Demond lived in a seafoam-green house. It had belonged to his grandmother; her husband had probably built it for her, as was the custom in DeLisle in those days. When his girlfriend gave birth to their child when he was in his late twenties, his mother gave him the house for them to live in. It was like most of the older houses in DeLisle: perched up on cinder blocks, two or three, in case of flood; low ceilings, wood paneling, small corner kitchen. Demond’s house was set at the rear of a long, roomy piece of corner property. His yard was mostly grass with a few trees clustered closer near the front of the house: an old spreading oak, pecan, a crape myrtle gone to seed. The house was fronted by a wood-framed, screened-in porch. The living room was always dark, lit only by the neon play of the television across the walls, our faces. The dining room was usually empty except for domino and spades games on the older wooden table, the kitchen brown as the rest of the house. The bathroom was shoved behind the kitchen in a weird, diagonally placed nook off his child’s bedroom. The rest of the house, which included two more bedrooms, was designed like a shotgun house, each room opening onto another.
I never went through the door in his child’s bedroom wall into the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend, through that door to the extra bedroom in the back where sometimes his girlfriend’s twin slept. I wondered about those rooms often, wondered if they were as dark as the rooms in the front, if they seemed as sealed, as insular, and I imagined them stretching off into a great distance, room after room, each one more cavelike than its predecessor, each holding what would later become treasure: a picture of Demond grinning and holding his child, his Enyce fits, his Timberland boots, still smelling faintly of the sweat of his feet. I never imagined people in those rooms since all the living seemed to be done in the front.
We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new. I wondered about Demond’s grandmother and her kids, and wondered what their lives in Demond’s house had been like. Had they lived with the dead as we did? Had they quaffed shine the way we did beer and weed and pills, and then stare at each other in the dim light, glassy-eyed, hoping for a sea change? Even though Demond’s parents had remained married and both had good jobs, his family wasn’t so different from my family, his reality the same, death stalking us all. If Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
That same summer, we decided to have a crawfish boil at Nerissa’s apartment. Rob borrowed a gas burner and a huge silver pot from a friend in the neighborhood. He set it at the edge of Nerissa’s small concrete back patio, pulled out a plastic table, set six chairs around it. It was a bright, warm day; the grass was tough with water because it was summer. It had been raining at least every other day for the past month. Rob set out with two empty coolers and went to a seafood shop that specialized in crawfish during the season, and returned with them full and crawling with mud-green crawfish. He and Nerissa chopped seasonings, dumped them in the heavy silver pot so large an infant could fit inside, and began boiling the sides. Charine and her boyfriend, C. J., cuddled on the sofa, demanded that the rest of us watch the Bruce Lee biopic Dragon over and over again. People arrived one by one, in pairs, in carfuls, Rog and Demond among them. Once there, Demond took a seat at the table where a dominoes game was in mid-slap. A cooler of beer appeared, a few bottles of Crown, some fruity malt beverages for the girls. We spread newspaper over the kitchen table inside the house, dumped the boiled crawfish, now blood red, on the table. We peeled, sucked, and ate. My lips began to burn and I noticed that everyone who was eating crawfish was sniffing, eyes watery, lips red and puffy as pickled pig’s lips in a jar. Demond sat at the table with Nerissa and me and Charine, passed us drinks, asked me questions about what I did.
“So what you doing up there?”
“I’m trying to be a writer.”
“What you want to write?”
“Books about home. About the hood.”
“She writing about real shit,” Charine said.
“What you mean?” Demond asked.
“They be selling drugs in the book,” Charine said.
“For real?” Demond asked, took a swig of his beer.
“Yeah,” I said. Laughed, drank a third of my bottle.
“I told you she be writing about the hood,” Charine said.
“You should write about my life,” Demond said.
“I should, huh?” I laughed again. I heard this often at home. Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about. Then, I laughed it off. Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims.
“It’d be a bestseller,” Demond said.
“I don’t write real-life stuff,” I said. It was my stock response for that suggestion, but even as I said it, I experienced a sort of dissonance. I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn’t pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys, Demond among them, experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God. To avoid all of this, I drank.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I smiled. Demond smiled. The vein running down the center of his high forehead pulsed and the skin around his eyes bunched at the corners.
Rob put the last batch of the eighty pounds of crawfish to boil at midnight, cut the burner off, and then went inside and forgot about them, fell asleep. We all slept, drunk, lips tender, on sofas, on floors, in beds. I woke at 2:00 A.M. hungry and drunk and stumbled out onto the slab to find the pot cold, the crawfish bloated with water, soft and ruined, and rain falling, the drops fat and warm. The dominoes, the table, the chairs: all wet. When I stepped out into the grass, searching for some crawfish that had been spared, hidden away on a plate or container, the grass gave and my feet sank. Every step was an exercise in loss. I looked up into the rain, then gave up, slipped back inside, figured somebody would clean up the mess in the morning, and fell asleep in the bunk bed that my nephew slept in when he visited Nerissa.