The Kid (11 page)

This is a home for Catholic boys who are orphaned, and if anybody calls up here willing to adopt older kids, it’s Catholic people. So you know, fuck it, I ain’ really thinking about shit like that no more. But just in case, I’ll be a Catholic. Religion is about believing, and I don’t believe nothin’ I can’t see. And anyway if they was so all that, then why shit goes down like it does.
CLAK CLAK CLAK
. It’s a toy. There’s these two strands of nylon cord tied together at the top, at the bottom of each cord is a hard clear plastic ball, smaller than a Ping-Pong ball, bigger than a boulder marble. The object of the game, the fun, is spozed to be getting the balls to bounce off each other nonstop real fast. The sound is
CLAK CLAK CLAK
over and over and over, loud. That’s the real object of the game—driving grown-ups crazy with the noise. I used to love doing it. The little kids here all do. I hate it now; everybody hates it unless they’re doing it. It’s not just that I hate the noise, it’s that the stupid shit noise is like part of my brain now, in there, I can’t get it out.

I gotta piss. I pull on my T-shirt and head for the door. Bear Ass is at the door.

“J.J., make up your bed, please, before you leave the floor.”

“I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“Um hmm, hurry up and make up your bed so you can relieve yourself.”

Fuck this fool, I think, and go to push past him. The next thing I know, he’s grabbed me and flipped me over his shoulder and I’m flying through the air WHAM! Flat on my back. I try to kick up, he gets me in a choke hold and slams me back down.

“Now!” he growls. “You make up that bed now!”

I scream, he cuts off my air, slams my head to the floor hard, it hurts like fuck. I feel like shit as I piss all over myself. I squeeze my eyes shut to all of Dorm Three looking down on me in pity.

Brother Samuel lets me go. “Well, don’t we both wish you had obeyed orders and done as you were told? Now, get
up
and make up your bunk immediately!”

I don’t raise my head while I’m making up my bed. I pull up the dingy wrinkled sheets, then the skinny pale blue blanket, reach under my bed in my trunk and get another pair of shorts, pull off the red athletic pants and put on a pair of jeans. I kick the wet clothes near the foot of the bed. Walking down the aisle, I look up at Richard’s half-breed ass gawking at me, turn around, and shove him back on his bed.

“What are you looking at!” I pass Jaime, his eyes on the floor. Mr Lee is near the door, mopping up the urine.

Brother Samuel is standing right next to Mr Lee. “After breakfast be in my office. Be prompt.”

I walk past him.

 

 

EVEN THOUGH I KNOW
he can beat me, it’s not fear I feel but something else I can’t describe. I just stare at the cornflakes. Saturday breakfast is always the same, dry cereal with fruit, bananas or canned peaches. Then they bring scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast with little square things of butter and jam in little plastic tubs—strawberry, grape, or marmalade. I usually take the strawberry from whoever has it. But not today. Today I eat my cereal without looking up. No one says nothing to me, I don’t say nothing to nobody. Brother Samuel Brother Samuel
CLAK CLAK CLAK CLAK
step on a crack and break that bear’s fat back. Hey! Hey! I’m gonna kill you one day. I look at the eggs the KP boy put in front of me from off the steam cart. I can’t eat no motherfucking eggs. I can’t eat no fucking eggs! I pick up my fork and jam it HARD into my left hand. The blood seeps out like steam out a valve. I feel relieved. Look up and Brother Samuel is standing over me.

“Come with me
now,
” he says. I get up follow him down the stairs to his office. I’m big, he’s bigger. I’m sweating. Funky. Tired of following him into his black hole. Office
CLAK CLAK CLAK
English Select
Macbeth
next semester computers last semester biology. Brother John. I got no fight in me, flight either. Fight or flight, instinctual mechanism for survival in animals. I’m thirteen I feel like I’m ninety. Mrs Washington liked my idea for my midterm paper. Time flies flies of time lord it seems like school just started but it’s almost two months now.

