George Pelecanos (15 page)
Authors: DC Noir
"Is
everything all right over there, Mr. Wisdom?"
"Everyting
is juss fine."
My
father said good morning to someone else on the street. He must have been
sitting out there on the porch all through the night. I just sat looking out,
hearing the quiet, thinking how I wanted to go on up to Rock Creek Park and get
lost in the woods. I glanced over and my mom was standing there silently. She
eased my little sister's head off the pillow and sat her up.
Then
went into the kitchen to fix breakfast.
I could hear her crying.
By
9 o'clock we were in the morning service. My mother, who taught Sunday school,
always brought us early.
My father only came to church for
weddings, baptisms, and funerals.
We were sitting in the middle section
and the wooden chairs threatened to tip over with the big bodies. The junior
choir had everybody on their feet and a fan cooled the sweating bodies. I was
in my iridescent blue suit, white shirt, and tie. I just looked around at
everyone and the smooth wooden floors and the feet walking by, carrying this
one big woman after she got the spirit. The choir master was leaning back,
mouth open, and the people were singing and clapping, but I couldn't hear a
sound. I ran the toe of my shoe through a smooth groove in the floor-board.
Blam! Blam!
the
only sound in my head. Everything else
around me was a blizzard of empty details.
Details that would
be packed away inside me without being looked at, without letting them touch
me.
Blam! My hands were sweating into my little sister's--the only touch
I let myself feel.
Fast
forward: My stories don't really come all crafted into a nice tale. There are a
whole bunch of things that come up as I tell this, and these are part of the story
now. These little memories like bees in my mind's eye, threatening, buzzing
around my head. Dangling threads that invariably lead to something deeper and
darker...the innocence of learning to slow-drag with a girl on the dance floor
and how the next day she was attacked and raped by a much older man. But nobody
ever really talked about it. My friend was way different after that and nobody
ever danced with her again. These are now just memories from the comfort zone
of my current life, away from police sirens, getting jumped after school, and
having to fight regularly just to get home. Long bus rides across D.C. to
Spring Valley, to a world where there were no gangs, knives, anger, violence,
roaches, and threats--at least, not in the streets where you had to look at it
all the time.
You
see, the cats I grew up with didn't hold on to our stories, we kept pure
emotion hidden,
cause
we were the kids of the city.
You had to be a quick study to survive. If you showed any feelings, much less
reflection, you got your ass kicked over and over. Those kids who moved up from
North Carolina and came into our neighborhood with their accents and their
openness were laughed at till they conformed. If your parents cared, they
fought to create some conditions so that you could value your life, your
experiences--but on the street your story didn't have any value. Top dog/dirty
dog. Only material things were valued on the street...One day I'ma get me a
[insert Cadillac, $50 shoes, etc].
When
I started going to an exclusive private school, I became convinced my stories
didn't have value. So it was better to appropriate their stories--be like them,
at least on the outside--because what could my stories contribute to the lives
of these princes.
In
college, there was an unspoken message to let go of the past, of my story, to
move forward. When I came home for holidays and caught up with Green Jeans,
Brock, or Black Joe, they told me stories, all the stories of who got locked
up, broke down, shot, or OD'd. These stories were snuffed out and then
forgotten, never to be recounted. College brought me pan-Africanism, the Nation
of Islam, and other progressive movements meant to shape the black identity, to
give us "real" stories. As these movements required new names, clothes, identity,
I started feeling a strong pull back toward my own stories, though I still
didn't have the will to tell them.
An
anchor dropped in high school kept me connected with the life stories I owned.
My track coach, Brooks Johnson, drilled into me the importance of character and
pride. His mantra took root in my life and became magnified through the men and
women around me: my father and mother, my father's best friend Mr. Christian,
other coaches, and my Episcopalian headmaster Canon Martin. These were fiery and
gentle people whose lives seemed guided by their stories.
The
light and the dark.
I
had to find ways to avoid being consumed by the myriad of dark impulses that
came into my life. I had to figure how o live before I could recount, before I
could truly own my story. It is very long and it continues. The stories I began
but couldn't finish can now be looked at and coaxed back...I can take the gloves
off, stop fighting life and instead hold it.
I
left my neighborhood in the 1970s. Even though the razor-sharp edge of living
in Petworth has dulled, I now hoard the memories. I find myself looking back,
repeatedly--at street corners, empty stretches of Kansas Avenue, Sherman
Circle--and these quiet scenes are arranged in my mind into strange, chaotic
stacks, as if waiting for the day they will reveal themselves as the hidden
alphabet that somehow spells out my life's meaning.
The
potency is in the stacking. Laying them down in a brushed-steel coffin was too
cold, I needed to heat them up with my experiences since that time and bring
the life back to them. They needed to be honored. The characters and events
struggled for a place in my soul. This is the richness I'm now willing to talk
about.
Sally
Holt was seldom the prettiest woman in the room, but for three decades now she
had consistently been one of the most sought-after for one simple fact: She was
a wonderful listener. Whether it was her eight-year-old son or her
eighty-year-old neighbor or some male in-between, Sally rested her chin in her
palm and leaned forward, expression rapt, soft laugh at the ready--but not o
ready, which gave the speaker a feeling of power when the shy, sweet sound
finally bubbled forth, almost in spite of itself. In the Northwest quadrant of
Washington, where overtly decorative women were seen as suspect if not
out-and-out tacky, a charm like Sally's was much prized. It had served her
well, too, helping her glide into the perfect marriage to her college
sweetheart, a dermatologist, then allowing her to become one of Northwest
Washington's best hostesses, albeit in the amateur division. Sally and her
husband, Peter, did not move in and did not aspire to the more rarefied social
whirl, the one dominated by embassy parties and pink-faced journalists who
competed to shout pithy things over one another on cable television shows. They
lived in a quieter, in some ways more exclusive world, a charming,
old-fashioned neighborhood comprising middle-class houses that now required
upper-class incomes to own and maintain.
