Confines
Everything along this route is different but somehow the same. There are just enough of the old places left. Even if the names have changed, or the ownership. Harkley’s Hardware owned and manned for sixty-three years by Ernest Harkley and his loving wife Able is now a health food store. The liquor store where you could get a six pack of Miller for four bucks on Wednesdays as well as frozen pizza, popcorn and cheap candy has become a thrift store—still inexpensive so not all that changed, I suppose. The movie theater that specialized in B-movies full of monsters and madmen, occasionally soft porn, an old dilapidated but still elegant structure with gilt and curves and red velvet now a gouged out fossil, skeletal, containing lighting and nothing but—chandeliers, brass floor lamps, outdoor and in. I know this from their window display. I’ve never stepped inside.
On the way to the place that was to be my home, an apartment—some apartment, a world I had known flashed past me, blur of color, chorus of sound. Even the smell: exhaust and cooked meat, the heated sweat of bodies… After nineteen years, I could still remember it. Nineteen years, three months and twenty-two days. And I thought, don’t hate what it has become, the changes—don’t you dare, for are you not that metamorphosis too?
Standing outside the brick building, a wrinkled plastic bag of groceries by my feet, next to it a softened paper bag with a stained copy of Ulysses, I stood as if a young boy before the great unknown dropping away at my feet like an abyss. More precarious still, for unlike a harbinger of youth all that there was inside me was grizzled, unsure. Where I’m coming from this is called freedom. Looking up I thought, Do not take for granted the sky gray as elephant hide, opaque as phlegm. Yes, at that moment I longed for the concrete confines of a cell, my cell though housing someone else now. The way officer Larry had looked at me and nodded, opening the metal door, and I stepped through it for the second time, only going out as opposed to in, ‘Good luck,’ he seemed to say. ‘If you don’t like it out there, you can always come back—many of ‘em do.’
I don’t need much. That’s what I told the woman assigned to me. A kindly lady, Black with a deep reddish brown skin, shiny on her forehead and across her nose. She wore makeup, a steely blue shadow on the balls of her eyes. Minuscule black moles lined the tops of her cheeks. I had quite a bit of time to observe her; her head focused downward, writing out my answers to the questions she posed. Her lips large and full, painted the color of raspberries, juicy as plums. Obviously unconcerned how she would be perceived by us—inmates, men who (a good number of us) hadn’t touched a woman in years. Have not smelled one. Can no longer even remember the softness. “I’ve done this a long time,” she told me meeting my gaze that was shaky, shifting. Prison eye, some of us call it. “And I’ve yet to meet someone who, in some form or another, didn’t want a place to call home. Even if that place was a cardboard box, or a sleeping bag, or a hole in the ground.” “Or a cell,” I said, a semi-smile on my lips. But she knew it was not real. “We’re gonna get you through this,” she said. “Try not to worry.”
The first night I woke up yelling. I haven’t done that since summer of 1991, just a few weeks into my almost twenty year stay. Used to drive them crazy—fellow inmates and guards alike. “Shut the hell up!” “Keep it up and you’ll get something to scream about you fucking fuck!” Making me feel every bit the kid I was. Nineteen. Summer of 1991. Half my life. Seeing him, his eye. Green with flecks of gold. And they say, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, joke about it. But what no one knows is how much time they will have to do and how there is the court appointed time and the time of your soul, trapped inside your skin, beating out from everywhere—every pore, how there is no end in sight. Time as you know it is infinity, and death isn’t a guarantee it will cease.
Following the shadow of light, for light is now the shadow in the middle of the night, the way introverted colors in a photograph define the image. The moon full enough to show me the path from bedroom to bath. Standing in the bathroom, body cool to the touch but my forehead hot and clammy like a fevered child, I turned on the cold tap and let water rush into the basin, the sound comforting and for the moment I forgot my screams. Cupping my hands, the water collected in them, feeling as I brought the cool liquid to my lips that it was an offering, another gift to me, and guilty, so incredibly guilty, I coughed and choked. Drank some more. To not see those emerald eyes, I turned on the small light over the bathroom mirror, blinking and half blind. Closing my own eyes, my head dipped forward and the hardness of the mirror pressed back at me. For so many years, the only mirror I had was burnished metal, a nonsensical pattern of scars, like webs from hundreds of spiders overlaid; what once made sense could no longer be deciphered. Not that it mattered. You learn quickly to no longer seek out the likeness of yourself in mirrors, even in the ghostly haze of the hard, indestructible plexiglass, especially in the retinas of another person’s eyes. So perhaps I was shocked to finally see myself, really peer at my haggard and aged reflection. Yes, a part of me expected to see what I looked like at the age of nineteen, before what transpired. But this… Had my emotions not already been soggy, a sponge soaked with rancid liquid, bloated, it would have been a shock.
