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Her boyfriend showed up a short while later. He had an annoying habit of calling me, “Chief.” He, too, was trying desperately to be happy. They disappeared into my aunt’s room to continue Act II and I went to the living room and turned up the volume on the TV. I fell asleep on the couch. I awoke hours later to the sound of my aunt and her boyfriend saying loud, demonstrative goodbyes at the front door. Declarations of love were made; promises to make things work out were renewed. However, in their voices there was a rushed, anxious quality—like when someone was making an emergency long distance call from a payphone at a highway gas station. They were forced to scream over the bad connection, talk quickly before time ran out on the payphone and they were left stranded in the middle of nowhere. As my aunt and her boyfriend rushed ahead with their declarations, it was as though they were even then thousands of miles apart.
Ghosts inhabit the imaginations of all human beings; but for children, ignorance and hopefulness continually give flesh to these ghosts. We are born seeing wonderlands and hell dimensions. However, with age and maturity, the customs and limitations of society begin to crush that innate hopefulness. Similarly, the lessons used by society to banish ignorance often have the side effect of withering the soul. At six years of age, I was in a state of flux. By now, I had consumed most of society’s kernels of wisdom, even though I hadn’t digested them yet. Whether that indigestion came as a result of my inextinguishable hopefulness or because of the same obstinacy I demonstrated with Williams, I can’t say. Either way, I clung to life—the essential goodness within me; and when I say “goodness” I don’t mean some moral precept. I merely mean that I was still intact. Most of the little compromises that socialization and maturity demanded of us hadn’t yet manifested themselves on my psyche and self-concept. I was still me….
In the morning, my aunt continued her attempt to be happy. I awoke to the sounds and smells of breakfast cooking. Still rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I approached my aunt shyly—and with a lingering sense of suspicion. Her baby seemed suspicious as well. It took her new onslaught of caresses and kisses for pokes and prods, and soon began to wail at her slightest approach. While I wolfed down her cooking, she spoke of the wonderful future that was in store for her, all the things that she and her boyfriend had discussed the night before. She was going to re-enter school; and somewhere down the line, there was a glorious career and marriage… and a house in the suburbs where her children could run in the back yard. I wasn’t really listening to her, of course. My aunt’s dreams were hers, and I had mine. Even as I sat there, all I could think about was Tisha and that magical basement room.
Compelled by that fantasy, I soon left and returned to the crack house. Nobody was there, but once again the reality of the room was a verification of the hours I had spent with Tisha, and therefore seemed to validate my hopes and my existence. The only drawback was that in the next room, one of Binzo’s knights was bartering with a bone-thin crackhead—trading a blow job for the drug she craved. Unfortunately, she was so on-edge from her addiction that her teeth chattered. She began chewing the sensitive tissue of his penis, and when a sudden spasm seized her body, the lamentable result was that she clamped down on his penis. The most blood-curdling scream you can imagine shook the foundations of the building. When I rushed to see what was happening, the crackhead was going into convulsions, her jaw still clamped down on the dealer’s penis. I don’t remember what the dealer’s name was—since those guys didn’t last long. However, I remember that from then on he was known as “Stumpy.”
With all the commotion (an ambulance was called), I left the crack house and began wandering the neighborhood. I figured that this would be a good time to visit Madame Evangeline. However, when I got there, the door was locked, and when I knocked on the door, the crazy old man that lived upstairs looked out of the window and yelled at me for making too much noise. He was pretty much toothless and, as he yelled at me, huge globs of spittle rained down on me. I left with a queasy feeling—not only from the spit, but because Madame Evangeline’s absence seemed to be yet another sign that I was doomed.
