Fresh Fear
In Chicago, death smells like fresh grass and barbecue.
When that last school bell rang at the end of the school year, we flooded the streets with excitement, anticipation, and fear. We circulated around each other hoping that the faces we took in would be the same ones we saw when that first school bell rang the next school year. The summer had a way of separating us from each other, temporarily and permanently.
At ten years old, I was becoming accustomed to death and its grip. I grew up in a house haunted by those living and dead. My five siblings and I loved the heat of summer. It yanked us out of bed in the morning and threw us into the arms of our block: Maryland Ave.
Maryland Ave felt like its own city.
Our house was the first house nearest to the corner. If you stand on that corner facing south you can see the tall, gray-cemented wall of the Historical Oakwood Cemetery. It was approximately two blocks and about 200 steps from our front door, which meant death was only 200 steps away.
In memory, I am told about the whispers of the ghost in the cemetery by one of my older sisters who is chewing gum with her front teeth; or it’s my brother while he bounces a ball against the side of the house nearly missing my mother’s bedroom window; or it’s my mother after she places the Quran on the highest shelf in her bedroom. They aim to incite fear in me because I can only watch horror movies during the daytime, but my curiosity wraps around their words tighter and quicker than fear is allowed to present itself.
“You don’t even have to put your ear to the wall to hear the whispers because they are everywhere,” I am told. And I wonder if the ghosts were whispering to us mortals or each other.
At night, I would lie on the rickety bunk bed I shared with my sister and stare into the darkness of the dining room that was just outside our bedroom. Each night I planned to close the door before ascending to the top of the bunk bed, but each night I forgot. The light never reached the dining room at any time, so in the depth of the night it looked vantablack. The more I stared at the darkness I began to see figments of my imagination: a leprechaun from the movie my mother warned me not to watch; the pale, pasty face of a white woman I saw once on the train; the dancing whispers of the ghost in the cemetery.
I hated our house.
Mostly because everything was made of wood and I got splinters easily. But also because our house was the antithesis of peace. Our next door neighbors were Bible thumpers who gave not one damn about us being Muslims. They held impromptu Bible study and prayer circles where they Hallelujah’d and said all things In the Name of Jesus. It never sat well with me, but there was a part of me that hoped they said a prayer for my family and that it landed on their God’s ears. A God by any name, because at times I felt my prayers had not reached my God. I wanted my mama to live beyond my father’s deadly vise-grip that was always days or minutes away from causing us to become wards of the state.
I wonder what would have become of my family had we not re-crossed the desert to get back to Chicago. During the Summer of 1988, we boarded a Greyhound bus in the middle of the middle to reach a promised land: San Diego.
In San Diego, my father was buoyant.
San Diego was hot. That is how I mostly remember it. It was hot, but my father was happy. I didn’t see much of him, but I always got the sense that wherever he was, he was surely in a good mood. My mother was reluctant about getting comfortable, though. She often walked with her hands deep in her pockets with us huddled so close that we merged into a step and shuffle. My father, on the other hand, had found home. His voice was higher pitched and welcoming. He talked of new job possibilities and a forever in California. His skin was shinier and his smile was lasting. I wanted to know this man and have a forever with him, but that forever was clipped.
One day something shifted, and it slowed him down. It was not drugs this time, but a subtle pull from Chicago. He was fraying from the distance he placed between himself and home. A place we were all too familiar with. Where family was stationed on every corner and the familiarity bred comfort. A comfort that burrowed itself into our bones and led us back there.
So again we boarded a Greyhound bus in the middle of the night. The feverish sun and the permeating body heat of those within the bus made my father skittish.
He was nearly a year removed from his drug addiction and without a buffer.
I imagine death sunbathing on the roof of that Greyhound bus pleased at us. It had us back in its grips, and all its plans would now move forward. Chicago was waiting with its bloody hands wide open.
Flesh
Two summers after we returned to Chicago I watched a colony of ants descend on the flesh of an ear I saw ripped straight from a man’s face.
