Slapboxing with Jesus (Vintage Contemporaries Original) Read online

  —Do you think she’ll be back soon? I asked.

  She considered it. —Keisha’s in class right now, I think. At the college.

  I nodded, looked around the room for my pick. —Could you tell her I called?

  —Sean, you know she’ll be graduating in two years. From college, I’m saying. She deserves something good. You understand what I mean?

  We’d known each other for a long time. When I was moving into this place, after high school, she and Keisha had helped me pack some things. Keisha and I had just been friends then. Her mother told me it was a good thing for a man to get out someway when he turned eighteen.

  —I know what you’re telling me Miss Bonyers. Keisha could do better.

  She didn’t even inhale again for thirty or forty seconds. —No, Sean. You didn’t hear me. That’s not what I meant.

  I sat quiet. Soon she said, —I’ll tell her. Can she call you tonight? Will you be around?

  I stood, walked to the window. —No, I said. Me and Ray are going out.

  —Well then, Miss Bonyers said and left it at that.

  K broke out and then we made the trip. It was a train first, just to get us out of Brooklyn. In Queens we rode a bus with no heat, people huddled up in their clothes. I tried again, eyes closed, and decreed that no one would ever go cold, but as before, I guessed my scope was too small. When the bus dropped us off, we were two blocks from Lianne’s building.

  —I just thought of something. I asked Ray what that was. Didn’t bring no condoms for my joint, he explained. I totally forgot. You got any I could use?

  —Nah duke, I didn’t bring any.

  —What you going to do? he asked.

  —Like always papa, raw daddy.

  —For real? He laughed like he was shocked. You do that shit a lot?

  —Nah, just with Lianne when I see her. And Keisha.

  We walked toward the right building, but here in Lefrak City each one looked like the others, tall and light red brick, curved driveway out front, parking lots only for people who’d signed a lease. All the stores had bright signs, for Chinese food, for liquor, so much light I bet you could see us from the moon.

  —Keisha, I said, that’s my heart, so you know she’s gotta feel me. Plus I want her to drop my seed.

  Ray was dipping through his clothes for the fourth time, in case he’d just misplaced his rubbers, but all he found were breath mints and three D-cell batteries. He was always bringing things home from Radio Shack by mistake. Once it was a battery tester, for cars, handheld; he’d gone through the apartment, putting the two little tongs to anything and testing for a current. He even tried the living. A cat from next door had none. I’d told him it was stupid, but in bed with Keisha one day I had her attach them to my pointer fingers, just to see if it would register a charge.

  —Why Lianne? Ray asked.

  —We used to always use something, but it was more because I didn’t want any babies with her. I don’t know how, but she shot out one ugly-ass kid.

  —True. He tossed a broken red pen against a fire hydrant.

  —I can’t take any chances, I told him. She takes the pill. I can’t have some ugly kids.

  —That is important, he agreed.

  At the doorway to Lianne’s building we stopped and stared at each other. I pressed the buzzer. —Who? Lianne asked over the intercom.

  —It’s me, I screamed loud so she could hear. The door buzzed and Ray grabbed it. Everything around us was electric, powerful. No one could have told me that we weren’t divine. I’m coming for you, I promised into the speaker.

  —Get your ass upstairs, she said. We dying up here.

  She gave me an idea. I shut my eyes.

  ghost story

  Move anywhere, when you’re from the Bronx, you’re of the Bronx, it doesn’t shed. The buildings are medium height: schools, factories, projects. It’s not Manhattan, where everything’s so tall you can’t forget you’re in a city; in the Bronx you can see the sky, it’s not blotted out. The place isn’t standing or on its back, the whole borough lies on its side. And when the wind goes through there, you can’t kid yourself—there are voices.

  I was at war and I was in love. Of both, the second was harder to hide, there was evidence. Like beside my bed, a three-liter bottle, almost full. I rolled from under my covers, spun off the cap, pulled down my pants, held myself to the hole and let go.

  Besides me and the bottle, my room had a bed, some clothes hanging in the closet, books spread out across the floor. Somewhere in that pile of texts and manifestos were two papers I had to turn in if I ever wanted to be a college graduate.