With nothing else to give me home, my yearning for Tisha became so acute that it occurred to me that if I headed in the direction that she and Binzo had driven off in, then I would eventually find her. I walked until about midday—past neighborhoods no different from mine, to neighborhoods with elegant brownstones… and all the neighborhoods in between. I didn’t find her, of course, and this corroborated my budding suspicion that Tisha only existed in that room and its immediate environs. With this new awareness, I rushed back to the room. On the wobbly stairway to the basement, I heard her laughter and leapt down the last four steps in my haste to get to her. And maybe she would hug me as she had the previous afternoon. I was almost wild with these thoughts now… but when I was about three paces from the door, I heard other voices—unfamiliar laughs. I stiffened, and when I turned the corner and looked in, I saw Tisha surrounded by five other little boys. I stared with the shock and heartbreak of a man that came home to find his lover in the arms of another. The boys were all about my age. However, as I didn’t recognize any of them from school, I knew that they weren’t from the neighborhood. Maybe, I considered, they were from Tisha’s imagination, conjured in my absence; maybe even I was only the product of one of those conjurings and had no real substance beyond this room. The little boys were hopping about her; I looked from their stupid antics to Tisha, thinking, Wasn’t I good enough for you? When she finally saw me standing there broodingly, she called me over. However, I sat to the side, listening to the shrill laughter that seemed to be a desecration of our magical place. I sat there for hours, thinking that Tisha would eventually see how unimaginative the boys were and banish them forever from our sacred room.
… Only in retrospect do I find it strange that a beautiful 13-year-old would seek out the company of six-year-olds. Yet, even as I stood there, I knew that something was very wrong—and it wasn’t my puerile jealousy anymore. Though Tisha was physically maturing into womanhood, she acted as though she were six. Gone from her play was the imaginative virtuosity of previous afternoons—maybe that virtuosity had never been there and I had
only imagined it in my desperation. As I looked on, I realized that her play with the boys seemed rushed, yet calculating—as though she were on some kind of deadline. It all seemed bizarre to me; and then, she asked the little boys the question she had asked me the day before—except that now, instead of it being “Who are you angry with?” it was “Who do you hate?” The little boys rushed up to give their responses. They didn’t succumb to the hesitancy that had gripped me the day before. The boys were natural born haters—perhaps we all are. They had people in their lives who mistreated them—and even abused them. The constant trickle of resentment was easy to dam into a reservoir of hatred. Growing up in the ghetto, surrounded by poverty and people who hated their lives, it wasn’t difficult to bring forth hate. Learning to hate was essentially about learning to hate one’s self—about realizing that one was in a situation that one didn’t have the wherewithal to change. Hatred isn’t so much about what others have done to us; it is about what we cannot do to them. Oppressors may disdain those they oppress, but the oppressed always hate their oppressors. There is a power relationship there: the realization that no matter what one does, one will never be able to correct the inescapable injustice of one’s everyday existence.
As the boys rushed up to Tisha, they named mothers and teachers and big brothers—and even cartoon characters. Soon, the huge teddy bear came out; then, at Tisha’s behest, the boys leapt at it, their little fists flailing, their legs kicking. Some of them bit the bear and clawed at it. The boys were screaming now. They weren’t merely boys anymore, but dispensers of justice and righters of wrongs—all this, under Tisha’s celestial gaze. I looked on from the periphery. When Tisha smiled at me encouragingly, I got up and went over to the fray and found an unoccupied piece of the bear to kick. However, I really wasn’t into it and Tisha seemed to realize it as well, because she practically ignored me for the rest of the afternoon. While the boys punched the unfortunate doll, I returned to the periphery, still waiting for her to come to her senses and banish the others. Of course, with all the flailing limbs, one of the boys got punched in the face. Being the righter of injustice that he was, he leapt at the offender and the two soon began to fight. The others, more intrigued with others fighting among themselves than with righting wrongs, soon began to cheer. Within moments, one of the boys was bloody and crying, but Tisha stepped up quickly and pulled the little boy to her chest, so that the whimpers faded away and the boy found himself ready to fight again. In fact, now the boys were all ready to fight, because they soon began sparring with one another. The boys didn’t even pretend to be motivated by justice anymore; they were now only dispensers of violence. Tisha urged them on from her seat of honor. The boys loved these games—and they loved Tisha more completely than I could have. She sat before them like Caesar directing competitors. She urged them on to the full realization of their bestiality. She quieted their cries; she dabbed their bloody noses with tissues and kissed their wounds… but she never curtailed their fights, and the boys loved her for this.
