When We Were Young Page 6

days before he was due to leave for his second tour of duty.

  Throughout that extremely hot August day, he’d acted strange and kinda distant toward me. It culminated with him summarily dropping me off at home at about 8:30 p.m. and burning rubber as he sped away. He gave me no explanation, no reason for his sudden change of plans. He simply drove up to the front of the house and barked, “Get out.” When I didn’t move, he repeated it. I remember standing on the sidewalk watching as his taillights became smaller, eventually merging into anonymity.

  About an hour later, I got bored. Annette was at a party and Sheila was working until 10:00. I borrowed my mother’s 1960 Pontiac Bonneville, because while he was home, Mitch had resumed control of his Chevy. For a while, having no particular destination in mind, I just drove around Long Beach checking out a couple of house parties.

  Although it was never my intention, at least not consciously, to drop by Sheila’s apartment, about 11:30 that’s where I wound up. Because I drove in from the Santa Fe direction, I approached her place from the alley. That prevented me from seeing my brother’s car. They must have felt comfortable, secure in their tryst, or were so consumed in their lust that they’d thrown all caution to the wind. The side entrance stood ajar, so I just walked in.

  Having taken no more than maybe three steps into the apartment, an eerie sensation flitted through me. I sensed that something was out of place. After a couple more steps, that feeling crystallized when I tripped over a size 12EE boot that was familiar, even in the faint light emanating from the kitchen.

  •

  “Hey, watch out, big guy, on your left,” shouted Greg Jr. to his big center. The big guy was so intent on jockeying for position against his defender that he was oblivious to the red-clad opponent creeping up on his blind side.

  “Damn!” screamed my brother, Sheila, and the big center from the gray team. They sounded like a chorus of well-rehearsed voices.

  “Damn, damn, damn, I dun fucked up now!” screamed Sheila, her big, saucer-round and startled eyes locked with my own as she peered over Mitchell’s broad, sweating back.

  “Damn, whyn’t somebody holla at me?” yelled the big center, as the red-clad thief streaked down court at breakneck speed to score an uncontested, game-winning lay-up.

  Somehow, today became yesterday in my mind. It was as if the game had triggered deeply buried memories of days gone by, mixing them together as I reminisced.

  “Dammit, bro, what the fuck are you doing here?” questioned my brother, still held in the tight grip of Sheila’s gaped legs, probably buried deep inside of her, as well.

  “Damn, damn, damn! Damn, whyn’t somebody holla?”

  “Dammit, bro, dammit bro!”

  Those damn-filled exclamations reverberated in my head, causing me anguish and pain, as if what I’d walked in on at 19 years of age was happening simultaneously with the end of the basketball game in the here and now. I shook my head vigorously in an effort to rid myself of the deeply confused, nearly catatonic state that had overtaken me.

  “Good game, Greg,” I heard someone say.

  I looked left, following the voice, and recognized the dude who’d jumped center for Red Haze as the speaker. He and Greg Jr. were walking toward the rec shack, probably to settle up, I reasoned. Another memory was triggered by that action.

  Damn, gots ta stop doin’ this shit to myself. That shit happened more than 40 years ago, and…and no matter how much I torture myself or rehash the past, nothing changes it.

  • 5 •

  Slowly, I came to my feet. Not only could I hear my bones cracking and snapping, I also felt them. The vision of a crab or lobster moving flashed in my mind’s eye. “Ouch,” I groaned when finally I was completely upright. For a moment I stood still to allow the feeling to return to my extremities and to regain my equilibrium. When my head had cleared a bit, I glanced back toward the court, and true to form, saw the yellow team warming up while they waited for the victorious red team to get back on the court. Farther down, I saw a couple guys on the gray team passing greenbacks to Greg Jr., who in turn handed the loot over to his Red Haze companion.

