Who's John?

The hood in Atlanta is different from the hood in New Orleans. More spread out. Without liquor stores on every corner where men of all ages drink Budweiser’s and Heineken’s from paper bags and watch big-legged women saunter in and out of Church’s Chicken. There are trees everywhere here in Atlanta, and when you hear sirens they are coming from somewhere in the distance, they are muffled, like a trombone player using a plunger. The bells of the ice cream van sing the same song  which may or may not have its roots in racism. Kids ride bicycles and chase dogs that look hungry. They like to talk about what I am growing, and though their slang has differences, these variations often mean the same thing.

            After CJ and Matthew helped me pull up the floors at my house in New Orleans, I offered them water from a gallon I had sitting around for my sleep apnea machine. It was good enough for me, and we were all thirsty. Matthew shied away and said he was okay. He is a good kid, well raised, and perhaps he had been taught not to drink after strange men.

            “I’ll do you a fountain,” CJ told him. He held the gallon high over Matthew’s lips and poured the water into his open mouth.

            Ron opened his front door. He is my tenant, a friend, and the neighbor that fixes all the kids’ bikes. They come to his door from sun up to sun down and who knows where they get these hunks of metal and chrome that he turns into miracles.

            In Atlanta, I found a fluorescent orange Mongoose, almost as bright as Vision’s shirt, while chopping down weed trees with a machete out behind the house off Compton Street. It had a flat back tire with a blown out tube that Ron could have easily fixed. There were pegs on the back tire. Not a scratch on the bike. There was a skull drawn by a kid’s hand guiding a Sharpie marker with artist and artist’s assistants’ signatures beneath: Demarcus, Dante, Deon—the 3D GANG.

Vision is an Indian kid, maybe twenty, on the verge of growing a moustache to rival Salvador Dali. The second time we met he was wearing a multi-colored day glo shirt made of cotton. On his skinny frame, the shirt bore breasts of its own, perhaps the ghost of the large-chested woman who died before retrieving her shirt from the laundromat below where many of these kids live. The building was passed on from Adam’s grandfather to his father and finally to Adam. The kids are fixing it up, living without water, living in cramped quarters among boards and boxes and beer cans, living the dream.

            What Adam has is a beginning that I admire. He is putting something together.

            Adam’s socks don’t match. His beard and hair made me think he was a Jew even though he looks kind of like Aniz …., but he is muslim. He is smiling whenever I see him. His friends—the band, including Vision—are renting four apartments in the concrete jungle that splits Jonesboro and Lakewood. Each building space is set off by bright colors of their own and there are owls and birds and bees and dragonflies painted by olive47.  It brings life. Like ants in the crack of a sidewalk.

            I like Adam. I trust his laughter, the way he smiles when he sees me. He is skinny. All these kids are skinny born after I graduated high school in 1992 are skinny. I don’t know how it happened, but I am going to learn.

            Julian has already moved into one of the apartments. He’s white. He has a moustache. He is 21. I’m not sure whether or not his wardrobe is salvaged from the laundry. His collared shirt looks like the sleeves were cut off and then carefully hemmed. Or maybe the shirt was made that way. When Carrie told him that she would let him have the sizable one bedroom for three hundred a month he asked, “If I did some work, could I get it for two fifty?” She said, “I’m a bit stressed. We’ll talk about it later.” I would have said that if you want an apartment with a shower curtain around the bathtub you can get it yourself. The three hundred bucks a month is the quiet-down-because-there-are-no-more-amenities-than-what-you-see price. If you don’t like it, you can take your ukulele or laptop or whatever instrument you play and beg for change in Midtown, but I kept quiet, and didn’t even utter the “h” word.

Carrie took me to a party for friends of hers who were leaving South Atlanta and moving on up—to the side where Martin Luther King was born and raised and where developers have been dumping money. She says Grant Park. I say Bywater. You might say Brooklyn. Or the East Village. Or the Haight. Or Paris in the twenties.

            I was driving because I always drive because Carrie is blind. Not blind like run-into-tables-and-sharp-edges blind. Blind like you-can’t-have-a-driver’s-license blind because what sighted people see at two hundred feet you see at twenty. Since she is blind, she also has trouble with landmarks and directions and ways to turn. I have trouble with paying attention. We’re a perfect match.

            So the party—blocks from her house—took around twenty minutes to get to. We road all the way down Jonesboro Road and turned around, laughing as Stevie Nicks sang her way through Rhiannon and into a Steve Miller marathon. Carrie squinted at the numbers on her phone and asked where Mr. Bubble was. (Mr. Bubbles are all over the place: car, bedroom, bathroom. It’s how she sees small writing) We finally got the directions and we’re rolling down Lansing when I said, “Baby.”

            The gang of kids on bicycles reminded me of being back home on Lesseps.

            “Why are you stopping?”

            “Look,” I said. “Hey! Wheredja get that bike?” The kid on the back pegs hopped off and joined the other kids, far away from the Mongoose rider who now stood, bike frame between legs, alone.

            We must have looked imposing with the top of the cherry red VW bug down.

            “I bought it.”

            “From who?”

            “My friend.”

            “Who is your friend?”

            “John.”

            “Where John stay at?” I had reverted back to how I sometimes unconsciously speak while talking with kids in my own neighborhood.”

            “Up the hill.”

            I froze. I could have jumped out of the car, taken the bike, and taught the kids a lesson, but we had sixty dollars worth of Miss B’s pralines and a packet of cucumber seeds that we had to deliver because that’s what Martin Luther King Jr. would have done.

            “You tell John he better stop stealing bikes,” I said.

            The sides of the kid’s lips curled up. It was the beginning a smile, maybe a smirk, that he withheld, but I knew, and he knew that I knew, there was no John.

The party was nice. There was a beautiful mixed race baby, a manly gay man, and an older lady who invited the younger neighbors to her house for dinners. I wasn’t used to this much diversity in this tight of a space. It felt good. Like putting something together. We ate chips and salsa and chicken on a stick, and though I did not know these people well, I felt comfortable in this home. It was bright. All the paint was new. Not a spot of caulk or spackle had been missed.

            The door opened. It was a man I had never met. Chris. He was holding a two-liter bottle of cherry cola. It was three quarters full.

            “I didn’t know what to bring,” he said. “So I grabbed this on the way.”

            “And you drank some on the way?” said the lady who was moving. She was pregnant, by the way.

            “No. There were these kids and they surrounded me and they said they were thirsty so I poured them some.”

            “They had cups?” she asked.

            “No. I held the bottle over their mouths and they leaned their heads back.”

            “Ooh,” she said. “I know it touched their lips.”

            “Maybe some got on their shirts,” he said, “but I made sure it didn’t touch their lips.”

            “In New Orleans,” I said. “The kids call that a fountain.”

            Chris set the bottle of cherry cola next to the box of pralines. “That’s what they called it. A drinking fountain.”

            “Did one of them have a bright orange bicycle?”

            “I’m not sure. Why?”

            Carrie said, “Tell them the story, Zach,” and then proceeded to assist with the telling by interjecting every twenty or thirty seconds.