Single Mom (19 page)

“Yo, Jay, I hear you workin’ the night shift, man! They still hiring?”

I turned around and spotted my man Calvin sitting on a milk crate across the street from the bus stop. He was a sophomore when I was a senior at West Side High. He was the only sophomore who made varsity that year on the basketball team. The boy had skills back in the day! But he was looking ragged that night.

“What’s been up, Cal!” I yelled at him. I rushed over there to give him a pound before my bus came. Calvin smelled like he pissed on himself. I shook his hand anyway.

“Bring me an application when you come back,” he told me.

I looked over into the corner of the abandoned storefront he sat in front of and noticed fresh piss running down the cracks in the sidewalk. I was relieved that Calvin had taken a leak, instead of going on himself, but he still looked terrible. His twisted face made him look fifty. He was only thirty-two.

All of a sudden, I was glad to see my bus coming. “Aw’ight, I’ll see what I can do,” I lied to him. I ran back across the street to my bus.

“Aw’ight, dawg!” he hollered at me.

I took a seat next to the window and watched Calvin being approached by some young hustler offering him a small package.

An older black woman sitting in front of me grunted, “Mmmph,” and shook her head.

Calvin didn’t want any damn job. He wanted to be high. High forever. Because when you’re high, you don’t have to punch in, wear no uniform, listen to no bosses, or wait on no hot, funky bus. When you’re high, you’re not going anywhere, and your only track of time is how long it took you to get from one high to the next.

I sat there on the bus, philosophizing about getting high for the entire ride to the train station. Then I thought about it some more while on the train. By the time I got off at my stop, I knew that I wanted to be at work, because I liked being able to go places. Getting high always made me lazy, especially when I was still running ball every day. That’s when I first started sitting around thinking about doing stupid shit, like robbing people. In fact, I was high the night I got arrested.

I got to work at ten of twelve. My boss, Roger Collinski, looked at his watch and said, “You’re late,” with a smile on his face.

I grinned at him and said, “Yeah, I knew I should have taken that taxi. You just can’t count on these buses sometimes.”

We laughed about it. Then he asked me about my son’s basketball game.

“My boy did all right. He had twelve points, eight rebounds, and a couple of blocked shots, but he was in foul trouble most of the time,” I told him. “They ended up losing sixty-eight to fifty-seven. It was the other guys on the team that lost it for ’em. They were playing like they didn’t expect to be there, all nervous and whatnot. My boy was the only one playing defense, that’s how he ended up getting in foul trouble.”

Roger nodded and said, “I know just what you mean. My oldest son, Johnny, had a great arm in high school, but he didn’t have any guys who could get down the field and catch the deep ball. My second son, David, used to work out and catch the ball with him, but he was a freshman when Johnny was a senior.

“Now David has some great hands in his junior year, but the quarterback sucks; a damn candy arm. I even thought hard about transferring my boys to a school where they could really use their talents, but I decided not to. Because although I love the game of football, I understand that an education is the only guarantee to success. Now
that
ain’t even good enough. Nowadays, you gotta get yourself a master’s degree, kick ass, and take names!”

“Yeah, that’s the same predicament my son’ll be in this year. He’ll be going to Belmont Creek,” I told him. “I don’t know if they’ll win much, but at least he’ll be the star of the team in a few years.”

Roger looked at me and said, “Belmont Creek? That’s in Oak Park, isn’t it?”

I said, “Yeah, he lives out there with his mother. She went and got herself a degree in business, kicked ass, and took names,” I added with a chuckle.

“You see that?” Roger told me, smiling. “Now your boy’s in good shape. Belmont Creek will definitely get him ready for college.”

Whitney Young High School would, too
, I thought to myself. Whitney Young had a reputation for academics, a magnet program, and they were on the rise in basketball, too. But you had to kick ass and take names to even get in there. Many Chicago kids couldn’t get in.

Anyway, I thought about Little Jay’s future that whole night at work. Before I knew it, it was checkout time again.

“Man, you were working like a maniac tonight. You took some speed
before you came to work, some No-Doz or something?” my co-worker Orlando asked me.

