1
1
People ask me about the time I mashed a gun into that girl’s cheek, so I guess
I’ll just start there. I remembered everything he taught me.
He said this:
“Swallow once and be dead, motherfucker.”
Can you imagine someone saying that? To a kid? Believe me, the first time I
heard that I wanted to run back to the suburbs and watch a Brady Bunch marathon
just to cleanse my trembling soul. But he said it over and over—“Swallow once and
be dead, motherfucker,” hundreds of times. Sometimes in a row—a chant or a mantra
or a fucking prayer. He said it so much that I actually got used to it, like a vacuum
cleaner, buzzing around the house. It bothers you at first, but then something happens;
the buzz turns into a hum and then into a lullaby and pretty soon you can’t get a
decent night of shuteye without that goddamn thing singing in your earhole.
Swallow once and be dead, motherfucker.
Oh, god, it’s so fucked up.
2
He could tell when I was still thinking, so he’d just grit his tiny yellow teeth
and yell it again, “Swallow once and be dead, motherfucker.” It meant I was
supposed to go cold. Be as close to dead as an alive person could be. Take every
emotion inside my shaky little body and swallow it like a glass of formaldehyde so
that I could do only what the coldest, deadest people would do. After that swallow I
wasn’t allowed to think about our brick elementary school or about Tatiana Kramer
naked and pissing on the toilet or about the tulips that lined up like soldiers in the
battlefield of our perfect brick suburb. I wasn’t allowed to think about my mother or
the combination of the setting sun and the Boston skyline that gave me a shiver down
my spine.
And I couldn’t think about turning around: “The only way little niggaz like
you get caught,” he told me, “is when little niggaz stop halfway.”
He said that to me, Bear Lopez, the supremely fucked up whiteboy
suburbanite, shitscared at the edge of Boston. His name was Stoop and I owe him my
life.
3
2
It seems important, almost vital, now, to tell you that by the time I turned
sixteen I’d jacked off exactly one-thousand-five-hundred-and-ninety-nine times; I
kept a tally on a sheet of paper that hung in my closet.
“What is that thing?” Mother asked with her hands on her hips.
“A Mayan calendar,” I lied.
“A what?”
“It tells us when the world ends.”
“Ohhh,” she said, in that fake, hybrid-Boston/Long Island accent that she
picked up Godknowswhere. “You’re very, very funny, Bear.”
My mother, for the record, was not from Boston. Or Long Island. My
mother—Lydia Figueroa Lopez—was a Mexican. From Los Angeles. Living in
Boston. She’d never been to New York.
“You’re always up to something,” she’d say, petting my head, scratching my
scalp with her long press-on nails.
She was right. I was always up to something, but so was she, barely making it
home those days. Forever at work. She called it “making a life for us,” but the FBI
later called it something entirely different. Back then nobody knew what she did for a
living—not even her own sister, who called every now and then asking how we were.
The truth is, we were fine. I stayed out of my mother’s shit and she stayed out of
4
mine. But every now and then she’d tiptoe upstairs to my room to poke around my
ribs and check my belly for signs of malnourishment.
“You eating ok?” she said. “You know, we have more than cereal in this
house.”
Blegh, she was such a Jew! Her round face betrayed her pointed Mexican features.
Her lips were stung by bees.
“Look,” she said. “It’s an apple,” holding the waxy fruit up to the light.
“I know, Ma,” I said. “It’s an apple.”
When she moved her head, her hair shook back and forth like a block of red
Jell-O and that was more than enough to mesmerize people, especially men, who’d
stop to watch her from the moment they found her jiggling down one end of the
sidewalk until her bouncy figure shook off into the distance.
Mother smelled like expensive perfume. She wore lots of makeup and was
never seen without designer clothes and big, ridiculous sunglasses. She never really
bought me anything, even for Christmas. Or Hanukah. Or whatever the fuck it was a
couple of Jewish Mexicans were supposed to celebrate. Sometimes, at home, while
she sipped on a martini in her silk robe and red, fuzzy slippers I had a hard time
believing she was my mother at all. I had no proof. My mother—a dark, Mexican
woman—looked more Jewish than most of the real Jews on our block. In fact, she
was probably the most robust, healthy and well-tanned yenta in Boston. She could
talk to anyone about anything and I, on the other hand, was thin and sickly—the
5
complexion of a dead man’s leg. I could not make sense of my peers and so I spent
most of my time by myself, counting the days until I could be somewhere else.
I understood that given a choice, my mother would have picked another son,
one who she could have brought to parties to show off. Once we walked in the door,
the party would stop, a crowd would gather and people would say, “Wow, look at that
boy. Isn’t he something?” Sometimes I’d catch her looking at me sideways, as if she
wondered where I came from. I could tell that sometimes she wasn’t on board with
the idea that we swam in the same gene pool.
6
3
At school, I was also an oddity—a misfit, an outcast, a dropped potato in a field
of tulips, born without a tribe, left for dead in the cavern of inhumanity, standing in
the crowded hallways of that School for the Dumb and Uncivil, chewing at my
fleshless thumbs, waiting under trembling fluorescent lights for the perfect group of
humans to come along and snatch me away.
Snatch is the wrong word. Take. No, that’s not true, either. Take implies an
unwillingness to go, but my mother said that go was the only thing I ever wanted,
ever since my mouth could form the word.
“Go, Ma,” I said, crawling toward a crack of sun.
“Go,” she answered. “Did you hear that, Bobby? Go! He said go.”
“Yes,” my father said. “So cute.”
So adorable, the way I tried to crawl from the living room floor toward the
front door, the crack of space, like a mosquito to a florescent lamp. My mother said
she wondered what would happen if she actually did let me go.
“Oh, Bear, I bet you would have tried to crawl to the Atlantic Ocean if we
opened that door,” she said. “Bloody knees and all.”
“Go,” I said, fingers stretched, clawing at that wedge of light.
The other fifth graders, even the fat ones, were somehow very athletic. Don’t
get me wrong: I can play basketball! But only during the winter, when everybody else
is sick! I am sick too, of course, but it doesn’t seem to effect me the way it does
7
others; running around, leaking fluid, coughing on everything ... But I just wasn’t
interested in sports. On the bases, I’d space out, dreaming of looking up skirts. I
wanted to see vaginas.
Once, on second base, waiting for the game to start, I watched Tatiana Kramer
walking with her friends. I had never seen skin so milky. It was Russian skin, and the
way it shined disgusting in the sun I truly believed that she was made of porcelain.
The kickball field sunk down like a war bunker and the sidewalk next to it sloped up,
so if you looked hard enough, with a little bit of luck, whatever skirt walked by was
yours to look inside.
That day, Bubba (the only black kid in our sixth grade) and Marky (the Russian
who never played a game without punching someone in the face) got into it pretty
bad; the game stopped and most of the kids crowded around, yelling, thirsty for a
fight.
But as the crowd engulfed the two fighters, I broke away to watch Tatiana
walking up the sidewalk; I moved toward the fence to get a closer look. With each of
Tatiana’s steps I saw a little more leg and I lost a tiny bit of breath. The crowd
cheered for the fight while I watched Tatiana’s thigh shining the palest color I’d ever
seen. When she came closer I caught a glimpse of her yellow panties from
underneath, which reminded me of a little canary in a field of snow. Isn’t that funny,
the image of a tiny bird hopping around in the glowing white field? Oh god, that
stupid thing jumping around in the snow tickled the inside of my head and—
SMACK—my ear exploded when the ball hit me into a single burst of noise and pain
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and the next thing I knew I was on the ground with Bubba, Mark, and a bunch of
other idiots looking down at me and laughing.
I cried out of frustration and anger, but tried as hard as I could to hide, although
I couldn’t get up or move. My attempt to silence myself only manifested as an inward
honking sound, which made the boys laugh harder. Through the cluster of my
classmates I could see Tatiana’s red hair. The sight of her little pale face with a
concerned look made me start crying all over again.
“Move over,” Tatiana said, pushing past the boys, who shouted a jumble of
words, a mish-mash of expletives—Pussygirlfriendbitchcryingasshole—while she
stood among the savages to see if I was OK.
“I’m Fine,” I said, smiling, waving to show her my pristine condition.
Snots dried inside my nose and my ear felt like a t-bone running through a
grinder. I could not move my body. The world felt lonely, and I was too close to it,
lying horizontally against the Earth while everybody else stayed vertical. But with
Tatiana there—her little Russian freckles on her little Russian face, the way she
kneeled beside me—things felt different. She sat down in front of me, her skirt
inching up her knees, my laser eyes burning a hole into the crotch of her panties, I
could just make out something inside, skin that I had never seen and I began to
hyperventilate … and fade out, like the end of a long, exciting movie.
9
4
I stayed home sick the next day and watched a documentary on TV about a
group of explorers who traveled through the Brazilian jungle with a camera crew,
trying to find one of the last native tribes. The white men trudged through the trees,
leaving gifts along the way for the natives—knives, pouches made of leather, sturdy
bags for carrying food—so the tribe would find them and know the group’s mission
was a peaceful one.
They traveled through the jungle for days without finding much, until one day,
early in the morning, one of the men heard rustling in the bushes. Finally, they heard
the sounds of human life. But the noises were more like unrecognizable hoots and
hollers, like packs of hungry apes.
“Shh,” the man in the front said to his group, crouching behind a large rock.
The group took his lead and also crouched. A second later they heard the flit
of arrows darting past. They were under attack. For several minutes, the camera
shook and pointed mostly at the ground. And just as soon as the attack began, it was
over; the natives finally retreated.
The camera crew regrouped and the men looked around at the wreckage from
the attack. They collected a dozen poison arrows that had missed them only by a few
inches.
One of the men, a chubby one with a beard and a khaki explorer hat, grinned
into the camera, holding up an arrow with pride.
10
“Lookit that,” he said. “Did’ja catch that? It was a close one, wasn’t it?”
It was close. One of those arrows could have punctured his chest, sending a
lethal dose of poison into his lungs. Even after that, they went ahead bravely to find
the natives.
When they reached the settlement, a group of mud huts, the natives were
wary. They flexed their muscles and clutched their bows. The group of white
explorers offered gifts. And medicine. When they gained trust, they treated the
natives with anti-bacterial medication. The native children were naked, except for
animal hides wrapped around their necks and long earrings made of bone.
The camera crew filmed the natives dropping their guard. No longer warriors,
they smiled and laughed. The explorers applied medicine to the natives’ dry, broken
skin with cotton swabs. They all seemed to get along okay. One of the white men
looked into the camera and declared their meeting a victory. They made contact with
the last Amazonian tribe.
But then the movie cut to a scene showing the tribe’s leader—older, dressed in
Western clothes. His shirt said Disneyland in thick, cartoonish letters. The narrator, a
man with a wobbly European accent, said that shortly after the group made contact
with the natives, the tribe died out, one-by-one, mostly of chicken pox, except for
their leader, who stuck around by himself.
The white man and the native, both old now, sat in a hut. It was the same
white guy who lead the group of explorers years ago. He held out a small table clock
toward the native, who looked at it without interest. And the white man held out
11
toothpaste. The native nodded. It went on like that for a while, the native waiting for
the white guy to hand him another object and when he did, he smiled and shook his
head, feigning interest. The white guy looked happy, every now and then saying
something like: “He doesn’t know what an airplane is, can you believe that?”
Sometimes the leader nodded his head in agreement and laughed. The white man’s
face—tanned, with deep, rugged lines—curled upwards in glee.
The white man thought his movie was about finding a tribe, getting close to a
dying group of natives. He thought his movie would show his rugged side, his
handsome, tanned face covered in a week-long beard next to the native’s dark, bony
face, his red-flecked eyes and rotted teeth. To him, the movie would represent a
perfect portrait of two worlds coming together—the story of one culture blending
with another, despite the violent clash of tradition and modernity. But his film didn’t
show that. It didn’t show that at all. It showed something awkward and ugly and dark,
but I wasn’t sure what.
12
5
I stopped going to math class, not because I disliked math but because they put
me in with the retarded kids. It wasn’t hard, math, but the tests—these 60-second
quizzes, a flurry of ridiculous questions, thinned my blood and I nearly experienced
heart failure at the beginning of every exam.
Things weren’t much better at home. After our Hasidic Jewish neighbors
blamed me for knocking down their sukkah (I was trying to find my cigarettes hidden
under their flowerpot but they built a whole goddamn Jewish village back there
overnight), my mother decided to never again leave me unsupervised. As luck would
have it, Tatiana’s grandmother let me spend the afternoons in her care, a term open to
interpretation; the old lady emerged from her room only to fix dinner and to pee and
we had most of the day by ourselves.
We played office—Tatiana the boss and I, the slave, whose only duty was to
pick up discarded items. Sometimes she’d remove her shoe and throw it across the
room and yell, “Get it,” her red hair glowing into the light.
Happily, I fetched.
The first time we played hospital, I was the nurse. Tatiana covered my face in
makeup and insisted that I wear her frilly white Sunday dress, a request I didn’t mind
so much. Tatiana, the patient, laid on the sofa and took off her shirt.
“I’m sick,” she said, pointing to her stomach. When I held my stethoscope to
her little freckled belly, she sprang up and ran.
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“I have to pee,” she said, urgently waving her hand for me to follow, closing the
door behind us, kicking off her pants, sliding down her panties and sitting on the
toilet. As she began to pee, my face burned, the energy flushing from my body like
toilet water. But I felt a certain power in the presence of a girl, pissing on the toilet. I
probably could have ripped the sink out of the wall with my bare hands.
I glanced at myself in the mirror, ashamed when I saw myself in a dress, my
lips muddy red, cheeks on fire with a bright pink blush. My mind became a
sandstorm, information blowing quickly past my grasp. When I reached up to grab a
thought, like a piece of paper, the gust only blew harder. My heart beat double-time.
When Tatiana finished, she wiggled out of her pants, stood up naked from the waist
down and walked toward me. I couldn’t understand her body. It was like mine, but
pale and freckled. Her little belly looked empty. Her chest flat. I couldn’t tell if I
wanted to run away or run inside of her. She hugged me, letting my fingers glide over
her bare skin, and I nearly fainted. I shook myself free from her grasp and vomited
violently into the toilet.
14
6
And there was the last straw—Anthony, the bullheaded Russian who one day
thought it would be funny to throw water balloons at me as I walked home from
school. I knew he was going to do it right when I saw him and his stupid friend
Katya. At least with idiotic people, you always knew what they were going to do.
There was no surprise. They had no subtlety. If you saw two stupid Russians walking
toward you with water balloons, you knew as a matter of fact that they were going to
throw them at your face.
So right when I saw them I decided very quickly in a split second that before he
could hurl one of the balloons I was going to walk up to Anton and punch him in the
face. He was about a foot taller and wider than I was. He had a Russian accent, which
made him that much scarier than the average 15-year-old. But once I got the idea of
attacking the oafish Russian in my head, it was as solid as a freight train.
So right when he got that idiotic look in his eye, I walked toward him. He stood
there with Katya, the lanky Russian who never spoke, who nobody even suspected of
speaking English at all. They stood there, smiling, proud of themselves, in complete
silence, but somehow saying, “We will make him wet” with their huge round heads,
bloated with stupidity.
As I approached, their pride turned to confusion. They wanted me to run away,
but I didn’t. I did the opposite. And before I could talk myself out of anything, I
cocked back, which seemed to be in slow motion and then let go, which seemed to be
15
in fast motion. When my fist reached Anton’s face, the surge of excitement was
almost unbearable and I nearly shit myself.
My bony fist against his doughy face made a slapping sound, his face crunching
inward. After I punched him, I felt a surprising amount of joy. The happiness nearly
knocked me down.
I wanted more. So while Anton, broken, slumped in a perplexed stupor, I
stepped back onto a small ledge behind me, jumped in the air and kicked the surly
Russian square in the mouth. It was overkill, of course, but it was something exciting
that I had seen in karate movies--a technique that I learned, practiced and perfected at
that very moment. The point of my big toe landed directly on Anton’s teeth and I
could feel a sharp bite through my shoe. The whole time Katya just stood there, dazed
in bewilderment. Anton fell to the ground with his hands covering his face, a crimson
swath streaming from the side of his palms.
Anton quickly stopped holding his face and got back on his feet. Katya stood
frozen, tensed up, waiting for direction from Anton.
I ran.
It was the fastest I had run to that date. My feet barely touched the ground as I
glided down the sidewalk, through front yards, knocking over trash cans. As I ran I
could hear Anton and Katya behind me, yelling, “You little fucking prick!”
My heart beat like my innards were made of hummingbirds and I ran down
Beacon Street to the impossible flight of stairs, which I bounced up in seconds. I
knew that Anton and Katya were nearly out of breath because I was out of breath and
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their bodies were mostly made of fat from daily six course meals of meat, potatoes
and butter. But the faster I ran, the faster they ran. When I reached the top of the stairs
I jumped up through a patch of grass into an abandoned apartment building to the
spot where Jeremy hid his stacks of Hustler magazines.
I laid in the dark, clutching my stomach. My throat burned and my sides felt
like they were being stabbed. It was the most alive I had felt since probably I was
born. I laid there alone in the dark for hours, my irregular breath escaping from my
body at sporadic intervals, pretty sure that a Russian search party had formed,
sweeping the area until they found me by myself, there shivering with my head
between my knees.
17
7
I spent most of the last three weeks left of ninth grade in the back of the
classroom watching Dracul, the Romanian. He had a bowl cut and wore thick glasses
and sweaters with holiday-themed prints. He stayed in his own world most of the
time, alone and happy, even though he was picked on by most of the kids in school. It
seemed like he spent half the week stuffed in a locker or in the bathroom wiping
liquidy shit from his pants. But he always came to class smiling, as if whatever
horrible thing had happened the day before was gone, and the new day was going to
bring good fortune and cheer. It made me wonder about Romania. It must have been a
horrible place that being stuffed into an American locker 165 days out of the year was
an acceptable way to live.
Our teacher—we called him Dicknose—was already three minutes late for
class. When that happened, which it rarely did, you could see the restlessness begin to
build in the students’ faces like the first rumbling of an storm; in just minutes the
storm would brew into an earth-splitting act of destruction.
Dracul stared at the fluorescent lights, every few minutes breaking his gaze to
look forward, blink his eyes and look up at the lights again, sometimes letting out a
little giggle. The sharp light was a drug.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote his name in big letters—“DRACUL”—
and scribbled some words underneath.
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Remember your brother, the police officer
came that day?
He said he lost some toes in the line of duty.
He came to class that day and scared all the kids
with his gun and twitchy fingers.
He yelled at Kathy when she sneezed one
too many times.