  Cocoa was in the next room, snoring and farting. I listened to him, all his sounds were music.

  I finished, pulled up my sweatpants and closed the bottle; inside, the stuff was so clear you could hold it to one eye and read a message magnified on the other side. I religiously removed the label from this one like I had all the others, so when I put it at the bottom of the closet with them, in formation (two rows of three), I could check how they went from dark to lighter to this one, sheer as a pane of glass; each was like a revision—with the new incarnation you’re getting closer and closer to that uncluttered truth you might be hunting privately. I would show them all to a woman I loved, one I could trust; that had been tried three times already—the two stupid ones had asked me to empty them and change my life, the smart one had dressed right then and walked out. This was my proof, their intolerance, that people hate the body. But me, I was in love.

  Cocoa and I had grown up poor and I was the stupid one; I believed that’s how we were supposed to stay. That’s why, when I saw him on the train two months before, with his girl, Helena, her stomach all fat with his seed, I didn’t leave him alone. I walked right over. I was at war too, and needed the help.

  She’d looked up before he did; the express cut corners and I fooled myself into thinking she was glad to see me. —Hey Sammy, she forced out. Cocoa was working, I was sure of that; she was rocking three new gold fronts on her bottom teeth.

  I asked, —You going to be a mommy?

  Started telling me how many months along she was but I’d stopped listening; soon she wasn’t talking. Her jewelry disappeared behind her closed mouth. Cocoa hugged me tight like when we were fourteen: me and him coming out of the crap church on the corner of 163rd, the one with neon-bright red bricks, the painted sign on the door, misspelling the most important word (“cherch”). It was when his mother died, quick, and we were leaving the ceremony, behind us the thirty more people who’d cared to come. It had been a nice day so fellas were hanging out in crews everywhere and despite them Cocoa hadn’t been able to hide his crying like his father and uncles had. I put my hand on his shoulder, patted it hard like men do, but it wasn’t enough. So I wrapped my arms around his neck and hugged, on the corner, like even his pops would never care: publicly. When Dorice walked by I didn’t stop and she probably thought we looked gay; still, I didn’t force him back and try to catch up to her. And Cocoa? He didn’t push me away, he leaned closer. He hugged me like that when I saw him on the train, like there was a death nearby. He looked right at me.

  —We need to chill again, I said.

  The way Cocoa grinned, it was like I’d given him cash. He was small, but he had the kind of smile it takes two or three generations of good breeding to grow; the one descendants of the Mayflower had after four centuries of feeding themselves fruit I’d never get my lips around (the kind where fresh means just picked, not just brought out for display). It was a good smile that made people trust him, think he was going places. Helena touched his leg, but he brushed her back, saying, —I’m just getting his number.

  I watched Helena’s back curl like it would when the stomach got grander, the baby inside pushing out its little legs like it might kick a hole; as she sank I told Cocoa my number and he gave me his; he was living with Helena and her family, back in the Bronx.

  —Wake up! I yelled out to the living room.

/>   There was a class today. Physics, I think, but me passing that now was like a dude trying to be monogamous—impossible. Cocoa hadn’t missed a lecture or seminar all year, he’d bragged about it, so the last three days he’d been with me were only getting him in trouble with the mother-to-be. When she beeped him, every few hours, and he called back, she’d say she needed errands run, but her cousin Zulma was around, and her aunt; she was just on that ultrahorny pregnant-woman program and Cocoa knew. He would say, over the phone, —You know I can’t sleep with you when you’re pregnant, that would be wrong. I might give the baby a dent in its head. He laughed with me when he hung up, but while they were talking I said nothing; I listened from the kitchen to every syllable; if I’d had a pen and paper nearby I would have written it all down.

  He stood in my doorway. He was slim as well as short but still seemed to take up all the space. Cocoa said, —You’re messing me up. That stuff from last night is still bothering me. What did we drink?

  —I had a bugged dream, I muttered.

  —I’d hate to hear it, Cocoa said. I’m going to make some breakfast.

