Authors: Darryl Pinckney
The public walked into a bleak, dusty reception area. Behind the listless secretary, a wall shielded the open-floorplan mysteries of the editorial process. A thicker wall farther back did nothing to block noise from the presses in the rear. The staircase up to Uncle Ralston’s domain was crooked. Dad and Ralston Jr. were shut up in the tower opposite, their stairs precarious with boxes there was no room for elsewhere. Nobody was ever worried about inspections. From the men’s room between editorial and press you could see across empty lots to the orange of the tin-drum fires of a homeless encampment two blocks away. Arguments on the rear wooden fire escapes could be sudden and violent.
The whole neighborhood was a hazard, from the boarded-up buildings to the people fighting and sleeping with the trash on the green island of Garfield Boulevard. Dad’s office had stacks of papers and books and clippings, and boxes held rocks and minerals and philosopher’s stones and model airplane kits, the sophisticated kind, the kind you didn’t have to share with children, the expensive ones that really flew, operated by remote controls. His office was the perfect place for him to get away from Mom’s crazies, the sad cases that Mom was always trying to help.
In the 1970s, when I worked menial jobs at the newspaper in the summers, there were advertisements from local black businesses—hair creams, hair straighteners, mom-and-pop restaurants, an independent black drugstore convenience chain, funeral parlors, a car dealership, a guitar and drum store, an African clothing design firm, a Third World–oriented travel agency that didn’t last long, a couple of motels, fraternal organizations, father-and-son sports events, sorority clothing drives. But I thought of the paper as a rickety operation, because the ads were for what most everyone my age could see was the obsolete, aging, segregated-Negro market.
The jingling of the typesetting machine, the viscosity of the squid-black ink, and the clack of the ancient press never won me over. I hated journalism and politics and preachers. But at least when I was a sullen teenager the phones rang convincingly. By the time I left for Berlin for good, there weren’t that many political and city offices where Uncle Ralston could get a call through. His stories were hardly local anymore anyway. The struggle for copy had been resolved by depending on syndicates of sensational urban crime. The classified sections had shrunk. Meanwhile, Ralston Jr. had put a stop to what would be Cello’s mother’s last attempt to get away by having a really spectacular breakdown that culminated in his streaking naked across the parking lot at the Black Star Funeral Home.
Mom’s father drank up his share of the newspaper and their other ventures. That’s no doubt why Uncle Ralston couldn’t really deal with me. In his mind I smelled and walked like his brother probably used to after five o’clock and often as early as three. Cello sometimes liked to remember, ever so casually, that her side of the family still owned everything while mine had become her grandfather’s employees. She liked to draw attention to the differences between us in what she called the psychological terms of blackness.
Dad sometimes referred to Uncle Ralston as Old Man Shay or Old Man Ralston, but it never caught on at the plant or in the family. He was just Uncle Ralston, even to Cello and her sister. His outer-galaxy hopes of becoming a great patriarch of a black Chicago dynasty clan he transferred to the back of his young grandson, Ronald, and to my brother, Solomon. He just wanted to freeze-dry his son, the phone calls from some white underling at the State Department had been so humiliating. It had taken Uncle Ralston a year to decide to go get Ralston Jr. from Ghana. It was a big deal, like a spy mission. At the time, I celebrated Ralston Jr. in my nine-year-old head for being far, far away. When I grew up, I was going to live on the moon and shine its light into Solomon’s face whenever he tried to sleep.
Nobody could kick me out of Berlin, but I was back where I’d started, alone in my room in Chicago, at my desk, as if still making up incompletes, handing in late term papers, unfree when those who had not messed up in their classes were enjoying what I had not earned. I did not go by the
Eagle
, and Dad had not encouraged me to say hello to anyone. Because there was no one upstairs with me, they let me smoke in my room. The house was redolent of Mr. Clean and Pine-Sol anyway. Mom had time on her hands. She never had a cleaning lady.
Growing up, I didn’t use the ground floor of the house unless I was alone. I ran away after meals—we all did, except for Cello and Mom. When a crazy was staying with us, she might go to the living room after dinner, expecting television or company. But she learned to disappear. Cello played very loudly. Her scales pursued us up the stairs and into our cells. The hour was selfish, but Mom rejoiced in the technique that produced the sound. Then Cello was gone. When Solomon went off to college next, I realized how little he’d been around, how quiet he was in general. My turn was coming, but my prospects as a Negro Achiever were narrowing every semester.