  In spite of my best efforts not to dwell on the past, I seemed to stumble through yesteryear with every action I saw, or thought that I had. Even watching the losers pay off the winners brought Mitchell back to mind. When we were young it was always my brother who collected our winnings. And although it happened only rarely, he was also the one who paid off when we lost. Well, why not? Of all of us, he was the most responsible, the most honest. That is, until…till that night, him and Sheila…

  “Fuck!” I screeched so loud that people on the other side of the court turned toward me displaying expressions of curiosity — which, of course, made me feel stupid. I kicked my feet into gear and pushed off toward the 32nd Street park exit. My ears were buzzing and my heart pounded out a staccato-like beat. I even imagined that my shuffling footsteps were in sync with Mitchell’s big body as he pounded himself into Sheila, and I hated myself. My self-hate was especially strong when I accepted that even after that night, I’d been so weak for her that I’d gone back to her, time and time again. Somehow all my self-recrimination, and decades of inner shame and guilt over the way my brother and I parted, all came flooding back, full force.

  The fact that he’d betrayed me with Sheila did not absolve me of my guilt, because I had somehow gotten past the whole thing with her (after a while), and this only served to increase the severity of my emotional self-flagellation and shame. But who knew that less than a month after returning to active duty in Vietnam, Mitchell would be killed? I certainly had no idea when I’d screamed, “Fuck you, nigga, you ain’t no brother of mine. I hate’cho ass!”

  What seemed to haunt me the most throughout the years was that pleading expression on his pain-ravaged face as he’d tried repeatedly to apologize to me. But no, I wasn’t having it. And so, he died with “I hate’cho ass!” as his last memory of me, his younger brother, the devoted tagalong who’d worshipped him all his life. Not that Sheila had fared that much better in the days, weeks, months, even years immediately following my inopportune intrusion into her apartment. I’d shunned, ignored, ridiculed, and abused her every time she came near me for more than four years. Even playing hoops did not provide me the solace and pleasure that it once had. Naturally, my game fell off, and my poor performances affected the team, causing us to lose games we were expected to win. But I was so far gone and enshrouded in bouts of anger and shame that nothing mattered. Not even the sudden lack of any real firm scholarship offers.

  For nearly two years I just lay around the house, doing nothing, living off my mother until she got tired of it. In response to her insistence that I not expect her to feed and clothe a grown man, I took a series of menial jobs, which provided me with just enough money to pay for my keep and have gas, beer, and weed money. A little more than two years after Mitchell’s death, my body and mind began to reject my sedentary lifestyle and the ravages of too much alcohol, pot, and days on end without sufficient sleep.

  Of the many who tried, it was Annette who finally broke through and scaled the walls of my emotional isolation. She would have tried harder from the beginning, but her load was large. Following her mother’s untimely death, she had a drunken father and younger siblings to care for while working low-paying, dead-end jobs to make ends meet. There was precious little time left over to babysit a grown man hell bent on self-destruction.

  She saw me at my worst, having deteriorated to the point that I’d slept in the car during a turbulent rainstorm and wound up hospitalized for pneumonia. She found time to visit me at Memorial each evening and dropped by the house to check up on me often after my release.

  Slowly, bit by bit, I came back to the surface and got a grip on myself. Things in my life incrementally started to work out fairly well. Annette and I drifted into an easy though undefined relationship, which provided me with stability and a reason to cut back on drinking and smoking pot. I la
nded a decent job driving a forklift for the Safeway grocery chain, and even took a few night classes at City College. Truth be known, at that point I had no real concrete plans or goals. My struggle was within me, learning to live with guilt, shame, anger, and the unfairness of it all.

  Of course, it wasn’t always easy going or constant progress. There were times when things would be going well, then I’d bump into Sheila, and my entire world would be rocked, shaken at its foundation. Because she usually appeared none the worse, unrattled by it all, I suffered an increase in anger and inner misery, not to mention a heightened sense of incompetence. The fact that she’d become even more seductive and alluring, and yes, more desirable, made our brief encounters during that period even more distressing.

  It also made my verbal attacks toward Sheila more vicious and vindictive — so much so that around the fifth anniversary of Mitch’s death, Annette used a bit of chicanery to get us to the same place at the same time — a party for Benny Calhoun after his discharge from the Navy. That night, she put her foot down and sternly insisted that both Sheila and I grow up, let go of the past, and look forward toward the future.

  That message was clearly meant more for me than Sheila, because Sheila barely