The telephone rang so loud that it woke me from the dream I was having. Ever since I moved out to Arizona from Detroit to escape the senseless violence, existential Crazymeaninglessness, and rampant hopelessness that permeated Detroit, running from something – although I did not know what it was... something, I guess, that I thought would eventually cause me to kill myself, or someone -  the bad dreams began. I do not know why I keep having these dreams.

The somber voice on the other end of my telephone did not sound familiar, so I leaned forward to clear my temporary state of nausea before slightly turning my head to glance at the clock that an ex-girlfriend had given to me as a Christmas present thinking it would resolve the matter of me waking up too late to catch the bus on time to go to work out in the suburbs at that god awful plant. Times when I got up too late to catch the bus I would have to wake her up and she would get out of bed stamping her feet, huffing and puffing and bitching and moaning because she had to drive me to work. I understood her anger because she would have just gotten home maybe two hours earlier from being out all night singing the blues and fraternizing with white people. Most of the times I went to see her play there would always be more white people than black people showing up at her gigs. I guess that black folks already knew what the blues was all about and therefore had no real desire to spend a Friday night listening to their plights and predicament over a loud speaker amplifying Bobby Blue Bland and Van Morrison guitar solos by some twenty-something year old suburban white boy who had fortuitously talked himself into a long-awaited baptismal apprenticeship with the great and legendary Detroit Blues Diva, Duchess Bettina.

I always believed that white folks liked listening to the blues because a gives them a chance to make that connection to black folks on a level that that still really do not understand. It's like the blues gives them a chance to feel pain, to see it, and to hear it. It's like, for the two or three hours that Duchess would stand up on that stage and sing the blues, white folks got to be human for a minute or two by allowing themselves to recognize their own humanity in the guttural funk and gut bucket wails, moans, grunts, dips and dives of Duchess's sermonic blues renditions of Bessie Smith, Bill Withers and Etta James. Just as they had filled the back pews of the rickety benches of dusty churches on treacherous plantations, searching for way to deal with the wretchedness of their lives, and the inhumanity of their own existence, today, three hundred years later, whites still depend on black folks to help them muster up the courage to face themselves so they can sleep at night. White folks love the blues because the blues offer them the chance to hear the existential pain and suffering they have caused, and to connect with that pain and suffering, and then to atone and repent for all of the pain and suffering that they know deep down in the depths of their minds - since they have no souls - that they have, and continue to cause blues people - black people, simply by the decree of their white skin. And every Friday night, down at the Music Menu in Greek Town in Detroit, the whites would all pack into the bar for a chance to hear the blues, and for a chance to repent.

Duchess had been a good woman to me and I really loved her. I did not realize just how much I loved her until we broke up. I did not really want to end our relationship but I guess the relationship had been over ever since my sister stole clothes from the house when Duchess was on tour and I had asked her to help me get the boys off to school. Duchess never let me forget that shit. Whenever we would have an argument she would throw it up in my face, "Yo sista stole my shit!" And she would scream it down my face to make it hurt even more. And there was nothing that I could really do about it because she was right and her anger and condemnation had been justified. My sister never confessed to the obvious fact that she'd come into our home and betrayed my trust in her. She stole from me and she stole from Duchess and her little daughter, too. I was so embarrassed and ashamed at what my sister had done, and the scandal that followed the high-profile robbery just simply devastated my mother. I do not think she ever really recovered from hearing the shameful news that her beloved daughter had scarred the family name by stealing from Duchess. My mother loved Duchess and was one of her biggest fans, so the fact that my sister stole from her and then passed around the clothes to other family members who were often seen by Duchess wearing the items, this just totally lowered my mother's proud and prideful face in disgust, humiliation, and shame. That incident was the beginning of the end for Duchess and I. I simply could not face the reality of what my sister had done. I was so hurt to know that she had betrayed me, us.

It was 5:23 in the morning, and the sun would soon rise. I paused a bit to bemoan the audacity of the person on the other end of the phone, who would dare disturb me by ringing my phone at such an early time of morning, and hoped that who ever it was on the other end of the phone would have a good reason for calling at such an obscenely disrespectful time of dawn. I pressed my ear closer to the phone before realizing that it was my brother, George. Feeling a little excited at the thought of getting a phone call from my brother made me rise up a little more and shake my head to make sure that he had my undivided attention. I was a little surprised to hear from him because he'd never really made an effort to call me about anything, at least not in the random sense. At that point, my heart began to pound a little because I realized that there must have been something wrong for him to call me, especially at 5:23 in the morning. I slightly lifted my upper torso from the mattress, not wanting to get completely out of bed because of the cool briskness of the morning air that seeped into my bedroom window, waiting to rush me the moment I pulled away the protective bed comforter that sealed in the heat. For once in George's sheltered and restless life his voice had lost the cool reserve that otherwise signified his brash arrogance and general flippancy and, because of that, I did not recognize his voice.

"Dude, you need to come home. Momma died last night," George said in a low and spurious tone of voice.

"What? Who is this?" I asked, sliding my 258-pound fat, tired, and sleep-starved frame to the side of the bed so as to brace myself for what I really knew I had just heard, but did not want to believe nor accept as truth. Immediately, the cold wind gently rushed over me and chilled my startled and shaken frame. It felt as though I'd been electrocuted. I think it was a combination of the cold air and the news that my brother had just told me. George, still on the other end of the line, paused to listen while I composed myself before he shouted into the phone.

"Push, are you there?" I was too numb and paralyzed with grief, anxiety, and fear to respond. I could not believe what I had just heard. Did my brother just tell me that momma was dead? I was not ready to hear the awful and frightening news that my beloved momma was dead, gone for good. I slumped on the edge of my bed staring blankly at my wallet sitting on the bedside table. In it, I had five crisp twenty-dollar bills that only two days before I'd assured my mom I would bring to her for Sweetest Day.

Grace, a 56 year old college professor, mother of my best friend, Fish, and the woman that I'd started fucking right after my break-up with Duchess, awoke at the sound of my nervous body movement, slipped on her night-gown and slowly moved around to the edge of the bed to stand her small, curvaceous, and aged frame in front of me. She looked both puzzled and spooked but, like most nosy women, she asked me what the matter was about, but I shrugged her away and took a deep breath while silently asking myself why I continued to bother myself with fucking her. But now was not the time to waste on such an ultimately frivolous question (partly because it was the best sex I'd ever had, and partly because, through all of the darkness that had been my life up to the point I'd started dating her, she had managed to pull me up from the filth and gutter of Detroit's tragicomic culture and the nefarious eastside streets and introduce me to James Baldwin as well as other authors whose works would eventually change my life). But she was not the focus of my thoughts, and I did not want to be angry with her, and I certainly did not want to take my anger out on her. "Just, please, babe, let me..." I felt as though I wanted to faint. I lost consciousness.

