SPINNING IN A CLUB IS THE DREAM, BUT REALITY goes more like this: Go to school, learn, go home, study, go to work, work, walk to Fever, daydream, go home, study more, go to bed, get up, repeat.
“Morning, Ma,” I mumble sleepily as I pass through the small front room of our apartment on my way to the kitchen.
My mother doesn’t respond, but then she hardly ever does.
I pull the Cookie Crisp down from the cupboard and shuffle to the fridge for milk, still caught in an early-morning haze, going through the motions, but not really with it yet.
There’s no milk. The only things in the fridge are a family-size bag of fried chicken cutlets, a pot of rice and beans, half a stick of butter, and a jar with maybe two scoops of applesauce left in it.
I peer back into the front room and speak to my mother as evenly and patiently as I can. “Ma? What happened to all the milk?”
My mother sits motionless, staring at the television set from her permanent spot, sucked into the cushions on the couch as if she hasn’t heard me. Half-moons sink into her cheeks below her vacant brown eyes. She is straight up skin and bones, her olive complexion looking veiny and transparent. Her hair, once long, thick, and shiny black, has gone from luscious Spanish curls to couch-potato gnarl.
My mother’s a straight-up junkie, aka a dope fiend, and a hard-core one too. The kind that has no job and spends all the time she isn’t doing drugs trying to figure out how to score more. And by dope I mean snow, brown sugar, Dragon, junk, smack. Or as Webster’s would define it—heroin.
She was only fourteen when she walked into a clinic with an abnormal weight gain and walked out five months pregnant. Normally it wouldn’t make much sense that someone could get to be an entire five months pregnant and not know it. Unless you know my mother.
Afraid to tell her own mother the news, mine ran away from home with tears in her eyes and me in her belly. Her boyfriend, Rodney Dylan, soon to be my father, had dropped out of high school the year before and was living in a studio in the projects when Ma moved in.
Four months later, my parents and a bunch of their friends got tickets to one of those Bob Marley Day Festivals where people camp by a river for a week and watch bands perform in honor of the late, great Bob Marley. My mother went into labor the very first day. But instead of having her friends take her to the hospital, like a logical person would, she stayed at the festival.
I was born in a first-aid tent at the side of the main stage during a lesser-known Bob Marley song called “Johnny Was.” It’s about this boy who gets shot down in the street by a stray bullet. His mother weeps over his dead body asking why and crying out that “Johnny was a good man who never did a thing wrong.”
My own mother was probably crying out too, her voice muffled by the cheers of the crowd. And then there I was. Marley Johnnywas Diego-Dylan, a baby boy born amid thousands of Bob Marley fans, my ears filling with music as I took my first breaths of weed-laced air.
I grew up dreaming of that music and dreaming of a better life. Now, at sixteen, I dream more than ever. That my pop could still be alive. That my mother could quit using. That one day I won’t have to work full-time to make rent and pay bills and buy food.
I dream I have no responsibilities in life except to be a teenager. And I dream that one day I’ll escape all this and find a home for my own music like Bob Marley himself must have dreamed of finding a home for his once upon a time.
“Ma,” I try again, “I bought two whole gallons of milk yesterday. Who drank it all? Was it your boyfriend?”
No answer. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother.
“I have to get ready for school, but maybe we can talk about this tonight. Okay? Please?”
She acknowledges my words by flipping the channel on the television and focusing her bloodshot eyes on one of those morning shows where the hosts sit around talking endlessly to each other about nothing at all for an entire hour.
My mother wasn’t always a heroin addict. She didn’t get into the drugs until after my father died, four years ago. At first we were both super depressed. But within a year Ma’s depression had pulled her into a downward spiral of heavier and heavier drinking. The drinking became painkillers. The painkillers turned into heroin. She’s been using for a year and a half now. Sometimes it feels like I’m just watching her slowly die right in front of me.
I take a quick shower and dress for school in a pair of oversized skater jeans, a black tee, sneakers, and an Etnies cap. I’ve got Etnies in black, white, red, and dark gray to cover my tightly shaved head, and today it’s all about the black one.
I’m pretty much toothpick-skinny, not the ultimate body type, I suppose, but I grew a ton last year and now stand six-two, which goes over pretty well with the females. I’ve sort of got the baby face thing going on, but girls seem to dig a young face on a tall dude, so I do all right with it. Plus, I got some decent features from my parents. Being half black and half Puerto Rican has turned into an advantage lately. You don’t see that every day.
On the bus, I crank my iPod volume and shuffle through flash cards for the presentation I have to give on Ernest Hemingway in English today. We’re only a month into the school year and I’m already about to give my second presentation. I’m a horrible speaker and my first presentation was a total disaster.
But that’s okay because this one’ll be different. This time I’ll be cool, calm, and collected. Hemingway’s life will pour from my lips like sweet maple syrup. I glance at the top flash card on which I’ve written in big, block letters:
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
WAS BORN IN 1899 IN
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
Hemingway.
1899.
Chicago.
Easy.