Though I am not nor ever have been a vain man. Just, certain things you remember and expect to be there, no matter how long the extended stay, the house should be waiting there just as you left it. Shouldn’t it? But in a way this analogy is too true, for while one is gone, all perishables left behind begin to rot, little by little, day by day, no matter where they are—freezer, refrigerator, even tin cans, it all begins to degenerate.
Strands glinting like silver ore, woven into black tight curls, or was it a flock of silver lambs with the occasional black sheep? How have I gotten so old? Or the wrinkles fanning around my eyes, a child’s heavy hand holding a stick boring deep into the ground along the same line, over and over, so deep I think a part of me expected to see blood, seeping down my cheeks, following predictably the indentations around my lips, over my stubbly squared jaw, prominent chin. Eyes the color of overcooked caramel—I remember it simmering in the pan and my mother taking it off just in the nick of time, except that one occasion when that well-meaning friend stopped by, opening the unlocked screen door, catching my mother unaware, bent over a steaming pot, my mother—not a stitch of makeup on her, eyes fluttering up, half expecting for it to be him, cringing, her two blackened eyes like a skeleton’s empty sockets and then the embarrassed tears, mother’s friend saying “Oh, my God, why didn’t you tell me? Why?” The caramel blackening before my own averted eyes.
Over each of my eyes are brows that I plan to trim—not vain, I simply consider it good grooming. Right now, they are unkempt, a couple of the hairs reaching down my eyelid or up into the forehead in a way that disgusts me. I am ashamed how badly the years have chewed me, regurgitated cud. Thick wall of fat around my gut whereas before all hard muscle, Nadine running her fingers over it, sucking her teeth in that way cats have of fanning their tails when they are stretched out and real satisfied. Teeth still white—off-white like ivory handled over the years, but only a slight yellowing, still bright, possibly more than most my age. Brushing so well morning and night, terrified of the prisoners’ meth mouths, often visible rotted shards in a rainbow of blue, black, brown and yellow, gums spongy and diseased; now more than ever, dreams in which my teeth fall into the palm of my hand. Even the skin, chocolate-hued, a few shades lighter than my mother, had a gray cast though I’d lifted my face to the sun, walking round and round the enclosure armed by guards with weapons ready to be fired. That had been my normal. Those days away from humanity. Reading books in my cell, ignoring the animal sounds, the yelling and screaming. The best part about my face is my lips, full and naturally rosy. The sort of mouth a man is embarrassed by, so sensual and womanly on his face. So soft. That’s where the lovers I have had took their time, young girls telling me how pretty my mouth was, older women—woman—only one, saying how my lips ‘took her back home’ to a southern place where the air was full of water and the sweat would run down your skin in cool rivulets. Saying, “Let me show you what I mean, baby,” and doing so.
Eventually I got tired of looking at myself and went back to sleep. Dreamless—thank you God for taking pity on me. Whatever it is you are.
In that place, they came around. Male, female, clutching crucifixes, Koran’s, wearing yamakas, speaking of enlightenment. Nineteen years is a long time, and if I didn’t learn anything during it, something would have been very wrong with me. Yet there was never any one religion that made me feel understood. I guess I wanted forgiveness, a way to understand my actions, the path my life had taken. This wasted life. Worse than that for I was also a killer.
It didn’t need to come to me from a Bible, and though the ritual of a sacred meal, boiled egg, food unrisen, bread flat as the dessert would have been nice, I did not require it. If I’d been able to find it in a bottle, I would have drunk it down—if not forgiveness then oblivion—my body unwashed and uncared for, invisible to me, mind so inebriated I could forget my own soul. If not forgiveness a mental death, though not an actual one. A part of me is more afraid of what is on the other side, the fate lurking for me there, than I am of existence. Questions engorged with meaning. Did I fail because there was no drink or drug, or was I actually winning? Was the forgiveness I sought really in existence? Was it in me and therefore controlled by me? Could it even be felt if his mother looked me in my eyes and granted her forgiveness? Questions engorged with meaning until they become meaningless. Like that night.
Traffic lights: their rays of green catching on the wet pavement, glowing like precious stones, leading the way as Dorothy’s yellow brick road led her to the unknown known. And I said yes to it all: pot smoke rich as an old man’s slow burning pipe; shoved in the backseat, my long basketball legs at rest and cramping, music louder than we could comfortably hear it, base like a hard hand thumping my chest, cock hard and constricted. Saying yes to Saul’s idea of robbing the gas station we’d stopped at earlier that night. Laughter a form of conversation. Saul telling PJ to reach into the glove compartment where his .45 rested, solid like a metal ball and so real. Envy in the pit of my stomach, penis twitching and I said, “Give it here, man!” Knowing what it would feel like, having held it many times before. So ready for anything to happen, yelling at the top of our lungs, “Tired of this shit, let’s just go, get in the fucking car and go.” But not really ready at all.