As one might expect, a crude hierarchy developed as a result of all these gladiator battles—but not in the way one might think. Usually, under such circumstances, the strong rose to the top. However, as Tisha’s kisses only went to the beaten, bloody boys, in time, the boys began to lose on purpose. I’m almost certain of it. They put out their faces to be punched. Many a baby tooth was loosened that afternoon. It became a strange mark of honor. Also, after a while, the tired boys realized that they could forego the worst of the battles and go straight to Tisha’s affection if they gave up and cried after a few blows. Both boys in the conflict would run to her begging for comfort, so that for much of that afternoon the basement constantly rang out with the cries of little boys.
I left them and walked off in a daze. They didn’t notice my leaving. It was all a bad dream. As I walked away, I was desperate to convince myself that none of it had actually happened. In stepping away from the basement I was emerging from a bad dream; and like someone awakening from a nightmare, all that I could hope was that the next time I closed my eyes and returned to the dream world, it would be the wonderful fantasy I had had before.
However, when I stepped away from the basement, it was as though I had entered a time warp. Everything was rushing ahead now, as though speeding toward the inevitable conclusion. Soon, I was entering the basement again. Tisha and the boys were there, but the boys were listening silently—intently. The boys were sitting on the floor; Tisha stood before them, holding a mannequin. I have no idea where she got it from, but she was using it to demonstrate the tenets of her religion. It was a religion based on hate and dolls, and she was telling them that if their hate was true, then the people they hated would be replaced by the mannequin. It was a strange offshoot of voodoo dolls, I suppose. Instead of the person merely feeling what you did to the doll, now, in exacting vengeance on the doll, the doll would become the person. The little boys were mesmerized—I was mesmerized. Yet, as the boys sat there rapt (as though in Sunday school) I looked on from the periphery. Tisha saw me but said nothing… and I almost wanted to cry.
It was then, at the climax of her sermon, that Tisha sat the mannequin in a chair and handed out steak knives to the little boys. Here, she probably decided to give me one last chance to redeem myself, because she called me over and gave me a knife as well. Soon, we were all stabbing the mannequin—the effigy of those we hated… And I did feel hate then. I hated the outside world in a way that I can’t even begin to explain. As my knife penetrated the hard plastic of the mannequin, I wanted everything to disappear but Tisha and that room. I wanted things to return to the way they were that first time. I wanted to get rid of the other boys, and Binzo, and my aunt, and my guilty thoughts about my mother. I wanted all of that to be effaced from the Earth. And when one of the little boys came too close to me, I punched him in the face and kicked him savagely as he lay on the ground crying. The others looked at me, as if just noticing me. When the boy tried to run to Tisha, I slapped him in the face and threw him in the corner. I still held the knife, so it’s a miracle that I didn’t eviscerate him in my fury. The others looked at me, cowed. Tisha looked at me as well—but there was a smile there that two decades of obsessive consideration on my part hasn’t been able to come to grips with. I don’t know what I felt at that moment, but I knew that I had risen to the hierarchy of the boys—that I had reset the natural order by surrendering to my brutality.
Tisha came to me then and hugged me—perhaps for restoring the natural order—and I stood there triumphant. I had succeeded where Binzo and all the others had failed, because she had come to me. Yet, I was only a six-year-old boy, and once we parted for the day (again at Binzo’s behest from his car) the madness I had felt in the room ebbed somewhat and I felt like someone struggling with the after effects of a drug binge. Even while I shuddered at what I had done, my body and soul craved the drug—was willing to do almost anything to feel that wondrous high again. I even had a headache—as if I actually did have a hangover. I shuffled home like a drunk struggling to get his bearings… Williams was still at his throne; the neighborhood children were again playing their games; and seeing that the world continued in its usual way, I had a momentary pang of courage when I thought of going cold turkey—of never returning to Tisha and the room in the basement of the crack house. That room still seemed magical to me, but in the face of what had happened that afternoon, it now seemed beset by dark magic of the sort that claimed one’s soul. Unfortunately, while all drug addicts had such infinitesimal spurts of courage, the drug’s imprint on their souls never allowed those spurts to be long lived.