He told us to leave you
alone.
Dracul, what’s in those lights
that we can’t see?
Is there something we don’t know
in there?
And what’s it like,
the view from inside of a locker?
I got up and walked over to Drakul, sat still at his desk, blinking his eyes.
“Here,” I said, and slid the paper in front of him. He blinked his eyes until
they were in focus and leaned his head down toward the page.
“Look!” He screamed. “Lookit!”
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“Stop it, Drakul, stop it,” I said, putting hand on his shoulder to calm him,
shaking my head. “It’s for you. It’s only for you. Just stop.”
But it was too late. The rest of the class was up out of their seats, fighting for
the piece of paper.
“I want one,” Michelle said, and in a matter of seconds the rest of the class
was clawing at my shirt, asking for their own pieces of paper with their names on
them.
The thing was, all I did was write words on a page next to their names,
something they could have easily done it themselves, but for some reason it was a
skill to them, like I was some sort of shaman or a healer.
I did Michelle’s name next and when she saw that I started with a line about
her slanty eyes she let out a little scream of joy. “Keep going!” she said.
By the time I got to Bubba, my hand cramped, but I didn’t stop. I kept
going—Mark, Ellis, Kenitra, Evan, Eugene .... I must have scribbled names for all 43
of my classmates by the time Dicknose finally showed up.
And when he did, he stood in the doorway with his tight curly hair and little
red face like an angry planet on the verge of explosion. There were some days, maybe
when he was angry, where his nose looked more disproportionate than others. More
dickish. That was one of those days. Everyone ran back to their assigned seats.
Drakul blinked at the fluorescent lights.
Dicknose stopped at Jeremy’s desk, plucking up his paper and where I’d
written a poem about his Hasidic father. I was proud of that one, but Dicknose wasn’t,
20
especially since he saw that everybody had a similar sheet of paper on their desks. He
walked to each desk, collecting their papers. If they put theirs away, he just stood
there with his hand out until they produced it. He stood at my desk for about five
seconds before he spoke up.
“Yours,” he said with his hand out. He smelled spicy, like he’d bathed in
cinnamon before he got to class. I didn’t dare look into his little eyes.
“I made them,” I said. “I don’t have one.”
In the midst of a deadly silence, Bubba screamed out, “He’s a poet!”
The class erupted in laughter. Dicknose slammed his hand out onto my desk.
“This is a science class,” he said, “not a – a—”. He couldn’t find the word.
I laughed, first out of my nose and then in rolled out of my mouth in a wave of
sound with jumped around the room, the rest of the class holding their stomachs. I
prayed to Jesus that he would grant me the strength to remain calm and stop laughing.
But the thought of Jesus, his lanky body, beard and sad bloody face, just made me
laugh harder. I looked up to face my teacher. He was not pleased and he stood there
with his face redder than a ripened tomato, with his finger pointing toward the door. I
picked up my book, put it in my bag and walked into the hallway. As I left the room,
my classmates stretched their palms toward me so I could slap them.
21
8
The phone rang. It was my aunt Helen.
“So, I mean, does she look alright?” she asked, in a quick, breathy sentence.
Helen lived in New Mexico. She married my uncle, Pedro, a lazy architect, who
moved the family to the Southwest because adobes were pretty simple to build.
“Is she sick?” she asked.
My mother looked fine, I said, but the trouble was I hadn’t seen her in a few
days. I didn’t tell Helen that.
“She’s fine,” I said.
Then came a barrage of questions: Does she have bruises? Does she walk
different? Does she wear short skirts? What does she smell like? Is her makeup, you
know, weird? Does she bring men around?
The answers were like this:
No.
I don’t know.
Not really.
Rain.
Yes.
No.
I told mostly the truth.
My mother hadn’t brought a man home since father left when I was six. She
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said she had enough of men. Better off without them.
Helen asked what kind of clothes my mother wore, what her face looked like,
what kind of perfume she had on.
“Does she ever stumble or walk funny?” she asked, forcefully chewing on a
piece of food. I had never seen my aunt Helen, but I imagined she weighed 400
pounds and never left the bed. “So where does she work again?”
I made an excuse and hung up the phone.
23
9
On the bus ride to the Museum of Modern Art, Bubba made fun of the
Romanian kid’s accent; the Romanian kid screamed in Romanian; Jennifer shrieked
because Jeremy’s webbed fingers came too close and Persephone the Australian cried
because her parents transplanted her from the island to America against her will and
she had been wailing ever since. All the while, I sat, watching the scenery, trying not
to get motion sickness on a big yellow bus full of semi-retarded kids who I tried to
ignore as we passed the slow, deli-ridden streets of the suburbs.
We reached a stretch of apartments that ran along the C line train on Beacon
Street and the roar of my peers became louder, each kid with his own treacherous
decibel. The driver smiled under his gray mustache and Red Sox hat and I counted
trees as not to get sick. Brookline reminded me of a slow, easy dream with buildings
made of large misshapen rocks dressed regally in snow. Old Jewish men walked
slowly to the bank. Russian women went in packs, flicking cigarette butts into the
black, snowy gutters. You can see the air in Brookline--thin and crisp as cartoon
electricity—blue and jagged. Everything is blue. And everything is green. And white.
And crooked. And strange. And foreign. The Jews walk too slow, steeped in
knowledge, hushed by the weight of their ideas. Even when alone they’re crowded by
traditions that follow behind them like flocks of sheep. The gentiles always walk
together in Brookline. Without exception or shame.
“That’s the way they are,” Mother said. “They’re a needy bunch.”
24
We’re a needy bunch, Mother. We’re Gentiles. We’re not Jews, Mother.
“We’re certainly not Gentiles, either, Bear.”
“Then what are we?”
Mother hated that question, because she had no idea.
Further up Beacon Street, Boston’s skyline became visible; the walls of trees
thinned. The air turned grayer. Old black men bundled in knit caps and smoked
cigarettes on the corner, eyeing cars as they passed. Young Puerto Rican kids drove
their bikes recklessly in the icy streets. Twitchy white women pushed babyless
strollers into dark alleyways. A division becomes visible at the wall of the city where
the slowness of Brookline moves quicker. The world is more immediate; the slow
stroll becomes the quick jog, the skin tone darkens while the straight-lipped smile of
carelessness firms into a frown. The city is different. And indifferent. Boston is a
meatless wishbone held between two gigantic hands—a deep brown one and a pale
white one—puling for the biggest piece.
25
10
When the bus screeched up to Huntington Ave., Ms. Sanchez—a moldbreakingly unmiserable human being, even for a teacher—ushered us out, smiling
like it was Christmas. She led our class like Jesus did his disciples, controlling the
maniacal flock using just her smile a strange glint in her eye that relayed a sweet,
godlike violence. Our class lined up and walked raggedly toward the museum with
Ms. Sanchez in the lead.
The class forged ahead while I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, entertained
by the angry men in scarves jockeying for position down the sidewalk. In the
distance, a basketball court rumbled with energy. Even from the sidewalk I heard the
squeak of tennis shoes against pavement. As my line of classmates vanished into the
distance, I stayed, listening to the cannons of a drum beat booming from an oversized
radio, and I walked toward the court full of shirtless black men playing basketball in
the freezing cold.
I noticed a man leaning against a tree, watching—pretty sure he was watching
me. He must have been there since the bus pulled up, but I wasn’t sure how I didn’t
notice a dark black man with bright red basketball shorts and a black sweatshirt with
the hood pulled over his head, smoking a cigarette. When we made eye contact he
stamped his cigarette, turned around and ran toward the basketball court, pulling his
sweatshirt and shirt over his head and throwing them on the bleachers, exposing the
spotty, black muscled flesh of his back. When the game started, I walked closer,
26
leaving my class in the distance.
Up close, the music sounded like a jungle war—the loud but indecipherable
chanting, the urgency of the beats like footsteps running toward a tribe clashing with
another tribe. The flesh on flesh of combat. The slicing. Blood leaking over thick,
ripped skin. I sat on the bleachers pretending to watch the game, but really just
listening, trying to piece together this new language.
“There are eight million stories in the naked city/ Some ice cold and told
without pity/ about the mean streets and the ghetto culture/ the pimps, the pushers,
the sharks and vultures./ Things that happen when it reaches dark/ You got to be
down, you have to have strength/ if you’re gonna’ survive past 110th.”
This was not music. Or this was not the music my father played when he sat in
the living room on his couch, humming along to the record player. This was not the
flamboyant energy of Fats Domino or the smoothness of The Four Seasons or the
lustful sleaziness of Richie Valens or the glowing chicken grease of Elvis or the
drugged energy of the Rolling Stones. This music was all of those things. And
something else.
While I sat on the bleachers and listened, one-by-one, players—sweating black
men with serious eyes—dropped out of the game and stood around in groups,
drinking from beer bottles covered with brown paper bags. Before I could make
myself invisible the dark, shirtless man wearing red basketball shorts came toward
27
me.
“Sup, little nigga,” he said, taking a drink from his bottle. His knotted chest
rippled with scars that snaked up to his neck. A doughy nose cocked slightly to the
left, and a pair of purplish lips ballooned out from his profile. A bath of steam rose
from his torso into the air. I followed a trail of tight curly hair that ran from his belly
button down to his shorts.
“Damn, what you looking at, yo?” he said, lips curled in disgust.
I froze, wordless.
“Hey, lil man, can I ask you a question,” he said. “Who you think won?”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“The game, nigga,” he said. “Who won it?”
“You did?” I said. The right answer. The man threw his bottle on the ground
and spun around on one foot, letting out a holler, “Woo-wee! You hear that my
niggas? This little whiteboy said we won!”
What a strange, strange man, I thought. The way he watched and loomed over
me. The way he carried a presence about him, an aura, something royal, the way he
commanded attention, maybe.
I knew the ghetto only from other kids at my school who were bussed in from
the projects, like Earl Simmons, a quiet genius who knew the answers to everything.
Dicknose hated him for that. One time, Earl, who always sat in the back of the class,
fell asleep and started to snore. Dicknose flipped out and ran to Earl’s desk with a
ruler.
28
“Earl!” he said, slapping the ruler onto the desk next to Earl’s head.
Earl shot up, a trail of drool running from his mouth to his forearm.
The class erupted in laughter.
“Quiet,” Dicknose said, glaring around the room. “Earl, we were talking about
barometric pressure. I don’t suppose you know what that is.”
Earl, still groggy, sat up in his chair.
“You mean atmospheric pressure,” Earl said, confused.
“Well, yes, but we call it barometric pressure.”
“Ok,” Earl said. “But scientists call it atmospheric pressure. It’s the weight of
the atmosphere.”
Dicknose’s face turned red, his body trembled and he returned to the front of
the class, barely able to teach while Earl drifted slowly back to sleep.
One day, Earl didn’t show up for school. Rumor had it that he got jumped on
the walk back from the bus stop to his apartment and spent the rest of his life
breathing into a machine at Boston General.
But this man in front of me, this scarred and rough looking man, this man who
watched me get off the school bus and saw my class leave me there in the park, was
much different than Earl. This strange man was a mysterious, astral king of the
ghetto.
29
11
The man ran over to a pile of clothes and put on his tank top and sweatshirt,
grabbed a duffle bag and produced a pack of cigarettes, flicking one out and walking
back toward me.
“You ever seen one of these?” the man asked, handing me a magazine with the
picture of a naked black woman with thighs bigger than my entire body. Hell no, I
hadn’t seen one of those.
“Yeah,” I said, nervous, stomach quivering.
Something about the man’s eyes didn’t sit right—glassy and yellowish, flecked
with red where the white part should have been. He never stopped smiling, but it
wasn’t the happy kind of smile—more the kind of smile you get when you’re so
angry that your body starts to laugh out of shock. And then he leaned toward me, a
white cloud of breath traveling with him toward my face that smelled like rotted fish,
feet, cardboard, coconut, sidewalk, pickles, cigarettes, alcohol and another stench that
I couldn’t pinpoint.
“Do you believe in magic, little nigga?” he said.
His speech sang with a certain cadence, but I didn’t understand where to chime
in, when he was joking, when he wasn’t. I didn’t know when I was supposed to
answer or when to listen. He laughed and reached into his bag again, this time pulling
out a dull black gun that looked dusty as the lead from a #2 pencil. My brain felt like
it exploded in my chest and settled into a pile in my stomach. My heart stopped for a
30
second and then started up again at a rate that didn’t seem possible, like a manic
hummingbird trying to escape the prison of my ribcage. I needed water, but the man
didn’t seem to notice, the gun resting in his palm, like a display case. He shook the
gun around, flashed a smile and placed it quickly back into his waistband.
“My magic wand,” he said, grinning, pinching my shoulder between his fat
fingers.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, sorry for myself, wondering what my
classmates were doing in the Museum of Modern Art. I sat on the bleachers thinking
of Tatiana, her auburn hair—my entire life filled now a mystery, full of mysterious
idiots. In the presence of this deranged, gun-toting psychopath, everything seemed
impossible. So impossible that it became possible again. It’s confusing to think about
it that way, but I felt tears welling up, unsure if I should wipe them away or just let
them go.
“What’s your name?” I asked, my mouth filled with sand and airplane glue.
“Why, nigga, you a cop?” the man said, laughing. He pulled the hood over his
head his head, his dark face hidden in shadow, like some sort of urban boogieman.
“Stoop,” he said. “You call me Stoop.”
I wiped the tears from my face with one hand and extended for a handshake
with the other; Stoop grabbed his magazine and strutted back toward the basketball
court, howling with laughter, his shorts hanging so low that I could see the dark crack
of his splotchy brown ass.
31
12
I’d been thinking of my father lately. I missed him, mostly at strange times.
Taking a shit. In the middle of math class. Watching T.V. I remember the way my
parents used to fight. About money. Sometimes the fights started in the house and
spilled into the backyard with a dramatic tumble; a neighbor peeking his head over
the fence to watch the masses of flesh—loud, intertwined, dirty and wet—rolling
through the yard. Sometimes the police showed up, but mostly they didn’t. The more
regular the fights became, the less the neighbors seemed to care. Their fights became
part of the neighborhood. I dreamt about their fights. One in particular. A nasty one.
I woke up to my mother screaming, got out of bed barely able to open my
eyes and walked from my bedroom, down the hall, toward the screams. In the
kitchen, my father sat with his head in his palms at the table by the refrigerator. He
looked small that way.
“We need more fucking money than this,” my mother said, standing next to
the table stacked with pennies. She slammed her hand down onto the penny stack and
it made a sound like a truck backing into a house, the pile of change leaping into the
air, landing back on the table, some of it showering onto the linoleum floor.
My father sat there without moving; still, with his head in his palms. My
mother stood, muscles taut, face fixed on my father, as if she was waiting for an
answer. Animals, ready to pounce.
32
My father stood up slowly, keeping his head down, examining the mess on the
floor, and slowly, he walked to the front door. My mother watched him, her face soft
and doughy. The front door shut and his car started. I could hear the engine shake and
then rattle off into the distance. Mother put her head in her hands and started to cry.
When she saw me standing there in the hallway she wiped away her tears and went
into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. I walked to the table littered with
pennies that spilled onto the floor, the quiet of the house cut in half by a nagging buzz
in the ceiling. I kneeled on the ground and picked up the pennies, one-by-one. I put
each one in my mouth, the sour bronze stinging my tongue. I filled my throat until my
cheeks puffed, until I wheezed and gagged, but, still, I ate them all.
33
13
The spring trees bloomed fully and Brookline looked like the kind of painting
a grandmother would keep in her apartment. Snow melted; the suburbs turned pink,
green and yellow and after a long, harsh winter in Massachusetts, the town let out a
collective sigh.
I walked up Beaconsfield Road, trying to figure out a way to tell my mother
that I had been suspended from school. I did nothing wrong, just wrote some poems
for girls during science class. But I was failing school. Not just in my marks, but in
the sense that I didn’t understand anything about the rules of engagement that took
place behind the brick walls of the institution. The groups moved past me like sharks.
When I got too close one of them would turn its slippery body to show me the power
of its jaws. I wasn’t sure whether to be frightened or whether I should point out that
they weren’t sharks at all. Or even fish. They were boys and girls, pretending in a big
brick building that they were something much more frightening.
The principal, Mr. Gary, who wore a mustache like a walrus, said that to make
something of my life would be a “near feat of impossibility.”
On the sidewalk I watched a line of ants traveling across the cement into a bed
of flowers in front of a house. We had big ants, black, the size of Tic-Tacs. If you put
your finger up close, they’d latch onto you with their pinchers. It didn’t hurt, but it
was just gross enough to make the girl you were with run in the other direction. The
ants went so straight that from afar they looked like a crack in the sidewalk. Up close
34
they were disorganized and some even moved against the pack. A pair of ants
wrestled about two inches away from the rest. I put my finger in the middle of the
succession and they scattered. One of the ants, a little one, flipped on its back. Its
little legs scrambled in the air to find solid ground. The ant shook its body until it
found its footing, but the other ants had already made their way down the sidewalk so
it crawled toward the grass where it disappeared into the tall blades.
35
14
When I got home my mother lay slumped on the living room couch with the
shades drawn. She wore her red bathrobe. Her hair looked dirty, caked with grease.
She drank vodka from a wine glass—the bottle of Smirnoff’s sitting conspicuously on
the coffee table. She didn’t look up when I stood in the hallway watching her.
“Mother,” I said, walking toward her. “Ma.”
She finally looked up, squinting her eyes.
My mother used to be more beautiful than anyone I’d seen on TV. When
people met her they’d compare her to some movie star.
“Oh stop,” she would say, batting her eyelashes, asking later if I’d heard the
comparison.
“Yeah, Ma, sure,” I’d say.
But she wasn’t pretty anymore. Her face wore a mask of worry and there
wasn’t enough makeup in the world to hide the dark circles beneath her eyes. Even
when she went to work, her clothes didn’t fit her right. Bulges of stomach jutted from
the sides of her skirts; her stockings developed thick runs.
“Mother,” I said.
“Mother,” she answered, as if she no longer recognized our language.
I sat on the couch next to her and she stared straight ahead and smiled. An
unhappy smile. The kind of smile cancer patients in movies muster right before they
die. I wondered if she knew how old I was. I put my arm around her neck and she
36
leaned her head onto my shoulder and started to cry, her heavy head boring into my
little one. Her hair smelled like chemicals and burnt toast. While she cried, I wasn’t
sure what to do. I wanted to tell her about Anton and Tatiana and how I dreamt of my
father and how I ditched the field trip and met Stoop in the park... but I just sat there,
carrying the weight of her head, trying not to inhale the strength of her cloying
perfume. I waited, watching the setting sun leaving its gift of soft light on our
shadowy house.
