees, pinning him firmly.
Those kids remaining, seven of them,
assigned to live together in an artificial family unit, hunker over him. Still
now, they appear flushed and slightly shaken. Whispering stops as I enter. It appears
that the Last Supper and the agony of the crucifixion have been captured
simultaneously.
“Now,” the boy says from his
position, helpless as a starfish, “Oh yeah, now y’all be st-toppin talk
tha-thatthatsshhhhiit.’ The stutter worsens when he rattles off particular
unkindnesses, paid him sneakily, by those pretending now to be concerned. He
names several. They have stolen articles of his, they have threatened him.
With one exception, all are fifteen
or under.
Perez, struggling to free himself
from the four holding him down, is eighteen. All bones, he looks twelve. His
hard eyes flick, frightened, about the room as he rants: a baby bird fallen
from the nest. He is blue-black, rutted and carved like someone actually out of
the tribes, an induration about the tight skin of his face. His hair is thick,
tufted, gray with dust right now. He doesn’t take care of himself.
He has been in correctional
institutions like this, foster homes, emergency shelters and halfway houses for
thirteen years. There was no place left but here. After this, the system would
deem him an “adult.” When he was nineteen, they would find adult foster care
placement, or prison. Faced with leaving us and returning to frightful,
hopeless environments and families, kids here not unusually grow violent with
their peers, thereby forcing us to repossess their freedom and ensuring
themselves of three squares a day and a bed and safety. Though it would have
been hard to accord Perez enough sophistication that he would have calculated
such a thing.
From the first, Perez Immanual Sims
seemed even to those of us charged with his care to be, quite conceivably,
deranged. The walking wounded. Upon seeing him at first in what I would come to
know as a typical daily tirade–his face a bunched black fist, eyes like
volcanic glass–I thought Wolf Boy.
“In a cancer ward,” another staff
comforted me, “you’re going to lose some.” He meant Perez.
The team of professionals with Perez
needed comforting. He was a colossal challenge. We were to babysit him, in
essence, until his nineteenth birthday, at which time his community worker
would find him a home, and a job, in Detroit.
By the morning of his birthday, Perez was to be turned back to the world, ready
or not. Very little had been entertained about therapy of any kind. The damage,
so went the argument, was done.
They might have been much younger
than him, but the others had no problem using him. They used him to hide stolen
objects, to do the stealing, to cheat for them in school– so that Perez was in
a low grade boil continually, trapped as he had always been between getting
accepted by them and getting caught by us, the quintessential sap. Perez was
slow but he wasn’t unaware of his shortcomings, and the most disabling fault on
the street, he had to know, is a conspicuous weakness: so he traded his
willingness for the safety of invisibility. He joined the team.
“What you l-l-lookin at?” he hollers
at me.
Quiet follows. Everyone waits. I sit
down, nod to the teacher that she can go if she has something else to do for
the moment. She lets herself out, the door clicks once. Nothing makes you feel
more helpless than a kid so self destructive he continually outmaneuvers every
better effort to help him, and here he lay in the embrace of his torturers. The
field is lousy with do-gooders convinced that expressing their heartfelt
frustration will turn the kid around. A kid like Perez just needs to know
someone cares. I put a look on my face that suggests I’ve had a better time
cleaning urinals.
He promises, after an hour or so, to
be good. The instructed fundamental once the instigator calms himself is to
commit somehow to better behavior before being allowed to get up. Not excuses,
apologies or promises, but alternative plans to control one’s behavior. This
usually means he sets out ways his group can test his patience –maybe he should
sit out of the basketball game tonight and help someone wash windows, say– in a
constructive way. It’s otherwise too easy to play a humble, get up, hit
somebody again. Lying there, Perez appears calm, reasonably. He asks for
permission to be let up.
Several turn their faces toward me.
They are children. You have to remind yourself. Some are so sophisticated and
charming, even inspired, it’s easy to forget. They’re expected, by adults like
me, to help each other. They think I have magical powers of restraint. I
must, because half the time I’d rather bang them around. Perez, too, even him.
They think I’m a psychologist, (though my degree is in English), a shaman who
sees.
Features as gravely petulant as
before, Perez stares belligerently at a water stain straight up in the acoustic
ceiling. Trying not to pay attention to me, to the fact of my authority that
determines his fate. Grownups have always decided him.
“Unless I missed something,” I say,
“I didn’t hear anything about how he was going to control himself.”
Already he is bellowing. With this
instrument or that, he is going to break my head. He’s going to cap me with a
.357 Magnum. Perez doesn’t like me at present.
Perez lurches, bucks; several boys
leap back on, ride him like a wave.
After a couple of hours of this,
having made myself fairly sure his hot, dirty and sweaty cohorts are reasonably
tired with the mess they’ve made for themselves in goading a lame, I call in
another group of guys to hold Perez down. My group is sent on with a staff who
is instructed to work them like dogs. He won’t though. He’s young, just out of
college and this is his first real job. He has a sunlamp tan and he thinks like
the kids do, that I’m too strict. He has shoes they always tell him they
admire. They ask the cost, which he discloses willingly. If he was in their neighborhood
they would strip him like an old Desoto. A couple might stab him.
Once Perez is free of his
“brothers”, he calms, seriously makes a plan to control himself. He is careful,
contrite. He is allowed up, sits in a desk.
I call the group back. Once they
arrive and sit around Perez, I conduct an hour session for the group on karma,
putting the bad out and getting it back; threaten a couple. This is a crowd
pleaser. Some have been taught the Bible and they are all Rambo fans.
Perez puts his head down. They want shaman, they get. I have them role-play the
manner in which they could treat Perez better. Finally, I suggest they think
about all this and try to have a better day. A lot of the job is a matter of
outlasting them, braving the storm, setting a sound principle example. They get
up to go.
Perez is asleep.
* *
* *
* *
* *
* * *
In the ensuing months we hold
meetings with his social worker, to prepare for his eventual release. Our
abiding interest had been in teaching him domestic skills like keeping himself
clean, learning to cook, managing money. Maybe he could marry money, one of the
team suggests wryly.
Quick way to devalue currency, quips
another.
If anything, the scenes of violence
have increased. The more Perez embarrasses himself, the more we appear to him
protectors of the culpable and not him; and the louder and more frenetic his
outbursts become. A borderline “with paranoid characteristics”, the
psychologicals on him indicated. We took some of the guys go-carting once and
Perez three times blew out tire stacks when, leading us, he’d driven completely
turned around to watch us,–unable to control his vehicle for fear of attack from
the rear.