I was alone in my room most of the time but seldom alone in the house. Ronald and Rhonda had elaborate board games going on his bedroom floor at all times. It never occurred to me to touch Dad’s alcohol in the kitchen cabinet. I also didn’t turn on the TV. When Mom was out at something like her class in First Aid for Activists and Dad was at the
Eagle
, I liked to have doughnuts and hot chocolate in the living room, surrounded by old books on Napoleon. I never went to the basement when I was alone in the house. I never told on Cello or Solomon for going down there when Mom and Dad weren’t around.
One time I struggled into Cello’s blue taffeta, turned on the living room record player, and opened the front door for a winter lip-sync concert. Mom and Cello did not pay as much attention to vocal music. Making my first move, I ripped the dress. I put everything back, but my crime was soon discovered. I knew enough not to admit that I’d had it on. I was just being destructive, angry with Cello.
I could feel Lake Michigan. You could feel all of the Great Lakes and their conspiracies of ice crystals and surface winds. I used to disobey and make my way to the edge to watch the kids who dared to climb out onto the ice chunks piled up in the frozen rim of the lake. In North America, winter was not dreary, as it was in Northern Europe near the pillaged Baltic. It was big and wild and eventful with storms that looked around for somebody to kill.
* * *
I took a bus to a meeting, in order not to be in my room. The bus was heated and so was the side room of the Episcopal church where I was pretty sure I would meet no one I knew.
“My name is Jed and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict.”
“Hi, Jed.”
“I have ninety days back.”
I was rewarded with applause.
“I haven’t spoken in a meeting since I got out of rehab almost two years ago. I just thought I should. That’s all I got.” That’s how the soldiers at the AA meeting in Dahlem would sign off. They’d stop talking and rock in their chairs, unable to make eye contact with anyone after admitting that they’d gone ballistic on the playground or placed a bet with their pay or put in for a transfer.
I had a dream about taking drugs, not about drinking. I was back again with a crazy of Mom’s who a few years before had stolen the Christmas money from one of the shelters that Mom took an interest in, not far from the tracks. Mom believed in trusting her crazies, in treating them like adults. She was not discouraged by how seldom that worked out. This woman’s getting out of control, her daring to, was my fault. Mom’s first rule was no drugs in the shelter or anywhere where she was and I knew that this crazy was using, because I let her fix me up with my first speedball.
It was easy to rent a respectable person’s curtain-shrouded living room for a few hours in order to consume drugs in private. The host was usually hovering around, himself or herself an addict. I insisted on watching as Mom’s crazy opened the packet containing the new needle. Sometimes I remember that I have no right to be alive. She must have cooked up the heroin and cocaine while we were sitting there, but I have blocked that out. I couldn’t look when she found my vein.
It was to be my last speedball. I held on until the effects wore off. I knew that I would never try that again. It was too powerful. I would not have cared had our host’s fourth-floor apartment caught fire. That astonishing apathy in the head, that indifference about the body was dangerous. I couldn’t wait to get back across the line, to go back to being an aluminum-foil-carrying cokehead in sawdust bars for gay losers. But for this woman, her new connect was the jam and when she at last turned up at the shelter, moving in slow motion, everyone but Mom knew that she was back at it.
Cello’s sister, Rhonda, was visiting, in from her own life of Negro Achievement as the lone black woman accepted into the neurobiology department at Johns Hopkins. In spite of everything, she came back to check on their mother from time to time, to listen to her wail that “that spook” had ruined her life. Rhonda said that Sister Speedball was obviously wasted and she reminded Mom that she, Mom, believed in the greater good. The shelter was a place where battered women came to feel safe, sometimes bringing their children and the few toys they’d grabbed.
Mom asked the woman for her keys. Unfortunately, she was what Dad called “street,” someone, so he believed, who would never get away from finding the bottom the most comfortable place to live. How many from Wendell Phillips High had given up before they were beaten, he’d ask. “She’s real tissue on the heel.” She’d made copies of the keys her first day as third custodian, one of those jobs Mom invented in order to give some parolee a break.