“I met someone,” I said, finally.
One thing about our house was it always so quiet.
“Mother,” I said again.
But she was already asleep.
37
15
“So have you ever seen a porno?” Bubba asked.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Which one?”
“No, I haven’t seen a porno.”
I imagined them many times, though. Women, piled on top of each other,
glistening with sweat, grunting.
Bubba got off the couch and waddled his fat ass into his father’s room. I never
met Bubba’s father, but the picture on the wall suggested a one-hundred-year-old man
with a white beard and a face darker than a Hershey’s bar.
Bubba reappeared with a video in his hand. On the video cover was a white
man with blonde, longish hair standing up and this huge, ropelike thing dangling
between his legs (which later I learned was his penis). Two naked women kneeled on
the ground looking up at him like starving foxes. The letters on the box said
“Threesome, Starring John Holmes” and as soon as I saw the picture my penis
hardened, although I had no idea what it meant.
“Put it in,” I said, unable to hide my enthusiasm. Bubba slipped the video in
the VCR and we sat on the couch. He threw a blanket over my lap and one over his.
The actor, John Holmes, wore a wiry mustache and psychotic eyes. In the movie, two
girls walked in the front door without knocking. He unbuttoned his shirt while the
girls moved over to the couch and started to take off their clothes.
38
I looked over at Bubba, whose eyes were fixed on the screen. His blanket
moved up and down.
“Stop looking at me,” Bubba said, frustrated. But it was hard not to. I turned
to the screen. The girls returned to the bedroom, Holmes leading the way. He stood
on the bed, dangling his penis back and forth between the two girls, who swatted at it
with their tongues, like a couple of cats.
I started to masturbate, too, which was awkward at first, especially with my
fat friend next to me, pounding away. But after a while, like anything else, I guess, I
got used to it. And within minutes, I hardly noticed.
We must have pounded away for a good half-hour. Until the front door swung
open. And slammed shut. And there, a man I imagined was Bubba’s father—white
hair and dark brown face—stood right in front of us.
“Faggots!” he yelled, putting his hands on his head.
Bubba and I both jumped from the couch with our pants around our ankles.
“Jason Earl Simmons,” he said. “Pull up your goddamn pants and get this
little whiteboy out of here!”
My face stung with shame and head pounded with the congestion of a
thousand ill thoughts struggling to escape, so embarrassed that I froze. Bubba sobbed
next to me, pulling up his pants.
I got mine on as fast as I could and ran out the front door, slamming it behind
me, which, by the way, is a sound you hear for the rest of your life.
39
16
I thought about Stoop quite a bit in the coming weeks. In some ways, he
reminded me of my father, yellow teeth and eyes that could at once relay silliness,
calmness, wisdom and an intense violence. He might have been insane like my father.
He was foreign to me, as if he had come from another planet. I dreamt about him,
visiting him, taking the train into the city to watch him play basketball. In the dream
he wore a white t-shirt with a picture of a big goofy rabbit and he glared at me when I
caught his eye.
“You ain’t even a real nigga,” he said. “Fucking whiteboy.”
He bent his knees, positioned his arms, took a shot, missed and ran back for
the ball. I couldn’t say anything to him. He ran toward me and with all his strength
launched the ball at my face. And I woke up every time.
40
17
On the train downtown an old Chinese lady used her forefinger to dig in her
nose, focused and intent on getting whatever was in there out into the world. A wig
sat lopsided on her head and she talked to herself in Chinese, making large swirls
inside her nose and finally pulling out a gigantic booger the size of a dime. She
smeared it on the seat in front of her and laughed.
The train grinded on through Brookline, ducking underground at Coolidge
Corner. I counted 76 cents in my pocket, enough for a candy bar. My stomach
growled as the train screeched to a stop into the empty Copley Station. I walked up
the stairs into the city. The old brown library looked like a dirty bar of soap, the
words “BUILT BY THE PEOPLE AND DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT
OF LEARNING” etched into the expensive stone. Hoping I’d see him, I skipped
toward the park where I first met Stoop, a cold wind slapping my face.
Players and spectators filled the basketball court and I took a seat on the
bleachers next to a black girl, about my age, her ponytail pulled so tight against her
scalp that it gave me a headache. I didn’t see Stoop anywhere.
“Can I help you?” she said.
I wondered how long I’d been staring at her. Her soft features—small rounded
nose and deep brown eyes—betrayed her uptight demeanor.
“Do you know Stoop?” I asked.
41
“What the fuck you want with Stoop?” She said, her head moving back on her
shoulders, irritated.
“You know him?” I asked.
“What you want with Stoop?” she repeated, frustrated and confrontational.
“I just want to talk to him,” I said, although I actually didn’t know what I
wanted with Stoop. “I’m his friend.”
The girl laughed. “Oh, hell no,” she said, with a little circular motion of her
head.
I laughed, too, looking at the sky, slate gray and uninteresting … so I looked
back at the girl, who waited for me to say something.
“I wanted to ask him,” I said, nervous, my sentences too long and I couldn’t
get them out fast enough. Really, I had no reason to look for Stoop. “A question.”
“That’s my pops,” she said, matter-of-factly.
Her pops, I thought. Stoop’s daughter.
“You cute,” she said. “For a white boy.”
“I’m a Mexican,” I said. “Half-Mexican. My mother is Mexican. So is my
father. But my grandpa is from Germany. So it’s like three-quarters.”
While I babbled, she turned her head back to the game and together we
watched the men play in the freezing cold, steam lifting from their bodies into the air
and then disappearing. Finding her in the park was definitely a sign. I knew that for
sure. But a sign of what, I couldn’t really tell.
42
18
I stood at the top of the grassy hill by my school and took off running as fast
as I could so the grass blurred into the image of a green oil painting. I ran so fast that
my feet could barely keep up with my body and I started to lose control and fall
forward. But right as my nose almost touched the grass, I left the ground, my feet
dangling just an inch over the Earth.
At first I nicked bushes and mailboxes, but as I got the hang of it, I flew a bit
higher until I soared over rooftops, through power lines, arms outstretched, laughing.
Just as I cleared the trees of Brookline and could make out the Boston skyline. Above
it all, I made out the clear division between Brookline and the city. I stretched my
body so that all my bones pointed forward with the wind rushing against my sides,
my door opened.
“Bear, you awake?” Mother said in a hoarse voice. She didn’t sound good,
drunk. I hated waking up from flying dreams. “You know what, honey? Your
mommy’s a wreck and she’s tired.”
Sometimes if I lay there without moving she would forget and stumble away.
But this time she sat on my bed and continued talking.
“You remember that night me, you, and your father sat around the house
playing games and laughing?” she said. “I beat everyone at Scrabble that night.”
I did remember that night, but only because that was the same night my father
left for good.
43
“That was a good night,” mother said. “Do you remember that, Bear?”
“Yeah, Ma,” I said, sitting up in bed.
“We don’t have any more of those nights, baby, but we will. Your mother
works too much right now. You know my boss is a fucking asshole. A fucking
criminal. A fucking animal … and look at me—I’m a thousand pounds. I’m a
goddamned whale.”
Her sick breath filled my room with a meaty and metallic vodka scent that my
stomach turn.
“OK, ma,” I said. In the dark all I could see were the whites of her eyes and
the moon’s reflection on the greasy curves of her face.
“What do you do, Ma?” I said. “For a living, I mean.”
“I’m a businesswoman, Bear,” she said, glaring, rising from the bed. “I’m a
goddamn businesswoman, Bear.”
Before I could say anything, she charged, grabbing me by the neck and
squeezing real hard.
“Don’t question the woman who puts food on your table, you little shit,” she
yowled, her Brooklyn accent mysteriously gone, strength doubling as she crushed the
color from my face with her hand clamps. Her long red nails pinched the skin of my
neck and I tried to pry her hands open, but, eventually, she let go, picking up my
things and throwing them at the wall. She hurled my radio, smashing it against the
closet door. She kicked my nightstand over, shattering my glass of water. She tore my
RUN DMC poster and punched her hand into the wall and recoiled in pain, clutching
44
herself, crying, storming away and slamming her door, rattling the house one last
time.
I got out of bed, put on my clothes and went outside, closing the front door
gently behind me, into frozen world. The full moon lit the clear, black sky
halfheartedly. Nothing moved except my breath, my cloud rising and disappearing
into the streetlights. I looked up at the light in my mother’s room and could see her
silhouette, bent over her nightstand. I walked down the stairs onto the sidewalk
toward Beacon Street to the city, away from the danger of the suburbs.
45
19
While the sun rose, I walked through the Marriott hotel and stood in the
walkway that looked over Huntington Avenue. A row of taxicabs parked on the
sidewalk. Men in gray suits and red ties walked quickly across the street. Women
with bright dresses under parkas lined with fur walked briskly in every direction.
Every now and then a homeless person wrapped in a sleeping bag would ask them for
change. I stayed there for an hour, two hours, five … watching the cycle repeat itself.
Even the city, which seemed reckless, had a pattern. The comfort of the world is its
pattern. When a flock of seagulls flaps past the only thing you can be certain of is the
next flock that will flap past.
I remember when my father took me to watch birds in the north shore of
Massachusetts. I didn’t recognize the land—the open sky, the strips of water in
between long fields of swaying brush.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” my father asked.
“Yeah,” I lied. Because it wasn’t. It was different, but not pretty. I learned that
in school—the more different, the uglier it is.
“Now look,” my father said, shoving the binoculars in my face.
“For what?” I asked.
“Birds.”
46
I didn’t see any. I held the binoculars to my eyes for what seemed like a whole
day, watching the ripples in the water, the stalks of grass, moving left, right until my
face felt bruised by the binoculars pushing against my eyes.
My father pulled out a small book from his back pocket and opened it up to a
picture of a small, brown bird with flecks of white.
“This,” he said. “This is what you’re looking for.
The bird looked no bigger than a maple leaf. Under the picture it said
“Sparrow” in the caption. In the picture, the bird had its neck tilted, beak up, waiting
for a worm.
Finally, hours later, a flock of white birds soared past, too high to make out.
“What are they?” I said.
My father flipped through his book.
“I don’t know,” he said, frustrated that he didn’t have an answer. “ I couldn’t
see. Let’s wait for another one to go past.”
We waited for a few hours until another flock of birds flew past. But by that
time we were cold, restless, hungry, and we both just wanted to go back home.
47
20
I walked through the hotel toward the park where I’d seen Stoop and his
daughter
and watched a basketball game raging. I sat on the empty bleachers, fixating on a
white man darting in and out of the rest of the players, like a pawn in a chess game—
more agile, but somehow weaker than the rest.
“What you laughing at, nigga?” I nearly fell of the bench at the sound of
Stoop’s voice. He wore a black bandanna around his neck and looked dirty and
unshaven, his beard fuller than the last time I had seen him. His skin looked like he’d
just taken a shower in a bucket of olive oil.
“Why aren’t you playing?” I asked.
“You’re my whiteboy probation officer now?”
“I’m not white,” I said. Stoop looked me up and down and half-smiled.
“What is you, then?” he said, cocking his head back to get a look at my pale
neck. “Beige?”
He laughed from the belly, slapping his knee, chapped lips opening wide to
show yellow teeth, bits of thick spit flying into the air.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“You buyin?” he said.
I felt my pockets for change and counted thirty-nine cents.
48
“It’s a’ight,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Stoop walked east, toward Roxbury and I followed closely behind him. He
limped slow, in a gait so exaggerated that I wondered how he played basketball at all.
He looked like a goddamn cripple. I tried to mimic his limp but only managed to look
severely retarded. He lit up a cigarette.
“So you a Mexican, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You know Spanish?”
“Yeah.”
“Then how do you say, ‘Suck my balls,’ then?”
I thought for a second. “Suck” was “chupa” and “balls” was “webols.” But I
couldn’t put them together.
“You don’t know Spanish, do you?”
“No.”
“So you’re a liar.”
“Kind of,” I said. “My father called me a storyteller.”
“I got a story for you,” he said.
Stoop flicked his cigarette to the ground. It made a little spark on the
sidewalk. “It’s called ‘The First Time I Robbed a Lil Nigga.’”
I only had 39 cents.
“Okay,” he continued. “You see the first time I robbed a nigga I was I was
about your age. How old are you?”
49
“Fifteen,” I said.
“OK,” he said. “I was fifteen, too. My older cousin, Ronnie, was a fool. And
when I say fool, that nigga was a fool. He wilded out when there wasn’t any reason in
the world to wild out. Old Ronnie’d get mad if the night time was too dark, you know
what I’m sayin’?”
“Sure,” I said.
We walked up Huntington Avenue, away from Fenway Park, cutting through
Northeastern University, where the students hurried to classes. On the sidewalk, a
group of boys stood, taking up the whole space, thumping their chests.
Stoop walked toward the group, picking out the biggest one, and shoving his
elbow into his side.
“Hey, what the fuck,” the kid said. His blonde hair swept dramatically over
one eye. He turned toward Stoop, who stood there, like a big, black wall, his
unflinching eyes slitted and yellow.
“What’s that, my nigga?” Stoop said.
“Nothing,” the boy said, turning back around, letting us pass.
“Where the fuck was I?” Stoop continued.
“Your crazy cousin,” I said, trying to remember his name. “Ronnie.”
“So Ronnie always have nice things: Clothes, chains, toys, whatever, man, he
always having new shit. When that nigga was sixteen he bought a car—a real piece of
shit, but that lil nigga had a car, nonetheless. None of the niggaz in our hood had a
bike to call their own … so one day I asked Ronnie how he get all that shit, because I
50
know his mamma—and his mamma poor as shit!—you know? At first, Ronnie like, ‘I
just be getting that shit.’ But that don’t fly. I might be stupid, but I know there ain’t
no God kind enough to dress you up like Rick James when you your mama eating dry
Cheerios for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So finally Ronnie pull me aside and told me.
He had to.”
In Copley Square, the Hancock building held the sun like a mirror. Stoop took
a right and we walked until Copley was to our backs. The scenery changed once we
crossed Mass Ave., the buildings so dirty that the bricks turned black. We walked in
front of a liquor store where a group of kids in track suits, jean jackets and Adidas
shoes drank beer and talked too loud. Old women hung from windows, kids darted
across the street. Young black men whistled short whistles while sirens screamed in
the distance.
And then I heard that sound again. The boom. Boom. Boom. The music came
from a storefront that sold brightly colored clothes—yellow shirts boasted pictures of
black men and women with wild hair. A smell came out of the shop, something like
the earth and cinnamon, the way my mother’s backyard smelled after it rained.
“You like that?” Stoop asked.
“The music,” I said. “Yeah, what is it?”
“Come on,” Stoop said, pulling me by my shirt into the shop, where a huge
black woman with white hair poking out of a red, green and yellow knit cap, sat at the
register where two sticks burned. The smoke filled my lungs and I coughed.
51
“Miss Ash,” Stoop said, changing his demeanor; instead of growling like a
roughneck, he spoke like English Royalty. “It’s a pleasure to see you on this fine
day.”
“Robert Roland,” the lady said, her stern face softened into a smile. “And how
is your lovely princess, Lakisha?”
“She alright,” he said. “You know kids.”
“Sure do,” Miss Ash said. “And how old is she now?”
“Fifteen, Ma’am,” Stoop said. “Going on twenty-five.”
“Sho’ is,” Betty said. “You got to watch them lil’ girls these days, Robert.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Stoop said.
“Who is this young man?” she said, both of them turning her attention to me.
“Bear,” I volunteered. I never told Stoop my name, just like he never told me
his real name was Robert Roland.
The woman looked at me and then looked at Stoop and then they both
laughed, heartily, from their bellies.
“Robert Roland,” she said. “Now how are you going to forget a name like
that?”
52
21
We walked into a restaurant called Deandre’s. The guy at the cash register
wore intricate braids that stuck to the sides of his head under a hairnet. He lit up when
he saw Stoop.
“Stooooop. What it be?” he said, standing up from his stool behind the
counter. They slapped hands and Stoop introduced me to Deandre himself. His
restaurant smelled like farts.
“Gimme two twos and two drinks,” Stoop said, sitting at a booth by the
window. “And put it on my tab.”
“Nigga, your tab is enough to start up a new joint down the block.”
They laughed. Stoop took a seat and watched a pair of kids outside playing
soccer with a Coke can.
“Bear, huh?” he said.
“Yup,” I said. “And I’ll tell you about my name when you finish your story.”
Stoop looked truly confused and then finally remembered.
“Ronnie!” he said, trying to figure out where he left off. “That nigga pulled
me aside, told me that he bought himself a gun—a real small .22. Didn’t even work.
But he been going into them suburbs at night, waiting outside the movie theater, you
know that one on Harvard Street off Beacon?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking out the window at the avenue, clogged with rich brick
buildings, old, beat up cars, drug fiends, nosey old people gossiping on the corner.
53
Stoop settled into his story. He and Ronnie waited around the theater until
they found a couple teenaged girls or rich kids in Cambridge to rob.
“Bam!” Stoop yelled, slamming his hand down on the table. My soda jumped
a quarter of an inch. “He did it quick, too. Before any of us even knew what
happened … that nigga was a stickup kid for real!”
A stickup kid.
Stoop leaned back in the booth, looking proud of himself, licking the dry
edges of his big, purple lips.
From behind the counter Deandre brought out two plates stacked with fried
chicken, yams, beans and rice and a pile of steaming greens that looked like spinach. I
barely waited for the plate to hit the table before I shoveled the food into my mouth.
“There you go, little man,” Stoop said. “Don’t hurt yourself now.”
Stoop grabbed my hand and took hold of my fork before I could put it to my
mouth again, gritting his teeth, nearly growling.
“Say grace, nigga,” Stoop said.
“Say what?” I said, unsure of the term.
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22
I stood in my mother’s full-length mirror puffing up my chest, contorting my
face to make it look less soft. But I was a little kid and I looked like a little kid.
Sometimes, people bumped into me on the street like I wasn’t there and kept going. I
thought about Stoop’s encounter with the Northwestern students; I tried to imagine
what went through the kid’s mind when confronted with Stoop, a large black man
who looked like he shot from the womb with balled fists and a cigarette in his mouth.
It reminded me of this one episode of the Brady Bunch where Bobby tried to
make himself taller by hanging on the monkey bars in his backyard for hours at a
time, which would have just stretched his Bobby Brady arms into freakishly huge
arms. The moral of the story was that he should have just been happy being Bobby
fucking Brady. I just had to think of a moral for my story.