He needs something to hope for.
After a time, a kid becomes “institutionalized”, or severely dependent –almost
completely refusing to do anything for himself. A kid like Perez will create
havoc-out of resistance to incarceration as much as he is doing it so that he
can remain in constant care
The worker says she is looking for
placements. But at his age, Perez falls through the child care cracks. Too old
for even state institutions or any other group programs, too young (and not
necessarily eligible) for adult foster care, unwelcome in several city programs
he has previously passed through, too intellectually limited for others. Too
dependent and troublesome to gain acceptance with foster parents locally, yet
not crazy enough to make the grade in psychiatrics anywhere. I don’t like the
worker who, though she is Black, wears baubles and French powders and
communicates an affected distaste for the boy, maybe culturally embarrassed.
We bring Perez in. He prepares in
his face a peace approximating a kind of adult reserve, meant to match our own.
He slips deep into his chair, then sits up as an afterthought. He licks his
lips.
“Ba-but though,” he stutters when
the subject of our difficulty is brought up. “Y’all say y’ga-gonna f-f-find me
somethin. Y’say it...”
Though he trusts no one, he doesn’t
want to insult us. In failure (such as we learn it) Perez always found a meal
somehow –from a drug sale, a hustle, a small job done for someone, people
feeling for you enough that they’d take you in...And Perez had a code: He
would not spare change anyone, stick anybody up, beg, stay in shelters, or
pickpocket. He didn’t break and enter “like my early days,” as if a seasoned
hand at nineteen. Which he was.
“Wa-w-well. I...I, oun’t know...”
And he takes a deep breath to swallow the stutter. He’d learned to get things
from the system by such announcements of doubt. His bane and advantage,
perhaps, as what he guilt-tripped out of social workers would never replace the
familial stability he’d been deprived. Monthly company and a free lunch in
place of comforting arms and the warm breath of a parent that won’t come when
you wake in the night. Gone, for Perez. Forever.
Truth was, he’d survived until now
–in the most liberal use of the word. From all we could gather there had been
periods when he’d vanished from the system, then popped up again, in a neglect
hearing, in a shelter,the broken-eared pup with a limp and foreign
substances clotting his hair. Always surfaced, maybe with no offenses tied to
him, but always lost. Always a little more scared.
After the bomb, a partner had
remarked once, there would only be rats and cockroaches, and Perez.
I sat behind my desk, playing the
prospective employer. “Like ah..” He pushes his tongue into the upper palate,
which sets up a momentary vibration.
The tremor will lock his face full against the stutter, will close his eyes an
instant. His mouth opens on nothing. Then, in a rush:
“Waa-waantajob...”
He never stuttered, never flinched
or displayed the slightest wrinkle when he lied or goofed you. To be honest
apoplexed him however, and knowing he would have to go through job interviews
like the ones I rehearsed with him was worse. And that he had to ask
whities...
Too much.
“Y-you want me to be somebody y-you
wa-want,” Perez told me during the rehearsal, frustrated with his failures;
someone should save him this discomfort. “But though, I...I c-cain’t be that.”
I wondered. Did I want that? He had
by that time become my student, I suppose, in lieu of any other concerted
attempt to “work with him,” a bit of social workers having a lot more to do
with objectives management and casework niceties than with any genuine faith in
the subject’s ability to achieve. And he had begun to improve. But in my eyes?
Or in his own estimation? I could not say. A relationship, glancing as the
approvingly shy regard he allowed me at our passing in a hall, was coming. I
was sticking it out with him.
So Perez became more frightened, and
more troublesome. Cruelly, he abused and antagonized anyone who, just having
had a visit with their family, showed any private misery. He goaded them into
fights. He told them a sister was ugly. He made them pay for having families.
His mother, in Detroit, was a drug addicted prostitute. He
told the others only that she was in Detroit.
That was all, she stay in Detroit.
Okay? Don’t be your business what she do.
Detroit was home, if any place in his life
could be termed that. He’d been used by every one who needed a decoy, a thief,
a seller. He let pieces of that go, but you had to listen close.
“Tell you what,” he would say,
correcting a peer’s unkindnesses –during a time when he had decided to
experiment with acting his age. “You acts like that on the street somebody
waste y’ass. You think I’m a kid you; they make you do things you don’t wanna
do. Y-yo-you can’t s-s-say you ain’t wanna do it neither. Cap y’all. B-be
scandalous. Th-thass a fack.” His eyes wandered to me. He was trying.
Perez even appeared proud. He was
giving someone advice. He’d lived through something which made him an
authority.
The worker called with a placement
in Detroit.
A halfway house, I told Perez when I
had been apprised. But in my relief and in that certain delight at being the
one to pass good news–except for family visitations or calls from home a
commodity in short supply to any of them– I had not anticipated his look.
Perez, alone with me, took a long moment. Oh yeah? was his quiet reply. But he
wasn’t done, and he finally fixed me a second. Put his head to one side.
He looked clearer than I’d ever seen
him, almost grown-up in his apparent discomfort, as if he especially didn’t
wish to hurt me. “C-can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t go back there.”
What...?
“Been had all that so long...” he
shook it out of his head, whatever he wasn’t going to finish with.
“Mightsw-well pa-put me in jail.”
It was a matter of days before his
birthday.
I was furious. “That’s the way it
goes,” I said, and I would have rather grabbed him by the hair, now much better
groomed, and dragged him to Detroit
myself. “You want to get put in jail, do it when you get down there, goddamn
it; you’re going if I have to shoot you out of a canon.”
The halfway house went out of
business, another victim of funding crunches. Just like that. The ATT recording
about “this number” no longer being in service; then confirmation from social
services.
I took Perez to live with me.
I tend to be impulsive, never more
so that when I feel stalled by people whose inaction– despite its obvious
impact on someone’s life– has sound procedural basis. My recourse has been
inevitably to prove them wrong, storm the gates and, the moral tyrant ever
railing, commit hari-kari. There. What do you think of that?
They liked it.
Charlie and Rainman, someone said. I
was doing a great thing; a couple told me this privately. Because it so rarely
happens that gestures of kindness to these kids end up in anything but
disaster, the praise and encouragement had their requisite measure of
neighborly counsel, and not a little of it disparaging.
When I was soon to go on vacation,
asked one of my colleagues, “you gonna put Perez in the kennel?”