“You will have a bed—nothing fancy but it will ‘do the job,’ as the saying goes. A few pots and pans, plates and cups. There’s a Salvation Army a couple blocks down from you. I’ve found them to be a great source for getting the necessary odds and ends. With the money you’ve saved up over the years, you should be able to find anything else you need. I’ll leave a bag for you that will be handed to you at your release containing toiletries and some nonperishable goods, just to get you through a couple of days, until you’re able to go to the store on your own. I have recommendations on places of employment—people who want to help you out, many of them have been where you are right now, both literally and figuratively. Don’t worry, we will see you through.” Her plum hued lips pressed together, golden cross around her neck, dark eyes of compassion on my own, crease in her forehead, reaching out to lay her large warm hand with the loose ringless fingers gently on mine. And I clenched my hands, couldn’t help it. Nor could I stop the flinch.
She came to visit me, once in all those years. Led into the large room full of long tables and plastic chairs, I saw her looming like a dark oracle, my mother, dour and dressed for church, her hair curled in large immovable swirls, slightly messed, and I knew she’d been forced to take her hat off, either leaving it in the car or, more embarrassing, at the main desk, where it had been thoroughly inspected. Like accelerant to already burning flames. Mouth compressing in on itself. Not a stir as I drew near. Me—uncertain, every bit the scared nineteen-year-old that I was. Then, sitting before her, her hands resting folded on the table, interlocked. I knew they would not open. “Well, you’ve really done it this time haven’t you? Messing up your life. Just like that no good man, may he rot in his grave—looks like you’re in this one.” She’d gotten religion since I saw her, a small plastic blue crucifix clutched in those stone hands. To think she’d soothed me with those hands as a child, and I remember her bringing a finger to her mouth on more than one occasion, saying, “Shh,” my father sleeping off a drunk in the next room. Maybe because she’d just gotten religion she wasn’t yet ready to share it with me, was still making it to the part of ‘don’t judge lest you yourself be judged,’ and though I could not blame her, I could still see where she’d gone wrong. Then she stood to go. And as if I hadn’t heard a word she said I called out to her, “Momma, you coming back?” Just looking for a little sweetness, the honey-hued caramel liquid before it burns. But she never turned.
There are ways I can call to mind my childhood, if I so desire. Food well-cooked, or even just strong in odor reminds me of my mother; large boned, her full breasts seemingly a single mound under her apron, filling me with awe, nausea and longing over the thought that I nursed there. My father demanded heavy meat-laden stews and steaks, but what my mother really loved to cook were delicate items such as soufflés, mousses, lean fish, heat sensitive foods that one could not turn their back on. It wasn’t until after my father died that my mother began to work as a cashier in a grocery store, a fact the young defense attorney assigned to me wanted desperately to make use of, but I would not let him—not that there was any significance. Of this, I was sure.
While married to my father, my mother did not work; “A life of leisure,” she would say, mouth twisting bitter with irony I did not always see or want to understand. My favorite memories of my mother are in the kitchen. I think focusing on measurements and time frames forced her head clear, and we would laugh together, calling me her “little dog,” my tongue always hungry for the taste of sweet uncooked batter licked off utensils and bowls. “Get up off of your lazy ass,” my father would say, dark, blurred gaze directed at her, oblivious to the spotless floor, full refrigerator, calloused hands, weary eyes—no, not oblivious, just wanting to curse her, hurt her. I don’t know if she expected me to do something to help her, deflect the blows somehow. Perhaps I would have done more if I’d been older and not a scrawny, fourteen-year-old. Would be laughable, if not so pathetic, the time I finally raised my fists, told him that if he ever touched her again I would kill him, my voice quivering and cracking, words stilted, barely audible though he heard me, looking at me unsmiling, then a slow grin like I’m telling him a joke, and we’ve just gotten to the punchline. “What’s that you said? I can’t hear you.” And I stood there unable to move, not wanting to say it again and knowing that somehow he’d already defeated me. Hoping the bruises would not be hard to hide. Got to a point I didn’t see so much after a while, spent more and more time out of the house. And I think she turned her back on me, another male, another ‘no good.’ It wasn’t long before I was making her prophesy true, confirming all psychological profiles of what a young boy with dark skin often does when he has an abusive father and a mother who no longer gives a damn. Another way I can call to mind my childhood?—looking at my shaking balled up hands.