“HALT!” he barks. I stop. He unlocks the door to his office. Hole. I follow him in. “Don’t let me tell you what to do—for God’s sake take that damn fork out of your hand, are you crazy!” I remind myself this isn’t real. It’s a dream, a
movie
! In the movie I’m always naked. A white man pulls me to him rough. I obey. I must. I must obey him. Be a good boy. He kisses my neck. He reaches behind him and puts in a CD, the famous actor, James Earl Jones, reading from the Bible. He tongues my ear. You’re pretty. You know I love you. His robes flow like black water his belly is pale whitey white with blue-green veins and red hair like copper wires. The bass voice fills the room with the Bible. He kisses me groans.
My soul has grown ancient like the rivers
I like that poem he pulls me down on my hands and knees his KY jelly is a cold splash on my asshole
my soul has grown deep like the rivers
. I love you I love you, black boy! Don’t you know it hurts me to hurt you. Why do you make me hurt you, black boy! I love you! Unh! Unh! I feel his tears hot falling on my back. It hurts. Do you do you love me do you love me. I wish he would get off me. I wish he would get in deeper it feels so fucking good like God I hate myself I hate him I hate him Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy Ahhhhha ha!!! I hate GOD! Ahhh! OOOhhhhhh! Get up, get your ass
up
and
out
of here. I don’t want any more problems out of you today, young man! You hear? You hear!

I pull on my jeans and T-shirt. Ten minutes after nine. Someone is crying like a bitch, but it’s not me. Not me not me oh Holy Mary mother of God in the name of the Father
CLAK CLAK CLAK CLAK
bam a bam goddamn! Bam! I slam my fist on the arm of the sofa.

“Do not leave the grounds today, hear?” He grabs my chin with his thumb and finger and pulls my face to his, tries to stare me in the eyes. I’ll put ’em out first, my eyes mine. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me!”

I try to squirm and twist my chin from his grip, look out at the door. He pinches harder. His smell, my smell, sweat, the smell of leather climb up my nose.

“Do you hear me? Do you hear me!”

I nod.

He drops his hands from my face. I walk out the office hear his big bear ass plop down on the couch. I’m going where I been planning on going all week, then I realize how early it is. The Africans don’t start till one-thirty. It’s not even ten o’clock yet.

I jog down to Marcus Garvey Park. Quiet. Bare brown dirt where the grass has died. Bushes green. It seems like nothing is going on, but it’s really like a split movie screen, on one side of the hedges cars is zipping past. Other side, other world—park people, waiting on dope dick ducat. I back into the high green hedges, sink down on my knees. A pair of jeans walks past with a big belly. “Five,” the jeans say. “Ten,” I say, unzipping the jeans, putting the bill in my pocket.

I got time to kill before class. I run up to the watchtower. No one has rung the bell since 1850 when New York had thatched roofs, I can’t imagine that! I love it up here, don’t nobody usually come up this high. Don’t need the watchtower no more, just let people, niggers, burn up. Who can I tell, where can I go? Brother John said the technology to record CDs was there when they brought CDs on the market, just like two-deck tape recorders, but wouldn’t have been no money in it. “Money is the motivating force for almost everything.”

“Almost?”

“Yeah, almost, not everything can be bought and sold.”

“What can’t?”

“What can’t is so insignificant in the eyes of the world—”

“What about
us,
the Catholics, St Ailanthus?”

“Yeah, we’re different. That’s why I’m here. I’m not of the world.”

Sometimes I like Brother John. Most times I don’t. I like earth science, though. This park is here ’cause they couldn’t cut down the rock. I’m a Capricorn, climb the rock. Right now I’m going to Bake Heaven to get some donuts. There’s a fracture in the earth’s crust that runs across 125th Street. I pull out my ten in Bake Heaven and it’s a one! I start back in the direction of the hedges, what the fuck, shit even if he ain’t gone which he is, I didn’t even see his fucking face.

 

 

“CLASS IS FIVE DOLLARS,”
says the girl sitting on the floor writing people’s names on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard, putting their money in a big manila envelope.

“All I got
today
is a dollar.” I stress “today.” The girl looks up at the teacher, who has on a deep blue leotard, same style as the yellow one she had on last week, and has appeared like magic by the girl’s side.

“Next week,” the teacher says.

“OK.”

“What’s your name?”

“J.J.”

She writes my name down and puts my dollar in the big manila envelope. She points to a door down the hall. “That’s the men’s locker room. You can get dressed in there.”