They were disenchanted with me, some
of them. Friends, but too aware of the futility in trying to save somebody to
offer more than grave warnings.
The consequence of an impulsive
nature like mine is an equally idiotic persistence, after the fact of
indiscretion, to make it fit. Because, after all, there were sensible reasons
for this–even if not a one occurred to me before I was obliged to conjure them.
Hadn’t Perez once lived in Ann Arbor? Remembered its
streets from when he’d been in a group home and gone through its schools,
figuratively speaking. In Ann Arbor, Perez still had friends, or “associates’
as he and any street kid will refer to their circle to distinguish
between physical proximity and the depths of their character they still have
the power to conceal from even those closest to them. (When you’re really
tight, somebody is escalated to “m’boy” –a secure repository of some
intermediate secrets with which you have tested his loyalty.) Perez felt safe.
He was close enough to Detroit
to visit his sister without becoming ensnarled in the city’s culture. There
were jobs in Ann Arbor.
And he had me.
Ann Arbor, though in recent history became a
high tech center, had always been a swank cosmopolitan cultural hub, anyway,
that still maintained its small town mentality. The joke goes that even winos
have to apply and wait their turns to bum the streets, so exclusive and refined
must be their panhandling, their circle of movement, their numbers overall. The
poor, the rowdy, the gamers, the regularly detained were predominantly black
and usually from the north side section of several blocks bordering fashionable
rehabs and an open air farmers’ market on newly-stripped, brick block lanes.
The most famous of the floaters, an elderly black named “Shaky Jake,” was
nonetheless a self-employed musical stylist on the corners who could be seen
any time of day, toting his sorry guitar case, adorned in a mismatch of second
hand coats and pants and screaming socks –or spats– to the next sidewalk stand.
Everybody knew Jake, the quintessential local eccentric, replete with buttons
and bizarre big-brimmed hat.
Perez was easy play, having in fact
known a few of “the boys” from the old days. They were the jam, what was
happening; they were moving some small time products to the affluent youngsters
at the college and brought a whole preteen entourage of skate-boarding,
match-chewing would-be cools and other punks to the after hours streets till
Saturday nights had come to look and sound like a Detroit block party.
Perez wasn’t going to be in play, if I could help it.
He gave me a listen. We were in my
living room which, with the couch bed pulled out, would be his bedroom. I ran
through the rules.
He said: “I got a clear
understanding,” which always meant he hadn’t quite. I told him to run back
through the list.
“Aw-awright. Awright, see..like,
yeah, okay...” he thought hard. His pimply features made him appear old as
Shakey Jake, careworn. “I d-don’t I-let nobody come over if y-you ain’t here.
Le’see..takes a bath ev-every day.” He concentrated on me, as if it were
written on my forehead. “Eat veg’bles.”
“Vegetables.”
“Yeah, vegetables, right?”
I nodded.
“Veg’bles, yeah. Oh, oh...don’t be
smokin’ in no house. Right? In yo’ house? Right?”
I didn’t have to nod; he knew.
“No kinna smokin, nobody can’t do-do
that,” he emphasized, as if lecturing an imaginary visitor. “C-clean up duty,
like that..”
“Which are?”
He got that smile; he didn’t
remember. He hadn’t done bad, though. We went through it all again. Especially
the part he had forgot about looking for a job.
Which became the first and most
nettlesome of our problems: children like Perez who have inherited nothing
approaching a “work attitude” –about its inevitability, the pleasure of
completing something, the belief that one gains later by labor performed now–
are not dissuaded easily from their sloth. They are not prone to developing
pride in work when it is only servitude to them, making one a dupe, simply and
finally. This is especially strong in the Black kids I’ve had, whose only
models often are those with counterfeit magisterial airs or criminals in the
street to whom the very image of the hardworking brother is the manufacture of
racists who would keep you down. Perez, when angry at his family group, would
antagonize with a rap that ended:
...rollin with my wad o’ hundred
dollah bills,
Never worked, never will...
And so there were whole days he
would sit on the steps outside my apartment building, gazing. Touchingly, he
would not go inside because “it ain’t my place,” rather like a pup reluctant to
use the too-new wicker bed you buy him. But he was not looking for work, which
I found less than charming, and told him so. He was waiting for something,
evidently, to happen. Being not of the earth has a little to do with a certain
irreconcilable spectatoring, no sense of affecting the overall picture. If no
one told him what to do, Perez wouldn’t. Nothing. Just sit.
I gave him the first couple weeks,
to get accustomed to me and the new surroundings, I told myself. Unnecessarily,
because Perez’ surroundings were, like Jake’s guitar case, as familiar and
encasing as his insular silence, his hand bringing the cigarette to his mouth,
his ritual of hanging out. Obediently, he was keeping out of the streets, but
this only left him without a part of his personality, perhaps.
Without question, he wanted to make
it. He kept his effects neatly in the two-by-two front closet. Though ill at
ease, he asked me (out of transparent guilt that he had even been caught using
something of mine) what channel I wanted even though he knew I didn’t watch TV.
He might shut it off and follow me about the apartment or go to a window and
try to pass some small talk on the kind of day it was. How were his friends
back at the institution? He asked to use the butter and other foods I had
informed him were ours to share. In case somebody might have some reservations,
he announced his intentions each time he used the john. He was still sleeping
on the couch rather than pulling it out, in the event of which he would have
had to use my sheets and pillows.
I was home more now that my
girlfriend and I had broken things off and my smoldering, uncharacteristic
quiet must have been intimidating. He was only allowed to smoke outside the
apartment, and he used the privilege as often as he could comfortably pretend
he was taking a break from something more
exhausting than what he was doing. Smoking to Perez was doing something. You
could mark the hours of a day. You left the prison of a boring room and when
you came back, it was later.
In a comical way, matters had
conspired to make Perez and me much more alike than I could have then accepted:
I haunted the house staying close to the phone, furiously cleaning or eating
nonstop meals and calling old friends and doing anything to keep away from the
desk where I knew I would only want to write love-sopped letters to explain
myself, journal entries. I was an emotional vagabond. But a vagabond
nonetheless. And as helplessly dependent as I was ostensibly schooling Perez
against being. My presence in the home was a self-imposed effort at
restraining what had become a near-hysterical bent for draining every
sympathetic heart, telling the same tale of betrayal, to hear myself, to fill
the silence.
I began seeing a psychiatrist. My
nerves were shot. If I’d been convinced of Perez’ chances for success-even
solely on the energies I could devote in support of him– I had little
confidence now. I had begun picking at him, much as a recriminate parent might.
