Drama City

EIGHTEEN

I left my baby a little present this morning,” said Shirley, the small young woman with the almond eyes and smooth chocolate skin. “Put it right there on the doorstep of my grandmother’s place, where my little girl stay.”

“What’d you get her?” said a dark-skinned woman sitting in Shirley’s row.

“What you call a playwear set. Got it up there at the Hecht’s company, thirty percent off. With the coupons, it was next to nothin’.”

“Hecht’s havin’ a sale this weekend,” said a man.

“They always be havin’ a sale,” said another.

“The shirt part of the outfit had a drawing of these four young white dudes on it,” said Shirley. “I don’t know who they are, but the lady at the Hecht’s told me the kids are into ’em.”

“The Wiggles,” said the dark-skinned woman helpfully.

“That’s who it was,” said Shirley. “So I was walkin’ away from the house and I heard the door open, and I turned around? And there my little girl was, standing with my grandmother. And my little girl took that outfit out of the bag, looked at it, and smiled. ‘This for me?’ she said to my grandmother. You could see she liked it, ’cause she was all happy. And my grandmother said to my little girl, ‘That’s a present for you from your mother.’ My little girl looked at me, said, ‘That my mother right there?’ It sunk my heart that she forgot me, but she wasn’t no more than a baby when I left. My grandmother says, ‘Yes, sweetheart, that’s your mother. Tell her thank you, child.’”

Shirley cocked her head. “She couldn’t say it. She was scared, or too shy. But the look she gave me… That look is gonna keep me sober. I’m gonna carry that look with me for a long time.” Shirley wiped at her eyes. “Thank you for letting me share.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

Rachel Lopez leaned back in her folding chair. Her nausea was gone, and color had returned to her skin.

The hard middle-aged man named Sarge, wearing a T-shirt and the same dirty Redskins hat he always wore, raised his hand and was acknowledged by the guest host.

“Sarge here…”

“Hey, Sarge.”

“… and I’m a straight-up addict. Now, I had a little episode last night, over at my efficiency. I was goin’ through this drawer in this old dresser I got, lookin’ for a knife. This one drawer, I keep all this stuff inside it from when I was little. Got an old baseball I kept from when my team won the city championship, under the lights in Turkey Thicket, back in seventy-three. A Zippo lighter and some firecrackers and shit. You know, boys’ stuff. There’s this badge in there too, like a sheriff’s badge. I used to pin it on my shirt when I was a boy.”

A man chuckled. He stopped abruptly when Sarge gave him a cool look.

“So I was lookin’ for this knife,” said Sarge. “Not to cut no one or nothin’ like that. I had some dirt under my fingernails, and I wanted to clean ’em out, see? I remembered I had this pocketknife, with a pretty pearl handle and a sharp little blade that could do the trick. But I couldn’t find it. I guess I lost it somewhere or it got took. What I did find, though, inside this cuff link box, was a joint of weed I forgot I had. I mean, it could have been five years old, sumshit like that. I musta hid it in that box, either from someone I was stayin’ with at the time or from my own self.

“So I’m standin’ there, staring at this old joint. I had some music playin’ in the room at the time, comin’ out this box I have. That song ‘Rock Creek Park,’ by the Blackbyrds. Donald Byrd and them? ‘Doin’ it in the park, doin’ it after dark’… Y’all remember that one. It just reminded me of, you know, summer and shit. Bein’ with this one girl I knew, the way the park smelled all green and nice, and how this girl smelled nice too. Kids ridin’ their bikes in packs down Beach Drive, blowin’ on them whistles like they used to do. Cookin’ some chicken or whatever on the grill, having a cold beer. Gettin’ your head up good.”

“ Yes,” said a man in a far corner of the room.

“I needed to speak to someone,” said Sarge, “before I went ahead and put some fire to that stale-ass joint.” Sarge made a head motion toward Shirley but did not look in her direction. “And I remembered that young lady over there, she said at yesterday’s meeting it would be all right to call her. So I did. We talked for a long while. And by the time we was done talkin’, I had decided to flush that weed down the toilet. It hurt me to do it, but that’s what I did.”

“You did right,” said the dark-skinned woman in Shirley’s row.

“Understand, I didn’t call that woman up because she was female,” said Sarge. “I don’t want to get with no females right now, anyway. I don’t act right with ’em when I do.”

“Hmph,” said a man.

“But I just wanted to tell y’all about my experience,” said Sarge. “It don’t mean nothin’, really. It’s just a story.”

“We all in the same lifeboat,” said Shirley. “Ain’t no one here deserve to get throwed out before no one else.”

Sarge tightened his hat over his graying hair and lowered his voice to a mumble. “So thank you for letting me share.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

Lorenzo Brown raised his hand. Rachel looked down the row to where Lorenzo sat, at the far end of the horseshoe-shaped aisle. She had seen him enter the meeting room at the same time she had but had not approached him. She wanted to respect his privacy and leave him to his spiritual time. He was under no obligation to talk to her, after all.