Williams looked at me uneasily as I ran past him and up the stairs. In the darkness of my mother’s room (which was still mine by default) I lay rigidly in bed. Mr. Johnson came home and started up his usual antics. Elsewhere, radios were turned up high—either to counter Johnson or to mask their own quarrels or whatever the case may be. Once again, I grew terrified of the collective noise of my neighborhood. Each seemed to be a new wellspring of madness. Each seemed to be calling me to my doom and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to escape. I missed my mother, suddenly and desperately. As yet, I hadn’t taken back the hateful things I said to Tisha. I had to find a way to curtail the spell that had been put in motion—and all the spells that bewitched us. I thought about going to Madame Evangeline again, but as had been the case with Tisha after our first parting, I grew terrified by the prospect that she wouldn’t be there, and that this irrefutable evidence of my total isolation would extinguish whatever reason I had to go on living.
I slept in fits and starts; several times I emerged from semi-conscious states with a shudder or a muffled cry. However, about two in the morning, I had a wonderful dream, in which my mother had returned. Upon awakening, I jumped out of bed, looking for her bags—for any sign that the dream had been true. Hearing the TV on in the living room, I rushed out, thinking that maybe she had stayed in the living room in order to avoid awakening me. However, with each step I took toward the living room, the euphoria of the dream faded. Then, when I reached the doorway, I saw my aunt’s morose form on the couch, staring at a late movie—but with eyes that seemed to see nothing.
She had stopped trying to be happy—had run out of the energy necessary to keep the farce going and was back to her old self. I sneaked back to my room and lay there silently until again possessed by my dreams.
Those dreams were undoubtedly turbulent, because in the morning I woke up on the floor of the bedroom, entangled in the sheets. I woke up in a strange terror, fighting to get free of the sheets—as though they were a monster. When I was free, I lay on the floor panting. There were sirens in the air, but I didn’t pay them much attention at first. I merely thought of them as a byproduct of my headache. I shuffled to the bathroom. Next, I went to the kitchen where, looking out of the window, I saw the police cars and ambulances that had blocked off the street. The night before the Johnsons had had a particularly bad fight—which I hadn’t heard in my daze. As I looked on from the window, the police dragged Mr. Johnson out of the building in handcuffs. He was screaming something, dressed only in his drawers and a pair of slippers. Mrs. Johnson came out on a stretcher—but she was screaming as well. She was a huge woman. In contrast, Mr. Johnson was as slight as a stick. I remember thinking that he looked like one of those starved stray dogs that I often came upon while wandering through the neighborhood’s vacant lots. Johnson’s ribs protruded horribly, seeming to want to burst through his skin as his enraged screams echoed through the morning air. He was trying to turn around to yell at his wife. In the meantime, the EMTs were trying to put an oxygen mask on Mrs. Johnson, but she kept brushing it aside to scream aspersions at her husband. Both of them were bloody. It was all a sick joke, of course. Besides the police and the ambulances, dozens of spectators were on the street; people were hanging out of windows to get a better look. I don’t know what to say about the Johnsons. A day later, they were back home screwing one another. They, of course, had an abusive relationship, but it was silly to say that Mr. Johnson was Mrs. Johnson’s abuser. Their relationship was the abusive thing. Their way of communicating—and maybe even of loving—was the abusive thing.
I went outside about half an hour later. My aunt, who was a heavy sleeper, hadn’t awakened yet. Outside, the streets were relatively clear by now—just like a cinema 10 minutes after the movie was over. I rushed to the basement—probably because I knew that nobody would be there and I needed to remember the room as it was—without little boys and their strange games. However, to my amazement, Tisha and the boys were there. The boys were stabbing the effigy again. When I entered, the boys looked at me diffidently, still acknowledging the hierarchy that had been established the day before. However, Tisha still seemed to be rushing ahead, as though running out of time. Shortly after I entered, she gave us some money and told us to go and get some ice cream while she made “preparations.”