 

*******

 

Sometimes when I daydream I think about my parents. They always appear in my daydreams as a young and vibrant couple. Mom and dad seemed very happy, dancing and singing, he, in a three-piece suit, she, in a lavender wedding dress. They both took me by the hand and together we flew through the air over a garden of beautiful and colorful flowers as though we were angels. Suddenly, we landed in the garden and they both began dancing and laughing. I watched from afar at mom dancing as though she were a ballerina. "She's so thin," I thought to myself, watching her from the distance, "she's so thin and youthful." Certainly not the obese, diabetic and sickly woman she'd been over the last four years of her life. She looked so happy. It had been years since I saw her look this happy, and I'd never seen mom dance, twist and turn in such gaiety and delight. After a moment of watching the two of them, dad turned towards the garden of roses and told me that I must return, and that my time had not yet come, but that he would take care of mom, and that I should not worry for her. But I pleaded with him to take me with them: "Dad, I wanna go with you and momma!" I never wanted to leave them ever again. He gently placed his arm around mom and they floated to the garden.

 

*******

 

I regained consciousness only to feel great amounts of fear and anxiety, and my girlfriend now alarmed and freaked out, still standing beside me still asking what the matter was about.  It seemed as though dad was trying to tell me that the time had come for momma to leave us, and that he had come to take her. Two days ago, she had confided in me about feeling as though her time had come, though she was not ready to die. She had been struggling with high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity, and had just returned home from a lengthy stay at the hospital. Her doctor told the family that the hospital had done all that they could do for her and that her recovery mostly depended on her own will to live.                           

"Yeah, I am here," I responded in a muffed, almost inaudible tone. My heart began to beat faster and I felt as though I would faint again at any moment. It finally happened, I thought to myself. My momma is dead. She has gone to the rose garden.

            "Yeah, I am at the hospital now. She died a little while ago with Nikita, Nolan, and Junior at her side," said George in what I thought to be an unusual voice of reserve and calm for a man who had just lost his momma. He was always that way about bad situations. He always provided laconic and profound philosophic statements that mostly served as disguises and masks for his genuine lack of care and concern for the matter at hand. In actuality, he was probably glad to not have to worry about my mother's constant pleas to him for more of his time and attention. Since he'd managed to get that good job at the plant, pulling himself up by his bootstraps and making a good life for himself and his delightfully obedient wife and her illegitimate son, it seemed as though he hated visiting my sickly, needy, and ailing momma because she reminded him of where he came from.

 

*******

I really believe that my brother hates the fact that he was not born the son of wealthy whites (as he once explained to me). He hates his past. He hates his family. And he probably hates his life.

But he hates me more. I know this because of the many subtle ways in which he has inadvertently tried to show and tell me that he hates me. When we were kids he introduced me to the life, poetry and times of Edgar Allan Poe. Of all the poets that my brother could have introduced me to, he chose Poe, a drunk, pathetic, infantile, loser, and a luckless genius, was Poe. He was a man who never reached his full potential in life, and eventually drank himself into a miserable state of delirium and death. My brother was quite acquainted with the works of other poets as well. He often quoted the lovely sonnets of Shakespeare, and dazzled me with dramatic soliloquies of Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." They seemingly represented the more amiable (human) qualities such as aesthetic beauty, lyrical brilliance and radiance de rigueur. Shakespeare wrote beautiful sonnets and Frost was simply a brilliant and learned man and an exceptional writer. Yet, my brother had never really fixed me on the works of these poets, and he certainly never spoke favorably of black poets and writers. As a matter-of-fact, the only time I'd heard my brother even make mention of a black writer was during the time when our high school held a fine arts assembly of some sort where students could recite and perform various dramatic skits and poems. My brother made a slight and honorable mention of a student who had recited a Langston Hughes poem. Other than that I had never really known my brother to make a favorable remark of any kind of black literature. And, as the first person to ever teach me about literature and the beauty and ugliness of words as a powerful political force for either good and bad (the power of that choice always lay with the writer), it was Poe that he thought it necessary to acquaint my young, tender and impressionable mind with. Edgar Allan Poe was the darkest and most sad writer of them all I think. In retrospect, perhaps this is what my brother thought of me. Perhaps this was just another way for him to express his hate and disdain for me.

I knew my brother hated my guts from the time I was nine or ten years old. My other brothers and I loved to play basketball in the backyard since my prescient mother rarely permitted us to play with the neighborhood children because she did not trust them or their inattentive and unconcerned parents. She did not trust parents who would let their children hang around from house to house and spend all day and night in the streets unattended to and unaccounted for. My mom believed that, with a large family of 12, there were enough of us that we should be content with playing with one another. She never believed that interacting with other children - people - was good for the development of basic social skills. My mother just simply did not trust people. (My brother Junior would quickly adopt this philosophy and make it an art form). Mom believed they were bad, quintessentially evil, ill-mannered, and up to no good. But she had been raised by the same type of parents that felt the way she did which meant that distrusting people was deeply ingrained in her since the of growing up on the Jack Perry plantation. As the daughter of sharecroppers, she grew up in a close-knit family on a plantation where most families worked together, played together, went to church together and genuinely cared about the well-being of each other their families. In the north, my mother soon came to understand, people - black people - were somehow different from country folk in that they were mostly concerned about themselves, were often selfish, and dutifully believed in the (white) northern protestant american notion of individuality, self-this and self-that.  As a matter-of-fact, mom never really reconciled her issues of having been forced to move north with her family, leaving behind the sense and feeling of community, family, love, sharing, and brotherly love. Perhaps, for her, that had been the single most thing that she could not seem to move beyond. Even her own family would eventually wedge divisions between each other, often using religious differences as the reason and rationale for not being the close-knit family that they once were back in Tunica Mississippi. 

I had never been much of an athlete, but I often played sports with my brothers because it made me feel big - bigger than I actually was. Until I reached the age of 20 or so I had been small and under-developed, which meant that I typically bore the brunt of brotherly taunts and bullying sessions (most of which were designed to alleviate my brothers' own personal feelings of weakness and inadequacy - which were consequential hallmarks of having been raised under my mother's matriarchal and emasculating household). George loved to see me play basketball with my brothers because he knew that I would get my ass kicked. He knew that the game would end with me wailing in grueling pain, screaming for my mother - or someone - to rescue me from my brothers' brutal and merciless terror. They were much taller, bigger, stronger, and athletic than I, and it thrilled George to watch me fight, whine, struggle, cry, and otherwise make a fool of myself being the little guy on the court. He never missed the opportunity to make fun of me, watching and grinning as I would get pummeled, whipped, and stomped on by the pugnacious crew of gangly roustabouts.

