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It was Saturday morning, and I was visiting my ole boy. Usually, he and I just talked with each other over the phone, or I would send him letters, but it was rare that I came down to visit him. For starters, the man was so anal when it came to visitation that he really didn’t want me coming to see him. Before I had children of my own, I could never understand his logic. Once I became a father, I could agree.
If I were doing the amount of time that he was, then I wouldn’t want my children coming down to see me in there either. If anything, you’ll just feel as if you failed as a parent. I hated this situation that my parents were in, but I knew that it wasn’t shit that I could do. He walked over to me, showing damn near all the teeth in his mouth as he swaggered in a way that only he could. My father used to be a big man, like myself. We just naturally looked like we could use our bare hands to pick up cars and shit. We had this certain physique about us that made people question if we were a quarterback on someone’s football team.
The thing is, as he walked toward me, I was the only one looking like a damn quarterback. He looked weak, although he tried to cover it up with the smile on his face and his cocky walk. Hell, this was even my first time seeing him without an inch of hair on his head. The last time I saw him for visitation was probably a year ago. His weight was up then, and he rocked a short, mini afro. Now, he looked like he was in this bitch starving himself, and his eyes looked sunken in a little bit as if he wasn’t getting a lick of sleep.
“Old where? Bring me any bitch that you out here fuckin’, and I bet you I can still snag them,” he said once he neared me and pulled me into a quick, fatherly hug.
I laughed at the comment he made, happy that his ability to talk shit hadn’t left. Hugging him, I swear I could feel this man’s bones. Something just wasn’t right, and I wondered if that was the reason why he’d called me in the middle of the week, telling me to come down and see him. After we finished embracing, we both took a seat at the circular table, and I could feel a little disconnect between the two of us.
While I stared him straight in his eyes, his eyes were everywhere but on me. It’s like he was nervous about something. Anyone who knew my father knew that he had to have been the cockiest man on Earth, so being nervous wasn’t a trait that he’d ever exposed.
“What’s going on, Pops? Some shit just seems off with you. You lost hella weight, and what’s up with the bald head?” I asked him.
The smile that he’d had on his face just a few minutes ago when he’d walked out to see me was quickly left his face. A more serious look came into view as he suddenly stopped looking at the walls behind me and finally looked me in my eyes.
“I felt like I could keep this a little secret for as long as possible, but this shit is pretty much killing me as the days go by,” he said, and then he released a sigh. “They diagnosed me last year with advanced prostate cancer. I didn’t make it a big deal because they quickly started giving me the treatments and because I wasn’t trying to scare you with it, so that’s why I didn’t tell you. These past few months, the cancer has progressed, so I figured I’d let you know that—”
“Let me know what? Fuck do you have to let me know?” I barked.
I was so loud that the majority of everyone in the visitation room had turned around to look at us. It was one thing to lose my parents to the system, but it was another thing to lose my ole boy to some fuckin’ cancer. At least with him being locked up, I could still talk on the phone with him, send him letters, or even come down for visitation whenever he allowed me to, but for him to just all around check out on me, nah, that was some shit that I wasn’t ready for. I didn’t think that I would ever be ready for some shit like that.
“Bully, this shit is hard on me too, son! How you think I feel? The system took me and your mama away from you when you were only two years old! Our actions denied you the chance of having a real childhood, where you got to experience having two parents in the house. It doesn’t make me feel good inside knowing that your grandma had to raise you. Now, years later, here I am, telling you some shit like this. I keep failing you, man. I wanted to be selfish with this shit. I wanted to let this sickness just take over my body, and when God was ready, He’d allowed me to rest. But I failed you for thirty-three years, so it was only right that I came out of my mouth and let you know in person,” he said.
When he finished speaking, a lone tear fell from his eyes, and it hit me that this was my first time in my entire life seeing this man cry. On some real shit, I just assumed he didn’t have any tear ducts because I never even saw his eyes get watery before.
“Does Ma know?” I asked him, and he shook his head.