And
if, on occasion, in a dark corner at one of the endless parties Sally and Peter
hosted and attended, her unwavering attention was mistaken for affection, she
managed to deflect the ensuing pass with a graceful shake of her auburn curls.
"You wouldn't want me," she told the briefly smitten men. "I'm just another
soccer mom." The husbands backed away, sheepish and relieved, confiding in each
other what a lucky son of a bitch Peter Holt was. Sally Holt had kept her
figure, hadn't allowed herself to thicken into that androgynous
khaki-trousered--let's be honest, downright dykish--mom so common in the area,
which did have a lot of former field hockey players gone to seed. Plus, she was
so great to talk to, interested in the world, not forever prattling about her
children and their school.
Sally's
secret was that she didn't actually hear a word that her admirers said, just
nodded and laughed at the right moments, cued by their inflections as to how to
react. Meanwhile, deep inside her head, she was mapping out the logistics of
her next day.
Just a soccer mom, indeed.
To be a
stay-at-home mother in Northwest D.C. was to be nothing less than a general,
the Patton of the car pool, the Eisenhower of the HOV lane. Sally spent most of
her afternoons behind the wheel of a Porsche SUV, moving her children and other
people's children from school to lessons, from lessons to games, from games to
home. She was ruthlessly efficient with her time and motion, her radio always
tuned to WTOP to catch the traffic on the eights, her brain filled with
alternative routes and illegal shortcuts, her gaze at the ready to thaw the
nastiest traffic cop. She could envision her section of the city in a
three-dimensional grid in her head, her house on Morrison and the Dutton School
off Nebraska the two fixed stars in her universe. Given all she had to do, you
really couldn't blame her for not listening to the men who bent her ear, a
figure of speech that struck her as particularly apt. If she allowed all those
words into her head, her ears would be bent--as crimped, tattered, and chewed-up
looking as the old tom cat she had owned as a child, a cat who could not avoid
brawls even after he was neutered.
But
when Peter came to her in the seventeenth year of their marriage and said he
wanted out, she heard him loud and clear. And when his lawyer said their house,
mortgaged for a mere $400,000, was now worth $1.8 million, which meant she
needed $700,000 to buy Peter's equity stake, she heard that, too. For as much
time as she spent behind the wheel of her car, Sally was her house, her house
was Sally. The 1920s stucco two-story was tasteful and individual, with a kind
of perfection that a decorator could never have achieved. She was determined to
keep the house at all costs and when her lawyer proposed a way it could be
done, without sacrificing anything in child support or her share of Peter's
retirement funds, she had approved it instantly and then, as was her habit,
glazed over as the details were explained.
"What
do you mean, I owe a million dollars on the house?" she asked her accountant,
Kenny, three years later.
"You
refinanced your house with an interest-only balloon mortgage in order to have
the cash to buy Peter out of his share. Now it's come due."
"But
I don't have a million dollars," Sally said, as if Kenny didn't know this fact
better than anyone. It was
April,
he had her tax
return in front of him.
"No
biggie. You get a new mortgage. Unfortunately, your timing sucks. Interest
rates are up. Your monthly payment is going to be a lot bigger--just as the
alimony is ending. Another bit of bad timing."
Kenny
relayed all this information with zero emotion. After all, it didn't affect his
bottom line. It occurred to Sally that an accountant should have a much more
serious name. What was she doing, trusting someone named Kenny with her money?
"What
about the equity I've built up in the past three years?"
"It
was an interest-only loan, Sally. There is no additional equity." Kenny, a
square-jawed man who bore a regrettable resemblance to Frankenstein, sighed.
"Your lawyer did you no favors, steering you into this deal. Did you know the
mortgage broker he referred you to was his brother-in-law? And that your lawyer
is a partner in the title company? He even stuck you with P.M.I."
Sally
was beginning to feel as if they were discussing sexually transmitted diseases
instead of basic financial transactions
"I
thought I got an adjustable-rate mortgage. A.R.M.'s have conversion rates,
don't they? And caps? What does any of this have to do with P.M.I.?"
"A.R.M.'s do.
But you got a balloon, and
balloons come due.
All at once, in a big lump.
Hence the name.
You had a three-year grace period, in which
you had an artificially low rate of less than three percent, with Peter's four
thousand in rehabilitative alimony giving you a big cushion. Now it's over. In
today's market, I recommend a thirty-year fixed, but even that's not the deal
it was two years ago. According to today's rates, the best you can do is--"
Frankennystein
used an old-fashioned adding machine, the kind with a paper roll, an
affectation Sally had once found charming. He punched the keys and the paper
churned out, delivering its noisy verdict.
"A
million financed at a thirty-year fixed rate--you're looking at almost $6,000 a
month and that's just the loan. No taxes, no insurance."
It
was an increase of almost $2,000 a month over what she had been paying for the
last three years, not taking into account the alimony she was about to lose,
which came to $4,000 a month.
A net loss of $6,000.
"I
can't cover that, not with just $5,000 a month in child support." Did Kenny
raise a caterpillar eyebrow at the "just." Sally knew that Peter paid well, but
then--he earned well. "I can't make a mortgage payment of that size and pay my
share of the private school tuition, which we split fifty-fifty."
"You
could sell. But after closing costs and paying the real estate agent's fee,
you'd walk away with a lot less cash than you might think.
Maybe
eight hundred thousand."