Yeah, nigger, I tell myself, you gotta get open. I stand in front where the mirror was before it broke. I don’t need no fucking mirror, I can feel my body. I pull my stomach in, my muscles. I ain’t got no stomach. But even your muscles can hang, Imena say. Just ’cause you not fat, doesn’t mean you don’t have to work your body, J.J. Warm up first, J.J., then stretch. You’re strong, which is good, but you’re tight. You need to stretch. You should spend an hour every day just stretching, and then work an hour on your technique.
I sit down on the floor in second position. Leather pants too tight to stretch in, I put on my sweats. I need some new gear, that old bitch better give me some money. “I gonna give some of it to you. You ain’ gonna git dat in no foster home.” I know I want more than some of it, shit! I spread my legs out in second again. My inner thigh muscles, adductors, and hamstrings are so tight they feel like bands of iron. It’ll happen, J.J., she says, not overnight, but it’ll happen. Just breathe into your body and gently sink into the stretch. You’ll be surprised at what happens. It hurts. I’m kissing Jaime. I never kissed no guy before.
Kissed.
Shit, I never kissed nobody before. I want to jack off, not stretch. Stretch, then jack off. Brother Samuel bit my nipples. I hated that, the way I couldn’t help but scream, but once he did it, I knew I wanted Jaime to do it to me. Now Jaime’s afraid of me like everybody else, ’cause of all the lies and shit they spread on me. I look at my watch, right on, Blondie.
Rolex,
I want to fuck her too. Twelve o’clock. Shit, if today is really Saturday, then that means class at 135 City-Rec at one o’clock. Imena said, Don’t worry about money, just come. So I’m gonna stretch out another second or so, then I’m outta here. Only thing I know for sure is to get to class and dance! Don’t let nothing get in the way of that shit, and maybe this other weird shit will all be over in a little while and I’ll go back to school. But maybe that ain’t gonna happen? The brothers is some fucked-up people. Why I wanna go back there anyway? Because I like it, because, shit, it’s my home. Well, I don’t know what happened to make the brothers go off on me, but ain’t nothing I can do about it now. I’m gonna finish stretching out, then run to class. I try to grab my ankles, tug a little. My back makes a right angle to my legs stretched out to the side of me. I wonder will I ever be able to just grab my ankles and lay my stomach down between my legs like the professionals do.
I look around the big, square room. I feel like I’m in a green and black box. A roach races from his crack in the linoleum. Fuck roaches, I ain’t no screaming girl. As much as I can forget—I want to, and move on. If I can’t get back in St Ailanthus, then I just want to move on. I look at my watch, hey, time to go!
Warm out, I got time to walk. I could have left my jacket. My shoulder feels way better, but it still hurts. This is a whole new avenue for me, St Nicholas, but I also think this ain’t too far from where I used to live in that foster home with Batty. I’m not sure. Well, whatever. I don’t know, it should look stupid—high-tops and leather pants—but it’s phat. I see how I look by peeping in other people’s eyes when they scoping at me. Old lady looks at me as I pass, she’s looking at my chest
hard,
then her eyes come up to the scar across my face. I guess I look like a hood or some shit all scratched up. How old would my mother be if she was alive, I wonder, turning my head back to look at the old lady scuffling down the street. I shift my bag to the shoulder that hurts, make it work. When I think of her, which I don’t do a lot, it’s like something on the other side of a door, stuck, pushing to get in. I don’t know what it is. Gives me the creeps, like a fingernail down a blackboard. I’m glad I’m tall. If I was Jaime’s size, I’d have to be dodging pigs all the time. Some kids at St Ailanthus was runaways. I never experienced nothing like that, really, just the foster home. When I think of the foster home, I think of Batty Boy, WHAP! I feel that shit like it’s happening again, whap! like a tennis ball my ear screaming but don’t make no noise. Pain. Pain that makes me feel like fucking, why I don’t know. Brother John was spozed to be my friend, his big ass was spozed to be on my side. Always talking about how smart I am, how most boys can’t stay hard as long as I can, how Mrs Washington said this or that good thing about me, I could be an English major or could go to medical school like Asian kids. About the Schomburg, he been there, done research on things. Nurse say I have 20 percent hearing loss in my left ear. A part of me can’t believe this minute right
now
—I’m walking down the street in a freak pair of leather pants that fit me perfect. I just left out of a old woman’s house I ain’t never seen until a couple of days ago. I’m just out here! I ain’t got a dime in my pocket. I’m not sure where I’ll sleep tonight.