Should I find her on bent knees, accost her in the church she has undoubtedly pledged her life to, tell her that her burden was more than I was willing to carry—more than I should have been given? That I am no one’s savior... What saved me? Books? Imaginary worlds far more vivid and alive than mine? The slow moving cart full of them, an oasis of sun in a void. No, I have not been saved. I bob and gasp, my nose just slightly above the waves that clutch at me, wanting to hold me close. Mouth choking, pulse drumming, eyes dilated and wide; I am laden with the things I have seen.
I have seen the most wondrous things, eighteen-years-old, standing scared shitless in the glassy white hall, my reflection in the window comical. If I’d seen myself, I would have laughed at the eyes wide and dilated, quivering, head arched forward like an animal in a zoo. Not a smile on my face, and before me all those moving bodies, a sea of them. Hundreds of minuscule toes, itty-bitty fingers, nails so small to be practically invisible. Faces in repose or mushed with open, searching, sucking mouths, cries that made me immediately think of a description I’d read in some book, ‘lusty cries;’ looking at all those small hungry babies, I finally understood it. And there you were. Latanya Renee Williams. I knew your name because it was told to me, not because I played any part in naming you. Until that moment, I’d played no part in your life at all. Though I couldn’t see them, I knew your closed eyes were brown. You slept so peacefully. How did you do that? I wondered, when all around you crying, as if signaling catastrophe. Who did you get it from—not her and not me. Your cheeks full, nose slightly squished. Beautiful plump red lips, and I saw just how lovely mine were on your small face. Chest and stomach a continual curve, belly already rounded. Each breath the rising of your whole body. From the diaper that looked huge on your little frame, two thin legs so delicate, brittle even. Perfect feet with wrinkled soles and tiny toes. How did I know your body would be so warm to the touch, not because of the light they had you under or the huge cotton hat on your dark, damp, blood-slicked curls but because of your heart, throbbing, throbbing, throbbing, beating so hard and you know I felt it in my own, so when I left, having never seen her or touched you, knew it to be so. Twenty and a half. That’s how old you are now. Beautiful as a vision of God to one who believes. Though I have never seen you since, I know it to be so.
And, yes, I have seen the most horrid of images. Exploded glass, shards of brown, and clear, covered with liquid the color of dark mud and sticky or see-through wheat gold, glistening. Junk food ripped out of their bags, corn chips severed into millions of pieces, bits of sickly yellow popcorn like pieces of a broken necklace on the ground, magazine rack scattered, pages torn still drifting to the floor, to the counter, behind it, fluttering onto shelves. Cash register uprooted off of the counter and onto the floor where someone—several people, including me, ripped through it, grabbing bills, stuffing bills, losing bills that slipped out of pockets, shirts, fell slowly and stunningly to the debris-strewn floor. Jumping over the counter because, damn it, there’s got to be more! forgetting in the excitement, drug moving through my body, just making me—all of us--go, go, go, the flashes of light and sound loud and the way he ricocheted back so hard hitting the wall and sliding down it. Forgetting so well that it was a shock! seeing him there on the floor, my body twisting and falling because what was left of my humanity told me I did not want to land on him, then lying beside him, on my back, dazed, dizzy, drugged, sick to my stomach, hot thick vomit rising volcanic like, and I threw myself forward and to the side and let it all go, heaving and gagging. Hating the stink of my inner self, a part of me thinking, this is what you deserve, though not yet repentant somehow realizing I would one day need to be. Glancing at him. Less than five seconds, perhaps even less than one. But like a snapshot and suddenly—although I’d always had trouble remembering dates and equations in school—like having a photographic memory now, because whenever I want—and especially when I don’t want to see him I do, what he was at that moment, how we made him—slack-jawed, black longish hair sticking to his forehead, head turned to the side, facing me. The center of his white Hendricks T-shirt the rings’ of Mars, bloody orbs seeping wider and wider as if to say: This is my heart itself escaping out the small holes, see how big it is, liquid ruby love, and you’d thought it was so small. But sometimes in my mind the horrific and the beautiful assume the same shape like when I was struck by the gold and bronze flecks in his eyes of green, green the color of translucent jade. The blackness and density of his long curved lashes out of which his beautiful dead emerald eyes glowed and stared. Just the faintest hint of tears.
I have a job now, working as a cook in a small diner, minimum wage work; however I’ve been promised by the owner that if I show up on time, put in a full day’s work, not “piss any of the customers off” he’ll throw on a couple more dollars. What I like best about the job is not the money, or even the job itself but what the job requires me to do: rise early before light and walk the few city blocks. The city is so much quieter then. Not completely silent or still but muted and slowed. I can hear my feet, the way they hit the pavement, the sound of my soles on the cement ground. Hands in my coat pocket, I walk briskly. To people passing by me, I am just an average guy, hurrying to work, just like them. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling normal in a long time. I like that. Makes me think maybe—possibly—there just might be something worthy enough in me to forgive.