It had been a month. I watched him
one early evening fry a slice of bologna. He put the package away in the fridge
and shut it. Then he poked the slice with a fork. It was curling and the grease
he’d dolloped in was smoking already. He had the flame too high; instead of
turning it down, he began scraping the skillet back and forth across the
burner, as if he were popping corn.
The meat made angry snaps. Perez’
features bulldogged, and he was muttering to himself. Something was messing
with him again. When he tried to turn the sweating piece, it stuck and he tore
it. Panicked, he shook the pan with even greater impatience across the burner
prongs, and this time got tiny
constellations of grease sparks. He winced, squealed a little bewildered
exhalation through this nose.
I could have helped. I was at the
kitchen table and some of his frantic rage was, I’m sure, because of my
passive witness to his embarrassing helplessness. I folded my hands before my
face, pressed my mouth to my knuckles. And began laughing.
It was later. He had just come in
from a cigarette and was slouched on the chair in the living room. A rubic cube
lay on the end table, and after some moments of studying it, he picked it up.
He turned it in a couple directions, then lost interest. The door wall was open
but the pall still hung. He’d thrown the meat out.
My desk chair creaked. I could feel
Perez look over, but I was fixed on a softball across the room beside the
television stand. I had dropped it some weeks before and had yet to pick it up.
There was dust on every surface. The phone was not ringing, might never again.
“You’re going out at seven
tomorrow,” I said. “I want names and phone numbers for the places you’ve been.”
“Maaan,” he moaned, but without
emphasis on the vowel.
“Take a shower.”
Perez said he knew when to take
showers.
For the first time our eyes met.
There are a lot of good reasons for just getting by, suffering the despond,
courting failure, waiting on the recovery, not picking up softballs.
“Now,” I said.
“What kind of job you want, son? Sit
down, man, we people here.” Aristocratic, broad and brimming with military
bluff, his cream-coffee bald head shines like good Brazilian leather. His
baritone has caught Perez up, and he is unable to answer right away,
anxiously sliding his eyes over to me, traveling the bookcased walls with them.
The man asks again, good-naturedly.
From behind his University
of Michigan professor’s
desk, he smiles a gold-capped tooth at us.
Darkly, barely moving his lips,
Perez replies dishwash. It’s what he’s done at the institution. It’s what he
knows. Under the perhaps naive notion that Perez needed to meet and mix with
male role models of his own race, I’d arranged the meeting. Might be a way to
insinuate him into the community.
“Uh-huh.” Forbearing, fatherly.
The man nods anyway, but the meaning
is lost on me.
“See, son...I know people. There’s
no need for you to do something beneath yourself given that you might have
trainable skills in certain other areas. Am I correct in assuming you do?”
A little of it is for show, a little
a matter of sincerely learned class demeanor–but the words...Perez can’t work
this fast. The inverted subject and the complex construction stop him. He is
still just getting over seeing a brother in these digs. His only experience
with something this somber and officious has been a cop shop detective pen or a
social services typing pool. Usually people are doing things to you, not asking
what you want.
“Jobs,” I intercede for Perez, his
interpreter. “Stuff you’ve done..”
“Oh,” Perez lights up momentarily.
“Oh, yeah, like...dishwashing. Already said that but, ah, lawn, cut grass...”
Clearly the man is listening.
“What else?” I say.
“Ahm, paint. I done that. Don’t know
what it was. Barn? What was that?”
“Outbuilding,” I fill in. “Barn is
fine.”
“Yeah, so like...” He is thinking.
“School, I goes to school.” And closes his face with an uneasy, almost
contentious frown that says ‘I know that ain’t a job but it’s a kind of skill I
ain’t had.’
He isn’t stuttering, probably thinks
we two are running a scam on the old swell.
“You plan to go to college, don’t
you?” the man asks kindly, but authoritative, as if this is something Perez
must want. He mentions the local community college, touts the virtues of a
strong educational base. Perez has acheived, after monumental effort and electrifying
strides in one of the finest remedial labs you will see, a third grade reading
level.
Perez allows as how this would be
nice. College, yeah.
The man has regarded my information
on Perez’ educational level as so much prejudicial shortsightedness. He will
get Perez a good job; Perez will “hit the books,” meet important community
people, discipline himself. Perez likes the speech. So do I. We are smiling,
all of us. There’s a lot of smiling. We’re going to get moving here. An old
photograph framed on the wall shows the man and some possibly famous
administrator, a white man, standing close together. Trophies of one kind or
another clustered prominently on shelves; some stacks of research. He is widely
published in the area of collective behavior, statistical likelihoods.
The man will introduce Perez to this
U of M football player, to this basketball player. He will work out with them
in a gym. They will be for Perez Big Brothers, of a sort. The man mentions one
of the famous players, an All-American who is always in the papers. You know
who I mean...”
Perez is at labor again, looks to
me. He is probably not sure what is being asked, but everyone has been smiling,
and who is he to shatter such equanimity?
“Yup,” he says.
“He’s a fine young man, I knew him
when he was a young whip like you,” the professor enthuses, now addressing me:
“Give the boy someone who’s about something to look up to. These fellas take
care of young boys.” Reassuring, conversant with youth.
I’ve chosen the right man, possibly
the right spirit, but I can’t keep an image of Foghorn Leghorn out of mind:
‘Boy, I say, boy listen up when I speak..’
I agree with him about role models.
The need.
Perez watches both of us.
“I’ll introduce you.”
Perez thinks this is fine. He uses
the word experimentally, unable to stifle a becoming smirk of self pleasure. He
has heard adults speak this way. He sits up a little more, saying “B’fine, oh
yeah,” and catches me looking his way. Smiles more: “See what’amsayin?” A shred
of street bullshit slips, mere friendly conversational transition, and he holds
a hand up: “I mm-mean not that, ex-excuse me..”
But the man hasn’t heard, is pulling
the phone over.
‘I’ll give____ a call right now,”
and he looks at his watch. “How will that be?”
Perez’ features cloud. Petulantly,
he says, “Who?”
The man freezes; his eyes take me
in. ‘There’s a light, I say there’s a light in the window, son, but nobody’s
home.’
“Why, you know.____, son, the one I
said–”
“Who?” Perez is uncomfortable,
perplexed. Every time he gets something, y’all go and change it.
The clean fingers are on the phone,
but the receiver remains cradled.