"Throw the ball to Lucas," he would yell, laughing at me as I bounced my small frail and bony frame around the outskirts of the basketball court, routinely ignored by the other guys who continued to play along as though I did not even exist, only pausing for the brief moment it took to laugh at my brother's treacherous insults and methodical finger-pointing.

The phrase, 'throw the ball to Lucas,' had been taken from my brother's favorite television show. In it, the little boy was always vying for the attention and affection of his peers. During basketball games, he, too, would try to get the other teammates to trust his talents and abilities enough to throw him the ball; trust that he would not let his teammates down; that he had the talent to get the job done; that, if given the ball (chance), he would actually have the courage to shoot the ball (opportunity), and make the shot (success). Instead, the team members ignored him while the belligerent bullies occupying the sidelines laughed, hurled sarcastic insults and serious threats, and cynically yelled, "Throw the ball to Lucas! Ha ha ha ha ha," they would laugh and shout, "throw the ball to Lucas!" My brother loved that phrase.

 

*******

 

It is not my poor, God-fearing parents who are to be indicted for the lack but this society. - James Baldwin

 

I think George's introduction to - and eventual experiment with - hatred began with our mother for not marrying John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford. They were white, rich and powerful. But, most importantly, they were white, a color which my brother has always rightfully equated with respect, opportunity, privilege, prestige, and power. On the other hand, my mom was black, poor, and powerless (as George might have been inclined to think).

When we were kids we would spend endless hours talking about our lives - past and the future - and what we ultimately wanted out of life. We had similar goals, my brother and I. We were going to finish high school, go to college and become English teachers so we could teach Poe, Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson. When we retired, we would move south to Tunica, Mississippi where our mother had been born and raised, and we would open up a coffee and sandwich shop on some desolate and obscure road. We expected that perhaps our grandchildren would come and work during the summer time while we sat at the lake eating mayonnaise sandwiches and fishing. We were adamant that we were going to do this but none of this ever happened. The more my brother grew out of the shell that my mother kept us bottled up in, the more his mind and thinking began to change. He despised being the son of poor parents. And he despised being the brother of poor siblings, whose parents were poor. I do not ever remember a time in our childhood when George was not preoccupied with our dire social economic status of welfare recipient, food stamp spending, thrift store shopping, paupers.

Once, while we were preparing clothes for school the next day, he lamented profusely on our unending and perennial state of abject poverty:

"George, I wanna wear those pants tomorrow," I asked.

            "No, you can not wear my pants because Nolan is wearin'em."

            "But I ast you yesterday and you said dat I could wear'em."

            "Well, Nolan ast me yesterday."

We had always been accustomed to wearing each others clothes and hand-me-downs because my mom just could not afford to buy clothes for 12 children. George turned away from me to finish ironing his pants with the makeshift iron that we would typically piece together every other week when it would burn out from overuse and old age. But my mom just simply could not do better. She gave it all she had. And since the death of my father, she was left with nothing but 12 hungry, mournful, and confused children, no money, no savings, no car, no license to even drive a car, and a big giant broken-down house that sat two houses off Frederick Street, near the busy thoroughfare of Gratiot, around the corner from Thomas Elementary school, up the block from Saint Anthony's Church, next door to a mean ole white lady named Mrs. Mc Girder, at the lot of 1255 East Grand Boulevard. But my brother could not seem to forgive my parents for bringing him into a life that was often regulated and determined by absurd poverty, psychological misery, irrational hopelessness and necessary want.

"You know what?" he turned towards me and asked, as though he'd been waiting

for the right moment in his 15 years of existence to finally get the chance and nerve to ask.

"What?" I asked.

"I wonder what it would have been like to have been born a Rockefeller, or a Ford, or something like that?"

For the first time in a long time, probably since that last Christmas before my dad died, I saw a certain twinkle of happiness in my brother's eyes as he momentarily imagined the life he could have had if only the sacred geometry of chance had been more favorable and kind. I really had not seen that twinkle in George's eyes since the Christmas Eve of 74' when we lived on East Grand Boulevard. At precisely 12 midnight we raced down the long flight of rickety and splintery stairs into a sea of trains, army-men, candy, clothes, phonograph players, toy soldiers, Barbie dolls, and Tonka trucks, and Nat King Cole singing the chestnut song. My dad was alive and he and mom owned a restaurant, and times were so much better for us. We were always happy and smiling, and my mom and dad was a happy couple (at least in our eyes). But was George unhappy then? Was he unsatisfied with the life that we had when dad was alive? Or was his stern rebuke and vitriolic condescension reserved solely for my mother? In retrospect, I think that my brother had never really fully grasped what it meant to be a black boy growing up in the ghetto of America. On the one hand, he wanted to be white because that had always been the image and symbol of what it meant to be good, righteous, wholesome, and even human. And, unfortunately, my mother - as the main source of his pain, despair, and humiliation - symbolized all the wrong reasons for being black, therefore reaffirming my brothers deep desires to be white. The more rational and logical associative blames of racism and inequality and discrimination were much too sophisticated - even for my smart brother - to place as a focal point of observation for what truly ailed and, eventually, destroyed my brother, or at least destroyed his potential or desire to be a crucial force for positive change for the family. Instead, all he could do was stand aloof and mock.

"What?" I asked in shame and disbelief at what I had just heard.

"Really! Think about it, Push. How would it feel to be rich and not be poor? Just once I would like to not have to share clothes, and shoes. Just once I would like to not have to miss school because it was somebody else's turn to wear the Levi's, or the gym shoes or the drawers or the sweater. I am tired of being poor," he grumbled.

"So you're saying that you're ashamed of momma?" I grew slightly defensive for mom's sake. Even she, in all of her vicious and violent tyranny that she'd mercilessly and painfully wield to dominate her family ("to keep y'all from runnin' ova me"), could not match the intelligent wit, pin-sharp intellect, critical reasoning, and sound rationality of my brother. I was always afraid that my brother's manipulative brilliance and skillful ability to sway the pendulum of rationality and reason in his favor would make me side with him. He could always manage to turn me against momma and stand with him in fiery judgment of her often Draconian measures of discipline. He could easily manipulate my brother Nolan too. But it did not matter much with Nolan because he and George were twins and therefore bound by such duty to have each other's back on any and everything.  But on this matter I could not side with him. To the day, I have not sided with him on how he feels about the way we were raised.

