Riot Baby, page 9
But, no. They got pool halls here and churches. Mosques, even. It’s like one of those Rockwell paintings but if a hood nigga stood over his shoulder whispering in his ear about home.
But this ain’t home; at least, no home I’m trying to get back to. It looks new. All of it. Which suits me just fine.
* * *
My place is one of those one-stories on a block of identical houses. There’s a yard and a chain-link fence. Even space for a garden, but I guess they’re leaving it up to me to see if I want to plant something. I half expect to see niggas out on their front lawns riding those big-ass lawnmowers you see white dudes riding in the movies, all moving in unison on some Stepford Wives–type shit. But it’s all quiet. A few folks hang out on their front porches. One or two nurse a cold beer. And the sun sits on the horizon so that the whole sky is cut with knife scars of purple and pink and white and blue.
I go to the knob, but when I try to turn it, it doesn’t budge. There’s no keyhole. Curtains cover the windows so I can’t see inside, and I call up the info on my Palm, and it says I’m at the right spot. I’m geotagged where I’m supposed to be. This is the address.
They said stuff like this was supposed to be over now that we didn’t have to deal with real actual human beings anymore, just algorithms and machines, and I figured the parole board was the last set of ugly-ass white faces I’d have to see for the rest of my life, but if I have to call in tech support for this bullshit in my first week?
I can feel it building. Even as I know it’s coming and I know what it’ll mean, the world begins to take on a shade of red, and I’m two steps away from breaking my fists against these Plexiglas windows when I hear “Youngblood!” from behind me.
He’s got one of those older-man short-sleeve button-downs, the type that come cut specifically to accommodate the basketball-belly you get once you hit forty. He’s got a beer in his hand, fingers only half covering the O’Douls label.
He’s chuckling. That kind of chuckle that old heads let out when they see something they think reminds them of themselves. If it ain’t the most irritating sound in the world, it’s close. “You gotta use the touchpad.”
“Touchpad?”
With his beer, he points to a small black square right by where a doorbell would usually go.
“They gave you a keycard, right?”
“You on parole too?” I realize he’s the first dude I’ve talked to since I got here. Maybe this place looks so new because it’s a ghost town. Ain’t nobody get here yet.
“Yeah, three years now.”
“Where you from?”
“Florissant.” Meaning St. Louis. Meaning the South. The way he says it, he knows I’m supposed to give him respect now. It ain’t enough to be an old head anymore or to have the tattooed proof that you were out once, banging, or that you were doing any number of other foolish things. Bringing the Fury or the Force or whatever it’s called where you come from down on your head out of your own stupidity. But some places, you got to deal with the worst of white folk, the terrorists. The places that made money off you by charging you for tickets and scheduling court dates when they knew you couldn’t make it, then fining you for those missed dates if they don’t jail you first, then they say they’ll graciously set you up with a payment plan, then you get a day or two late one month and they put out a warrant, then when they do get you in jail, you gotta post $2,000 bond or some shit like that that they know you can’t pay, and that’s how it starts. While in jail, you miss your job interview, and when you finally get your day in court, they say you gotta change out of your jumpsuit, but you gotta put on the same funky clothes you spent however long getting arrested in and you gotta stand in that courtroom smelling like rotten poom-poom, handcuffed, and you gotta do all you can to even feel like a person still. If you got family, maybe your mama can borrow against her life insurance policy to post your bond.
I know better than to ask him about kids.
He’s at my side now, and out of his back pocket, he pulls a thin white card. Whatever writing used to be imprinted on it is pretty faded. Looks like Braille more than anything else, but it’s got the three-bar logo on it.
“Each house here got one of those touchpads. Put this to it, and you’re golden.”
I pat my pockets. I don’t remember getting anything that looked like that, not at Rikers and not here, and now I’m back to getting ready to cuss out the System that can’t even get rid of me properly. “I ain’t get that,” I tell him. Then I remember something. “They put a chip in my thumb, though.”