The problem, for the professor and
even the famous players, was that they’d been raised on Bing Crosby movies,
maybe. They expected the capricious Bowery rascal with the heart of gold who’d
never had a chance and would now blossom under their tutelage. In fact, when I
brought up the idea of Perez living with a former NFL safety who resided in the
apartment complex, the man asked first if Perez used drugs, or, much worse, ran
with undesirables. Absolutely unacceptable would have been any back talk.
“I don’t want some kid cause no kind
of trouble, understand? I have a busy life, but I want to help, okay? So if I
can help, let’s work something out.”
He was not a bad man. It is an
exceptional person–in the broadest interpretations of that, even to the point of
being uncomplimentary–who will take in a stranger. The inn is still closed to
most, but everybody, as long as it doesn’t have to be too inconvenient, wants
to help somehow. Still, I was incessantly frustrated in getting Perez something
long term because the primary stipulation was always that if anyone was willing
to help, it was because no help was necessary. Perez had to be self-governing,
enterprising, and generally agreeable. The football player assumed the boy was
fixed. We’d given him his release to the civilized world, hadn’t we?
Unfortunately, any institution’s graduation of a juvenile offender says less
about a purported degree in citizenship than a necessity to remove the boy from
care before he becomes so institutionalized no amount of debriefing will outfit
him for independent living of any sort.
The player had been born, raised,
bred, groomed and streamed for the football field and, rather in the same
stream, as the deputy sheriff he became after his injury ended a short career.
The professor, product of a hard-knuckled, many storied Tennessee upbringing,
could tell proudly of its value to him as he rose to a major in the military,
and to be a published and sought-after authority in the field of sociology.
With loving firmness behind you, you succeed. As I had grown up on the same
movies, I believed with them; still do. But as we entered our joint shepherding
of Perez, we drove headlong into the egocentric willfulfillment about another’s
life that is the quintessential counselor’s error, fostered in parenthood and
perpetuated in child care repeatedly, of not accepting a youngster’s right to
who he has become, or his transit till then as anything but happenstance.
The truth was Perez had developed a
system of survival, I would eventually learn, as intricate in some ways as any
well-practiced NFL back’s defensive maneuvers and strategies, and with the same
rationale: to keep them, anybody, from scoring.
For a while, everything is working.
Perez plays at the athletic center with the famous University of Michigan
stars, and visits with the professor –where he will eat meals occasionally,
finish his homework, sleep over. He acts as houseboy and earns some money
taking out garbage, washing clothes, folding dinner napkins. He has fathers and
big brothers everywhere; he is attending school. I don’t see him as often.
When I do, the TV or radio will be
on as I let myself in, and Perez lies asleep in his clothes on the couch. The
sink might be cleared of dirty dishes, the bathroom wiped down, something has
always just been tidied. This boy the others told me was helpless, is learning
to take care of himself. His mouth will be open, raw and pink, his plugged
passages causing him to rip snores.
My neighbors say hello to him; some
of their kids ask after him. He has picked up cash from piecework with friends
I’ve asked to keep him in mind when something comes up. Their jokes retain none
of their formerly cryptic skepticism. My own children, when they visit on
weekends, take to Perez.
“Yeah?” he will say, artfully
simulating interest when the young one retells a story for the eighteenth time,
and “Hey, thas good, man,” when one of them does something well.
“Tripped out how they is..nice, you
know,” he muses to me later. “And th-h they gots good manners too. I see that.”
They are his buddies. “They be good in sports, too, ain’t they though?”
He hasn’t seen much family stuff. He helps them clean after themselves.
Stuttering, tentative, he might correct their behavior here and there.
In the Irish Hills one day for a
family outing, we rode “bumper boats,” inner tube floats with motors you
control while seated in a plastic contoured cup. Perez was being all kid–and he
was no good at it. With a cockamamie pinwheeling of his hard eyes he would
speed toward me in the water, ramming my float and emitting squeals of mad
delight. It’s easy to understand why people sometimes take delinquents for
mentals.
When the pot-bellied, cigar-smoking
attendant docked us, Perez misunderstood his directions as the man set a foot
on his tube and began to bring Perez in. Perez gunned his motor. The guy had to
think quickly. He leaped on as Perez spun away again. He stood over Perez,
facing over him with legs spread precariously, making wild circles toward the
middle of the pond despite the man’s loud order to the contrary and attempts to
snatch the hand controls. Each cry jangled Perez into yet another acceleration.
Circles and useless circles, and circles. It was Laurel and Hardy. We roared.
He even attempted to laugh with me
about the incident, later, learning to look at himself that way without
wounding.
When I called home to get messages
or check on him, my signature greeting was, “What you doing?”
As inevitably, because such
questions drove him nuts, he would bark: “Talkin to you!” as if nothing could
be more obvious.
But anything that’s going to stick
has to be constantly repeated, and this was even more essential to Perez’
survival than to most. He did not seem to dream of futures or dwell on past
mistakes. Movement toward something, anything out of the momentary or the
immediately tangible was a real stretch to him. His dreams were sleep, and to
Perez, sleep dreams were little distinguishable from the illusory trappings of
wakefulness. The one emotion he spoke of was boredom, but more like
disapproving of a movie’s plot.
“N-not you, now,” he assured me when
he spoke of it once. “You be nice an all. I p-preciate wh-what you d-done. I
likes it here..”
I listened from my chair.
“It’s like, I be thinkin...”
He wagged his head, like he couldn’t
get something out of his ear.
I looked past him then. Poor kid
couldn’t even say what bored him. Nothing was happening, though. He might have
had nothing particularly in mind that should be, but nothing was. I was gazing
out at the courtyard
“Thinkin,” he smiled. Or smirked; or
maybe he was asking me to put his thought into words.
“Thinkin,” Perez said. “I be thinkin
a lot. Can’t sleep sometimes.”
Out in the grassy courtyard some
kids were kicking around a soccer ball. One of their parents called something
to them. It was getting dark.
Perez said, “See wha’m sayin?”
He said he wanted to visit his
sister. You had to sit down and work out plans, even if it was just to get his
bus route plotted on the way into town.
It infuriated him. To Perez, a call
and a simple, “Yeah, s’like, maybe see whu’up, huh?” meant, Can I stay at your
house for a couple days and do some things with you?’ Yet as long as no
demonstrative protest greeted the above vagary, arrangements were set and all
systems were go.