That summer, a friend and I snuck eggs from our respective refrigerators to see if the asphalt was so hot you could fry an egg on it as the weatherman had predicted. She, coming from a family that was probably not on welfare and could afford wasted food, slapped a slice of bologna next to our eggs. I marveled at the sizzle of the eggs but scowled at the formation of sweat beads over the bologna that would have made a blissful sandwich, for which I hadn’t had in a long time.
Something was in the air that day.
The exhilaration from our egg experiment had passed, and we awaited something else to replace it. Nothing came for a while. So we busied ourselves: mimicking the teachers we hated, scraping our knuckles across the pavement playing Jacks, and telling tall tales about what our future would hold.
We dubbed it another boring day until we heard the commotion that told us a fight was brewing. The crowd grew louder and louder as it rounded the corner, eventually planting itself in the church parking lot next to my house. Complete chaos, for which we loved: the commotion of loud voices that egged the situation on, the footsteps running toward the crowd to gather enough information to build a story, and the footsteps running away from the crowd to gather more spectators.
The smell of blood, fear, anticipation, and need created a cocktail that was on the brink of exploding.
At just under five feet, I could not see into the crowd enough to know what was happening. I saw arms flailing every which way but could not tell to whom they belonged. The crowd moved in unison as if protecting the nucleus. Just as I was tiring myself from jumping, the crowd parted enough for me to see a man being scraped across the concrete by his neck. Blood was spilling from his mouth, nose, and through his eyes that were bruised shut. I stepped back as if reeling from a blow.
My father had emerged onto our front porch and was looking over the railing directly into the crowd. It was the perfect spot to see the entirety of the fight. For a quick moment, I wished I had thought of it, but then I remembered the bloody mess I had already witnessed.
I don’t recall if my father knew the man, but in the throb of memory I see my father moving to and through the crowd to lift the man from certain death. My father, only peeking at 5 ‘9”, but solid as a brick wall, carried the bloodied man to the foot of our steps and poured water, handed to him by my mother, over the man to wake him.
There was something about my parents as unified caregivers to a stranger that relaxed the crowd. I think I remember someone saying, “Nah, that’s Cha’lie,” referring to my father by his street-given nickname; we called him Abu.
Sometime later, the ambulance arrived and, in haste to get the man from our porch to the stretcher, one of the first responders ripped the man’s dangling ear right off his face. I watched that ear thump to the ground planting itself in the dark earth soon to be ravaged by ants.
Death wanted that man that day. It licked at his life hoping to reach bone but only managed to get his ear.
Flames
A week after I wrote my father a ransom note detailing all the ways I would kill him, I learned about the trifecta of fire in science class: heat, fuel, oxygen. With this new information, I decided to set our dining room on fire.
I was seething from the reception of my ransom letter that I had worked on for over a week. I collected magazines from every place I’d entered: doctor’s office, grandmother’s house, grocery store (five finger discount), and my father’s stash of nude magazines of white women with pink nipples.
The letter demanded my father stop abusing my mother.
I detailed how I would stab, shoot, or poison him if he didn’t. In my naivety, I slid the letter between our pile of unopened mail early one morning. The letter was a work of art. It was a mixture of fonts, colors, and word placement set against a white background. I had a deep affection for Agatha Christie novels and Murder She Wrote, so the letter was greatly researched in its execution.
By nightfall, I found the letter balled up in the garbage by the back door. Within hours, my rage from the failed mission had recast itself as a vengeful wrath that would leave our dining room ceiling bubbled and burnt by a sweeping fire.
While my father was taking his routine nightly shower, which lasted nearly an hour, I took a lighter and set the tall stalk of pampas grass, the only decoration that stood out in our dining room, on fire.
Spark. Light. Blaze. It was terrifying and exhilarating.
The flames rose high and spread across the ceiling in search of anything to help it grow. I watched those flames drip their embers onto the floor where we sat Salat just hours before. Those flames were calculating in its mission. So sure of itself. My brother, who I didn’t know was standing behind me, was also wrapped in amazement.
