After Tupac & D Foster (9 page)

“Your grades just
okay
,” Neeka said. “I wouldn’t say
good
.”

Jayjones just looked at her, but Miss Irene told her to hush.

“College first,” Miss Irene said, working on a tough piece of chicken, trying hard to cut through it with the plastic spoon. “They come around making all kinds of offers, but you tear up a knee and three years later they won’t even remember your name.”

Neeka looked at me.

“I
know
, Ma,” Jayjones said, sounding annoyed. “I got all plans to go to college first. That’s why I been trying to pull down good grades!”

“You really be just standing there shooting the ball into the basket like that?” Tash said.

“Yup,” Neeka answered for Jayjones. “Over and over and over and over. The sun goes up and he’s standing there shooting. Sun comes down and he still standing there shooting. Snow. Rain. Don’t matter. Like a dude that’s lost his mind.”

“Genius
is
crazy,” Jayjones said. “That’s what everybody be saying. If you got any kind of genius in you, it’s like right on that line between being real brilliant and real crazy. I got genius in me when it comes to ball.”

“Nah,” Neeka said. “I think you just got crazy in you.”

It seemed to get noisier in the common room with so many other families around us. Down the table, a young girl was holding a small baby. The guy she was visiting didn’t look much older than Jayjones. The woman beside her looked older, like she could be one of their moms. When the baby started crying, the girl took a bottle out of her bag. I heard her say,
You lucky, baby. The guards almost took your formula
.

Across the room, Emmett and the girls were walking from vending machine to vending machine. Some had coffee. Others had sandwiches or candy or chips in them. They took their sweet time deciding what they wanted.

“What’s the first thing you gonna do when you get home, Tash?” I asked.

“Girl, you know I’m gonna get my hair twisted, make myself a cute drink and get myself over to the river and see my people!”

The river was where all the gay guys hung out. Sometimes Tash took me and Neeka with him when he went to hang with his “girls.” I loved going because the other queens always made such a fuss over us, telling us how beautiful we were and how we’d grow up to give somebody “fever” one day.

“Some of the children came to see me last week and they were like,
Girl, how is you living up in
here?!”

I laughed, trying to imagine Tash’s queenie friends looking around at the gray walls and dirty floor and barred-up windows.

Tash laughed too.

“They been coming up in here for all this time—and every single time they walk up in here, they acting like it’s their first.”

The children.
That’s what Tash had always called his gay friends. When me and Neeka were finally old enough to ask why, Tash said,
You know what they say
.
Sunday’s child is happy, bright and gay!So we are most definitely Sunday’s children.

“Jayjones,” Tash said, getting serious. “Don’t ever get yourself locked up.”

Jayjones rolled his eyes. “You tell me that every time, man.”

“I’m serious, Jayjones,” Tash said, raising his finger at him. “You don’t ever want to get your freedom taken away like this. They try to take your
soul
up in this place and you gotta fight hard to keep you inside of you.” He looked at Albert. “You tell Emmett the same thing, Al.”

Albert nodded but didn’t say anything.

Tash turned back to Jayjones.

“And you tell your gangsta homies and you tell anybody that don’t know that there ain’t nothing cute about this place.” Tash’s voice got wobbly and he pressed his fingers against his mouth and closed his eyes.

“I’m not coming here, Tash,” Jayjones said real soft. “Count on it, man.”

“I am counting on it,” Tash said. “People talk you into stuff you’ll be regretting to your grave. I lay on my piece of a cot and I go over that night again and again in my head. And when I have my dreams, I’m not anywhere near where I was the night they arrested me. I’m on a beach or in my apartment or at some fancy restaurant eating lobster. And then I open my eyes and the bell’s ringing for us to get up and get busy. Every day it’s the same old day in this place, Jayjones. Every day, the same old tired day.”

“I shoot baskets,” Jayjones said quietly. “I shoot baskets and the whole world drops away.”

He looked at Tash like it was only the two of them in the room, only the two of them in the whole wide world. “Everything that’s real hard disappears.”