I’m already dressed, though. I slide my back down the wall, sit on the floor, check things out. It’s a nice-size gym but not huge. Above us is an indoor track. Some niggers is hanging over the railing looking down at us. Mostly women in the gym. All kinds—young, hip-looking, dark, light, one old white woman. Some is fat, some look like athletes, almost all of them, even the old white one got on some kinda African shit. I wonder how many of these niggers is real Africans and how many is just dressed like it. Against the wall, under the windows, are four chairs with a tall drum sitting in front of ’em, no guys drumming, just the chairs and the drums. These people in the gym seem different from the niggers walking up and down the streets. I try to figure out how and what it is, where or how I fit in, can’t—just know this is where I want to be and where I am, and I don’t really give a fuck about anything else. Four guys in long white African robes file in and sit down in the chairs in front of the drums. I’m so busy scoping them, wondering what country in Africa they come from if they
are
Africans, that I don’t notice Jaime has slid up beside me! His earlobe is swollen and got a little drop of blood on it where he has pierced it with a silver hoop that has a seashell on it. It’s like the shells some of the girls have sewn on their belts and African bra tops. Around his forehead he got a band like Indians wear around their heads. I think he thinks it’s African. More, I think in some way he’s sorry about this morning. Whatever! He’s here. That makes something swell up in my throat, I can’t even talk.

“Whew!” he whispers. “Man you stink.”

I flip back through the dollar scene in the park, back to me flying over Brother Samuel’s shoulder in Dorm Three this morning. But I laugh at how funny beautiful Jaime looks and how embarrassed I am to be so glad he’s here. The girl near the door with her clipboard hollers to Jaime, “Five dollars!” He walks over to her. I never seen any of the St Ailanthus boys in the park. How do they get money? Rob? They got it, I can see that. I don’t strong-arm kids for cash even though I could. Jaime’s grandmother be bringing him dust, talking about she gonna break him out when she gets back on her feet. But according to Etheridge, who is a KP, not an office monitor, meaning I don’t know how he know everybody’s business, she ain’t getting back on her feet no time soon. She got AIDS—SIDA, the Spanish people call it. Most of the boys in St Ailanthus is there because of that even though they don’t say so. Jaime got on white sweats and a blue sweatshirt say SYRACUSE HIGH #7. Next week I’m coming in here with some African shit on. The woman teaching the class, she’s tying a beautiful piece of blue and white cloth around her waist. You could see her stomach is flat, and she got big muscles with definition like dancers do in her legs. Her face is dark smooth chocolate, no wrinkles. But her hair, which is pulled back in a braid and that she’s tying a piece of African cloth around, is all white. Weird. It don’t compute, she ain’t old enough for no white hairs.

We do a lot of exercises with dance names: pliés, tendue-flex-pointflex. Plié, relevé, roll down 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 soften your knees for eight counts, now using every vertebra in your back, that’s it, roll up slowly. Then we did stretches and sit-ups and push-ups. The stretches are excruciating for me, but the push-ups and stuff are easy.

“Line up four across,” she says, nods at me, Jaime, and three other guys, “men come in the back.” Rows materialize with the sound of her voice. I like that. She claps her hands and the drums start.

“
Ba
BAH!
Ba
Bah!” she says, her right foot coming down on the
Ba,
her left on BAH! Her arm comes down from where she has it stretched up toward the ceiling, and she flings her hand open to the ground as she stamps her foot on BAH!

“You’re planting seeds. You throw the seed into the earth, then you stomp the earth—BAH!” She brings her foot down on the earth where she has just thrown the seeds. “This movement comes from Congolese dance, which really influenced a lot of Afro-Haitian movement.”

The drums funk up! Me, Jaime, and the three other dudes are in the last row bringing up the rear as the girls move across the floor.
Ba
BAH!
Ba
BAH! I’m in Africa or Puerto Rico somewhere, planting my seeds on my land.

 

 

I FORGET WHEN
he starts that Papi shit, but that’s when I start to pull away from Jaime. He has me mixed up with somebody,
something
else. I’m a man, not a faggot. I got an A in my earth science project, an A on my midterm paper in English, a B-plus in math, and an A in art. If I wasn’t so old, Brother Samuel told me, I would be a prime candidate for adoption, so old and so big, you scare them, they want little boys. If they’ll take black kids, they want mulattoes and girls. Whatever they want, they don’t want black boys. I guess my question, even though I’m only thirteen, is what kind of motherfucker is Brother Samuel to sit up and tell me some shit like that? I don’t know if I want to be adopted anyway. What would I do in a family now? Next month, January, I’ll be fourteen. Raven is fifteen. I met her in dance class. I’m meeting a lot of people in dance class. I think she likes me, Raven.