The dude’s eyebrows rise in slight surprise. “Ain’t that some shit.” After a beat, “Well, go on. Try it!”
I put my thumb to the touchpad, and the screen door slowly opens toward us. Then the main door slides into the wall, revealing a room dressed in darkness. But already, I can make out a couch, a dining room table with chairs around it, and a hallway, which must probably lead to a bedroom and a bathroom. It’s strange to think of those two things as being separate. Feels, more than any of this other stuff, like the greatest luxury in the world. I ain’t gotta shit where I sleep.
“Who’s paying for this?” I ask, without turning back to face him.
“You are, Youngblood,” the dude says, laughing outright. “Nigga, who you think?”
“How, though?”
“Same way everybody else does. They take it out your paycheck.” He’s shaking his head at me while I take the whole thing in. It hadn’t really hit me till then. Barely do I get to process my freedom before I already got another set of obligations sitting on my shoulders. But this is good. In prison, in jail, routine was good. Had three square meals a day, though most days you couldn’t call ’em that. Had work. Also had to remember that you never knew when or where the harm would come from.
But I look around, and I only see the two of us on this street. And it doesn’t sound like anybody’s waiting for me in there.
“It’s all right,” he tells me. “You ain’t incarcerated no more.”
I wanna tell him I know, but it’d be a lie.
He starts to walk away. “Next time you in trouble, need some help, call on Calvin.”
* * *
There’s more room in the shop than I think Miguel needs. It’s supposed to be a barbershop-type setup, but we’re in an open hangar, a bunch of us with varying degrees of time on the outside. Royce came up in Detroit and was in Dearborn for a while before getting transferred here. Romero was the Dominican from the Bronx, Marlon the Jamaican from the same neighborhood. They hadn’t known each other growing up, had gone to the same high school and mixed it up with the same gangs but never really banged with each other until after they got out and had that whole “Hey, ain’t you the cat from—” exchange.
There’s metal all around us. It’s gotten hot enough outside that you can’t let your skin touch the hoods of the rusted-out car-husks scattered out around the hangar. A couple other parolees lie on them anyway, knees up, newspapers covering their faces as they try to sleep. We’re supposed to be working, but a bunch of us don’t have our mechanic’s license yet, so we have to apprentice. And Miguel’s only got one customer right now.
A light-skinned man sits quietly in his chair, chest up against a cushion, his stub of a right arm out on another cushion in front of him. Miguel has his tools on a piece of metal at the man’s arm, and sparks spray in arcs that sizzle when they hit the floor. Miguel used to be a barber and a tattooist, and now he does this.
“There’s no union or anything like that yet,” the light-skinned dude in the chair is saying, “but a bunch of us at the factory are trying to get something together.”
“You think they’ll allow it?” asks Miguel almost absentmindedly in that way barbers have of maintaining conversation while engaging in the geometric precision required for a fly high-top fade.
Marlon leans forward on his milk crate. “You just can’t call it a union in English. You gotta say it in Spanish. Or patois. Had a PO one time who thought bumbaclots were an after-school snack for the kids. Like fuckin’ Tostinos pizza rolls or some shit.”
Mero lets out his belly laugh and nearly falls off his own crate. “Make their software in their fuckin’ algorithm auto-translate from Spanish to English and the shit still doesn’t make sense.”
“Right! Dominican Spanish ain’t Spanish, my nigga. It’s Dominican-ese. It’s like in the Pen when you gotta speak that code while your shorty visiting.”
Mero pointed his O’Douls at Marlon. “But she gotta sag her pants when she first come in because the CO’s like ‘No, ma, you can’t come in here, you look too sexy right now’ or she gets turned away ’cause she got the underwire in her bra.”
Marlon chuckles. “Right before she pulls the heroin out her poom-poom.”
Even that gets me laughing.
Mero lets out a sigh and says, “Shoutout to jail.”
“No!” Marlon shouts back. “Shoutout to getting out!”
