You Know Where to Find Me Page 5

  Jim finishes his cigarette and throws it on the ground, stubs it out with his foot. I pick up the discarded butt from the ground, then reach for the glass ashtray tucked away behind my back, already filled with a half dozen morning butts. I add his discarded cigarette to the ashtray pile. “No need to litter this beautiful garden,” I scold.

  He laughs, which is a relief. Words exit too quickly from my mouth. I must train myself to think before tossing out comments to someone who shall determine how long I’ll have a roof over my head.

  Laura used to make him laugh, performing reenactments of scenes from Jim’s favorite old movies, strutting around the family room like Rita Hayworth, or lodging water balloons at him when he was back here in the garden sneaking a smoke despite his ongoing vow to quit since her infancy. I could never fill her void.

  More than I’m hoping Jim has not joined me to announce my eviction, I’m hoping he’s not here to talk with me about Laura. I’m not ready to deal. For now, all I can do is go on. Smoke. Hunger.

  “Is your dad here yet?” Jim asks.

  “Nope. Buddy always promises to get here before Mel leaves, but he never does. But you know I’m fine on my own.”

  “Do I?”

  Jamal’s early arrival saves me from answering Jim’s question. Jamal never fails to know when I need him.

  Jamal’s arrival can be heard before we can see him standing at the doorway to the carriage house. He’s got jumbo earphones on his head, although the high bush of Jamal’s newly unbraided Afro hair obscures them. His audio player must be at full blast if I can hear it so distinctly from my garden perch a few yards away. Old school hip-hop meets Broadway musical from Jamal’s headphones, with some rapper riffing on how it’s a hard knock life.

  If it weren’t for Jamal, I would probably not know or recognize any form of popular music—yet another sign that I am a freak and a failure as a teenager. I will listen to music with Jamal, but rarely on my own. Words are better experienced through sight rather than sound. What’s to hear? It seems to me that most songs are about love—wanting it, finding it, losing it—all pointless and irrelevant to a size-challenged listener who’s never been kissed or gone on a single date. The musical message is the same as those Jane Austen books I hate and refuse to hand-sell at the bookstore. Why did that old girl have to start that Get A Man mythology of literature, anyway? Boring boring boring, a waste of time. I’d rather absorb the bleakness of Burroughs or Bukowski, or even the sophisticated, mean-spirited wit of Dorothy Parker, rather than choke down the false promises of Austen and her descendants.

  The fundamental lesson from the Fat Girl’s Guide to Surviving Popular Culture, besides the obvious one—never open up a fashion/beauty magazine dedicated to Hate Your Body But Learn to Pleasure Your Man principles—has got to be to avoid that Jane Austen lady’s books and all the movies her books have inspired. Think about it. In real life, men who look like Hugh Grant and Colin Firth do not have punching matches over a “fat” girl (who’s not even fat). Hot men wearing breeches may eventually go for the interesting girl, but only if she’s a stick-figure Gwyneth. I’ve issued a complete ban on these books and their movies from my life. I don’t like being lied to.

  “Guess I’d better go,” I tell Jim. I take one cigarette from my pack for the walk to the bookstore and hand over the remaining box of smokes to him. I can afford to be generous; I’ve got a carton in my room and a part-time bookstore job to pay for the supply. I place the leftover cigarette in my mouth, expecting Jim to light it for me with bygone’s lighter, but he only blankly stares at me—or, rather, through me. He must also see gray these days.

  “Thanks,” he says. “Is there anything you need?”

  “I’m fine,” I repeat.

  “Well, if you do need anything . . .” I almost, almost, finish the sentence for him, instinctively remembering what he always said to Laura instead of “good-bye,” but for once I manage to rein in my mouth, and Jim speaks the words for himself: “You know where to find me.”

  I light my own cigarette. Matches.

  “Thanks,” I say. I walk away, toward Jamal.

  I won’t be looking.