The host nodded in Lorenzo’s direction. “Go ahead.”

“My name is Lorenzo…”

“Hey, Lorenzo.”

“… and I’m a substance abuser. Something happened to me today, on my job.”

“You some kind of police?” said Shirley, looking him up and down with interest.

“Dog police,” said Lorenzo. “This morning, some man got up in my face over an animal he’d been abusing. I retaliated in a physical way, which I shouldn’t have done. But the thing is, it felt good. I get these headaches most all the time now. After this man tried to take me for bad and I went right back at him, my headache went away. But something else came over me too. I wanted to get high. Doin’ violence, getting my head up… it’s all part of the same package for me, I guess.”

Lorenzo glanced around the room. “Most of y’all, you made a decision to try and stop what you was doin’ on your own. Me, I had it decided for me. I’m comin’ off an incarceration, see? I caught a charge for dealing drugs.”

“You ain’t alone,” said a man.

“All respect,” said Lorenzo, “that don’t make it any easier. You can’t always be at these meetings or get someone on the phone. One thing I learned, this here’s not a team sport. It also ain’t no sprint. The more you walk this road, the longer the road seems to be.”

“I heard that, ” said the same man.

“ Long road,” said Lorenzo. “Shoot, I started sellin’ marijuana when I was twelve years old. Started smokin’ it around that time too. By then, I had already lost my mother to drugs. She got to the point, she was selling herself for money. Later, she did this grand-larceny thing and got put away. She came out eventually, but she couldn’t make it. She had to violate herself to save her life. My mother’s behind walls to this day.”

Lorenzo shifted in his seat. “I never did have a father. I ain’t cryin’ about it. That’s just the way it was.

“I moved in with my grandmother early on. I loved her, but she couldn’t contain me. Y’all know how that is. I ran with some boys, one in particular, and when those boys and my main boy went down to the corner, I went with ’em. They were my people, the closest thing I ever had to male kin. I dropped out of high school and moved up to dealin’ heroin and cocaine. I was arrested for it and did a couple of stays in juvenile. It didn’t teach me a thing. Matter of fact, I was further down the hole when I came out. I impregnated a girl. I did other bad things. Finally, when I was an adult, the jump-out squad got me on a corner in my own neighborhood, doin’ hand-to-hands. I was up on some good hydro when they did. I had a whole rack of foil in my pocket, and I took a felony charge. They wanted me to flip on my number one boy. I wouldn’t do it. I was just arrogant, the way I handled it. Between my priors and me showin’ no kind of remorse, the judge came down hard on me. I did eight on a six-to-eighteen.

“Prison was prison; y’all know what that’s about. When the time came, I didn’t even show for my first probation hearing, ’cause I knew I wasn’t ready to come uptown. Thing of it is, you never are ready. It’s harder in some ways to do your straight time than it is to jail.

“I came out the cut and got on a bus. I had thirty-some dollars in my khakis and a blue shirt on my back. I was wearing sneaks had Velcro on ’em ’stead of laces. Prison gear, and I looked it too. Rolled into D.C. at night, went straight to a drugstore near the bus station, and bought some cologne, ’cause I felt like I had the smell of jail on my skin. I get up to the register, and people be runnin’ cards through some machine they got on the counter. No one was pullin’ out cash. Everyone be talkin’ on their cells, everyone be wearin’ new fashions. I realized, I am an old head now and I am lost. I do not know what the fuck is goin’ on out here anymore. Right there, in the drugstore, realizing what I was up against, that’s when I got scared for the first time in my life. Standin’ right there in that store, I felt that ache come to my head.

“When I come out that drugstore, I spent the last of my money on a taxi and went to my grandmother’s place in Park View. She was waitin’ for me. She looked good. Her house smelled like her cooking. She had tied balloons to the banister, right there in the entranceway. She hugged me soon as I came through the door, and I hugged her back. ‘Welcome home, son,’ she said. ‘Welcome to your new life.’ Both of us just stood there and held each other. My grandmother cried. I ain’t ashamed to admit it, I cried some, too.”

A chair creaked in the room.

“It just takes one person to believe in you,” said Lorenzo. “When I hugged that woman, I knew I was gonna try to do right. And that’s all I can claim. I’m tryin’ out here. I don’t mean to bore you, but I needed to talk to someone today, and you people came to mind. So thank you for listening, all a y’all. Thank you for letting me share.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

“Anyone else?” said the guest host.

“My name is Rachel Lopez…” said Rachel, speaking quickly, not planning to speak at all, not knowing what she was going to say.

“Hey, Rachel.”

“… and I’m an alcoholic.”

Lorenzo leaned forward in his chair.

“I don’t have the right to be here,” said Rachel. “I haven’t even tried to get sober. I was drunk last night. I was still drunk when I woke up this morning.”

“I remember those mornings,” said a woman.

