An infamous kickball bounds high over a tall park fence. Where the wobbly red orb will land is both impossible to know and half the fun of kicking it. The girls leak out, wrestling for choice real estate. For every excited smile there’s an intense desire for this odd red ball to survive. Someone has to catch it. This much they know. One or two bounces and it is Third Avenue who decides whether the game shall go on. Third Avenue is neither kind nor playful. The girls brace themselves. Our wobbly old ball’s been booted so many times she appears to be birthing another. As for flight and trajectory, it’s a crapshoot.
Maybe deep down most Third Avenue males are good guys and if you were in a burning building they’d save you, but at street level from an educator’s perspective, they’re mostly vultures waiting for temptation to turn into opportunity. Peanut vendor wheels his cart closer. Maybe it’s just the lure of the forbidden. Either way, construction workers, cops, and suits all seem to enjoy the allure of our wobbly red ball.
Gravity wins out, the girls brace with micro-adjustments, and the kickball plummets. Dancer girl whose name I forget makes the catch. Peanut vendor claps twice. Mid-celebration a boy in suede boat shoes steals the kickball, and a chase ensues.
Stay inside! I yell. Students take their time walking back through the gate. To the untrained eye it’s just teenagers playing kickball. Fun and joy. To a homeless substitute teacher it’s like watching another willfully blind bubble readying to burst. The alpha girls are stuck on saving the ball; Third Avenue chesters are all stuck on the girls for various repressed fantasies; the alpha boys are all predictably confrontational faux protectors and stuck on the girls. The other girls and boys are stuck on being like the alpha girls and boys and we day workers are stuck fully conscious in a strange game for chump change. My true job out here is to keep the chesters at bay and make sure no one gets hurt. Crowd control and chester protection. That’s it. There is no teaching going on. I watch professionals walk by and allow themselves to get stuck wishing they had a chance to be teenagers all over again. Everyone does it. Everyone wants what someone else has until they have it. Then they want what someone else has. People take little stock concerning their own blessings. When there are teachable moments I’m all in, but they’re few and far between. I mostly try to get the students to appreciate being alive and healthy with dreams. That’s it. Twenty years from now I don’t want them sitting here watching the same old tragedy play out again as if they’ve never seen it before or weren’t at least warned. When I can close my eyes I make sure to enjoy the warmth of the sun.
I take attendance, pack up, and walk class back uptown to school. Today’s easy money. I have to wait two weeks to get to it, and not much of it, but easy. Feeling free and strangely diligent, I walk downtown to the board of education to check the status of my full-time substitute license. Just as odd, I get an unexpected interview regarding my application. Touché, universe, touché. A nice and rather serious lady takes me to the back and goes through the motions. Clearly she has work to do. Reminds me of one of my aunts in South Carolina or Grandma Billings a bit. She pauses and squints at a notation on her screen, and I feel my worlds begin to swirl. I can feel it before she even says it.
I see you’ve had a previous conviction, she says.
I have. They told me that was expunged, though.
Board of education sees everything, she tells me.
I see.
She removes her reading glasses and asks what happened. I tell her the truth. She approves my application for final review. Bigger than the approval, though, is that when I was talking she was actually listening. It felt like some impromptu therapy in the last place you’d expect. What a nice lady.
Text Blue and meet him at a loft party on Dekalb. Lean against what I think is a wall and ends up being a sturdy little bookshelf. I’m that guy tonight. Felt like a wall. Collect the literature and get a slap to the back of the neck. Feels like a whale tail.
Sorry. She blinks too much. I thought you were my friend James. A few folks laugh as she pivots and walks off toward the kitchen. I pick the tough little bookshelf up. A couple paperbacks are stuck behind a record player I’m not reaching beyond. Already doing too much. Partygoers still looking, I find a way to care very little and gaze past them out the giant loft windows. I’m still shocked at how nice that lady was at the board of education. Maybe it was just that I needed to talk about what happened and she could tell or something. Either way, I’m feeling a great sense of gratitude and relief when I see the boys exit one of the room gatherings with coats in hand. I pick up and fall in line. Descend the tight flight of stairs and catch buddy we walked in with who wanted to buy a book hipster drunk at the bottom of the steps.
That’s buddy from Public? A cheap restaurant bar downtown.
That’s buddy we walked in with.
My goodness. He’s splayed with his face to the ceiling like a starfish. Did he even make it to the party?
Who knows.
That’s going to be a rough morning.
Hold that. Hollywood steps past.
‘Hold that’ means ‘sucks for you’ or ‘better you than me.’ Same thing really.