When I heard the knock at the door I was still standing in the mirror with my
shirt off, puffing up my chest, contorting my face to take away the curves of
boyhood; I didn’t answer right away, but the knock repeated, louder, so I went
downstairs and opened the door to a man with a very neat, parted hairdo. He didn’t
smile when I said hello.
“Is your mother home?” he said.
“No.”
55
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Work?”
“Do you know where she works?” he asked. I imagined he was her boss.
“No.”
“How old are you?” he said.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“Can you give this to your mother?” he said. “It’s very important.”
The man rustled in his coat pocket, produced his wallet and handed me a
business card that said: “Detective Jack Flowers. Boston Police Department.”
“It’s very important that you have her call me when she arrives,” he said,
turning around and walking down the stairs, getting into a beige car and groaning off
into the distance.
56
23
“Nigga, you need shoes,” Stoop said, inspecting his biscuit, sopping it into a
pool of white gravy.
“I do?” I said, looking at my shoes. Kangaroos, with pockets on the sides,
which looked fine to me. Most of the boys at my school had them. They fit okay.
“You look like a mongoloid, my nigga,” he said.
“A mongoloid?”
“A retard,” Stoop said, stuffing the rest of the biscuit in his mouth. He stood up,
big belly hanging from his white t-shirt. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Get you some shoes.”
“I don’t have money,” I said, but Stoop just shook his head and motioned for
me to follow.
We walked through Roxbury. The strange sun turned the dirty brick buildings
into a movie set. Kids darted back and forth across the streets while old men sat in
lawn chairs on the sidewalk. Homeless people staggered, like monsters, out of
alleyways. People recognized Stoop and they called out his name.
A woman with gigantic tits stopped, bending down to pat my head.
“This your lil’ white baby?” She asked, her cheeks painted bright red, like two
big apples. I looked into the cavern of her shirt to spy her dark crease and the outline
of her deep brown nipple.
57
“This my cousin,” Stoop said. “Bear.”
“Oh, Bear,” she said. “You a cute little motherfucker.”
Roxbury sang with electricity. A magnetic buzz surged through the streets and
shot up through the sidewalks. People moved quickly, but with ease. In Brookline,
people went slow, but with purpose, as if they didn’t want to get to where they were
going, but they had to go out of some grand obligation.
We stopped in front of a store with hundreds of pair of shoes in the window,
called Jimmy the Greek’s. Black and Puerto Rican teenagers dressed in loose
sportswear milled around, not buying anything.
“Let’s get you straight,” Stoop said, doors ringing behind him as we entered the
shop. We browsed the shoes and Stoop stopped at a pair of white Adidas shoes with
black stripes and a plastic toe. “That’s it,” he said. “What size?”
“Seven,” I said, and Stoop paid the cashier. We left the store, Stoop hading me
the bag with my new shoes. We walked a block and sat on a bench advertising a
lawyer—a dignified black woman with a cartoon caption bubbling from her mouth
that said, “LEGAL TROUBLE? NO PROBLEM.”
“That’s called the projects,” Stoop said, pointing to a cluster of old brick
buildings all the same shape and size. “Them is the ones for the Latin Kings,” he said.
“Your people.”
The projects looked empty; nobody outside; no trees or gardens or grass near
them.
My people, I thought.
58
“What’s your story?” he asked. I took the shoes out of the bag, opened the box
and looked at the leather, whiter than a blank piece of paper with oily black stripes—
almost too pristine to put on my feet, so I held my new shoes and tried to think of
something to say.
“I don’t have a story,” I said.
“Fuck you,” Stoop said. “Everybody got a story.”
“My father left when I was six. They had fights,” I said. “They met at a protest
in Los Angeles and fell in love. My mother told me that my dad was a hippie. She
was, too, but she grew up, she said. I don’t know. Guess that’s not a story.”
“Sounds like a story to me,” Stoop said. “So why you don’t go to school?”
“Summer time,” I said.
“Why you didn’t go to school in the fall?”
“I did, sometimes,” I said. “They put me in the retard class.”
“You a smart nigga, though,” Stoop said.
A group of four teenagers, wearing yellow bandanas like scarves, walked past,
one of them turning to Stoop, forming his hands into a signal that looked like a star.
Stoop’s face hardened into a frown, but then he nodded and the teenagers passed.
“Latin Kings,” he said. “Those is your people.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re P.R., right?”
“P.R.?”
“Puerto Rican.”
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“No.”
“What is you, then?”
“Mexican.”
“Still your people.” Stoop looked at me right in the eyes. His face was so solid
and hard that he could have been chiseled out of rock. He scared me.
“Ay, man,” he said. “What your mama do for a living?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She works at night. A businesswoman, I guess.”
“At night?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your mama Lydia?”
I looked at Stoop for a clue. His face glistened under the sun. Beads of sweat
formed around his hairline that looked like a wet helmet with its tight black curls. His
strong jaw, a wrecking ball that swung on his burly neck.
“Bear,” Stoop said, his calm demeanor crumbling into a little pile of dust right
on the sidewalk. There was nowhere to look that wasn’t awkward so we both looked
into the air and watched a flock of doves flap noisily over our heads, toward the
projects— hundreds of them formed into a loose point and slowed as they got to the
wall of brick buildings, like they’d taken a wrong turn before they vanished
completely into the horizon. “She sure as fuck ain’t a business woman.”
60
24
At 1:47 a.m., I couldn’t sit still—my fiery brain dripped hot wax into my
stomach. Our house felt dark and frightening, but I couldn’t get myself to turn on the
lights, so I sat there, on the couch, looking at my new shoes, the only things
emanating any sort of glow. Stoop was a scary motherfucker, but the fact that a man
with a gun from Roxbury could be connected in some way with me and my mother
gave me some strange sense of hope, as if life was actually more delicate than I
thought. Until then, I treated life like an unnamed planet lost in a solar system—an
idea in the mind of some wacked-out scientist, when, really, it was a porcelain
statuette you carry gently in your palms to the bookcase where you set it carefully so
it doesn’t fall and smash on the hard wood floor.
At 2:59 a.m., the door jiggled and I awoke with a crooked neck and drool
running down the side of my cheek. My mother occupied in the doorway, wobbling;
she threw her bag onto the floor and stood there for a second. I sat still until she took
off her shoes, went upstairs and I heard the bathroom door close. I exhaled and put
my head on the couch’s arm. I could smell the sweet weight of her perfume, the sweat
in her clothes, the spray in her hair. Her deep brown eyes reflected the world in their
wetness. She was her own planet and I could hardly breathe in her atmosphere.
I woke up to my mother screaming my name. She stumbled down the stairs and
turned on the lights, still in her dress and her hair wild, like a hurricane raged on top
of her head. Shards of sun stabbed through the curtains.
“Goddamn it, you little fucker,” she said. “Did you put this on my pillow?” She held
61
up the detective’s business card, which had been there for a week.
“Yes,” I said, rubbing the fog out of my eyes. My dry mouth needed water.
“Why did they come by, Bear?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t say.”
“There was only one?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“What do you mean, you think so?”
“I mean, I only saw one, but there might have been another one in the car.”
“He drove a car?” she yelled.
I didn’t understand the question. Of course he drove a car. I went to the kitchen
to get water, but before I could get there my mother grabbed me by the neck and
flung me onto the couch. “Don’t you fucking move,” she said. “You know that every
time I come home you’re out, off, Godknowswhere, doing Godknowswhat? What
kind of life do you lead as a fourteen year-old boy?”
“I’m fifteen,” I said.
“You prick,” she yelled.
“Mother,” I said.
She’d aged almost ten years and looked like a grandma.
“You’re a hooker,” I said, unable to look at her.
The atoms in my body popped and deflated.
She flew towards me with every inch of her body. Even her bouncy hair, her
only feature that still relayed a hint of youth, shot forward to clobber me, her only
62
son. She didn’t actually beat me, but she grabbed me, cursed at me, made a motion as
if to strangle me. But as soon as she applied pressure to her choke-hold that would
surely have been the end, my mother dropped to the floor and cried. She cried the
way I’d never seen anyone cry, with her entire body, starting from her toes, traveling
up through her legs and knees, gaining momentum at the belly and shooting up
through her sternum and exiting her mouth in a cannon-like blast of air. A volcano
made up of a lifetime of misery, heated, boiled over and spat into the world. She
cradled herself, rocked back and forth and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to
touch her, so I sat there with her as she vomited forth the magma of her life. It took an
hour. Maybe two. Or it might have been a week. We sat on the carpet and the sun fell
back down. I had fallen asleep several times while my mother stayed on the floor,
leaning against the couch, eyes raw and wet as oysters and she whispered to herself.
The light of day turned the world delicate, thin glass that would break if we moved,
even an inch, everything would shatter, so we stayed still hoping that sleep would
cure our mistakes.
“You’re going to Santa Fe,” mother said, finally, sitting up, adjusted her dress,
which twisted around her body so that she was almost wearing it backwards. “I’ll call
Helen. Just for a little while,” she said, her voice trailed off into uncertainty. My
mother’s makeup was almost gone, and so was her faux-Brooklyn accent. Santa Fe
might as well have been Siberia. There was nothing for me there. If her sister was
even half as fucked as my mother, I would die in the desert of malnutrition, my
remnants carried out to the desert in the beak of a hungry vulture.
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25
It was very businesslike, the way my mother explained it all. The
“representatives” from the FBI, she said, were going to take her “away” while I
would be “escorted” to Logan Airport for my flight to New Mexico. The way she
maintained her innocence, (even with charges of prostitution, money laundering and
racketeering hovering over her head) was uncanny. “Away” is where lovers go on
honeymoons. Away is where a ship sets off on a maiden voyage. Away is not where
Mexicans with identity crises go when they’re caught stuffing dirty cash under the
floorboards and prostituting their bodies in the Boston night.
“Are you okay, Bear?” she said, seemingly back to her regular self—makeup
perfectly applied to mask her age and wrinkled shell.
“I’m fine,” I said, which was the truth. In fact, a part of me was proud. My
mother
was a criminal and a whore, a pretty good excuse for being an awful parent.
I packed my suitcase—a few pieces of clothing, a few Hustler magazines—
while my mother watched in the doorway.
“Where did you get those fancy shoes?” she asked.
I imagined telling her that I got them from a gigantic black man who carried a
gun and called himself Stoop, and I imagined her face tightening like a hot air
balloon, a blue flame beginning at the tip of her head, widening to her shoulders, her
body shooting fire until her the house burned to the ground, a pile of black ash on the
64
earth.
“A friend,” I said. “You like them?”
“No,” she said, slinking to the bathroom. I stood by the door until I heard the
water turn on and I went into my room, hauled my suitcase downstairs, and looked
around the house. The way the light shined, giving our home a dull sheen, everything
lit with the same yellow fuzz, like a fading dream.
“Bye, Mother,” I said to myself, closing the back door behind me. I walked
toward the C line and caught the next train downtown.
65
26
On the train, my mind wandered, and I remembered the time I broke my ankle
at school, running toward the cafeteria, turning the corner too quickly, the weight of
my body pressing down on my foot and the quick “snap,” like a small twig breaking
under a boot. The pain, I can barely describe. It started at my ankle, but took root in
my chest, like someone had set off a bomb to explode every second for an hour.
One of the popular Eighth graders found me. His name was Derek. He stuffed
me in a locker in the third grade. But when he saw me crumpled on the concrete, he
stopped and kneeled down next to me.
“Can you move?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s my ankle.”
“I’m going to pick you up,” he said.
And he did. He lifted me up and put me on his shoulders. My ankle felt like it
had already snapped off and I actually looked down to see if he left it on the ground.
Derek carried me on his shoulders to the nurse’s office. I had no idea why. He didn’t
have to. I went to the hospital in an ambulance. The nurse couldn’t get a hold of my
mother, so I sat in the hospital, in the stark white room, with my new cast, waiting for
her. The beeps of the machines, the humming of the fluorescent lights, the brick
buildings in the window were lonely things. I waited for hours for my mother. Five
hours later, at 11 p.m., she stormed through the door.
“What the fuck happened to you, Bear?” she screamed. She looked like she was
66
running toward me, to strangle me. “Why can’t I leave you alone?”
Her breath disgusted me. Her anger did, too. Her white dress was so tight that
I could see the indent of her belly button.
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27
I found Stoop at Deandre’s, sitting in the booth, looking at his plate, a mash of
leftover potatoes, gravy and fried chicken skin.
“So you just left?” he said, dumbfounded.
“Yeah,” I said. “I left.”
“And you came here?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
Stoop paused, slightly.
“Nigga, this ain’t right,” he said, shaking his head. “We ain’t friends. We ain’t
even acquaintances.”
He examined a forkful of potatoes, dripping with oil.
“There was some stupid shit for me to find you in that park,” he said. “And I
didn’t want to tell you about your mama.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m not going to Santa Fe.”
“Ask any kid in this ghetto,” he said. “And he would smack his own mama to
live with rich folks in the desert.”
“Have you been to New Mexico?” I asked.
“Hell no,” Stoop said, laughing.
“They have snakes there.”
“I don’t care if they have spiders the size of taxi cabs, nigga,” he said. “Pick up
your fucking suitcase and I’ll take your little ass to the airport.”
68
Even when he was mad, Stoop spoke softly. He pushed food around the plate,
knowing that I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Let’s just get this straight,” Stoop said. “Don’t think I fucked your mama
because I see that look on your face and I don’t fucking appreciate it.”
“What look?” I asked. “But how do you know her, then?”
“Curious motherfucker,” he said, shoving his last forkful into his mouth and
chewing, his lips making wide circles under the weight of his jaw. “How real do you
want your life to get, Bear?”
I wondered if I even had a choice.
I had a couple pairs of pants, a couple shirts and forty-two dollars that I pulled
out of my mother’s purse before I left.
“Just tell me, please,” I said.
Stoop shook his head and Deandre came for the dishes, happy, smiling, chipper,
as usual, as if when someone asked him “How real do you want your life to get,
Deandre?” he just smiled and said, “Nah, not real at all, please.”
“How you fine fellows doing this afternoon?” Deandre said, with a show tunes
smile.
“Cut that shit, nigga,” Stoop said. “Give me some apple pie.”
“And for you, Poo Bear?” Deandre smiled.
“Water, please.”
I put down a twenty and slid it toward Deandre, who took it and went back to
the kitchen.
69
“You know that nigga ain’t as nice as he look,” Stoop said.
“Deandre?” I asked. “What’ wrong with him?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with him. He one of the smartest niggas I know. He just
ain’t as friendly as he look,” Stoop said, pausing, as if he was trying to figure out how
to say his next sentence. “He know your mama, too.”
I looked back into the kitchen where Deandre fumbled around the refrigerator,
whistling along to the radio, which played, “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Deandre loved
that white people station.
“We both knew your mama,” Stoop said, twisting his dirty napkin into a point.
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28
It turned out they knew my mother for a while. For months Stoop and Deandre
watched her walk into the Fairmont Hotel at Copley Square with some crusty old man
by her side, and then she’d walk out two hours later and do the same thing in another
hour with another crusty old motherfucker. It didn’t take a rocket scientist.
“Ain’t no woman who look like your mama hanging out with old crusty
motherfuckers every night of the week,” Stoop said, shaking his head. But Stoop
wasn’t interested in my mother, the whore. He was more intrigued by my mother, the
moneymaker, namely the big black sedan that would pull up at the end of every shift.
Mother would get in and get dropped off in the same spot fifteen minutes later.
“It was some high class, bourgeoisie shit,” he said. “And it wasn’t right, Bear.
That’s our block. That’s our money. We charged a tax.”
“A tax?” I asked.
“Yeah, it started out that way. I mean, niggaz can’t come in here and hustle
unless they pay taxes on it. The more money we seen your mama clock, the greedier
Deandre got,” Stoop paused. “And that nigga greedy as fuck.”
So they set out to rob her. And then when it came time for that car to pick her
up they would jump out and take whatever kind of money was packed away in there
and run back to the hood.
Deandre came back without the pie.
“We’re out,” he said, wiping his hands on a dishrag and heading to the back of
the kitchen. Stoop told the rest of the story while he sucked on his fingers.
71
He and Deandre waited around for my mother and followed her to the car where
they drew their guns and shoved them against her back.
“And she was cool as a motherfucker, too,” Stoop said. “Almost like she
wanted us to rob whoever it was in that car. She didn’t give a fuck.”
But the driver, an old, well-dressed Caucasian, panicked, Deandre said. They
shoved their guns up to his cheeks, while he clawed at the leather interior. In the
confusion, my mother rolled out of the car before the driver punched the gas and took
off, weaving through the streets of Boston with two pistols aimed at his head coming
from the back seat. They made it through three intersections until they swerved wide,
nearly ramming into a cluster of commuters at the Back Bay station, crashing into a
mailbox, almost touching the bumper to the liquor store’s glass doors. When they
stopped, they shook down the old man and rustled up eleven hundred dollars in cash,
plus fourteen hundred in his wallet and told him to drive back to the hood, where the
old man stopped in front of the Citizens Bank and pulled out the $500 daily
maximum. He then went into the bank with Stoop close behind and withdrew another
$11,000 from the teller.
“And that, my little nigga, is what happened,” Stoop said with a glassy-eyed,
crooked smile.
Deandre came back with my change and set it on the table.
“You should start smiling more, boy,” Deandre said, oblivious. “It ain’t such a
bad place, you know what I’m sayin’?”
72
29
Stoop stayed near Cedar and Highland in a one-bedroom apartment barely big
enough to fit my mother’s shoe collection. In the suburbs, they called it quaint. In
Roxbury, they didn’t call it anything. I slept on the couch. The rules were to stay out
of Stoop’s way, and to find my own money—two things that sounded easy, but I
found in the coming months, they were quite hard for a fifteen year-old boy.
Especially the last one. I asked Deandre if I could help him out in the restaurant, but
he said he said no, slipping me table scraps every now and then. I was hungry. And
bored. One night, when Stoop came back from the park, he took a seat on his couch.
He could sense a question and furrowed his brow, untwisting the cap of his 40 oz. of
Old English malt liquor.
“What?” he said.
“I don’t have any money.”
“Shit,” he said, a statement and an exclamation. “Nigga, you sound like a
bitch.”
“I’m too young to work.”
“How old was I the first time I made some money?”
“I forgot.”
“Fifteen,” Stoop said. “That’s your age, Bear.”
Stoop set down his beer and looked into my eyes and when he did that I felt
dizzy and light, like my body would detach from my head and float up to the ceiling.
“I want to do it,” I said.
73
Stoop shook his head.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, sitting up. “You going to be a stickup kid?”
“Yes.”
“And you think you can stand in the middle of the night, acting like the coldest
motherfucker that ever walked the planet?”