Why did everybody always need so
much information? He’d once hung up on a medical secretary I’d prevailed upon
him to call for an appointment when she’d had the cheek to ask for his middle
name.
“None a they bi’ness,” he’d sulked.
We ran through the particulars of
departure and return. Money management. What and how to pack. Ran through his
options in every eventuality. It was difficult. It took time. It was
complicated by the fact that he was not often as dumb as he was unwilling. Are
you helping someone who only desires the attention and not the objective, independence,
that would prompt its withdrawal?
Much less a contention borne of
temperament, daily pressures, color, or intellection, our growing disaffection
that had arose was one of class. Perez adopted behaviors, he didn’t adapt. He
internalized nothing. He was obedient –no small sacrifice–but was not
assimilating. He was out of his element. It’s a matter of what you envision for
yourself: he didn’t want to lose his protective coloration. He expected to be
returning to the street. Like the Laurel and Hardy
routine when Hardy, miserable for his friend, generously takes him up in his
arms out of a wheelchair Laurel
had borrowed, which had made him appear one-legged. Laurel, confused by the unnecessary kindness,
is nonetheless touched, and takes his ride good-naturedly.
Perez got on the bus to Detroit. His face was
closed. He was not unhappy, only unable to imagine what would transpire at the
other end. I wished him well.
The first indication that something
was wrong came as a blipping red light in the panel of my phone recorder. His
sister’s voice, stern possibly, asking if Perez had been seen.
“I thought he was with you!” I
told her when I called. I was upset with her. I was upset, too, with me: I
hadn’t missed him. But how could she lose him? She knew, didn’t she, that
unwatched he would float away?
Evidently, Perez had been told he
would have to pay for his own food, a not unreasonable request from her in that
she was on the dole anyway with a new baby, and one eventuality for which he’d
prepared. Perez had, however, stormed out. He told her the money was for the
bus trip back, telling her these were my instructions.
He knew better. This wasn’t
stupidity.
But he was gone, and none of my
contacts in Detroit
knew anything. Though my anger was considerable at first, it passed into
genuine concern. By the second and third days I was assailing myself: the kid
had needed protection and I hadn’t cared enough to do more than make an
experiment out of a trip to a region too dangerous to practice in. Even if
someone tried to help him, he wouldn’t be able to explain himself. And asking
for anything, no: Perez said he was no beggar. He’d hang out and follow you
around till you offered it, but he was his own man, didn’t need nobody.
Not too different than what I was
doing at the time. I was the thief of every even remotely amorous gesture from
my former partner, to be taken in, to sleep over, to be fed. I would have sat
in a wheelchair and faked Stanley’s
amputation. I wanted company. I wanted a family. I was hardly ever home, and
couldn’t sleep when I was. I slept on one side on my bed as if the other half
were occupied.
I was picking up a change of clothes
one evening when Perez rang through. I’d rather suspected him of a couple
clumsy hangups on the machine, and even now he wavered in a momentarily
apoplexed silence. He grunted a quick breath.
“Yeah, Ahh..”
“What?” I was already teaching
again, going to make him talk. I realize in retrospect that any teaching is
preferable to listening to a heart, and though I had suffered exactly that
indignity from my lover in the past, a person who no longer wanted me beyond
empty moments to be filled, I was cold, hard, impregnable with him. I treated him
as I should have her.
“S’happenin?”
“Who is this?” Make him work for it,
the squirrel. I had taught him proper phone.
“Me...” Perplexed. “S’me.
P-pa-Perez. I’m over here.”
For his usual output of information,
this constituted a veritable summit.
“I don’t know where ‘here’ is.”
“Oh. Yeah,yuh, ah, aaam, th-this
here ph-phone booth.”
“Where the hell is the phone
booth?!”
“Oh. Ahh, yeah, like Woodward.”
“You’re still in Detroit then?”
“Yeah I’m in Detroit,” he snapped, dimly suspecting I was
running him around. “I been gone. Member, you put me on the bus, long time–?”
“Perez, yes. Yes, I know. What do
you want?”
He’d been setting up the touch. I
awoke him to his purpose, and he started over: “Oh yeah. Oh, so like, s’like,
what up? Y’aright?” He was so bad it was almost endearing.
“What happened?”
“Mmmean...?”
I demanded he tell me, and listened
to how he’d been able to hustle up some grub –after he’d of course spent it all
the first day– working for a trucker unloading at a downtown office. Most each
night he’d just been walking, squatting in doorways to keep warm. Hadn’t
changed one article of clothing, I felt sure. His hair must have looked like a
Sudanese tribesman’s in the desert. He hadn’t used the halfway houses we’d
planned, in case of emergency, because he said he’d forgot. He hadn’t. Just
afraid again. He wanted me to come get him.
“You’re a big boy,” I said. “Go to a
police station, see what they’ll do.”
I hung up.
Two days later I heard form the Detroit police. A female
officer on a precinct desk.
She said he had no money.
“He might not.”
“He said you could pick him up.”
No, that was not true, I said. He
was a young man who would very much like to avoid doing for himself.
As a point of information, she said
he hadn’t eaten for days. This was possible, but I warned her not to believe
everything she was told, either.
“Well,” said the woman, “maybe I’ve
done the wrong thing, but I gave him his bus money. Ten dollars?”
Nine.
“I’ll make sure he gets down there
on his own, though, okay?”
A cop, in the city yet. I asked her
to give me the precinct and her name, so I could be sure Perez paid back.
Perez wasn’t even an extreme example
of the unintentional havoc social service support plays with individual
perseverance. He’d grown to expect a bed, meals, money, transportation and
solace. Direction, kindness, warmth...Even the poorest among us are all
conditioned to expect someone, somewhere, to have our comfort at heart.
Perez called some time later. He
wanted to know, straight out, if I would come to get him. To my question, he
said, “Don’t got no money.” And plainly wanted no conversational followup. He’d
spent the money, as it turned out, on
food
“You’ve got a thumb,” I said. “You
want highway 94, west.”
Weeks after his return, he began
working more for the professor in other odd jobs. We saw even less of each
other when I began a business on the side, and I could not determine from day
to day whether he had been home or not. The professor attested to the boy
having done his homework, even to his having taken some tutelage.
“He’s very needy,” said the man, as
if announcing one of his researched conclusions.
Except for the time he’d lost his
house key and flubbed breaking back in through a screen, there had been no real
trouble. I’d been detained by the cops, in fact, for stuff that trifling.