Everything along this route is different but somehow the same. There are just enough of the old places left. Even if the names have changed, or the ownership. Harkley’s Hardware owned and manned for sixty-three years by Ernest Harkley and his loving wife Able is now a health food store. The liquor store where you could get a six pack of Miller for four bucks on Wednesdays as well as frozen pizza, popcorn and cheap candy has become a thrift store—still inexpensive so not all that changed, I suppose. The movie theater that specialized in B-movies full of monsters and madmen, occasionally soft porn, an old dilapidated but still elegant structure with gilt and curves and red velvet now a gouged out fossil, skeletal, containing lighting and nothing but—chandeliers, brass floor lamps, outdoor and in. I know this from their window display. I’ve never stepped inside.
On the way to the place that was to be my home, an apartment—some apartment, a world I had known flashed past me, blur of color, chorus of sound. Even the smell: exhaust and cooked meat, the heated sweat of bodies… After nineteen years, I could still remember it. Nineteen years, three months and twenty-two days. And I thought, don’t hate what it has become, the changes—don’t you dare, for are you not that metamorphosis too?
Standing outside the brick building, a wrinkled plastic bag of groceries by my feet, next to it a softened paper bag with a stained copy of Ulysses, I stood as if a young boy before the great unknown dropping away at my feet like an abyss. More precarious still, for unlike a harbinger of youth all that there was inside me was grizzled, unsure. Where I’m coming from this is called freedom. Looking up I thought, Do not take for granted the sky gray as elephant hide, opaque as phlegm. Yes, at that moment I longed for the concrete confines of a cell, my cell though housing someone else now. The way officer Larry had looked at me and nodded, opening the metal door, and I stepped through it for the second time, only going out as opposed to in, ‘Good luck,’ he seemed to say. ‘If you don’t like it out there, you can always come back—many of ‘em do.’
I don’t need much. That’s what I told the woman assigned to me. A kindly lady, Black with a deep reddish brown skin, shiny on her forehead and across her nose. She wore makeup, a steely blue shadow on the balls of her eyes. Minuscule black moles lined the tops of her cheeks. I had quite a bit of time to observe her; her head focused downward, writing out my answers to the questions she posed. Her lips large and full, painted the color of raspberries, juicy as plums. Obviously unconcerned how she would be perceived by us—inmates, men who (a good number of us) hadn’t touched a woman in years. Have not smelled one. Can no longer even remember the softness. “I’ve done this a long time,” she told me meeting my gaze that was shaky, shifting. Prison eye, some of us call it. “And I’ve yet to meet someone who, in some form or another, didn’t want a place to call home. Even if that place was a cardboard box, or a sleeping bag, or a hole in the ground.” “Or a cell,” I said, a semi-smile on my lips. But she knew it was not real. “We’re gonna get you through this,” she said. “Try not to worry.”
The first night I woke up yelling. I haven’t done that since summer of 1991, just a few weeks into my almost twenty year stay. Used to drive them crazy—fellow inmates and guards alike. “Shut the hell up!” “Keep it up and you’ll get something to scream about you fucking fuck!” Making me feel every bit the kid I was. Nineteen. Summer of 1991. Half my life. Seeing him, his eye. Green with flecks of gold. And they say, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, joke about it. But what no one knows is how much time they will have to do and how there is the court appointed time and the time of your soul, trapped inside your skin, beating out from everywhere—every pore, how there is no end in sight. Time as you know it is infinity, and death isn’t a guarantee it will cease.
Following the shadow of light, for light is now the shadow in the middle of the night, the way introverted colors in a photograph define the image. The moon full enough to show me the path from bedroom to bath. Standing in the bathroom, body cool to the touch but my forehead hot and clammy like a fevered child, I turned on the cold tap and let water rush into the basin, the sound comforting and for the moment I forgot my screams. Cupping my hands, the water collected in them, feeling as I brought the cool liquid to my lips that it was an offering, another gift to me, and guilty, so incredibly guilty, I coughed and choked. Drank some more. To not see those emerald eyes, I turned on the small light over the bathroom mirror, blinking and half blind. Closing my own eyes, my head dipped forward and the hardness of the mirror pressed back at me. For so many years, the only mirror I had was burnished metal, a nonsensical pattern of scars, like webs from hundreds of spiders overlaid; what once made sense could no longer be deciphered. Not that it mattered. You learn quickly to no longer seek out the likeness of yourself in mirrors, even in the ghostly haze of the hard, indestructible plexiglass, especially in the retinas of another person’s eyes. So perhaps I was shocked to finally see myself, really peer at my haggard and aged reflection. Yes, a part of me expected to see what I looked like at the age of nineteen, before what transpired. But this… Had my emotions not already been soggy, a sponge soaked with rancid liquid, bloated, it would have been a shock.