She told us to come back in about 45 minutes and kept looking at her watch. Actually, she gave the money to me, since I was still the top dog, but outside the building, beyond the magical confines of the room, I knew that I didn’t want to be with the boys. I gave them the money and pointed them toward the store. I had an impulse to go to Tisha and help her in her preparations—or just be with her—but in the end, I walked away by myself. I was halfway down the block when I realized that I had lost my amulet. I retraced my steps to the basement, but when I got there, Tisha screamed at me in a strange rage that was tinged with terror, telling me to come back in 45 minutes. I left her—I ran as though fleeing for my life.
Madame Evangeline’s warnings about the amulet—and about the vulnerability of my soul should I lose it—made me tremble. I ran back to my room and was relieved when I finally saw it lying on the ground—entwined in the sheets I had fought with during the night. However, even as I held it in my palm, I wondered if it was already too late. I sensed a difference in myself—maybe the dawning maturity I had alluded to before, or a sudden awareness that the forces of evil had already taken my soul. When I remembered how Tisha had screamed at me, I wanted to cry; and in this disconsolate state, Madame Evangeline again seemed like the last chance for my soul.
I ran to Madame Evangeline’s shop. I, like Tisha, was running out of time. As I held the amulet in my hand, I considered that maybe we were all trapped in the same spell. The amulet, which had allowed my miraculous escape from certain death, and which had brought Tisha into my life, conjuring her from the yearnings of my soul, was like all things spawned by evil, wrought with hidden consequences—dire tradeoffs that were even then amassing on the horizon.
I again found Madame Evangeline’s door locked; succumbing to the accumulated terror of the previous days and weeks, I banged on the door, screaming out, “Madame, help me! Help me, please!”
The old man who lived on the second floor came to the window angrily. I was crying by then, screaming hysterically for Madame to come and save my soul.
“She went back to Haiti!” the old man screamed, spraying me with spit in the process.
I looked up at him in shock: “What! For good?”
“Do I look like a goddamn information service to you?!”
I turned and ran. I was sure that the 45 minutes Tisha had specified had passed by then—and that I had run out of time. I rushed back to the basement, numb with terror, and yet still hoping beyond hope that I would be able to stop the evil I sensed all around me now. It was in the breeze; I felt it emanating from the ground, and shining down on me like the sun. It was everywhere and in everyone. I saw it in the eyes of the people I passed; I heard it in their voices—even in their laughter. I ran for my life—for all our lives. Even when I cramped up and my lungs felt as though they were on fire, I shuffled along, like some kind of cripple.
On the wobbly steps to the basement I cramped up again and promptly tripped, toppling down the staircase. I lay unconscious on the ground for a while; then, in those strange moments between unconsciousness and full consciousness, I heard the laughter of the little boys. However, now, it sounded like the laughter of angels. I lay on the ground listening to the melody of it. Minutes seemed to pass as I lay there dreaming of angels and peace of mind. Maybe I had died in the fall, I thought. Maybe I was dead now and my life of fear and vulnerability was over. However, just then, an inflection in one of the boy’s laughter drew me back into the real world. I looked around in a daze, seeing the dark, dour confines of the basement chamber. The laughter that had once seemed angelic, now seemed cacophonous. It was like a jarring alarm bell. I had the impulse to run away right then, but some morbid streak seemed to seize me, and I stumbled to my feet. My muscles were still cramping up, so I shuffled along toward the magical room that had before seemed like the fulfillment of all my fantasies.
Just as I made it to the doorway Tisha was handing out the knives to the little boys. They had been playing before, but she called them to order before the freshly prepared effigy. It was a mass of rags and tape, covered from head to foot. Yet its proportions were unmistakably that of a man, and when I looked closer, I noticed that it wore Binzo’s expensive sneakers….