Why does looking at the blue of the sky seem like it’s murdering your heart? No clouds, hot perfect day. I pass the Harlem School of the Arts on my right. What do they do in there? How do you get in? Your school? Parents? I don’t have either right now. On the corner of 141st Street, St James Presbyterian Church, big light orangish stones, I don’t know what kind. St Nicholas Park begins across the street. It’s different from Marcus Garvey Park, which is one big square. This park is blocks and blocks long. First you see just like a regular park, picnic tables, benches, handball courts, then your eyes are drawn up to the huge granite boulders cracking through the green grass bending the trees sticking up maybe a hundred feet in the air. Way on top of that mountain of rock is City College, its gray buildings like Hamlet’s castle. Brother John said that’s why New York is so strong, because of granite bedrock. Everywhere you look walking down St Nicholas Avenue you see huge glittering slabs of granite. Brother John showed us all this on our Rocks of Harlem earth walk. But these trees, I forgot them; he told us some of them. Everything on earth has a name. Imena said every muscle in the body has a name. They’ve cut into the earth to build these cement steps that wind up through the trees, rocks, and grass. I don’t know where they go yet. Ha! Look at the kids on the swings! What I’m gonna do now? Stay with the old lady? Five years? Two years? I could hang anywhere except jail for two years? Could I learn enough about dancing in two years to be a dancer? I could. I look at the steps rising out of the rocks up to the castle, at the blue sky—blue blue? What exact color? I don’t know, I wasn’t good enough in art to be one of the boys got a sixty-four-color Crayola box to keep. Indigo? Cerulean? That’s all I can remember from the box right now. My life is just the opposite of that clear sky right now. What could be worse? Being dead or locked up. Well, definitely being locked up would be worse. Dead? I don’t know. Maybe I’m lucky I got out? The plan, I think, was for me to be a fall guy like in the movies. Or did they think like in earth science I was the catalyst precipitating the fall? Does that make sense? A catalyst is a substance that changes things in a chemical reaction but isn’t changed itself. No, it doesn’t make sense. They wanted their life to go on nice and quiet, no one ever know, so that would mean them not wanting me to get in trouble or be in any kind of situation where I might come in contact with anyone and tell. That’s why Brother Samuel had my back at the police station. He wanted me out of there before I started talking, which he didn’t realize I wouldn’t have done. Never, ever would I have told anyone
anything.
He didn’t know that I’m loyal to St Ailanthus, him, them,
us.
I believed them:
Despite the trauma of some of your lives, each boy comes to us from a different situation, situations that without exception would be better if they didn’t exist—missing parents, parents who have passed away, parents who were abusive, or parents who dearly wanted to fulfill their duties but were just too sick or despondent to do so. We are here to fulfill those abdicated duties. We exist here in a community to serve God. And we have chosen to do God ’s work by serving orphaned and abandoned children. We will not let you down again for a second or third or even fourth time in your short lives. For some of you it would be even more than that. You have arrived at St Ailanthus as result of a string of tragic events; others, as I said earlier, come to us placed by parents and relatives who, knowing they can no longer care for their children, you, leave them here in a supreme act of love and trust.
We are committed to providing you with an optimal Catholic education. An education in mathematics, literature, and religion, social studies, foreign languages, and science as well as tracks in auto repair and carpentry. You will be able to enter the world on equal footing, we hope, with the children who have had the benefit of uninterrupted parental care. All we ask of you is you study hard and remain as wonderful and positive as you are now. Your future, which may have been up in the air, so to speak, before you came to St Ailanthus, is now on solid ground. If you put in the effort here at St Ailanthus, your future is assured.
I look up at the sky again as I’m walking the forever blue of it. Vast. Shit, ain’t nothin’ assured except the sun gonna rise like it’s been doing for a zillion fuckin’ years and it’s gonna go down and the earth is gonna keep spinning around on its axis as it rotates around the sun.