  Virginia Is for Haters

  JAMAL THINKS I SHOULD PLAY HOOKY FROM WORK AND take an adventure with him. We could make like George and Martha Washington and hang out in Old Town Alexandria, browse the art galleries and record stores, talk in Ye Olde Jivespeak that only the two of us understand. Why, Miss Miles, I declare, your reputation is in danger of tarnation with that there interplanetary funky butt jivestep yo’ fine self is struttin’ down this alleyway. Why, Mastah Jamal, thee gots to be funked up to think me capable of funky butt. Mayhap thee has been imbibing of the cider troth too much?

  Mama’s pride and joy heads off to Daddy’s alma mater in the fall, so I should be taking this opportunity for time with Jamal before he leaves for Morehouse in Atlanta. But Jamal must really be smoking some funky stuff not to remember that I don’t care to hang out in Alexandria, not even for Ye Olde Jivespeak.

  I hate Virginia. Mostly for vague reasons like the whole state just bugs me, but for some valid, specific ones too. There’s the state’s across-the-river association with D.C., subjugating it from across the Potomac, sheltering the Pentagon and the CIA, and housing the hordes of transient residents who come from other places to work in D.C., gridlocking the highways and necessitating the building of strip malls and superstores; I swear, the whole of Northern Virginia is one long traffic jam to IKEA. And let’s not forget, Virginia is where that General Lee guy came from. Remember him? The general who tried to save the Confederacy so that the fine institution of slavery could be upheld?

  “Nope,” I tell Jamal as he stands next to me while I unlock the Once upon a Time storefront. “Count me out.” I have my principles.

  Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t skip out on work. The storefront door was tagged with graffiti sometime between yesterday and today, leaving the chestnut-colored door emblazoned with black and purple insignia that I do not understand. I’m less irritated and more fascinated that I will have to spend the first part of my work afternoon cleaning it off the door when I’d otherwise be lost inside one of the store’s books.

  I wouldn’t mind being a graffiti artist, enrolled in a secret revolution fought through symbols and hidden meaning. If I could decipher the graffiti code enough for rudimentary communication, I would answer the “vandals” with my own graffiti message on the store’s door, in black spray paint: Consider this store your safe haven. 8 Mile wants to rap with you. Will not call police on you. Respects your artists’ way. Would like to learn your secret language. Any takers?

  “Do you know who did this?” I ask Jamal, pointing to the graffiti.

  “That’s right, ask the brother, he’s sure to know all the colored ones coloring up pristine Georgetown with graffiti.”

  “Hah-hah. But seriously, do you know? Because I would like to meet these people. Don’t you think they’re like stealth ninja artists? Ride the Metro through tunnels, look out the window when you’re on the track riding over a bridge, and what do you see? Graffiti. Who are these people pulling this off? When? Have you ever seen them? How do they manage to get it into those obscure spots that must require lots of dangerous climbing and dangling in order to get that one perfect paint perch? Don’t you want to know?”

  “Don’t particularly care, and you’re dodging the question.” We step inside the store. Jamal flips on the lights as I head toward the cleaning supply closet behind the cash register counter. “Sistah Miles, I know from experience that you can be persuaded to ditch this place and come experience the world with me today. So what’s it gonna take to make you say yes?”

  I have no intention of saying yes—the day is just too gray, despite the hot yellow sun poking through the window shades—but I am curious nonetheless. “Why do you want me to miss work? You score some nice weed?”

  “No. And do I have to score some nice weed in order to have an excuse to take you on
an adventure?” He smiles at me, big white teeth on a full red mouth of pure sweetness. As his brown eyes catch my own, I almost catch my breath at the vision of him. If he dated white girls and I wasn’t a fat one, I would probably be in love with this boy.

  “You know that’s not true. It’s that since . . . you know . . . I just don’t feel like going anywhere.” I never feel like going anywhere anyway, but historically I have been open to exceptions if the doing something involves getting some part of Jamal’s time.

  Jamal jumps over the counter to stand next to me. “That’s the thing,” he says, excited. “That Bex girl, she feels the same. So I thought I could get all of us together and go somewhere—”

  “What do you mean, ‘that Bex girl’? What, are you friends with her now?”

  “Maybe getting to be. I like her. She’s cool.”