My mother scrambled in and out of the room gathering water and baking soda and whatever she could lay her hands on. My father emerged from the bathroom through a steamy mist like an animal: naked, anger wild in his eyes, and no sense of direction. The flames only reached the middle of the ceiling before the foam of the fire extinguisher I never knew we had interrupted its trek.
The room was filled with smoke that hovered above everyone’s relief. I went stone-still. I was unable to speak until my parents looked in my direction. Without hesitation, I pointed to my brother and said, “He did it.” The blows came down on him before he could object. I was nicked slightly across my shoulder for standing too close, but later told it was because I was irresponsible in watching my little brother.
That moment, propelled by a failed ransom letter, became the moment my brother decided he would never trust me again. It was the death of our relationship.
Farewell
On a Saturday morning at the end of the last summer I would spend on Maryland Ave, my mother blew up the gas station a block from our house.
It wasn’t a real gas station. It was a car repair garage owned by an old Black man and a white man we only saw ever so often. We called it a gas station because in our young minds we believed things were whatever we wanted them to be, and my mother called it a gas station, too, so it made it so.
The night before the explosion my family gathered in our living room to watch a pre-recorded episode of Martin where his tagline for that episode was, “I’m about to blow up!” We laughed in unison, and my mother dragged that tagline over our ears all night.
By the morning, soon after the explosion, my mother sat at the edge of her bed reading The Holy Quran shaking her head in disbelief.
“I blew up the gas station,” she said.
We made no protest about her proclamation because my mother, in true Capricorn fashion, believed all things revolved around her. She gathered small handfuls of information to tether to her life. She believed she and Oprah were similar in temperament and taste because they both possessed high cheekbones; she’d watched several music videos of Dionne Warwick’s, who had an overbite, and that was the reason my younger sisters had overbites.
She had long believed that Life and Death were in the tongue. A sentiment she learned while in Catholic school. It was also in the Bible, for which none of us had read. So, it was no surprise that, with her newfound superpower of proclaiming that which would come true, she’d begun speaking her way out of my father’s life.
In a journal hidden deep in her closet amongst numerous hanging scarfs that flowed in the air like whirling dervishes, my mother had detailed a new life for herself. She had dreams of writing romance novels and living out her stories, but she’d felt anchored by her duties as a mother and wife.
In the weeks following the explosion, our lives had begun to change incrementally. My mother had taken a job at a small sandwich shop owned by a woman she befriended on her daily walks. It was the first job she’d had since becoming a mother. Unbeknownst to us, she’d been stashing away her tips and small paychecks in a gray military ammo box she stored under her bed. She’d begun building a bridge that would lead her away from the life she’d known since she was 17, and we were the little ducklings that would follow her.
In between bouts of drug use: heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, my father would notice my mother’s absence and hurl expletives at us believing we knew more than we did. When she finally arrived home, my mother would examine our sleeping bodies for any signs of bruising or scratches possibly given by my father; we never had any.
My father knew my mother was planning to leave him. His anger morphed into a sadness that slumped his shoulders and muted his voice. He had no more fight in him, so the day my mother yanked us from our beds announcing our departure he allowed us to leave. He’d finally decided to give us the peace he could not afford to give previously.
We gathered almost nothing and piled into a Taxi van. From the back window of that Taxi van, we waved goodbye to my father. We also bid farewell to Death, who wrapped his arm around my father’s shoulders like an old friend happy to have him all to himself.
Death had hovered around us the entire time we lived on Maryland Ave. It tickled at our sensibilities, but it never wanted us. It only wanted my father.
Fin
On a blistering winter day in November during the year 1999, death had finally won the battle against my father.
At the age of fifty-two, with a needle in his arm, a deadly dose of heroin surged through my father’s veins reaching his heart causing it to explode. In a small bedroom at the back of his mother’s apartment, his body maxed out and slumped against the door barricading him in the room. At the front of that apartment, my grandmother watched game shows on a TV too loud, making it impossible for her to hear her son dying.
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