“Yes,” I said.
Stoop leapt up from the couch and reached over the coffee table, clinging onto
my neck with his long, rough fingers.
“Motherfucker, as fucked up as your fucked up life is, it’s still not as fucked up
as you think it is. You a teddy bear motherfucker. What the fuck do you see when you
look in my eyes?”
I couldn’t speak.
“Do you know why I’m pissed the fuck off?” Stoop said. “Because I ain’t ask
for you and you ain’t ask for me, but here the fuck we are.”
Stoop held onto my neck until I couldn’t breathe. His sweaty face hovered so
close to mine that I could see every pore on his nose, each razor bump, white pustules
ready to burst. His fingers wrapped around my neck, squeezing away my life, and I
watched the way his face muscles contracted. He was right, I wasn’t a criminal, but I
had a streak of something awful within me; pliable, like a snowball that you could
shape it into an icy ball and hurl it into someone’s face, or you could just leave it in
the sun and watch it melt away. I balled up my fist, reached back and let go. The
punch landed in the center of Stoop’s nose. I felt my knuckle connect with the bridge
74
of his nose; the thin strip of bone bend under the pressure of my fist, which, to my
surprise, moved forward until his face, under the weight, crunched inward with a hard
snap, like a branch breaking clean in half. Stoop let go of my neck. He cupped his
hands to his nose, which leaked a thick, relentless stream of blood. And I froze.
Stoop froze. And the door knocked.
Thank God for Lakisha, who skipped through that doorway wearing her tiny
white shorts, like a little goddamn angel.
“What y’all doing?” she said, me and Stoop still frozen in time.
“Oh, hell no,” she said, looking first at her father standing next to the sofa with
blood pouring from his nose and then at me with what I imagine was a look of terror
etched into my face.
“Girl, close that door,” Stoop said, unclasping his fingers from his nose, letting
the stream of blood trickle down his chin. Lakisha closed the door and Stoop ran to
the closet and came back with a gun, the same one he showed me when we first met.
My stomach clenched and a sharp pain shot through my back. I couldn’t control my
face, which I could feel twitching violently. Stoop approached me with the gun but
grabbed my hand and forcefully pried open my fingers, leaving a flakes of crusted
blood in my palm. He placed the gun inside my hand and then closed my fingers, oneby-one, around its handle. “This little nigga wants to be a stickup kid,” he said,
loudly, like he was standing in front of a classroom.
“Daddy,” Lakisha said, but Stoop didn’t want her to talk.
“Nope,” he said. “He made up his goddamn mind.”
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30
I sat on the couch with Stoop trying to listen to him talk about money and life
and hustling and things like that, but it was hard to concentrate. There were empty
bottles and ashtrays and trash all around the place. It would have been depressing,
with all that shit everywhere—the stale cigarettes and spilled beer—but maybe the
freedom of it made it okay, the fact that I’d finally escaped my strange little lonesome
life in the orderly house of Mother and stumbled into this—this palace of filth, this
dwelling of strange hand signals and unrecognizable curse words, this room of
strange men doing sweaty deals behind a locked door.
“You know what I’m saying?” Stoop prodded.
“Yeah,” I said. He wore a pair of gray sweatpants with pockets on the sides
and a white tank top with a brown leather jacket over, like a homeless person. Stoop
didn’t care about things like regular people cared about things. For instance, he only
brushed his teeth once a week. His mouth looked like it was filled with butter.
“Ay, man,” Stoop said, leaning back into the couch. “You never said why they
named you Bear.”
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31
I guess I never told him about my father. I didn’t remember him much. He had
a beard. My mother didn’t like to talk about him, except when she was angry, when
she was trying to describe something horrible, even if the connection wasn’t totally
obvious. “Oh look at this horrible weather, Bear. Your father would have loved this.”
She talked about him like he was dead. But he just couldn’t take it anymore. He
snapped. He left. My mother told me I’m named Bear because my dad smoked a lot
of pot when he was younger. She said one night, high out of his mind, he started
yelling out baby names.
“Tree!” he said, laughing hysterically. My mom told the story with a look of
disgust on her face. I can’t understand why she married him if she hated him so much.
“Bong!” he yelled.
“Watermelon!”
“Kunta Kinte!”
Finally he settled on the name Bear and wouldn’t listen to my mother when she
told him how stupid it was.
“Bear,” he said. And that’s what it was.
When I was first born my mother said my dad would hardly let go of me. He
would take me to the store to show everybody his baby boy. He’d even stop to show
me to homeless people. And everybody was nice, my mother said.
“Oh, everyone was so happy for him, you know,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly
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the kind of man you’d think would be good with babies.”
Stoop sat up and looked confused. “What you mean ‘good with babies’?
“I mean, he was crazy,” I said.
He was a pretty regular guy before he went insane—a law student at UCLA
who wore a ponytail and took me to watch Cheech & Chong movies before I could
control my slobber. He drove me to the park, pushed me on swings, took me into the
city, read Treasure Island while I sat on his lap in the dusty corner of the library that
nobody else could find. Or that’s what my mother told me. I don’t remember any of
it. All I remember is when he started to take on this distant look, one that started in
his eyes, made its way down to his mouth and drooped, even his long brown fingers
seemed to hang independently of his hand, as if his nerves and worries rested not
inside, but in some glowing aura that surrounded his body, like Jupiter’s ring.
I can still see how he looked in my mind, though—a tiny man, barely over
five feet tall, who carried around this little body that hunched over like a fern. He had
deep olive skin and dark almost black hair and a beard with long black hair that he
kept in a loose ponytail. When he looked at you, it was always with the deepest of
sincerity, but there was also a profound sadness in his dark brown eyes. They were
always wet, constantly on the verge of tears. The calmness and relaxedness that I
came to associate with my father I later found out was mostly from the effects of
marijuana. The only thing that I really remember about him was that he loved to drive
around and tell stories about great people that he knew. There was this one story he
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told over and over that if you knew him long enough he’d tell you. My mother said
that one out of every ten people in America knew the story.
“So what is it?” Stoop asked.
“What’s what?”
“The fucking story, nigga,” Stoop said, annoyed.
He leaned in so his body touched mine. I could smell the burnt flesh of his dark,
leather coat. Next to Stoop, I felt like I was a part of something, but at the same time I
felt more alone than I’d ever been.
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Dorchester sits outside of the city, just off the Red Line, like Boston’s mean and
lonely cousin. I was supposed to meet Lakisha there, near her school, at Nice N Clean
Jamaican Restaurant on Washington. When I go there, she sat at a booth, drinking a
Coke, her tight pigtails sticking out of either side of her head.
“Listen to this,” she said, handing me the earphones. I put them on and listened
to the beat with a guitar loop and a man’s smooth, gravely voice rapped. He sounded
like Stoop—angry and calm with a high note of mental insanity.
“Cuz I grab the mic and try to say yes y’all/ They try to take it, and say that I’m
too small”
And the beat stopped, along with the music and the man’s voice continued by
itself,
“Cool, cuz I don’t get upset/ I kick the speaker, pull the plug, then I jet.”
She bobbed her head with the music.
“Rakim,” she said. “You like it?”
“I enjoy it,” I said.
“You stupid,” she said. Lakisha made fun of the way I talked:
Don’t say “mother.”
What the hell is a “vehicle?”
Why don’t you just say car?
You sound like a fuckin’ old lady.
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Sometimes she laughed at me until her eyes started to water. Sometimes I’d
catch her staring at me, and we’d both look away.
When she finished her soda, we walked up Washington and sat on the steps of a
little church on the corner and watched a crackhead about my mother’s age. She stood
by a parked car and fumbled through her pockets and then turned them inside out and
looked at the white swaths of cloth, shaking her head.
“Very much money in here,” she said, looking up at me and Lakisha; her hands
didn’t stop moving, sometimes making wide, jerky sweeps up in the air. Her hair was
pulled back into a bun and she wore a men’s sport coat, splotched with a white crust.
When she approached, Lakisha pulled her head back and put her hand up.
“Don’t touch me,” she warned, with a nervous laugh. “I’m telling you right
now…”
The crackhead began a dialog, a plea for us to give her money, as well as a
lesson in history of race relations.
“Now, tell me white boy, do you know the history of your culture?” she spat.
“White culture?”
“Yes, white boy, and do you know the history of my culture?” She spoke in an
exaggerated British accent, pointing her fingers and attempting a little ballerina
curtsy.
“Do you know the history of my culture?” she repeated.
“Crack culture?” I said. Lakisha kicked me.
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“Yes, black culture.”
Lakisha laughed through her nose.
“No,” I said.
“Well maybe this little girl can tell you, and if you’ll please give me just a bit of
change so I can catch the bus, like the great composer Beethoven once did, then I can
be on my way. Have you ever heard of the great composer Beethoven?
“Yes,” I said, looking at Lakisha, who had already lost interest.
“That’s good, young man,” the crackhead said. “Have you ever heard of
hoodoo?”
“Hoodoo? Like, you mean, Voodoo?”
“Yes,” she said, wagging a sickly finger. “Hoodoo.”
Agitated, the crackhead pointed her thin, ashy finger at my face and came
closer. Her dry lips frothed; deep, brown cracks sectioned off the meat of her flesh,
which looked like it was caving in on itself. Steaming, her mouth rusted like a sewer
grate.
“Hooodo! Hex on you! Hex on you!” She yelled, dancing in a circle, while
Lakisha laughed an insane laugh and grabbed onto my waist with both of her arms.
The crackhead twirled and twitched off into the distance, singing, “Hex on you!
Hoodoo! Hoodoo curse! Hex on you!” as Lakisha laughed until she started to cry,
holding me for dear life.
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33
Lakisha sprawled out on Stoop’s couch, her spindly legs hanging over its arms.
“If my daddy don’t kill you,” she said, “somebody will.”
“Everybody says that,” I said. The small, cluttered apartment needed a good
cleaning. Beer bottles and old magazines littered the carpet.
“For someone so smart, you the stupidest motherfucker I know,” Lakisha said,
giggling, pleased with her assessment.
“Your father says I’m the smartest motherfucker he knows.”
“He say that shit about everybody,” she said, waving a dismissive hand.
“That’s true,” I said.
“And don’t say ‘father’ no more,” Lakisha said, sitting up on the couch. “I don’t
care if you Puerto Rican … You still a white boy.”
“—Mexican,” I corrected.
“—What-ev-ah,” she said, shaking her head. “You look like you lost in this
hood. And you definitely ain’t no stickup kid.”
“How many stickup kids do you know?” I asked.
“Me?” Lakisha said, counting on her two hands. “Shit. Fifteen? Twenty?”
“And how many of them are black?”
“All of ‘em, dummy.”
“And most of them go into Brookline and Cambridge to put in work, right?”
“Yup,” Lakisha said. “And Brighton and Coolidge Corner, nigga. What’s your
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point?”
“And I just look like a little kid, right?” I said, watching Lakisha get off the
couch and stretch her frame, her little brown belly button poking from underneath her
t-shirt. “So a big black guy, like your father, comes around the corner and the white
lady grabs her purse and crosses the street. But what if she sees me? She’ll probably
take me to McDonald’s if I look hungry enough.”
Lakisha watched two Dominican boys across the street play boxing. One of
them, a skinny kid with little muscles wrapping around his ribs, close cropped hair,
long, thin sideburns, baggy jeans, Timberland boots and a carefree, ignorant look on
his face.
“Mmm, mm, mmm,” she said, licking her lips, lost in some whorish trance.
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34
Stoop paid for a shirt and motioned toward the door.
“Let’s hit it, little man,” he said. “I’m sorry, Miss Ash, but we gots to go.”
Miss Ash beamed in her big, yellow dashiki, lighting up the room like a 300
pound sun.
“What kind of cruel business do you have planned for this poor little boy going
now, Ronald?” she said. “You know, he should be in school.”
“It’s summer-time, Miss Ash,” Stoop said. “Now, if I put him in school in the
middle of summer, that would be cruel.”
Out front, Stoop hailed a cab and told the driver to take us to Tobin Bridge.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Stoop didn’t say anything. Through the windows we watched the city pass—the
bombed out bricks of the ghetto giving way to modern buildings with glass panes and
complicated geometry. Men in blue shirts walked with briefcases, sport coats slung
over their shoulders. On Interstate 93 the cab raced toward Charlestown; the high
rises settled behind us. Before us, the horizon flattened. Instead of houses and stores,
nameless factories stretched as far as the eye could see.
“Which side you want? Charlston or Chelsea?” the cab driver said.
“Wherever you could stop,” Stoop said.
The driver kept going over the bridge until we got to Chelsea, which gave him
an extra $1.50 on the meter. He took the first exit and pulled over. Stoop gave him
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twenty dollars and he drove away.
“C’mon, little nigga,” he said.
We walked back to the middle of the long, green bridge that stretched across the
river like a praying mantis, cars shooting across its slick back. The greasy water
underneath stayed still and the flat landscape on either side of the bridge dotted with
smokestacked factories spouting black and white clouds into the sky.
We shuffled along a thin walkway. Traffic whirred past, blowing my shirt and
hair back while I held the guardrail until we got to the middle of the bridge. Stoop
stopped and looked at me, like he was about to give a eulogy, his face and chest slick
with sweat.
“Jump,” he said, pointing toward the water below.
I saw the word leave his mouth. A tiny word. It sounded like he said “Jom” with
a “p” at the end of it. Or “jum.” Just a word. A noise that left his face in a certain
pattern. Words were like that. They didn’t even have to mean anything. But that
noise, the word “jump,” made my stomach contract until it sucked all the good air out
of my head and left it with my dry brain and a burning sensation between my ears.
“I ain’t kidding,” Stoop said, sweat dripping down his forehead. “Jump.”
“Jump,” I repeated.
“You swim, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
To jump from the bridge I’d need to climb over the fence, twice as tall as I was.
And if I wanted to hit the water, I’d need to jump up and out to clear a green safety
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net.
I looked out across the Chelsea River and imagined the fall, the weightlessness
of it, the feeling of being on a metal bridge one second and then having nothing under
my feet the next. I imagined landing in the black water, submerging, opening my
eyes. Everything would be murky, surrounded by foreign shapes with slimy
appendages., forms of animals floating by in a stream of bubbles; a gelatinous toothy
thing brushing up against my leg. I’d try as hard as I could to pretend it was a rock or
a tree branch. And—if my legs weren’t broken in half from the impact—I’d swim to
the top of the water and take in a big breath of air. Of course, I’d get a little bit of
water in there and then remember that directly below me is some sort of thing, a
goddamn sea beast, and I’d swim as fast as I could.
Stoop looked at me as if he just asked me to sweep the floor or get him a beer
from the refrigerator. He never seemed to grasp the magnitude of the situation. There
he stood in his Boston Celtics jersey and dirty white basketball shorts as if he wasn’t
aware of the consequences of throwing a pre-pubescent boy from the suburbs off of a
bridge in the middle of industrial Boston.
“This is it,” he said. “This is the part where you become a real nigga.”
“I don’t—”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s too late for this whiteboy shit.”
“This is where you wipe the motherfucking tears off your cheek and act like a
real nigga,” he said. “Go ahead. Ask it. Ask me, ‘Damn, Stoop, you make every
motherfucker jump of a muthafuckin bridge before they put in work?’ And the
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answer to your question is hell fucking no. You know why you’re jumping off this
bridge?”
“Yes.”
“Why I want you to jump, then?” he said, annoyed. “Huh?”
Without an answer, I walked up to the railing and hugged the metal bar while I
climbed up and over it to a small platform that allowed me to take off my shoes and
throw them over the railing, back at Stoop. It certainly wasn’t the last time I’d be that
scared, but it was definitely the first. Nothing in my life had compared—happiness,
sadness, anger and fear, but this … this was beyond fear. I was going to vomit. My
head felt light.
I watched a bird flying overhead. His wings, the pattern of feathers, and
direction of flight all made perfect sense. My thoughts became segmented, like a list:
1)A bird is just a bird.
2)The bird is flying to the shore
3)The bird is trying to find a piece of food.
4) He is a male blackbird.
5) He understands he is not a dove.
6) He does not want to be.
I shimmied out to the end of the ledge, suspended 5,000 feet over the water,
where thousands of frothing mouths waited to swallow me whole. And I jumped out,
over the green safety net.
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35
Lakisha and I sat on the bench, fanning ourselves, watching Stoop play
basketball.
“What was it like?” she asked, swinging her feet over the bench, turning her
attention toward me.
I didn’t really know what it was like. It wasn’t like anything. A scream, a jump,
a terrifying moment in the air where my stomach sang with nerves … and then the
water. Instead of bluish water with black shapes, it was just black. And green. And
more black. I shot down into the water almost expecting my feet to touch the bottom.
The water felt cold, but not as cold as I thought. The water was frightening but not as
frightening as I thought. And when I came up for air there was no breath left in me,
but I was only under the water for what felt like a second and I made sure that my
first gasp of air was all air.
I didn’t know where I was because I couldn’t see anything.
“It was okay,” I said. Lakisha looked at me with her tilted head, that said, at
once, “I don’t believe you” and “Okay, now tell me the truth.”
“I mean, it wasn’t as scary as I thought,” I said. “I didn’t want to do it.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Stupid, I guess.”
The scariest part was the waiting. The cab ride to the bridge. The moment when
I knew Stoop wanted me to jump. The time in between standing on the bridge and my
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feet leaving the cold green metal. The seconds of flight, from jumping to hitting the
water with a smack. The moments underwater to the surface. The time swimming
from the water to the Chelsea shore. Nothing is inherently frightening. It’s the
anticipation. The waiting. The time from point a to point b.
“My daddy like you,” Lakisha said, looking at the ground, as if it pained her to
say something pleasant.
“How do you know?” I said, not wanting to push it.
“I heard him talking,” she said. “You know his boy Marco?”
The burly Puerto Rican. They called him Deez, because he was bigger than a
diesel truck. Deez was quiet, barely said a word, but he and Stoop got along OK.
“He told Marco he like you,” Lakisha said. “But you the most sensitive
muthafucka he know. But he told him about how you damn near broke his nose and
Marco almost fell out his chair laughing.”
“Sensitive?” I asked.
“Sensitive, nigga,” she said. “You know what it means.”
“I know what it means,” I said. “But how am I sensitive?”
“You know how you asking all these questions?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s sensitive.”
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36
“This is how you hold it,” Stoop said, breathing hard out of his nose, which
produced a little whistling sound that lightened the mood, but made it hard
concentrate. He showed me the outstretched palm of his right hand, like a magician
showing a sleight of hand trick to his apprentice, and then he gently placed the Glock
in the center of his palm and in one motion wrapped his fingers around the butt,
leaving his forefinger pointing, just outside of the trigger.
