65. Too Late For Laments

 

Soon I will no longer have any need, or reason, to feel shame or to apologize. I can’t recall mother having done either, or that she ever expected one or the other of me. When I was a child, some kids stole other kids’ bikes or jackets, insulted each other by questioning each other’s sexuality or practices, or damaged or destroyed property. I did none of those things, although they were done to me. Certainly that didn’t make me any more moral than, or superior to, anyone else.

I realize now that you only learn about shame and contrition when you’ve had to express them yourself. The only such experience I had growing up was having to say something called “The Act of Contrition” during mass. I didn’t understand it, even after I looked up the word “contrition,” probably because it made no sense for me—or anyone, really—to say it. Even at such a young age, I realized how silly it was, and how it was even sillier to talk to someone who wasn’t there, especially if someone told you he was there but couldn’t tell you where, much less how or why.

For that matter, all apologies now seem absurd—now there’s a word I wish I’d known then!—in the way that alarms installed after a burglary seem pointless and useless. The deed is done; the doer is gone—mentally, if not physically. He’s gone on to other things, unless of course he’s rationalizing or gloating over what he’s done. In which case he isn’t going to apologize anyway.

Even if I’d given that man a chance to acknowledge his rape of me, it wouldn’t’ve changed him, or me, or anything. You could even say that if he could or would see how he’d violated me, he wouldn’t’ve said he was sorry. I wonder now whether that’s what mother thought.

And so it wouldn’t’ve made any sense, or changed anything, if I’d apologized for having retaliated—had I done such a thing—in the moment after he attacked me, or in the future. Beating, mutilating, killing him wouldn’t’ve been acts of rage, an emotion that precludes—some say precedes, but I don’t see how—sorrow.

Mother never expected apologies from me, even though nothing I’ve done, nothing I’ve become, justifies the difficulties I caused her. I’ll never know—though I can guess accurately, I think—whether she’d wanted or planned for me. Not that she ever implied, even in anger, that I constricted her life, as other parents have told children who became some of the people I’ve met since I left this block. Vivian’s father always reminded her of his abandoned ambitions toward a musical career, or that he’d played drums behind guitarists and singers whose records kids—and sometimes their parents—in my generation, even on my block, bought and listened to. Maybe mother had no such aspirations, simply because she didn’t have time to have them. But if she’d had dreams, I never heard about them.

It’s no surprise, I guess, that she never even made me apologize for not having aspirations of my own. For one thing, I was never sure I’d grow up to realize them. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t live long enough, or that if I did I’d end up in jail or a mental hospital. That’s what happened to the young men here—or else they simply disappeared. Even if I survived to seventeen, eighteen years old on this block, I’d had no idea how I’d finish high school, much less go to college. Not that I’d want either one. School, for me, was always just a place where I was prey and supposed to get used to it. And expect no apologies, no expressions of shame from anyone.

Not that I would’ve expected anything from the other kids—mostly boys—or the teachers, the principal or anybody else. Kids beat up other kids in the hope that someone else wouldn’t beat them. They won fights, games, competitions—none of which mattered away from school, much less this block—so they wouldn’t have to experience defeat for the moment, a day or—they hoped—forever. They did what they did—just as I lied, stole, sold my body and killed—and offered no apologies or explanations for the same reasons I didn’t, mother didn’t, why nobody on this block did. You don’t—or perhaps you can’t—justify anything you do to survive, to make it from one moment to the next. Some people—we often hear about them in the news—may try to offer an expression of contrition, an acceptance of responsibility, for their deeds or those of their parents, long after they’re done. But they’re not lamenting the deeds themselves: Usually, they’re ruing some outcome of it. Like that scientist who said “I have become death!”-- or something like that-- long after he and his colleagues exploded the first atomic bomb.

64. Fall

Days’ve been growing shorter. At times, that would’ve meant more work, or at least more time for it. At times like that, I’d hardly see daylight. I probably won’t for the next few months.

