I walked back up Los Angeles Street toward Spring again. I didn’t want shoes.
All these years, I had never wanted to look up Hattie Jackson in the phone book. I didn’t really know if Grady was homeless or not—I’d just heard it when I was home in Rio Seco. Someone would say his cousin had heard Grady lived on the streets in a cardboard box, and all I could think of was being a child, in a box from my mother’s new refrigerator, drawing windows with magic marker, Glorette sitting beside me.
I had left all that behind, and I didn’t want to remember it—every memory made me feel good, for the smell of the oranges we kept in a bowl inside our box house, and then bad, for not being there to help my father during the harvest. I didn’t want to see Hattie, or Grady.
Sprung fool. Growing up, I always heard my brothers and their friends talk about fools. Man, that is one ballplayin fool. Don’t do nothin but dribble. Damn, Cornelius is a drinkin fool.
When I went to college, I heard Shakespeare. The fool. Fool, make us laugh. Go tell the fool he is needed. When I went to England, I saw the dessert Raspberry Fool. I closed my eyes, back then, tasting the cream and cake, thinking of Grady Jackson.
How you gon get sprung like that over one woman? That’s what my brothers always said to him.
He came to the barn another night, and my brothers were working on a car. I stood in the doorway, watching him hold his right hand in a rag. Grady said to Lafayette, “She over there at her mama’s? Glorette?”
Lafayette said, “Man, she told me she was movin in with Dakar soon as he got a record deal. Said they was gettin a place together. I don’t keep track of that girl.”
Grady said, “I heard him say it. Dakar. He was playin bass in a club, and I heard him tell somebody, ‘I gotta book, man, I gotta get to LA or New York so I can get me a deal. Tired of this country-ass place.’ So I hatted him up.”
My brother said, “Damn, fool, your finger bleedin! He done bit off your finger?”
The red stain was big as a hibiscus flower on the dirty rag. Grady said, “He pulled a knife on me. Man, I kicked his ass and told him to go. He was gon come back and then book again, leave Glorette all the time. I just—I told him to stay away.” He was panting now, his upper lip silver with sweat. “Forever.”
He pushed past me and said nothing. I had already been accepted to college, and Glorette had told me she was pregnant with Dakar’s child—I’d seen a swell high up under her breasts, awkward on her body like when we used to put pillows inside our shirts in that refrigerator house.
I left for college, and when I came back in the summer, my brothers told me what had happened. Grady had been driving a Rio Seco city trash truck for a year, made good money, and he rented a little house. When Dakar didn’t come back, and Glorette had the baby—a boy—Grady took her in and said he’d marry her. But after a year of not loving him, of still loving a man who got ghost, she left him to get sprung herself—on rock cocaine—and she refused to ever love anyone again.
I walked through the Toy District again, the dolls and bright boxes and stuffed animals from China and Mexico. Glorette’s son would be a teenager now.
Often my mother would call and say, “Marie-Therese and them wonder can you get a scooter. For her grandson. Out there in LA.”
To everyone from back home, LA was one big city. They didn’t know LA was a thousand little towns, entire worlds recreated in arroyos and strawberry fields and hillsides. And Downtown had canyons of black and silver glass, the Grand Central Market, Broadway, and its own favela.
That’s where I was headed now. I was close to 3rd and Main. If you hadn’t been to Brazil, and you hadn’t seen a favela—that’s what Skid Row looked like. The houses made of cardboard, the caves dug out under the freeway overpasses, the men sprawled out sleeping on the sidewalk right now, cheeks against the chain-link.
Were they all fools for something? Someone?
Would Grady Jackson still be on the street? Would he be alive?
All the men—sleeping with outstretched fingers near my heels, pushing carts, doing ballet moves between cars—black men with gray hair, heavy beards, bruise-dark cheeks, a Mexican man with a handlebar moustache and no teeth who grinned at me and said, “Hey, payasa.” A man my age, skin like mine, his hair dreaded up in a non-hip way. Like bad coral. He sat on the curb, staring at tires.
I kept moving. How would I find Grady among these thousands of people? And why would he still care about Glorette?
Sprung fool.
I glanced down an alley and saw a woman standing in the doorway of a porta potty. She lifted her chin at me. Her cheeks were pitted and scarred, her black hair like dead seaweed, and her knees gray as rain puddles. Then a man whispered in her ear and she pulled him inside by his elbow, and closed the door.
Glorette. She wanted to go wherever Sere Dakar went. He played the bass and the flute. He played songs for her. He left when she was seven months pregnant. Nothing mattered to her but living inside a cloud, and yet she was still beautiful. The bones in her face lovelier. She smoked rock all night, walked up and down the avenues like the guys who passed me now, their faces crack-gaunt.
A man waved and hollered high above me. Construction workers were gutting one of the old banks and an old SRO hotel. I saw the signs for luxury lofts on the building’s roof. I turned on Spring Street.
Rat or Squirrel. What was Lafayette talking about? Hattie Jackson had a TV gig? I needed more coffee, and I needed to get myself together before meeting Rick, so I headed to Clifton’s Cafeteria.
As I left Skid Row, the haunted men became fewer, like emissaries sent out among the rest of us. The other thousands and thousands of homeless people had packed their tents and boxes and sleeping bags and coats and melted into invisibility because now the day was truly the day.
I tried, but had no heart for it. Rick was short, and thin, and handsome, and funny. He held his tray like a shield, and then put soup and salad on it and laughed at the greenery in Clifton’s. I put away the notebook where I’d tried to write about Oaxaca, and mole, and mescal.
Rick sat down and said, “So, since you’re a world traveler, it’s good to know where you’re from.”
“Here. Southern California.”
“LA?”
“No.” I picked up one fry. “Rio Seco.”
“Really?” He studied me. “Where’s that?”
“Have you been to Palm Springs?”
“Of course! I love mid-century.”
“Well, it’s on the way.” I smiled slightly. I didn’t know him well enough to explain. “Where are you from?”
Rick said, “Brooklyn.”
“What part?”
He raised his eyebrows, like black commas. “Ah-hah. Fort Greene.”
“Cool,” I said. “Nice coffeehouse there. Tillie’s.”
He grinned, all the way this time. “But I live on Spring Street now. New loft. It’s echoing, I’ve got so much space to fill.”
I looked out the window at the shoulders bumping past. “Don’t you worry about all the homeless people?”
“Worry?” He slanted his head.
“Do they bother you?”
“They keep to themselves,” Rick said. “Everyone has parameters, and most people seem to respect those parameters.”
I nodded and ate another fry. Like powder inside. Parameters and boundaries and demarcation. I could never explain that to my mother, or to Glorette.
Rick looked up under my lowered eyes. “But you know what? It’s scary when you’re walking past a guy and he looks dead. I mean really dead. Laid out on the sidewalk in a certain way.”