Though I am not nor ever have been a vain man. Just, certain things you remember and expect to be there, no matter how long the extended stay, the house should be waiting there just as you left it. Shouldn’t it? But in a way this analogy is too true, for while one is gone, all perishables left behind begin to rot, little by little, day by day, no matter where they are—freezer, refrigerator, even tin cans, it all begins to degenerate.
Strands glinting like silver ore, woven into black tight curls, or was it a flock of silver lambs with the occasional black sheep? How have I gotten so old? Or the wrinkles fanning around my eyes, a child’s heavy hand holding a stick boring deep into the ground along the same line, over and over, so deep I think a part of me expected to see blood, seeping down my cheeks, following predictably the indentations around my lips, over my stubbly squared jaw, prominent chin. Eyes the color of overcooked caramel—I remember it simmering in the pan and my mother taking it off just in the nick of time, except that one occasion when that well-meaning friend stopped by, opening the unlocked screen door, catching my mother unaware, bent over a steaming pot, my mother—not a stitch of makeup on her, eyes fluttering up, half expecting for it to be him, cringing, her two blackened eyes like a skeleton’s empty sockets and then the embarrassed tears, mother’s friend saying “Oh, my God, why didn’t you tell me? Why?” The caramel blackening before my own averted eyes.
Over each of my eyes are brows that I plan to trim—not vain, I simply consider it good grooming. Right now, they are unkempt, a couple of the hairs reaching down my eyelid or up into the forehead in a way that disgusts me. I am ashamed how badly the years have chewed me, regurgitated cud. Thick wall of fat around my gut whereas before all hard muscle, Nadine running her fingers over it, sucking her teeth in that way cats have of fanning their tails when they are stretched out and real satisfied. Teeth still white—off-white like ivory handled over the years, but only a slight yellowing, still bright, possibly more than most my age. Brushing so well morning and night, terrified of the prisoners’ meth mouths, often visible rotted shards in a rainbow of blue, black, brown and yellow, gums spongy and diseased; now more than ever, dreams in which my teeth fall into the palm of my hand. Even the skin, chocolate-hued, a few shades lighter than my mother, had a gray cast though I’d lifted my face to the sun, walking round and round the enclosure armed by guards with weapons ready to be fired. That had been my normal. Those days away from humanity. Reading books in my cell, ignoring the animal sounds, the yelling and screaming. The best part about my face is my lips, full and naturally rosy. The sort of mouth a man is embarrassed by, so sensual and womanly on his face. So soft. That’s where the lovers I have had took their time, young girls telling me how pretty my mouth was, older women—woman—only one, saying how my lips ‘took her back home’ to a southern place where the air was full of water and the sweat would run down your skin in cool rivulets. Saying, “Let me show you what I mean, baby,” and doing so.
Eventually I got tired of looking at myself and went back to sleep. Dreamless—thank you God for taking pity on me. Whatever it is you are.
In that place, they came around. Male, female, clutching crucifixes, Koran’s, wearing yamakas, speaking of enlightenment. Nineteen years is a long time, and if I didn’t learn anything during it, something would have been very wrong with me. Yet there was never any one religion that made me feel understood. I guess I wanted forgiveness, a way to understand my actions, the path my life had taken. This wasted life. Worse than that for I was also a killer.
It didn’t need to come to me from a Bible, and though the ritual of a sacred meal, boiled egg, food unrisen, bread flat as the dessert would have been nice, I did not require it. If I’d been able to find it in a bottle, I would have drunk it down—if not forgiveness then oblivion—my body unwashed and uncared for, invisible to me, mind so inebriated I could forget my own soul. If not forgiveness a mental death, though not an actual one. A part of me is more afraid of what is on the other side, the fate lurking for me there, than I am of existence. Questions engorged with meaning. Did I fail because there was no drink or drug, or was I actually winning? Was the forgiveness I sought really in existence? Was it in me and therefore controlled by me? Could it even be felt if his mother looked me in my eyes and granted her forgiveness? Questions engorged with meaning until they become meaningless. Like that night.
Traffic lights: their rays of green catching on the wet pavement, glowing like precious stones, leading the way as Dorothy’s yellow brick road led her to the unknown known. And I said yes to it all: pot smoke rich as an old man’s slow burning pipe; shoved in the backseat, my long basketball legs at rest and cramping, music louder than we could comfortably hear it, base like a hard hand thumping my chest, cock hard and constricted. Saying yes to Saul’s idea of robbing the gas station we’d stopped at earlier that night. Laughter a form of conversation. Saul telling PJ to reach into the glove compartment where his .45 rested, solid like a metal ball and so real. Envy in the pit of my stomach, penis twitching and I said, “Give it here, man!” Knowing what it would feel like, having held it many times before. So ready for anything to happen, yelling at the top of our lungs, “Tired of this shit, let’s just go, get in the fucking car and go.” But not really ready at all.
