Near Death

Tripp Robinson
EVWP Summer 2009

In Memoriam Quan, Cierra, Skit, Thomas. RIP

Noah’s Tee Shirt shop is all about freedom. Noah’s a religious dude, likes to talk to you about how blessed he is. Matter of fact the other day a “foreign” guy, to Noah’s way of thinking, presumably less blessed, in the grocery next door was freed from his earthly sojourn though a crack in the Second Amendment. Not a bit daunted about his own safety, Noah asserted to the Times-Dispatch his contented confidence in God’s impenetrable shield protecting his store. Noah, who seems to possess a friendly heart, persists in almost non-stop religious commentary to anyone—listening or not. His adolescent customers seem to weary of it about the time he tells them that to stay in his shop they have to pull their pants up.

Two types of freedom shirts dominate Noah’s trade: Funeral and jail. Local custom demands a fresh tee at a funeral with a picture of the funeralized. (Nothing fancy, necessarily. Maybe just a snap from a cell phone.), birth and death dates, and RIP. Noah posts the images he uses to make funeral tee shirts. One wall of his shop is completely covered floor to ceiling. Imagine a wall entirely covered with faces of the dead. The mostly young dead. The mostly shot-to-death, young dead. I call it Noah’s wall of death. I have a picture of it posted in my classroom. Ten or fifteen students in three years have pointed out someone they know on the wall. One girl is particularly well known. My son knows one of the guys.

Got to meet Noah one day a while back when one of my sons, DJ, popped up one day with a sudden need to have a tee shirt made, the second kind—a freedom shirt—to wear on behalf of his buddy Marco who was in city jail. DJ wanted the shirt to say “Free Marco” and display images they valued. In my opinion those chosen were the worst possible pictures of the two together. But the pictures were about freedom of a sort. In general the photos reflect DJ and Marco engaged in a war to wage temporary freedom from the misery they have grown up with. Faces blank, stupefied, their expressions look like nothing so much as the calves I once saw being killed at a slaughterhouse in Richmond. It’s a three-blunts-to-the wind glaze, tweaked with maybe a few Percs or a couple of Zannie bars. That’s how Marco and DJ looked on the shirt—like the dying calves, childhoods slaughtered.


Inside my head, the calf connection is this: My college roomie and I once prodded each other to take a somewhat sophomoric, ghoulish field trip to the Richmond Abattoir. As we watched a group of calves begin their pilgrimages to final freedom, their attentive guardians anesthetized their young charges: A sledgehammer’s thud to the forehead left the little guys standing, but stupefied, eyes darting wildly, distracted from the last blade between them and freedom. I see this knocked-in-the-head expression of the dying calves disconcertingly echoed on the countenances of Marco and DJ in the photos. But I’d never have made an issue of it with DJ. He was so proud of the tee shirt he had designed. And when I leave him alone to find his own way he takes me inside his world and we understand each other better. It would hardly have been the death of our relationship, but such a petty comment would bring me only momentary freedom, and lasting regret. He’d survived Noah’s preaching. That was enough. So as with my college buddy long ago, DJ and I left Noah’s and went to grab a burger.
****
One of the guys on Noah’s wall of death is Too. DJ knew him casually, and later got to know him too well. Too was a boy soldier.

DJ himself is a boy soldier, the archetype. He was once also a businessman, which means survivor. Frequently he stayed up all night seeking income, excitement, warmth. For lack of a place to sleep he found camaraderie waiting on the corner with his “bruh” as he calls Marco, for a blustery midnight sale. He still feels safer with a Glock 44C than a teacher. Raised in the margins of the city which was once the capital of a country hastily thrown together to keep DJ’s progenitors in bondage, he has lived and moved without much being. His ephemeral dad’s obsession with other women, cost his dad the unspeakable fun of raising his kid. DJ’s parenting of himself was uneven, evinces itself now in tribulations with any authority. DJ is Everykid and the impact of the lash, stilled long ago, is still evident on him. Even though his agony may now have the psychiatric handle PTSD, it goes with him, as with his peers, untreated and misinterpreted. He reflects, staggers under, the same fiction that males enslaved bore: that he, they—were stupid.

Though not now prevented by law from learning, DJ is print-averse, feels unlettered. DJ and the battalions of kindred boy soldiers seem to be on an unconscious mission. With casual guns, raging rap, sagged jeans they assert some modicum of authority over the obscenity that mostly is their lot. Bullets are as gnats at a picnic. Can each bullet, ominous, unpredictable, be a time-bomb legacy hurled down through the unhealed generations— compressed anger finding voice as rage in firearms in the streets of the young soldiers’ Richmond haunts? Randomly, misdirected, the ancient lash returns in steel projectile guise, and stalks most those yet still reeling from its forbearers. In my classroom I, too, have my own wall of young warrior death. But each firing is only momentary release. Decade upon decade of rage remains, unperceived, unhealed. Unabated and deadly, disguised as weed, bravado, and sadness, this ancient and present rage marches with the child warriors into their classrooms. The soldiers sit and stare placidly. Grammar, the encryption of privilege, stares back. “It’s not “I’m is.” Say, “I am.” Vainly they scour their schools for their place. These boy soldiers’ hearts hear accurately the unspoken harmonics of worthlessness.

And so it is that one notorious weekend this worthlessness erupts savagely. Five people are shot to death on the Southside in two different venues by a regular guy with some ax with the world. It was his day to turn ordinary grinding into rampage. Dramatic headlines, several days of TV delirium report the bloodletting. DJ’s inheritance from this weekend was a more intimate acquaintanceship with Too, and even deeper layers of grueling insomnia and nightmares.

By chance DJ got drenched in Too’s blood. DJ was deep in hopelessness in the most hopeless of the bricks (his slang for the projects) still trying on facets of his life, sorting out the odds at 19 of staying alive past 21. Too and an antagonist were toe to toe in the middle of the street. The dispute was trivial, enlarged through the lens of tangled perceptions to an epic issue. It was four, five o’clock. August. Saturday afternoon. Heat snapping, humidity short circuiting sultry, sluggish reason. It got down to ok shoot me bitch. So he did.

Too instantly was at once suspended and dropping. Blood mist and eye-socket fragments flayed the air, stultifying, oppressing, confusing the helplessness personified as young men, arrayed at random around the roiling tableaux; DJ’s not part of the fracas, but closest to the impact. Too slumps, DJ kneels—a pieta in indigo and crimson. Too heaves. DJ cradles. Medics fail. Too, once friend, now pagan Eucharist, finds heartbroken acceptance and revulsion at the altar of godlessness trembling in DJ’s heart. It’s not so much death, it’s the dying that’s so tough, he later tells me.

DJ’s jeans and white tee, fresh with dammed spot, are abandoned, thrown into a nearby sewer.
And the telling when it comes is clipped. Wire reports lingering in my head complete the fabric of his story as I patch them into his laconic, staccato Teletype.

It took DJ three days to mention it.