Royce, on the car hood, removes the paper from his face, then slides so his legs dangle over the side. He doesn’t even flinch when the hot, rotted metal touches his skin, makes me think he’s got augments, or prosthetics at least. “Niggas really think when you get out, you just gonna start over. Niggas never stopped. You ever play Monopoly, my nigga? You know how you go to jail, then you just wait two turns or whatever? Wait till I get out, I’ma buy Baltic Ave., nigga. Niggas couldn’t walk down Boardwalk without paying respect.”
He says it all straight-faced, but we know he’s clowning.
“Everything green was me, nigga.”
Mero says, “You know all the avenues in Monopoly are mad fucked up in real life. You know that, right?”
Marlon: “You can actually buy those avenues with Monopoly money.” Through his laughter, “Bronx Monopoly.”
Meanwhile, I’m staring at the guy in the chair. He’s chuckling while Miguel’s saying something to him, but I can’t hear any of it. “Ayo!” I call out. “What’s that factory job like? Is it government?”
Marlon giggles. “You see how he asked that question? Like it was pino or something. Oooh, look at that nigga workin’ weekends getting that double-overtime. Weekend rates, hunh, my dick is hard, yo.”
Mero: “Damn, you know how much vacation time that nigga probably accruing?”
“You don’t even look at girls and shit, you like, ‘You know that nigga got benefits, right? Oooh, I wonder what that nigga paystub look like.’ Wake up in the morning with your robe open, watching the sanitation workers.”
I have to wait for the Bronx niggas to calm down before I can nod at the dude in the barber’s chair. “So?”
The dude in the chair shrugs. “I’m here getting a new arm.”
“You lose the old one workin’?”
“Yeah, but the Sponsors got me covered. Paid for my hospital time and everything.”
Mero leans forward on his crate. “They ain’t dock your pay?”
The dude winks as Miguel fuses the metal to the man’s nerves. “Government job, yo.”
“Issa Babylon ting,” Marlon murmurs in an exaggerated Rasta accent, smirking.
I squint. “That don’t hurt?”
The dude lets loose another shrug. Not sure if he’s trying hard to advertise for these factory jobs. Maybe he’s getting paid to seem as excited for this gig as he reasonably can. “Nah, the Company turns off the pain receptors for my appointment. My chip, yo.”
I look at my thumb, where my own chip was put in after the parole board back in New York approved my release. Can’t tell if it’s the way the sun’s shining and casting shadows, but I think I see it glowing blue under my skin. Blue bars like the Company logo I seen on the billboards.
* * *
There’s a bunch of us in a circle.
Dr. Bissell’s the one with his back to the door, and the rest of us sit around him. About eight of us or so. Almost all black and brown. Nobody’s got gang tats, so it’s like we were all singles passing through the system, spat out to land here in this little oasis where we have a job and a pretty big place to sleep. Dr. Bissell doesn’t say much. Looks like he’s been doing these sessions for a while, and he’s seen enough of us come through that he knows it’s impossible to “earn” our respect, like a points system or something, but that sometimes you just gotta let the one guy talk and the others’ll maybe slide through that open door. I remember the prison counselors and all those mental health workers Rikers used to churn through. Just couldn’t shut the fuck up and stick around to wait and see that these closed-down, shut-down niggas just lookin’ for a reason, any reason, to talk.
Calvin’s here too. Tan-color button-down over his Jupiter-sized belly.
“Violence causes trauma,” Calvin had told me just before I slid through the open door to this room. “And trauma causes violence, Youngblood. Hurt people hurt people.” He’d said it in a low, counseling voice. I wanted to tell him to stop calling me Youngblood. Twenty-eight ain’t that young.
A kid named Davis is talking. Philly kid. Probably the kind of shooter Philly rappers rapped about knowing personally. The ones they were whipping work in the kitchen with, maybe the type to appear in their music videos. If I pulled up a Meek or Beanie or Cassidy music video on someone’s tablet, I’d maybe see him neon-lit in the background.