  My hand, I placed it against the window to see how cold it was out. It wasn’t a snowy winter. When I’d enrolled at City College it had been a big deal. I’d be getting my own place. My mother and sister were against it, but when you hit eighteen they call that adulthood and a lot more decisions are yours to make. Plus, you know how it is with boys in a family of women, they won’t let go. When I’d first moved in, Mom and Karen were coming by once a week to check on me, but after two years of staying on top of things, schedules, they had no choice, they let me be.

  Three nights ago, when Cocoa had come to hang out, I’d made him wait outside while I got things in place: threw my pillows and sheets back on my bed, plugged everything in. I kept up with news, they were doing renovations all over the Bronx: new buildings, the parks reseeded with grass and imported trees, you could almost pretend there wasn’t a past.

  After breakfast, for an hour, Cocoa and I took trains up and down the spines of Manhattan. Then we stood outside Washington Square Park, on the side farthest from NYU (Cocoa’s school), staring at three women he thought he knew. I was shaking my head. —No, no. You don’t know them. They’re way too pretty to be talking to you.

  He spat, —You criticize when you get them herpes sores off your lips.

  I touched my chin. —They’re only pimples.

  —Then wash your face.

  He’d been giving me advice since we were kids. He had thought that if he just told me how to be better I could be. Age ten was the first time for either of us that I acted up: when people whispering into telephones were talking about only me, a radio announcer was making personal threats (—Someone out there, right now, is suffering and won’t get relief until they’re our ninety-eighth caller and gets these tickets to Bermuda!). And Cocoa grabbed me tight as I dialed and redialed the pay phone in front of our building, screaming for someone to lend me twenty cents.

  Cocoa walked and I moved beside him; we entered the park. The day was a cold one so the place wasn’t way too full like summers when you couldn’t move ten feet without having to dodge some moron with a snake on his shoulders or a cipher of kids pretending they’re freestyling lyrics they’d written down and memorized months before. —I saw Evette the other day, I told him.

  He smiled. —What are you telling me that for? Anyway, she married someone didn’t she?

  —Well, you staring at them three girls, I thought I’d tell you about one you actually got.

  We had come to an NYU building and he told me to wait outside; he was angry that I’d brought up this woman with him trying so hard to be good; really, I don’t know why I did. When I’d called him a few days earlier, it had been because I knew I needed help, but once he was with me I avoided the issue.

  My hands in my coat pockets, they were full of those used tissues from the flu in March. I had planned to keep them in a pillowcase under my bed when I got better, but those were all filled with the hairs I clipped off and saved, so it was September and I had never truly healed and my hands were full of dried snot.

  Maybe if he hadn’t been doing so well, if his girl hadn’t been so pretty, if his grades weren’t soaring, if he’d been unhealthy, anything, but I couldn’t confide in someone doing so much better than me. I wouldn’t feel like I was asking for help, more like charity. The man he was now, I couldn’t sit down with him and go through all the events in my day to figure out which thing was damning me: that I woke up every day, alarmless, at seven-forty? that I couldn’t stand the taste of milk anymore? that I kept putting off a trip to the supermarket and so the cupboards and fridge were empty? that I had two pillowcases under my bed, one full of cut hair, the other full of old tissues? They all made sense to me.

  They all had reasons: 1) for two years I’d had nine A.M. classes so now my body, even though I’d stopped attending, had found a pattern; 2) on campus two women had pulled me aside and shown me pamphlets about the haphazard pasteurization process, pictures of what a cow’s milk does to human lungs so that even just a commercial for cereal made my chest tighten; 3) I’d dated a woman who worked at the market two blocks away, had been too open in explaining my collections to her one night, sat dejected and embarrassed as she dressed and walked out forever, so I couldn’t go back in there even if it was silly pride; there wasn’t another grocery for blocks, when I needed food I just bought something already made and I was mostly drinking water now (to watch a cleansing process in myself) and you could get that from a tap. And 4) it wasn’t just my body, but The Body that I loved. So where others saw clippings as waste and mucus as excess, all to be collected and thrown away, spend no time on them, to me they were records of the past, they were treasures. Just tossing them out was like burying a corpse too quickly—rub your face against the cold skin, kiss the stony elbows, there is still majesty in that clay. People hate the body, especially those who praise the life of the mind. But even fingernails are miracles. Even odors. Everything of or in the body is a celebration of itself, even the worst is a holy prayer.