My mother, on the other hand, would beat my brother black and blue for having such an opinion. She never allowed us to have an opinion that was not automatically censored and influenced by the threat and use of her mighty "sapline switch." In my mother's house, there was no such thing as freedom. No freedom of speech, freedom of thought, or freedom to feel anything or anyway that might possibly go against the judgment of momma. It was hard being a child under her regime. Once, when we were older, I had yelled at my brother for something he'd said to my mother to upset her, and my brother told me that we - the children of Ruth Nevahda, who'd been raised under her roof - needed to give ourselves a hand for having made it through such an ordeal. At that moment, I felt like a Jewish holocaust survivor standing in the courtyard of Auschwitz or Dachau or Bergen-Belsen. And he was right.

One time, when my brother was in high school, my mother punished him for not coming home from school. As a matter-of-fact, he didn't bother coming home for the rest of the night. Some would have looked at the situation as being typical of the kind of behavior that most high school kids exhibit when turn that age. But my mom looked at it as an act of blatant disrespect and disobedience. For that, George would suffer the most horrible beating I had ever witnessed my mother administer to any of her children (including the girls, thought they never really got it as bad as the boys). I don't think that it was the physical part of the punishment as much as it was the mental and psychological part of the punishment, which, to me, was worse because, for once, it revealed the degree to which my mother could be cold-hearted, cruel, and brutal to her child.

When George finally arrived home the next day after school had let out, he came right home to bravely face the punishment he knew he would get the moment my mom got home from work. He, Nolan, and I sat in our small and cramped bedroom and discussed the possible ways and methods of discipline my mom would render unto his helpless and pitiful body. But, more than anything, we wanted to know why he had put himself in such a predicament. "I just wanted to hang out with my friend and do what I wanted to do. I'm tired of not being able to do anything, and if I get a whuppin' then I get a whuppin'. I don't care anymore. George's friend, Bruce, was a classmate of his who, due to unknown circumstances with his mother, had been granted legal guardianship over his own affairs. He had his own place, his own money, and could do what ever he wanted to do. From time to time his grandmother, who lived under him in a two-family flat would check on him to make sure that he was going to school. Otherwise, Bruce did whatever he wanted to do. George envied that. Well, it turned out that he and his girlfriend had met up over at Bruce's house and spent the night. Her name was Reknita (pronounced Ree-kee-tha... seriously). Essentially, my brother had spent the night with her at the horrible expense of an ass-whipping. We hoped it was worth it because when my mom got home he would get it good. She would immediately have me or Nolan go out to pick switches of various shapes, lengths and sizes, all of which would be for breaking the flesh of George's back, and eventually wind up broken, frizzled, and used the way a bayonet would in war. When my mother got home from work, she called for George to come downstairs and explain to her why he did what he did. Of course, no amount of good explanation would suffice enough to spare him the ass-whipping that my mom had already decided to give after the five minutes had passed and he had not come in from school yesterday. But, aside from the bloody and ruthless beating she would later give him, the most painful and horrifying experience of the matter was in my brother having to lie down at her bedside like a dog to receive his ass-whipping in the morning because my mother was too tired to give it to him at that moment. My mother told him to lay down there on that splintery floor like a dog to wait for a beating the next morning. Later on that night I would sneak downstairs to see if my brother had done like I had done before and run away from home. I crept through the kitchen and on through the swinging door where my mom slept in the room adjacent to the one with the swinging door. I slowly moved my body around the door so I could look back to my mother's room. George was lying on the floor. She had made him take off all of his clothes so he could not run. I could only imagine what my brother must've felt at that moment, lying there unable to sleep because of the ass-whipping he would surely get first thing in the morning, right before he went to school. I was ashamed of my mother from that point on.

But, after awhile, my brother's skin grew thick and numb from the beatings, and his immunity against my mother's incorrigible tyranny grew more vengeful and scornful. In a little way, I admired him for his mutinous stance against my military mother because he was the only one who had the courage to speak freely to my mother, particularly about her ways of parenting and discipline, and the unnecessary psychological turmoil that we were constantly afflicted with. He was more defiant than rude or nasty with his remarks, and I think that is what really pissed my mother off because he had provided her with no angle from which to swing her "sapline switch." It would have been easy for mom to whip my brother for back-talking or sassing her, but it was very difficult for her to whip him for his audacity and courage to contest her in a polite, intelligent and respectful manner, no matter how cynical, condescending, and witty he could be. I think that my brother always seem to make my mother feel stupid, dumb, weakened and defeated by a child, and I think he enjoyed making her feel that way. It was sort of like the feeling that the Jews had watching war tribunals execute Nazi war criminals.  The rest of us were too afraid of the vicious wrath of my mother's bloody-thirsty "sapline switch" and pain-greedy extension cord to ever dare contest her will and way. But George was different; he was brave. And in that, he was powerful.

"No! I am just saying that I am tired of being poor. Just once I wanna wear nice

clothes an' get a Huffy bike like Bernard and Tookie'nem do. They be wearing nice clothes and stuff. We be bummy. It's embarrassing. I hate going to school."

I sat in silent anger as I listened to my brother's virulent and vociferous indignation of the kind of life my mother had provided for us. She... she... she.... He never made mention of the life that my father had left for us, just the poverty and misery that my mom had subjected us to. He blamed her for everything. It was her fault that my dad had died and left his wife with twelve children and no money nor means to care for them. He must have forgotten that dad never divorced his first wife, which meant no social security money for momma. He was just dead set on blaming and hating my mother.

 

*******

I did not have time to analyze and critique my brother's dry and smug attitude; he was always dry and smug and arrogant.

"Where are you? What hospital is she at?"

"Well, actually, we're at Cantrell Funeral Home on Mack between St. Clair and Bewick. Aunt Virginia and Aunt Bertis are with us." I turned around to look at the clock. It was now 5:27 am.

"Well, what happened? When did she die?" I asked, wondering what she might have been doing during her final hours. I hoped that she did not suffer the way some folks do when they are afflicted the way my momma had been. Over the last four years, she'd gained so much weight, and Nicole did not make it any better for her with the foods that she cooked for her. But momma always said that she wanted to die happy, eating whatever she pleased, so, I guess that Nicole did not have a choice. She was just doing what made my mom happy.  Besides, my mom had been accustomed to eating that way all of her life.

*******

Black Folks Disease

 

"I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where the rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about 'the man.' We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not.