  “She’s not cool. You know who her dad is?”

  “I do. I won’t hold it against her. That’s not her fault.”

  How very open-minded of Jamal. His mother is a leading advocate of D.C. home rule, yet he chooses to potentially ally himself with the daughter of one of the District’s great enemies. Let’s call him Congressman Same Old White Man. C-man SOWM has served in the House since long before Bex was born. I doubt she even knows what her home state looks like aside from short trips there for photo ops during election years. He regularly declines his party’s overtures for him to make a run for Senate, because why should he risk his political clout? The promotion would in fact be more of a demotion, since he’d have to start all over on the other side of the Capitol. Congressman SOWM has been a representative so long, he’s an institution in the House, with influence on all the important committees. And he repeatedly uses that influence to thwart D.C., year after year making sure that any legislation that proposes to give power to the very city he calls home never makes it out of committee, much less to the floor of Congress for a real vote.

  As if the very fact of an Electoral College that decides our most important election, regardless of the popular vote, was not evidence enough of our forefathers’ (that Philly crew of Same Old White Men) tenuous connection to the concept of fairness, the issue of D.C. statehood proves to me that there truly is no justice in this country. The population of D.C. is greater than that of Wyoming, and comparable to that of Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Yet each of those states gets two senators and a handful of congressmen to represent them. D.C. gets nothing besides one token representative to Congress, whose vote means nothing. I appreciate the right of gun-toting, freedom-loving South Dakotans to be represented in Congress, I really do—but shouldn’t D.C. residents share that same privilege? Uncle Sam cashes their federal tax payment checks the same as those from all the other states. But I suspect those Same Old White Men who’ve been ruling the world since Jesus’s time wouldn’t want D.C., with its majority black population, to have a fair vote in our nation’s important decisions. The injustice is that most un-American of principles made legal for the sake of the federal city D.C. harbors: taxation without representation.

  I may have gotten a C- in American Government this past term, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know or care about understanding how the system works. I just don’t feel the need to write properly, punctuated—papers: about; it. To me, requiring a born-and-bred D.C. resident to study American Government is like asking a fat person to join a dating service—why bother, when you’re going to be ignored, anyway?

  Jamal asks, “Is this one of your stupid Virginia-hating things? Because we don’t have to go to Alexandria. That was a bad idea.”

  “It’s a D.C. thing.”

  “Says the girl who won’t even get a D.C. driver’s license?”

  “I’m an environmentalist. I take the bus.”

  “Then why won’t you go and at least get the official photo ID card from the D.C. DMV?” I start to answer, but Jamal holds up his hand to stop me. “I know, I know, you’re not going to be subjugated to government profiling so long as the federal government’s enslavement of D.C. persists. I’ve heard all about it.” He looks at me again, trying to figure out why I really can’t be persuaded to take a ditch day. When his eyes spark, I know he knows. He dropped a word worse than Virginia. “Laura didn’t hold Bex’s father against Bex. Why should you?”

  8 Mile has to be honest. “I just don’t like her.”

  If Mel were here, she would throw her hands up in the air, sigh in frustration, glare at me. But Jamal only laughs and pulls me to him. “Mayhap thee needs to funkify some attitude adjustment? Miss Miles, my extraterrestrial sistah from the scowling masthead mothuh ship, is there anything or anybody you don’t hate?”

  You.

  “I like chocolate.” I reach under the counter for my energy supply box. I offer the box of Snickers bars to Jamal.

  He shakes his head. “Nope. I’m gonna find that Bex girl and take her on an adventure through the real Chocolate City. No need for Snickers when we can find ourselves some serious sweetness somewhere out in the world. So you just stay here and clean graffiti and read books, because that sounds so much better than what I propose.” He looks around the decrepit store, piled with books and magazines—all words, all chaos. “Why do you even care about trying to maintain this store, or showing up here at all? You do realize this store has no customers?”

  Exactly.

  He holds up his phone behind his back for me to see as he walks out the door. “Holla if you change your mind.”