That’s
assured. The rest is shit. Spruce trees? I never noticed them before, the spruce trees near 135th Street station, the park benches along the sidewalk painted the same color as the trees. At the red light I close my eyes for a second and I hear what I been trying not to, the old bitch’s scratchy voice. She says, I hear it clear, her voice is not scratchy now, her voice is not her voice, it’s another voice, clear and gentle, “Your name
is
Abdul.” I open my eyes, the light is still red, I look at the oncoming cars, dash out, beat them across the street. I knew I could. Slow down as I pass the Jehovah’s Witness Church, cross at the next street on green, keep walking, then, oh shit, I almost trip, I’m in front the police station. My instinct is to break and run, but I keep walking cool. I’m doing the exact right motherfucking thing, innocent people don’t run. I ain’t did nothing. I ain’t no runaway, ain’t nobody looking for me. I ain’t scared of the police, fuck them! But ah, I think I will walk a different way—home? Back, I’ll walk a different way back.
Coming up on the corner of Lenox and 135th Street, I always feel, I don’t know, such a
sigh,
yeah, my breath just pisses out and I relax. I feel like I’m home or not far from it. St Ailanthus is around the corner. It’s not “home” anymore. Everything around here is familiar to me, Harlem Hospital, the Schomburg, the fancy apartment buildings of Lenox Terrace. Harlem Hospital is big takes up a good part of the block. I remember the emergency room and the nurse—was I born there? I don’t remember. Of course I don’t remember being born! Who’s alive who does? Where was I born? Exactly? How could I find out? Who was my dad? Really? Why does everyone say he’s dead? Old bitch said they said something about AIDS. But I don’t believe that. That’s some of the foulest shit in the world, AIDS and welfare. What could be worse than that shit? I could have AIDS? How you get it? Fucking? But I wasn’t really fucking in the park, just getting my dick sucked. And with the brothers that was different—how it happened as a kid and all. The brothers is clean people, the kids clean. I don’t have it. I could have it? Just see if I get sick? See if my sores don’t heal? Cough, get spots on you? What if I did have it? What difference would it make? Then I would just have it and that would be that. Wonder if I went back and asked Blondie about it. Spoze she ain’t in the emergency room no more? How could I find her? Forget about it. I don’t want to know. If I got it, I got it. If I ain’t got it, I ain’t got it. Welfare and AIDS, that’s what Brother Samuel said is wrong with African Americans, we’re disproportionately represented on the welfare rolls and our lifestyle predispose us to criminality. Brother Samuel’s a sociologist. He thinks he knows what’s wrong with everybody. Brother John says that’s a mistake, just a mistake, he shakes his head, Brother Samuel is wrong, just wrong, most of the people on welfare is white, and he said white people commit more crimes but they go to jail less. He never contradicts Brother Samuel to his face, though. Who’s right? I’m not a criminal. Why was I taken to the police station and kicked out of my house? If I am a criminal, well, I ain’t. But even if I had done that shit they say I did, how am I different from Brother Samuel or Brother John? I’m not. They’re not criminals, and neither am I.
The corner of 135th Street and Lenox is great! It’s big, clean. It’s modern. I don’t see how this is a ghetto. I don’t see nothing wrong with this. A library, a hospital, apartments, stores? Nobody’s shooting anybody. I don’t want to shoot nobody. I want to become a dancer, get married and have kids, have a nice apartment. I don’t want to sell dope or be in a gang. How do you get in a gang? Where are they? Would they like me? Probably not. So many people are ignorant, Brother John said, and they don’t go past first impressions. I don’t know if I like other boys, and I ain’t got no friends that’s girls. How do you get to be friends with girls? How do you get to fuck ’em? Giving them stuff? Do they like gang members? Yeah, gang members and rappers. The streets here are wide. Brother John said some of the widest in the city. I like watching people’s heads come out the subway like they’re busting out of some dark body being born.
When I get up the stairs to the door of the gym, I look around for Imena. I walk past the girl at the door with the clipboard, tell her I’m a guest of Imena’s. The girl knows that, but I do it anyway, I don’t want no static. I’m tense, real tense, it’s like something on the other side of the door in my head is pressing. A headache? Panicky, I run over to Imena. Perspiration breaking out under my arms, it’s hot, I can smell myself, I’m out of breath, don’t know what I’m going to say until I lean down. Imena’s about a head shorter than me, and I say it, whisper.
“I can’t hear you, J.J.”
“Don’t call me J.J. no more, OK? From now on call me Abdul.”