FISTFUL OF TEARS

D got off the 3 train at Rockaway Avenue, as he had thousands of times as a child, and walked across Livonia Avenue past the Tilden projects where he and his family had lived and perished in a New York City of legend and fear. He walked past 305, where his first girlfriend, a plump girl with big bangs named Brenda, had lived on the twelfth floor. He went by the parking lot where his brother Rashid had mastered the art of the stolen car and then the front “lawn,” a patch of greenish dirt where he and his three brothers had played tackle football.

Behind 315 there was a community center where, back in the day, they’d held dance competitions, kids played board games, and Con Edison gave out free tickets to the deepest part of the old Yankee Stadium bleachers. D hadn’t been inside the community center in years.

He wasn’t sure how he’d feel when he got to the next corner. Repulsion, anger, sorrow, and regret were among the feelings that could have rippled through his consciousness causing him to drop to his knees in painful prayer as if this ghetto intersection was an altar to the sacrifices made in Hunter blood.

But when D finally placed his toes on the hard concrete slabs that constituted the northwest corner of Livonia and Mother Gaston, he felt nothing. He was as numb as if a dentist had administered novocaine to his whole black-clad body.

Then, creeping through that nothingness, came disappointment. After all this time, D couldn’t believe that walking here hadn’t evoked any passion in him, not even a moist eye. The tears had all drained out long ago, he guessed, in thousands of dreams and nightmares.

It wasn’t the corner where his brothers died that mattered. His memories were the real site of his pain. This was just a corner under the elevated IRT line, no different than the other three corners here on Livonia and Mother Gaston where, it was quite likely, somebody else’s brother or sister or father or mother had been gunned down, slashed, beaten, or gutted in the hard, sad decades since Brownsville had first been developed.

After so many troubled years, D had finally accepted that grief wasn’t a location but a state of mind.

Interrupting these thoughts, Ray Ray called his name and walked up. “Why you wanna meet out here, yo?”

“This corner used to be important to me,” D said, and then took the leather case from under his arm and had handed it to the young man. Ray Ray unzipped the case and pulled out the 45 single, looking strangely at this ancient technology.

“That’s for you,” D said.

“And what do I do with it?” Ray Ray asked.

“I dunno. You’ll figure it out.”

 

 

The End