Tash nodded, then looked down at Albert. “And what about you, Al? What do you be doing?”

Albert smiled. He readjusted his glasses on his face and shrugged.

“Not talk. I tell you that much,” Neeka said.

“Well, why should he if he’s got you to talk for him.” Tash squeezed Albert’s shoulder. “Neeka speak for you most of the time?”

Albert nodded and pointed his chin to over where Emmett was standing by a vending machine with candy in it.

“I know
he
talks enough for quadruplets!” Tash said. “Well, you rest your voice and grow your brain if you need to, little brother. Your mama got so many kids, she needs some quiet ones in the bunch.”

At the other end of the room, a guy was taking pictures of families. Tash said it cost five dollars and asked Miss Irene if she wanted a group shot.

Miss Irene’s hair was in a French braid pinned up at the back of her neck. She smoothed it back and adjusted the bobby pins holding it in place before answering.

“I’m not saying this to criticize you, Tash. But I don’t expect any of the other children to ever end up in jail.”

She shot a look at Jayjones, who started to say something but didn’t. Maybe it was the look Miss Irene gave him.

“Once you come home, I don’t ever plan to take that bus up here to see anybody ever again.”

She got up and started clearing our plates into the now empty shopping bag. I stood up to help her. The blue jeans she was wearing had creases down the front and the light blue T-shirt looked new. She had two gold bangles on one wrist and a watch on the other. Her arms were the same pretty light brown as Neeka’s. Mama always talked about how well put together Miss Irene was and now I got it.

“I’m saying this to you,” Miss Irene said, “because I don’t want any pictures commemorating your time here. I don’t ever want to look at a photo and say, ‘Yeah, that’s when Tash was in jail.’ Because the minute you come home, baby, I’m gonna forget all about this time.”

“Amen,” Tash said. “Amen a hundred times.”

The photographer was taking a picture of the couple who had their heads pressed together earlier. The man was holding the little boy in his arms and smiling. The woman still looked sad, though.
Say cheese, Mommy
, the little boy said.
God is watching you.

Maybe he’d heard that from his mother a hundred times. Maybe more than that.

Emmett and the girls came back over and Emmett handed Tash a package of peanut M&M’s.

“I always remember that you like the peanut ones,” he said.

Tash gave him a hug. “Thanks, E.”

Emmett smiled and sat down on the other side of Tash. When he wasn’t looking, Tash made a face at me and mouthed,
I hate peanut M&M’s
. Then he gave Emmett another squeeze and popped two in his mouth, making a face as he chewed them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tash was always falling in love with guys that didn’t want to be with him. Maybe that’s why he got caught up with Sly. For a while, Sly was cool with being on the block and around the neighborhood with Tash. But maybe that was all part of the whole setup.

Tash played the piano at church, and when his fingers touched the piano keys, it was like magic was taking over the whole place, making it all soft and holy and different. When Tash played the piano, church ladies dabbed at their eyes, threw their hands in the air and said,
Well . . . !
in this way that people do. It meant
What more can I say
. It meant
God is good every day.
It meant
Ain’t this all something?

Tash’s fingers were long and light brown, and sometimes when he’d go just to practice and nobody else would be in the church, me and Neeka used to go with him. We’d stand around that church piano and sing all kinds of songs. Neeka’s voice was high and pretty and mine was kind of low. The one time D came with us—right before Tash got arrested—she sang too. Her voice was just regular, soft and shy, but Tash said we all three together made a perfect harmony.
Get y’all some wigs, you could be the next Supremes
, he said.

The guy who’d taught Tash to play was named Randall. When Tash was a little boy, rumor had it that Randall took Tash’s hand, studied Tash’s long fingers and said,
Music is going to save you, baby. Ain’t nobody out there can take your talent away.
Maybe Randall saw something in Tash nobody else could see yet. Maybe he knew that Tash would need some saving. Maybe that’s why he’d started teaching him to play piano—so Tash could walk into that church and give people music and then nobody could say anything about any of the other stuff.

Tash used to tell us the story.
Legendary,
he’d say, throwing his head back.
My talent is legendary.
Randall was old now and he was kind of a sissy boy like Tash.