“It’s like, we don’t get shot or stabbed, we get ourselves shot or stabbed, you know?” He talks with his hands in front of him, constantly putting his fist in his palm for emphasis. That’s the whole ambit of his reach. He doesn’t wave, doesn’t point, just claps with his knuckles and palms. “Like, my boy—I ain’t gonna say his name—but after he got shot and got out the ER, he used to jump out in front of buses and, at the last minute, hold his hands out.” Soft clap. “I ain’t wanna end up like that. So soon as I could, I got the transfer to Watts. I heard you was here.” He shakes his head. “And all over some stupid shit.”
An Atlanta cat named Hendrix, with dreads down past his shoulders, leans back in his chair. Type of nigga to wear sunglasses indoors. “You ever think about revenge?”
Davis bristles. “All the time, nigga. What you think?”
Their voices have started to rise, and I eye Dr. Bissell, who remains unmoved.
“That’s why I come here. So I can talk about it, ’stead of do it. What I look like, huntin’ the nigga who stabbed me over weed.”
I feel Ella in the room. Standing somewhere between me and Davis. Haunting me. And her Thing, her ability to get into other people’s heads, it’s starting to get to me, so that when Davis talks about the nigga who stabbed him over weed, I can see the abandoned church on the corner of 18th and Ridge in North Central Philly, and I can see Davis taking too long to mull over a purchase and the other dude, bulky Sixers jacket on to protect against the Philly winter, sucking his teeth, getting impatient, then telling Davis to go buy his weed elsewhere in a few more words than that and Davis saying, “I go wherever the fuck I wanna go,” and the dude saying some things back, then Davis swinging and catching the dude on the side of his head, and the dude swinging and Davis not caring if the dude was strapped, just knowing that if he got the drop fast enough, he could smack the dogshit outta dude, but then metal glints—a knife—and the other dude slashes then stabs, and then Davis watching the knife going in and out in and out in and out, still swinging, feeling no pain, even though there’s blood everywhere, then the dude running out of Davis’s grip and Davis writhing on the ground, then Davis thinking of calling an ambulance, thankful the weedman ain’t take his phone, but then realizing he’d have to pay, like, $2,000 so, gritting his teeth, Davis picks himself up and walks a little over a mile to Hahnemann University’s emergency department. During the whole walk, Davis is holding his stomach together. Blood drips on the sidewalk. Strangers see him, offer to help. But his Francisville folk, the people he’s known all his life, know better than that. They know what kind of person he is. So he shrugs off the strangers and walks and walks and walks.
And I wake up, still in the circle with the other Watts guys. Everybody’s quiet, and Davis is looking at me with this pained look in his eyes. I got no idea how long I was out. But I must’ve been staring the whole time.
I put my hand to my eyes, shake Ella out of my head.
“I’m good,” I say quietly. It looks like they’re waiting for me to say more, but I’ve already lied once to these guys. When Hendrix starts talking about his prison bid and the first time he got thrown in AdSeg, I have to leave. I can’t live through that guy’s memories too.
* * *
Dr. Bissell’s door is open, but I knock anyway.
He has a tablet on his desk and a few pictures of what I guess are his family. The frames’ backs are turned to me, so it’s just a guess. He sees me and smiles, then gets up to shake my hand. “Kevin, right?”
“Yeah. Kev. Kevin Jackson.”
He goes to close the door, then I sit down in one of the chairs and he takes his seat behind his desk.
“Trouble sleeping,” I tell him, before he can keep going with any small talk. “You the type of doctor that can write a prescription or something?”
“We don’t do prescriptions here.” He folds his hands and leans forward on his desk. His shirtsleeves are rolled up. No tattoos that I can see. Doesn’t mean he isn’t his own kind of hard. “But if residual anxiety from your time inside is getting to be too much, I can write to the Company and have them up your dosage.”
