Mitchell Jackson: The Residue Years

You balling? he says.

No, sir, I say. Just the books for me.

He fixes his face into a frown you could almost call authentic. You got the right idea, he says. For sure. You could be out here running amuck like the rest of them. You keep on.

When they pull off, the part of my brain that makes good decisions says, Leave now! Leave now! Leave now!

But what do I do?

What they should tell you in those youth programs is that reckless confidence breeds bad decisions, that avoiding a felony can swell almost anyone with a superfool’s sense of safety.

Back in my ride with window cracked, it’s Northeast in concert: tires whirring over slick streets, water rushing down a sewer, a dog barking in somebody’s backyard. It’s Northeast on stage: a stray cat rummaging through a curbside recycling bin, a small black thing darting into the lot across the street. This is the same lot where years ago, I’m talking back when we were living in the house on Sixth (our home then and now though we don’t own it), me and my homeboy Half Man and a couple of my patnas from King Elementary would play stickball or football or kickball against dudes from another neighborhood. On days when everyone showed we had enough for six-on-six, but attrition is a motherfucker. It’d be slim pickings for our reunion squad: Half Man, my boy with the lazy eye, and maybe my wannabe pimp patna, but only if we could coax him away from the beefy white broad he brags to anyone who’ll listen is paying what she weighs.

Bam! From nowhere a basehead appears at my window. Say, boss, I’m doing bad out here, he says. Let me get a little bump to set me straight.

Dude’s a veteran smoker. Used to see him my second go-round at curb-serving. Good sense says I shouldn’t speak one word, but I speak two: Beat it.

Aw, boss, don’t do me like that, he says. I’m not askin for no handout. He waves his arms, fans a noxious funk of mildew, smoke, and highgrade piss and backs into a snatch of light. In that snatch you can see he has a nappy beard that runs all the way down his throat and yellow eyes, my alcoholic uncle Pat’s yellow eyes. Right after we’d left for the first time the house on Sixth, back when my moms kept the family level, balanced like the weight you use to zero a digi scale, my always-soused uncle Pat would pop up unannounced plying at her with sob-ass drag: Grace, I just need a place to lay my head a few nights, he’d say, and parlay that few nights into a week, into a month, into a year of living rent-free, drinking the last of the 2 %, and spending whole days beached in front of our TV.

I ask dude if he’s police cause back in my crucible days an old head told me asking the question would protect me against police entrapment. Dude scratches his head and bores into me with spangled I-get-zooted marbles. C’mon, boss. I’m fucked up out here, he says, as if the shit isn’t explicit. I raise the window and shoot him a glare that’s the same as thorough ass-whooping.

This veteran basehead, nappy beard, my drunk uncle Pat’s yellow eyes, he drags to the other side of the street. He stops, plucks a small bit off the ground, and, with the rain slapping his skull something vicious, holds it to the sky and cocks his head. He leaves his arm up until it tremors. Then he drops his arm and shakes his head and tosses his find aside. He turns his back to me, slugs off, and in the distance, a shadow swallows him whole.

The counselor — she wears her hair short as a man’s and handmade clothes — glances from a desk messy with papers and pens and a multicolored coffee mug. Hey there, she says. Just finishing. When I sit, my feet won’t keep still, so I fold my hands in my lap and dig my heels in the floor and don’t let the clock tick off but a few seconds before I get around to what’s most important: Where? She picks up my file and runs her finger along the top sheet, her bookish frames free-falling down the slope of her nose. She tells me my housing assignment, the Piedmonts, and you couldn’t pick a place with more addicts and dealers, a place with more to tempt. Oh my, I say. Is there any place else?

I’m afraid not, she says, and tweaks her frames. She goes on about denied grants and budget cuts and program closures — excuses she must think consoling, but aren’t in the least — and takes out a triplicate-copy contract and asks me to read it.

She tells me that my caseworker will have the details, but that the gist is I give them nine months to a year clean as an outpatient, and they set me free and clear, clean slate. She flashes teeth coffee-stained to light ocher. Here’s my best advice, she says. Affirm, affirm, affirm, and do it every day. Find a new group of friends if the old ones are users. Choose new places to hang out if the old places are triggers. You should also do yourself a huge huge favor and take up a hobby, she says. Reading, drawing, cooking, sewing. She leans over her desk and points at the sheet and explains the penalties for breaking rules. She claims she’s confident I won’t. She waits for a response that isn’t forthcoming. Let me be the first to congratulate you, she says. Don’t mistake today for anything but progress. For the next nine months you’re pretty much free to do as you please save breach the contract or break a law. Just nine more months and we cut you loose.

They tell us in times like these to affirm.

I am a child of God .

I place my life in the care of God .

I believe in a power greater than me .

Before I say I can’t, I will say I try .

Grace, Grace, she says. Are you here? Do you anticipate trouble?

No, I say. No issues, I say. None.

She tears apart the copies and hands me the bottom sheet and bullies me into a hug. Nerves are natural, she says, and steps back. But you have the tools to make it. You have the tools and you have us. So if ever you need, you stop by, she says. It’s open-door and I mean it. She hands me a voucher for food and toiletries. We are a resource, she says. We are your partner. She takes out a camera and poses me against the wall and snaps a portrait. She tells me when I finish outpatient, she’ll post it on her wall of champions.

In my room, I fold and smooth shirts, pants, blouses, my one skirt, audit socks for matches, check stockings for runs, couple bras to panties, and pack it all in my nylon suitcase and duffel. I swipe ledges for dust, sweep and resweep the floor, inspect the desk drawer; I count empty hangers left in the closet, take apart my bunk, and turn my sheets and blanket into squares. I lie across my bunk and, for the umpteenth time, read old letters, greeting cards, my old intake papers, the last few months of progress memos.

I throw on my jacket and slide a picture into my front pocket, the only one I can find of all my boys, together. It was taken at Canaan’s first birthday, ten years ago now, the year KJ started first grade, Champ finished junior high, the year Big Ken and I split for the last time. This was also the year my word, in ways that measured most, began weighing less than it should, a time before my case and the sentence that sent me down state and my boys, my precious loves, for a time with their father.

I loll in the hallways, peek into my friend’s rooms, coax them into long-winded good-byes.

You wait so long to leave and when it’s your turn you wait as long as you can to leave.

I am not alone .

I am capable of change .

I am the change I want to see .

At last, I end up under a covered bus stop with my duffel slung and my suitcase squatting by my side and my cherished birthday picture tucked in the pocket over my heart. There’s only one other person down here with me, a rugged-faced man wearing a stained work shirt and thick-soled boots. The man pats his pockets with an unlit filterless cigarette teethed between his lips. He asks for a light and I offer my Bic and he cups his hands against a gusty wind. He gets it lit and takes a drag that must be Zen, and though it wasn’t on my mind, I tamp out my slim menthol and light up myself. The bus arrives before long and I crush my cig under my foot and lug my duffel and suitcase on board and haul them to the back, where a boy — he got to be somewhere between the ages of my youngest two — with spiked green hair is slumped in a seat with a battered skateboard laid across his lap. It’s fall, but the boy’s wearing a T-shirt that, without even looking, you can see right through it, cutoff shorts, and dingy tenny shoes with no laces. He thumps his board and jerks his neck to what must be a song in his head, oblivious until we reach Northeast, where he signals his stop, leaps into the street, and skates off against traffic.