“Naw, man, I just had a lot on my mind,” I answered him.

“Lando” was one of the few brothers there who worked with me. There were two Mexicans there, too; Eduardo and Jesus, pronounced “Hey-Zeus” in Spanish. Once I got to know him better, I would joke with him every now and then, about giving me the power of Hercules. I don’t think he got the joke at first, but after a while he caught on. The rest of the guys were Polish, Irish, and Italian. Chicago was a very ethnic city, like most big ones are.

When I was walking out that morning, Roger pulled me aside and said, “Remember what we were talking about last night?” He was speaking in low tones.

I looked at him confused.

“You know, about teamwork and talent with our sons?”

I said, “Oh, yeah. What about it?”

“Well, sometimes you have to make sure that
you’re
always prepared, regardless of what everyone else is doing. You know what I mean?”

At the time, I was just thinking about getting over to Kim’s house and getting some rest. I said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. And the cream rises to the top.” I was bullshitting again, just staying in good with my boss.

He said, “Yeah, but sometimes the cream has to learn how to keep a good team together by making crucial decisions and sacrifices.”

“Unh hunh,” I mumbled with a nod. I was just ready to get out of there.

Roger gave up on what he was trying to tell me and smiled. He saw that I was itching to go. “I’ll see you again tonight, Jimmie,” he said to me. “Get yourself some rest.”

“Definitely,” I told him. On my way to the train, Orlando stopped me on the street and asked me what the boss had talked to me about.

“Nothin’. Just sports, education, and leadership and stuff,” I told him. I didn’t think much of it.

Lando looked at me and asked, “You like that guy, man?”

I
did
like Roger. “Yeah, he’s all right,” I said. “He don’t give
me
any problems.”

Lando was a short, secretive-looking brother. He was the kind of man who always had some undercover news. He said, “I don’t trust that white boy, man. I wouldn’t get too close to him if I was you. You know how
these white boys with a manager position are. They’re laughing and joking with you one week, and firing you the next.”

I looked into Lando’s small, frowning face, and all of a sudden, Roger’s advice made perfect sense to me. He was telling me not to get mixed up into the crowd. He was telling me to always make my own decisions. So I did just the opposite of what Orlando was telling me. I didn’t get close to him and the other guys. Roger was the one who had given me the job, so I considered him the
first
man to trust.

Sure enough, after a few more weeks, people were getting fired, and Lando was one of the first on the list. I had been through that same shit countless times before, but not this time. Lando had complained, but he was always disappearing on the job. He was forever taking extra-long breaks and getting out of doing shit. I would have fired his ass if I was the manager, too! That’s what Roger meant when he talked about keeping a good team together by making crucial decisions and sacrifices.

I appreciated Roger for taking a liking to me and looking out for me like he did. White, black, green, or yellow, if a man looks out for me, then I have to respect him for that. There are too few real friends in this world to turn down a sincere handshake just because of the color of the hand. It took me thirty-four years to realize that. A lot of brothers would never trust a white man; we have too much baggage in our history of their wrongdoings. But I was glad that I trusted Roger. He turned out to be a real friend.

Anyway, I got over to Kim’s place that morning, and her son, Jamal, was staring me in the face as soon as I walked in.

“Hi,” I said to him. What else could I say?

“Hi,” he said back. He smiled with a bunch of energy and jumped on my legs.

I reached down and lifted him up into the air. He felt heavier than I thought he would be. I was a little drained in the strength department from working all night. I damn near dropped the boy.

“Watch that!” his mom yelled at me.

I laughed it off and put him back down. “Shouldn’t he be in summer camp somewhere?” Neecy had always sent Little Jay and Walter to camp.

“These camps cost too much,” Kim told me. As soon as she finished saying it, she realized that she was wrong. She started acting shaky, just like a guilty person. I was very familiar with the nervous energy that guilt could cause. I mean, how much of a financial burden would it be to
send your only kid to summer camp? I never had any stable money to do it with. If I did, I would have been able to move out of my mother’s place a long-ass time ago! Kim
had
stable money, she just wasn’t looking out for her son’s best interest. I was beginning to think more like a responsible parent before I even knew it. I knew right from wrong when it came to kids. I just had to begin applying myself.

