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.
I worked on Rosen-Montag’s pages, shuffled through photographs and drawings, making sure Mom and Dad saw them when I came to the dinner table. But Rosen-Montag’s people had let me know that they were printing the book in Italy. Apparently he’d sat down and rewritten every page placed before him. Then an editor I’d not heard from earlier announced that they would keep my page about Mary Cassatt’s murals for the Chicago World’s Fair, something irrelevant I’d thrown in for fun because it showed women laboring together. Otherwise, my sentences on various subjects had become blocks of text to help fill up a page or add to the design. Most of what I’d done wasn’t used even as captions for the numerous illustrations. The cost of the printing was what occupied everyone. I thought about confiding this to Dad, as if to bond with him over a work problem.
I sometimes thought Dad would have preferred that I had not told them about my alcohol and drug problems, at least not all of them. I hadn’t. But I could believe that he wished I had gone away someplace, cleaned up, and come back without mentioning anything. Ralston Jr. couldn’t help himself. I could have. Instead, I’d introduced this story into Dad’s life. It hadn’t remained confined to the magazines he read. I pulled it out of the newsprint and set it walking around his house. This was what I had become to him, an embodiment of a social problem, the old slander of what black men were like, and I took his conversation, no matter the subject, to be in the end about the stuff he wished I hadn’t told them.
It was their job not to forget, his tone let me know. It was one thing to be a lost youth who drank and quite another to be a black drug user. One night Dad brought up a new law, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which had taken effect just before the holidays. I would get five years in prison for having even small amounts of “the crack” in my pockets. That is, if the police searched me. Dad was being brave, facing my past, schooling me on the new American reality.