“Got it?” he asked.
I shook my head, yes.
The alleyway looked haunted—wet, littered with garbage, too quiet—and I
trembled. But as I stood there with Stoop—among the brick walls that enclosed us
into the alleyway and the overfilled dumpster—I watched Stoop’s face, taut with
intention, I knew I was in the right place.
Stoop gripped the gun and held his arm straight out.
“Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe.”
He looked natural with that thing resting in his palm. He put his arm down and
looked at me with a tilted head, as if he’d already given up on me.
“You got to listen to this part,” he said, stuffing the gun into his waistband.
“Because this is the part that make a stickup kid a stickup kid.”
“You remember what it felt like when you jumped off the bridge?”
“Yeah.”
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“Like what?”
“Scared.”
“But what else?”
“I had to shit.”
“That ain’t a feeling.”
“Like I was going to die.”
“Like you were going to die?”
“Like I was dead.”
Stoop smiled and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You felt dead because you was
dead,” he says. “Your brain, your heart and your body stopped working. It was just
your goddamn instincts right there.”
“So what I’m going to ask you to do now is recreate that feeling,” Stoop said.
He spoke gently, like a therapist.
“You want me to die?”
“No, I want you to hold that gun,” Stoop said, gripping my hand into his. “And
then you die.”
Stoop told me to flatten my right palm and then placed the butt of the gun
against my palm, gently, like he was handing me a newborn baby.
“Feel the metal against your hand,” he said. “What do you feel?”
“It’s cold,” I said.
“Exactly,” Stoop laughed. “It’s colder than a motherfucker. Now you do it.”
“What do you mean?”
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“I mean, you do it,” he said. “Be cold. Remember that bridge, stepping out to
the ledge. Remember the breeze on your face. Remember the way the wind hit your
lips and remember what the black water looked like from up there.”
Stoop put his hand on my neck and started to squeeze.
“Now swallow, motherfucker,” he growled.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Stoop squeezed my neck so hard that I could barely
breathe, let alone swallow.
“Swallow once,” he said in a low voice that grinded out of his throat. “And be
dead, motherfucker,”
I swallowed once and felt myself jumping from the bridge, the sensation of
floating as soon as my feet left the ledge and the scared feeling leaving my body and
the new feeling that took hold—the sense of being outside myself, but not far away. I
had no opinions. I couldn’t see anything. But I felt it all.
“Go cold,” Stoop whispered in my ear, and I understood. “And now pull the
trigger.”
It wasn’t a bang. It was more of a pop.
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37
Stoop burst through the apartment door a with a newspaper in one hand and a
Big Gulp in the other. He threw The Boston Globe at my feet.
“Read it, nigga,” he said.
I picked it up and immediately recognized my school picture from the fifth
grade.
Brookline Police officers are still searching Bear Lopez, 15, who has not been
seen since Saturday, June 19, 1990. Lopez frequents the Copley/Downtown Boston
area and may have run away to New York or California. He was last seen wearing a
gray plaid shirt, khaki pants and gray tennis shoes and should be in good physical
condition.
Anyone with information regarding this person or his whereabouts is asked to
please contact Brookline Police Department detectives at (617) 343-5619.
Community members who wish to help anonymously can call 1-800-494-TIPS.
“They still looking,” Stoop yelled from the kitchen.
I sat on the couch, looking at the newspaper article. At my picture. Fuck, I
looked different. I’d been getting my hair cut at the barbershop in the hood, where
Rico shaved away my Caucasian bowl cut and traded it for a close-cropped taper.
“Now you look like a Lopez!” he said, shoving a mirror in my hand, spinning
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me around in the chair to see. I traded my plain striped shirts for Nike tees and wore a
thin gold chain that dangled outside of my shirts. I could slip in and out of Roxbury
without anyone looking twice. When I walked through Roxbury, old Puerto Rican
women talked with me in Spanish. I nodded my head like I understood, but I still
didn’t know shit.
I had no idea why the police thought I would be in New York or California.
Maybe my mother told them that to throw them off track, as some sort of parting gift.
Either way, Stoop said it was a good thing, that if I sat tight for another month they’d
forget all about me. He said after a few months I could open up a store called Bear
Lopez’s Runaway Delicatessen and they wouldn’t know the difference.
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38
“I’m hungry,” Stoop said, tearing the newspaper from my hands, crumpling it
up and throwing it in the trash. “I need a pastrami on rye.”
“Nothing’s open,” I said. “And no place sells pastrami and rye around here.”
“Shit, yo, Coolidge corner, nigga,” Stoop said.
“What about Deandre’s?” I asked.
“I swear, that nigga trying to poison me,” he said, rubbing his belly. “I ain’t
asking you shit, muthafucka. I’m telling you.”
He handed me a $10 bill of which the change would be exactly two pennies.
Sometimes I hated Stoop’s demands disguised as life lessons, but at least on the
train to Brookline, I could sit around and watch people.
I took a seat on the half-full green line, across from a college kid with curly
black hair and glasses, hunched over a book called Ulysses, so intent that it looked
like he was going to devour it. I imagined him finishing a page and ripping it out of
its binding, stuffing it into his mouth until eventually it filled, clogging his throat, his
eyes watering, bulging out of their sockets. Every now and then, he’d let out a little
chuckle, and when I got off at Coolidge Corner, he took a bite of an apple and shook
the book in disgust.
In Brookline, nobody looked at each other as they walked down the sidewalk,
hurrying from point a to point b as fast as possible. When a group of kids gathered
near a store, adults would shoo them away; they’d wander off to the next spot to
convene.
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In Roxbury, everybody looked at each other. Sometimes people rapped or sang as
they walked down the street, pounding fists for the neighborhood when the passed.
Two old women stood in front of the doorway at Michael’s Deli.
“Excuse me,” I said. One of the ladies, a thin, curly haired Jew, looked at me
and clutched her purse, but didn’t move.
“Excuse me,” I said again.
“Can I help you?” she said. Her hair, an unnatural shade of peach.
“I’m trying to get in.”
She moved out of the way, reluctantly, and continued talking with her friend.
I ordered Stoop’s sandwich and pushed past the old ladies on my way out. The
sun set over the two story buildings as I walked back toward the train stop. A movie
got out of the theater and I stopped to watch the people rush toward the train, mostly
couples, walking arm-in-arm and groups of friends talking loudly, making wide
gestures with their arms, summing up the movie’s plot in dramatic swoops.
At Beacon Street, a skinny black man slid toward me with a slow stride. As he
approached, I saw his face—eyes cold, but focused. I heard footsteps behind me. The
man in front pointed to the alleyway to my right.
“Go,” he motioned, and I tried to run, but a hand behind me grabbed my neck
sturdily and pushed me into the alley.
I imagined a fist ramming into my face, snapping my nose, my skull grinding
into the concrete, teeth crunching against the rocky gravel. I heard the imaginary
crack of a bone.
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39
There were two of them. The slender, dark-skinned one wore a Red Sox hat low
over his eyes. He licked his chapped lips constantly. The other one had a lighter
complexion. Muscles poked out from under his white t-shirt. He fidgeted, pacing
back and forth like a lion in a cage. My limbs felt like they were made of bamboo
while theirs looked sturdily constructed from steel rods and rusted spikes.
They circled.
The lighter skinned one pulled a large pistol from his waistband, but it didn’t
look real, too large and the black stell looked crisper than I thought a gun should be.
But he put the barrel in my chest and pushed me against the wall. I wanted to fall to
the ground and hold my hands over my head until they went away. The larger one’s
voice felt deep and gravely and almost non-existent against my ear.
“Where you from, nigga?” he said, pushing his head toward my face. A sharp
pain of pure nerves shot down my neck and back.
“Roxbury.”
The skinny one laughed, his head so close that we touched noses.
“You a hard nigga now?” he said. “You ain’t from no Roxbury.”
“I don’t have any money,” I said, showing him my two pennies.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s all I got.”
He slid the gun back into his waistband and then they both eased off. The
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skinny one took my bag with Stoop’s sandwich and handed it to his friend.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said, smacking my check with his open palm. “Oh
yeah, tell Stoop what’s up.”
And they ran off, out of the alleyway, turning right, toward the train stop. I
leaned against the wall, trying to catch my breath.
I watched a cockroach scurry across a wet newspaper, across the alley and
behind a garbage dumpster.
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40
Waiting for Stoop, Marco sat on the couch with his legs spread out, arms resting
across its back, like he was purposely trying to take up as much space as he could, his
hair braided into tight cornrows and then pulled back into a short ponytail; he wore a
thick, gold chain with a king’s crown pendant dangling from the end. For as large,
and imposing a figure as Marco was, he had an easy way about him—a calmness that
emanated from his body. And he could quiet even the loudest of beasts, even Stoop.
“You coming the parade?” Marco said.
“The what?”
“Nigga, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, my nigga.”
For someone who wasn’t black, Marco said the word nigga more than anyone
I’d ever heard. Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga. He used it to begin and end sentences.
Sometimes, if you can imagine, he used it as a deep philosophical question. I didn’t
understand the rules of the word. Although Marco wasn’t black, nobody in the hood
seemed to care that he said it all the time.
Back in Brookline, we learned about the word’s history. It was a Latin word for
“black” used by John Rolfe to describe slaves being shipped to the Virginia colony.
Mrs. Clark (who blushed even when the wind howled inappropriately) called it “the N
word,” and said that we were never to use it. But to me it was a word, like bird or
mongoose. If a man could give a word meaning, couldn’t a man also take it back?
But in Roxbury. Everyone said it: kids, adults, Puerto Ricans, blacks. Everyone
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except me. I stayed away.
“So, it’s like a regular parade?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Marco said. “But there’s mad bitches there, my nigga.”
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41
Stoop and Lakisha burst through the door, each with a bag of groceries.
“Nigga, don’t look at my food,” Stoop said to Marco, who smiled and cupped
his hands around his balls and gave them a little tug.
Lakisha sat on the floor next to Marco and tugged at his boot. In less than a
minute, Stoop came out of the kitchen eating a sandwich bigger than his head; we all
turned to watch him.
“What?” he said, taking a huge, dramatic bite. “Man, stop watching me eat,
nigga.”
“So you going?” Marco asked.
I looked at Lakisha who was lying on the floor with a pillow over her head.
“You going?” I asked, kicking her shoe.
“To what?”
“The parade.”
“Hell no,” she said, putting the corner of the pillow in her mouth and chewing.
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s just a bunch of nasty Puerto Rican niggas,” she said, pointing to Marco.
Marco leapt up from the couch, like a giant woken from a 300 year slumber. He
ripped the pillow from Lakisha’s mouth and lifted her above his head so she nearly
touched the ceiling.
“What you say about me, mothafucka?” he yelled.
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She screamed and laughed, yelling for her daddy, who had retired to the kitchen
to eat his sandwich in peace.
“Stop it! I’m sorry!” Lakisha screamed. “I didn’t mean it!”
Marco spun her around over his head and threw her onto the couch.
“Help me, daddy,” she pleaded.
“That’s what you get for talking your shit to a Puerto Rican!” Stoop said with a
mouthful of food. “Them niggers is savages.”
Marco, Lakisha and Stoop laughed, as if nothing mattered in the world, not
even the filthy streets of Roxbury or the old men and women who sat in the trashladen sidewalks, complaining about their kids who sold drugs in their alleyway,
bitching about white folks who built their stores in the city and extended the
boundaries of Caucasian Boston into colored Roxbury or the junkies who pushed
their way through the avenues damning God to hell or even the gunshots that split
through walls, nicking mothers and their wailing babies, because at that moment,
Roxbury, the brick ghetto shoved carelessly behind downtown Boston, was the
happiest place on the planet Earth.
“Y’all niggas crazy,” I said, swept up in the moment.
They stopped laughing. Stoop looked at me. Marco set Lakisha onto the couch
and all three of them gazed in my direction. When I said it, the words didn’t form
right. They started as a mushy ball in my head, dropping down to my stomach, nearly
disintegrating when they reached my lips. But it was too late. The word “nigga”
amplified across the room, long and drawn out, bouncing off each wall, every corner
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of the tiny apartment, as if I had spent fourteen years saying it in front of a crowd of
millions. The ‘a’ sounded too heavy, separated from the rest of the sentence, the
language standing outside of my body, hovering, watching me say the word—
“nigga”—I felt naked, my pale skin soft, glowing in the light of the day.
And then Stoop started with a snort and then a loud yell and he doubled over
and laughed the hardest I’d ever seen him laugh, which caused Lakisha to fall over
and roll around the carpet while Marco covered his head with a pillow, screaming
with delight.
“Ohhhh, this nigga crazy!” Marco screamed into the pillow while Stoop and his
daughter rolled on the carpet, crying with joy.
“Out of his mind!” Stoop yelled. “This nigga is out of his goddamn mind!”
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42
We tucked ourselves into a corner of an alley in the midst of condemned
projects in the eastern part of Roxbury. At night, homeless camped there to smoked
crack and prostitute themselves. We used it as a shooting range.
The gun felt too heavy in my hand, like it would have made a better weapon if I
just dropped on somebody’s toe.
“Grip it,” Stoop said, hunching over, taking both my hands into his and
steadying my arms. I wrapped my right hand around the grip and my left hand held
the bottom of the gun for support.
“Now let go with your left hand,” he said.
I let go and held the Glock straight out, locking my elbow.
“Put your thumb forward,” he said, patiently.
I stuck my thumb straight out, like I was hitchhiking.
“Nah, keep it on the gun,” Stoop said, calmly correcting me. “But point it
forward.”
I did what he said. Exactly.
“Now breathe,” he said. “Swallow. And squeeze.”
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43
I put on my white, shell-toe Adidas, blue jeans and navy Adidas track jacket
with a clean white t-shirt underneath to meet Lakisha at the Downtown Crossing
station, where all the kids gathered to steal shirts and hats from the Pakistani-owned
sports stores.
She wore her hair pulled back with huge, gold earrings and a pink tank top that
showed her belly button and painted her lips bright red and looked as close to a movie
star as I’d ever seen in real life. Lakisha reminded me of my mother, who I sometimes
imagined sitting in a cell, behind bars without any makeup wondering why nobody
was coming to rescue her—why nobody was calling. For having the shittiest mother
in the history of shitty mothers, I couldn’t help but to feel bad for her, every now and
then. But I also felt that no matter what we are supposed to believe about family,
freakish circumstances were our only, true parents.
“What’s wrong with you?” Lakisha asked.
The station bustled with young Puerto Ricans with close-cropped hairdos and
oversized sports jerseys.
“Nothing,” I said, trying to smile.
“I know when you’re alright,” she said. “This ain’t it.”
“My mother.”
“What about her?” she asked. A group of Puerto Ricans my age played dice
next to us, every now and then sneaking looks at Lakisha’s ass.
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“Your mom’s a hooker, Bear.”
“I guess,” I said, wondering if she was trying to hurt my feelings.
“You look nice, though,” she said, taking my hand.
We walked through downtown, holding hands, the sun beginning to set under
the buildings and the heat of the day escaping with it. People leisured around on
summer days in Boston, their steps slowed, almost to a stop. Tourists sat in Copley
Square eating ice cream.
“You know about Latin Kings?” Lakisha said.
“Only what Stoop told me.”
“Them boys don’t play,” Lakisha warned. “If they beef with you, don’t say
nothing.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, if they get you in a corner, stay there,” Lakisha said. “Don’t say
nothing and don’t tell them who you know and who you with.”
There were so many rules. Everywhere I went; every new thing I did seemed to
have its own set of guidelines to follow. I wondered how I was still alive.
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44
When we got back to Roxbury, a good crowd of people had gathered on
Columbus Ave. with cups of beer and bottles of alcohol in their hands.
Lakisha took my hand and pulled me toward the DJ booth where we stayed,
swaying to the music, the crowd swelling, spilling out into the street; we danced slow,
even though the music was fast, watching the sun set over the projects.
There might have been 300 people in front of those old, burned out buildings in
the middle of Roxbury. A chaotic buzz of men and their girlfriends, zig-zagging their
way to the makeshift dancefloor, an old patch of sunburned grass. The air turned
sweet with liquor. A woman next to me danced by herself. She was tall and her hair
was pulled back so tight that it shined under what was left of the sun. She wore large,
gold earrings and heavy eye makeup.
“Le gustaria bailar? she yelled over the music.
“No,” I said, embarrassed.
“Vamos,” she insisted, taking my hand into hers. I looked at Lakisha and she
giggled.
“Dance,” she said, letting go.
The woman held me, speaking to me in Spanish, not like I was some doughy
kid from the suburbs, but like I was Bear Lopez or Roxbury, Massachusetts. My head
came up to her breasts and she smelled of coconuts.
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45
There were so many people around us that I could hardly breathe. So I didn’t. I
just held onto this woman, watching the crowd from the corner of my squinted eye. It
was a throbbing mass that moved with the slow drum. The whole ghetto swayed in
unison while I clutched onto this strange woman trying to find the rhythm. The more I
thought, the less coordinated I became. I stepped on her feet once or twice. It took me
a few minutes to find the beat again and when I finally did, the song changed.
She guided my shoulders to the rhythm and we danced into the center of the
crowd, staying like that until the sun went down.
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46
The neighborhood felt easier in the summertime. Everything drooped and
melted over the concrete banisters. Even the people. The stores, like Miss Ash’s,
seemed to triple in customers, money going in and out of the register, and we felt OK
in the neighborhood.
Mostly everybody.
Stoop hurt his ankle playing basketball and spent most of his time at home,
hobbling from the kitchen to the TV. He gained some weight in his cheeks and belly.
“I’m a motherfucking fat man,” he said. “Bear come here.”
I found him in the bathroom with his shirt off, looking at his boobs, which
rested in his hands.
“You see this shit?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Titties.”
“Yup.”
“Men aint’ supposed to have titties, Bear,” he said. “I look like a bitch.”
Stoop hobbled over to the window, opened it and looked out over Columbus
Avenue—the brick buildings, trash, homeless people, girls in shorts that barely
covered their asscheeks, young hustlers standing around on the corner. Sometimes
lost tourists made their way to Roxbury, maps out, looking around at the black kids in
baggy shorts and Timberland boots, wondering how to get out without making a
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scene. Truth is, they could have eaten at Deandre’s, cheaper, better than any
restaurant on Newbury Street. Miss Ash might have given them a free postcard. There
were decent people in Roxbury.
But Stoop wasn’t one of them.
“This is your day, nigga,” Stoop said, motioning for me to look out the window.