It’s one of those things you never stop noticing if you’ve had to notice it before: the length of darkness, not the lack of daylight. On this block, you don’t see those bright, sunny vistas stretching endlessly, like the ones you see in all those paintings and photos in the books they try to make you like in school. The sidewalks, the street, the tar and slate on the roofs, the darkening bricks and shingles refract any light from the sky into shadows and other shades of gray.

And the night: It’s just another, deeper shade of charcoal—what’s left at the end of the day.

So in spite of—no, because of—all the fears I’ve had, I’ve never been afraid of the dark. On this block, it’s a bit of a relief. When you’re a very young kid, nobody expects anything of you, except perhaps that you sleep at some specified hour. There’s nobody to beat or harass you on your way to or from school. Nobody snubs you or starts conversation when you’re in your house, alone. And nobody else did when I was with mother.

It’ll be night—evening for those who don’t work—soon. Nothing you can do about it, but nothing to fear, either. Didn’t some poet say that we don’t die from darkness; instead, we die from cold?

When it gets dark, I get to come in from the cold. Or at least I’d find ways out of it. Late on a fall or winter afternoon—at least sometimes—I walk in the chilly air, looking for my way out. Shadows disappear and headlights reflect off my shiny boots and glows in the sheen of my make-up.

Someone brings me into a room and turns out the lights. After a while, even the acrid, salty smells of a man’s skin and hair fade away with the honking, shouting and skidding on the street. Here is only the rough, bristly feel of hairs when the flesh presses or pulls away my flesh. Of course it helps to numb your nerve endings with the bottle, the pipe or the needle. You move from one to another as your need deepens. It always does; everyone who’s sold his or her body will tell you that if they’ll tell you anything.

All touching, all kissing, all caressing lead to penetration—something that is always, by definition, against the will of the penetrated. So the practices to which people refer when they’re talking about “making love” always pierce into that same places, into the those same places—for me, under my spleen and back in my throat—where you were first entered, through stealth or overt violence.

I’ve been told that at the end of the transition I’m making, I’ll no longer have a sex life or, as some have called it, a “love life’. That doesn’t deter me now. Until I left this block, my body was always used by people—actually, males—I never saw again. Nothing changed, except that now I get paid.

I guess that in that way, at least, I’m not different from most people, on this block or off it. Things happen for no apparent reason; after you get paid for them, then you pay.

And the nights are getting longer now. Just as mother’s leaving.

63. The Price

 

All of my life, I’ve respected only one man: Adam. I recall him whenever I’m in the presence of anybody who’s just died, or when I hear about any death that matters to me.

Death is death. Vivian told me that, I think. She’s probably right, although I don’t know how she’d’ve known. We all become the same minerals; we feed worms, fish or some other scavengers when we’re dead. And in the end, I guess it doesn’t matter whether we’ve enabled a swimmer, crawler or flyer to continue living. It probably doesn’t even matter whether we’re interred whole, or buried or submerged in the ocean. There’s not much difference, really, except that the sad people—he ones born into grief and burdened with sorrow—always seem to want their corpses immolated.

After Adam died—was murdered—an intense heat—one that covered or at least occupied and filled—a hollow within—and I’m not just talking about a mere physical “inside of”—me. Mother often scolded me for leaving the house in the dead of winter without my coat. “But I’m too hot!” She insisted, demanded—but to my recollection, never threatened. And I’d wear my coat for as long as I could stand it or until mother was out of sight.

That feeling—heat coursing through me, as if from a fire no one notices because it’s deep in the ground—pushed up through my pores whenever someone I knew died from AIDS or was driven to that act the police and others conveniently classified as “suicide.”

There was none of that after the cops found the body to which they gave my former name. The cops called that one a murder—case closed. And no doubt it was, at least in the way they understand it. But he was not Adam; he was no Adam.

As I am not.