“It’s not just that I haven’t tried to get straight,” said Rachel. “I’m a probation officer. I make my living telling other people that they need to stay on track. And that makes me a hypocrite. Because I jumped the tracks myself a long time ago.”

“I recognized you the first time you came to these meetings,” said a male voice behind her. “You used to come to my mother’s house to call on my brother. You always showed my mother respect. You got the right to be here, same as anyone else.”

Rachel did not turn around to match a face to the voice. She laced her fingers together and rested her hands in her lap.

“I’ve been drinking a long time. I started when I was about fourteen, down in Texas…”

Rachel Lopez spoke of high school, then college. She spoke of being the last one standing in the bars at the end of the night. Her friends said she handled alcohol well. She didn’t change while under its influence. While drinking, she seemed to have control.

“I got a degree in criminology at the local college. I don’t know why I chose law enforcement, exactly. It seemed exciting, I guess, and I had a vague notion that I was going to help people. After graduation I took an internship at a halfway house near my parents’ place. I didn’t like the work, and I felt stifled, living at home…”

She had entered into no romantic relationships. She had continued to drink.

“I wasn’t happy. I sent in an application to become a probation officer in Maryland. The EEO was on my side. They needed Spanish-speaking POs at the time. Still do, I guess. Anyway, I got the gig.

“My father…”

Rachel closed her eyes and saw him, in bed, on his last day. He was going to die and yet he was not thinking of himself. He wanted to talk about her. He was worried about her.

“My father got sick,” said Rachel. “My mother got sick too. I took a leave of absence from my job and went back to Texas to stay with them. You know, to help. But I couldn’t help. I couldn’t control what was happening to them. They both had inoperable cancer. The doctor called it an unfortunate coincidence. My father passed, and then my mom.”

“They’re together now,” said a voice in the room.

“Yes,” said Rachel. “And here I am, still drinking. Still trying to control things I can’t control. I don’t even know why I’m telling you all of this today. It’s not like I’ve got a plan or anything like it. Anyway.” Rachel cleared her throat. “Thank you for letting me share.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

The basket was passed around. The group gathered in a circle, their arms resting on one another’s shoulders, and said the Serenity Prayer and afterward, the Lord’s Prayer. An older gentleman extolled the virtues of Narcotics Anonymous. The meeting dispersed, and its participants went on their way.

Out in the parking area of the church, facing East Capitol, Rachel Lopez lit a cigarette. Some members of the group went to their cars, alone or in twos and threes. Others went to the bus shelter and sat on a bench protected from the sun. Lorenzo Brown walked across the grounds of the church and stopped beside Rachel.

“Hey, Miss Lopez.”

“Hey, Lorenzo.” She exhaled a stream of smoke. “What about that incident you described in there? The physical-retaliation thing. We gonna have a problem with that?”

“The man I stepped to, I don’t think he’ll report it. That’s how it goes in the street. Callin’ the police is the last thing he’s gonna do.”

“I’d hate to see you violated over something as trivial as that.”

Lorenzo chuckled. “You ever stop working?”

“When I stop working I get in trouble.” Rachel’s eyes softened. “You know…”

“What?”

“I’m sorry you had to hear all that.”

“You’re human, is all.”

“I appreciate it.”

“We all just tryin’ out here.”

“Yes.”

“You ever want to talk about any of this, you can call me. Doesn’t need to be about me all the time. You hear me, Miss Lopez?”

“Sure. But when it’s on that level, it’s Rachel.”

“Okay, then. Rachel it’ll be.”

Shirley, walking with the quickness of the short and compact, came from the church and joined them.

“Hey,” said Shirley.

“Hey,” said Rachel.

“Can I get a Marlboro, Rachel?”

“Sure.”

As Rachel retrieved the pack from her purse, Shirley looked Lorenzo over with blatant interest.

“You tall, ” said Shirley.

“Everyone is to you,” said Lorenzo, and Shirley smiled.

Rachel shook out the filtered ends of a few cigarettes, and Shirley drew one from the pack. Rachel handed her a matchbook from the hotel she’d been at the night before and told her to keep it. Shirley lodged the cigarette behind her ear as Sarge passed them on foot.

“Hey, Sarge,” said Shirley. “Where you headed?”

“Back to my efficiency,” said Sarge, not breaking stride. “What you think?”

“You need someone to walk with you?”

“I don’t need it,” said Sarge, still moving, but slowing down. “But if you got a mind to, I ain’t gonna try and stop you.”

“He ain’t all that tough,” said Shirley. She looked at Rachel and then at Lorenzo. “You two have a blessed day.”

“You also,” said Rachel.

Shirley joined Sarge by the shelter.

“I need to get back to work,” said Rachel.

“I do too,” said Lorenzo.

“You been to the clinic yet?”

“I haven’t had the chance.”

“Better do it.”

“I will.”

Rachel touched his arm. “Thank you, Lorenzo.”

“Ain’t no thing.”

Rachel walked to her vehicle; Lorenzo went to his.