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by Lavonda R. Staples ~

  There was no way for the summer to have ended without one really bad homicide.  Everything pointed to an event like that being one of the many climaxes over three long months.  As it happened, that particular homicide was the only one I noticed.  Even though I was a witness to maybe a couple more.  A man I knew killed a woman I didn’t know.  I knew her type.  I had even partied with people like her, although later I learned to avoid White girls on runs as if they were carriers of the most virulent plague.  My runs generally hurt me.  They also hurt my family.  I didn’t think about what I was doing.  I couldn’t.  All I could think about was grabbing oblivion, forgetting about a past I didn’t own.  Forgetting about every slap, kick, punch, abuse, the everything that had come to be the everyday events of my life.  My story is the same as any other drunk, or junkie, or addict, or substance abuser.  But my story is different, thankfully different because I did everything wrong and every wrong was done to me – yet I lived to tell the story.  Unlike the girl my friend beat, choked and stabbed to death, I get to sit here in my nice apartment, go to my nice job, lunch with my nice friends, and hold my children for as long as God decides I am able.

When I heard the girl was dead it was being announced on the television.  I was already three days into my mission, which meant that it would end sometime that day or night or somewhere in between.  After a decade of an off and on refuge in everything but meth, ecstacy, and heroin, I had finally found a spot to get high and not be bothered.  I didn’t have to hide by the side of my toilet anymore.  Neither did I have to sit on the bed of my truck while my boys slept peacefully inside.  I had a spot at Blue’s house.  He was cool.  He felt sorry for me.  He knew I didn’t mean any harm.  He had been around enough to know that someone like me, who didn’t grow up around this shit and wasn’t on any kind of trip just to trip, needed to be looked out for.  I needed someone to have my back when I didn’t care about anything.  I needed him.  He needed me to tell his story.

How did I meet him?  I was stumbling past his house early one morning.  I don’t know how but I was wearing a pair of flannel Christmas pajamas.  I think maybe I must have pissed on myself, or my clothes were torn, or maybe I just got too freaked out and run through the alleys tearing off my clothes.  At any rate, these pajamas had found me.  As I walked past his house he said, “you want some coffee?”  Without saying anything I went to his steps and sat down.  He went and got the coffee and I realized that the day was beautiful.  I just needed to take a moment and let it in.  I drank the first sip of normalcy.  At home, I couldn’t start the day without at least three cigarettes and a cup of caffeine with a little milk for color.  I would go to my computer and start writing.  I would go to my bookshelves and select the texts I would need for the day.  I would go to the phone and start making calls.  In this realm, I just took the coffee and sat.

He didn’t ask me anything.  I just started talking.  “This is a kind of passive suicide for me.”  He looked at me and kept stroking his chin, his moustache, he seemed to be at the inception of a love affair with his face.  I continued, ‘I’m not forcing the issue, but I just don’t mind going.”  He finally spoke, “You don’t want go nowhere, you just don’t know how to be here.”  We looked at each other for a real long time.  The next thing was one of the most shocking things I ever heard.  “You can put all of this in your book.”  He didn’t know who I was.  He didn’t know that I taught.  He didn’t know that I wrote.  Hell, he didn’t even know if I was even fucking literate.  But he knew that one day I would chronicle the event of that summer and a couple of others.  He knew, when I had no thoughts of self-revelation.

            He was jealous because Earl shot her and not him.  He didn’t actually tell me this.  There was no need for him to say it.  The evidence was as abundant as air, water, and dirt.  I handed him the tall boy.  I was so drunk I didn’t even have a thought about where his mouth had been.  This wasn’t even the strangest event I experienced in this place where there was very little fantasy, very few dreams and even fewer dreams that reached fruition.  Reality walked the streets at 4 a.m. and it screamed from every window and every door of vacant holes that used to be homes.

            Anyway, I looked at him.  He didn’t have to go in drag.  He is one of those men who are born somewhere between male and female.  He had a natural prettiness that most women can only achieve with store-bought assistance.  Darrell is his name and I re-discovered him hiding in that place.  One of the coincidences of my life.  He had been my junior high crush; both of us in the “smart kid” program in our suburban neighborhood.  I found out he was gay when I met him, 25 years later, in a dope house.  This is also where  I met Earl.

 (novel excerpt)
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