I spotted a lost family of blondes on the other side of the street. The father wore
shorts and carried a walking stick in one hand and a map in the other. The little boy
jumped up and down and started to run toward a broken fire hydrant that spurted
water into the street, a group of neighborhood kids splashing in their underwear. The
father, in another language, yelled for the boy to stop.
“You see what I see?” Stoop asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re lost.”
“Nah, nigga, fuck that family,” Stoop said. “Look back outside.”
I didn’t see anything. A couple kids down on the sidewalk kicked a milk carton
into the street. A drunk leaned against a wall. And there was Joe, Willie’s son, the one
who sold guns, sitting on the stairwell of his apartment.
“Joe?” I asked. I didn’t understand.
The look on Stoop’s face—wide-eyed and impatient—relayed a certain danger.
“What about Joe?” I said.
“You’re going to go up to that little nigga and fuck him up,” Stoop said, putting
his shirt back on.
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47
Joe was my age, but he grew up in that hood. He was tough—knew everyone in
Roxbury and some even wanted a piece of him, but nobody ever did shit. The
apartment—at that second—got smaller, so small that it closed in on me, all four
walls touching my skin. If I just stood there, I would, no doubt, be suffocated.
It took all my strength to hold back tears.
“Do I get a gun?” I asked.
Stoop laughed and stood up, walking over to the couch. He sat down and put his
bad leg up.
“Nope,” he said.
“What do I do, then?”
“You going to walk over there and fuck him up, yo.”
“I need a gun,” I pleaded.
Stoop wasn’t amused. I was about five inches shorter than Joe. I couldn’t fight.
“Let me just tell you this,” Stoop said, sitting up. “Every nigga out here think he
hard. Every nigga. You know why? Because we don’t have shit else to believe. We
grow up here. This is where we live. Look around you, Bear. Why you think Joe
sitting out there on the stairs looking at every motherfucker who pass by like about to
take they wallet? But you know what? Joe scared as a motherfucker. The last thing he
want to do is put his hands on somebody, yo.”
Sometimes I couldn’t fathom taking advice from Stoop, an out of work thief. As
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if he was my savior/teacher/god all wrapped up in one. My last hope was that the
door would jiggle and Lakisha or Marco would walk in and make Stoop a sandwich
and turn on the TV.
But silence roared through the apartment. Stoop sat on the couch, yellow eyes
fixated, waiting for me to make my move.
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48
When I opened the door to the street, the light hurt my eyes and it took them a
second to adjust. I half hoped the sun would blind me out of sympathy.
I made my way across the street Joe didn’t see me at first. He sat on the steps
with his head between his knees. A group of kids huddled around the gutter, looking
into the grates. The thought of walking up to Joe made my stomach nauseous.
I tried to exaggerate my steps, kicking my feet into the ground so he would hear
me coming, but he didn’t. Because he was crying. I heard him sniffle and when I got
close enough to reach out and touch him, I watched him sobbing into his hands. Joe’s
head shot up when he realized that I was there and he quickly wiped the tears with his
shirtsleeve.
“Motherfucker,” he said. Neither of us knew what to say. Another tear rolled
down his cheek and he stared at me with no words.
Joe was maybe a year or two older, but he looked younger, with the perpetually
confused look on his face; his slack-jaw hung like he wanted me to fill it with
something to say.
I remembered Anton, how he looked right before I clocked him—dull and
confused. He didn’t see it coming. And neither did Joe. I cocked back and punched
him in the mouth.
My fist landed on his eye and my pinkie finger snapped. Joe’s face shot back
and his mouth hung open even lower. A very sharp pain traveled up to my arm and
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into my brain. He couldn’t understand and neither could I, but I swung my fists
erratically, many punches missing him completely—but a few of them landed solidly
with a dull thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. The snap of fist to face had a sharpness, but,
ultimately, it sounded soft and unimpressive, like a butcher pounding on a roast. Joe
covered his head and crouched into a ball for what seemed like an hour as I hit him.
In his ribs, in his face, in his ribs, in his face. I tired quickly, sweating and nearly out
of breath. My fists swelled and ached.
A crowd formed around us. People from the neighborhood watched and yelled
as I sat on top of Joe on the stairwell and swung my fists into his head, body and ribs.
People cheered and covered their faces and I don’t think they could hear Joe, who
begged for me to stop.
“Please,” he said. “I didn’t do anything. I don’t want any trouble.”
He kept his head in between his arms and every couple seconds a burst of air
exited his lips, like the air escaping from a tire. But I swung until I couldn’t swing
any more, until Joe’s face looked like a chocolate glazed donut.
I imagined what would happen afterward, standing over Joe’s bloody body,
twitching and curled in the gutter—the clapping. I’d look over and see Deandre
standing across the street with Marco, tugging at each other’s shirtsleeves, doubled
over in laughter. People would start to cheer. People I didn’t know. Old heads would
hang from windows. Families would come out to their stoops to see what had
happened and when they realized what I had done, the act I had accomplished, they
would one-by-one congratulate me in their own way. Some would hand me money,
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which I would bring to Stoop, who would take half and give the other half to me as a
token of appreciation. A reward for a job well done.
But the neighborhood just stood with their jaws slack, hands on their heads. My
fists throbbed and my head burned with adrenaline. Joe crumpled on the stairwell,
crying in a ball, begging for his life. A window slammed shut and an old woman
leaned against a bus stop sign, shaking her head in shame.
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49
When Stoop’s leg healed, he was back on the court, chubby and wheezing for
breath. Me and Lakisha watched him from the bleachers. She reminded me of
Tatiana, sometimes. Or maybe I’d just been thinking of Tatiana, who I remembered
as delicate, pale and breakable, while Lakisha was dark, aloof and strong-headed.
When her father screamed at her to stop interrupting, to stop looking at him sideways,
to get her fat ass out of the way so he could watch TV, she did it without so much as a
whimper.
“Do I look like my daddy?” she asked, watching her father go up for a miss a
lay-up.
“Not really,” I said. It was the truth. Lakisha didn’t have that hard glare fixed in
her eyes. “Do you look like your mother?”
“No I don’t look like my mother,” she mocked. “We both got this little nose and
this big ass booty.”
Lakisha lifted her ass up for me to see.
“You look like your daddy?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said. Maybe a little. Most of it was in the eyes. I remember whenever
he listened to someone, one eye would raise just a slight bit and the other one would
look like it was falling asleep. It was slight, and I don’t think anyone else in the world
could have noticed. But I did. And when I looked in the mirror I saw the exact same
thing. It made me look insane.
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“Where is your mother,” I asked, realizing that I never heard anything from
Stoop about what happened.
“Same place as yours,” Lakisha said, matter of fact, without a hind of emotion.
Stoop came to the bleachers, out of breath and panting, holding his sides like he
was about to fall over. When he looked up and saw us laughing at him he lost it.
“You little motherfuckers,” he said, so exhausted that he leaned forward and
held up his hand, as if we had to wait another few minutes so he could yell at us.
“Daddy, you want me to call you an ambulance?” said Lakisha, stifling a laugh.
“Or maybe Bear can carry you home on his back.”
Lasha winked.
“Or maybe you can just stay here and we’ll go back and eat the rest of your
Doritos,” I said.
And then Stoop lost his footing and stumbled forward, dropping to the ground,
clutching his chest. He grit his teeth and rolled onto his side.
“Call an ambulance,” he whispered.
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50
The clean white walls and floors of Boston General Hospital shined so intensely
under the florescent lights that everything looked wet—me and Lakisha wading
slowly through the hallways, like jellyfish blowing through a dream. One minute we
sat in the park, talking shit, and the next we swam through a hospital waiting to see if
Stoop had died in basketball shorts, clutching his heart. We found the unit where he
was supposed to be. The intake nurse, a black lady with gray hair and a mole on her
nose, told us without emotion to wait on the couches where a Puerto Rican girl,
maybe about 20 years old, waited, too. She looked out the window as if there was
trying to give a message to someone on the other side. We didn’t say anything.
“Write something for me,” Lakisha said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like anything,” she said. “Like the poems you wrote in school for girls.”
“Those are easy. Anyone can do that,” I said. “I’ll write something else for
you.”
“Write about your daddy,” she said, reaching in her backpack, handing me a
notebook and pen.
I stared at the lined paper for a few minutes before I began to write, thinking
about my father, his lopsided eyes and his odd temperament. And I thought about my
mother and Tatiana and Bubba. And I thought about Stoop’s tyranny and about his
kindness.
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And then I just let the words slip from the edge of my brain, down my neck,
into my arm and through my fingers. Lakisha tried to look at my paper, but I huddled
over it and turned to the side so she couldn’t see.I wrote until I forgot Lakisha was
there. I wrote until I was no longer in a hospital I wrote until the insides of my fingers
turned red and throbbed in pain.
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51
I wrote about the last time I saw my father.
I don’t remember him much. He had a beard. My mother didn’t like to talk
about him, except when she was angry, when she was trying to describe something
horrible, even if the connection wasn’t totally obvious. “Oh look at this horrible
weather, Bear. Your father would have loved this.”
She talked about him like he was dead. But he just couldn’t take it anymore.
He snapped. He left. My mother told me I’m named Bear because my dad smoked a
lot of marijuana. She said one night, high out of his mind, he started yelling out baby
names. “Tree!” he said, laughing hysterically. My mom told the story with a look of
disgust on her face. I can’t understand why she married him if she hated him so much.
My father always talked about bears. He knew about brown bears, grizzlies; he knew
about the bears on the islands of southeastern Alaska and the arctic. He knew how to
treat a bear when you see one and what to do if you’re attacked by one.
“They tell you not to run,” he’d say. “But when you see a black bear, just
run.”
But he’d never seen one in real life.
Finally he settled on the name Bear and wouldn’t listen to my mother when she
told him he was being ridiculous.
“Bear,” he said. And that’s what it was. When I was first born my mother said
my dad would hardly let go of me and he would take me to the store to show
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everybody his baby boy. He’d even stop to show me to homeless people.
“Oh, everyone was so happy for him, you know,” Mother said. “He wasn’t
exactly the kind of man you’d think would be good with babies.”
He was a pretty regular guy before he went insane—a law student at UCLA
who wore a ponytail and took me to watch Cheech & Chong movies before I could
control my slobber. He drove me to the park, pushed me on swings, took me into the
city, read Treasure Island while I sat on his lap in the dusty corner of the library that
nobody else could find. Or that’s what my mother told me. I don’t remember any of
it. All I remember was when he started to take on this distant look, one that started in
his eyes, made its way down to his mouth and drooped, even his long brown fingers
seemed to hang independently of his hand, as if his nerves and worries rested not
inside, but in some glowing aura that surrounded his body, like Jupiter’s ring.
I can still see how he looked in my mind, though—a tiny man, about 5’9” who
carried around this little body that hunched over like a fern. He had deep olive skin
and dark almost black hair and a beard with long black hair that he kept in a loose
ponytail. When he looked at you, it was always with the deepest of sincerity, but there
was also a profound sadness in his dark brown eyes. They were always wet,
constantly on the verge of tears. The calmness and relaxedness that I came to
associate with my father I later found out was mostly from the effects of marijuana.
My mother said he “wasn’t well,” but I thought she was lying. I was seven
and my mother and I sat on the couch, watching a show was about rich people in
Texas. Mother got up for a glass of wine and stopped at the window.
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“Holy shit,” she said, pressing her face against the glass. I got up to see my
father outside on the sidewalk with a guitar. He looked up and waved, his long beard
and hair shaggy and wild. He wore a sport coat with a Hawaiian shirt underneath. He
did look very sick, his electrified eyes buzzing around his face, like the second hand
on an old watch.
My father dropped out of law school, started growing marijuana in the
backyard, bought a bible and quoted scriptures. My mother hated that kind of shit. All
of it. They fought constantly, and he got out. He begged for change downtown. We
got letters in the mail that looked like ransom notes, with pictures from magazines cut
out to make some cryptic message. For Christmas, he sent a picture of a giraffe with
Jesus’ head at the top of the long neck and it said. “Be good for Jesus” in mismatched
letters at the top.
It was strange to see my father again, homeless and out of his mind.
“Don’t go out there, Bear,” my mother warned. “He’s not the same.”
I didn’t want to go out there, anyway, so I sat back down on the couch and
tried to watch television until I heard a knock at the door.
“Don’t answer it,” Mother said, pacing around the living room.
The knocks got louder, and before long it sounded like a battering ram.
“I’m calling the police!” my mother yelled.
“I am the police,” screamed my father from the other side of the door. “I am
the four points of God’s law. The only law is natural law and I am natural law!”
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“I’m giving you one chance to get out of here, Robert,” she said. “And then
I’m calling the cops. I swear to God.”
Mother said my father was a hippy. They met holding signs made of
cardboard at a rally after Ruben Salazar, a local Mexican farm worker, was killed by
police. After the protest they went to a bar and got drunk enough to fall in love. I was
an accident, my mother said.
“A happy accident, Bear,” she said.
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52
My father banged against the door.
“No physical being on this planet can take me away from here,” he yelled, his
words demented with intention.
My mother called 911 and within ten minutes two Brookline Police cruisers
showed up. One officer calmed my father while the other officer knocked on the door.
My mother opened the front door where a young and pudgy cop stood, my father,
next to the him, making faces.
“Ma’am, is this your husband?” the cop said in a monotone voice.
“Ex-husband, yes,” she said.
“Sir, I’m going to ask that you please stop touching me.”
My father kept one finger on the officer’s shoulder and one finger on his own
nose. The other cop looked sort of amused.
“We are all touched in one way or another. You are touched by me. I am
touched by the Lord Jesus Christ. We are all winners, sport,” my father said without a
hint of mockery or joy. Every now and then he’d look at me and stick out his tongue.
“Can you just take him away?” my mother said. “Or can I just shoot him?”
“Ma’am, you do not have that authority,” the cop said, steadying my father,
who became increasingly more energetic. The officer seemed to realize that a
wickedly intense energy hovered over our house, through the blood red bricks. My
father’s eyes, usually crooked and confused, gained a sense of clarity like he’d been
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injected with anti-psychotic medication, like he’d felt the effects immediately. His
smile carried no traces of sickness in his joy. And then he leapt from the top stair with
his arms outstretched and landed directly on the other cop. They tumbled down six
stairs and then landed with a thud onto a patch of grass. Neither of them moved for a
second. Nobody did. My mother gasped and covered her mouth with her hands.
The chubby officer leapt down the stairs and tackled my father, who grinned
while he rolled and maneuvered under the officer’s direction. And when the
handcuffs were secured he got up on his knees and let out a big sigh.
They stuffed my father in the back of the cop car and I watched him through
the window, his eyes glassy and crooked, wiry hair sticking up and to the side with
that lopsided grin, like everything in the world was a joke.
My mother turned to me, her face foreign and strange. Even the lines around
her eyes seemed new. The way her hair fell flat against her eyes was different than I
remember. I didn’t know who the woman was. As my father rolled off downtown in
the back of a police car, my mother said, “Remember the good things, Bear.”
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53
Stoop came back from the hospital softer, doughier, unsmiling eyes sagging,
less abrasive. He sat on the couch, still in his hospital scrubs, like an overgrown baby.
“You want something from the kitchen?” I asked.
“Pills,” he said. “Aspirin and the little blue ones. And pink ones.”
I went into the kitchen and found the aspirin and the other pills. I poured a glass
of water and took them back to Stoop.
He portioned them out into a colorful little pile on his lap.
“You need to be in school,” Stoop said, putting a little mountain of pills into his
mouth.
“They’re still looking for me,” I said. “I can’t.”
“No they ain’t,” he said.
“Why?”
“They probably gave up after a month,” Stoop said. “Figured you was in
California.”
“Roxbury ain’t like school in Brookline,” he said.
“I know.”
“But, then again, you done fucked Joe ass up pretty good, boy,” Stoop said.
“Matter
of fact, I didn’t tell you about that.”
“What?”
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“Shit, that nigga was fixing to bust a shot through your skull,” Stoop said.
“Only thing that stopped him was his pops.”
“Willie?” I asked, thinking about how Joe’s father hated me more than Joe did,
ever
since I moved into the neighborhood.
“Yup.”
“Willie hates me.”
“He did hate you,” Stoop said. “Thought you was a rich boy on vacation in the
ghetto. Old black folk get jumpy, Bear.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened to what?”
“How come he didn’t he shoot me?”
“Because ever since you beat Little Joe’s ass, Joe been going to school, coming
home right after and do his goddamn homework, yo. You done beat academia into
that nigga,” Stoop said, laughing, clutching his chest. “Lakisha showed me that shit
you write down while I was laid up in the hospital.”
“Stupid,” I said.
“Nah, man,” he said. “You got a gift.”
“You didn’t go to school,” I said. I tried to imagine Stoop as a small boy, but I
couldn’t.
“Look at me, nigga,” he said. “I mean, for real. I’m a 44-year-old man, sitting
on this busted up couch in the middle of the ghetto with half of a heart, a child
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running around Dorchester, a baby mama who ain’t got nothing better to do than sit
up in a jail cell counting the days till she can put a pipe up to her lips and I got but
$330 to my name. What part of this shit do you really need, Bear?”
Stoop reached down to the carpet and picked up my notebook.
“This shit, nigga,” he said, waving my story around his head like a flag of
surrender. “This shit your ticket off this dirty ass island. You a real nigga alright, but
you ain’t a real nigga like you think you is. You ain’t a real nigga like me. You ain’t a
real nigga like Deandre or Marco.”
“I bet Joe thinks I’m a real nigga,” I said.
“Joe fucking retarded.”
He was right, in a way. I hated our little apartment. I hated the moldy wood
smell and the empty beer bottles. I hated how Stoop smoked inside. I hated that
strange people knocked on the door at impossible hours of the night.
“You need money, Stoop?”
“Everyone need money.”
“No, I mean, like, right now.”
Everything in the apartment buzzed. The windows vibrated and the light
stabbed through the blinds.
“I need the gun,” I said, salty words rolling off my tongue like a wad of thick
spit.
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54
The butt of the gun in my waistband felt cold and thick against my skin. I
stood in the alley with my palm wrapped around it and when I could see the shape of
a girl just a few feet in front of me I walked out into the sidewalk and stepped in her
path. There she was. I saw her from first as a speck, a white blemish on the horizon of
the Boston streetscape and then as an unsightly smudge and then as a translucent
bubble ready to be popped and then a fully human shape with a face and a heart. It
was almost like watching a live birth. I knew she was mine because she met the
criteria: She was small, meek, her arms were thin; she was college educated; she was
less than half my strength and she wore long earrings. That was Stoop’s criteria.