–James  Baldwin

 

 

 

Growing up in the South meant that mom had become accustomed to eating the kind of foods that typically killed black folks because we eat so much of it. Pork, fatback, red meat, bacon, ham, chit'lins', hog mogs, ham hocks, fried chicken, ribs, homemade gravy, and every part of the pig and cow would be cooked into a delightful dinner of soul food. I never understood why black folks call it soul food. I mean maybe I do, or I at least understand why they think of it as soul food. When black folks get together for eats, conversation, and food, there's something quite soulful about spending time with your loved ones. The coming together of family and friends to sit down for a hot meal where we can talk and just be ourselves and love each other - that's the soul of it! It is not so much the food that is soulful, but the unique way in which we come together in harmony and communion - and argument, discord, fussing, cussing, and telling each others' business - that is soulful. I can understand that.

On the other hand, there really isn't anything soulful about eating food that is ultimately bad for the cardiovascular system, clogs the arteries, and causes all kinds of heart and weight problems. And sometimes these illnesses transfer from one generation to the next. For example, my momma and her family, as well as her momma and her family, all had the black–folk-disease like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and everything else. Now, more than half of my twelve brothers and sisters have diabetes and weight problems. Sometimes, that's the only inheritance that black folks receive: the black-folk-disease. White folks leave their progeny good genes, wealth, property, stocks, bonds, privilege and opportunity (and most important - white skin), but black folks only leave their children bad health and imminent death sentences. And they call it soul food. That comes from all that bad eating that my family has been doing for generations. Black folks are ignorant when it comes to our health and the things we put into our bodies.        

White folks take care of their bodies. When I was living in East Lansing near Michigan State University, I would leave every morning to go to work, and, like clockwork, I would sit at the intersection of Michigan and Harrison Road, curiously watching as several small groups of young and old white people came jogging in front of my car. Some of them would be smiling and waving or listening to IPOD music or talking to their running partners while drinking water from canisters. Then, at lunch time I go to the restaurant and I notice how they eat. They eat green salads with low-fat this and low-fat that.

Growing up in Detroit, I always saw Black people eating fried chicken and French fries. Even the foreigners are aware of black folks' generational association with pork, burgers, chili fries, 99 cent Coney dogs and $2.99 breakfast specials to the point where, no sooner than they arrive in this country, they got a license, a loan from the bank, and a 'Grand Opening' sign ready to open up a Coney Island in our neighborhood. They even got soul food joints! Fried clams, fried chicken, fried whiting sandwiches, fried catfish dinners with macaroni-n-cheese and fried okra and a free coke with your order. It is amazing the way we are killing ourselves due to ignorance, and it is more amazing the way other ethnic groups capitalize off of our ignorance. But I'm not mad at the Yugoslavian brotha that comes to my neighborhood and opens up a Soul Food joint and gets rich because that's what he is supposed to do. It's his constitutional right to pursue his right to life, happiness and money.

Soul food. And the ignorance digs deep into the black psyche to a point where one realizes that it is almost impossible to explain the madness to any black person in the ghetto who wholeheartedly believes that they are getting a "hook-up" by paying only $2.99 for the Hungry-Mans Breakfast Special: 3 large eggs, grits, 3 pancakes, a choice of ham, bacon, or sausage, with white, wheat or rye toast or a bagel. And coffee, orange juice, hot chocolate or pop. And all the butter your pancakes and grits can absorb. Soul food.

 

*******

The Origins of the black-folks-disease

My Aunt Virginia would sit and talk about the good ole days of growing up on the Jack Perry Plantation, and how good they used to eat. She loves to reminisce about the Johnson history, and has righteously self-appointed herself the Johnson historian and archivist. Whenever I would go and visit with her, she would make a pot of coffee and get some Louisiana Crunch Cake and we would sit for hours talking about the good ole days when she and her siblings - my momma too - had the time of their lives on the Jack Perry Plantation. But even as I listened to her stories - oh how she could tell a story with such great exuberance and vivid detail - I was able to gain better understanding of why my family was cursed with the black-folks-disease.

"We wuz sheah-croppin' fahmuz dat wuhk'd own uh plantashin. Dis iz wheah we lib'd. An yeah, we id pick cot'n amung many otha thangs. We gathud'd coe'n from duh feelz at hahbess time ta feed duh hogz an ta puhpare fa dayaddee ta take to duh meel. From duh coe'n it wuz groun' ta make coe'n meel, not Jiffy Mix, dis iz reel coe'n meel. Eh'bey fall, about Nobembuh, when duh weathuh got coe'd, it wuz hog killin' time. Sometimez we slawtuhd two ta three hogz anna cow. We wood be bizee cleenin' chit'linz an makin' showt'nin, witch we caw'd lahd. We awso made cracklin', witch we put in coe'n bred. Dayaddee had uh smokehows. In it, he kep sawsagez, ribz, poe'k chops, jowls, bakin an ham, witch he cured himsef, as well as othuh foodz. We wuz bizee grynin, mixin, and stuffin sawsagez. In uh dayz wuhk, we had ta feed duh hogz, chickin, mues, gathuh duh eggz and milk duh cowz. We awe'wayz had plenny uh chickenz. We churn'd milk and made our own buttuh.  Fresh fryd chicken, right off the yaw'd wuz uh towdilly delishis meel. Manny timz trav'luhz or hoboz wood cum thoo duh playce. Momma an dayaddee awe'wayz had enuff ta sheah, eeb'n wit duh neybuzz. Momma an dayaddeez wuz exsuhlent cooks."

By this time, my Aunt Jean had sauntered from the back room where she'd been quietly taking a nap and joined in the discussion. Like always, she would ask me to stand so "I kin take uh look at choo. You dun grow'd up ta be so han'sum, and duh lawd gon' bless yall boyz fa stayin' roun' ta take care uh yall momma. I awe'wayz like duh way yall see'd bout yall momma." She would always say that to me whenever I visited Freeland Street. In a way, I think that she wished she had the kind of children that turned out to be as loving and caring to her as my siblings and I had been to our mom. Whenever we visited her and my other aunts, they always lavished those types of acknowledgements and compliments on us. In actuality they were condescending and offensive remarks for what they thought had been a miracle of a situation that had otherwise become damned to doom because my mother - and her children - were not sanctified and holy and would, by decree of the father, the lord, and the holy ghost, be subjected to a life unrepentant and merciless hell.

Aunt Jean took a seat in between Aunt Virginia and I and readied herself for the chance when she could interrupt my aunt's famous and historic ruminations. Panting and grunting as she stumbled back into her rocking chair, defeated by lack of energy, weakened bones, and the subtle cruelties of old-age, Aunt Jean would assume her position in the ritualistic ceremony of oral history telling.

"Ya an'tee talkin' 'bout when we was liddle on duh plantation, Push?"