“You will have a bed—nothing fancy but it will ‘do the job,’ as the saying goes. A few pots and pans, plates and cups. There’s a Salvation Army a couple blocks down from you. I’ve found them to be a great source for getting the necessary odds and ends. With the money you’ve saved up over the years, you should be able to find anything else you need. I’ll leave a bag for you that will be handed to you at your release containing toiletries and some nonperishable goods, just to get you through a couple of days, until you’re able to go to the store on your own. I have recommendations on places of employment—people who want to help you out, many of them have been where you are right now, both literally and figuratively. Don’t worry, we will see you through.” Her plum hued lips pressed together, golden cross around her neck, dark eyes of compassion on my own, crease in her forehead, reaching out to lay her large warm hand with the loose ringless fingers gently on mine. And I clenched my hands, couldn’t help it. Nor could I stop the flinch.
She came to visit me, once in all those years. Led into the large room full of long tables and plastic chairs, I saw her looming like a dark oracle, my mother, dour and dressed for church, her hair curled in large immovable swirls, slightly messed, and I knew she’d been forced to take her hat off, either leaving it in the car or, more embarrassing, at the main desk, where it had been thoroughly inspected. Like accelerant to already burning flames. Mouth compressing in on itself. Not a stir as I drew near. Me—uncertain, every bit the scared nineteen-year-old that I was. Then, sitting before her, her hands resting folded on the table, interlocked. I knew they would not open. “Well, you’ve really done it this time haven’t you? Messing up your life. Just like that no good man, may he rot in his grave—looks like you’re in this one.” She’d gotten religion since I saw her, a small plastic blue crucifix clutched in those stone hands. To think she’d soothed me with those hands as a child, and I remember her bringing a finger to her mouth on more than one occasion, saying, “Shh,” my father sleeping off a drunk in the next room. Maybe because she’d just gotten religion she wasn’t yet ready to share it with me, was still making it to the part of ‘don’t judge lest you yourself be judged,’ and though I could not blame her, I could still see where she’d gone wrong. Then she stood to go. And as if I hadn’t heard a word she said I called out to her, “Momma, you coming back?” Just looking for a little sweetness, the honey-hued caramel liquid before it burns. But she never turned.
There are ways I can call to mind my childhood, if I so desire. Food well-cooked, or even just strong in odor reminds me of my mother; large boned, her full breasts seemingly a single mound under her apron, filling me with awe, nausea and longing over the thought that I nursed there. My father demanded heavy meat-laden stews and steaks, but what my mother really loved to cook were delicate items such as soufflés, mousses, lean fish, heat sensitive foods that one could not turn their back on. It wasn’t until after my father died that my mother began to work as a cashier in a grocery store, a fact the young defense attorney assigned to me wanted desperately to make use of, but I would not let him—not that there was any significance. Of this, I was sure.
While married to my father, my mother did not work; “A life of leisure,” she would say, mouth twisting bitter with irony I did not always see or want to understand. My favorite memories of my mother are in the kitchen. I think focusing on measurements and time frames forced her head clear, and we would laugh together, calling me her “little dog,” my tongue always hungry for the taste of sweet uncooked batter licked off utensils and bowls. “Get up off of your lazy ass,” my father would say, dark, blurred gaze directed at her, oblivious to the spotless floor, full refrigerator, calloused hands, weary eyes—no, not oblivious, just wanting to curse her, hurt her. I don’t know if she expected me to do something to help her, deflect the blows somehow. Perhaps I would have done more if I’d been older and not a scrawny, fourteen-year-old. Would be laughable, if not so pathetic, the time I finally raised my fists, told him that if he ever touched her again I would kill him, my voice quivering and cracking, words stilted, barely audible though he heard me, looking at me unsmiling, then a slow grin like I’m telling him a joke, and we’ve just gotten to the punchline. “What’s that you said? I can’t hear you.” And I stood there unable to move, not wanting to say it again and knowing that somehow he’d already defeated me. Hoping the bruises would not be hard to hide. Got to a point I didn’t see so much after a while, spent more and more time out of the house. And I think she turned her back on me, another male, another ‘no good.’ It wasn’t long before I was making her prophesy true, confirming all psychological profiles of what a young boy with dark skin often does when he has an abusive father and a mother who no longer gives a damn. Another way I can call to mind my childhood?—looking at my shaking balled up hands.
