Show and Prove (16 page)

“Do people know?” It sounded to me like just a bad luck of the draw and nothing to be ashamed of. Still, people look for excuses to be nasty, so I had to know if mum was the word.

“Oh, yeah,” said Smiles. “No big secret.” I remember being disappointed. I really wanted to be buddies, and that meant keeping each other's secrets. “Everybody pitches in whenever Mama has a crisis. The last time she needed a transfusion, some people came to Bronx-Lebanon to donate blood, like Mr. Cutter and even Booby's mom.” And maybe because he was tired of talking, Smiles said, “My mother's a social worker and has helped a lot of people around here. My dad works for the train system. What do your parents do?”

I wasn't the only kid on the block whose father didn't live with him, but most of the kids at least knew where “their fathers” could be found. That's why I appreciated that Smiles didn't assume the gossip was true, even though it was, so I told him the deal. “Back in Brooklyn my mom used to sew in a factory. I'm not really sure where the hell my father is. Somewhere in PR. Ask me if I care.”

“Is that why you went berserk when Javi said you were named Wilfredo after your father?”

“That ain't what he meant, though,” I said. “He dissed me and my whole family.” Smiles stopped rummaging through his drawer, waiting for me to explain. For a moment there, I wondered if I could trust him after all. What if he was really in cahoots with Booby and them, and the next time Smiles saw me in the street wearing one of his shirts, he made a point to tell everyone where I got it? All these questions crossed my mind, but for some reason, I decided to trust him. “Puerto Ricans call welfare
el wilfredo.
When the husband books, the wife gets Wilfredo to pay the rent, feed the kids, or whatever.”

Smiles took that in. “That's messed up! No wonder you housed him. I would've kicked his ass, too.”

That's when his doorbell rang, and it was Cookie with piononos from her father's lechonera for the Kings. I could never say this to Sara, obviously, but I remember seeing Cooks playing dodgeball with the guys and thinking she was too cute for a tomboy. Cookie joined Smiles and me in the kitchen for some Fig Newtons and Nehis, leaving the piononos for the grown-ups. For a while we were a trio, the Mod Squad: Bronx Division, homies 4 eva. The next day Booby, Pooh, and the other guys acted as if the brawl never happened, everyone on the block was cool, and we all lived happily ever after.

Yeah, right.

Things changed.

Like dynamite.

Junior came out of juvie, started the Barbarians, and recruited Booby and 'em.

Cookie let Javi go all the way and got herself a bad reputation.

And Smiles dissed me for Dawkins.

Sara's voice pushes me off memory lane. “Willie, help me load the dryer.” This is how it's been for the past few days. Sara wouldn't give me her number, but she took mine. After work I walk Sara to her building, race home, and wait for her to call me. Then we talk until she hears a key in the door. Twice Sara has snuck a call to me later to let me know that she was being sent on some errand, and I rush out so by the time she comes downstairs, I'm waiting on her corner. I've never felt so lucky to spend three hours doing laundry.

“Sure thing, Princess.”

“And turn up that song!” We're listening to BLS, and Frankie Crocker's playing “I Wanna Thank You.” It turns out that Sara and I have the same taste in love songs.

T
he proposal I lent Qusay helped. Following it to write his own, and including some of my ideas, he convinced Mama's old social service agency to give him a small grant to start a pilot program. If he can recruit and retain a certain number of kids from the neighborhood over the summer in a series of workshops—that's what I said he should call the parliaments instead—they might give him more money. Q offered me a little stipend from his seed money to canvass the neighborhood.
The more participants I enroll, the more money I get, the sooner I can hire you to assist me,
he said. I walk into Silvio's game room to pass out flyers for Q's initiative and find Flex and the Don going at it.

“I don't want you with those guys, Flex,” Don Silvio yells. “They're hoodlums. Every last one of 'em.” He sprays the glass counter with Windex and wipes it in a fury. He has all kinds of knickknacks for sale—name buckles, fake gold chains, rabbits' feet, hair feathers, whatever's in style. Don Silvio still sells some albums on vinyl and cassettes and even a few 45s if the joint is hot. Except for some candy, however, I've never seen anyone buy anything from him. Don Silvio stays in business running the game room and the numbers. Every other business in the neighborhood is a front for another kind of hustle. JD sells all the latest fashions in his window, but in the back room he has knockoff Ray-Ban sunglasses and Gucci handbags for half the price. If you want to get HBO but not pay for it, look no further than Ms. Rhi at the Laundromat, who'll sell you a black box to descramble the signal. Sometimes Elsie at the bodega “cashes” the WIC check for a mom who needs the money more than the baby formula, taking a cut for herself and submitting the vouchers to Uncle Sam for full reimbursement. And I can't even count all the half empty hardware stores, pharmacies, and five-and-dimes that are really weed spots. Like Melle Mel says in “Message II,”
It's called survival
. But Don Silvio is the only one who has yet to be raided or busted.

