“You don’t even look at girls and shit, you like, ‘You know that nigga got benefits, right? Oooh, I wonder what that nigga paystub look like.’ Wake up in the morning with your robe open, watching the sanitation workers.”
I have to wait for the Bronx niggas to calm down before I can nod at the dude in the barber’s chair. “So?”
The dude in the chair shrugs. “I’m here getting a new arm.”
“You lose the old one workin’?”
“Yeah, but the Sponsors got me covered. Paid for my hospital time and everything.”
Mero leans forward on his crate. “They ain’t dock your pay?”
The dude winks as Miguel fuses the metal to the man’s nerves. “Government job, yo.”
“Issa Babylon ting,” Marlon murmurs in an exaggerated Rasta accent, smirking.
I squint. “That don’t hurt?”
The dude lets loose another shrug. Not sure if he’s trying hard to advertise for these factory jobs. Maybe he’s getting paid to seem as excited for this gig as he reasonably can. “Nah, the Company turns off the pain receptors for my appointment. My chip, yo.”
I look at my thumb, where my own chip was put in after the parole board back in New York approved my release. Can’t tell if it’s the way the sun’s shining and casting shadows, but I think I see it glowing blue under my skin. Blue bars like the Company logo I seen on the billboards.
There’s a bunch of us in a circle.
Dr. Bissell’s the one with his back to the door, and the rest of us sit around him. About eight of us or so. Almost all black and brown. Nobody’s got gang tats, so it’s like we were all singles passing through the system, spat out to land here in this little oasis where we have a job and a pretty big place to sleep. Dr. Bissell doesn’t say much. Looks like he’s been doing these sessions for a while, and he’s seen enough of us come through that he knows it’s impossible to “earn” our respect, like a points system or something, but that sometimes you just gotta let the one guy talk and the others’ll maybe slide through that open door. I remember the prison counselors and all those mental health workers Rikers used to churn through. Just couldn’t shut the fuck up and stick around to wait and see that these closed-down, shut-down niggas just lookin’ for a reason, any reason, to talk.
Calvin’s here too. Tan-color button-down over his Jupiter-sized belly.
“Violence causes trauma,” Calvin had told me just before I slid through the open door to this room. “And trauma causes violence, Youngblood. Hurt people hurt people.” He’d said it in a low, counseling voice. I wanted to tell him to stop calling me Youngblood. Twenty-eight ain’t that young.
A kid named Davis is talking. Philly kid. Probably the kind of shooter Philly rappers rapped about knowing personally. The ones they were whipping work in the kitchen with, maybe the type to appear in their music videos. If I pulled up a Meek or Beanie or Cassidy music video on someone’s tablet, I’d maybe see him neon-lit in the background.
“It’s like, we don’t get shot or stabbed, we get ourselves shot or stabbed, you know?” He talks with his hands in front of him, constantly putting his fist in his palm for emphasis. That’s the whole ambit of his reach. He doesn’t wave, doesn’t point, just claps with his knuckles and palms. “Like, my boy—I ain’t gonna say his name—but after he got shot and got out the ER, he used to jump out in front of buses and, at the last minute, hold his hands out.” Soft clap. “I ain’t wanna end up like that. So soon as I could, I got the transfer to Watts. I heard you was here.” He shakes his head. “And all over some stupid shit.”
An Atlanta cat named Hendrix, with dreads down past his shoulders, leans back in his chair. Type of nigga to wear sunglasses indoors. “You ever think about revenge?”
Davis bristles. “All the time, nigga. What you think?”
Their voices have started to rise, and I eye Dr. Bissell, who remains unmoved.
“That’s why I come here. So I can talk about it, ’stead of do it. What I look like, huntin’ the nigga who stabbed me over weed.”
I feel Ella in the room. Standing somewhere between me and Davis. Haunting me. And her Thing, her ability to get into other people’s heads, it’s starting to get to me, so that when Davis talks about the nigga who stabbed him over weed, I can see the abandoned church on the corner of 18th and Ridge in North Central Philly, and I can see Davis taking too long to mull over a purchase and the other dude, bulky Sixers jacket on to protect against the Philly winter, sucking his teeth, getting impatient, then telling Davis to go buy his weed elsewhere in a few more words than that and Davis saying, “I go wherever the fuck I wanna go,” and the dude saying some things back, then Davis swinging and catching the dude on the side of his head, and the dude swinging and Davis not caring if the dude was strapped, just knowing that if he got the drop fast enough, he could smack the dogshit outta dude, but then metal glints—a knife—and the other dude slashes then stabs, and then Davis watching the knife going in and out in and out in and out, still swinging, feeling no pain, even though there’s blood everywhere, then the dude running out of Davis’s grip and Davis writhing on the ground, then Davis thinking of calling an ambulance, thankful the weedman ain’t take his phone, but then realizing he’d have to pay, like, $2,000 so, gritting his teeth, Davis picks himself up and walks a little over a mile to Hahnemann University’s emergency department. During the whole walk, Davis is holding his stomach together. Blood drips on the sidewalk. Strangers see him, offer to help. But his Francisville folk, the people he’s known all his life, know better than that. They know what kind of person he is. So he shrugs off the strangers and walks and walks and walks.
And I wake up, still in the circle with the other Watts guys. Everybody’s quiet, and Davis is looking at me with this pained look in his eyes. I got no idea how long I was out. But I must’ve been staring the whole time.
I put my hand to my eyes, shake Ella out of my head.
“I’m good,” I say quietly. It looks like they’re waiting for me to say more, but I’ve already lied once to these guys. When Hendrix starts talking about his prison bid and the first time he got thrown in AdSeg, I have to leave. I can’t live through that guy’s memories too.
Dr. Bissell’s door is open, but I knock anyway.
He has a tablet on his desk and a few pictures of what I guess are his family. The frames’ backs are turned to me, so it’s just a guess. He sees me and smiles, then gets up to shake my hand. “Kevin, right?”
“Yeah. Kev. Kevin Jackson.”
He goes to close the door, then I sit down in one of the chairs and he takes his seat behind his desk.
“Trouble sleeping,” I tell him, before he can keep going with any small talk. “You the type of doctor that can write a prescription or something?”
“We don’t do prescriptions here.” He folds his hands and leans forward on his desk. His shirtsleeves are rolled up. No tattoos that I can see. Doesn’t mean he isn’t his own kind of hard. “But if residual anxiety from your time inside is getting to be too much, I can write to the Company and have them up your dosage.”
“Dosage? Of what?”
“They gave you an implant, correct?”
I look at my thumb. “You mean this? Yeah, but it’s only for access. You know, to my home and stuff. And when they need to check on me.”
“Well, the chips are also equipped to monitor your biorhythms, and when the chemicals in your brain begin to show signs of rising anxiety levels or if your symptoms of PTSD begin to recur, it can release chemicals to counteract them. Are your episodes recent?”
I shrug. I’d dreamt of the night I borrowed Freddie’s ski mask. “I mean, I had one last night, but it’s never really been that bad.”