When we met by chance in the laundrymat on the wrong side of Washington Park, where her connect’s runners could be found, Sister Speedball was talkative, waiting for them to come back with her shit. She explained that she’d got some guy to help her boost the shelter’s two televisions, the typewriter, and the electric can opener, but they couldn’t figure out how to get to the stuff with people around all the time. So they dropped that plan. She figured it was best not to use her keys, anyway. Instead, she let herself into the shelter late one night and jimmied the front office and then broke open the desk that held the strongbox of considerable Christmas cash.
Sister Speedball could brag to me because she had something pretty big on me. My mother blamed herself because she hadn’t kept the funds in the bank. Miss Speedball laughed, as if to say she’d got over on that social worker and she didn’t care that I knew it.
The runner was back. Lady Speedball got in his car. The laundrymat seemed to heat up, though nearly empty, a few dryers going. The connect himself, the semi–big man, was outside. He wanted everyone to see him ordering runners around. He wasn’t going to last long. Yet I took my turn speaking to the blood who whispered to him. As revenge on this sad junky, I copped more than her usual dose. I showed them to her when she came back. I wouldn’t let her have the bags until she had sex with me.
I could not say, “I’m going to fuck you,” or “Give me some pussy.” I said, “Take off your clothes first, bitch.” She was a mess to look at, scarred, sagging, and puffy all at once, at forty years old. I hadn’t thought this through sufficiently.
She eased herself up onto the filthy sink in the laundrymat bathroom. “Why do I get myself into these situations?”
That was my line, but it was this woman who’d said it. I was amazed she even knew a word like “situations.” Her claim to be a victim got me hard. She was merely in a hurry to do the drugs she had. Up close, that pachyderm’s ear between her thighs raised alarm. Moreover, there was no mistaking the semen leaking from her folds. She had been in negotiations with her runner. I called the whole thing off and gave her the bags, wishing her an overdose.
The low point of my drug life was not the speedball, and not those few minutes in the laundrymat bathroom. It was afterward, knowing what Dad and Mom thought of guys like me in our neighborhood. I forgot my dry cleaning and didn’t go back for it. Two of Mom’s other crazies had seen the junky thief woman with free amounts of cash. I kept quiet. I wanted to get to Berlin, the chance to be another me.
In my dream, I have boned a clean version of this junky silly and we are doing powdery lines of cocaine on a glass coffee table. However, I am not soaring from the cocaine; instead, I am slumped over and jerking like Manfred’s car, as after a speedball. She is about to cut off my tongue with a pair of secateurs, but as she leans in—I wake up, greatly relieved it was a dream.
Someone at the back of the meeting was talking about her Resentment Issues, a young white girl, a redhead in a lot of knitted layers. She did not look out of place among the older black workers, but then no one looks out of place at an AA meeting. I thought about getting up to wash my hands, but dozed off instead. It was so snug, even with the lights turned back up for “sharing” after the speaker, the “qualifier,” had finished. A few old guys were asleep. I turned over under the covers, safe in my father’s house, with Mom downstairs trying to decide if she really believed that grapefruit juice caused baldness, as she had read in the latest issue of her alternative medicine newsletter.
* * *
In the more than ninety days since I pulled up in the taxi and saw Dad and Mom at the front door, I had dried out. Dad had brought Ralston Jr. over on Christmas Eve, as usual. But that was it. Things were so quiet all over town. I did not go to my dive bars in the Loop or my sober coffeehouses in New Town. I did not cruise anyone, not even white boys sitting with college hockey bags in Union Station. I went about my business and then went back to my parents’ house. They saw no one; I saw no one. I liked the way snow lowered the city’s decibel level.
I walked past the homeless and did not take off my glove in order to dig into my pocket for an inflationary dollar. I stayed away from the laundrymats and bars on Garfield that had always been in my peripheral vision, whether I was using or not. And I stayed far away from the upstairs of the German-run student pizza parlor in the neighborhood where I first learned to score weed. I was going to unattractive neighborhoods, waiting with soggy envelopes of court papers in front of super-locked doors and windowless last-known addresses. I stayed wrapped up, hooded, silent. It was too cold to smoke outside for long, but I didn’t shirk from assignments. I stood on the train back to the Fifty-Fifth Street station in Hyde Park.