I said, — Great.
Every realm has its capitol and for Southern Queens that’s Jamaica. Sanctuary of discount shoppers. 99¢ stores and used cars sold along Hillside Avenue.
Mom drove up Merrick Boulevard. It wasn’t congested at noon, but by one o’clock all the churches freed the faithful. You wouldn’t imagine how many believers there are until you see them filling the roads.
I kept the car window down because I had the smell from between Lorraine’s legs still drying on my chin; no mother wants to smell pussy on her son’s face.
— You’re right about that! Mom laughed and slapped the dashboard.
I was embarrassed for what she might have heard. I put my hands around my forehead.
— Did I say something?
— Never mind that. You’re a grown man I guess.
An admission I’d appreciate on any other afternoon, but this time it made me feel oily.
— Reach in that dash, she said.
Gladly. I went into the glove compartment elbow deep pulling out every item asking Mom if that’s what she wanted. What about this? In one movie I liked, Little Tricks, a man hides his monstrous, deformed brother under the car’s dashboard; the creature eats unsuspecting prostitutes one digit at a time.
— One of the music tapes! Stop playing, Mom said. It has your name on it.
The tape with my name on it was so old that the plastic outer shells were held together with Krazy Glue that had gone gummy brown in the cracks. While the tape began reeling I took off my shoes. I wanted to sleep. I would have, but then my mother asked me a question.
— How old are you today?
Her voice sounded strange because it was playing through our two car speakers. Then my answer was funny, because I squeaked. — I’m ten years old.
— You keep these in the car? I asked over the recorded conversation.
— Not always. Just recently.
If I was ten on the tape then it was from 1982. She’d been taking photos, home movies and even these cassette tracks since I was five. Whenever she was institutionalized I sent her the tapes of Nabisase and I to comfort her.
— How do you like your new little sister? My mother asked a ten-year-old Anthony.
— She’s fine, he answered.
— Is that all you can say about her?
— My sister is always making BM’s!
That’s how the dialogue went; I was underwhelmed, but my mother was marooned. She was back there now, in 1982, without need of rescue.
She said, — Do you remember when you were that little boy?
— You taped us a thousand times.
The rest of the way she and I were quiet while Mom and Anthony spoke. They were funny, sometimes bland, but I enjoyed the time capsule, too.
We parked on Linden Boulevard then walked around the corner onto Merrick. Two of the four corners at the intersection were occupied by gas stations, the third was a hair salon and fourth the Hillman Christian School.
Hillman A.M.E. was the grandest landowner in Southern Queens; its elders ran the school and other businesses. The church itself, two blocks from this intersection, was one hundred thousand square feet. It looked like a massive clam, a wooden quahog, surrounded by flood lights. A house of worship constantly lit for a Hollywood premiere.
This Hillman church consortium ran for-profit businesses like the Christian School along Merrick Boulevard. Hillman Neighborhood Care Team, Hillman Christian School Early Childhood Learning & Development Center, Hillman Home Improvement Association. Hillman Federal Credit Union.
They placed caregivers with the homebound elderly.
Ran small-business seminars.
They were even buying back homes from the Arabs and Jews who’d been overcharging the largely working-class black renters for two decades. There was much applause for this in local black papers because it was still two years until Hillman A.M.E. raised the rents to prices neither type of Semite would have ever dared.
— How many more of those tapes do you have? I asked her.
— Plenty. Of you. You and your sister. Your sister and I. A couple of Grandma. Isaac.
— We’re all saved, I said.
The long corridor that is Merrick Boulevard pushed sounds up into the ceiling so that car horns and bus horns and truck horns, the music of Queens, floated away. And underneath them I heard the cheerful wind of birds flirting.
I was constantly surprised by how many trees there were on every block out here. Is that a stupid thing to say? When I was at Cornell, Ithaca’s ponds, the foliage, made me forget what my city was really like. When friends who weren’t from New York would call it mechanical and unnatural I agreed. Pretty soon I was describing the piss in building staircases or heaps of trash ten feet high because I thought it made me tougher to come from a hard place. But I didn’t tell enough about Flushing Meadow Park’s scarlet maples. The white-rumped sandpipers of Jamaica Bay.
— I want you to drive with us to a pageant in November. You know I can’t stay awake more than two hours in a car.
I didn’t believe her. Not about the contest, but why she wanted my participation. — You just don’t want to leave me alone in the house for a weekend.
One of the stores on this Hillman-owned block was our destination. — Anyway, she said, here we go. Mom held the door.
I looked up to read the silver letters above the entrance. Hillman Halfway House, it read.
— I’m not going in there.
Mom pulled my arm forcefully. — What’s the problem?
— A halfway house? You want to put me in a hospital, just take me there.
She read the sign out loud then laughed. — I’m not thinking that way. You’ve got the wrong idea.
— How do you mistake the words Halfway and House?
— It’s a saying of ours. ‘Once you step inside you’re halfway to your goal.’
— And what’s my goal?
— To be healthy.
— Healthy?
— To be lean.
— This is a weight-loss clinic?
— It’s a Diet Center.
My mother had to follow me back around the corner to Linden Boulevard, because I walked away.
— What are you doing, Mom? This isn’t going to make things better.
— It’s not? When did you become a doctor?
— Oatmeal in the morning won’t fix me!
She put a few of her nails into my hand. — Worked for me.
I couldn’t deny that she looked force majeure, but this solution was as idealistic as Grandma’s. Labor was not a balm. At a job in the Bronx I’d tried to pick up a couch by myself a day ago and strained my shoulders.
— Maybe you should just get me some of your Haldol. I’ll take it if that means you’ll all stop trying to save my life.
— I’m telling you that’s wrong, Mom said. I stopped taking it a year ago. And look at me.
Reflected in the glass panels of the hair salon on the corner Mom and I looked like a married couple. I was wearing a cheap suit plus my fat added twenty years. I looked forty-three. And Mom, fetching, sinewy, wearing a red rabbit fur scarf, seemed thirty-five at best.
— So what do you use for. . I tapped my right temple twice.
— I used to have faith in doctoring. But the doctor’s had no faith in me. They don’t want you well just wasted.
The stinging odor of hair dye made it out to the street. Along with it came the vinegar odor of straightening treatments, the cloying dreadlock butter. We walked back.
— Why is a church running a fat camp? How do they make a profit on it?
— It’s in Hillman’s honor.
— Hillman A.M.E., that’s a real guy?
— Bartholomew Hillman was a slave in New York in 1787. He had a weight problem.
— The church is named for a fat slave?