“I’m hip. One side door, one injection.”
The television coverage moved into interviews with stricken associates of the departed mayor. Bottles and flasks and plastic cups that did not belong to the house came out of raincoats and handbags as people who loved Mom and Dad but knew they didn’t know how to party got louder. Uncle Ralston craned around, looking for Aunt Gloria perhaps. She was with the attorney in an arrangement of chairs, and Dad had moved Ralston Jr. out of harm’s way by a window. He, too, wore a black suit. Mrs. Williams darted off to get in on some Johnnie Walker.
In a flash, it had become impossible to remain sober in Chicago. I felt the need for an AA sponsor and was humbled that I couldn’t recall the name of the guy who’d volunteered to act as mine when I got out of rehab thirty months before.
* * *
After I had dropped out of the University of Illinois, Cello told me that my real problem was that I did not believe myself to be good enough. Her advice was that I set my sights lower, in all things, like checking the National Achievement box, a separate category for Negroes on the National Merit exam that was judged by a lower standard and was therefore an attainable prize for black students like me, who were psychologically disadvantaged. Cello had not got over her Bicentennial Concert Disaster of the year before and she never would.
I just looked at the telephone receiver, believing, as I did then, in the poetry of my impending nervous breakdown.
To go nuts had been my plan for what to do once I had dropped out of school. But when I wasn’t hearing the voices that flocked into Ralston Jr.’s head during his breakdowns, and forgetting to eat or getting lost on the El or acting out in abandoned downtown blocks by the new library didn’t bring to my synapses the traffic of psychosis, I couldn’t think what to do other than to drink even more.
I was soon going to run out of money and in that state I stayed with successive unsuspecting someones. I was usually asked to seek shelter elsewhere once it had become clear to my helper in my crisis that I would continue to drink up everything alcoholic that came into the house. I knew I was putting off having to go home to face my parents, the son and daughter of graduates of black colleges in the traditional antiblack South.
“Remember, they have to take us now, but they don’t have to keep us,” Mom said hopefully when she and Dad left me at the brick-everywhere university in Champaign, Illinois, three years before.
My first year I spent my extra money on drinking; my second year I spent my tuition on drinking and the university notified Dad that I’d failed to register. He flew down the same day and made it to the bursar’s office. He took me out to dinner and I got drunk. He stayed in a motel and said the next morning that it was okay that I could not get over to say goodbye. I didn’t have a car.
He never scolded me for what I’d wasted. My dad said that one of the worst feelings in the world was that of not knowing what was one’s calling, one’s path. He said he knew people laughed, but he never doubted that accountancy had been right for him. He hoped I’d find mine soon. Until I did, not knowing what to do with one’s life was worse than not having a woman or a family to love.
I was surprised by his coherence and moved by his leniency, so much so that I continued to drink in town and to fall behind in my classes. I filled out the withdrawal documents in a fog of being tired and broke, unable to make up the work for the term, unable to do my laundry because I didn’t have quarters, didn’t have the energy to carry that enormous bag to the basement, and I didn’t care. My tab had been cut off at the bar downtown where I drank underage.
The disgust my parents felt at my coming home a dropout was too much for me to handle. When the nervous breakdown didn’t come and the locked liquor cabinet turned out to be unlocked and empty of everything except flat tonic, I called an old flame and met her at a black bar where an overweight white girl might expect some action. We got completely drunk. She paid. I could hear her laughter as her taxi lurched out of the parking lot.
I got in the car borrowed from my brother, his army-green Mercury Coupe, his beloved Tank. I thought of how my father had taught me one day at the Eagle to tip my cap to the ladies. I was such a hit. The memory brought me to tears. I started up my brother’s Tank, roared out of the parking lot, and within three minutes had careened off a post and flipped the car over beside a disused brown railroad track, the giant warehouse into which it had once run long gone.
I remember saying to myself in a British accent, “I’m all right.” The car was on its left side. I could see that the windows were either broken by the impact or scratched by the gravel the car had slid across. I was in my seat belt. The radio was going. “Aha,” I said, still in Bunbury’s voice, and pressed the window button. The left one cracked horribly and I pulled myself up quickly, away from bouncing glass pieces. But the window on the right had gone down. I unbuckled and reached up. I hoisted myself up and fell over the side, jumping back from contact with the hot underbelly of the vehicle. I got to my feet. No one was around.
I went three blocks before I saw a convenience store. I said in a heavy Bunbury-British accent to the black man behind the Plexiglas shield, “I say, I’ve had an accident.” Incredibly, I had no injuries.
I never saw the tow truck. I was gone from the scene before it arrived. The police dropped me at the hospital, perplexed by my bright British accent. Dad and Solomon picked me up. Mom waited at home with something new in her eyes. The crazies staying with us had sat up with her. Dad fixed things with a judge. The car had been hit while parked in the lot of the Sweet End Tavern, the insurance story said. I missed most of the aftermath. I slept through it. I slept for two days. Mom was worried that I might have a concussion. When at last I woke, they were standing over me. Solomon asked if I was all right.
I cried, which spoiled things. They went away, except for Mom. But here my brother had been looking as though someone had shot the dog we’d never had and the first thing out of his mouth was to ask if I was okay. When Cello went into how much he disliked me, I remembered that about him and held on to it, as they say.
After that, I pulled myself together for a while, so much so that Solomon asked me to cease my hysterically punctual payments. The debt kept us more in touch than he wanted to be. Dad stopped talking to me pretty much and Mom nattered in order to cover up her disappointment.
* * *
“The fun never sets,” Dad said as he passed by. He had never been the sort of black guy who could get people laughing by remembering neck bones and rice in the Second Ward. “There is life after Sears, Roebuck.” He was acting as though he were glad-handing his way around a crowded room, but what he was doing was revolving from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room and back, clapping the same dozen people on the back and saying anything that seemed jolly, spirit-keeping.
The need to smoke had reduced the number of mourners. The house had quieted down considerably. Aunt Gloria had been in the bathroom for some time. Ralston Jr.’s pockets were full of baby carrots. I was sure that he was counting between carrots, timing each one. The television was on still, but nobody paid attention, loud as it was. Mom was in earnest conversation with the priest. We didn’t notice that Solomon had let himself in.
“You arranged for the pilot, I presume,” Ralston Jr. said.
Uncle Ralston was up, tottering toward Solomon, as out of it as his damaged son. “Take me to North Carolina this instant.” The old dictator making demands before he’d accept exile.
But my brother had Mom hanging on to his shoulders and Dad fastened to his ribs. I was in a sports bar with Solomon when Harold Washington was first elected.