  I am alone again but I can feel Laura’s presence in the store, guiding me. I will clean the graffiti on the door later this afternoon. Let the neighbors enjoy the door art for a while before it’s lost to a scrub brush. Surely the hipster yuppies and rich old fogeys will appreciate the urban artistic expression dignifying the view from the windows of their posh homes.

  I step over to the Non-Fiction section instead of tending to cleanup duty. I browse the aisle, looking for today’s reading selections. I find them on the American History shelves. The Cold War. The Great Depression. Words and eras to live by.

  Sleepless in Not-France

  TOO MANY HYDROS AND MY BODY WILL DEVELOP A tolerance, so this jive turkey has decided to go cold turkey. Insomnia, you are mine. I embrace you. I accept you. I smoke through you.

  “You again,” Jim says. He should apply to become the world’s first senior citizen ninja graffiti artist, so stealth is he with his movement. I did not see or hear him approaching my middle-of-the-night spot on the bench under the tree house. The crickets humming and fireflies lighting the black night are more noticeable than he. I certainly didn’t expect him. I might not be able to see him at all but for the streetlight shining from behind the oak tree.

  He sits down next to me. “Can’t sleep?” He lights a cigarette. He’s back on Virginia Slims.

  “Yeah.” I place the ashtray in between us and reach for a fresh Marlboro to put in my mouth. Better than Snickers, those cigs. Overindulgence in smoking will only lead to cancer and lung disease. No one can see internal maladies like they can obesity.

  “Same.”

  Because now it’s real. Laura is not coming back. This has not been a cruel joke. It is fact. She is dead. We may think we see her coming through the front gate, blond and chipper on a cold winter’s day, a baby-blue cashmere scarf on her head as she’s wrapped inside Jason’s tight embrace; we may hope it’s her laughing voice on the other end when we pick up the phone, asking for directions to the closest Metro stop because she’s lost again; and we may pray for a do-over of that recent day—the ambulance arrived sooner, the stomach pump retched those pills from her body before it was too late. But we know the difference now.

  All we have left is nothing.

  An unlit cigarette dangles from my mouth. I see the lighter in his hand, and I pause, thinking he will offer me a light. He does not. As always, I’m on my own.

  “You really ought to try to quit smoking,” Jim says. So should you, fella. And stick with it this time. He cross
es one leg over the other, takes another drag. “You’re so young. If not for your health, think of all the money you’ll save. Your money is better spent elsewhere.”

  Like paying rent elsewhere?

  I cross one leg over the other too, but I don’t look as elegant in my cotton pj’s as Jim does in his silk ones. He looks down at my Chucks and asks, “Is there something written in glow in the dark pen on your shoes?” Jamal painted the words “Sistah Miles” on the canvas parts of my shoes, my own personalized graffiti funk, but I kept the rubber ends at the top for myself, for words written in secret spy ink that’s only visible in the dark. Jim’s so old and blind he’d never be able to make out what I wrote: What is wrong with me!

  “Just scribblings,” I tell him.

  “‘Scribblings,’” he repeats, chuckling. “What a Miles word. When you were little you used to invent the funniest stories and words. Do you still do that?”

  Yessuh-fo’sho’. “No.”

  “You should. I always thought you would grow up to be a writer. Dr. Turner tells me you’re quite talented. Though apparently your English teacher thinks you . . . I can’t recall—what exactly was the complaint?”

  “According to the English teacher, not only do I turn in work late and grammatically incorrect, but I ‘squander my gifts on sarcasm.’ She just got mad that I didn’t find the symbolism she wanted me to find in Twentieth-Century African American literature. She thought my ‘Fat Like Me’ essay made a mockery of her assignment.”

  “Did it?”

  “Kinda.”

  He chuckles again.

  I add, “She said I should have spent more time discussing the books written by black authors instead of modeling my essay on a book by the white guy who went around in blackface so he could understand racism. If you ask me, the teacher’s criticism was its own form of reverse racism.” I wonder what adventure Jamal took that Bex girl on today. I ask Jim, “Did you know that back when Bex’s dad was a young state senator, he once supported a measure calling for The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison to be banned from the high school reading lists in public schools?”