I shook my head as well because I thought about the many ways that this would break her hurt when she found out about him having cancer. The thing is, even with the two of them getting well over fifty years in prison, my ole girl still loved this man down to his fuckin’ dirty drawers. I had just seen her in visitation not too long ago, and she was talking about how the two of them were going to renew their vows once they were released, and now look. That shit wasn’t going to ever happen.
“How much longer they saying you got?” I asked him.
I could tell it was a question that he didn’t too much care to answer by the way he released a sigh and started looking off again. My father was a lot like me. We tend to steer away from the truth, especially when we feel like it’s some information that could possibly break someone’s spirit.
“They saying that I don’t even have a year,” he finally said.
As hard as I wanted to be about this situation, I couldn’t. The tears that I was trying so hard to keep at bay eventually slipped from my face. I was angry, hurt, and just confused. Here I am, thinking that I was coming down to the prison today just to kick it with him, but I was given some bullshit ass news about him having cancer, and to top it off, they didn’t even give this man a year left of survival. In my thirty-five years of being on this Earth, I swear to God I’ll never understand the way life worked. Didn’t God know that I had already suffered enough? How mu
ch more was He going to take from me until it was nothing else to take?
I lost my parents at a time in my life when I was too young to even remember the times we had together when they were free. When Mother’s Day and Father’s Day came around in school, I would always have to send my cards off in the mail for them to receive it, while most kids had the luxury of going home and giving their parents their shit in their hands. Although both of my parents still had twenty years left to serve in prison, I was actually looking forward to that shit.
“Don’t cry over this shit, son. I know it hurts like a motha fucka, but I can’t help but feel as if this is my karma for all the bad shit that I did when I was in the streets. I took so many lives, served so many drugs to people, that’s probably still hooked to this day, and I brought your mama into this shit with me. If I cry, it’s not because of this cancer. It’s because I’m getting ready to check out on you before I got the chance to see you outside of these walls,” he let me know.
All I could do was nod my head because I no longer felt like talking. My heart was too heavy to sit there and talk about shit. I knew it was a fucked up thing to say, but I regretted even coming down there. Was I wrong for wishing that a part of him would have just been selfish and not told me this shit? Damn, I just felt like some shit was better left unsaid.
15
Journey Evans
“Alright, Jada and Jaden, give me those iPads. Shrimp said that she normally takes them from you at 9:00, but because it’s the weekend, I thought I’d give the two of you an extra thirty minutes,” my grandma said, coming into the bedroom that me and my little brother and sister shared whenever we spent the night.
I would say that I would much rather go home, but these days, I just didn’t know what home was. The townhouse that my mom had us living in just didn’t feel like home. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice and luxurious, but it just felt like something that you vacation at until you go back home. Then, the big mansion that had been our home for the past few years or so didn’t feel like home either without my mom in it. My mom didn’t express her dealings between her and my father to me, so I really didn’t know what was going on. Hell, I really didn’t even know what happened between the two of them that was so bad that it had her walking around without her ring and moving out of the house.
The shit that my parents were going through had turned me angry. I felt like they were going out like every other parent who acted like they weren’t mature enough to work through their damn problems. At thirteen years old, I just wanted something stable. That moving from house to house throughout the week was stupid as hell. Because I didn’t too much agree with the changes that had been going on in my life lately, it caused me to distance myself from my mom. I think I was more distanced from my father because I felt like he was really the reason why the marriage wasn’t working. I just felt like he no longer cared.
With me distancing myself, and my parents having problems of their own, they hadn’t even noticed the phone that Raheem had given to me well over three weeks ago and that I’d been keeping in contact with him. Call me stupid, but I believed him when he said that he was sorry. He was right, neither of us were ready for a child, so I couldn’t blame him for wanting me to get an abortion.
I lay back in the twin sized bed that was closest to the window with a goofy smile on my face because I knew that in a few short hours, I would be able to see him. His mother had gone out tonight with a few of her friends, so he had the apartment to himself. Knowing what was about to go down between us tonight had me smiling from ear to ear.