In the back some guys yell,
Oh!
I walk past Flex and peek into the back room, where the games are. Just a bunch of kids in a heated round of Mario Bros.

Flex hooks his fingers into his belt loops, swaying back and forth while staring at his Converse. “Man, Silvio, you can't be telling me who I can be down with, yo.” He's a soft-spoken dude who holds the block record for solving the Rubik's Cube—one minute and thirty-eight seconds. The Professor doesn't even come close, and he's the indisputable neighborhood genius.

“Every day I have to chase one of 'em sonsabitches outta here,” says Don Silvio. “They have no shame, trying to sell that garbage to kids. Vergognoso!”

“How many times I gotta tell you? I ain't involved in none of that. We just be chillin'.” When I give Flex a sympathetic nod, he says to me, “Dude want I should be turnin' my nose up at niggas, and you know that won't fly.”

“Word 'em up.”

Don Silvio notices me. “Smiley!” Then he does what a lot of adults in this neighborhood do that I wish they wouldn't. “This is who you should be trying to be down with,” he says, mimicking Flex's slang in a sarcastic tone. “È così onorevole. He goes to school, church, work. Smiley's a good boy, and you should be more like him.”

Flex looks at me like,
You believe this shit?
“Yo, Smiley be maxin' with Booby and 'em, too.”

Don Silvio shoots me a look. I sneer at Flex as if to say,
For real, B?
I turn back to the Don and explain, “It's not the way it sounds.” I hand Flex and him a flyer. “Flex and I are part of a new program that Qusay is creating—”

“Koosay!” Don Silvio begins to rant in Italian. He crumples the flyer.

“Yo, Silv, what're you doing?”

Flex says, “He be goin' off like that over nothin', B.”

“That Koosay's no better than Junior and his gang of pushers. You gonna see. Different scheme, same mentality.”

Now it's my turn to give Flex the
You believe this?
face. Flex snickers. I've known Don Silvio all my life, and except for the occasional scolding when the guys and me would get a little too raucous or bang on his machine if it ate a quarter, I've never had a problem with the man. I mumble to Flex, “I know this white dude isn't standing here judging the homies when he runnin' numbers.”

“What was that?” says Don Silvio. “Speak up!” Then he turns toward the game room. “Hey, hey, hey, take it easy back there!”

Flex throws his hands up. “Yo, my name ain't Bennett, and I'm not in it.” Then he books, leaving me with a fuming Don Silvio. I get it, though. Flex can only talk back just so much to the only man who will hire him. This is why the brothers need Qusay's program to break free of vultures like him, preying on our people.

Don Silvio points his finger at me and says, “Your father know about this business you have with Koosay?”

“Look, Silvio,” I say, “I didn't come in here looking for trouble. I just wanted to pass out some flyers about a great opportunity for the kids in the neighborhood. You're the one started poppin' shit about hoodlums and schemes. I mean, they don't call running numbers the policy racket for nothing.”

“You. Get out! Out my game room now!”

He spews another few choice words in Italian. Some kids rush out the game room to follow the commotion. I put my hand behind my ear. “What's that you said? You called me a what? I'm a moulinyan?”

Don Silvio's face gets red. “I called you no such thing! Get out already. Before I call the police.”

He doesn't have to tell me a third time. Some of the kids follow me outside, where Flex is sitting on a hydrant and smoking a loosie. I explain what happened, give them some flyers, and build with them until I see Don Silvio making his way out from behind the counter and toward the door. Before he can chase me from his storefront, I say to Flex, “See you at Q's, G?”

“Most def.”

Then I hit the parks, the corners, the pool hall, everywhere the homeboys congregate, passing out flyers. I even swing by Pulaski Park. Surrounded by his usual minions and a couple of girls, Junior holds court at a concrete checkerboard table and eyes me. We were never friends, but I also never had any beef with him either. Before I know it, he summons me over. It takes the fifty-foot walk to summon the courage I need to play the role.

“Junior Junior,” I say, offering him my free hand.

He gives it a quick clasp. “Smiley Smiles. What's up?” Junior gestures toward the flyers in my other hand.