As for mother, the heat is rising, closer to the surface. It has nothing to do with the temperature of the room in which her body has been laid out: The other attendees—both of them—are wearing sweaters over their black dresses. I took off my jacket but I still feel beads of sweat forming just below my neck. Getting hotter; I don’t want the heat to consume me. Oh, if only there were a pool, or even a bathtub, here! The ocean’s only a couple of miles away. But I’ve never gotten to it from this block and have no idea of how to do that. I know the ocean’s there—at least I’ve always accepted it as some sort of knowledge—from the maps I saw when I was in school. Mother’d never’ve been any help on this one: She never went to the ocean, either.

I don’t know that Adam did, either. I’m not even sure he ever left that stoop, except to go in the house. He wasn’t like all the other men I’ve known—at least the ones I recall—who always seem to have the need to go some place or another, even if they’re always going to the same places. If they came back, they’d lie about what they’d done and where they’d been. They’d slept with everybody, or nobody. They didn’t have to pay for it, or they could afford whatever they wanted. Loved and spat upon, conquering fear yet with fear all the time. No need; they can’t do without. The same stuff, everywhere I’ve gone.

Except from Adam. He’s the only person I’ve known—except for mother, and then only after I left this block—who could give me something without demanding something else from me; who didn’t abandon or betray me when I made choices because I had no choice but to make them. He accepted shyness swaddled in 11-year-old baby fat; she never questioned me about the transformation I’m making, the next stage of which she won’t see.

Nor, for that matter, will the other two women in this room. Does the woman whose name I never knew realize who she’s seeing? She glances my way again; I see her squints and stares. Eyes like hers can’t hide furtiveness, which is to say attempts at stealth. They seem gray, lifeless, to anyone who sees her only for a moment. Any more than that, and you can see her color-- not quite blue or hazel or any other hue you’ve seen before—registering, it seems, tones and volumes pulsing from your blood, your bones or something else you don’t see when she sees you.

At that moment, it seems, she decides whether or not she decides to speak to you. Today, for the first time, I caught her indecision and uncertainty. When I lived on this block, I knew she’d never speak to me. Or to that man who used to come around to fight with mother. She never spoke to Mrs. Littington, and I doubt that she will today.

She’s looking my way again.

I never saw her speak to Adam: She never seemed to leave her house; nor did he leave his. But here she is, with mother and Mrs. Littington.

And him.

Out of respect for mother. For the ones she knew, with whom she shared coffee or roasted chickens, for whoever ate the drumsticks and wings. But not the necks. I still haven’t tried them. Mother never would’ve allowed that. For the boy she raised, from whom she kept his father, at least for as long as she could.

At least I never had to pretend I belonged to him. In fact, I’ve never had to respect him or any other man, so I never did. Except for Adam. He’s probably the only man I ever met, to this day, who could offer me a simple pleasure without obligations, without entanglements. He offered nothing more than those five-ounce bottles of soda and, when the mood suited him—or me—a conversation, sometimes a story.

Too bad about the way he died. But he’s still the only man who, to my knowledge, didn’t kill or inflict some other sort of violence on another person. I don’t know what he did before he got to this block, or at least whether he got to live because someone else didn’t. But, at least for the time he lived here, he didn’t kill or maim, or cause the death of anyone else.

Though bottles of soda are valuable currency in the world of children, he never extorted promises or confessions with them. Usually, when a man pays for something, he thinks it’s subject solely to his whims, his impulses. Don’t ever let a man pay for you; otherwise, you owe him. If he knows he’s going to see you again, he might wait. But if he’s in your life for an hour, he’ll take whatever he can get. If he pays for dinner, he’ll take the night from you. If he pays for your body, he thinks he can beat you. The only question is whether he’ll do it before or after he fucks you.

My stories weren’t so different from those of the girls who walked the streets. None will ever tell you of an encounter with a man like Adam.

On this block, nobody would ever speak of him.