Her blonde hair shined translucent under the sun. A face so pale it looked like
a bowl of milk. She walked up the sidewalk and I grit my teeth I closed my eyes but
that only made me internalize the fear and it felt like a marching band was stomping
through the core of my body. My breath was short and I felt sick.
“Go cold.” I heard Stoop’s voice grinding in my head, but it was much easier
when he was there, standing over me. I hit my forehead against the brick wall and that
helped a little bit. The pain was sharp and it shook through my entire body.
“Go cold.” I hit my head against the wall again in the same spot and I could
feel a welt rising up and settling in a big, tender, red mound. It was excruciating and I
was so angry that I felt like I could rip somebody’s head clean off.
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“Go cold.” I watched the girl walking toward me. I could see her flushed red
cheeks and the wrinkles in her white sweater. She wasn’t as skinny as she looked
from far away. She was out of shape and she was smiling, but she also looked sad. I
felt like if I concentrated hard enough I could tell what she was thinking. Which was
the wrong thing to do. I imagined Stoop; his tiny yellow teeth, his greasy face with
gray stubble coming out of his muscled cheeks and his growled instructions:
“Swallow once …”.
Her cheeks flushed and then turned bright red when she saw me. She jumped
back a little and smiled a nervous smile, her face reddening. In one swift motion, I
took a step toward her, pulling her into the alleyway. She didn’t struggle. Instead, she
giggled.
Be dead, I thought.
When I pulled the gun out of my waistband she crumpled against the wall and
started to cry. The action seemed incongruous to the world. It was sunny. The world
seemed to be just as calm as it ever was. I didn’t know what to do then. My instinct
was to bend down and comfort her.
Fuck, was she crying, her blonde hair brunetted, wet with snow. The book bag
with the letters Boston University emblazoned on the pocket spilled its contents onto
the icy ground—a Managerial Economics textbook and a red notebook flopped
pathetically in the wind. Cars passed the alley slow, their passengers oblivious. We
were ghosts. As soon as she saw the Glock she crumpled into nothing, fell easily
against the brick wall like a flimsy sign knocked over in a windstorm. I didn’t go
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cold. That’s for sure. I didn’t go dead, either. I did the exact opposite. I wanted to tell
her I almost did the same thing my first time I was robbed. Instead of a cold, dead
motherfucker, I became a therapist.
“Do you go to college?” I asked, my gloveless hand nearly frostbitten from
the cold. What do you say to a girl twice your age at the business end of your gun?
She wouldn’t look at me; just stayed there, pressed up against the brick wall,
wet and crying. Trembling.
“Hey,” I said, giving her a little kick on the ass. “College. You go to college?”
She turned her face toward me and I could see into her blue eyes, mascara
running in messy little rivers down her cheeks. Such a sad thing.
“No,” she said and rested her head back into her arms and sobbed. “Yeah. I
mean, yes.”
She’d given up; didn’t even care if she lived or died, just collapsed there on
the ground—didn’t tell me to stop or beg for her life. Just cried with her head in her
lap. I stood there for what seemed like five days, pointing my wobbly gun, trying as
hard as I could to swallow her away, but I stood there, too shitscared to figure out if
she even had a wallet.
Stoop spent so much time on what would happen in the beginning, but never
spoke about what would happen in the end. And I swallowed.
“… and be dead, motherfucker.”
And I was dead.
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55
Stoop slept on the couch when I got back. The sun shot through the blinds,
lighting the apartment in sharp slivers, a shard of light dividing his body clean in half.
I sat and waited chair for him to wake up. I felt a nervous shit coming on, a mass of
exposed and shaken nerve endings that gathered and settled restlessly in my snow
globe of a stomach.
When Stoop finally woke, he rubbed his head and scalp hard, like he was
trying to start a fire.
“Sup,” he said, the apartment mostly dark by then. What little light remained
had crept up to the ceiling. Stoop stretched his arms wide, yawned, rubbed his eyes.
He must have seen the story of failure written all over my face; he smiled and jumped
up to the stereo, pulling out a cassette and popping it in the deck. A hard beat blasted
from the speakers. A DJ scratched the words, “Melle Mel” and “Raheem” and
“Creole” and “Cowboy” over a piano loop and Stoop bit his upper lip, lifted one leg
and did a chicken dance until the sun went completely down and the only light came
from the green radio dial. I couldn’t help but to laugh, but it didn’t feel good.
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56
I was there when it all went down.
Lakisha and I were supposed to meet at Miss Ash’s and then walk down to
Copley to watch the skateboarders. It was a regular fall day, the lawn chairs still out
on the block; old Willie sat low on his chair with a blanket, scowling at the kids. I
waited on the stairs watching the neighborhood settling into its new shell—the
crackheads still pushed hard for change and cars still passed, driving slow with a
boom, rattling the tinted windows. But little-by-little, the white folks started moving
in. We all noticed. First order of business was they flattened the crooked streets; men
worked overnight to fill the cracks. They took out a few of the liquor stores and put in
markets. Deandre said a man came in with a deal—give up the spot and take a bagful
of cash.
“Nigga crazy,” Deandre said.
“What’d you do?” I asked.
“I took his cash alright,” he said, grinning.
Lakisha ran up wearing a pair of white shorts and a tank top, hair braided,
spotted with colored rubber bands.
“Aren’t you cold?” I said. She ignored me and grabbed me by the hand.
“Let’s go,” she said, pulling me toward downtown, past the new restaurants
on Columbus, the fancy nightclubs and the modern boutiques that Miss Ash cursed
under her breath. I tried to resist Lakisha’s force, but she was strong, my arm acting
as a rope as she clutched my fingers and pulled me through the ghetto.
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57
The ghetto changed for sure. When I first arrived, there was no such thing as
Thai food or French food … In fact, there was no cuisine to speak of at all. In place of
this faux-industrial eatery packed with intentionally scruffy white people, we had
corner stores, ate 20-cent Slim Jims and drank chocolate milk from waxed cardboard
containers. The Columbus Avenue I remember came before the gay clubs and
delicate shops that make pink cakes to look like birthday presents. It was a
thoroughfare, a road that took you from one shitty place to the next. Aging white girls
with ripped stockings and cardboard stuffed into their bigassed shoes jerked quickly
down the sidewalk, waving at passing cars. Black men with gray afros slouched on
lawn chairs playing spades while sticky Puerto Rican kids, hair nappy as cotton
candy, drove their scooters down the jagged sidewalks, yelling shit like, “Besa mi
culo!”
Behind the Avenue, in Titus Park, money changed calloused hands, fingers,
black at the tips, ruffled through pockets for spare change, plastic baggies laid
crumpled, littered onto the spotty grass. The bushes smelled year-round like salt and
metal and in the winter the snow around them yellowed like the beard of an old
smoker. We found needles and crack pipes and cigarettes and torn up bibles there. We
found homeless people fucking in the trees like sick, dirty birds and nuns from the
church down the street whispered as they walked through the park along the brick
path, the kids scattering in every direction like they’d just seen a pair of ghosts.
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In the spring, the neighborhood let out a collective yawn; we stretched our
crinkled arms and one-by-one, set rusty barbeques in the sandbox and fired cheap hot
dogs until they tasted like charcoal while lanky men drank can after can of watery
beer till their eyes turned yellow and they danced to Kool and the Gang and Tower of
Power and Sly and the Family Stone and Whodini, Grandmaster Flash, Run D.M.C.,
Rakim, EPMD playing on wobbly turntables with pennies taped to the headshells to
keep the records from skipping.
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58
Lakisha let go of my hand to walk faster out of the hood. I slowed my pace,
studying the brick buildings. A group of scruffy white kids, probably Harvard
students slumming it in Roxbury, sat outside a café called, The Block.
Back in the day, they never would have come. This neighborhood didn’t give
a fuck—about Brookline or Chestnut Hill or Watertown or the tree-lined
neighborhoods on the outskirts of Boston where everyone and their mothers made
rent by gripping the edges of boats and pulling fish from the frozen Atlantic. The sun
rose and set on our four blocks of Massachusetts. Four blocks was the inception, the
creation and the end. Our world was four blocks, from West Newton Street to Mass
Ave.—we represented the Boston City Breakers, the Latin Kings, UPS, Fly ID,
AWOL, Control Crew, MPC Crew, the Lil Crip Gang, 20 Love, Asian Boyz, Big
Head Boys, Los Solidos, Untouchable Vice Lords, Ed OG, Guru from Gangstarr. We
uprocked and bodyrocked, pop locked and moonwalked. We set cardboard on the
sidewalk and practiced headspins until our skulls went raw. We did not give a fuck
because we listened only to our souls—the souls we caught like lightning bugs
released from the cupped palms of our elders with their greasy do-rags waving like
victory flags in the wind. Our elders hung from windows, clipping orange, green and
yellow dashikis to clothes lines.
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I could barely see Lakisha’s head she walked so quickly. But I caught a
glimpse of her white tank top, just a few blocks ahead, right at Titus Park by the old
church. I tried to catch up, jogging toward her.
I watched a car, an old Cadillac with rust spots on the doors, pull up beside a
group of black teenagers crowding on the corner. The car stopped. The group of
teenagers split up. One of them ran East. Another dropped to the ground. One ran
toward me. I focused my eyes, trying to watch for Lakisha, who had turned around,
basketball still in her hands.
I heard a Pop. Pop. And silence. And one more Pop. Two of the kids hit the
ground instantly and laid still. One of them hit the ground and slapped against the
concrete like a fish out of a pail. The car screeched away and the basketball rolled
from the sidewalk, toward the street, from Lakisha’s hands. She lay crooked against
the brick wall, neck twisted, arms out to her sides, like a bird caught mid-flight. I left
her there, ran back to Stoop’s before the police came.
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59
The uninspired lunchroom at Roxbury High looked like an institution for the
insane clowns with its orange, yellow and blue color scheme and random shapes
painted haphazardly onto the stark, white walls. Mostly black kids jetted carelessly
around the cafeteria with trays and I watched them for a while, without any money or
lunch, I stood in the doorway entrance trying to scope out a seat in the room, made up
of hundreds of small groups, talking shit, play boxing.
The room echoed into a loud buzz. A group of boys next to me stood in a
circle, taking turns rapping, one of them making drum sounds with his mouth. The
steady hum of youth did not settle my nerves; kids ran from one side of the cafeteria
to another with no pattern. I stood in the doorway trying to find a table to sit, settling
on a place by a window in the corner where I could sit and watch the circus of the
lunchroom. I picked out one kid, a stocky Puerto Rican whose hair looked like it was
painted on, the lines cut into his hair executed with the precision of a fine artist. He
stood in front of another group of girls who pulled at their braids, held tiny mirrors in
front of their faces and squinted at their own images.
It was nothing like Brookline. I remembered the fourth grade, on a field trip
into some historical countryside in Massachusetts, when I sat on the bus, the bumpy
ride doing bad things to my sensitive stomach. The three-hour ride away from town,
through the winding roads lined with pine trees should have been pretty, but while the
other kids gawked, huddled near the back and told stories, showed each other their
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genitals, and screamed in high pitch yowls, I curled up on the sticky plastic seat near
the middle of the bus and swallowed hard to suppress my vomit. My face sweated and
froze and turned the color of chewed mint gum. When we got off the bus, I ran
behind a tree and vomited into the dirt. Waffles, orange juice, and some fingernail
sized red chunks that I think were part of my stomach. I couldn’t pay attention to the
rest of the field trip. While the kids shot through the woods, trying to lose the
chaperone, I stayed close to Mr. Montgomery, a burned out hippie who never learned
any of his students’ names. It was the longest three hours of my life, walking through
the woods while Montgomery told me about the time in college when he fell in love.
“I know you’re just a kid,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t
understand it.”
“Understand it?” I asked. He laughed, As if I made a joke.
“You’re a funny fucker,” he said, kicking an oversized pinecone like he was
punting a football. It continued that way for several hours.
“Love isn’t like you think,” he said. “Half the time you don’t even know
you’re there.”
At lunch, the class piled into a large picnic area with about a hundred separate
picnic tables, and as noon rolled around, the tables filled with kids from different
schools. I sat at the only empty one and laid out the contents of my lunch. A turkey
sandwich with cheddar cheese, Doritos, Reecee’s Peanut Butter Cups and an apple. I
was so hungry that my stomach roared out in agony, directing me to eat as much as I
could in as little time as possible. So I did. I started with the sandwich and ate it
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without chewing. I shoved the Doritos into my mouth and opened my Reecee’s and
devoured those. By the time I finished my apple, I felt OK, full and satisfied.
When I got up to throw away my trash I noticed that the entire picnic area had
stopped talking. They were all girls, looking in my direction, some with their mouths
hanging open. And most of them were laughing.
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60
At Roxbury High, though, I didn’t feel that way. Like a punk, I mean. I wore
good clothes and made some money. People knew my name in neighborhood. I sat in
the lunch room and looked out the window at the old, white house on Greenville (the
one in front of the projects with boarded up windows). A girl stood on the porch,
wearing a tank top and shorts, waving a stick into the air, talking to herself, dancing
in wide steps with an imaginary partner, mouthing the lyrics to a song.
I wondered why she wasn’t in school.
I imagined she was Lakisha, fooling us all, allowing us to grieve while she
secretly lived a life of solitary joy. I put my head on the table and gritted my teeth for
being so stupid, waiting for lunch to end.
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I was used to people in suits, homeless with empty cups, police on horses and
couriers on bicycles filling in the spaces between buildings, but that day, downtown
was empty. The city, as big as it was, had a way of building drama, as if it knew I was
going to the Bay State Correctional Center in the suburbs to visit my mother. It was
as if last night, while everybody slept, the city swept into their houses, one-by-one,
through their windows, and told them to stay home—to leave me alone while I
traveled.
For three years, I practiced what to say.
Stoop isn’t so bad, mother. He let me stay. Took me to school.
I wondered what she would say about my peach fuzz mustache, my angular
fade and thin gold chain with a crown pendant.
I bought a ticket to Norfolk at the counter and sat down on one of the
uncomfortable wooden benches and waited for the train to come, listening to the clerk
call trains in a thick Boston accent.
“Reveah” he said. “Next train Reveah.”
Only a few other travelers waited in the station—an old black man with a wiry
white beard who stod on his tiptoes near the trash can; a black woman with a huge
belly who read a tabloid magazine and a white lady who went back and forth into the
women’s restroom with her little boy.
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I tried to imagine my mother in an orange jumpsuit, like on television, with
her big hair exactly the same as it was. She probably had on bright red lipstick and
got special privileges from the guards. She’s probably fine, I thought, and watched a
fly buzz around in large circles until my eyes started to close.
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I stood at the top of the hill by my school, looked down and started to run. My
legs didn’t work right, like trying to run through molasses. The ground stuck to my
shoes. Halfway down, I saw Lakisha in her little white tank top and shorts sitting
crosslegged on a picnic blanket.
When she saw me, she waved.
“Oh hell no,” she said, trying to watch me fly. “Nigga, you ain’t a fucking
dove.”
She motioned for me to sit, fumbling around her backpack, producing a
notebook and pen.
“Here,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
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63
I nearly fell down at the sight of the building’s innards. Not that it was
spectacular, the metal and concrete, but there was so much of it. The idea that people
built a structure to trap other people gave me a pit in my stomach that nearly sent the
contents of my guts spilling into my blue jeans.
The giant silver doors opened into a cold, fluorescent building.
“That way,” the clerk muttered, pointing to a metal detector. He said it
without human attachment, as if he had said the same thing every day, 1,500 times,
for the last 20 years. There wasn’t anger in his tone. He spoke in a way so measured
that it could easily be mistaken for kindness.
In fact, the prison was not an angry place. I remember how casual it seemed,
unlike the movies, where hungry rapists grit their yellow teeth at the site of a fresh
meat. Nobody seemed to care at Norfolk. It looked more like a school office than a
prison. Even the fluorescent lighting flickered with indifference.
A line of us waiting to see our relatives stopped at a room in the end of a
hallway and the guard stuck a large, cartoonish key into the hole and it opened.
I had to shit so badly that I could barely walk, standing straight up with my
legs crossed, stomach gurgling like a storm drain.
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When the guard led us up the stairs, all I could think was about the cliché of it
all: men peering from cells with thick mustaches and scars that ran down the lengths
of their faces. The fat Puerto Ricans with grown out afros. The slender, shiny black
men, elastic pants drooping below their asscracks. The ashy white trash villains from
parts of the city lined with homeless women baked into pavement—their squinty eyes
and dirty hair matted into the crooks of their necks. The cold dullness of the
institution. Concrete upon concrete upon metal upon concrete, like a documentary of
a movie about prison.
I imagined telling mother that I’d graduated high school, that I won a
scholarship to attend college in California. I imagined the look on my her face—a
feigned interest or some comment about how a good son would have at least filled her
commissary fund once in a while.
Or maybe jail changed her, like it was supposed to do.
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A wicked glare split through the plexi-glass window and I watched the back
of the guard’s head, red neck wrinkled; bristly gray hair turning white at the edges. I
tried to guess the his age, but couldn’t, and settled on the age a man gets just before
he shifts from a young man to an old man, staring at his man tits in the mirror, I
thought, chuckling.
“What’s funny?” the guard asked without stopping or turning around.
“Nothing at all,” I said to the back of his neck.
I meant it. Nothing was funny. I’d been thinking in the train, while we
traveled down the bricklined streets of Roxbury, past the bombed out liquor stores
with packs of slender men in knit caps rolling dice into the gutter. I’d been thinking
about my mother sitting behind those bars—how I wasn’t meant for prison, how I
couldn’t hack it here. I’d been thinking that nothing would be funny for quite some
time.
It hit me, as I walked toward the visiting room, how the last couple of years
folded into one another without the luxury of spare time. My nervy guts spoke with
outstanding clarity always. My body groaned with each step toward the cell, so I
walked clenching my asscheeks together, my body lurched forward, growling like a
broken machine.
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It took us fifteen minutes to walk up three flights of stairs, the keys around the
guard’s belt rattling like coins in a tin can. My legs almost stopped working as we
walked toward a door that looked like it was sealed shut with a soldering iron.
The guard pushed a button, looked up and said “P-447” into thin air, like he
was talking to God. A loud buzz rang out in the hallway and the door opened. A
mouth into the body of a creature. She probably sat on the other side of the thick,
impossible pane of glass, waiting for me, wondering what I looked like now,
wondering how I’d survived without her for all those years.
The door opened into a room, not a cell, like I’d imagined. No pane of glass to
divide us. No burly guard. No snarling cell mate. Just my mother, nervous in her
neatly-pressed orange jumpsuit, sitting in the middle of an open space, full of light.