"Yes ma'am!" I would say with excitement and enthusiasm. I knew she too would also enchant me with one of her dramatic stories of plantation life and sharecropping. It was better than any story Alex Haley could ever tell and I simply adored her southern accent. After more than fifty years of living in the North, she still talked with that slow southern black folk accent the way Blanche on the Golden Girls did, but in black folk talk.       

"I'll aint gon' neva fuhget dayaddeez owe fashin jelly cake an buttuh rowz. Momma wuz a good howskeepuh an' cook-"

Aunt Virginia interrupts Aunt Jean, who looks at her a bit startled and disheveled, the way an old person does when they are hard of hearing and someone eventually taps them on the shoulder to get their attention.

Aunt Virginia fusses at Aunt Jean for interrupting her before she continues to lecture me on the "fineries" of good ole southern eating.

"Like I wuz sayin, momma could git a meel tagether from coe'nbread, onions an water which she caw'd gruel bread. Deah wuz awe'wayz dayz we wood hab good ole smoked jowl, hot biskits, Alga or karo sirrip and buttuhmilk. Mom wuz a good howswife. She did not wuhk inna feelz much becuz she wuz bizee wit duh baybeez. But she awe'wayz seed dat we had a hot lunch, witc she puhpared in duh fireplace,  duh wood stoe'b or wood-pile. Manny dayz we wood see mom cummin wit uh bic pan own huh hed anna lot uh packagez in huh hanz. When she got to duh end of the feel, she wood spread us out a delishis lunch uh hot coe'nbread, tuhnip greenz, baked sweet puhtaytuz, hot soop, and sometimes sirrip, fryd meet, wahtuh, and otha thingz. Yes, we wuhk'd haw'd."

As I stared at my Aunt Virginia and Aunt Jean eating their Louisiana Crunch Cake and drinking their coffee, in between those regretful sighs and occasional soulful murmurs that old church folk do ("umph, umph, umph...."), or those vociferous contestations, that always seem to come from nowhere at any given moment ("yes lawd...dank ya Jeeeeezus!"), I realize that it has been more than fifty years since they left the Jack Perry Plantation, but they still cannot seem to reconcile the past. My mom had been the same way. She could never seem to get past the good ole days "when chicken was so fresh it was sweet. It ain't nothing like it is today, with all those pesticides and stuff that they shoot up into the animals," she would say, always reminding her children of "the good eatin'" we'd really been missing.  Soul food.

My momma's health had started to seriously deteriorate years before her ultimate death. I think the move from the South had in many ways been an issue for her that she'd never really quite reconciled within herself. We would always hear her talking about the day when she would plan to move back to the South. But in the meantime, she liked to reminisce on the good ole days of growing up on the Jack Perry plantation. That was the only way she could maintain some connection to her southern roots. 

I think the only reason why my momma adjusted so quickly to northern life rather than return to the South for good was because she had a ton of children to raise, and she had made a promise to my dad on his death bed that she would never leave their children in the care of anyone else no matter what happened. She kept her promise to him.

 

*******

 

 

Black Magic

 

Ruth raised her large family with black magic. Black magic: the ways in which black folks manage to survive, eat, and make it against all odds and turn the bad to good. And she had learned these life-saving techniques from watching her parents. Once, when we did not have any food in the refrigerator, and food stamp day was two weeks away, my mother went out back into her magic garden and picked four squash, two tomatoes, and some sweet peppers and tucked them into her tattered and wrinkled apron and returned to the kitchen where I was standing with a dazed and confused look upon my face. Mom just looked at me with a slight grin and turned around and started slicing, dicing, mixing and stirring. 

"What choo finna make momma?"I asked.

"Um finna cook dinnuh boy. Nah you gon' outside an' play," she said, never once turning from her magic bowl, stirring her magic mixture. Two hours later, momma called all of the children inside to eat, and the moment we entered the house they could smell the food. It smelled like a Thanksgiving dinner. We did not know what momma had concocted, and, like most children, we did not really care. We were hungry, and it was momma's con as to what we would eat. We never thought to concern ourselves with how momma managed to squeeze a meal out of four squash, two tomatoes, and some sweet peppers, but she did it. We ate until our bellies were good and full, and our thirst quenched with good and sweet lemonade! That's the black magic I'm speaking of.

All black folk know black magic. In times of financial crisis, white families go berserk and lose control. A white man would rather kill his pregnant wife, the two children, the dog - and the grandparents who happen to be visiting that day - if his bank account is audited and/or his economic status is threatened. He will kill his whole family rather than lose a little money. And when the cops catch up with him, he is usually found sitting on the beach drinking a Pina Colada or something, with a new wife, his money deposited into a new bank account, presumptuously free from criminal responsibility and worry, with a fresh start, like ain't nothin' happen. But black folks, on the other hand, got black magic. I know. I've seen it happen. And my momma had used it many days to keep her family together during the tumultuous years after my father had died.

 

*******

 

And now my brother was on the other end of the phone telling me that our mother was dead.

"Well, Nikita told me that she had a regular day like she'd always have. They said that she went to bed around 10:00 last night. Nicole checked on her from time to time. She went to and from her bedroom to the bathroom a couple times during the night, and then Nikita, Nicole and mom all lay down and went to bed. After a while, Nicole went to check on her and noticed that she wasn't breathing, so she called the ambulance."

The thought that my momma was lying on a strange, cold, and remorseless slab of stainless steel made me feel sick to my stomach. Yet, in an odd and weird kind of way, I was glad. The world had become unworthy of her presence, I felt. I was also glad because I could no longer stand to see her suffer; watch her disintegrate into nothing. I did not even like calling her on the telephone to hear her weary and tired voice tell me that she was feeling fine and not to worry about the cough (that never seemed to go away). My mom had suffered enough, and it was time for her to rest. She had had a long and burdensome life of raising children amidst adversity and hardships. Ironically, I think the best of her years were spent on the Jack Perry Plantation. Whenever she spoke of her years there, she would always perk up and radiate at the opportunity to talk about her life and times on the plantation with her brothers and sisters and her mother and father. And she missed "the way chicken used to taste before they started shootin'em up wit all'lem pesticides an' stuff." She missed the way family stuck together and helped each other. She liked the way she and my father had always worked hard to stay together and keep the family together. But things were different in the North. People were different. It seemed as though she hadn't been that happy in a long time. I think the happiness ended the moment she left the Jack Perry Plantation. It would take many years of adaptation and adjustment before momma really understood the depth of her discontentment with the northern way, and just how isolated she felt from her lost life in Tunica, Mississippi. But she also loved it when her father moved the family to Buchanan, Michigan and her dad had found work in the automobile factories. She loved life on the Jack Perry plantation because her family was together, yet, she loved the North because there were no fields that needed picking, and for once in her life she could lay under the bright of sun and daydream. She could do as she pleased without the violent rebuke of Jim Crow, or the watchful scrutiny of Jack Perry. The North was different. But she also missed the glorious days of living on the Jack Perry plantation, and deep down in her heart and soul, Tunica, Mississippi was her home and it always would be.