But I knew the signs. Like he’d come
back from his trip wearing Detroit
in his face, on his body, even as a new suit of clothes will transform a
person. Attitude. There is a Detroit
one but it’s not the one former residents will tout, some romantic alchemy of
grit and American can-do. Whether it’s that proletarian hangover lie in the
auto workers’ victimized mentality or the vengeful ignorance of the
historically displaced, a Detroit attitude is a whine perverted into
pathological cruelty, obdurate inertia, the excuse to finally give up, and work
for nothing else but making them pay. And you get to pick the list.
But my own unease: it was in there,
alive in my apartment as any odor or the cockroaches in the dark of the
refrigerator’s underside. I described it thus to friends. I saw Perez as an
alien, all right, but my safety was what I wanted to safeguard. I had been in
the gang fights and had the guns held on me and strode down the streets even
some of the brothers wouldn’t have and where the assumption was any white boy
doing it was junked and broke, or carrying hard enough to speak and be heard,
and I was wise to the ways but now the rules were off, the neighborhood was in
my home. And it was not my neighborhood any more. It was his. Because he had
nothing; for the first time –property, money, me, my life– I had something.
None of it any longer, I feared, meant anything to Perez. In the night, any
night, with anybody along, or used by somebody who wanted me and mine, Perez
could be the one taking me out.
What piqued the paranoia was a visit
from the football player one afternoon. He was surprised to see me in, but no
more than to find Perez was not. He said Perez was usually in. All day.
“I check up on the little cat when
he don’t know I be coming by,” he explained. “Him and his little friends be
hanging out. I smell smoke couple times, ain’t see none a that weed.
Cigarettes. I catch him I’ll whup his ass. Told him too. Boy don’t care who he
hang out with.”
I’d found the butts carelessly
stubbed into a discarded mayonnaise lid, which I found on the dining room
table, like a challenge.
I woke him one morning when, getting
dressed for work, I could not find the pair of pants I wanted; another was
missing, I noticed. It was cold that day: my gloves weren’t on the shelf.
“Get up.”
One eye. With one eye open, Perez
will only ever look like one of those eerily shriveled apple-head dolls. In
another circumstance, almost worth a laugh: His pillow-sandwiched thick nap
bunched over his narrow features like a pencil eraser.
He snorted through a nostril,
starting a stretch, closed both eyes. Opened them, swollen to slits. Appeared
an angry old man.
“Who’ve you been having over here?”
No one was allowed in. Perez dredged
a pearl, swallowed it. I was mad enough to want to hurt him.
“Who say I––”
“Who, and when?”
He was defiant for all of the three
or four seconds it took common sense to kick on. He told me. Two guys was all.
Couple times. They’d smoked cigarettes and talked. He knew they shouldn’t have.
He wouldn’t do it a––
“Two pair of pants are missing.”
Now he was all the way awake. But
mystified. If that is possible, his face crinkled even more, but in a panicked
theater of contrite reflection.
“Nobody ain’t touch nothing,” he
said. “Swear to god. Fack I knows that.”
“Gloves, too.”
Shaking his head, he said, “Uh-uh. I
even be sure they goes straight in the bathroom,” and he drew a line on the air
with an index finger, “an right on back.”
I don’t care, I was saying. He was
responsible for whatever happened when he was here. My clothing would be paid
for, I told him. I would add it to whatever else he owed for bills, I told him.
and so on, venting myself on some dimly rationalized motive for teaching, I
suppose, but abusing him, with the weapon I have, my words. He was disarmed
from the get; he took the rest in hooded, insolent silence, the sermon on his
obligations to himself and his good fortune for being in a place, the whole
stretch.
I came to the true objective in all
of this, though I’d not been aware of it myself. A new coat I’d seen him
wearing, “which I hope you bought.”
It was going to be cold in the
winter, he said.
Dreadfully skinny and unhealthy,
Perez’ invariable posture for those six months of the year was a modified
ambulatory fetal. He quaked incessantly, wearing sometimes as many as six pair
of socks and several long sleeved shirts, changing only layers (if he could get
away with it)-convinced his body, thus encased, needed no bathing, or air
particularly. Forced by me to shower anyway, he would jump and smart from the
wet; needles, they might have been, hot and sharp. He might also wear three
coats, cinching the last hood so that his face disappeared as if behind a purse
mouth puckering closed until only his pocked nugget nose remained, seemingly.
Instead of moving around, he would stand acting on the assumption, swearing
incessantly at the weather’s confounding resourcefulness in finding his bones,
that by turning slightly, approximating a certain elemental inertia, he would
finally be left alone.
“You take the coat back,” I said. “Or
I do. You owe me money.”
He had two weeks, or he was to get
out.
So he disappeared. He became the
wind. For days, I could feel him. He was a nocturnal his eyes were night vision
and I began a brief ritual of pulling the doorwall drapes to and hitting all
the lights before turning in, peering through a crack to probe the broad
courtyard below.
Movement, just out of the unearthly
pall of one moon-globe sidewalk lamp.
I might lie in bed for an hour,
wondering. I might for longer, until the deadbolt thumped open, the door
screeked. By seven the next morning, he was gone again, everything set back, no
trace.
One night, as I went to the car I
had unintentionally startled him as he passed through the lot toward the other
side of the building, stealthily streaming in and out of the deep shadows along
the parking cowl. He’d caught me completely off-guard. Perhaps he was
retreating to the warmth of the basement laundry room. He nodded, rather. An
inclination of the head, but jerked. As if breezily on the way to get the
evening post at the corner and chancing upon an old acquaintance.
I gave myself away, squawked,
managing a choke –warbled “Jesus,” whose accentuated second syllable came
diluted of its intended gruff impatience. I was shaken clean through. I would
have begged for my life. For all my seamless, ballsy surrogate fathering
professionally with dangerous kids, for all I’d seen or been around myself, I
was as insecure as some visiting gray flannel Pentecostal conventioneer
stepping out of the Mark IV in the darkened corner of the hotel parking lot,
alarms in the synapses shrilling THIS IS IT! The jackal’s face looming up from
the shadows.
I was everybody else, no different.
I wanted to be left alone. I was done.
The professor said Perez was acting
unacceptably. “The boy drags in here dirty and wet as a stray. He stayed over
last night. I found a pint in his pants pocket.” Working on homework was a rare
consolation. Perez watched television, got what he could to eat. He wasn’t
saying anything. Something, in the professor’s estimation, had passed over the
boy. Drugs and liquor seemed likely enough. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree, but
to me the cloud passing over was darker, different.