“Maybe I’ll send him next year,” Kim told me.

I was tempted to ask her how much the summer camps cost, but I decided not to. It wasn’t my decision to make. But I did care about it. Jamal should have been with other kids somewhere, enjoying the summer and his youth. You’re only young
once
. I wish that I could have been young again. I would have done a lot of things differently.

“You play basketball?” Jamal looked up and asked me. As a black man in America, once you reach a certain height, that question will always be in the back of people’s minds, especially with the popularity of the NBA and the connection to urban playgrounds in the ’90s. Hell, in five more years, with the start-up of the WNBA, people might start to think of tall black women as bailers too. Maybe Neecy had a point about overemphasizing basketball. That’s not all that we do.

I said, “Who told you that?”

Jamal smiled and said, “My mom.”

I figured that. I guess she was going to try and use her son to get closer to me with the whole basketball thing. That wasn’t right either, but I was too tired to think about it. I just wanted to lay down. “Well, not anymore. I just watch the game now,” I told him. Then I asked Kim if I could lay down. She led me to her room.

Jamal followed us in.

“No, Jamal, he can’t play with you right now. He’s been working all night and he needs his rest,” she said, closing the door and pushing her son out. She made it sound as if we were going to play when I woke up. I wasn’t planning on it.

Kim stuck her head back in the door a minute later and asked me if I wanted some breakfast.

“If I’m still up when you finish, I’ll eat it,” I told her. “But if I’m not …”

She smiled, all happy-looking, and said, “I told you my son likes you.”

I shook my head and stretched out on her king-size bed. She actually had a
king-size bed
and was complaining about the cost of sending her son to summer camp! I couldn’t believe that! I had heard about single
mothers who spent more money on themselves, but to actually be that close to it was ridiculous.

I ate a little bit of Kim’s scrambled eggs, sausage, and pancakes and fell asleep. When I woke up, it was two-thirty in the afternoon. The only reason I was up was because Kim had to go to work. She was making a bunch of noise in the room while she got dressed.

“Where’s your son?” I asked her. I just knew she wasn’t going to try and leave him there with me.

“He’s going over to his grandmother’s. Why, you thought that I would try and get you to baby-sit?” she asked with a grin.

I smiled back at her. “I was just making sure that you wasn’t, because I got somewhere to go.” I didn’t really feel up to making it down to Neecy’s office, but at least it was the truth.

Kim asked me, “When are you leaving?”

Actually, I didn’t feel that tired anymore. I said, “I might as well leave now.”

“You don’t have to leave right this minute if you don’t want to. I can give you the extra key, and you can give it back to me when you come back,” Kim told me. She was really coming on strong!

I said, “Naw, I’m late already. I need to get going.”

“Well, I can give you the extra key anyway, in case you wanna come back and get some more rest.”

I started to feel like a turkey being fattened up for the kill. I jumped up out of that bed and got myself together. “When are you getting off work?” I asked her.

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Damn. Well, I won’t see you again until tomorrow,” I told her.

She started smiling and said, “Or, you could stop past my job.”

I looked her over. Kim was wearing this tight black uniform that hugged all of her curves, with a skirt that stopped well above the knees. I started wondering what the rest of the women at her job looked like, just out of curiosity. “Where is it at again?”

Kim wrote down the address, got me something to drink, and we all left without me getting that extra key she kept pushing.

“Tell Mr. Jay bye,” she told her son.

Jamal smiled at me and said it.

I told him, “Bye, little man,” and headed on my way. Kim wasn’t even trying to hide anything. She was being outright
bold
about wanting me in their life. I just wasn’t trying to commit to the idea.

I jumped on a bus heading to Halsted Street and found myself getting
nervous. I really didn’t feel up to arguing with Neecy. I was already two hours late. Maybe she would have some other things to do by the time I got there. I tried to convince myself not to go, but my manhood wouldn’t let me back down. I used to
rule
this girl, and I didn’t care how successful she was, I couldn’t allow her to turn around and
rule
me! So I planned to march into Neecy’s office like a man and set her ass straight!