The news of my mother's death couldn't have come at a worse time in my life. I was approaching the age of 35 and to have finally finished my degree was a big thing for me to have accomplished. But, even, still, I felt as though I was stuck in an endless vacuum of disappointment and unaccomplished tasks - most of which I really had not even wanted to accomplish because, in the end, they were worthless, pointless, selfish, inhumane, unnecessary and would ultimately yield no sustainable medicine for which my soul and spirit desperately needed in order to survive. Perhaps I was having a mid-life crisis. I did not know what the hell was happening to me. Perhaps I was standing in the middle of a labyrinth of other people as they were having the mid-life crisis! And maybe they were bombarding me! Whatever. I was beginning to question the meaning of life, which, for me, had dwindled itself to nothing more than an arbitrary notion of pointless and futile mind games. There is no meaning of life, just cause and effect.

What did my mother's death mean to me? I did not know. And for once in my life I needed advice but who was going to give it to me? Typically, in a tensed and stressful situation I could always go visit my best friend Andre and find comfort and peace in his ghetto-singed, funk-braised, blunt-enhanced couch philosophy, and manage to make sense out of the nonsense.

 

*******

 

One day, just before I left Detroit to move out to Arizona, I drove over to his house to see if he was at home - his phone got cut off so much that I eventually did not even bother to call him to tell him that I was on my way over. I would pull up on the side of his apartment building and blow my horn and wait to see if he would come to the window. After three or four honks, Andre would lean his upper torso out of his third floor apartment window and motion for me to park and wait for him to throw down the door keys to let myself in. I hated this part because it usually took about fifteen minutes for him to find the keys. Meanwhile, I waited at my car and pondered over the multitude of questions that I would ask him.

"Do I leave my job, disregard my responsibilities, throw away my worldly possessions, and embark on an endless and fantastic journey to everywhere and nowhere writing, reading good books, discovering the world, exploring new places, sight-seeing the unseen, meeting new and strange people, eating exotic foods, and never again plan to settle down anywhere?" I asked Andre, as he sat on a crate in the middle of his acutely cluttered living room rolling a blunt from a fresh sack of weed that he had just purchased from the bud-man, "or, do I keep my day job and resign to the conformity, complacency, and complicity that is life?" Always the intent and trusted listener, I could expect for Andre to slowly and rhythmically nod his head (like a good musician, he always seemed to have a beat going on in his head. And like a true genius, he would always rely on the sounds in his head to give him guidance and strength to answer the question that I'd so wearily posed).

 

*******

 

Andre never seemed to have moved beyond the poetic, psychedelic, strivings of the 1970's, he got lost in the 80's, reborn in 90's, and, by the early phases of the new millennium, Andre had figured out that the last fifteen to twenty years of his life had been wasted on bitches, bud, and bullshit. The only problem, though, was that he could not seem to get away from neither of the three treacherous forces that haunted him like a junkie needing a fix. Like most of us coming through the ruthless era of the cocaine game Andre had it bad as a child. His father loved him but resented Andre's headstrong and stubborn persistence that he would be the next Prince and the Revolution. For Andre's ole skool dad, Willie D., Andre's dreams were flimsy, unrehearsed, unskilled, lackadaisical, and just another way for Andre to get out of doing the chores that his dad expected for him to do. In actuality, Andre's plight was just as was the plight of the other young boys growing up around Harding, St. Clair, Montclair, St. Jean, Garland, and Bewick.  We were all just simply trying to figure out the quickest and easiest way to get out of the hood... alive. We all stood by on the dusty post-industrial streets (where, back in 1925, Ossian Sweet had bought the house and white folks tried to run him out) where crime and death became as usual an occurrence as block parties, fish-fry's, barbeques and unwed teen pregnancy. When I first met Andre I thought he was either mentally ill or having a nervous breakdown. His brother, Amiri, who had been a classmate and friend of my brother, had been killed the year before I met Andre on the yellow-cheese school bus. Andre always say in the back of the school bus because he knew that some of the other kids would be waiting to beat him when he got off the bus. I think that most of the boys that hated Andre, and were always trying to beat him up for no apparent reason, were jealous because Andre had curly, wavy, hair, and they had kinky, nappy hair. Back then the girls were really into the boys who were light-skinned with good hair, and all the girls wanted Andre. They would always try to find a reason to play with his hair and flirt with him.

In the meantime he would be seated at the back of the bus showing me pictures of his dead brother and King Tut saying that his dead brother would return reincarnated as King Tut. I just sat there looking at him thinking that he was crazy. At the same time I realized, even as a young child, that he was obviously still mourning the death of his brother and hadn't quite come to grips with the whole thing. Eventually, we formed a funk band to take our minds off of the neighborhood, death, despair, poverty, and anxiety that permeated our young and impressionable minds. I began to spend a lot of time at Andre's house. I still remember the first time I met his mother. Rumor has it that she used to sleep around with Andre's friends and neighbors, and their brothers as well. She was notoriously known for being a super freak. She and Andre had a strange relationship, too. I believe that she molested him when he was a little boy because she always seemed to be obsessed with the abnormally huge size of his dick. She used to make reference to his dick-size from time to time. Whenever girls would call the house for Andre his father would get on the phone and flirt with them and ask them, "what you want with him, all he got is a big dick." I always thought that was strange. The family was strange. Always were. Last I heard, his mom had called him and told him that she had contracted HIV.

 

*******

 

 "You know what, Push," Andre would say, blowing more marijuana smoke-rings up into the already smoke-filled, cognac-smelling room that was too small to house the overwhelming amount of mostly aged and busted instruments and recording equipment that littered his entire front room. As I inadvertently inhaled the vicious and mighty clouds of funk smoke, waiting for my contact-buzz to hit me like a ton of bricks, as it had so routinely done before, Andre went into the kitchen to fetch some cups so we could drink our beer. He returned with a dirty mason jar and a wine glass with a chipped rim. I took the mason jar from him and returned to the kitchen area to look for a dish cloth so I could rinse out the jar but I did not find one that was clean. Instead, I left the jars on the dirty, molded, and dish-filled kitchen-countertop and returned to the living room and took the two sweaty forty-ounces from dampened paper bag and sat one of the beers in front of Andre. Like always, he takes a second to pause and break from the blunt-toke fest to ask me if the forty I'd just sat in front of him was for him, at which I'd sardonically reply, "Of course, dude." "Oh, thanks, P," he says then gets up to go and look out of his window to see who might happen to be passing by, perhaps a girl up the street that he's been trying to fuck, or some guy he's been waiting on to come and buy his broken down Cadillac, or perhaps his mother stopping by to bring him and Camilla some food, or some young rapper-wannabe coming to talk to Andre about some beats for a rap, or whatever. But he always darted to that window in an unpredictable and paranoid manner, the way weed-heads do. After his curiosity and suspicion has been settled by the disinterested aliens strolling up and down the dangerous and toxic city streets just below his window lattice, ordinary folk looking for the same thing that Andre is fortuitously smoking on - thanks to the timely and weekly paycheck that Camilla faithfully and routinely brings home.

