“Call everybody,” I said. “We’re going to New Orleans.”
We left around 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. in a caravan, at least fifteen of us piled into a Suburban. None of us wore seatbelts. I was stupid and didn’t care. Ever since I’d left home, I’d learned that life for me in the wide curious world was a constant struggle against empty rooms, against the grief at my brother’s death and at Ronald’s death that followed me always, that made itself most felt in those quiet spaces. When I was in DeLisle, I liked to get as many of us as I could together, cousins and hood, and organize trips to New Orleans, twenty of us roaming Bourbon Street with Styrofoam cups. We parked on Decatur Street and walked into the quarter. A limousine with spinning rims was parked at the edge of the lot; we noticed because these types of rims were new and we’d only seen them on television. C. J. knelt next to the tire.
“Watch this shit,” he said. He spun the wheel and the metal caught the light like a knife flipping through the air. “It’s spinning!” he called. We laughed at the boldness of it, the silliness of it, the feeling that we were doing something stupid that we probably shouldn’t be doing. We spent the night getting drunker and drunker, walking, eyeing the doors of strip clubs that only a few of us were old enough to enter. C. J. shepherded Charine through the drunk crowd the entire night, her protector; he was only an inch or two taller than she was, and just as lean, but when he walked next to her he seemed larger, bolstered by attitude, possessiveness, loyalty.
The next morning, I woke up on the daybed in the second bedroom in Nerissa’s apartment. I stood up and walked toward the door, but my legs crumpled under me. I fell to the floor. I’d had fun the night before, and figured the only reason I felt so weak and had almost fainted was because of the migraine medicine I was taking to treat the headaches I’d suffered from since I was fifteen. C. J. and Charine and Nerissa and Hilton walked into the bedroom, and C. J. sat in a toddler’s chair on the floor, a white T-shirt wrapped around his head, and looked at me.
“You ready to go at it again?” he said.
I smiled.
“Yep.”
It was 8:00 A.M. We drank. We got high. C. J. plugged a small portable radio into the wall in the room with the daybed and the bunk bed, and he popped in a new Lil Boosie CD. He played the same song repeatedly; he rewound it over and over again and sang along. I’d never heard him sing before. His solid voice was clear through the T-shirt. He made me laugh with silly, unselfconscious jokes. He surprised me: I’d never known he could be so funny, so kind. And then, suddenly, the conversations shifted. We were talking about cocaine.
“You ever did it?” C. J. said.
“No,” I said.
“You know anybody who did it? In college?”
“Yeah, a few people. But we weren’t close.”
“Don’t never do it.”
C. J. shifted in the toddler’s chair he’d folded himself into, readjusted the T-shirt across his face, but it was too bulky and slid down. He was half smiling, half not.
“I tried it once,” he said. “I did it again.” C. J. rubbed his head. “I wish I’d never did it the first time.”
I nodded and understood why he’d known the bathroom at the hotel was so disgusting, why he was so insistent and erratic that night he dragged the cooler up the road, why one day he’d scare me, and the next, he could be another person, kind and funny, painfully honest, telling me things he was somewhat ashamed to tell me while wearing a T-shirt like a veil across his face.
I got a feeling I ain’t going to be here long, C. J. said. He told Charine this. He told his close cousins this. Not here, he said. He lived as if he believed it. He never talked like the rest of us, never laid claim to a dream job. He never said: I want to be a firefighter. Never: I want to be a welder. Neither: Work offshore. The only person he ever spoke to about his future was Charine; once every so often, he’d tell her he wanted her to have his children. We can hustle, he’d say, make money. Live good, he said. Live. But even after dropping out, he never got a legitimate job, perhaps dissuaded by the experiences of the young men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked until they were fired or quit because minimum wage came too slowly and disappeared too quickly. They sold dope between jobs until they could find more work as a convenience store clerk or a janitor or a landscaper. This was like walking into a storm surge: a cycle of futility. Maybe he looked at those who still lived and those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. Maybe in his low moments, when he was coming down off the coke, he saw no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, no hope. Maybe in his high moments, he didn’t either. Don’t say that shit, Charine would tell C. J. when he spoke of dying young. You ain’t going nowhere.
Years later, Nerissa told me a story she heard from one of C. J.’s friends in Pass Christian. They were walking along the train tracks, Nerissa said, because it was the fastest way to get around town. C. J. would have been surefooted, stepped easily over the hunks of granite that shifted while he skimmed from wooden crosstie to wooden crosstie. Over years, these had been burned black by the Mississippi sun and the heat of the trains. On either side of the tracks, ditches ran deep with water. Cattails grew tall. C. J. would have heard it first, the way the train whistled in the distance behind him. His friend loped on for a few steps and then crossed over the steel rails before wondering why C. J. kept walking, a small smile on his face, but even that was like a slide of rocks down a hilclass="underline" all hard. Or perhaps C. J. glared at the ground when he walked. Either way, he ignored the blasting train advancing toward him. He ignored his friend, who flinched at the train’s blast. I ain’t, C. J. told people, I ain’t long for this world. He waited until he felt the train cleave the air at his back, until the horn made his eardrums pulse, until he was sure the conductor was panicking, and then he called on his lean golden body to do what it would, and he jumped from the tracks, out of the way, alive another day.
C. J., Hilton, and I spent January 4, 2004, at the park in DeLisle on the warped bleachers. C. J.’d asked Hilton to roll a blunt with some weed my sister gave him: the buds were bright green and damp and tight. C. J.’s blond-brown braids hung over his forehead and he smiled. The mild Mississippi winter sun made his blond eyelashes sparkle like gold wire. C. J. was mellow and calm. I asked him if he wanted to ride to the movies with us later that night and see Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai.