Victor Lavalle - Slapboxing with Jesus

— You’re going to get sick in this bad weather, I told him.

— You too.

— But if I get sick I miss school, there’s nothing bad about that.

He leaned close to me. — Nothing wrong with missing a little work either.

He had finished two beers and was halfway through his third; I had killed one and was almost done with the next.

— You think your mom might be around later?

— What for?

The hand rose again, like to touch me but it was on himself, running his hair neat. — I’m not leaving for two more days. You think your mother might want some dinner?

Then, like it happens, bad skies got better; sunlight started making things nice, nice, nice. Right away people showed up on the streets again; kids were on their way back to the park. My father checked his watch. I got two more, handed him one and popped the other, but we had done all the drinking we were going to do.

His laugh came out like a shout. I asked why.

— You know, one time, when I was still with your mother?

I kept shut because I had never known that era.

— I remember we did it once, finished, and she wanted to go again. Right there. Didn’t even have time to wipe the juice off.

I shrugged, it was all the move I could manage.

— It’s getting late, he said.

It wasn’t.

His face was all lit up, call it glee.

— And? I asked.

— We should get back to your mom. He stretched his arms like he could reach her from here.

This was the year of crib deaths. This was the year of baby sisters. Our newborn, named Nabisase, cried even after she was fed. My mother came home weak from her labors. Grandma was the dishwasher and a pessimist. And then there was me.

Flushing had come alive in a wave of infants. You’d have thought there was a block-wide blackout nine months before. Our building leaned left with all the new weight on our side; at the other end of the place the elderly were not propagating. Diapers and bottles came in like a relief effort. When the elevator was broken, supplies were hauled up stairs on the scarred legs of older brothers. This was a change for most of us, this was a very new thing.

Each boy had ways to handle it. The standard was indifference. Ray and Bertram did this. Ali took it another route and ran. At twelve that seemed stupid, but he’d always been good with people so he took a chance. Between other conversations we would imagine where he had gone.

I became a family man.

Todd brought me to his third-floor apartment, on a Monday. He lived in one of the strip-thin homes that larger buildings like mine bracketed. We climbed past boxes, bikes left on landings. His mother was at work, his older sister too, cashiering at Key Food. His mother was distant and tall, a skinny woman who never let him have visitors. His long, swinging hair was a family trait, superblond; Todd’s skin was so pale we had to call him Red.

Todd, his sister and his mother had their own rooms. I shared one with my mother and our new girl. This arrangement wasn’t deadly yet: I hadn’t started having those dreams that left me needing privacy, waking up with messy sheets.

— What is it? I asked, annoyed at the buildup. I have something to show you, that’s all he’d said.

Todd opened the door to his room, told me to wait inside. His room was how a boy’s should be: a mess. A week of clothes on the floor, piles of the unwashed. I sat on the bed, that old Space Shuttle — style frame, a short mattress in the middle. I only came up to Todd’s shoulder and this thing was too small for me. On the end where his ankles would droop his mother had wrapped the thick yellow cushioning that televisions came in before Styrofoam. I stared at the material, getting bored; it was so perfect I couldn’t help but pick at it until fingerfulls were at my feet like baby chicks on a farm. Todd stepped in. — What the fuck are you doing? He tossed me a ball good for running bases, stickball or handball. I squeezed it.

He left again, shut the door. That Thurman Munson poster was still hanging there, on tacks. Todd talked about it incessantly. In it, Thurman was watching something he’d swatted over a fence, standing straight like he wouldn’t run until he’d heard the ball bounce down Bronx streets. The look on his face might have been called intensity but it had been a few years since he’d been in that crash, so to me he seemed to be listening to those game-day clouds as they whispered, You’re going to die up here. Todd’s father had left this for him before catching a plane back to Sweden where he lived apart from all he’d made here; somehow, fathers were leaving all types of things behind with which their sons might remember them, objects over which we could obsess.

Todd pushed open the door, in his right hand a small peach-colored box; with his left he turned on the light. He sat next to me, opened the box, turned it over and dropped the diaphragm onto his palm. It looked like half a rubber ball.

— That’s it?

— Oh yeah, Todd said. He held it over his mouth and nose. Look, a surgeon’s mask.

Laughing for no reason, I asked, — How does it work?

— My sister puts it in her pussy and it catches the guy’s cum so she won’t get pregnant.

I looked at him like he was stupid.

— I swear.

I put my hands out, he tossed it to me. — In her pussy? I asked, then, to my nose with it.

— She hasn’t used it yet, asshole.

I kept it over my face, trying to imagine. I threw it back to Todd.

— But that’s not the best part. See the little holes? He held the thing up to the bulb.

I stared, soon saw them. Shrugged.

— So? If she uses it she’ll get pregnant for sure.

My sibling was new to me, so I didn’t understand this hatred yet.

— My mom will kill her.

I shrugged again. — Okay.

He shook his head, put it back in the box. — Her life’ll be so fucked, he laughed. My sister says all babies are assholes.

— Not all of them. I picked up five candy wrappers he’d littered on the floor, crinkled the plastic in my hand.

— Isn’t she getting on your fucking nerves already? Todd asked. Doesn’t she cry a lot?

— She cries sometimes, but I get up.

— Why?

I reiterated, — Because she’s crying.

Todd grabbed his balls. — You sir, are a superfag.

— Your mother’s a faggot, I said, looked outside. All those apartment buildings, in every direction, and so many people inside, too many for me to count.

Kids on Colden Street could sense only two things instinctively: fights and running bases. Guys sat on stoops while younger ones slapboxed for their approval. Cars were lined up and never moved. I stood in the street, raised the ball for all to see. They came at me in multitudes, like the Israelites escaping Pharaoh’s bondage.

David was older, seventeen, a scourge. Normally he’d have appeared already, cut through our bodies and enthusiasm with his thick left hand, grabbed the ball from me, would have turned his back and launched that little blue globe up. It would bounce around when it hit our roof, where it would stay. Willie the Super would appear in a week with a brown box of balls: handball, football, baseball, more, that he’d sell back to us at a fair price. He and David were in on some high-class business venture. Around Flushing there were lots of ways to make money. Some harmless scheme. I even worked. One employee. Supervisor and supervised. For two dollars, you got one page. A letter, a note. You tell me the specifications and I turn out a product makes you seem: articulate, sensitive, heartbroken, serious, funny, concerned (choose one).

In my dresser drawer I had an envelope with forty-eight dollars inside, all singles. I was known for my work. Famous. Recognized by guys ages nine to nineteen as, that kid. I had been doing it for two years, since I was ten, and getting better. When I saw some guy holding hands with his new girlfriend, heard about the handjob he’d received at the movies, I took pride in knowing I had played a part. I told them all to recopy my letters in their own handwriting so females wouldn’t get suspicious.