 

*******

 Every Friday after Camilla cashes her check at the corner liquor store and buys him a pint of cheap gin, orange juice, a forty ounce, and a pack of Newport cigarettes. Customarily, after she has purchased Andre's psychiatric grab bag of drink, smoke, and paraphernalia, she then walks on over to the fish joint and orders two whiting fish sandwich with fries and large coke and extra hot sauce and tartar sauce, then, while she waits on her order, strolls on up to the corner of the East Grand Boulevard and Jefferson to the phone booth to call the bud man and tell him to meet her at the apartment with two dime bags. The bud man always flirts with Camilla over the phone because she's pretty and has a nice body. He cannot understand what she sees in Andre, or why she remains so faithful to him. In other words, even if she doesn't want to leave him, "you still can gimme sum uh dat pussy. I'll even make it wurf yo wile." By that he means that he'll give her free bud. But, like always, Camilla just laughs and tells the bud man, "stop playin' wit me, boy, an bring me my shit." She walks back to the fish joint tired, regretful of the low pay check that never seems to increase no matter how much overtime she does, and the fact that Andre won't, and may, possibly, never, get a job. She walks back into the fish joint and takes a seat near the door and stares out the panoramic window frame on to the filthy, funky, rhythmic mess of her neighborhood. Thinking about the sexy compliment that the bud man gave her, she leans back into the hard-back chair and takes and deep sigh and, just for a moment, contemplates life without the worries and stress of taken care of Andre.   She thinks about what her life could have been like if she would have never met him. Perhaps, she could have become a model; she could have worked things out with her baby daddy and they could have gotten back together and raised their son rather than he get custody of him and run off with another woman to raise his and Camilla's son. She certainly missed little Ernest and knew that she would have the chance to have and raise him again, especially when she had Andre for an example of a man, and that he did nothing to enhance her life or Ernest's life and the social workers had already told her on more than one occasion that Andre had not been a good influence on Ernest. Every time the social workers visited the apartment to assess little Ernest's living conditions and the psychological effect that his surroundings might have on him, they could expect to walk into a dank, dark, and cluttered melancholia of soiled dishes, dirty clothes, beer cans, and empty Hennessey pint bottles strewn about the blunt-smoke infested apartment. 

Also, they knew that Andre had several children by several women that he had never done anything for, so the likelihood of him ever being a good role model for Ernest was slim to none. Yet, Camilla could not let go of Andre because she loved him. But, sitting in the fish joint, waiting for her and Andre's whiting fish sandwich with fries and large coke and extra hot sauce and tartar sauce, trying to make it home in time enough to catch the bud man - who will not wait for her because he has other customers to see - just for a hot moment, she thought about life without Andre. The thoughts were sweet and bitter, but mostly sweet. Bitter because she would miss Andre's big dick; sweet because, while she was still pretty and young enough to still interest another man, she could certainly find someone to treat her good and take her out to dinner once in awhile. Andre couldn't do anything for but fuck her good and talk shit about how he was going to be a big time recording star and a producer for Bad Boy and Puffy and Kanye West and Jay-Z. For the first  four years that shit sounded pretty good, but now, with, still, no word from Bad Boy, Puffy, Kanye, or Jay-Z, and with no significant changes in Andre's life - other than his birthday - she had begun to see Andre for who and what he really is: a has been who never was. She began to realize that for eight years all he had really ever produced - besides good music on his expensive keyboard that his wife parents had bought him in hopes that he'd become a famous producer, just as he had promised them he would if only they'd have faith enough to buy him the two-thousand dollar programmable keyboard - was a bunch of bullshit that only amounted to bullshit. And now she was eight years older, still slim and pretty, but certainly not the young hot-ass she was when she first met Andre. Back then, men fell at her feet, worshipped her, took her out, bought her things, and, on occasion, she could even look forward to having her rent paid if she wanted. She even had custody of her son. Now, she had nothing but an aging artist who had no prospects or desires other than to smoke blunts, sip Hennessey, gin, and juice, and eat whiting fish sandwiches. And make beautiful music at all hours of the night while she tried to sleep after having worked all day to keep a roof over their heads. Sitting in the fish joint waiting for their usual fish dinner reminded Camilla of the life she had missed and the life she still had. All the men that hit on her; all the guys at work who tried to talk to her and always asking to take her out. Damn.

 

*******

 

I took a long guzzle of the cold and sweaty forty ounce while Andre sat back on the crate and took another puff from his Hennessey-soaked blunt. He paused to snatch back the released and escaped weed smoke, before taking in a deep and long hold of smoke. He inhaled and passed it to me. I declined. I always decline. We've been friends for twenty-five years and he knows I do not, and have never, gotten high, but he always passes the blunt to me. I do not get mad anymore because I realize that that is the theatre and drama, the rhythm and cadence of smoking blunts. You take a toke and pass. Puff, puff, pass, as they say, I guess. "Oh, oh, yeah, das right. You do not smoke do you Push?" I laugh a little and remind him, "No, dude." He takes another toke, then a sip (never a guzzle) of the Old English forty ounce I brought for us, and then raised his head to think before he continues:

"It's just like daddy used to tell us, a man gotta do what he gotta do. Das why a man do not need no woman hangin' round him all goddamn day, Push." I nodded, thinking of how his response had anything to do with my question. But, I'm sure it did, I would just have to think about it some more. With Andre, it was like that. It was like that me with me, too.

Perhaps I should acquiesce to what my life had become, but that would take away from the danger and risk of it all. And when you compromise or reconcile those two sacred and irredeemable elements life is not exciting anymore.  The last thing my mother ever told me, just days before she died, was that she was not ready to die. She said that to me, crying, but at the same time giving me the answer to the questions that had so plagued my inner soul. "Live your life because you only get one," she said. "And when you're gone, you are not coming back."