This Little Boy

This little boy lives in the apartment across from mine. His hair is blond. His eyelashes are so light as to be almost invisible in the sun. He is underfed and thin and his button-down shirt is too small for him. His jeans are some off brand picked from the bargain bin at Sears or J. C. Penney or the racks of the Salvation Army. Only the poorest of us wear anything but Levi’s, and he is among them, this little boy. I’m six years old and he’s maybe seven or eight. One front tooth overlaps the other and the bottom row is crowded together.

We don’t know each other. I never knew his name. He is a child, like me, growing up in a cheap apartment complex in East San Jose. I sometimes tell myself that I have no reason to remember him, and yet here I am, sixty years old, still thinking about this little boy. I sometimes tell myself that I made him up, that he’s another character in some story I started a long time ago and never finished. But he’s not. He’s real, and if I were to write a story about him tomorrow, I’d change it up, so he wouldn’t be skinny because there was no food in the cupboards. I’ll make sure he always has some mac and cheese on hand and plenty of peanut butter and jelly. Milk, certainly there will be milk in the refrigerator, and eggs, and bread, there’s no reason not to have a loaf of bread around. These things are cheap enough, and if for whatever reason he does have to go hungry, as children in America sometimes do, it won’t be for more than a day or two, and never because his mother is a negligent alcoholic. If they’re down on their luck, it’ll be because she lost her job, but she’s looking hard for another, not sitting around all day drinking wine from a box.

But this is precisely how I remember her, a middle-aged woman with thin, tight lips sitting on a beat-up sofa chair on her apartment balcony. On a small table rests the box of wine, and nearly every day when I come home from school, or on warm summer nights when I step out onto my own apartment balcony, there she is on hers across the way, drinking that cheap wine, chain-smoking and flipping through the glossy pages of some gossip magazine. Of course at my age I don’t yet know what an alcoholic is. All I think is that she is lazy. Now I believe that she is both, because I’ve since learned how quickly alcohol can turn on you, make you mean where it once made you happy, and how that meanness left unchecked can sicken the soul and the mind. But I also don’t believe in excuses. Certain acts, regardless of circumstance, are beyond justification.

In my story I won’t hear the boy scream through the thin apartment walls. There won’t be any late-night scenes where my father climbs out of bed and puts on his bathrobe and slippers and goes to their apartment. She never opens the door but the screaming always stops, usually subsiding into sobs before it’s quiet again. And when a woman in a pantsuit, a man in a dress coat, and a police officer come to the apartment one day and take the boy away, it’ll have nothing to do with alcoholism and the cruelty that often accompanies it.

In my story the authorities are making a mistake. She’s really a good mother who loves her child and those marks on his arms and legs and back are from falling off his bicycle. Or getting into fights. This boy is no scrapper. He’s weak and scrawny with crooked teeth and his skin is white in a mostly brown and black neighborhood. Of course he’s going to get a little banged up. If it’s a teacher who reports him to the authorities, she has it all wrong.

He’s gone for about a month.

It’s not how long he’s gone that gets me, though, so much as how far he must’ve had to walk. I’m sure they didn’t place him in a foster home down the street or around the block. This little boy embarks on a serious journey. Imagine a seven- or eight-year-old navigating miles and miles of twists and turns of suburban neighborhoods and city streets. Imagine him crossing a busy intersection during rush hour. And how can he remember the way home? Does he have a map? Can he even read one at his age? I’m sure he gets lost. Undoubtedly he has to backtrack more than once and ask strangers for directions. It’s exhausting, too, his legs ache, his feet throb, and as the day slips into night fear sets in.

So maybe this kid is no scrapper but that doesn’t mean he isn’t tough inside. I respect his grit and determination. His resolve. His devotion and tenacity. It’s something primal that drives him.

That’s how I’d write it, anyway, the story of a boy unjustly wrenched from the arms of his loving mother by heartless authorities, but ultimately, against all odds, child and parent are reunited.

It’s right against wrong.

Good versus evil.

Late at night, after a grueling journey, this boy finally arrives at the doorstep of his apartment. His mother pulls him to her bosom and holds him tightly, as he longs to be held, and the cries I hear through the thin walls of my bedroom are ones of joy. The tears are from happiness, not agony, so the part where that same night she burns holes in his arm with a cigarette doesn’t belong in my story. I need to create a different truth. I need to revise. I need to make it mine when in fact I can do no such thing.

But I can lie.

I can make this a place where there is no human cruelty. In my story I can reinvent the boy I cannot forget and remember him not for the pain and suffering he endured but for the haunting power of a child’s love for the parent, no matter how perilous that love may be.