The night Tash got arrested, Sly had called Tash to meet him at a club near where we lived. Sly lived out in Brooklyn, but he’d been hanging with Tash for a few months by then. Tash had first met Sly at some club in Manhattan and nothing about Sly said gay boy. He wore his jeans way low and kept his hair in braids and a gold chain with SLY in thick diamonds around his neck. The few times I’d seen him and Tash talking, I’d felt cold and a little bit scared. When I asked Tash why Sly wasn’t like him, he said,
Girl, gay comes in all kinds. Don’t even try to recognize just by looking. Sly’s truly one of the children, no matter how thug he tries to be.

The night Tash met Sly, Tash got a few drinks in him and started talking about Randall—about how good he’d been to Tash and how he had a baby grand piano inside his house. Randall hadn’t been rich, but he had a nice house with beautiful rugs, African statues all around and pretty pictures on the wall. The few times I’d gone there with Tash and Neeka, I’d been happy just to sit in the living room and look at all Randall’s stuff.

I sure wouldn’t mind hearing you play that piano,
Sly had said.
And making sure this Randall guy ain’t somebody I need to be jealous about.

Sometimes when I was lying in my room, watching the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling start coming to life, I couldn’t help but think about good and bad people. I couldn’t help thinking about how it is that somebody like Sly met up with somebody like Tash. About how somebody like Tash fell in love with somebody like Sly. I didn’t understand love, the way it let you not see all that junk that people be showing right up front. Seemed Tash never even noticed the way Sly always showed up alone, didn’t have no boys or no girls with him. You needed your boys. You needed your girls. Everybody knew that.

A few months after they met, Sly and Tash and some guy Sly said
was a good friend and liked music too
ended up at Randall’s house. Tash said Randall was happy to have the company and even played a few songs himself.
Wasn’t until I sat down to play this Vandross song
, “
So Amazing
.”
And I’m all into that song because that’s what I’m feeling—like Sly was all about me and it was amazing, you know. To think somebody loves you like that.

The first time Tash told us the story, he was sitting in Rikers Island and me, Neeka and Miss Irene had gone to see him. His face was still swollen from the beating Sly and his friend had given him and his hands shook as he spoke. I’d known Tash all my life and that was the first time I’d ever seen him cry.

“It’s so amazing to be loved,”
Tash sang softly
. “I’d follow you to the moon and stars above.”
He stopped singing and stared over our heads
. That’s when things went crazy,
he whispered.

By the time the cops got there, Sly and his boy had beaten Randall and Tash real bad and the apartment had been turned all inside out. Randall wasn’t conscious and the only one there to tell the story was Tash.
They beat me too,
Tash kept screaming
. They beat me too.
But he’d brought Sly and the guy into the house, and Randall wasn’t clear enough to know whether Tash was one of the good guys or one of the bad. And when they caught Sly and the other guy, they both said Tash was in on it too. In the end, Sly, Tash and the other guy all ended up in jail.

Miss Irene’s church friends took up collections for Tash and for Randall. But by the time Randall was well enough to get out of the hospital, some of his people from down south came and got him and took him back with them.

Randall’s memory had gotten real bad with the beating and he just knew that it was three guys and somebody was beating on him and somebody was screaming. But he didn’t know who was who anymore.

Tash spent a few weeks at Rikers Island, which wasn’t as bad as the big prison. Rikers Island was kind of like a holding place, where people who hadn’t done really, really bad stuff or people who were waiting to see which way things were gonna go ended up. But some guy started messing with Tash at Rikers. That wasn’t good.
You let one mess with you
, Tash told us later
, you’ll have a whole lot of guys messing with you.
So Tash got a knife somewhere and cut the guy in a few, as he told it,
choice places
.

You know this girl don’t play
, he said.

In the end, Randall was getting on a bus heading down south and Tash was on a bus heading upstate to do time.

Randall told me these hands was gonna save me
, Tash told us, months later—the first time we visited him upstate.
And I ain’t gonna stop believing that they will one day.