“Yo, Qusay's starting this fresh new program for the brothers around the way. It's called the Bridge.” I hand him a flyer. It's a long shot, but I can't help but imagine what it would be like if someone like Junior got down with the Bridge. A lot of the homeboys would follow suit, and the neighborhood would be a completely different place. Even if there'll always be some cats who want to sidle up to the devil for a quick buck, what if the uplifted minds outnumbered them? “Come check it out, B, 'cause it's gonna be all the way live.”

Junior takes the flyer and skims it. He snorts and hands it to one of his associates. By the way his eyes dart across the page and with the quickness he hands it off to the next dude, I deduce that homeboy can't read. Then, in Spanish, Junior says something to the effect that he needs to do something about ese conden'ao Qusay before he becomes the bane of his existence. My spine grows cold, but I pretend to not understand a word he said. Junior says, “Very nice, Smiles, but I'm a busy man. And so are my homeboys.” He motions across the park to where Booby and the others are slinging. “But thank you for the invitation.”

I speak thug better than Spanish. Translation:
Make like a tree and leave before I drop-kick you into the East River.
I salute Junior and scram—my second eviction of the day. If this is how Q felt, no wonder he never tried to build here again. I'm halfway across the park when Junior calls, “Oh, Smiley, do me a favor and tell your homeboy Nike that I'm looking forward to catching up with him real soon.” I turn around to give him a nod and a plastic grin, and he adds, “And if he doesn't catch my drift, do me the favor and spell it out for him. I know he ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

I figure I've done enough canvassing for the day and take my Black ass home. When I walk into the apartment, Nana asks, “Where have you been?” But before I can even answer, she says, “A friend of yours from school called.”

I almost say,
I don't have friends at school anymore.
“Who?”

Nana points toward the credenza, where we keep our mail and telephone messages. “Said his name was Sean. Call him back now, don't wait until it's late.”

Why Nana's so keen? She's never this chipper when Nike calls. As upset as I get with him at times, that's just not right. She's never even met Sean, and he's no saint. He's the guy who's convinced that Kennedy was taken out by the Mob—
No way, man, would anyone kill the president over civil rights
—and said he didn't have time to read
Bad Blood
even though all the proof he needed about the Tuskegee experiment was in it.

I pick up the message and debate calling him back. Funny, at the end of the school year, we traded numbers, and I secretly hoped he would call me. Sean's different when Eric's not around. Now that he has, though, I'm suspicious about what he really wants.

I grab the phone, go into my room, and dial his number. He answers. “Sean, it's Raymond. King. From school.”

“Yeah, man, what's up? How ya doin'?”

“I'm cool. Chillin'.” I remember how he didn't put Eric in check when he started poppin' all that mess about the judges giving me the debate that I won fair and square. For a moment, I have the urge to confront him, but I hold back. “What's up with you?”

“One of the other kids hooked me up with an internship at his dad's law firm, and yo…” The slang cuts into me like it never has before. After all, Sean's one of those Irish kids from Hell's Kitchen, where the
word
s and
B
s roll off their tongues like a first language. The second day of school, Sean was standing behind me on the lunch line when I snapped on Dawkins's elaborate spread. I mean, at Saint Aloysius you only had two choices for lunch: whatever the meal of the day was or a cheeseburger in a tinfoil sack. Sean overheard my wisecrack and snickered, so I panicked, thinking,
Damn, one of these trust-fund kids done busted my scholarship behind dissing the gourmet cuisine like an ingrate.
Then he said,
They can keep the Grey Poupon, B, where the ketchup at?
Sean sounded like home to me, and we became friends like that. At least, I thought we were friends. “…I'm dying here, B. Why call 'em briefs when they're a gazillion pages long? Answer me that. And the jargon?” He snorts into his receiver. “If it weren't already dead, B, I would've killed Latin by now, I swear!” I choke on my laugh. That sounds like something Nike would say, and under different circumstances, I would have cracked up and come back with something funnier. Instead I just hold back and make Sean fill the dead air. “You workin'?”

“Yeah. Day camp. Counselor.”

“One of those Summer Youth Employment Program joints?”

“Uh-huh.” To this day Sean still takes me off guard whenever he knows something about my life. I keep forgetting all the ways we're two satellites in the same orbit. He's probably had a job through SYEP at one point. Mama pressed me to go to Dawkins, saying that it would open doors for me, but none of them led to an internship at a law firm. They hoard those opportunities for their own kind. “Been doing a little volunteering in the neighborhood, too.”

“That's fresh,” says Sean. “Where?”

“Helping this brother open a school.”

“Ah, droppin' science. Word. What kind of school?”