  I found, as soon as he spoke, as I considered opening myself, I hated him again; I wanted to mention anything that would ruin his happiness. Like that, I brought up Evette and the night before it had been Wilma. Cocoa came out the building, pushing the glass door with power. Smiling.

  —Your divorce come through? I asked.

  He stopped, composed himself back to pleasure. —Today, a little boy was born.

  —Yours? I thought it wasn’t for three or four more months. I was suddenly hopeful for the pain of something premature; I could talk to a man who was living through that kind of hurt.

  —Not mine. Once a week I find out the name of a baby, a boy if I can, that was born. Newspaper, radio, Internet. This kid was born today, his father already posted pictures. Nine pounds seven ounces, man. Benjamin August something. He looked healthy. It’s good luck.

  I laughed. —I bet that kid wasn’t born in the Bronx. If he was he’d have come out coughing. One fear of every South Bronx parent: asthma. It was enough to make Cocoa tap me one, hard, in the chest and I fell back onto a parked car. His child would be born in the Bronx, he didn’t want to be reminded of the dangers. I put my fists out, up. I’d been planning for this, not with him, but with someone. Had been eating calcium tablets every day, fifteen of them (student loan refund checks are a blessing), and now my bones were hard like dictionaries.

  He didn’t hit anymore. It’s what I wanted.

  Do you remember the hospital? Not torturous (well, maybe one time), no beatings though; it wasn’t even the drugs; try one word: boredom. You could move around but there was nothing to chase the mind, hardly even television if you weren’t always good. Just the hours that were eons sitting on a couch, a row of you, ten or twenty, no books, magazines too simple for the mildly retarded and your active mind leaps further and further over an empty cosmos, as lonely as the satellites sent to find life in the univ
erse. But in there, at least, was when I’d realized how they waged their war, my enemies: through sockets and plugs, through a current.

  We balanced on a corner as cabs passed by in yellow brilliance. It was late morning. I noticed how much energy was on: some streetlights never went off, people passing spoke on phones and the charged batteries glowed, radios came on and stayed on, computers were being run, every floor of every building. The taxi horns, engine-powered, began to sound like my name being called; I kept turning my head; the sounds bounced around inside my body, leafing through my bastard anatomy like I was a book of poems.

  He spoke but the words were coming out of his mouth now all orange. I could see them, like the cones put out on the road at night to veer traffic away from a troubled spot. He said, —Look, let’s not get craz, uh, let’s not get agitated. I know someplace we could hang out. It’ll be real good.

  The NYU banners flapped with the wind, loud enough to sound like teeth cracking in your head. And how many times had I heard that noise! Like in the last month maybe five; whenever the remote control wasn’t working or the phone bloopblopbleeped in my ear about no more Basic Service and I took each instrument between my teeth and bit down, trying to chew my anger out, that rage of mine which could take on such proportions.

  Thought we’d catch the 4 to 149th and Grand Concourse—everybody out, everybody home. We could pass the murals of young men painted outside candy stores and supermarkets, where a thoughtful friend might have set out a new candle, where mourning seemed like a lifestyle. Instead we took the 6 and got out at 116th, walked blocks, then left, to Pleasant Avenue. My sister’s home.

  Cocoa saw me turn, flinch like someone had set off a car alarm in my ear, but then he put his arm on my shoulder and pushed hard, said, —Come on. Keep going. Cocoa kept pushing until we got upstairs, to the door, green, on it the numbers had been nailed in and the air had oxidized their faux-gold paint into that blackened color so familiar to buildings across our income level. He rang the bell. (Are they artificially powered?) The sound was so shrill I guessed they were part of the enemy army. Our first battle, twelve years before in the drab brown medical ward, had been so quick I’m sure they’d thought I’d forget. But I’d squirmed after they set those wires against my little forehead, so when they flipped the charge that one time, the lines slipped and burned both cheeks black; years later the spots were still there.