I see a twenty-dollar bill peeking out his hoodie and trade him for a copy of Strays. Strays, or United Strays of America, is my first novel. I published it with what was supposed to be rent money a few years back. Strays is a cold press of my reckless sophomore year in college. I put my faith in it, fully convinced it would make me a millionaire. Feels like I’ve been behind on rent ever since. Strays has also morphed into much more than a novel. It’s a business card. It’s a living will and a conversation piece. I prop doors open with it. Strays travels with me. I sell copies whenever I can. Hollywood and Blue disapprove of my aggressive sales tactics. Row seems rather impressed. Step outside and hear a gunshot in the distance.
People are wilding, Row says.
Hollywood pats his pockets, concerned, and doubles back upstairs. I play numb and pretend the gunshots mean nothing too because I’m used to it, but I also know that it means a great deal that none of us have the words for yet. Hyper-present, no shower in two days, bullets flying, and I feel very alive. I get the sense that someone’s watching us, but there’s always someone watching you in the city.
We reach Blue’s car and pile in. Something about four doors closing is soothing to me. Blue cues up some riding music and wheels out the park into a head-wrapped scribe who’s now sprawled upon the windshield. Blue mashes the brakes, the scribe’s front tooth pings off the windshield, and she tumbles onto the pavement.
What the – Hollywood sits up.
The scribe props herself up on an elbow and tugs at her front tooth.
Is this happening? Row chuckles involuntarily, if there is such a thing. Fight-or-flight mode fully engaged, I still have my hand on the door latch. Hollywood slaps his cell phone back together. Blue steps out into the drizzle and closes his door. We watch on as he and the woman exchange information and duck off into a bodega. Pop! Another mysterious gunshot. Someone having fun on a roof somewhere. Five long minutes later Blue hops in and adjusts his rearview. The indestructible scribe drifts back into the shadows of the park.
She’s okay? Row asks. She’s always had a genuine concern for people. Family full of doctors I think.
Good to go, Blue says.
I try to disguise my heart, but I’m still in fight-or-flight mode. I’m still waiting to see some lights roll so I can pop the door and run.
How much? Hollywood asks nonchalantly. Somehow he’s been unaffected by all of this and is more concerned with his cell phone.
Blue steps out again, inspects the hood, and jumps back into the driver’s seat. I gave her an old metro card I already used twice and ten bucks.
That’s greeeease. Hollywood.
‘Grease’ = foul or opportunistic beyond the point of morality.
You lucky the glass ain’t break. Hollywood smacks his phone like an old TV.
We drop Row off and head downtown. The accident shifts things. Whipping in and out of back blocks, Blue knows well I feel a lingering sense of numbness as I bob with traffic patterns. It’s like I’m hardly here or powerless or merely an observer, and it’s inexplicably empowering. Black-hole heavy. I’m at the mercy, life seems to say, of vehicles, people going places, and places driven by ideals. God knows what else. We pull up to the red light on Atlantic by Essence lounge and my immutable core takes control. My face, heart, and hands go airplane mode. I completely disassociate. It’s a peace I can’t recall feeling before. Feels like a fearless observation. I barely blink. It reminds me of the nothingness from which we came. Then it reminds me I’ve felt this nothingness before. I’ve felt it on my balcony overlooking a drop that would surely kill. I’ve felt it in college. I’ve felt it in adolescence. From nothing to a world of memories and expectations. A woman nearly killed me once. Did I already say that? I journaled about it not too long ago, but these last couple of days have been a blur. She and Ma were good friends when we lived in Meriden, and her boyfriend was a cop. We were over her place across the street, one thing led to another, and she pulled a pistol from her dresser drawer. She waved it over her head like a cowgirl and with a big smile put me in her sights. I was fourteen maybe and she didn’t mean any harm I’m sure, but she was having fun with her finger on the trigger. I remember feeling the nothingness then. Later I heard she passed from breast cancer. A shame. I used to have a crush on her daughter. People can tell you all they want, but until you experience it and actually feel the shift to oblivion, the texture doesn’t stick. Every time you could have died you kind of do. Youthful invincibility gives way to a cold logic and reason. You begin to understand probability and statistics. The light turns green and I drift off into Saint Timothy visions. I haven’t told anyone, and I have no plan other than I’m going. For now it is good enough. I wanted to come up with Paris or someplace romantic, but all I could afford was a one-way ticket to Saint Timothy with a layover in Puerta Rica.
Image © glsƒngrs
This is an excerpt from Wings of Red by James W. Jennings, published by Soft Skull Press.