I came in one night near the end of
the two weeks to the radio playing. Several lights were on. I called for Perez,
but I knew better. I went about the rooms, but I knew better. He’d evidently
changed in a hurry, because he’d slung his sweatshirt, one of his skins, on the
couch. Something was very wrong.
I was in the back turning off lights
when two great hammering bangs came at the door. I opened it on three very
large cops and, behind them, the apartment manager. One cop asked if they could
talk to me.
I told them to go ahead. I didn’t
move to let them in.
“It’s all right” said the manager, a
hot-blooded lunatic former vet whose unresponsiveness to his renters except in
events like this was legend. He said there had been many complaints about
Perez.
“Yeah?” I said, making it a
challenge. I remarked on the curiosity of no such information having reached
me.
One of the cops had in the past
stopped Perez for loitering. Descriptions of peepers in recent months were too
close to be coincidental. A number of females in the area were frightened.
Earlier that evening they had caught him, followed him to my place. A complaint
had been filed. They’d questioned Perez. He’d shoved one of the police
officers. He had been booked and a hearing set.
The manager came forward, said,
“He’s got to be out. Either that, or, I’m sorry, I’ll have to ask you to
leave.”
I got on the phone to my lawyer,
then to the professor. As such things have gone for me in the past, I was back
on his side, advocacy being a shorter road to sainthood, I can only suppose.
The kid’s rights had been violated.
But not to hear the neighbors tell
it, when I went about knocking on doors. They begged off defending Perez.
“He really should be gone,” one of
the mothers said. Accounts of his spooky behavior, craven stares, talking to
himself in the presence of the children as he lurched in and out of the
apartment building, there were many stories, and all kept from me because my
neighbors liked me and applauded what I was trying to do.
One woman almost daily was followed
by the boy out to her car in the morning, silently escorted at a five foot
remove or so, and in the night he was there again, standing in her parking
space, watching for her. He sat back by the lockers in the dim basement by the
dryers when they came down with their clothes. One of them found him in her car
one day, just sitting. He’d asked her how her radio worked he hadn’t been able
to get it to.
He jumped from the couch, like he
shouldn’t be there. I closed the door behind me.
“What?” he said. Must have been
something in my look, but it didn’t have to be. Everything was attached to that
question.
“I guess it’s over,” I said. “Isn’t
it?”
Perez sat down slowly; he put both
arms out along the top of the couch, something like holding it and everything
in the room in place for the interlude. His expression might have begged more,
except that he was looking at the same thing I was. I imagine even now he was
as relieved.
I had never seen him cry except when
he’d been restrained, what seemed a long time ago. I’d felt sad then. He was
crucified on the floor. It is a common theory in the field that some kids get
restrained like that so someone will touch them.
He leaned forward, elbows on his
knees– his face puffed into an awful smirk of attempted restraint. He brought
up his fingers and let go, at first only sobbing quietly. Then he was making
small unsuppressed whelps that turned up at the end of each exhalation.
He dried off by using the backs of
his hands. I’d gone for the toilet paper roll and set it on the couch arm.
“I thought I’s gone make it,” he
snuffled. “I wanted to make it.”
He began once more to cry.
“This is a setback.” My voice was
almost too small, I was speaking to myself, really.
“All them guys say I wunt ga-gone
make it. I’s gone do it, prove’m sa-s’-something.”
I drove him to the shelter. I told
him who to ask for. He’d packed a small bag. The snow, and this was the first
time that year, was flying. It would be a long cold snap.
I would find out that he waited for
me to drive away and walked on, walked out that night. In fact, he walked out
every night, refused to sleep “with bums” for months, many nights of which
recorded wind chills of worse than thirty below. He was seen often by people I
knew, same posture, same clothes. All of his effects remained. My only
encounter was in a bus station and I’d made the mistake of chattering to him
without noticing the big brother in the ostentatious waist-length fur who’d
just bought their tickets to Detroit.
Guy had brought some pathetic potted banana plant, too, and when he turned, I
knew. I knew why Perez was trying not to answer my questions, was trying to be
a stranger.
Mr. Smooth was on a sales trip with
his little disposable drug salesman.
“Stay outa trouble huh?” I
whispered.
Perez even got a hint of a smile.
“Oh..ah,” he said. He nodded.
The girlfriend and I had finally
done it in. I sublet my apartment anyway, though. I sublet it to some friends
who used my furniture and let me keep my stuff hanging in the closet corner and
I lived out of my car, used the tender mercies of friends some nights and slept
on their floors and couches. I had thought I was going to make it, too.
By the following summer I had
recovered some and lived somewhere; I saw Perez. Only I didn’t know right away.
He was beat-boxing out on the sidewalk as I drove past, and he was with some
smaller, much younger, boys. I didn’t recognize him because he was wearing an
affair on his head he might have called a lid which more nearly resembled Red
Skelton’s creased hat when he did Clem Kadiddlehopper. It fit about as well,
and Perez wore dark granny spectacles from a Woodstock garage sale. He had become Shakey
Jake.
I kept driving.
When I was cleaning out the closets
to move into my new place, I found both pair of pants I accused him of
stealing. They had been hanging on the bars under suitcoats. There was even a
five dollar bill in one of the pockets. Perez had a code. I recall thinking,
still standing there in a fresh burn of shame, he wouldn’t sleep in shelters
either.
A couple years from that point, I
will learn he has been convicted of attempted murder and sent to the prison
where he once sought his father. Holding the gun for someone, as usual, he
panicked. He will call me and we will talk and he will say he should have
listened but I don’t encourage that. I’m not real interested in hearing it. I
don’t believe he can hew to much, beyond the momentary, anyway.
“Try to do for yourself,” I say.
“Face things there.”
He says “Yeah, ah...”
To Perez, it’s a nice try. He
wants me to write. I want to say more, but I don’t. He deserves to hear
something more from my heart; But I can’t decide if it would do him any good.
The opportunity passes.
*
*
*
I have a girlfriend now who believes
we should bring in street paupers and feed them, and she thinks we should talk
to them and hear their stories. This is no idle distraction for her: it is as
strong in her as any spirit I have known, but I don’t agree, completely.
I tried, even when I should not have. I’m not weak,though. I would not
say reckless, either - so sure, that is, about my power to influence anyone
else that I would try it again.
I tried. Maybe that’s all I wanted
to be able to say.
It’s someone else’s turn.
(back to top)