Should I find her on bent knees, accost her in the church she has undoubtedly pledged her life to, tell her that her burden was more than I was willing to carry—more than I should have been given? That I am no one’s savior... What saved me? Books? Imaginary worlds far more vivid and alive than mine? The slow moving cart full of them, an oasis of sun in a void. No, I have not been saved. I bob and gasp, my nose just slightly above the waves that clutch at me, wanting to hold me close. Mouth choking, pulse drumming, eyes dilated and wide; I am laden with the things I have seen.
I have seen the most wondrous things, eighteen-years-old, standing scared shitless in the glassy white hall, my reflection in the window comical. If I’d seen myself, I would have laughed at the eyes wide and dilated, quivering, head arched forward like an animal in a zoo. Not a smile on my face, and before me all those moving bodies, a sea of them. Hundreds of minuscule toes, itty-bitty fingers, nails so small to be practically invisible. Faces in repose or mushed with open, searching, sucking mouths, cries that made me immediately think of a description I’d read in some book, ‘lusty cries;’ looking at all those small hungry babies, I finally understood it. And there you were. Latanya Renee Williams. I knew your name because it was told to me, not because I played any part in naming you. Until that moment, I’d played no part in your life at all. Though I couldn’t see them, I knew your closed eyes were brown. You slept so peacefully. How did you do that? I wondered, when all around you crying, as if signaling catastrophe. Who did you get it from—not her and not me. Your cheeks full, nose slightly squished. Beautiful plump red lips, and I saw just how lovely mine were on your small face. Chest and stomach a continual curve, belly already rounded. Each breath the rising of your whole body. From the diaper that looked huge on your little frame, two thin legs so delicate, brittle even. Perfect feet with wrinkled soles and tiny toes. How did I know your body would be so warm to the touch, not because of the light they had you under or the huge cotton hat on your dark, damp, blood-slicked curls but because of your heart, throbbing, throbbing, throbbing, beating so hard and you know I felt it in my own, so when I left, having never seen her or touched you, knew it to be so. Twenty and a half. That’s how old you are now. Beautiful as a vision of God to one who believes. Though I have never seen you since, I know it to be so.
And, yes, I have seen the most horrid of images. Exploded glass, shards of brown, and clear, covered with liquid the color of dark mud and sticky or see-through wheat gold, glistening. Junk food ripped out of their bags, corn chips severed into millions of pieces, bits of sickly yellow popcorn like pieces of a broken necklace on the ground, magazine rack scattered, pages torn still drifting to the floor, to the counter, behind it, fluttering onto shelves. Cash register uprooted off of the counter and onto the floor where someone—several people, including me, ripped through it, grabbing bills, stuffing bills, losing bills that slipped out of pockets, shirts, fell slowly and stunningly to the debris-strewn floor. Jumping over the counter because, damn it, there’s got to be more! forgetting in the excitement, drug moving through my body, just making me—all of us--go, go, go, the flashes of light and sound loud and the way he ricocheted back so hard hitting the wall and sliding down it. Forgetting so well that it was a shock! seeing him there on the floor, my body twisting and falling because what was left of my humanity told me I did not want to land on him, then lying beside him, on my back, dazed, dizzy, drugged, sick to my stomach, hot thick vomit rising volcanic like, and I threw myself forward and to the side and let it all go, heaving and gagging. Hating the stink of my inner self, a part of me thinking, this is what you deserve, though not yet repentant somehow realizing I would one day need to be. Glancing at him. Less than five seconds, perhaps even less than one. But like a snapshot and suddenly—although I’d always had trouble remembering dates and equations in school—like having a photographic memory now, because whenever I want—and especially when I don’t want to see him I do, what he was at that moment, how we made him—slack-jawed, black longish hair sticking to his forehead, head turned to the side, facing me. The center of his white Hendricks T-shirt the rings’ of Mars, bloody orbs seeping wider and wider as if to say: This is my heart itself escaping out the small holes, see how big it is, liquid ruby love, and you’d thought it was so small. But sometimes in my mind the horrific and the beautiful assume the same shape like when I was struck by the gold and bronze flecks in his eyes of green, green the color of translucent jade. The blackness and density of his long curved lashes out of which his beautiful dead emerald eyes glowed and stared. Just the faintest hint of tears.
I have a job now, working as a cook in a small diner, minimum wage work; however I’ve been promised by the owner that if I show up on time, put in a full day’s work, not “piss any of the customers off” he’ll throw on a couple more dollars. What I like best about the job is not the money, or even the job itself but what the job requires me to do: rise early before light and walk the few city blocks. The city is so much quieter then. Not completely silent or still but muted and slowed. I can hear my feet, the way they hit the pavement, the sound of my soles on the cement ground. Hands in my coat pocket, I walk briskly. To people passing by me, I am just an average guy, hurrying to work, just like them. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling normal in a long time. I like that. Makes me think maybe—possibly—there just might be something worthy enough in me to forgive.