Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

He snatches a pack off the shelf and thumps it and lays it on the counter. Boy, if I had a dollar, he says. But fuck it, you good for business.

Best to pay and leave before I have the chance to reconsider. A foot out the door it’s as if I’ve wandered into a new county. The first drag stokes my chest and feels better than it has, the best it might feel ever again.

When we were knee-high to an ant, wet behind the ears (you know all the little sobriquets the old heads love to tag you with), and everything else they called us in those days, every time we were doing something we (the we being me, my bros, and any one of my intractable-ass first, second, or third cousins) had no business doing, Mama Liza would say it’s all fun and games … It’s all fun and games till somebody gets their eye gouged out … It’s all fun and games till somebody busts their head wide open … It’s all fun and games till somebody scrapes all the skin off their knees. When we were older, she didn’t even have to finish the sentence. She’d catch us committing some stark crime, shake her wig askew, make her eyes go all ecclesiastical, and say, It’s all fun and games …

Professor Haskins is hunched over a stack of papers with his door cracked. He hacks a loud cough into the crook of his arm and swivels slow at the sound of me entering.

Got a sec? I say.

For you, he says, sure.

He pats the couch, tells me to have a seat.

The cushions suck me low.

What can I do for you? he says.

About the program, I say. Can you tell me more?

He grins, taps a ditty on his desk. So you changed your mind? he says. Ready for politics?

No so much politics but school, I say. Do you know the deadline, what I’d need?

He frowns and shakes his head, his frosty natural going back and forth. There’s meat under his eyes and a bulge above his belt. Well, Shawn, he says. I’m afraid the deadline has come and gone.

Oh, I say, and fight the suck of the couch cushions onto my feet. Guess my next question is moot.

Not so fast, he says.

But I thought you said I missed it, I say.

You did, he says. He shuts the door, sits at his desk. He pushes his specs up the bridge of his nose, wheels his seat close. Now, this stays between us, he says, and puts a ring finger to his lip. The word is there’s one spot left and pressure from the dean to fill it. He explains how to apply — the recc letters, the essay, a speech.

What I tell him is all I need is a shot, as if I’ve considered the whole process all before. But that’s always been my gift: Say it first and believe it second. I tell him, no sweat, that the info goes no further than me. He tells me start quick, recites the drop-dead deadline. You should see me when I bop out all buoyant — a theme song playing in my head. The recc letters: cool. The speech: cool. But the essay — not so much. Though you all know me; by the time I stroll out of Smith Hall, I got the inkling of a half-ass plan.

The campus ain’t but yay big. But that ain’t stopped me from exploring, from getting my Jacques Cousteau on in buildings where they seldom hold classes, where the rooms are so cold that even this time of year, sitting alone in them like I do some days, my blood runs cooler. No bullshit, every now and again, on days when my meter’s full and there’s time to burn, or days when you can bet there’s a ticket waiting on my windshield, I search the campus for a quiet space. This is how I found the elevator where I used to steal off with this chick from my black studies class. What can I say about her? She was a superbad, smart, with fierce short hair and heart-attack hips and thighs, the kind of chick who makes me feel inferior. Add to that she had an ass that could turn staunch assologists into teary-eyed swains. Fortunate me and she were assigned to work on a project. We stopped by the campus bar the night we finished the project, tested our threshold for microbrews, and somehow ended up on Marine Drive watching planes take off. I’m not sure when, but sometime that night I said some slick shit (or maybe it wasn’t so slick and she was hella-credulous) I’ve been dying to rehash: We got to make the most of this, I said. This moment right here is history right after right now.

Now, maybe that sounds corny to you, some world-class drag, but say that sitting on Marine Drive, say it with the right song playing and the rain making music on your hood, and beyond-your-limit of alcohol swooshing your brain, say it right then, and it just might sound like the suavest shit you ever said in your life. And I don’t know how it is where you from, but I told you all a while ago what that equals around here.

Here’s the extended remix of the story: She let me hit in the car that night and, after our next class, was game for a second go-round in the elevator I’d found in the emptiest, coldest building on campus. Even more unbelievable was this: For the rest of the quarter, she’d let me coax her to that same building for another shot.

Why’d I tell you? Answer A is this: I don’t fuck for the sake of fucking or fuck for sport like other fools; I fuck for stories, tales I can trade with my boys after. Shit, if they cared more about chess than chasing skirts, I’d set my sights on becoming a black Bobby Fischer, but since they don’t, and since, how I see it, lying on your dick is a transgression worse than treason, what else can I do?

I stop by the phone booth and return a couple pages before I bounce, the last of which is to Todd, who says he wants to up his usual buy. The timing don’t surprise me. For as long as we’ve been doing business, he’s been a godsend. He never flakes on a meet time or dickers with short bank; what he does is once a week or so call to meet and pay with big bills arranged faceup and folded over. I swear, clients like him make this life feel infinite.

Hold up, godsend? What the fuck? One of you should’ve checked me for that.

Todd’s a great, great customer, but, real speak, he’s also a sucker-for-love type too. There was this one time when I stopped by his old crib to handle business and he answered the door in a wife-beater and boxers, with his braids undone, looking like he’d just got his ass whooped, when in truth he was damn near disemboweled over a broad. Most guys, in front a crowd, they’ll claim they’re tough boss-mack-player types, but away from the public, in those recesses where the lie of us won’t live, they’re Romeo-drink-the-poison-for-a-pretty-young-Juliet kind of punks, and choice client aside, count Todd in that group. That day I stopped by, he whined and whined about the broad and likely would have kept right on whining if I didn’t cut him short: Listen, man, it’s all fun and games till they got you where you like them more than they like you, I said. You need a new plan. You can’t keep treating these chicks like crystal statues.

I don’t know, man, he says

Damn, thought you was a player, I said. I thought players know some of them is dying to be dogged. Don’t you know a gang of broads is mystic flagellants.

Homeboy lit up a blunt and sucked. Like many a cliché dope boy, his whole crib was redolent of some of Oregon’s finest, reason why a contact high was wagging its middle finger in my brain.

And I ain’t talking physical either, I said. You’d be surprised how many chase heartache, need it to feel whole.

He took another pull and gazed at me, sclera the color of blood, a half-moon of white in the crease of his scorched bottom lip.

I’m tellin you some real shit, bro, I said. Put the cease-and-desist on the search-and-rescues.

You will never guess what homeboy’s response was after all that free G . ( G as in game, peoples, stick with me!) It was this: Champ, what the fuck’s a flagellant?